Whistling Past the Graveyard Read Free Page B

convincing—I bet his nose didn’t even hurt that much.
    Mamie had made me walk Jimmy’s bike home while he held one of our dish towels filled with ice on his nose and she fussed over him like he’d been crippled or something. She made me apologize to Mrs. Sellers (which she probably deserved ’cause she had such a horrible kid for a son) and to Jimmy (which had nearly made me barf ). The whole way back to our house I got the ladies-do-and-ladies-do-not lecture, which started and ended with how embarrassed she was by my “trashy, street-gutter” behavior and always had a bit about not saying ain’t . Hey, I didn’t even want to be a lady.
    After stewin’ and sweatin’ all night, I was tired and extra grouchy Fourth of July morning. Guess it didn’t really matter; sass or not, I was still on restriction on the best day of the summer.
    I walked into the kitchen, real quiet, hoping to avoid another lecture. Mamie sat at the table in her pink-and-white seersucker housecoat, her pink slippers, and a pink lace hairnet over her pink sponge curlers—I forgot to mention, Mamie liked pink best of all the colors and was real sad that my red hair kept her from buying me pink dresses. She was looking at the S&H Green Stamp catalog, drinking coffee and smoking a cigarette. Mamie loved that catalog enough to marry it. Our grocery even had double-stamp days; if we was out of bread and one of those days was in sight, we’d go breadless. Which is kinda funny, ’cause we got our toaster with Green Stamps.
    Mamie looked up at me. I braced myself; if I got sassy now, who knew how long I’d be on restriction—probably till Labor Day. But she didn’t start yammering about me being a lady, or being an embarrassment to her and Daddy (even though Daddy wouldn’t even know to be embarrassed if Mamie didn’t keep telling him stuff ). She just nodded toward the fancy, new Norge refrigerator Daddy had bought for her. She’d been so proud of it that she’d made the whole bridge club come into the kitchen to look at it. A long list of chores was taped on the door. She must have been up all night thinking up stuff for me to do.
    “That should keep you out of trouble today while I’m gone,” Mamie said in a way that said this wasn’t gonna be the end of my punishments.
I felt a hot prickle run over my skin—the red-rage prickle. I looked her right in the eye and said, “Maybe I’ll just run away from home. Then you won’t be embarrassed by me anymore—and you’ll have to do all this stuff yourself.” Like I said, I was grouchy.
I half-expected a slap, or at least another day stuck onto my grounding, but Mamie just blew out a stream of cigarette smoke and pushed herself up from the table and headed out of the kitchen. “I’ll go pack your bag.” Over her shoulder she said, “But remember, you can’t leave until next week, after your restriction is over.”
Gritting my teeth, I snatched the list off the refrigerator. It was worse than Cinderella’s.
I stomped back up to my room without breakfast. Milk would have soured right in my mouth.
While Mamie went to the Fourth Festival, I was Rapunzel in the tower. I crumpled the chore list and threw it into the corner of my bedroom. I sat on the floor in front of my window with my elbows on the sill and watched as the LeCounts loaded their station wagon with a picnic basket and lawn chairs and four of the five kids piled in. Ernestine, their colored maid, stood on the porch holding Teddy, the baby, raising his chubby arm for him to wave as the family pulled away. She was probably glad to see ’em go. I liked Ernestine fine, even if she was a grouch most of the time, nippin’ at me to not step on the flowers and to stay away from the cistern. I reckon she had cause to be grouchy. Them LeCount kids was the wildest and noisiest in town; and there just kept getting to be more of them all the time.
Our upstairs is hot as the hinges of Hades. Usually if I wanted to stay out of sight,