Autumn Street Read online

  I was still sitting in the rocking chair trying to untie the knot in my shoe. "No. I never do. I hate prayers."

  "Elizabeth. Aren't you afraid not to?"

  "Afraid of what? Father Thorpe?" The knot came loose, my shoe dropped to the rug, and a generous helping of backyard dirt appeared beside it. "'Lord Gawd Awlmighty,'" I intoned, standing, imitating Father Thorpe at the Episcopal Church, crossing myself ostentatiously, and then pulled my jersey off over my head.

  Jessica giggled nervously. "You sound like Lillian."

  Lillian Chestnut had a guitar in her room over the garage. One night Jess and I had crept up the dark stairs, listened outside her bedroom door, and heard her singing "Gawd rides right in the cockpit with me" very slowly, feeling for, and missing, the right chords.

  "Prayers don't work," I said, pulling on my nightgown and climbing into bed.

  "Liz, aren't you even going to wash?" asked Jess, making a face.

  I scowled and examined my feet and hands. There were green and brown combinations of grass stains and dirt. I sighed, went into the bathroom, swabbed them halfheartedly with a damp, unsoaped washcloth, rubbed most of the dirt off onto a clean towel, and came back to bed. The covers were up to my chin when Mama came in to kiss us good night. She looked heavy and tired.

  "Why doesn't Grandmother like Jess and me?" I asked, after she had kissed us both, hoping to keep her there longer.

  "She loves both of you," Mama said.

  "But she doesn't like us. She doesn't even like you a whole lot, and she doesn't like the baby at all, she won't even look at your stomach, she looks the other way all the time."

  "Well," Mama sighed, "it's just that she isn't accustomed to having people around. And she's not accustomed to little girls, or to babies."

  "But she had a little girl, and a baby. Wasn't she nice to you when you were little?"

  "Liz, she wasn't my real mother. My real mother died when I was born, and I was all grown up, nineteen years old, when Grandfather married again. So Grandmother hasn't ever had children. That's why it's hard for her to get used to them,"

  I was stunned. Even Jessica had sat back up in bed, her eyes wide.

  "Who took care of you when you were little?"

  "Maids."

  "Like Lillian Chestnut?"

  Mama laughed. "No. Maids were different then. But Tatie was there, when I was a girl. She came to work here when I was just about your age, just about six."

  So it was all right. If Tatie was there, it was all right. Tatie was as good as a mother. Sometimes, I thought guiltily, she was even better. I relaxed and stroked Mama's hand as she sat on the side of my bed.

  It was Jessica, not I, who realized what the frightening thing was. "Why did your mother die?" she asked.

  Mama didn't say anything for a minute. She was thinking. "It was a long time ago, remember. It was thirty-four years ago. And back then, sometimes ladies died when they had babies."

  "But not now. Now they don't." I said firmly.

  Mama smiled, leaned over, and took a tiny piece of grass from my tangled hair. "No," she said gently. "Now you girls must go to sleep." She turned off the light.

  "They don't, do they, Jess?" I asked, when she was gone.

  "I don't know," Jess whispered back.

  And in the darkness, in the silence, to myself, I said my prayers. I said them to Lord Gawd Awlmighty, in Father Thorpe's voice, so they would be official and make up for all the prayers I had ignored. I said, Lord Gawd Awlmighty, please don't let Mama die when the baby is born, it's okay to let the baby die if you have to, but if the baby doesn't die make it be a girl, or if it has to be a boy then please don't let Daddy die in the war, don't let the Japanese kill Daddy, I tried as hard as I could to kill their beetles but the can was so slippery I kept dropping it, don't let that count, and Gawd bless Jessica and Grandfather and Grandmother, I'm sorry I don't like Grandmother very much it isn't her fault because she never had babies of her own, I'll wash every night and I'll say my prayers every night, Gawd, if you don't let Mama or Daddy die, Amen.

  Then I added, And Tatie, Gawd bless Tatie too. Amen again.

  Before I fell asleep I realized that I had forgotten to mention the turtles lurking in the woods at the end of Autumn Street. As long as I was saying prayers anyway, I probably should have asked Gawd to do something about the turtles so that they would never eat me. But by then, I thought, he was probably listening to someone else's prayers, and Grandmother had told me often enough: Elizabeth Jane, it is very rude to interrupt.

