Candles Burning (41 page)

Their voices drew me to the surface of wakefulness.

Gus: “You must worry about Calley.”

Mama made a noncommittal noise.

“Must be tough for her, her ears. I think they're kind of cute but I bet she gets plagued by the other kids.”

“The world's a tough place. She's gone have to be tough to survive in it.”

“Ain't that the truth. That's what I like about you, Roberta Ann. You look the world straight in the eye, don't you?”

Mama purred.

“But you're her mama and you love her so much, you want to believe you'll always be able to protect her. She's gone grow up, Roberta Ann. Someday you won't be there for her. She'll have to take care of herself. It would be unkind not to do everything that you can to give her a fighting chance.”

“What are you gone on about?”

“Don't take offense, now. I got some money set aside. I'd be really pleased to use it for Calley, to have her ears fixed. Honey, it's just gone be impossible for her to get a decent job with those ears. They make people think she's feebleminded, and she's not, you know she's not. She's got a good little mind.”

“Stop right there,” said Mama. “I have never taken charity, Gus O'Hare, nor borrowed money, and I never will.”

She had, of course, and she would.

It took a lot of back and forth but eventually Gus O'Hare placed a cashier's check for two thousand dollars in her hands. The winning argument, he thought, was his anxiety that in her devotion to me, Mama might reject an opportunity for her own happiness—to which she was more than entitled, after what she had been through. Mama appreciated being portrayed as a victim of her own virtues. Once she had the money, she spun a world of lies about seeing doctors with me.

Mama never missed cadging a magazine, or in a pinch, buying it, that had anything about plastic surgery in it. I had studied them as often as she did, and had a good idea of what was possible and what wasn't. I didn't want my ears fixed. The most any surgeon was likely to do was pin them back, and render me unable to waggle them. They would be just as big as ever. It was wishful thinking on Gus O'Hare's part that some doctor could magically reduce them to normal proportions. Since I was not supposed to know that Mama was accepting money from Gus, I could make no open objection.

All the following winter and spring, Gus O'Hare visited for a week at every major holiday. He tried to give Mama his late mama's engagement ring on Christmas Eve. Mama tried it on and faked admiring it. Anybody could see that the value of the ring, 12-carat gold set with a tiny garnet, was purely sentimental. Mama never cared for garnets. More importantly, she never cared for anything that anybody could see was more sentimental than valuable.

Overcome with tragic widowhood, Mama was so bereaved that she had never considered opening her heart to another man. It was such a shock—well, she needed more time. When Gus asked her to accept the ring as a friendship ring, she blushed and dabbed at her eyes. In the end she was able to avoid immediate acceptance.

Gus was brave, the poor boob, and admired her fidelity to a dead man as he did her maternal sacrifices for me. He wanted Mama for himself, of course, and was welcome to her, as far as I was concerned, by then.

He returned the Saturday before Easter. I finagled him into a beach walk to see a possible osprey nest, and 'fessed up that the kids at school teased me about my ears. Somehow it came out that I had not seen any doctors about my ears and that, in fact, Mama had done nothing in that direction.

My treachery precipitated the first of several strained conversations between them. Mama was, of course,
devastated
that he no longer trusted her, and insulted and appalled that he should turn out to be mercenary. She got it worked around so that she was the victim, and he wrote a long pathetic letter begging forgiveness. I felt sorry for Gus but I also felt like he was going to find out sooner or later, and I was saving him a few months of delusion.

Mama forgave him, of course, but forgiveness did not include mercy. She sent him away, a brokenhearted man, who blamed himself for having lost a wonderful woman. I was sorrier than I could ever admit. If I were ever to have a stepfather, Gus would have been as good as any. I suppose Mama did show him some mercy; she only relieved him of two thousand dollars. She didn't marry him.

I never asked her what she did with the money.

“You've seen two dogs going at it in the road, haven't you?”

“Yes ma'am.”

“Well, now you're ready for that too,” Mama said.

