Little Altars Everywhere Read Free Page B

yells out, Yall do something! This is a movie camera!
    You can smell the sun hitting the needles and see little mushrooms under your feet. If you quit thinking about everybody and everything, it gets real quiet and private, like swimming underwater with your eyes open. I stop for a minute to feel some bark peeling off a pine like it’s the tree’s skin. And then I look up andsuddenly realize that Edythe has almost caught up with me.
    She says, Siddalee, did you see that monarch butterfly?
    I wouldn’t mind seeing a monarch, but I panic at the thought of being left behind with Edythe. I act like I don’t hear her and take off running to the front of the group where my popular friends are. The sprint gets me winded, and I have to pretend I’m coughing, and palm my asthma inhaler to stop the wheezing.
    I pray: God, please don’t let me get stuck with Edythe, and please don’t let M’lain see me sucking on this inhaler like Daddy.
    Then Mama says, Okay yall, we’re gonna sing now! And she starts up with her old camp songs that only the Ya-Yas and their kids know the words to. I wish I could crawl off and hide from her voice and her legs marching like she is the general of the world. She sings:
    I go with the garbage man’s daughter,
    Slop! Slop!
    She lives down by the swill
    She is as sweet as the garbage itself
    And her breath is sweeter still
    Slop! Slop!
    Oh, she just makes me so sick! Who does she think she is, Mitch Miller? I signal to M’lain and Sissy thatmy mother drives me crazy. I’ve got to let them know that I am not like her. But then—don’t you know it—they start trying to sing along with her! Stumbling over the words, acting like they’ve sung it a hundred times, when they’ve never heard it before in their lives. Mama keeps leading the big sing-along, and we march through the woods like in The Bridge on the River Kwai. Finally, I start singing too, all loud and full-throated. Mama always says, If you can’t sing it good, Siddalee, at least sing it loud.
    By the time we stop to cook our food, I’m dizzy from all that hiking and singing. We have to dig out these little pits in the ground and drop hot coals in there, and then plunk our tinfoil packets full of potatoes and vegetables and hamburger meat down in there and let it all cook together. It takes forever and you get dirt under your fingernails and I just hate it. Mama acts like she’s an Indian princess in the great outdoors. But I notice that she’s got her these little packets of peanut butter crackers that she unwraps and eats, and a Coke that she slips out of her knapsack and gulps down. My throat is all dry and it’s too dusty out here. I don’t see how my Daddy can stand it, working in the fields all day long.
    When we finally finish up eating and head back to camp, M’lain whispers to Sissy and Mimi and me, Yall watch Edythe. Look at how she walks.
    And we stare at Edythe the whole way back. She walks all bunched up, like invisible hands are squeezing her shoulders together. It gets me embarrassed just to look at her. I want to go over and hit her on the back and say: Edythe, walk right! Quit being such an I-don’t-know-what!
     
    Back at Camp Mary Alice, Mama and Necie get out the Hershey bars and jumbo marshmallows and graham crackers and we make s’mores. I’ve got to have my marshmallows done perfectly light brown all the way around or I will not eat them. I don’t see how anybody can stand to swallow the burnt-up ones. After I get mine just perfect, I slip it off my coat hanger right on top of the Hershey bar. I bite into that crunchy cracker and taste that marshmallow and chocolate down to the tip of my toes.
    Mama says, Yall keep rotating those marshmallows constantly and they will roast evenly. When anybody’s—even Edythe’s—marshmallow falls off into the dirt, Mama laughs and hands them another one. One thing about Mama: She is never stingy with food.
    This is the fun part. Around the campfire those flames