Running Around (and Such) (27 page)

“Oh nothing. Come on, let’s play!”

The game started in earnest. Amos proved to be a capable player. He was quick, so Lizzie came to depend on him when an opposing shot was too fast or hard for her to reach. When the opposing players scored nine points to their 10, Lizzie was breathlessly laughing, no longer paralyzed by shyness. She was having so much fun she quite forgot her misery of only an hour ago.

They played two sets, and Lizzie did not want the game to end.

But Amos threw his Ping-Pong paddle down, ran his fingers through his hair, and said, “It’s too hot in here! Let’s go for a walk!”

Lizzie didn’t know what to do. Was he talking to her or Marvin? She couldn’t go on a walk with him alone on her very first weekend. That would not be proper at all, she knew that, and she could just hear Mam and Emma on Monday morning if that happened.

But she wanted to go for a walk with Amos. He was fun to be around and quite nice- looking, but…she shouldn’t, not her first weekend of running around.

Marvin found his coat and asked Lizzie why she didn’t go get hers. “You and Ruthie can go with us.”

Lizzie smiled shyly at the strange girl who evidently was named Ruthie. “You want to go?”

“Do you?”

Lizzie cast a sideways glance at Amos who was looking at her, waiting to see what she’d say. “Yes. If you do.”

“All right. My coat’s upstairs.”

Lizzie ran up the stairs with Ruthie, and they looked straight into each other’s eyes, smiling happily. No matter if they didn’t know each other before this, they were going for a walk with the boys! Ruthie’s eyes sparkled as she tied her covering strings more tightly, checking her face in the mirror. “I’m Ruthie Stoltzfus, and I heard that Emma had a sister who would soon be 16. So you’re the one!” she said, smiling at Lizzie.

“I am, yes!”

They laughed together as they dashed down the stairs.

Outside, the air was brisk and cold, although most of the snow had already melted. Lizzie pulled her scarf closer and shivered as they set a brisk pace out through the driveway.

They talked about all kinds of things with Marvin leading the conversation, as he usually did. Lizzie saw a few more Amish houses and learned about the community. She also heard about Amos’ home, where he lived, and how many were in his family. Ruthie lived only a few miles away and had four sisters.

Lizzie looked at Marvin and smiled. He smiled back as if to say, Isn’t this just the most fun ever? Her heart swelled with genuine fondness and admiration for her uncle. Dear Marvin. Even now, at this absolutely important time in her life, good old Marvin was enjoying it along with her, just as had happened many times in their childhoods.

The hymn-singing was taking place a few miles away. Ruthie told Lizzie that when a boy took you to the singing, or when he asked you to go along with him, it was because he liked your company. It wasn’t like a real date, not even the start of one, but it was exciting to see who asked you to ride along in his buggy. Sometimes a group of girls asked a guy to take them along to the singing in his buggy, which was all right, too. Ruthie giggled a little when she told Lizzie that it was a really great thing if someone asked you to go along.

Lizzie chewed on her lower lip, nervously eyeing the boys getting ready to go out and hitch up their horses. She saw Joshua ask Emma if she was ready to go, and Emma nodded her head, smiling at him. It would be so safe and secure to have a boyfriend, Lizzie thought.

“Ruthie, what about our walk? That didn’t mean anything, did it?” Lizzie asked a bit hesitantly.

“No. We were just cooling off after playing Ping-Pong.”

Lizzie nodded. But she couldn’t help but be disappointed that Marvin and Amos didn’t ask them to ride with them to the singing.

Barbara and Mary caught up with the two girls, inviting Lizzie and Ruthie to ride along with them and Barbara’s brother.

The ride to the singing was the wildest buggy ride Lizzie had ever experienced. She was so glad she was in the back seat and that it was dark. Barbara’s brother drove so fast that she was immensely relieved she couldn’t see the landscape flying past from where she sat.

More teams of horses tore along, both in front of and behind them. One by one, they overtook the buggy Lizzie was in, streaking past them as if they were hardly moving. Lizzie hid her face, hung on, and hoped there was no vehicle approaching from the opposite direction.

She was sure that they turned into the driveway on two wheels, the horse leaning at a 45-degree angle, but she didn’t say anything because she was too new to squeal or state her opinions.

The youth all filed into the living room of the large house where a long narrow table had been put together. It was made of church benches set on small wooden extenders to form a table top. Other wooden church benches were set on either side, and hymnbooks were piled in the center of the table. The boys sat on one side; the girls on the other.

Emma and Sara started the first song, an old German hymn Lizzie had often sung in school. She knew the words well and loved to sing, especially with a whole group of people. On this very first weekend she discovered the utter beauty of joining the young people’s hymn-singings on Sunday evenings.

She was singing heartily when she looked up and saw Marvin and Amos come in and sit down on the boys’ side of the table, followed immediately by two girls whom Lizzie did not know.

She blinked her eyes nervously, hastily looking at the words in the hymnbook. So that was how it was, huh? You could go for a walk with a good-looking young man, and it amounted to nothing.

Already, only a few hours later, he had asked another girl to go along to the singing with him. Lizzie felt absolutely dejected, her future of running around as insurmountable as Mt. Everest. She would have to have a serious talk with Emma.

She noticed Ruthie watching her anxiously, so she knew she had to paste a smile on her face and start to sing again. But all she could think about was Uncle Marvin having the nerve to do this to Ruthie and her.

She was not only planning a serious talk with Emma about how she managed to go for a walk with Joshua
and
ride to the singing with him. She had also decided to give Marvin a good scolding on the way home.

