Follow Me (24 page)

Close to term, she settled on the name Rebecca, but she managed to forget this in the hospital during the rush of her quick,
searing labor, and in the first minutes after the birth of her child — the daughter she’d been expecting — Sally knew that
she had to be called Penelope, after her friend who had first welcomed her when she’d stepped off the bus.

Penelope Mole, born at 6:31 a.m., March 17, 1953, in Tuskee General Hospital.

But good Lord, wasn’t she the funniest-looking child anyone had ever seen! So ugly with her big, swollen eyes bunched shut
and her fat lips and her wet cap of hair that the nurse declared her the next Miss America out of pity, failing to foresee
that the infant’s lopsided proportions would gradually shift and settle neatly into place, and the girl would develop into
such a startling beauty that strangers, men and women alike, would stop in their tracks and stare as she passed.

And that’s just what Sally did. She stared as the infant settled in her arms, not quite believing that the funny, wonderful
creature was hers, marveling until marvel became an inevitable aspect of their interaction, implicit and constant. Even if
she didn’t speak of it, she’d often feel it, marveling at the child’s sheer presence in the world. And now and then she’d
wonder if she would have felt the same for her son, her firstborn, if she’d just given him a chance.

She had every intention of writing to her family in Tauntonville and telling them that she had a new daughter. But in the
letter she sent them on March 28, 1953, she didn’t mention Penelope. She expressed the hope that her parents and brothers
and sisters were all in good health. Spelling
raspberry
without the
p,
she announced to her mother that she missed her jam so much that she was going to try to make a batch herself come summer.
She went on to ask her little brother Clem if he was behaving himself. She directed her little sister Laura to pay attention
to her teacher, and she wondered if she had a sweetheart yet. She said that the fairy in the new movie
Peter Pan
reminded her of Tru. Sally asked Tru if she remembered the night long ago, before she became sick, when Tru had a dream that
she could fly. For many days afterward, she tried to fly. She jumped off the bed and she jumped off the fence and she jumped
from the loft. Did Tru remember? She flapped and flapped her arms so hard there were times Sally thought her sister just might
fly, but then splat, down she’d come, every time.

Sally went on to write that she found it hard to believe Tru was all grown up. She wondered if Tru was thinking of marriage.
Sally assured her that she would find a nice and suitable young husband.

She hoped there were no worries about the rain this year and pointed out that the almanac predicted it would be a good year
for corn. She told her parents that she went to church regularly and worked hard at her job at a store in town, though she
didn’t say which store. She assured all the members of her family that they were in her prayers every day, and she wished
them good health and happiness. She noted that she was enclosing a gift of money for her son. She signed the letter,
Your loving daughter Sally.

After sealing the envelope, she picked up her baby, who was blinking contentedly at the ceiling light, lying on her back on
an alphabet quilt Mrs. Campbell had given her. Sally whispered nonsense to her, putting together any meaningless syllables
that came to mind:
Nutter-butter
or
humf-fafa
or
lubadubdubdub.

In a letter dated April 17, 1953, she wrote again to her family, hoping that they were in good health and wishing a happy
Easter to each and every one. She said she hadn’t forgotten that Loden’s birthday was on the twenty-first and Laura’s birthday
was two weeks later, if she was counting correctly. She enclosed small presents for them, a locket for Laura and a wooden
tie clip for Loden, both of which were small enough to fit in the envelope. She guessed that Loden had moved out of the house
and started his own family by then, though she didn’t put that in the letter.

She wrote that she’d read about the development of a polio vaccine, and she wondered if that might mean they would soon have
a medicine to strengthen Tru’s legs, and she wouldn’t need her brace anymore. She named all the members of the family in order
of age —
Father, Mother, Loden, Tru, Laura, Clem, Willy —
and assured them that they were in her prayers. She noted that she was enclosing a gift of money for them to save for her
son and thanked them for looking after him.

After she’d sealed the envelope she picked up her baby and recited an old rhyme that came suddenly to mind, a simple rhyme
for counting:
Goody goody two shoes. Three shoes, four. Five shoes, six shoes, seven, and more.