She took a tampon out of a box in her dresser and tossed it to me. I had seen them there for years but without any grasp of what they were. If it were not embarrassing enough to be abruptly asking Mama what the blood meant, I wondered how I could have been so dim not to have asked or made any effort to find out what the tampons were.

I was aware that Mama and other grown women were “unwell” occasionally, a more or less regular unwellness. I did not grasp that bleeding was involved, until after a day of stomachache, while in a warm bath, a feather of blood rose from the vicinity of my crotch to the surface of the bathwater. I took it for the output of an unseen scratch.

The blood dissolved into the water. When I dried myself, the towel came away from between my legs with another trace of blood. With that penny drop of blood, I grew worried. No amount of anxious, awkward, indeed ludicrous, self-examination revealed a break in my skin.

Seemingly over the summer, I had developed quivering little cone-shaped bumps on my chest. They were mostly dark nipple. I obscured them by wearing an undershirt under my blouse or work shirt. Some of the other girls came back to school in September with bumps too, but I was too much of a tomboy still to pay any attention to the incessant giggling and whispering among the more advanced of my female schoolmates. The older we got, the more the girls at school all seemed to be rendered witless by their very femininity. What had I to say to them?

Like Alice, I was growing taller at a headlong rate. If I were going to get any wear at all out of my clothes, I had to buy them too big, for at the end of six weeks, they would be outgrown. I hardly had time or inclination to notice the pale wisps in my armpits and sparse feathers on the little hummock of my crotch, even if I had known what they signified. I peed from the cleft between my legs, effortlessly and regularly, and had never experienced the slightest difficulty in so doing. I had ears to clean out and nails to groom, hair on my head to wash, and teeth to brush, and sand that I wasn't to track into the house to remove from my person.

When I first told Mama that there was a little blood in my bathwater and showed her the towel, Mama rolled her eyes.

“It's your damned curse,” she said in disgust. “How old are you?”

She looked at her fingers as if they would tell her.

“Twelve,” I reminded her.

“Damn.” She grimaced, taking up her glass of bourbon. “All I need; my life isn't hard enough as it is. I am not old enough to have a daughter on the rag.”

Then she said the thing about dogs.

I didn't pay much attention because I was having an epiphany: why the other girls found the word rag so funny, and why they whispered about a curse, and why monthly meant something in particular to grown-up women.

I studied on the tampon.

“You stick it in,” Mama told me impatiently. She rummaged the box in her drawer and came up with a leaflet, which she handed to me.

The leaflet proved to be directions. I went back to the bathroom and sat on the closed commode and studied it. The diagrams that indicated the nature and arrangement of my immediate inside female parts were news to me. Aware that I still did not really grasp my own anatomy, I made repeated attempts and eventually did succeed in inserting the tampon. It seemed to make me cramp more, raising doubts that I had done it correctly after all.

Miz Verlow was still in her office downstairs. In pajamas, robe and slippers, I went down and rapped gently at her door.

She said come in, with barely a glance up at me from behind her desk. I remembered Mrs. Mank in the same place.

“My stomach aches,” I told her. “I have the curse.”

Miz Verlow sat up straight.

“Oh,” she said, “oh my. First time? Oh, that's a silly question. And you just twelve.” She rose and came round the desk to take my hand. We went to her room. How many times had I gone there, how many times yet to come, to be anointed with her nostrums, given one of the little orange pills, or comforted in her efficient, professional way?

She brought me a glass of water and two tablets. They were vermillion in color; I had never seen their like, but supposed them to be some sort of aspirin. They scraped the sides of my throat going down, so I drank down the whole glass of water.

“A heating pad can help with the cramps,” Miz Verlow told me. “Now you go to bed.”

I thanked her and left and as I reached the room I still shared with Mama, the ache began to ease. I did Mama's feet and crawled in next to her.

In the morning, Miz Verlow gave me my own room, an awkward little corner thing previously used for storage. I cleaned it out and Roger and I put a cot into it and fixed a shelf to the wall over the bed for my books and that was it. My own room, that I hadn't had since I was six-going-on-seven. Since Daddy was alive. The six-going-on-seven-year-old Calley had longed to sleep with Mama. The twelve-year-old was thrilled to sleep alone. No doubt Mama was too.

