Good Graces (12 page)

“He did?” I say, dumbfounded. Even though I didn’t know Charlie all that well, I was positive he was a good kid. Even after Mary Lane told me that no-tripper story about how he might be the kind of orphan that kills people and strings them up in his living room to drip-dry. Now here’s Fast Susie telling us Charlie’s a thief. How am I ever going to protect Troo when I can’t tell the good guys from the bad ones?

I ask, “How . . . who caught him stealin’?”

Fast Susie picks her suit out of her crotch and says with a smile, “Father Mickey.”

I say, “Oh,” and look over at Troo to see what she thinks about all this because she’s
always
interested in any news about our pastor, but she’s still staring at those Italian cantaloupe bosoms.

“Hey . . . I just thoughta something. You two . . . wanna stay over one a these nights?” Fast Susie says, all of a sudden like we’re her best friends. (That’s the other thing you have to watch out for in Italians. They can turn on a dime.)

“Ah . . . thanks. I can’t. I’m . . . ah, busy,” I tell her.

Troo, finally breaking free of the spell Fast Susie’s chest has put on her, says, “I want to!”

I knew she’d say that because Fast Susie is her idol, but I despise staying overnight at the Fazios’. We have to sleep in her spooky attic, which is bad enough, but then Fast Susie will tell us a bedtime story she knows will scare the underpants offa me. Like the one she told us the last time we stayed over, the one about Count Dracula. How after he sucked everybody dry in his Transylvania neighborhood, he’d turn into a bat and fly off to somebody else’s neighborhood to quench his blood thirstiness. A neighborhood just like ours. All I could picture was Henry sleeping in his bed on 49th Street with the window open. He would be like finding a pot at the end of the rainbow for the Count. That vampire would lick his bat lips and open up my boyfriend’s hemofeelya neck like he was the drink spigot at the soda fountain. The time we stayed over and Fast Susie told us about Frankenstein stealing body parts was bad, too. I had to go home in the middle of the night because I couldn’t stand hearing that story for a minute longer. I should’ve waited until the sun came up because that was the first time Bobby came after me. I didn’t know it was him. I couldn’t see his face in the dark, only his pink-and-green argyle socks from under the Kenfields’ bushes where I hid.

“Aw, c’mon, ya gotta stay over, Sally,” Fast Susie says. “I wanna tell you all about this movie Tommy took me to see last week.” She’s going steady with Tommy Molinari, who is one of Greasy Al’s brothers, but is mostly known as The Mangling Meatball. “You’d love
Psycho
. It’s all about this square who takes extra good care of his mother!”

Troo, really keyed up now, says, “Can we eat over, too?” She adores all of Nana Fazio’s cooking, but especially her
cannolis
, which are these creamy little rolled-up sandwiches.

I check Daddy’s watch on my wrist for the third time. “Troo, I’m goin’.” I nudge her with my foot. “Did you hear me?”

She nudges me back in the ankle much harder and shouts, “Do I look deaf?” She reaches into her shorts and slides a pack of L&M’s out of her pocket.

I say, “You know where I am if you change your mind,” and then I run out of that backyard because when her and Fast Susie light up those cigarettes and start puffing away, Nana Fazio starts shouting some crazy-sounding Italian curse out of the kitchen window and Fast Susie yells something back that sounds like “Basta or pasta” and Troo begins her French
hunh . . . hunh
ing and more than anything, all I want to do is be with somebody who speaks my own language.

W
here ya been, Miss Sally? I was gettin’ ready to send a posse out for ya,” Ethel says when I come barging through Mrs. Galecki’s back door.

My other best friend is standing at the sink barefoot to give her bunions some breathing room while she’s popping the tops off juicy red strawberries and running them under cool tap water, never hot. That would suck the sweetness right out of them. There’s an angel food cake baking in the oven. She makes one every week around this time. Later on, she’ll whip a bowl of cream ’til, as she says, “It’s cryin’ for mercy.” Strawberry shortcake is Mrs. Galecki’s favorite dessert. Because she’s so long in the tooth, she gets to have it whenever she wants.

Ethel’s wearing her white nurse dress that she’s always got on when she’s working. It sets off her skin that is almost the exact same color of chocolate pudding after you pour milk over it and mix it all together. Ethel is tall and solid, like the Kelvinator. Once she knows you some and likes you more, she’ll let you pat the top of her hair. It feels like a new mattress because it’s got a lotta bounce to it. Though she says a lady never tells her age, I know that she is thirty-six years old because I always give her a green lanyard on her birthday, which falls on St. Patrick’s Day.

