The Saturdays (9 page)

“But, Miss Pearl, tell me about how you ran away.”

“Well, finally I just couldn't stand it anymore. She used to beat me up something terrible, and she kept us working all day long. She wouldn't let us go to school even. Well, one afternoon she caught me reading a book when I was supposed to be mending, so she took the book and threw it in the stove and then she whipped me good. It was just too much. I sneaked out to the barn where Perry was milking and I says to him: ‘I won't stay any longer. I'm going to run away to an orphan asylum.' So Perry says: ‘I'll go with you'; he was all excited. ‘Not to an orphan asylum, though,' he says. ‘We'll go to the city and make our fortunes.' Well, I have to laugh when I think of it.” Miss Pearl was drying Mona's hair dreamily. “We didn't make our fortunes exactly but we made out all right.”

“But tell me about the running
away.
”

“Oh. Well, we got it all planned out. I had a heifer that was my very own; I'd raised her from a calf. Margaret, her name was. Perry had a sow called Greta that was
his
own. Besides that he had a good bicycle and Dad's gold watch. We never took a single thing that belonged to our stepmother. Well. So the day before we left I sneaked away and walked Margaret all the way to Verona, near five miles. I sold her, too. Gee, I felt bad but I had to do it. She was a good heifer and they paid me fifty dollars for her, and would have paid me more if I'd been grown up instead of a kid. Well, anyway, fifty dollars made me feel like I was Mrs. John D. Rockefeller.”

“I should think so,” said Mona. “What about Greta?”

“Oh, she was a mean sow. Big as a kitchen range and, my, was she mean. Perry couldn't have walked
her
to Verona, so he did the next best thing. He went to our neighbor, a farmer named Mr. Ruxton who knew Greta well because she'd busted loose and eaten a whole row of onions in his garden once. He knew she was a good sow and he gave Perry a fine price for her; and after Perry'd sold the watch and the bike and all we figured we were rich.” Miss Pearl began combing Mona's hair. “So the next night, maybe ten o'clock, after our stepmother was asleep, we packed everything we owned (which wasn't much) into an old wicker suitcase of our father's. Perry looked at me. ‘You ought to do something different with your hair,' he says. ‘Why?' I says. ‘Well,' he says, ‘you look too much like a kid. And anyway for disguise. You ought to do something with it, put it up or something.'”

“How old were you?” asked Mona.

“Thirteen, going on fourteen, and Perry, he was nearly sixteen. Well, but I couldn't put it up because we hadn't any pins. So Perry says, ‘I know! We'll cut it off.' We often kid about it now; he should've gone into the hairdressing business, I tell him, instead of me. He showed a real talent for it, I tell him. Honest, you should have seen me! He just took a pair of shears and cut off my hair like you'd cut off a bunch of grass with a sickle. Was I a sight! Perry says: ‘Well, you look worse but you look older.'

“So we sneaked out of the house! The only way to get down was by the front stairs and Perry had a pair of new shoes that squealed like puppies. The suitcase thumped against the banisters and our hearts were right up where our tonsils were.” Miss Pearl leaned out of the booth. “Oh, Mr.
Ed
-ward,” she called, “we're ready for you.”

“Please go on,” begged Mona.

“Okay, honey,” said Miss Pearl. “Do you want a manicure?”

“Yes, I do,” said Mona recklessly. “I never had one in my life, and goodness knows when I'll ever have another chance.” She shut Cuffy's disapproving face out of her mind. Just this once, she told herself.

Miss Pearl went out of the booth and reappeared with a little table on wheels. She sat down at the table, snapped on a light, and reached out for Mona's hand, which she placed on a covered cushion. Mona stared with interest at the little bottles and the instruments on the table.

“Let's see, where was I?” said Miss Pearl, taking up Mona's hand and beginning to file her nails. She was much more gentle about this, too, than Cuffy was.

“You were going downstairs,” Mona reminded her.

“Yes. Well, we got downstairs all right, and we left a note for our stepmother on the mantel telling her we were never coming back. (I guess she was glad to be rid of us.) But
then
we had to walk all the way to Verona. The suitcase weighed a ton. Perry'd carry it first in one hand, then the next. Then I'd carry it a little ways. Then we'd both sit down on it and rest.”