Lizzie felt almost as confused as she did one morning a few years earlier. As they got ready for school, Emma gave her another lecture about how she should look and behave at school. She wasn’t even a teenager yet, but if she listened to Emma, it sounded like she was now too old to horse around with the boys. Let Emma be sedate and domestic, Lizzie decided. But she wasn’t going to stop having fun.

Lizzie finished combing her hair in silence that day. Emma pinned on her apron, asking Lizzie to straighten it in the back. There was a small piece of cloth sewn to the waist of their dresses, called a lebbley, and their black aprons had to be spaced evenly on each side, according to Amish custom.

“Yesterday your apron was so crooked I couldn’t even see your lebbley, Lizzie,” Emma informed her.

“So?”

“Well, you could let me straighten it for you.”

“I can do it myself. Besides, I don’t even care much what I look like. Around here, nobody really cares much about clothes. It’s relaxed,” Lizzie said, sniffing.

“I agree,” Emma assured her. “But you looked so sloppy yesterday in school, I was almost embarrassed. Your hair looked a fright. I mean, I don’t want to be unkind, Lizzie, but you should hold still and be a bit more quiet. We’re not exactly little girls anymore!”

Lizzie narrowed her eyes at Emma. She had a straight pin in her mouth, because she was pinning her black school apron, so she didn’t say anything immediately.

“Emma, we’re not old yet. I don’t want to have to grow up right now and start worrying about what I look like. There’s too much to do yet, like playing baseball and going sledding and skating,” Lizzie said, holding a straight pin to the lamp to see why it wouldn’t pierce the fabric of her black belt apron.

Emma sighed, turning to hang up her flannel nightgown. She shook her head. There was no use trying to persuade Lizzie to act a bit more grown up. Lizzie assumed she was fine exactly the way she was, although Emma thought she was too noisy in school, often speaking her mind quite loudly and at the wrong time.

As they splashed through the slush on their way to school, Emma hung back a bit because Lizzie was stomping her boots in the shallow ditch beside the road. Bits of slush and water flew in every direction, splattering anyone close to her.

“Stop it, Lizzie,” Sadie Mae said. “You got my socks wet.”

Lizzie laughed and skipped ahead, trying to catch up with Ivan and Ray. They were talking, never noticing Lizzie’s approach. Emma watched as Lizzie sneaked up behind them and then stomped her boot in the slush, splattering their pant legs with cold, wet snow.

“Hey!” Ivan yelled.

“Cut it out!” Ray growled.

Lizzie stomped again, splattering more cold, wet snow across their legs. Ray put down his lunchbox, picked up a handful of wet snow, grabbed Lizzie by the shoulders, and rubbed the snow in her face. Lizzie shrieked and tore out of his grasp, stopping to shake the water off her face. It ran down her chin and soaked her coat. She rubbed a coat sleeve across her face in an effort to dry it. Her face was red as a beet, her bonnet pushed to the back of her head, her hair a disheveled mess, and the day hadn’t even begun.

“Lizzie!” Emma scolded.

“What?”

“Behave yourself.”

Sadie Mae was scowling at her and Emma looked embarrassed. Mandy walked quietly behind them, but her eyes were at least twinkling.

“That makes Ivan and Ray mad if you splash slush on them,” Sadie Mae told her sourly.

Lizzie felt terrible. No one smiled—not even Mandy—so she figured that wasn’t a good thing to have done this morning. She pinched her mouth shut and fell behind everyone else. That was just the trouble with getting older, she thought bitterly. There were always these unspoken guidelines about what was nice behavior and what wasn’t. Who was to say what was grown up and what was childish? Emma? Emma couldn’t always be there with Lizzie to remind her to behave herself her whole life long. And that Sadie Mae had nerve, telling her that Ivan and Ray didn’t like slush splashed on them. How did she know? Everybody was mean this morning. Even Mandy was sober and serious.

Now, Lizzie sat at her first singing, wondering again if she had missed some important rule of behavior. She guessed she’d have to ask Emma.

Spring arrived, along with warm, mellow sunshine and buds bursting from the maple trees in the yard. Even the old walnut tree beside the sidewalk began to shine with a look of light green mist. Thousands of tiny green buds were erupting from its dark branches.

The swollen creek churned on its relentless way to the river, muddy brown from all the April showers. Little green shoots emerged from the moist brown earth under its blanket of wet, decaying leaves which had mulched the baby sprouts to new growth.

Dat was working the horses hard, preparing the soil for another crop. Clyde was back in the harness, still bouncing around as if he had springs in his legs. But the spirited horse was learning to buckle down and behave long enough to pull his share of the plow.

Mam’s energy level was almost back to normal a year after her bout of pneumonia, which comforted and relieved Lizzie and Emma. She asked Dat to bring a few wheelbarrow loads of manure into the yard so she could start a new flower garden. And she asked the girls to help her in the evening with laying out a huge new rock garden on an unhandy slope between the house and barn where no grass could grow decently.

New Amish families were moving into the community this spring. When the Glick family went to church, they often met new girls and parents with small children whom they had never seen before.

Each weekend Lizzie went with Emma and Marvin to Allen County, which she looked forward to each and every other day of the week. Running around was even more fun now that warmer weather had arrived, because there was so much more to do. Lizzie thought that baseball games, volleyball, croquet, and just going for drives to different picnic areas or lakes with a group of young people were the funnest things in the entire world.