My One Hundred Adventures (6 page)

“It's always good to come home,” says my mother, sighing, and she picks up Hershel and carries him into the house, his chocolate mouth resting against her clean white blouse.

The Rescue

My Fifth Adventure

I
am awoken by Ginny tapping on the window. I get up and raise the window sash and she climbs in.

“I have an idea,” she says.

We go down the hall to the kitchen. My mother has been up picking raspberries and the kitchen smells like raspberry muffins. There is a basket of them on the kitchen table. There are a jam jar of roses and a pitcher of milk next to the muffins. My mother has a pot of raspberry jam started on the stove. She has been busy already by daybreak.

I suddenly wonder where the roses came from. We have none growing around our house and that is when I see my mother and H. K. Thomson sitting on the beach, talking.

“What's he doing here?” Ginny asks.

“I think he's taking my mother to lunch,” I say.

“But it's breakfast time,” says Ginny.

We sit down and eat muffins with an open jar of my mother's strawberry jam. There is a whole row of them in the pantry. Then Maya comes in looking all sleepy and we pour her a glass of milk and put a muffin on a plate for her.

“What's your idea?” I ask Ginny.

She empties her pockets onto the kitchen table. “My quarters from my New York jar,” she says. Because Ginny wants to be a dress designer when she grows up, she is saving up her spare quarters to go to New York and scope things out. She says she may go to dress designer college or she may just muscle her way into the business. She is thinking about it still, and planning.

“That's your New York money,” I say, and put another muffin on each of our plates.

“Not anymore,” says Ginny.

Maya brings Ginny pen and paper and while Ginny talks she draws beautiful, fantastic outfits for Maya's paper dolls.

“Now, listen,” Ginny goes on. She leans on the table with one forearm and puts her face close to mine, staring me hard in the eye. “Here is how we stave off Mrs. Gourd. When we meet her in the parking lot, we give her all my New York money as a down payment and we tell her we will keep paying her off so long as she tells absolutely no one about the dropped Bible. Then we just find jobs, is all.”

I am touched by Ginny's giving up her quarters for me as much as I am aware that this is just one more person whose life I have potentially derailed.

I get changed quickly with Maya clinging to Ginny and begging her not to leave. Maya stands pathetically with her face pressed against the screen door but we turn our backs and run across the sand.

The air smells this morning like it has just come out of the wash. The sun is still low, casting white, opaque light. The ocean is quiet but beginning to whoosh as if it is getting in gear for the things it has planned for our day. As if it is time's great internal-combustion engine. The mist patches run across the wet sand, late to work. It is commuting mist.

We sit on the cement dividers all morning and Mrs. Gourd still does not come. We have not taken sunscreen because somehow I thought Mrs. Gourd was coming at daybreak. Like the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. It is past noon when we see her old green station wagon pull up. All the little Gourds are in tow, armed with sand toys. They are already slapping each other with their shovels. The baby makes not a peep. It has a blanket over its carrier again. I wonder if this is like riding in a litter.

Mrs. Gourd looks like she is going right past us and down to the beach but Ginny stops her with a raised hand.

“Mrs. Gourd!” she calls. “I have a proposition.”

There is a man sitting on a cement divider in another part of the parking lot and he looks up with curiosity. He has been sitting there for the last ten minutes smoking cigarettes as if he, like us, is waiting for someone. But now when he looks at us it is as if he is satisfied; he was just waiting for
something
and all of us are as good as anything.

Mrs. Gourd stops and looks at Ginny. “A what?” she asks.

Ginny gets out her two handfuls of quarters. “These are for you,” she says.

“What for?” asks Mrs. Gourd but before she gets the answer, takes and pockets them.

“For your baby,” Ginny says. “Instead of going to see Mrs. Fielding, why don't you deal directly with us? Mrs. Fielding has no money anyway.”

“You again!” Mrs. Gourd says to Ginny. “You in that contraption dropping Bibles with this one?” She points at me.

“I am Jane's friend,” says Ginny. Everything is in this statement. “We will make payments until we pay off whatever you and Jane decide is fair. The only thing is, you can't tell Mrs. Fielding or
anyone
anything about the baby. If you do, we get all our money back.”

