Running Around (and Such) (10 page)

“When I was your age, I was almost never at home,” Mam was saying. “Either I was cleaning houses or I was caring for elderly people. These are all good experiences for young girls to have before they get married.”

“Good for
you
,” Lizzie muttered.

Mam chose to ignore that comment, and Mandy blinked her large green eyes in Lizzie’s direction. Lizzie caught her gaze, and Mandy blinked again. Lizzie knew she meant she had better watch it.

“I’m kind of excited to go. John’s wife, Hannah, always talks to me at church. She’s so full of fun, sometimes it seems as if she’s my age instead of being a mother with children,” Emma said, wiping the counter clean.

“Well, good! Then if you feel that way, we’ll just forget about me going. You can paint the kitchen, and I’ll stay here and do the work for Mam. Right?” Lizzie looked hopefully in Mam’s direction.

Mam shook her head. “You’ll go,” she said, and she was not smiling.

S
O THAT’S HOW LIZZIE
found herself at the Kings’ new house at the bottom of the mountain, six miles away from her family’s farm. Because John had come to get her in his horse and buggy, the drive there was long enough to give her a good chance to think about painting for a very long time.

Emma and Hannah had already spread newspapers on the floor. They had set up a stepladder in the middle of the kitchen and had gallons of paint and fresh new rollers and brushes scattered across the plastic-covered kitchen table.

Hannah greeted Lizzie warmly and explained that she needed to help John in the fields that forenoon so the girls would start painting the kitchen on their own. After Hannah left, Lizzie went upstairs to change into her old dress and tie a bandanna around her head. She clattered back downstairs to find Emma covering the stovetop with an old sheet and then carefully moving everything away that could accidentally be spattered with paint.

“Where’s the paint?” Lizzie demanded.

“Lizzie, this isn’t our house. You need to be careful,” Emma said.

“I know what I’m doing,” Lizzie said.

 Lizzie picked up a paint can and set it on the table without bothering to put any newspaper underneath it. She pried off the top and started stirring the light green paint so vigorously it sloshed over the side of the can.

“Watch it!” Emma yelled.

She dashed over to grab the wooden paddle from Lizzie’s hand.

“What?” Lizzie asked.

“The paint! It’s spilling down over the side. I mean it, Lizzie, if you don’t slow down and listen to me, I’m not going to help.”

“Good, then I’ll do it!”

Emma gasped as Lizzie tilted the bucket of paint into the roller pan.

“Not so much! Not so fast!” Emma wailed.

“Oh, calm down,” Lizzie said.

Emma sighed. She picked up a tray and brush and put them carefully on a sheet of newspaper that covered the floor. Lizzie slid her roller deeply into her own tray before heading straight for the wall in front of her, a trail of sticky paint dripping behind her.

The kitchen walls and ceiling were old plaster with deep cracks, some broken spots, and peeling paint. Covering them well would be hard work, she knew. She smacked on the paint as if her life depended on it, furiously rolling straight up and down in long, uneven rows.

Emma grabbed an old rag and wiped up the paint Lizzie had dripped on the floor.

“Lizzie, see what you did? Don’t fill your roller quite as full next time,” she said.

“Okay,” Lizzie said cheerfully, continuing her mad rolling.

The two girls worked side by side, covering the walls with new paint.

“How do we do the ceiling?” Emma asked.

“That’s easy—with a broom handle stuck in here,” Lizzie said airily, pointing to the end of her roller.

Lizzie used the rollers as if she was brandishing a serious weapon and the ugly old plaster was a great enemy she needed to conquer. She dashed back and forth from her paint tray to the wall, spattering paint on the floor, on the table, on anything that was not sufficiently covered. Emma tried in vain to keep all the paint spills under control. She continued to clean up drops of paint while brush-painting the trim.

“I love this color!” Lizzie said.

“It is a nice shade,” Emma agreed.