Ethel has been taking care of Mrs. Galecki for . . . I’m not sure how long. Mrs. Galecki’s husband died in a war so she lived alone in the house next door to Dave’s until she got a bum ticker. That’s when Mrs. Galecki’s son, Gary, who lives in California, hired Ethel to come and take care of her. Ethel has nursing experience and is also a great baker. Mrs. Galecki needs medicine and appreciates a flaky crust, so they scratch each other’s backs.

I say, “Sorry I’m late,” and slide out the three-step ladder she keeps next to the sink for me. This is almost always where I get situated when we have what Ethel calls a rockin’ chair visit minus the rockin’ chair.

“Apology accepted.” Ethel wipes her wet hands on the yellow dish towel and says, “Peanut ’n marshmella?” That’s Troo’s and my favorite sandwich in the world.

“No, thank you.” My stomach is still not calmed down from what Mother served us last night at supper. She called it jellied moose. “But I’d love some Ovaltine.” That’s Troo’s and my favorite drink in the world.

Ethel says, “Sure ’nuff,” and gets up on her toes and gets down my favorite lilac metal glass off of the top shelf of the cupboard and takes out two of her famous Mississippi blond brownies from the cookie jar in case I change my mind about eating something, which I already have once I get a load of the melt-in-your-mouth buttery squares on the clean white plate.

“Where’s your sister?” Ethel asks in that accent of hers that sounds less like talking and more like crooning. If Frank Sinatra came from Calhoun County he would sound just like her. He wouldn’t be so skinny either.

I say, “Troo’s over at the Fazios’ talkin’ to Fast Susie.”

“That’s fine, long as she ain’t listenin’ to her.” Ethel shakes her head. “That Fazio girl had one good idea it’d die from loneliness.”

She said that to make me feel better because she knows how much Fast Susie razzes me. It’s Ethel’s way of sticking up for me. That’s the kind of person she is. True blue. And not only to me. She takes such good care of Mrs. Galecki and that’s why she deserves exactly what’s coming to her. When Mrs. Galecki passes away, Ethel is going to get a bunch of money from her Last Will and Testament. Ethel doesn’t know that though. The reason I don’t tell her is because she loves a good surprise, and second off, Mr. Gary Galecki made Troo and me promise not to tell a soul when he let that inheritance secret slip because he had too many Tom Collins cocktails on his screened porch last summer during his yearly visit. Mr. Gary adores Ethel and he doesn’t need any of his mother’s money. Just like Dave, Mr. Gary has a thick wallet. He’s in the movie business. I want Ethel to open a bakery with that money she gets, but one of her dreams for the future is to open a school for Negro kids, so that’s what she’ll probably do. She should call the place Miss Ethel’s School of Manners and Everyday Advice. She’s smart at those things and a lot of others. She studies both the morning and evening newspapers and never misses the
Reader’s Digest
.

I ask, “How’s Mrs. G been feelin’?”

Ethel sighs hard enough to flutter the curtain above the windowsill where Mrs. Galecki’s medicines, over ten bottles, are lined up.

She says, “Her gut’s still actin’ up. Gotta go pick up some more Pepto. That’s what Mr. Lou recommended for this sorta thing.”

My future father-in-law and Ethel Jenkins are friendly because she has to go to the drugstore all the time to get the pills Mrs. Galecki needs to take every day to keep her going, which Ethel doesn’t mind because Henry’s father acts toward her the same way he acts toward everybody else. Gentlemanly. Not like the vegetable man at the Kroger. He treats Ethel like she’s week-old cabbage.

“Would you say hello to Henry for me when you go?” I miss him and our visits. Next time I know that Troo can’t get into anything she shouldn’t, when she’s locked in our room for disobeying Mother again, that’s where I’m heading. “Please tell him I’ll get over there really soon to count Ramblers.”

“Will do,” Ethel says, stirring my Ovaltine. She is such a great cook. Gets all that malty grit to dissolve just perfect so there’s only smoothness going down your throat. “Ya heard anything more’bout the orphan boy that disappeared?”

