The Wonder of Charlie Anne (13 page)

Anna May and Belle are getting quite worried about me. They want to know why I am thin as a rail. Because of all these chores, I tell them, throwing another string bean in the pot.

Mirabel thinks when you lose your mama and your papa and now your two brothers, the thing is to keep busy. Snapping beans is the best cure, she keeps telling me, for when you are feeling down in the dumps.

I tell her to stop talking like that. I run out and bury my face in Anna May’s neck. After a while, there is Mirabel right beside me, handing me another basket of beans.

I am down by the barn giving Minnie and Olympia and Bea the what-for because they have hidden their eggs again where I can’t find them.

I hear crying, and first I think it is Birdie, out by the road again. It is not. It is Phoebe. She is ripping her little braids apart, and throwing the little strings on top of the sunflowers that are just poking up. Then she stomps all over everything. She is making quite a mess. Then she sinks down and buries her face in her arms, and I can see her shaking all the way over where I am.

I hear my heart saying I better go over, and of course Anna May and Belle are right there telling me to hurry, Mirabel won’t even know.

“Phoebe?”

She looks up at me, soon as I get across the road. Her face is wet.

“Phoebe. What’s wrong?”

She puts her face on her lap again. I bend down closer. I think how with that many tears, the sunflowers won’t need watering.

“Phoebe?”

“What?”

“What’s wrong?” I look over at Anna May and Belle. They have come all the way down to the fence and are telling me to keep trying.

“Phoebe?” I say softly.

“My mama did my hair the right way and Rosalyn does it all stupid,” Phoebe says, crying so hard she has to stop talking. Finally, she says, “I don’t want Rosalyn anymore. I want my mama.”

I look up, and Anna May and Belle are remembering what it feels like to lose someone you love.

I reach over and touch Phoebe’s hair, her every-which-way braids all undone. “Oh, Phoebe,” I say. “Rosalyn loves you, I know she does.”

“Rosalyn is terrible with hair.”

“I bet she’s better than Mirabel.”

Phoebe shakes herself away from me.

“I will do it,” I say, finally.

Phoebe cries even more. I’m not expecting this.

“What do you know about my kind of hair, Charlie Anne?”

I look back at Anna May and Belle. “Nothing,” I say. “Except I think it’s pretty. And you can teach me how.”

I keep wondering the next few days if Mirabel will ever see the hole in my heart. She says that after I milk Anna May, I can have some time to myself. She hands me
The Charm of Fine Manners.

“Keep it in your pocket, and keep looking at it whenever you think to,” she says, wiping the biscuit flour off her hands. “Your reading will get better before you know it and you’ll be bettering yourself at the same time.”

Mirabel picks up a tray of biscuits and puts them in the oven.

“What about Ivy?” I say, looking at the book. “How come she never has to?”

Mirabel shuts the oven door and turns around. “She’s started being friends with that Ellis girl, that’s why. She’s developing plenty of manners over there, I’m quite sure.”

“With Miss High-and-Mighty? How can Becky Ellis be better than Phoebe?”

“It is quite clear, Charlie Anne, that you need that
book more than anyone. Why must you make a to-do about absolutely everything? Now go, before I find more work for you.”

Anna May doesn’t stand still for milking any better than she used to, but at least with Belle close she’s happier.

I still have to be very stern with her, though, because Anna May is that kind of cow. I give her my most terrible mad look, just to get things started on the right foot, and then I tell her I am in no mood for any horsing around.

Then I turn soft as butter while I brush her with her favorite cow brush and scratch her behind her ears, and I whisper sweet things in her ears, like what a lovely girl she is and how all the other cows in the world can only wish they were as wonderful as her.

This makes her happy.

Then I scratch her some more and give her some corn, and while she’s eating, I set the milk stool on her right side (cows like things to be the same way all the time) and I wash her udder. I tell her in my sweetest voice to behave.

While I am milking, Belle is wondering what the dickens is going on, and I tell her to hold her bonnet, that if Anna May does her job, we will all be out under the butternut tree very quick.

Anna May shifts her weight around and I pull my feet away, because getting stepped on by a cow can make your heart stop beating, it hurts so much. She moos to make sure I am doing everything right. “Yes,” I tell her. “I know how to milk a cow.”

“How on earth did you get so much?” Mirabel wants to know when I bring the pail up to the house.

“She’s happier with Belle here. Cows are happy when you don’t take away someone they love.”

Mirabel just stares at me. “You are a funny girl,” she says slowly. Then she goes back to frying potatoes.

After breakfast I sit on the porch and open
The Charm of Fine Manners
, but the letters get all switched up and I can’t make sense of much of it.

Then I hear Phoebe and Rosalyn down by the road, tending to their flowers, and pretty soon my feet are telling me that if I hurry, I can go over for a visit, and Mirabel won’t even know.

I rush off, hiding the book in the apple barrel in the barn, and before I can say milk cow, I am jumping over the stone wall and running across the road.

They are replanting the sunflowers that Phoebe mussed up, trying to make the little broken ones stand up again. Phoebe has new ribbons in her hair, and the braids I made for her are looking fine.

“Charlie Anne,” says Rosalyn, “we were just talking about you. We are just finishing up. We have a surprise for you inside. Want to come see?”

I nod and I let Rosalyn pull me into the house, where there is a bright yellow dress on the kitchen table that someone has cut up to make over.