The forenoon passed quickly with Emma chattering happily, going from one subject to another. Lizzie could tell that Emma enjoyed painting. Lizzie hoped that someday soon she would be as confident as Emma was in new situations. It hadn’t always been that way. Lizzie remembered when Emma would get scared and would even admit it—like when they were eight and nine and going sledding with the big kids at school.

“Lizzie, don’t tell anyone, okay? But …” Emma had lowered her voice, “I am so terribly afraid of going sledding that I … well, Lizzie, don’t tell anyone—promise?”

“I promise,” Lizzie answered solemnly.

“Cross your heart?” Emma asked worriedly.

“Cross my heart.”

“Okay. I was so scared at lunch that when I tried to eat my bologna sandwich, I almost threw up. Really, I had to take a drink and put my sandwich away.”

Emma stopped and looked squarely at Lizzie. “And Lizzie, I don’t want to go sledding. Don’t tell anyone, but I’d almost rather sit at my desk and do my lessons.”

Lizzie’s eyes squinted as she looked out over the sparkling white hill. She watched as the boys tried to push each other off their sleds while they were flying down at quite an alarming rate. Then she turned to look at Emma, who looked back quite solemnly at Lizzie.

“Emma, that doesn’t matter one bit,” Lizzie had said staunchly. “I will not tell one single person ever that sled-riding scares you if you don’t tell one single person that I put five whoopie pies in my lunch this morning.”

“Five?” Emma was horrified. “Why five?”

Lizzie looked carefully over her shoulder and whispered to Emma, “Because. And I’m not even giving one to the teacher!”

 Emma had laughed, throwing back her head, and Lizzie had smiled, glad that her sister was feeling better. And now here they were together today, but with Emma stepping out ahead.

The Kings’ house was new, built only a few months earlier. It offered a lovely view of the mountain, which really was only a big hill, but quite a beautiful one, nevertheless. Lizzie thought she could have stood at the kitchen window for a very long time and watched the trees swaying like natural dancers with the mountain providing the stage.

John King’s brother, Elam, lived on the same farm, with only the large white barn separating the two houses. His wife, Priscilla, was a small, dark-haired woman, and she was good friends with Hannah.

Lizzie wondered if she and Emma might marry brothers and live together on the same farm. That would be all right as long as Emma and her husband did the milking. They might share a farm, but her husband would most definitely
not
be a farmer. Even to imagine a whole cow stable full of huge black and white Holsteins was so depressing, she could not think about it too long. Smelly creatures!

Mam always told the girls they must learn to pray for God’s will for their lives. Lizzie didn’t know if it was alright to ask him to please not make her milk cows, though. There were lots of other ways to make a living that were just fine. Would Joe and John ask her and Emma for dates? She doubted it, but then, you never knew.

“I’m hungry!” Lizzie said.

“It’s not even 11 o’clock!” Emma said.

Lizzie glanced out the window and across the front yard toward the team of horses and the wagon moving slowly across the hay field. Hannah was driving the horses while John stood on the back of the wagon, stacking bales of hay.

“Oh, that almost scares me, Emma. I cannot imagine Dat plowing a field with those huge, fearsome-looking workhorses. They’re five times as big as Bess and Billy.”

“Not that big!” Emma laughed.

But Lizzie found the idea of Dat working as a serious farmer both exciting and scary. How could he handle those large, heavy horses? He was not a big man. It was all too much to think about, Lizzie realized. The only way she could have any peace was to think Dat and Mam must know what they were doing. Everything would turn out alright, especially with Doddy Glick helping Dat to get started.

Lizzie kept rolling paint onto the ceiling. She grimaced as she put one hand up to rub the back of her neck. The ceiling was a lot bigger than it looked. Her arms ached and her lower back hurt, but she wasn’t going to complain.

She thought about what kind of horses Dat would buy and if she would ever be allowed to drive them. If Hannah could, then so could she, Lizzie thought. That would be much more of a challenge than anything she had ever experienced before in her whole life.

She was thinking about driving the new workhorses and walking backwards as she painted the ceiling.

THUMP!

