Sherry can’t get over how innocent the girls up north are. “No girl in Chicago would be caught dead without makeup,” she says. Whenever Lou calls on her, no matter what time it is, she has on orange pancake, pink lipstick and black eyeliner. At school she always wears a tight cardigan sweater buttoned up backward. She and Lou smoke cigarettes behind the portables and talk to each other in Southern accents like Sandra Dee’s in
Tammy Tell Me True.
“I’m feeling all funny peculiar,” they say. “I’m feeling all cotched in a tree.” When a high-school boy comes along and wants Sherry to neck with him, Lou goes
around to the front of the portables to keep a lookout. “I’m feeling all pleasured for sure,” Sherry says afterward.
Despite appearances, Lou knows that between the two of them she’s the bad influence. Sherry necks with boys, smokes the cigarettes Lou steals and dresses like a sex maniac. That’s it. Underneath she’s as nice as a Sunday-school teacher. “She’s not so bad,” she’ll say, or “She can’t help it,” when Lou gets carried away lambasting somebody. She always looks on the bright side. “Beats living with a mental mother,” is what she says about having to leave Chicago. Anyway, she says, in a few years she’s going to start marrying old, rich men, having sex with them until they die of heart attacks and then go spend all their loot.
“Why don’t you marry rich,
young
men and murder them?” Lou suggests. Sherry tells her she has a big mean streak.
Lou has an even bigger angry streak. Sometimes she gets so angry that she goes out after dark and throws stones at windows and streetlights. One night she writes “
FUCK OFF
” in white chalk all down the road and on people’s fences.
In her dreams she is another person, gentle and innocent, often still a little girl. She has a recurring dream in which she and her sisters live peacefully by themselves in the white mansion where the old man died on them.
In real life she hates living with her sisters, especially with Norma. Norma drives her crazy—eating like a pig, fat as a pig, letting boys get away with calling her names. Lou can’t stand anyone being mean to Norma. She throws a full bottle of Coke at a boy who moos at Norma when she and Norma are coming out of the smoke shop. Whenever she sees Norma from far away, at the end of the street, for instance, walking home from school (always alone), her throat tightens. She wants Norma never to hurt again. She wants to save Norma’s life! Instead, she yells at her. She can’t help it. Every time she turns around, it seems, Norma is stuffing herself with cookies. Or doing one
of Lou’s jobs. Washing the dishes. Making the lunches. “What are you trying to prove!” Lou rages, tears welling in her eyes. One day, she’s had enough. She says,“Okay, you want to do everything around here, go ahead. I quit.”
The only chore Lou will still do is the grocery shopping, because that’s when she picks up her weekly supply of pop and candy. Saturday mornings their father drives her and her wagon to the store on his way to work—“The early bird catches the worm,” he says (you can stake your life on it)—but she usually goes straight from the car to Sherry’s place in the apartment buildings behind the shopping centre and doesn’t get around to buying the groceries until the afternoon.
One Saturday she leaves it a bit late and flies through the supermarket doors just as the manager is about to lock up. “Five minutes,” he warns.
“See ya in three,” Lou says, dropping her wagon handle and grabbing a cart. Since she buys the same things every week, she moves fast.
She seems to be the last customer in the store. It increases her speed. But as she’s racing to the meat counter, she sees two people standing in front of the hotdog section, right in front of where she’s headed. One is a woman in a clerk’s coat, and one is a man in a black topcoat.
A strange woman.
And their father.
Lou comes to a stop, her running shoes squealing. Their father doesn’t turn around. The woman, who is standing too near to their father, facing him and Lou, glances over. Her name is written on her breast pocket. Lou reads it, she’s that close. “Vera Produce,” she reads.
She says,“Dad.” But the word seems to slam into a brick wall just outside her mouth. Their father is gripping Vera Produce’s
left hand, holding it low and tight against her red skirt.
Against her hip. She has wide hips and big white legs with no nylons. Red high heels. She glances at Lou again, glances at someone else who is walking up the next aisle.
“The store is closing,” a voice says over the
PA
. “Please take your purchases to the checkout. The store is closing.” Vera Produce combs her fingers through her black hair. Their father whispers something to her. She shakes her head at the ground, looking crabby, then looks back up at him with a sprawling, wet face.