Miz Verlow took me to the pharmacy and picked out a smaller size of tampon that she said was meant for young girls. She paid for them.

She also started giving me a vitamin that she compounded herself. It had iron in it, she explained, as the monthly bleeding could make a woman anemic.

Fortunately, my first period was brief and very light, and so my periods remained for many years, never more than a mild nuisance. I was able to stay a tomboy and that was good enough for me. I didn't think of it as “becoming a woman.” Though I lived in a woman's body, I was still a child and I thought as a child.

ROGER Huggins first began to help guests launch the little boats or tie them up, and then to go out with the tentative ones on calm days. There were dolphins to spot, and mullet leaping in the bay. Puddling about made a pleasant low-key outing for those who were nervous of deeper water. Roger grew adept at showing this guest or that one where to fish for mullet, or a secret beach on which to crab.

Miz Verlow made note of his increasing skills as a boat handler and guide, and by the time Roger was thirteen, she had acquired a larger sailboat and a larger, though still modest, motorboat, for him to operate. She didn't pay him much but she did encourage the guests to tip him generously.

If sometimes rocket science is plumbing, plumbing is not rocket science. Grady had mastered the rudiments by the time he was twelve. In the brief periods in which his daddy, Heck, was sober, he managed to teach Grady a little more, and in a pinch, Grady took his questions to the shop teachers. Miz Verlow gave him her custom, provided he never brought his daddy with him. Grady soon knew the plumbing at Merrymeeting better than anyone else.

Being around Merrymeeting brought Grady into contact with Roger. Grady knew something about boats and longed to learn to sail. Soon enough, he was Roger's mate oftener than I was. Often, if a guest was particularly inept in a boat, Grady or I could be a real help to Roger. For one thing, Grady and I spoke nearly comprehensible Southern white American, and while Roger might make an effort in that direction, he really preferred not to speak at all.

This is not to claim that the three of us were Huck and Tom and Jim, drifting on a raft with our poles in the water. What we had in common was working day in and day out and being close in age. We joked around some, argued about work and music, and bitched about our parents. I lie. Roger never bitched about his parents. He knew Mama, of course, but the both of us were shocked by the squalor and misery of Grady's home life. Grady never complained of being poor; he just resented getting beaten up by Heck and his five uncles.

From the time Roger and I first carried a footlocker to the attic, we went there at least weekly. Occasionally, after hauling something to the attic, we had a few moments without another chore, and amused ourselves by rearranging luggage and furniture and bric-a-brac in order to make more room. Nearly weekly, we recovered luggage from the attic to deliver to a departing guest. Familiarity diminished the creepiness of the attic. It became just an enormous closet. Once in a rare while, something would catch my attention, or Roger's, and we would muse upon whatever it was: a postcard found on the floorboards, a crow's feather, the old aluminum Christmas tree, long since replaced with an annual real tree. None of it had any significance and none of it was scary. There never seemed to be any lack of curiosities; we were forever discovering things that we had not previously noticed.

Grady's plumbing chores never took him to the attic but he heard about it from Roger and from me. It was the only part of Merrymeeting that Grady did not know as well as Roger and me. It began to seem unnatural that he had never been in it.

The summer before we were all to start high school, we settled on the day of the annual Five Flags Fiesta, when Cleonie and Perdita had the day off, and all the guests and Miz Verlow were at the Fiesta all day, for Grady's first visit to the attic.

Once the house was quiet, we set off on our mission. So as not to get either of the boys in trouble if we were discovered, I carried the key that I had taken from Miz Verlow's office. The attic, of course, was hideously hot. I wore only a halter and a pair of loose shorts. The boys were stripped down to their shorts. We had a jug of sweetened iced tea that I'd made and laced with pilfered bourbon. We had some cigarettes, lifted singly from one unattended pack or another, and saved up for the occasion. Grady had a lighter. I had a few candle stubs and paper cups for the tea. And Roger had a kitchen timer.