Marguerite
Tall red and pink-tipped spears reach for the nothing-at-all blue sky, all washed out with sunshine. The tight wrapped buds of the hollyhocks are too high for us to reach, but Imogen can. You and I wait for her to bring them down. Here behind the flowers, no one can see us.
It’s hot. Your mother calls us in to dinner but beckons us first inside, past the bright kitchen doorway on into the dark dining room. We form a small circle behind her as she points to the thermometer on the wall- 112 degrees it says! I stay there trying to see if it will spurt out the top like it does in Popeye, but it won't do it and I've gotta go eat. Well then, goodbye!
Us kids didn’t notice the heat. Every day is warm in summer and we were busy in our shady corner. The thick green grass cooled our feet and bare legs, you in a loose cotton dress and me in a sunsuit my mother made. Seersucker, no iron. And rick-rack.
The best thing was the hollyhocks themselves. One of you, maybe you, maybe Imogen, showed me a big red blossom with a dark pink bud threaded at an angle onto its stem. A fairy tale princess! She was beautiful. I was aghast. Picking flowers! I looked around to see where your mother was. But you went right on, picking more flowers, more buds. I finally picked some, too, being careful not to take too many and to stagger the harvest so the gaps wouldn’t show.
We admired one another’s flower ladies and when there were three or four for each of us, we had a party and the princesses swirled around in their reddish dresses, riding away to adventures and back again, adjusting headdresses, perhaps even exchanging heads for the occasion. We talked quietly but incessantly among ourselves, making conversation for our charges, inventing plots and actions. There was a stillness and an ongoingness about it like a French film, you know, the ones that have a single cello note played continuously.
Is this the childhood you asked me to remember? Bright, warm, shaped with pleasure? Ah, but once I begin, the kaleidoscope turns and the picture changes. Stop! I liked that one; turn it back! But every movement, back or forth, reveals another color, creates another shape. Which are the jewels of colored glass and which are the mirror-created symmetry?
So began the letter to my dear cousin, Marguerite. She had been recounting stories about our ideal upbringing! As I called up my memories of childhood, I was not so sure.
I’m rummaging through my box of old photographs. They probably should go on the computer like the boys say but I like to hold them and turn them over for the writing on the back. Portraits of the old folks, snapshots when we were small.
This is me in my dad’s hat, the one he used to wear for truck driving. We had a big old farm truck with a box on the back so you could carry cows or hay or you could take the box off and drive it plain to go to town. Sometimes Dad wouldn’t be home for suppertime or the next supper or next one. Awake in the night, I wondered if he was ever coming back for me. Then, late in the afternoon, he’d turn up laughing, with whiskers on and clothes all runckled up. You could hear the truck coming up the long lane. I’d fly down to meet him and he’d pick me up and whirl me around; he’d set me down and throw his hat on my head like a ringer. The smell of his sweat was a sweet veil over my face and hair.
We lived on the farm then. You and Imogen and Clare used to come up with your Mom and Dad on summer Sundays. Remember big rock in the front yard? We climbed up the ledges on the back of it and slid down the other side! Over and over again. Your Mom lifted Clare up to do it because she was still too little, so we had to go play somewhere else!
It was Grandpa’s idea for Dad to carry apples from the orchard over to Pittsburgh and go on from there to get oranges, bananas, and grapefruit from Florida. That’s Dad’s dad, Grandpa McCann. The other one, Grandpa Franz, was your Grandpa, too!
Anyway there was always a big party when Dad got back, with Lee and Frances, Harriet and Ted, and Ruth and Eddy, and Laurie who was always by himself, and Martin and Maisie. The kids came along: Ronnie and Bobby and Doris, Barbara and Mary Jane.
"Now, don't be crazy this time!" my mother pleaded as cars began coming up the driveway. But we whooped and hollered up and down the long staircase just the same, in and out of doors, playing hide-and-seek, tag, grocery stores, Mommies and Daddies, then doctors and nurses when grown-ups weren’t around. We knew it might be naughty so it must be fun! But I got tired of nothing to do so we crawled back out to run again.
Smoke and beer and whiskey, gingerale bottles sitting in a bucket of cold water, potato chips, loud jokes and laughing.
"…so she fishes around on the bottom of the creek and comes up with this tub and she stands up there, stark naked out of the water but holdin' it up in front of her …and she's mad as anything!
"'You know what I think?' she hollers, comin' out of the water, holdin' up the tub up in front of her, gonna give him hell!
"'Yeah,' he says, 'I do. I do know what you think. You think there's a bottom in that tub!"
Later on, when the night is very dark, it's quieter. Most of the kids have fell asleep where they lay, on a chair or on the floor; the rest sit staring, glassy eyed. I reach up and get a sandwich from the big plate still on the kitchen table even though my tummy feels a little sick from the beer-wet potato chip I ate before. Somebody's snoring on the couch in the front room. One or two women finally sit up and yawn, looking around for their shoes, hitching up their girdles and baggy stockings, patting uselessly at their hair. Husbands gather up sleeping children, bundling them over their shoulders and out to the cars, cranking up the engines, slamming doors.
“Hey, Lew! Next time you’re down South, get me some of that there grapefruit juice!” a man’s voice rings out in the dark. Other males join in the chorus.
“Me, too, Lew!”
”Don’t forget about me!”
“Get in the car for Pete sakes,” a female voice complains, “or I’ll have to go back for a pee!”
The final doors slam shut and the cars grind through their forward gears. The edge of the world is cracking open and the red is leaking through. Headlights jolt and jitter toward it down our lane to the main road.
Our house is far out of town. The way back from the South is through the mountains of Kentucky where small wirey men work alone in the hills, back under the trees. It's Prohibition.
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