That’s the way it is in the neighborhood. It’s like living with a hundred Chet Brinkleys. No matter where you go—the park, the playground, Mass, the Five and Dime, the library—you can’t get away from the hottest subject. Even if the last thing you want to do is think about it anymore, rotsa ruck. Everybody’ll be flapping their lips about Charlie’s running away from us and Greasy Al running toward us—well, limping toward us—until another disaster happens, which could be at any minute. When we lived in the country, all I ever had to pay attention to was not getting too close to the chickens, who have the worst personalities, but here in the city . . . it’s the people you gotta watch out for in more ways than one. They can egg your worry on and even if you are doing your absolute best to keep it under control, they won’t let you with all their jibber jabber.

“Thank you,” I say, when Ethel sets down the lilac glass that’s sweating as bad as the both of us. “All I heard about Charlie is that he’s still missin’.” I pull up the neck of my T-shirt to dry myself off and Ethel uses her arm on her forehead because she’s already got her hands full. She’s taken the blue bowl of strawberries to the counter and is holding a small sharp knife to slice them up real thinly between her fingers.

“Miss Bertha’s friends with Sister Jean from the orphanage,” Ethel says. “She come over for a visit and was real broke up. Told us that boy was really something. And how the Honeywells are so disappointed to have lost him. Father Mickey is tryin’ to put some men together to go lookin’ for him.”

I don’t tell her that Father Mickey probably doesn’t give a hoot about some orphan kid, he just wants the poor-box money back. The church loves moo-la-la. If it isn’t paper drives, it’s fish fries or Bingo. They’re always asking to give until it hurts. Especially lately. Father Mickey says we need to build more classrooms onto the school. All the money that gets taken in will go to finishing the new wing, but even if that’s a good cause, I notice people’s pinched faces when they drop dollars into the collection plate on Sunday. They have to work hard for their money, almost all of them at the cookie factory.

Ethel says, “That Father Mickey sure is something. Easy on the eyes, too.” Music is coming out of her bedroom. I can’t barely hear it, but her body is having no trouble keeping the beat. It’s swaying. “Ya know what I been thinkin’, Miss Sally?”

“What, Ethel?” I say, snitching a berry out of the bowl.

“I been thinkin’ I’m gonna switch myself over to the Catholics.”

“Oooh . . . nooo . . . nooo . . . I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” I say, in the same no-nonsense voice she uses on me when I come up with an idea that she thinks stinks. “That . . . that would be like takin’ that shiny orange dress of yours and tradin’ it in for a . . . burlap sack.”

Mother lets Ethel take me down to her church on 4th and Walnut Street sometimes. It’s in an old store that has the sign: JOE KOOL’S SMALL AND LARGE APPLIANCES FOR THE DISCRIMINATING hanging above the door. The basement windows of the church are stained, not with glass, but who cares? The whole congregation dances and shouts even when the Reverend Joe Willow is sermonizing. I have already decided that when I grow up, that’s what I’m gonna be. A Baptist. Mary Lane said she’d do it with me. I’m sure more for her hungry tummy than her hungry soul. She went down there with me and Ethel a coupla times so she knows all about the fried chicken and colored greens they put out after the service.

“You’ve got the wrong idea about our church,” I tell Ethel. “You’ve only been up there for funerals. You don’t know how bad it can get.”

“
Mmmm
. . .
hmmm
.” In southern, that means, Go on, tell me more.

“You gotta starve yourself for hours before you receive Holy Communion.” Ethel would especially not like that part. She adores a big country breakfast with ham first thing every morning. She wouldn’t like the taste of the body and blood of Christ. He’s really bland. (I’m too nervous to bring this up to anybody who might know the answer, but isn’t swallowing down Jesus kinda like being a cannibal?) “And the nuns, they got ways of torturin’ people that are worse than the Red Chinese.”

“That’s nothin’ but your big ’magination talkin’,” Ethel says with a snort.

“No, it’s not! Swear to God. The sisters tied Mary Lane down and dripped holy water on her forehead after they caught her peepin’ on them.”

“Sounds to me like that girl was spinnin’ one of her no-tripper tales,” she says, still slicing away at those berries, making them not too thin so they fall apart, but not too thick either. “I only know the one nun. Sister Jean seems real nice.”

“She’s only bein’ nice to you because ya aren’t a Catholic.” Ethel doesn’t understand how those crabby penguins work. “You can’t believe how bossy they are. They’re the brides of Christ so that makes them almost as powerful as priests,” I say, hoping that I’m getting through to her. “If you join up, you’ll be under all a their thumbs. Even in your dreams they can come after you.”