  In the morning Mama was not there; Grandfather had taken her to the hospital during the night. It was Grandmother who checked distractedly to see if our teeth were brushed and our shoes tied; and it was Tatie, in the kitchen, who held me on her lap and rocked me after breakfast as I sucked my thumb and said the long prayer again and again, silently, in my head.

  In the middle of the morning, Grandfather came to the kitchen and told us that the baby had been born, that it was a boy, that Mama was fine, and that a telegram had been sent to Daddy out in the Pacific.

  "Praise God," murmured Tatie. "Praise the Lord." I wondered briefly if I should correct her pronunciation, but Tatie didn't like to be corrected. Instead, I climbed from her lap and asked her to make me some oatmeal cookies. That night, I forgot all my promises, all my prayers, and went to bed without washing; Grandmother would have scolded me for that, but Grandmother didn't bother coming to our room to say good night.

  6

  MAKING FRIENDS WITH Charles wasn't difficult. I stuck my tongue out at him while he peered at me from behind the pantry door. He stuck his tongue out, even farther, in reply. I giggled. He giggled. We stuck our tongues out simultaneously.

  "You two no-accounts stop that," ordered Tatie.

  "If you gave us each a cookie, we couldn't stick out our tongues," I suggested.

  "Yeah," said Charles, poking his head around the door.

  We took our cookies to the backyard and talked with our mouths full, spewing crumbs.

  "How old are you?" he asked me.

  "Six."

  "Me too," said Charles. He chewed for a while. "When was you six?" he asked.

  "In March. My birthday is the first day of spring."

  "Ha," said Charles. "I'm older than you. I'm almost seven."

  I chewed for a while. "Can you read?" I asked slyly.

  "Course I can't read. I don't go to school till September."

  "I can read even though I don't go to school yet," I told him loftily. "My sister showed me how. Every letter has a sound, and if you put the sounds together they make words, and..."

  But Charles was bored. "I can stand on my head," he said. "Can you stand on your head?"

  "No," I admitted. "But your hair is like a pillow. That's probably why you can do it."

  "Look, I'll show you." Charles tipped himself upside down on Grandfather's grass and waved his bare brown legs in the air. "Now you try," he said, righting himself.

  I tried, and my dress draped itself around my head. Charles roared with laughter, as I fell over into a somersault.

  "I see London, I see France, I see Elizabeth's underpants," he chanted.

  No one had ever found my underpants particularly interesting before. Jessica's were better—she had some with rosebuds—but mine were ordinary white cotton. I grinned uncertainly at Charles.

  "If you pull yours down, I'll pull mine down," Charles suggested.

  "Underpants?"

  "Yeah," he said.

  I shrugged. I didn't mind, though I had a feeling we shouldn't do it in the middle of the yard, with Tatie glancing through the kitchen window now and then. "Out behind the lilacs," I said.

  So we did it there, and it was no more interesting than I had anticipated. I watched Mama change the baby's diapers several times a day. Charles was no different, except in color. I seemed something of a disappointment to him, as well, but we were both polite, and thanked each other as we pulled our pants back up. It was a curiousl
y pleasant way to seal a friendship.

  Charles had no father. I asked him, after we were friends, if his father had died in the war; but Charles said no, he had just never had no father at all. Later I asked Jess if that were possible, to have no father, ever; she thought it over, and said yes.

  "Like baby Gordon," she pointed out. "He's never had a father."

  "But he has one," I told her. "It's just that Daddy is away at the war."

  "But if Daddy didn't come back, ever, then Gordon would never have had a father."

  "DON'T SAY THAT."

  Jessica shrugged and went back to cutting out her paper dolls. She cut very neatly, on the lines, and kept her sets of paper dolls in a cardboard accordion file, in alphabetical order, with the June Allyson set first.

  But Charles had a mother, and his mother was infinitely more interesting than my own. Tatie's only daughter was named Gwendolyn. Sometimes she appeared at Grandfather's house, in the kitchen, and smoked a cigarette, with Tatie opening the windows and fluttering her hands at the smoke so that it would not waft into the realm of Grandmother's nose.

