Autumn Street (11 page)

"Elizabeth Jane Lorimer."

"Mine's Miss MacDonald. Look, Elizabeth. Right here on this desk is your name. I've made special nametags for all my first graders. Would you like to sit here in your desk and look at some books while I greet the other children?"

I nodded. First grade didn't seem so bad after all. The shelves around the room were filled with books, books with pictures on the covers, more intriguing than the leather-bound volumes at Grandfather's house. Miss MacDonald brought me some.

At the desk next to mine, a dark-haired girl sat leafing through a large book of bright illustrations. I read the nametag on her desk: LOUISE. She glanced over and grinned impishly at me.

"These are baby books," she whispered. "Look-there aren't even any
words.
"

"Can you read?" I asked.

"Yeah. I can already read pretty good."

"Me too. But probably the other kids can't. That's why they have to have baby books."

"Yeah. Because of the other kids." She grinned again.

The other kids. I liked the phrase when it came from Louise. I had a friend already.

After school, we traded sweaters and walked together. She wore the blue sweater that Great-aunt Florence had knitted for me, and I wore her yellow one buttoned up over my blue and white striped dress. We exchanged telephone numbers, agreed to bring our jump ropes to school the next day and to approach Miss MacDonald together and ask for books with words. On the sidewalk ahead of us, I saw Jessica, walking and laughing with two other girls, their arms intertwined.

"That's my sister," I told Louise. "The pretty one with the curly hair."

"Hi, Jess!" I called.

Jessica looked back, smiled, and waved to me. Then 128
she turned back to her friends; I took Louise's hand in mine and we kicked the few leaves that had begun to fall, with our first-day-of-school shoes, giggling. The air smelled like apple cider, sweet and fresh.

***

I saw Ferdie Gossett for the first time, at school, and forgot my intention to smile shyly at him. It terrified me that he was there, almost every recess, standing by the edge of the playground. His eyes seemed hooded, like a reptile's, and his sloping chin disappeared into a neck that was wrapped in layers of clothes as stained and repulsive as old bandages. But the other children were unafraid of his presence. They said he had always been there. They pronounced his name Ferdiegossett, the way we all slurred phrases like peanutbutter and bestfriend. Sometimes they pelted him with pebbles, the tiny weapons as casually cruel as the small insults that we inflicted on each other at play.

It frightened me that his inaudibly moving mouth and his vacant eyes made me think of my grandfather.

He became part of my mind's landscape of school, as omnipresent as asphalt, as reliable as chalk. Like snapshots glued to pages of an album, my images of school were objects and people: Ticonderoga pencils in an orderly yellow row; a daub of mint-scented paste on a square of construction paper; Miss MacDonald in a flowered dress, bending to whisper; furry erasers thick
with chalk dust; Dick and Jane and Baby Sally skipping through the pages of a book; Ferdie Gossett, reptilian sentinel of the playground; and Louise Donohue, bold and mischievous, who moved into the spot that Charles had occupied alone, and became my other best friend.

"Charles," I said to him tentatively one weekend when he came to visit Tatie, "I can't play with you
all
day, only part. Because I have to visit my friend Louise."

"I don't care," said Charles. But his eyes were hurt.

"You probably have new friends at your school," I said warily, not certain whether I wanted him to or not.

"Yeah. Clarence E. Cartwright. He's my friend at school."

"And if I came to visit you at your house, probably you would have to go play with Clarence E. Cartwright some of the time."

"You never come visit me at my house," Charles pointed out, as if the idea startled him.

"Well. If I did. If I was allowed to."

"Yeah. Probly I wouldn't even play with you at
all,
if you did."

"I wouldn't care," I lied.

"Me neither. Clarence E. Cartwright and me, we don't like girls any."

"Oh. I like
you
still, Charles."

We looked at each other anxiously. Finally he reached into his pocket. "I brung you something," he said. "Jest my ole printing paper."

I looked at his neat printing, the rows of uppercase
As
and
Bs,
and at the star pasted on the top of the perfect paper. His penciled letters were as carefully formed as my own. It seemed a link between our different schools, our different lives.