“It’s for you, Charlie Anne,” Phoebe says. “We are making trousers so you can have some, too.”

Rosalyn puts wood in the cookstove to heat up her kettle. “Want tea?”

I nod. As long as it’s sweet raspberry. I walk over and touch the cloth. It is soft like the fluff on a new chick.

“We thought your dress was a little small, and that maybe you were ready for something that fit you a little better?”

“Well, yes,” I say, looking down at my chore dress, and at how it hardly covers up my underpants anymore.

“Have you ever had trousers like this?” Rosalyn wants to know.

I shake my head. “I’ve never known any girls who wear trousers except for overalls, not until you two.”

“I see,” says Rosalyn, picking up a pair of scissors and beginning to cut. “Well,
I
think girls should wear trousers if they want to. Do you know why?”

She is looking at me, waiting for an answer.

“Why?”

She looks glad I asked. “Because we do not need to be defined by our circumstances. We can make things different, we can change things, even climb right up and out of the boxes that some people want to put us in. But we have to work hard and we have to decide that we’re no quitters and that we’re going to succeed at what we set out to do—no matter what. Are you a quitter, Charlie Anne?”

I watch the two of them, Phoebe cutting around the pattern in careful lines and Rosalyn sitting there in red pepper red trousers. I think about Mirabel and what she would say about all this. I shrug because I really don’t know if I’m a quitter or not. Maybe I’ll talk to Anna May and Belle about it when I get home.

Rosalyn smiles at me. “You let me know what you decide, okay?” Then we cut out the pieces and pin everything together, and I prick myself over and over because sewing is one chore that I cannot do. Then Rosalyn takes the pieces and puts them in her sewing machine, and she pumps the foot pedal up and down, up and down, and before I know it, my trousers are getting sewed. Phoebe asks me if I want to help her make carrot sandwiches, and I say I have never had carrot sandwiches before but I will be pleased to try some and, yes, I will help.

This is how you make them: Peel and then chop up uncooked carrots as fine as you can get them. Put the carrots in a bowl and add a handful of chopped-up salted peanuts (or raisins if you are up north, where no one has any peanuts anyway) and a spoonful of mayonnaise. Spread on warm bread.

Carrot sandwiches go especially nice with a bowl of applesauce and about a hundred cups of sweet raspberry tea.

*    *    *

I eat so much—two sandwiches, two bowls of applesauce and all the sweet raspberry tea I can hold—that we are not sure if I will fit in my new yellow trousers, but when they finally come off the sewing machine, they are fitting just fine.

Phoebe and Rosalyn make me stand in the middle of the room with my trousers on because it is pinning time, and they put a bunch of pins in their mouths, and both of them fold and pin where the hems should be. Then I have to take the trousers off and Rosalyn clears all the crumbs off the table and we go over and she gives me a needle and takes one for herself.

While I am learning to hem, Rosalyn asks Phoebe if she will read to us again, and before I know it I am feeling so bad for little David Copperfield and his awful life that tears start welling up in my eyes and then dripping down my face and then Phoebe puts down the book and asks what is the matter and I tell them all about how my life is not turning out so good.

Then Rosalyn reaches over and hugs me and then Phoebe does, too. I am not used to so much hugging since Mama left us, certainly not from a colored girl, not ever, but I pretend that I am used to being hugged a lot. When the hems are done, I put the trousers back on and go look at myself in their mirror and say, Hey, wait a minute, when did you get so tall, anyway?

When I leave a little later, I think that even the sun is not as bright as I am in my new yellow trousers.

I run across the road and into the barn, where I hurry out of my trousers and fold them as small as I can make them and hide them inside the apple barrel and walk back outside as calm as can be so no one can see how happy my heart is feeling about everything. It is a nice change.

“Oh, Charlie
Aaaa-aaaanne!”
I hear from up in the tree by the barn. “We saw you. We saw you over at that house with that colored girl!”

Ivy and Becky Ellis are high in the apple tree, looking down at me. They throw apples on my head.

“We’re going to telllllllll on you.” Ivy is laughing. “And what’s that you were wearing when you went in the barn? Tell us. Was it something yellooow?”

A few more apples fall on my head. “Mirabel told you to stay away from that colored girl, and now you’re going to really get the what-for,” says Ivy.

Five apples fall on me all at once. Then Ivy starts climbing down.

“Fine, go ahead, Ivy,” I say, stepping out of the way of any more falling apples. “At least I’m not spending my time kissing Becky Ellis’s shoes.”

When I get up to the house, Mirabel tells me to get the clothes on the line. “Take Birdie with you. She’s been pestering me all day. Where’ve you been, anyway?”

Birdie does not understand how when you are with Mirabel, you should not be asking her a hundred questions every five minutes, and you should especially not be asking, “Where is Charlie Anne?”

Just as we are folding the last blanket, Ivy tears past me with a streak of yellow flying behind. Becky is running after her, laughing so hard and staggering so much she looks like she is going to pee.

My heart flips and I let the blanket fall on the ground and I run after Ivy, trying to catch her before she gets any farther with my yellow trousers, which now look like a kite flapping behind her.

Birdie cries, “Stop, Charlie Anne, wait for me, wait for meeeeeee.” She falls and wails, but I don’t stop. Ivy is not the fastest runner in the world. I am gaining on her, and she looks back and shrieks for Mirabel.