“Where you going to get the money?” asks Mrs. Gourd. She puts the baby carrier down and stares challengingly at us.

“We'll get jobs,” says Ginny.

“Pfff,” says Mrs. Gourd, picking up the baby carrier again and letting her eyes drop to me. They are like knives. “You can't get no jobs.”

“We'll get babysitting jobs,” says Ginny. “I've had the Red Cross babysitting course. You can make a lot of money babysitting.”

Mrs. Gourd looks out over the sand. Her eyes start doing that thing again, moving back and forth, cranking her brain into gear.

“Babysitting?” she says.

“Uh-huh,” says Ginny.

Mrs. Gourd's eyes dart, dart. “You babysit for me,” she says.

“WHAT?” cries Ginny. She eyes those smelly, runny Gourd children.

“That's what I said. You babysit for me. I want that job coming open at the Bluebird Café. That waitress job. You babysit for me and I'll think about letting you pay off the debt this way. For now.”

“I don't know,” says Ginny. “How many hours a day is that? We've got school in the fall, you know.”

“Well, we worry about that in the fall,” says Mrs. Gourd. Her mouth is closing in kind of a happy smile like she has opened chocolates and found one she likes. That is when I notice that among her other difficulties she has one long, yellow snaggle-tooth that sticks out from under her upper lip and sort of hangs there, threatening to pierce her lower lip. I can see her using it to poke holes in chocolates to suck out the filling and see if she likes it. She barks at me, “YOU'D BETTER,” as if I were thinking of saying no, and I can't tell her I was just staring at the snaggle-tooth.

“Oh, I
will,
” I say. I will promise anything if she just doesn't talk to my mother. If she just doesn't sue us.

I can't figure out whether the man with the cigarettes is close enough to hear us. I realize suddenly the importance of keeping this whole thing contained. So far only Dr. Callahan, Ginny, Mrs. Gourd and I know what I have done, although it feels as if everyone in town knows. As if it is written all over me. It was an accident. It was really Nellie's fault. I explain this mentally to people over and over.

I search for signs that the cigarette man has overheard us but he isn't looking our way while he smokes, although his ears are perked like a dog's. He gets into his car and drives away. Who comes to the beach just to sit in the parking lot and smoke?

Mrs. Gourd grabs me by the chin and swings my face back around toward her. “You start now. I won't tell no one about what you done or what's it done to Willie Mae and you don't tell no one about our deal either. You tell someone and it's off and I will go get my fancy lawyer to talk to your mother and then it's all up with you, ain't it?”

She puts the baby carrier in my hand and gives Ginny the diaper bag and then she starts to stump back toward her car.

Ginny and I run after her. We don't even know the children's names, we say. The Gourd children go wild and start running all over the beach. Mrs. Gourd points out Darsie, Dee Dee, Darvon and Dean. I wonder if she ran out of D names when she got to Willie Mae or just got tired of them.

“Wait a second,” yells Ginny. “When are you getting back? What do we feed them?”

“You take them on back to the trailer and give them peanut butter and jelly when they get hungry but don't take none for yourself. I ain't a restaurant. Baby's bottle is in the diaper bag and there's an extra in the fridge,” says Mrs. Gourd, and then gets in her car, and the tires squeal as she pulls away.

I am so relieved it has been this easy that I almost faint. At the same time I worry that we are just delaying the inevitable. That eventually we will be caught.

“I'm sorry about your quarters,” I say to Ginny. “I'm sorry about everything.”

“There's something not right here,” says Ginny. “She leapt on that deal too fast.”

But we have no time to think about it because the Gourd children have seen that their mother has left and are going crazy on the beach, running into the water and in all different directions, and we have a terrible time roping them in. Then Ginny teaches me how to change a diaper and what to do if a child is choking and other things she has learned in her course. It helps to pass the time, which moves more slowly than you would think possible. As if it is being weighted by all those Gourd children.

“Do we have to do this for the rest of our lives, do you think? Does she plan to have us always babysit?” I ask as I get Darvon in one hand and Darsie in the other.

“Well,” says Ginny, panting and grabbing Dean by the shirt, “eventually they have to grow up.”