"Thank you," was all that I could think of to say.

***

Louise's house was very different from Grandfather's. Instead of the austere silence punctuated by the hollow striking of the hall clock, there was noise at the Donohues' house: radios played in adjacent rooms, tuned to different stations, combinations of gospel music, syncopated Rinso White! Rinso Bright! commercials, and the portentous conversations of Helen Trent and her many lovers.

Instead of the gleaming, well-polished antiques, each placed in the spot, at the angle, at which it would stand forever, there was clutter at Louise's house, and the surprise of things moved, rearranged, discarded, or changed.

One week there was a canary in a cage in the Donohues' kitchen; he hopped and twittered and sang and spewed seed on the stained linoleum floor. He had several names. Louise called him Goldie. Her mother
had named him Rudy Vallee, after a singer, and she called him Rudy for short. Cousins who came and went referred to the canary as Yellowbird and Tweety; the same cousins called Louise things like Weezie, and Lulubelle, and Babydoll.

One afternoon the door to the canary's cage was left open by mistake, and the little bird emerged, looked around, flew across the kitchen, sang briefly by an open window, and disappeared. The Donohues waited a day or two, hoping he might return, decided cheerfully that he would not, filled the cage with artificial flowers, and hung it in another room.

The casual, amiable impermanence of everything delighted me.

There were babies at Louise's, but they were not like my own baby brother, who slept according to a schedule and was brought out for display only occasionally, always in clean clothes and with his sparse blond hair brushed into a temporary curl. Louise's baby brothers were one and two years old; they sat most of the time together in a playpen with their hands full of soggy graham crackers that they fed alternately to themselves and to each other. Their diapers were always wet, and each baby had a pink rash at the back of his neck. Louise's mother called it "heat rash" and sprinkled it from time to time with cornstarch from the kitchen cupboard. Their nostrils were always
crusty, but they smiled a lot when they weren't biting each other, and they reached their sticky, smeared hands up to me when I came to the house. I liked the babies.

"Hi, Ralph. Hi, Frank," I always said to them shyly, avoiding their gluey grasps and refusing their offers of wet cookies.

Louise's room was a collection of her entire six years of life. She still had her own baby clothes, now on an assortment of eyeless, stuffing-leaky dolls that were piled in a corner.

"Was that yours, really? Did you wear that?" I asked her, fascinated, when she showed me an embroidered white dress, stiff now with dirt, on her favorite, largest doll.

"Yeah. In the album there's a picture of me wearing that. 'Louise Marie, at Aunt Monica's, age six months,' it says under the picture. My mom writes everything in white ink, in the album, because the pages are black."

My mother, too, wrote with white ink in our photograph albums, dipping the pen again and again. There were pictures of me, too, at six months, wearing white embroidered dresses. But where had those dresses gone? Our baby had new clothes, and my dolls were dressed in my mother's carefully stitched doll clothes. What had happened to the things I remembered from
New York? My special glass with the red dots painted on the sides, from which I had drunk orange juice in the mornings? At Grandfather's house, orange juice was served in stemmed crystal, and I had not thought of my red-dotted glass until I met Louise and was introduced to lives that paid no attention to style but still cherished tattered and derelict memories. Maybe my special glass had been broken. Certainly the fragile crystal ones were more elegant.

But I wished that I had the thick, spotted glass to hold, still, for recollection's sake.

People shouted at each other, at Louise's house. Anger, grief, joy: all were conveyed at full volume, with gusto that nudged any tentative secrets out of corners for scrutiny.

"What's your grandfather's name?" Louise's mother had asked me when we met and I explained where I lived.

"I don't know," I confessed.

"YOU DON'T KNOW?" As if she had turned her volume dial to
its
full capacity.

"Well, I've always just called him Grandfather," I explained.

"Louise calls her grandfather Paw-Paw. But she better know his
name
if anyone asks her. Hey, Louise, what's Paw-Paw's name?"

"Ralph Cedric O'Reilly."

"Right. Now, Elizabeth, you find out what your grandfather's real name is, because sometime you might need to know it. In case you get hit by a car and the police have to call your mother, how would they know where to call?"