  Gwendolyn's fingernails were as long as her Lucky Strikes. Only once had I seen fingernails that long, and it had been in the illustrations of a book of fairy tales, on the hands of a particularly evil witch. But aside from her fingernails, which both frightened and fascinated me, Gwendolyn was not at all like a witch; she had a loud and throaty laugh, long straightened hair, rhinestone jewelry that glittered at her neck and wrists, and clothes that shimmered and rustled.

  Charles said that his mother was a secretary. I couldn't imagine how. I pictured her at a typewriter, with her arms lifted high in the air, tapping at the keys with the ends of her nails, a Lucky Strike caught in the corner of her wide, lipsticked mouth.

  Grandfather's secretaries at the bank, I knew, because I had been taken there for a visit, were elderly, mirthless, and prim, their white blouses buttoned neatly at the neck and their dark skirts covering their knees.

  Gwendolyn sat in the kitchen on a sweltering June day, her legs apart, her shiny skirt pulled high, her toenails polished and exposed in strapped high-heeled sandals. She pulled her blouse loose at the waist and flapped it against her bare brown midriff.

  "Gotta ventilate myself," she explained to me, chuckling with her low voice. "Hooie, it's hot. I'm sweatin' in places you wouldn't believe, child."

  "Don't you talk to Elizabeth that way," said Tatie disapprovingly.

  "She don't mind. You don't mind, do you, child?"

  I shook my head solemnly no.

  "I mind," said Tatie. "What you doing here, Gwendolyn?"

  "Came to see if you could keep Charles for the weekend. I'm going to Ocean City. Going to get away from the heat."

  "Who you going to Ocean City with?"

  "Victor."

  "You going with Victor, then you ain't going to get away from any heat, Gwendolyn. You taking your heat with you."

  Gwendolyn laughed again, her deep back-of-the-throat laugh. "Maybe. Can Charles stay here?"

  Tatie sighed. "Charles, you take your things up to my room. You got clean underwear?"

  "Yes ma'am." Charles picked up the brown paper bag he had brought and started up the back stairs. I scampered to go with him.

  "Not you, Elizabeth. You stay right here."

  I pouted. I had never been to Tatie's room. And rooms were important to me; I wanted to know how hers smelled, how it was lighted, where her clothes hung, whether her bed was soft and enveloping, as she was. I daydreamed Tatie's room into being often: I daydreamed it dark and warm, with small lights that glowed gold in the corners. In my mind's picture her dresses hung against a wall like friendly women in a group, their sleeves flowing in slow, shadowed, beckoning gestures with the breeze that came through a small window. It would smell heavy and hot, like the chicken soup she made on Saturdays, with, somehow, the sweet tinge of peach ice cream piercing the warmth. Her bed would be large enough for me to curl beside her, with pillows as huge and yielding as her breasts; there would be a deep crimson blanket as awesome and safe as church, to cover us both.

  But the back stairs were forbidden to me. And my own room, shared with my sister at Grandfather's house, was airy and light, cleaned every morning, with ironed sheets on the sturdy pine beds, and no mystery, no cobwebs, the only shadows those of practical and familiar things.

  "Charles," I said, as we sat on the ground beside the spruce tree, scribbling designs into the dry dirt with twigs, "have you ever been in the woods at the end of Autumn Street?"

  "I don't even know about no woods."

  "Yes, you do. At the end of the street, at the dead end, where all those trees are. Have you ever been in there?"

  Charles was quiet. "You get there on the sidewalk," he said, finally.

  Then I remembered. It was one of the many puzzling rules at Grandfather's house, one of the rules I had questioned, one to which my question had been answered only with the word "Because." "Because why?" drew no answer at all, only a frown. "Because why?" a second time brought banishment to my bedroom.

  When Charles came to visit Tatie, he was not allowed to go to the front of the house. Not indoors, or out. He had never seen the library, or the parlor, or my bedroom, or any bedroom except Tatie's. I had shown him the dining room once, and the polished silver arranged in the drawers of the mahogany sideboard, but that had been a secret and private excursion into territory forbidden to Charles. He could play only in the kitchen, the laundry room, the pantry with the flower-arranging sink, the back porch, or the backyard inside the fence. Why? Because. Because why? No one would tell me that.

  Charles had never been on the Autumn Street sidewalk that bordered the front of the house. Of course he didn't know about the woods.

  "There are giant turtles in the woods," I told him, hoping to share my fear with a friend. "And caves."

