Autumn Street (3 page)

"If she had a girl, we could name it Felicia," I suggested. I knew that would entice Jess. She named all her dolls Felicia. She wanted her own name to be Felicia, instead of Jessica Kathryn.

She was quiet for a moment, thinking. "Felicia June," she said dreamily. "Because it's going to be born in June," she added, explaining, but I knew her explanation was a lie. The June was for June Allyson. Jess had June Allyson pictures, cut carefully from movie magazines, hidden in her bureau drawer, under the rolled white socks. Jess wasn't allowed to have movie magazines, but the hired girl, Lillian Chestnut, who did the laundry, had hundreds. Lillian Chestnut's own room, above the garage, was filled with movie magazines. Jess and I had once sneaked there on Lillian's day off, had examined all of her belongings, and Jess had stolen the pictures.

"Can't," said Jess suddenly, from her bed, shaking off the fantasy of Felicia June. "It's going to be a boy. All the baby blankets are blue. It's going to be named Gordon James, Junior, for Daddy."

I buried my face in my pillow. I heard my own muffled voice say, "Then Daddy will die."

"What? Take the pillow out of your mouth."

"Daddy will die if it's a boy," I said distinctly.

"What on earth are you talking about? That's preposterous."
Preposterous
was one of Jessica's favorite words.

I told her the secret I had known for several weeks. "It's nature's way. Nature makes boy babies be born when there's a war, and then the men get killed."

"Preposterous," she said again, but her voice was uncertain. "Who told you that?"

"I heard Judge Crandall tell Grandfather," I whimpered. "And Grandfather said 'Yes.'" I burst into tears. "Hold my hand, Jess."

She reached across the gap between our beds, in the darkness, and our hands found each other. Hers felt warm and firm and comforting. But after a second she let mine go, sat up, and said, "Elizabeth! Why is your hand
sticky?
"

"I was licking it." I had been. I had wiped my nose on it, too, but I didn't want to tell her that. "I was wondering what I taste like."

She turned on the light angrily, got out of bed, and went into the bathroom. I could hear her washing her hands. I could hear that she was using soap.

"You're disgusting," she said, when she came back. She arranged her nightgown tidily around her legs, pulled the sheet up, and turned off the light again.

I sighed.

"Jess, I could be the boy."

"
What?
" She was still angry at me, about the hand.

"I really want to be a boy. If I could be the boy, then the baby could be a girl."

"You can't do that. You can't change what you are."

"I could. I could wear boys' clothes, and I could cut my hair off. Everyone could call me Gordon."

Jessica took a very long deep breath. "Elizabeth, I want to go to sleep. You
can't
be a boy."

"Why not?"

"Because right now you are six, and when you are six you can wear boys' clothes and look like a boy. But when you are older you are going to get
breasts.
"

I knew that. I had forgotten about it. I didn't like the idea very much.

I reached up under my nightgown with my sticky hand and rubbed my chest. Nothing but ribs. Reassuring. I felt with interest my heartbeat for a while: a soft thu-dump feeling, regular and hypnotic and something no one else knew about but me.

"Good night, Jess," I whispered, but she was already asleep, breathing softly. I realized then, for the first time, that her dreams would always be different from mine.

***

Tap.

Tap.

There were the sounds, in unison, or almost, of the tightly tied shoes, the old ladies' shoes, striking the floor of the back porch as the three great-aunts rocked in their wicker chairs. The whisper of their summer dresses of voile. The murmurs.

There were the sounds of the doves, settling ¡at evening: muted, sad, sleepy calls from one spruce to another.

And the cheerful thwirp of the tree frogs.

Jessica and I moved barefoot through the damp grass at the end of the long yard. I could see her through the twilight, the pale pink of her neatly sashed dress flattened to white as color sank away with the sunset; she stood by the far rosebushes, fastidiously tidying the leaves with her little stick the way we had been shown.

"Nineteen," she called across the yard in her high, clear voice.

How like Jessica to count. We were removing beetles from the leaves of the roses, nudging them with our sticks into cans of kerosene. Jess was orderly, precise. Her hair was combed, her hands were clean, and her beetles, I knew, were probably laid out in businesslike rows at the bottom of the can she carried.

