Nebula Awards Showcase 2006 (17 page)

Mary Louise goes up to her room. At 4:30 she hears Kitty come home, but she only changes into out-to-dinner clothes and leaves and doesn’t get into bed. Ruby says good-bye when Mrs. Banks comes at 6:00, and Mary Louise eats dinner in the kitchen and goes upstairs at 8:00, when Mrs. Banks starts to watch
Dr. Kildare
.

On her dresser there is a picture of her mother. She is beautiful, with long curls and a silvery white dress. She looks like a queen, so Mary Louise thinks she might be a princess. She lives in a castle, imprisoned by her evil stepmother, the false queen. But now that there is magic, there will be a happy ending. She crawls under the covers and watches her doorway, wondering what will happen when Kitty tries to come into her room, if there will be flames.

Kitty begins to scream just before nine Friday morning. Clumps of her hair lie on her pillow like spilled wheat. What is left sprouts from her scalp in irregular clumps, like a crabgrass-infested lawn. Clusters of angry red blisters dot her exposed skin.

By the time Mary Louise runs up from the kitchen, where she is eating a bowl of Kix, Kitty is on the phone. She is talking to her beauty salon. She is shouting, “This is an emergency! An emergency!”

Kitty does not speak to Mary Louise. She leaves the house with a scarf wrapped around her head like a turban, in such a hurry that she does not even bother with lipstick. Mary Louise hears the tires of her T-bird squeal out of the driveway. A shower of gravel hits the side of the house, and then everything is quiet.

Ruby comes upstairs at ten, buttoning the last button on her uniform. Mary Louise is in the breakfast nook, eating a second bowl of Kix. The first one got soggy. She jumps up excitedly when she sees Ruby.

“Miz Kitty already gone?” Ruby asks, her hand on the coffeepot.

“It worked! It worked! Something
bad
happened to her hair. A lot of it fell out, and there are chicken pox where it was. She’s at the beauty shop. I think she’s going to be there a long time.”

Ruby pours herself a cup of coffee. “That so?”

“Uh-huh.” Mary Louise grins. “She looks like a
goopher
.”

“Well, well, well. That come back on her fast, didn’t it? Maybe now she think twice ’bout messin with somebody smaller’n her. But you, Miss Mouse”—Ruby wiggles a semi-stern finger at Mary Louise. “Don’t you go jumpin up and down shoutin ’bout goophers, hear? Magic ain’t nothin to be foolin around with. It can bring sickness, bad luck, a whole heap of misery if it ain’t done proper. You hear me?”

Mary Louise nods and runs her thumb and finger across her lips, as if she is locking them. But she is still grinning from ear to ear.

Kitty comes home from the beauty shop late that afternoon. She is in a very, very bad mood, and still has a scarf around her head. Mary Louise is behind the couch in the den, playing seven dwarfs. She is Snow White and is lying very still, waiting for the prince.

Kitty comes into the den and goes to the bar. She puts two ice cubes in a heavy squat crystal glass, then reaches up on her tiptoes and feels around on the bookshelf until she finds a small brass key. She unlocks the liquor cabinet and fills her glass with brown liquid. She goes to the phone and makes three phone calls, canceling cocktails, dinner, tennis on Saturday. “Sorry,” Kitty says. “Under the weather. Raincheck?” When she is finished she refills her glass, replaces the key, and goes upstairs. Mary Louise does not see her again until Sunday.

Mary Louise stays in her room most of the weekend. It seems like a good idea, now that it is safe there. Saturday afternoon she tiptoes down to the kitchen and makes three peanut butter and honey sandwiches. She is not allowed to use the stove. She takes her sandwiches and some Fritos upstairs and touches one of the nails under the carpet, to make sure it is still there. She knows the magic is working, because Kitty doesn’t even try to come in, not once.

At 7:30 on Sunday night, she ventures downstairs again. Kitty’s door is shut. The house is quiet. It is time for Disney.
Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color
. It is her favorite program, the only one that is not black and white, except for
Bonanza,
which comes on after her bedtime.

Mary Louise turns on the big TV that is almost as tall as she is, and sits in the middle of the maroon leather couch in the den. Her feet stick out in front of her, and do not quite reach the edge. There is a commercial for Mr. Clean. He has no hair, like Kitty, and Mary Louise giggles, just a little. Then there are red and blue fireworks over the castle where Sleeping Beauty lives. Mary Louise’s thumb wanders up to her mouth, and she rests her cheek on the soft nap of her Bankie.

The show is Cinderella, and when the wicked stepmother comes on, Mary Louise thinks of Kitty, but does not giggle. The story unfolds and Mary Louise is bewitched by the colors, by the magic of television. She does not hear the creaking of the stairs. She does not hear the door of the den open, or hear the rattle of ice cubes in an empty crystal glass. She does not see the shadow loom over her until it is too late.

It is a sunny Monday morning. Ruby comes in the basement door and changes into her uniform. She switches on the old brown table radio, waits for its tubes to warm up and begin to glow, then turns the yellowed plastic dial until she finds a station that is more music than static. The Marcels are singing “Blue Moon” as she sorts the laundry, and she dances a little on the concrete floor, swinging and swaying as she tosses white cotton panties into one basket and black nylon socks into another.