“Honey,” their father says. He lays his hand on the side of her head. She drops her red lips to the cuff of his shirt that yesterday Norma scorched with the iron and soaked in straight bleach. Tears pouring out of her eyes, Vera Produce kisses a line from their father’s cuff to the tips of his fingers.
Lou lets go of her shopping cart. She turns, leaving the cart and her groceries, and marches back down the aisle to the front of the store. The manager has to unlock the door for her. “Don’t forget your wagon,” he says.
The minute she steps outside, the parking-lot lights come on. In the farthest row, by the Salvation Army bin, she spots their father’s station wagon. Hiding there, like dirty underpants thrown behind a door. She won’t go past it. She goes the other way, the long way home. She is familiar with the calm she is feeling; she recognizes it as temporary. She walks slowly, pulling her empty wagon, starting and stopping, looking into windows that she has no inclination to break. Everyone is having supper around kitchen tables. In front of one house, which is exactly like theirs—it even has a spindly willow tree in the middle of the lawn, and the same front door with three round windows going up at a slant like how you know a character in a comic book is thinking—she sits down in her wagon. Then she lies down, testing out what kind of bed it’ll make.
*
His car isn’t in the garage. Lou has a quick, repellent image of him and Vera necking in the parking lot. Vera Produce has fat white legs like the pillars in front of a mansion. What does their father see in her? What does she see in him?—that’s the real question. Vera Produce must be crazy. A crazy piece of tail.
Lou pulls the wagon into the middle of the garage for him to crash into, then kicks it over to the wall out of the way. It makes her sick to think how he’s been playing them all for suckers with his nice-guy act. Who will pay the bills if he runs off? After Sherry’s father ran off with the Negro woman, Sherry’s mother was forced to sell the house.
Inside, the t? is blaring. Norma is hammering.
“Why can’t we ever have any goddamn peace and quiet around here!” Lou screams.
Instantly there is silence. A moment later Norma comes up from the basement and into the front hall. She’s wearing a pair of their father’s old work pants with the cuffs rolled up and one of their cousin Mary Jane’s gigantic cardigans, flaked with sawdust. “Where are the groceries?” she asks.
Lou takes her jacket off. Instead of dropping it on the bench, she hangs it on a hanger in the closet.
“What’s going on?” Norma says.
Lou shoves by her into the kitchen. She wonders whether or not to tell the truth. Norma follows her, asking about the groceries again. Sighing, Lou drops onto a chair. She looks at Norma’s anxious face and notices for the first time that it’s their father’s, only with glasses and younger and fatter. And nicer. Sandy’s face is their mother’s. Mine, Lou thinks, is nobody’s. It’s going to be awful, she thinks, not doing anything that might make him mad, being good all the time so that he’ll want to stay here. She folds her arms on the kitchen table and rests her head on her hands. Right now she hasn’t the energy or the heart to give Norma the bad news. “I forgot,” she says.
“Forgot?”
“Yeah, forgot. Okay?”
More than the obvious lie, more than no groceries and hanging up the jacket, the tone of Lou’s voice worries Norma. What has Lou done? Lou was the one who scrawled that filth all over the roads and fences a couple of weeks ago. (Norma wiped off as much as she could with her scarf.) Aside from recognizing the writing—the same
F,
like the twice-crossed T that Lou uses to sign their last name—Norma can’t think of anyone else who would go that far. She knows that Lou steals and hangs around with the loose girl from Chicago. “Protect your sisters,” their brother, Jimmy, advises from heaven. Easy to say.
“Well,” Norma says, sighing, helpless as always,“I guess it’s mustard sandwiches for dinner.”
They wait for their father before starting to eat. Every few minutes Lou checks at the window. After a quarter of an hour she says quietly,“The son of a bitch isn’t coming back,” and Norma wraps his sandwich in wax paper for him to eat later.
His car pulls up just as they’re sitting down at the table. “Come on,” Lou says, dashing out to the front hall.
Their father seems surprised to see them. “Fine, at ease,” he says without inspecting their outstretched hands. He frowns past them at the dining room, as if he’s in the wrong house.
“I got sick, so there’s no groceries,” Lou says. She can’t keep the resentment out of her voice. As he’s hanging up his coat, she sees Vera’s red lipstick on his shirt cuff.
“What?” he says remotely, turning around.
When Lou doesn’t answer, Norma murmurs,“Lou was too sick to do the shopping.”