I had dropped mine twice, killing more grass than bugs. Retrieved, my can was slippery and smeared; there was kerosene on my hands and feet, dying beetles
lurching back to munch the bushes again, and those in my can were still alive, crawling up the sides to the top. I tried to poke them back down with my stick, and they adhered to the stick, so I scraped them off against the trunk of a maple tree, hoping my great-aunts couldn't see me through the twilight and that the gardener would not find them there in the morning.

They were Japanese beetles, I had been told. I had not been told why the Japanese, who were part of the war in the Pacific, who were out there looking for my father, had loosed insects in my great-aunts' yard. But I scraped at them dutifully with my stick, unproductively, and they dropped off the leaves, not into my can but onto the lawn, so that they could scramble over to the next rosebush for dessert, and every time I scraped one off, the leaf would turn to reveal three more nibbling on the underside.

"Twenty-two," called Jess with satisfaction. "I'm quitting soon. It's too dark."

The can slid through my hands once again, fell to the ground, and it was empty when I picked it up. So I had sealed my father's fate. There was no hope for him at all if I couldn't even fight the Japanese in the backyard of 203 Autumn Street.

"Put the cans in the gardening shed, girls," called Great-aunt Caroline, rising, her white dress now gray
in the dusk, against the railing of the porch. "Then wash your hands and I'll give you some lemonade before you go home."

"I got forty-seven," I lied, feeling another Oriental saber enter my father's side with the lie. I put my empty can into the shed, concealed behind some screwdrivers and paintbrushes, and wiped my smeared hands on my skirt.

"Dummy," said Jess with scorn, carefully placing her can and stick on the workbench, in the center, where they could be seen. "You can't even count to forty-seven."

"I can too. One, two, three, four, five..."

But she was gone, flitting across the wide lawn in her clean dress, her curls smooth, her fingernails trimmed, her high laugh reaching to the porch where the great-aunts waited to clasp her against soft bosoms scented with lilac cologne and to touch her with their wrinkled, gentle, veined hands.

I caught a firefly as I walked toward the porch, caught it on the first try, after its brief glimmer beside the honeysuckle. I felt it move, raw it flicker in my grimy fist, held my hand to my face and smelled the acrid firefly smell mingled with the thick sweet scent of kerosene. It was mine: I had captured it and made it mine. I would take it, secret in my closed hand, home to Grandfather's house and release it in my room
so that its sporadic beacon would soar in the darkness above my dreams.

But when I opened my fingers tentatively to see its light once more, I found it dead. Grief-stricken, I rubbed the broken body—the fragile, lacerated wings—from my sticky hand with the hem of my dress. In the shadows that moved now from the bushes like furry creatures reaching dark paws across the lawn, more fireflies moved and glowed. Frightened by my own failures, I ran from them to the sanctuary of the house.

G
RANDMOTHER
didn't like me.

She didn't like Jessica, either. She didn't call us Jess and Liz, the way everyone else did. She called us by our full names, snapping out the syllables like the short, even stitches that she put at the edges of her embroidery. Jessica Kathryn. Elizabeth Jane. She said the names as if she were reading them from the label of a bottle filled with bad-tasting medicine.

One dose of Elizabeth Jane before bedtime, I imagined she was thinking as I went to her each evening
for her dry-lipped kiss on my cheek. Snap. And the cap was back on the bottle.

"Good night, Elizabeth Jane. Remember to say your prayers."

Then one dose of Jessica Kathryn, which she seemed to find slightly less bitter, perhaps because Jess' cheek was always clean, as mine was not.

Upstairs, undressing together in our big bedroom with the flower-sprigged wallpaper, I asked Jess, "Do you say your prayers?"

She was naked, reaching into the closet for her pink nightgown that hung on a hook beside my blue one. She looked at me in surprise. "Of course I do. I say 'God bless Mama and Daddy and Grandfather and Grandmother and Liz.' When the baby is born I'll say the baby, too."

She stood there for a moment, looking at me, puzzled. Finally she pulled her nightgown over her head. "Don't you?" she asked, as her face emerged.

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.