It is a long, exhausting afternoon but by four o'clock we have a rule that works. When we say drop everything, the Gourd children have to freeze, and they aren't allowed to move until we touch them. We make a game of this. I cannot help feeling this is going to work only until they get tired of the game but it is enough for now. They are hungry and Dee Dee hits Darvon.

“All of you follow me. We are taking you home and feeding you peanut butter,” says Ginny. She doesn't talk to them in the sweet voice she uses for Max and Hershel and Maya. They trail her in a bedraggled line, too tired to be wild anymore.

The trailer door is standing wide open. The children run joyfully in and I am appalled at their audacity before I realize that it is their home and of course they don't need to knock. They are so filthy and matted that I can't imagine them having a home that they love the way we do ours. And maybe they don't love home. Maybe they just love peanut butter.

They are all over the trailer and Ginny makes them sandwiches while I pour Kool-Aid. There is peanut butter smeared and dried on a lot of the furniture and my guess is they eat a lot of it. We cannot find the jelly but they don't seem to notice. I hear a sound and it makes me jump and I realize that Mr. Gourd is sleeping in the next room. He is snoring loudly and thrashing around. Why couldn't he watch them if he is here all day?

Just then Mrs. Gourd comes in. She looks at their sandwiches. “I thought I told you to make them peanut butter and
jelly,
” she says to Ginny, who is putting the bread away.

“I couldn't find any,” says Ginny calmly, but there is an edge to her voice. I imagine her duking it out mano a mano with Mrs. Gourd. Ginny is young and muscular but Mrs. Gourd is mean. It would be an interesting match.

“Well, that's just fine. I suppose you mean for them children to develop vitamin deficiencies. That there jelly is their
fruit,
” Mrs. Gourd says, pointing to the recommended fruit and vegetable portion of the government food pyramid stuck to the fridge.

“Jelly is not a fruit,” says Ginny. I'd better get her home. She has clearly had it.

Mrs. Gourd reaches up on the top shelf of one of the grimy cupboards and pulls down a sticky old jar. She shoves it right in Ginny's face, pointing to the word
APPLE
. “You look right here, APPLES. Are you telling me that apples aren't fruit?”

“Oh, for Pete's sake,” says Ginny, starting for the door. I follow her.

“I expect to see you girls bright and early tomorrow morning. Yep. Bright and early, because I got the job and I'll be working nine till three,” says Mrs. Gourd. She smirks but she looks proud.

As we leave we hear Mr. Gourd's voice. He has woken up. He yells at Mrs. Gourd. The children start wailing.

“Well, there's no question who fathered
those
children,” says Ginny as Mr. Gourd and his children harmonize their loud noises. I pretend not to know what she means and then we see a peanut butter jar come flying out the window and we spontaneously break into a run and keep running until we get close to town.

“That was awful,” says Ginny, panting, as we slow down on the corner where she'll split off for her street. “That sound he made. I've never heard anyone yell at someone like that.”

“Ginny…,” I say.

“This is a horrible predicament,” she says grimly, “but it's not your fault,” and turns toward her street without a backward glance.

When I get to the parking lot there is the man with the cigarettes, sitting on a cement divider, smoking and staring down the beach. He pretends not to look at me but I can see he is sneaking glances in my direction. In fact, I can feel his eyes bore their way into the back of my neck as I walk across the parking lot. I pass his car. It has an Ontario license plate. I look at him again. I have never seen a Canadian, at least as far as I know. What is he doing here? Maybe his life is so empty all he has to do is slowly migrate south, smoke and study people. He has seen me three times now so I guess he thinks of me as a regular. He has a nice face, in sort of a distracted way, and I begin to study it but just then I see H.K. heading toward me. Don't tell me he has been at our house the whole day! What could he and my mother possibly have to say to each other for so long? H.K's face is in contemplation too but it is not nice, it is closed up tight and he is somewhere so deep inside you will never be invited in.

At home, my mother is humming and setting the table. She has summer tomatoes on the stove cooking down for spaghetti sauce, which she says she is putting on rice because we are out of spaghetti. We have a huge fifty-pound bag of rice that she bought ages ago. It is only half empty so we will have many more rice dinners, I suppose.