“Oh, that’s okay,” their father says. He pats Lou on the shoulder, then walks down the hall to his and their mother’s bedroom, going in and shutting the door without a sound, as they have never known him to shut a door.
S
andy goes out with lots of boys, almost any boy who asks her. A couple of nights ago a boy told her he loved her and pleaded with her to go steady.
“Well, okay,” she said at last, seeing as he loved her.
They were sitting in his car in her driveway. They kissed, and she floated a long way away from all of him except for his mouth. She forgot who he was—she thought he was the boy she went out with the week before—and when she opened her eyes, his face gave her a start.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
She said,“I’ve changed my mind,” thinking she’d better.
“Why?”
But she wouldn’t tell him, she wouldn’t be that mean. He slammed his hand on the steering wheel and called her a tease. He said she had come between him and his best friend, did she know that? She shook her head. She didn’t even know who his best friend was. At this point the kitchen light came on, and she jumped out of the car, afraid that their father had been spying from the window.
Their father hates her going out on dates. But when she was thirteen and getting asked out, he said: “When you’re sixteen.” And when she turned sixteen, and he tried to go back on his word, their mother surprised them both with one of her rare interventions. “Let the child kick up her heels,” she said, quoting something, her sad, lost voice evidently striking their father where it counted, because he gave in.
But he still delivers lectures about male hormones running
wild. And the home for unwed mothers is never far from his thoughts. (He claims that the girls there have to eat without knives because they’re so depressed and ashamed, they’re liable to stab themselves.) When he catches Sandy wearing makeup, he demands that she hand over her tubes and eye pencils. If she wears a tight skirt or sweater, or even if she wears high heels, he calls her Hooker and Pickup Artist.
At least he never hits her—Norma and Lou he would have. Lou says that what saves her is looking like their mother. She says,“Tell him to go fuck himself. What have you got to be afraid of?”
That one day he
will
hit her. When he yells at her, she cries in case he’s on the brink. And yet she’d rather stab herself like an unwed mother than leave the house dressed out of fashion. As treacherous as it makes her feel toward their mother, she wishes that he’d find another girlfriend and be nice again.
Not that their mother seems to mind about his girlfriends. She talks about them as if they’re the cars he borrows from the lot at work. It’s their mother, as a matter of fact, who told Sandy about the girlfriends. Sweetie pies, she calls them. One day, after six months of him not losing his temper once, he hit Lou across the face for taking cigarettes from his dresser drawer. Sandy ran crying into the t? room, and their mother said that he must have broken up with his latest sweetie pie.
“We’re all going to have to be patient with him,” she said, wiping Sandy’s tears. “We’re all going to have to dance on eggs for a while.”
That was a year ago. But last night he brought gifts home—three pairs of knitted duck-head slippers—so Sandy had her fingers crossed because, thinking back, she’s figured out that gifts are the first sign.
Only Norma put her slippers on. It struck Lou right away that she could sell hers to a kid she babysits, and Sandy decided to take hers into work, to show the other girls, she told their
father, but actually to give them to Mrs. Dart, who has an eight-year-old daughter.
Mrs. Dart is Sandy’s boss at the fabric store. Thursday and Friday evenings and all day Saturday Sandy sells fabric on a straight commission basis. Last month she was the top parttime salesgirl in the entire chain, coast to coast, which meant that she won a bolt of fabric of her choice (she picked blue velvet) and got her picture on the front page of the store newsletter.
“You have a model’s face,” the other salesgirls told her. “Too bad you’re not taller.”
But Mrs. Dart said that Sandy was destined for greater things. Sandy was going to be a fashion designer, Mrs. Dart said.
Mrs. Dart is always praising Sandy to the skies. The least Sandy can do is to give her the slippers. Although Mrs. Dart is tall, black-haired, wears glasses and too much makeup, uses bad language and has Parkinson’s disease, she maintains that Sandy is her twenty years ago. Everything Sandy wears (Sandy designs and makes all her own clothes), Mrs. Dart raves about. “I used to sew like that,” she says,“before I got the shakes.” Her theory is that Sandy’s clothes are her magic sales formula, that they draw in customers like flies to horseshit, if Sandy will pardon her French. It seems to be the case. Sandy isn’t pushy, but she’s the one that most of the women approach.