She fills the washer with a load of whites, adds a measuring cup of Dreft, and turns the dial to Delicate. The song on the radio changes to “Runaway” as she goes over to the wooden cage built into the wall, where the laundry that has been dumped down the upstairs chute gathers.

“As I walk along . . . ,” Ruby sings as she opens the hinged door with its criss-cross of green painted slats. The plywood box inside is a cube about three feet on a side, filled with a mound of flowered sheets and white terry cloth towels. She pulls a handful of towels off the top of the mound and lets them tumble into the pink plastic basket waiting on the floor below. “An’ I wonder. I wa-wa-wa-wa-wuh-under,” she sings, and then stops when the pile moves on its own, and whimpers.

Ruby parts the sea of sheets to reveal a small head of carrot-red hair.

“Miss Mouse? What on God’s green earth you doin in there? I like to bury you in all them sheets!”

A bit more of Mary Louise appears, her hair in tangles, her eyes red-rimmed from crying.

“Is Kitty gone?” she asks.

Ruby nods. “She at the beauty parlor again. What you
doin
in there? You hidin from Miz Kitty?”

“Uh-huh.” Mary Louise sits up and a cascade of hand towels and washcloths tumbles out onto the floor.

“What she done this time?”

“She—she—” Mary Louise bursts into ragged sobs.

Ruby reaches in and puts her hands under Mary Louise’s arms, lifting the weeping child out of the pile of laundry. She carries her over to the basement stairs and sits down, cradling her. The tiny child shakes and holds on tight to Ruby’s neck, her tears soaking into the white cotton collar. When her tears subside into trembling, Ruby reaches into a pocket and proffers a pale yellow hankie.

“Blow hard,” she says gently. Mary Louise does.

“Now scooch around front a little so you can sit in my lap.” Mary Louise scooches without a word. Ruby strokes her curls for a minute. “Sugar? What she do this time?”

Mary Louise tries to speak, but her voice is still a rusty squeak. After a few seconds she just holds her tightly clenched fist out in front of her and slowly opens it. In her palm is a wrinkled scrap of pale blue flannel, about the size of a playing card, its edges jagged and irregular.

“Miz Kitty do that?”

“Uh-huh,” Mary Louise finds her voice. “I was watching Disney and
she
came in to get another drink. She said Bankie was just a dirty old rag with germs and sucking thumbs was for babies—” Mary Louise pauses to take a breath. “She had scissors and she cut up all of Bankie on the floor. She said next time she’d get bigger scissors and cut off my thumbs! She threw my Bankie pieces in the toilet and flushed, three times. This one fell under the couch,” Mary Louise says, looking at the small scrap, her voice breaking.

Ruby puts an arm around her shaking shoulders and kisses her forehead. “Hush now. Don’t you fret. You just sit down here with me. Everything gonna be okay. You gotta—” A buzzing noise from the washer interrupts her. She looks into the laundry area, then down at Mary Louise and sighs. “You take a couple deep breaths. I gotta move the clothes in the washer so they’re not all on one side. When I come back, I’m gonna tell you a story. Make you feel better, okay?”

“Okay,” says Mary Louise in a small voice. She looks at her lap, not at Ruby, because nothing is really very okay at all.

Ruby comes back a few minutes later and sits down on the step next to Mary Louise. She pulls two small yellow rectangles out of her pocket and hands one to Mary Louise. “I like to set back and hear a story with a stick of Juicy Fruit in my mouth. Helps my ears open up or somethin. How about you?”

“I like Juicy Fruit,” Mary Louise admits.

“I thought so. Save the foil. Fold it up and put it in your pocket.”

“So I have someplace to put the gum when the flavor’s all used up?”

“Maybe. Or maybe we got somethin else to do and that foil might could come in handy. You save it up neat and we’ll see.”

Mary Louise puts the gum in her mouth and puts the foil in the pocket of her corduroy pants, then folds her hands in her lap and waits.

“Well, now,” says Ruby. “Seems that once, a long, long time ago, down South Carolina, there was a little mouse of a girl with red, red hair and big blue eyes.”

“Like me?” asks Mary Louise.

“You know, I think she was just about ’zactly like you. Her momma died when she was just a little bit of a girl, and her daddy married hisself a new wife, who was very pretty, but she was mean and lazy. Now, this stepmomma, she didn’t much like stayin home to take care of no child weren’t really her own and she was awful cruel to that poor little girl. She never gave her enough to eat, and even when it was snowin outside, she just dress her up in thin cotton rags. That child was awful hungry and cold, come winter.

“But her real momma had made her a blanket, a soft blue blanket, and that was the girl’s favorite thing in the whole wide world. If she wrapped it around herself and sat real quiet in a corner, she was warm enough, then.

“Now, her stepmomma, she didn’t like seein that little girl happy. That little girl had power inside her, and it scared her stepmomma. Scared her so bad that one day she took that child’s most favorite special blanket and cut it up into tiny pieces, so it wouldn’t be no good for warmin her up at all.”

“That was really mean of her,” Mary Louise says quietly.