She wrote to her family to wish them a happy Fourth of July. She hoped that they were enjoying good weather and good health.
She predicted that the corn would be knee-high by the end of the week, and the raspberries would be ripening. She spelled
raspberries
without the
p
again. She wondered if her mother remembered, as she did, the time they thought there was a dog in the bushes, and her mother
went out to chase it away, but when it came out into the open they saw that it was a bear. Her mother ran up on the porch
as the bear waddled back into the woods all full and fat from the berries it had gorged on. They were sure mad to lose those
berries, but they laughed. Did they all remember how they laughed?

It was so long ago,
she wrote,
so much has happened since.
She enclosed a gift of money for her son and signed the letter,
Your loving daughter Sally.

She pressed the moist stamp onto the envelope and then picked up Penelope, bouncing her on her lap, reciting,
Monday is a Monday, Tuesday is a brick, Wednesday is milk shake nice and thick, Thursday is a fairy tale, Friday is a lark,
Saturday’s a’passing, Sunday in the park.

She wrote a letter to her family in August, and then again in October, November, and December. She sent presents for their
birthdays and Christmas, and she enclosed a portion of her earnings to give to her son. Without going into specifics, she
assured her family that everything was all right.
Better than all right,
she wrote,
not counting what you read in the newspaper these days.

She always included a return address, though she didn’t really expect her parents to contact her. She convinced herself that
she didn’t care whether or not they replied. She wasn’t going to waste the rest of her life waiting to hear back from them.

But, oh, if those Werners only knew the truth; if they could have seen chunky, funny-looking Penelope, who grew chunkier and
funnier-looking before she began to grow beautiful. Surely the sight of her would have softened their hearts.

Her fat cheeks fattened into two stuffed pouches, and her eyes had the startled, sparkling glare of a raccoon caught in a
lantern’s glow. She sucked her thumb with great energy; upon discovering her feet, she took to chewing on her big toe. She
was smiling before she was a month old, and her proudest smiles accompanied her juiciest farts.

She went to work with Sally and lay contentedly in a cradle that Mr. Potter had set up for her, charming the customers who
bent down to have a look, gurgling and cooing sweetly. So what if her proportions were odd? Odd was cute when it came packaged
in a splendid little girl. It didn’t matter to the people of Tuskee that her mother didn’t have a marriage license to make
the child legitimate.
Legitimate
wasn’t a word in the local vocabulary. Neither, as far as Sally could tell, was
sinner
or
shame
or
bastard.

Come to think of it, there were a whole lot of missing words. While Sally swept the aisles at the end of the day, she’d make
a mental list of familiar words she never expected to hear in Tuskee:
catastrophe, gloom, horror, damnation, humiliate, massacre, vile —
and
whore,
of course, she’d never hear that around here, or
slut,
not because such words were forbidden, but because they simply weren’t available for common conversation.

If Sally was judging correctly, the language spoken in Tuskee didn’t provide an opportunity for slander. How lucky she was
to have found her way to this haven, where she was free to carry on her life protected from the world’s dangers, to work and
raise her child here, to talk with friends, to point a customer in the direction of a ladder or a garden hose, to be useful,
to nurse her baby and quiet her when she cried.

Coaxing her,
Shhh, don’t you cry.

Persuading her to
Go to sleep, my little baby.

Promising to give her all sorts of treasures when she woke —
pretty horses, mockingbirds, golden rings, shortening bread.

And wouldn’t you know, one humid day late in the summer, when the sticky heat was making Penelope uncomfortable and her whimpers
were building up to wails, Sally Mole heard herself singing. She’d probably been singing aloud to her baby for weeks, and
she just hadn’t thought to listen to her own voice. But now she heard herself singing to soothe Penelope when she was irritable.