  "Yeah?" Charles looked interested. He drew a turtle in the earth, a turtle with a small straight tail extending from one end of its oval shell, and a pointed head from the other. Four tiny feet, like table legs. "Where I live," he said ominously, "there's a train goes through."

  "I've been on lots of trains," I told him arrogantly. "In New York I rode on trains all the time."

  "Not like this one. This one, she's a monster train. She goes through at seven P.M. Hoooie," he said, imitating his mother. "You stand on the track and you get flattened."

  "Nobody stands on train tracks. That's stupid."

  "Look," Charles said. He took from his pocket a flat tarnished disc. "Know what this is?"

  I shook my head.

  "Now it's nuthin'. But usta be it was a dime. I put it on the tracks just before she come through at seven P.M."

  He let me hold it. It was flatter, thinner than the gold dog tag that was now in my mother's jewelry box, now that we were in Pennsylvania where there were no air raids. I could see, faintly, the marks that had once identified it as a dime.

  "Can I keep it?"

  "Nope." Charles took it back, returned it to his pocket. "A guy I know about, he got flattened just like that."

  "I don't believe you."

  Charles shrugged. "Ask Tatie. His name Willard B. Stanton. He comin' home just before seven P.M., he comin' home drunk, and he pass out right on them tracks. Whoooosh. Flatten him right out like that dime. They scrape him right up, fold him into a little box, that's how flattened Willard B. Stanton was."

  "Did you see him?"

  Charles wanted to lie, I could tell. He was tempted. But he said, "No. But everybody talk about it. Ask Tatie."

  "What's drunk?"

  Charles shook his head at me in exaggerated disbelief. "What's drunk?" he mimicked. "Elizabeth Jane, you so dumb. You the dumbest person I know."

  "I can read and you can't."

  He ignored that. "Drunk" he explained with the same impatient tolerance that my Sunday School teacher often displayed, "is when you drinks a whole mess of dagowine. Then you acts crazy, then you throws up. Or if you
Willard B. Stanton, you gets yourself flattened out straight by a train."

  "What's dagowine?"

  "Just a thing you drink to get drunk."

  "Do you? Does Tatie?" Suddenly I was filled with fear for Tatie, that she might drink dagowine on her day off, lie down on the railroad tracks, and be flattened. I could see in my mind her copious brown body in its starched uniform, as one-dimensional as a paper doll, foldable, inert, immobile, and blank-eyed, gone from me forever.

  "Nope. We Full Gospel. Full Gospels don't drink."

  "Don't drink dagowine, you mean."

  "Right."

  He scribbled in the hard earth for a minute. Then he whispered, "I tell you a secret, though. My mama does."

  Gwendolyn, with her long, pointed scarlet nails and her laugh like water-fountain bubbles. "Does she get crazy?"

  Charles hooted with laughter. "My mama, she crazy all the time. When she drink, she just get crazier. Victor, he fold her right up and bring her home. Him and me, we plunk her into bed. Next morning, she don't remember nuthin'."

  "Charles," I said, "your life is more interesting than mine."

  "No, it ain't. You got them woods with them turtles. Hey—" he said, thinking, "sometime, when your grandma takin' her nap in the afternoon, you and me could go up the back alley so nobody see us, and..."

  "No," I said, frightened.

  "I ain't scared."

  But I was. "No," I told him. "I'm never going into those woods."

  7

  Prance, I THOUGHT, liking the word. I am prancing. I am prancing in and out of the kitchen from the back porch, with my feet high in the air like a thoroughbred pony.

  In truth, my feet were high because Grandmother, stern and exacting, had braided my pigtails as tightly as she crocheted the edges of organdy placemats; my forehead felt pulled smooth as a mask, and my ears hurt less if I walked on tiptoe. When Mama braided my hair, she did it softly, with deft and accustomed hands. But Mama was busy now, mornings, with the baby.

  I wanted to be barefoot, but barefoot was not allowed at Grandfather's house. Going barefoot, said Grandmother, was tasteless and caused hookworm. Often Charles and I shed our shoes beside the garage or out behind the lilac bushes, where no one could see. Before I rebuckled myself into my practical brown sandals, I always checked my feet for small worms that would, I thought, have tiny mouths shaped vaguely like the tops of wire coathangers.