Hit by a
car?
I always looked both ways, several times, before I crossed the quiet streets on my way to school. If I were in a place of busy streets, my mother was with me, and I was holding her hand. But that evening I asked my mother what Grandfather's name was. She smiled, surprised that I didn't know.

"Benjamin Lord Creighton," she said, and showed me how to spell it. Benjamin and Lord (how
embarrassing,
to be named Lord) I could have spelled myself, sounding out the letters, but Creighton was impossible.

I told Louise's mother. "I found out what my grandfather's name is."

"Oh? So tell."

"Benjamin Creighton." No need to include the other.

"Oh." She wiped vigorously at some dishes with a spotted, damp towel, leaned over and wiped the babies' mouths with the same towel, and picked up the dishes again. "Oh. Well. How about
that!
"

How about that. She seemed embarrassed by my grandfather's name. Embarrassment at Louise's house always took the form of loudness and remarks like
"how about that." I remembered that Louise's grandfather had shuffled into the kitchen once, a cigar in his mouth and his fly open. I had averted my eyes and begun to talk to the babies; but Louise's mother had laughed and said, "Hey, Paw-Paw, your barn door's open!" Paw-Paw had bellowed in response, "Well. How about that, anyway! What do you know," ostentatiously, pretending he didn't care; but he had been embarrassed. He turned his back and fumbled with the buttons, puffing hastily on the cigar so that thick smoke rose around his head as if he were trying to create a diversion or a screen.

"So," said Louise's mother, after I had given her my grandfather's name. "Your mother was Celia Creighton, then. I remember her from when we were both little girls. I should have guessed who you were: you look like your mama did when she was little."

It couldn't be true, I thought. Mama's hair was curly, like Jessica's, and always in place. Mama had graceful hands and clothes that were clean. She could never have looked like me. Neither Grandfather nor Tatie had ever told me that she did.

"What was my mother like when she was little?" I asked Louise's mother.

"Pretty. She had beautiful clothes—I remember a yellow dress she had, with a deep blue sash around
the waist. I used to think it was the most beautiful dress in the world."

I knew that feeling. There was a girl in the first grade who sometimes wore a pink dress with hearts embroidered on the pockets. I felt that if I owned that dress I would be beautiful; but the feeling made me dislike the girl. I realized that Louise's mother must have disliked mine, if only for the yellow, blue-sashed dress.

"And she had a pony, too. There was a little stable there where your grandfather's garage is, now."

So. That cinched it. Louise's mother must have
hated
mine. I would hate any little girl who had her own pony.

I tried to make up for that justifiable hatred. I told Louise's mother, "Her mother died when she was born, so she was practically an orphan. Probably that's why they got her a pony."

"Yeah. I knew that, that she didn't have a mother. A maid used to walk her to school when she was little. Then when she got older, she went away to boarding school someplace. She was the only one in town who went away to boarding school. So she didn't have many friends here. I used to feel sorry for her."

Feel
sorry
for the girl with the yellow dress and the pony? I wouldn't have. I looked at Louise's mother
with a new respect. She was kinder than I would ever be.

"My mother doesn't have very many friends here now, either, because she stays at home with the baby all the time. Why don't you come to visit her someday?"

The invitation embarrassed Mrs. Donohue, and her volume control went up again. "WELL. THAT'S SOME INVITATION. YOU HEAR THAT, LOUISE? ELIZABETH WANTS ME TO VISIT HER MOTHER. HOW ABOUT
THAT?
"

I was very puzzled. I thought they would probably like each other, Louise's mother and mine. They could talk about babies. They could even talk about Louise and me, if they wanted to; we wouldn't mind. Tatie could serve them tea in the thin cups decorated with blue flowers. Mrs. Donohue liked pretty things; she had a whole collection of cups on a shelf in the dining room, although some had been broken recently when one of the cats, chasing another, had leapt at the shelf.

She eased off her loudness, put her arm around me, and explained, "I don't think your mama would remember me. And I have to stay here to take care of Ralphie and Frankie, same as your mama has to stay home with her baby. But thank you for inviting me, anyway."