She sang,
It’s simple to wish
. She sang,
Darlin’, won’t you walk with me
. She sang to cajole her daughter out of a fuss. She sang to make her giggle. And once, months later, without thinking, she
sang to Penelope in the hardware store. It was a song Sally had read as a verse in a children’s book, an homage to the Cheshire
cat, his saucy manner and lingering smile, and Penelope liked the melody Sally had made up so much that she clapped her hands
together to beg for more. So Sally sang it again,
Grinning his grin and fading away, grinning and fading away, away, away,
and again,
away, away, away,
and again, noticing only after she’d whirled around, twirling the baby, that two men were standing at the end of an aisle
watching her, listening to her sing. And the sight of them brought to Sally’s mind words that were supposed to be absent from
Tuskee, reminding her that she’d had a good reason for swearing off singing forever.

“That’s a dandy song,” said one of the men, a young man in a droopy tweed cap.

The other man, older than the first, perhaps his father, took the frayed, unlit stub of his cigar from his mouth, and said,
“Don’t mind us. You go ahead and sing.”

“No, that’s enough,” said Sally, more angrily than she’d intended, drawing from the baby on her hip a grunt to express her
dissatisfaction and then another grunt to indicate that she would burst out crying if her mother didn’t resume her song.

“Quiet now,” Sally said to her, truly an outrageous direction from the point of view of the baby, who might not have understood
the exact meaning of the words but must have sensed that her mother was signaling that she would no longer comply with her
daughter’s simple desire. Penelope’s frown bunched her whole face into an expression of despair, and she erupted in a sobbing
frenzy. All Sally could think to do was to whisper a promise that she’d sing to her later.

For a moment Penelope fell silent and peered at her mother suspiciously.

“She wants you to sing is all,” observed the younger man.

“Go ahead and sing for her.” The older man offered this more as an expectation than a suggestion; he inserted his cigar stub
back between his lips and folded his arms across his chest, waiting for Sally to continue. But Sally wasn’t going to continue,
and Penelope, sensing this, burst out crying again.

“Can I help you find something?” Sally asked, raising her voice above her baby’s wails.

“We’re looking for…”

She thought she heard him say
gadget.
He corrected her: he was looking for
a gasket, a graphite gasket.

“A gasket, you say? Okay then, let me think, graphite gasket. Graphite, you said. Right, yes, okay, down there, next to the
boiler tape…”

As the men disappeared down the aisle, Sally bounced and swayed her screaming baby. When the motion didn’t comfort her, she
whispered the words of the song into Penelope’s ear. When that didn’t work either, she opened the door and stood on the threshold,
soaking in the brisk, bright cold of a January day, hugging her daughter close to keep her warm.

She had to raise her voice to be heard above the slur of tires on slushy macadam, the rattle of a bus’s engine, the chimes
outside the gift shop across the street. She sang to her baby,
fading away, away, away,
loudly, nearly bellowing the words
away, away, away.
And as she sang, a woman passing by, bundled in a wool coat and braided scarves, picked up the melody and hummed it as she
continued down the street.

Penelope’s smile suggested that her pleasure came more from manipulating her mother than from listening to her sing, but her
mischievous delight was contagious, and Sally felt it, too, and she liked the way the tune was returning to her as an echo,
hummed by a stranger.

All she had to do was sing. Of course she’d sing. She decided right then and there that it had been ridiculous to forswear
singing for her entire future when she couldn’t have guessed that the future would evolve into a present time in which she
was a clerk at a hardware store holding a daughter in her arms who loved to cajole her into singing.

Grinning and fading away, away, away.

Sally Werner had stopped singing. Sally Angel had never allowed herself to sing. But now that Sally Mole had finally begun
singing loudly enough for others to hear, she didn’t want to stop:

Walk with me, walk with me…

Left and right, day and night…

“Thank you, miss!” the younger man called from behind her in the store’s foyer. She looked at him in confusion. “The gaskets,”
he prompted.

Of course, the gaskets. Sally Mole had a job with responsibilities, she had customers who needed her attention, and Mr. Potter
was off helping Wally Campbell install a dishwasher in a fancy house on Montague Street.