Lizzie’s foot hit the edge of the roller pan. Warm, sticky paint flowed over her foot, across the newspaper, and onto the tile floor. She dropped her roller and held up her foot. Paint dripped steadily onto the floor.

“Oh, my word!”

“Don’t move!” Emma shouted, as she dashed to the back porch for rags.

“I didn’t do it on purpose. Maybe you should have offered to do some of the ceiling!” Lizzie wailed.

“Be quiet. Stop your yelling. You weren’t watching what you were doing,” Emma ground out between clenched teeth as she knelt on the floor and grabbed Lizzie’s foot. “Hold still.”

Emma muttered and grumbled to herself as she swabbed Lizzie’s foot viciously.

“Now go to the bathroom and stick that foot in the bathtub,” she instructed.

“Go to the bathroom?” Lizzie shrieked. “How?”

“Hop on one foot, of course,” Emma said.

So Lizzie hopped through the living room, tears rolling down her cheeks.

Emma followed her, trying to clean up any paint that fell on the floor.

“Stop your crying, Lizzie, you big baby,” she said. “Maybe if you’d grow up once and stop being so …so much in a hurry when you do something, things would go better for you. I didn’t say anything on purpose, so we could get along, and look what happened. Nobody can ever tell you one thing, Lizzie Glick, so you’re only getting what you deserve.”

With that Emma closed the bathroom door. Lizzie sat on the side of the bathtub, letting water run over her foot and crying her heart out. She just wished she could go dig a nice big hole and crawl in it, never to show her face until everyone liked her again.

Emma thought she was goofy and dumb, Lizzie was sure. She had it easy, being so thin and without one blemish anywhere on her face, while Lizzie struggled with awful-looking skin. And she was fat. Well, not really fat anymore, but not as thin as Emma.

The water sloshed over her foot, and tears ran down her cheeks as she squeezed her eyes shut. She pitied herself so much she wondered if this is how you felt right before you died. She hoped God still liked her at least.

Sometimes she was still afraid of God, especially at times like this. She had just wanted to hurry up and get the kitchen painted so Hannah would think she was a hard worker. She hadn’t stuck her foot in that pan on purpose. It was probably just God punishing her for some other things she had done wrong. That’s always how it was.

After her foot was clean, she wiped her eyes and her nose, smoothed back her hair, and went back out to the kitchen. Emma was on her knees, mopping up paint, her cheeks flushed to a rosy color. Hannah, who must have just come in from the fields, sat beside her rubbing furiously at some other paint spots.

Lizzie just stood there, both hands to her mouth, still not quite able to comprehend what she had done. It was so embarrassing and so awful, watching that green stain spreading across the Kings’ linoleum.

“I…I’m really sorry,” she managed in a hoarse croak.

“Oh, don’t be sorry. It wasn’t your fault. It could have happened to anyone,” Hannah said.

Lizzie didn’t know if she wanted to laugh or cry. She could hardly believe that Hannah wasn’t angry at all. Lizzie felt like crying partly because of her kindness. Hannah surely couldn’t be as nice as she sounded.

But she was. Hannah laughed as they scraped up the last of the paint, pointing at the nice shade of mint green that her linoleum became. Emma laughed with her, while Lizzie went to the washhouse for some clear naphtha gas. After they applied the naphtha, rubbing at the massive green spot, Lizzie was so terribly relieved to see that the floor wasn’t ruined at all that she felt like crying again.

They finished painting the kitchen without any further incidents. Then Hannah made a special meal of delicious cheeseburgers much later than the usual lunch hour. She served tall glasses of Coke with tinkling ice cubes, and lots of ketchup, mayonnaise, tomatoes, onions, and lettuce to put on their sandwiches.

She tried so hard to make Lizzie feel better, to help her forget about spilling the paint, and certainly not to blame herself, that Lizzie decided if she ever got married and had to have a
maud
, she would treat her exactly like Hannah treated her. Of course, she was not going to hire a
maud
unless it was
absolutely
necessary.