Mr. Edward, flourishing a comb, made his villain's entrance into the booth. “
Now
then, little lady,” he said, and began curling Mona's wet hair up into little snails like Cuffy's, and stabbing them together with hairpins.

“Go on, Miss Pearl,” commanded Mona hastily, before Mr. Edward could think of any more questions.

“Finally we did get to Verona. We went to the depot there and hoped there'd be a train. My brother made me go in and buy the tickets because he figured the station agent, Mr. Kraus, wouldn't be so apt to recognize me with my hair cut and all. I had a hat on too, and tried to act like I was sixteen years old. The next train didn't come till midnight. We sat outside on one of those hard benches, and all we could hear was the crickets and tree toads in the woods across the tracks. Dip your hand, honey.”

Mona dipped her fingers in a little bowl of soapy water.

“Finally the train came, and we sat up all night in the coach. There was a baby that cried all the time, like there always is, and a fat man that snored fit to beat the band. I never heard anything like it. I guess we slept though, all right, because the next we knew it was morning and the conductor was hollering: ‘G-rand Central Station!' ‘Does he mean it's New York?' I says to Perry, and we asked him, and he says ‘Where else?'

“Well, we went walking around the streets looking up at the high buildings till our necks ached, and that darn suitcase weighing like a grand piano. We were sort of bewildered, I guess. We'd never seen so many people in our lives and we'd never heard such noise. ‘I wish I'd gone to an orphan asylum instead,' I says, just about ready to cry. But Perry got mad. ‘I think it's swell,' he says. ‘I'm going to live here forever.' The funny thing is that Perry's married now, and running a poultry farm in Jersey; and here I am still in the city, and crazy about it.”

“
Then
what happened, Miss Pearl?”

“We just walked around and asked at all the places where there were signs saying ‘Vacant Rooms.' But all the places were too expensive and most of the people we talked to wouldn't have taken us anyhow. We looked too young, I guess, and kind of bewildered. That night we went back to Grand Central Station and dozed sitting up in the waiting room. You can take your hand out now, dear.”

“Why, Pearl, you never told me all this before,” said Mr. Edward. “What have you been keeping from me?”

“Well, it's all so long ago.” Miss Pearl laughed self-consciously. “Seems like a dream now. Anyway, the next day we found a boardinghouse way downtown on the East Side, and they didn't care what we looked like and it was cheap, so they took us in. We felt fine. It seemed to us like our money would last forever, and we bought some new clothes (as grown-up looking as we could get), and then spent about a week going around seeing the sights: boat rides, Statue of Liberty, the Zoo, the Aquarium, up to the top of the Empire State Building, just about everything. Dip the other hand, dear.”

“It must have been fun,” Mona said.

“Yes, it was fun. But then our money began getting low and we got scared. Perry looked for jobs everywhere. So did I; but it was summertime and nobody seemed to be hiring anybody, and then, like I say, we probably looked too young and green. We lived for weeks on crackers and oranges. Perry got sick too, and we didn't dare get a doctor. We were too poor, and anyway we were worried they'd find out about us and ship us home, or something. Poor Perry just had to get well by himself. My, were we scared, though!”

All through this tale Miss Pearl continued to smile happily. She looks well fed now, thank goodness, Mona thought.

“And in the end it was me who got the first job. It was a little one-horse beauty parlor up in the Bronx (naturally I let them think I was a lot older than I was). They needed a girl to sweep and clean up, and hold pins; things like that. That's how I got interested in the business. Then Perry he got a job as an office boy. Everything was okay after that. It seemed like I spent half my life in the subway (and at first it made me carsick every time). At night my feet nearly killed me. Perry had a hard time too; everybody kidded him all the time because he was green. But none of those things mattered. We were just kids, we had our health, and we'd got away from something we hated; we were earning our own livings decently, and gee, we felt like a couple of Christopher Columbuses or something. It seemed to us like nobody'd ever done such a thing before!”

“Quite a little story, Pearl,” said Mr. Edward, tying a net over Mona's snailed-up hair. “Quite a little story, isn't it, Lorna? What they call a human interest story.”

“Well, I think it's wonderful!” said Mona fervently. “The most adventurous thing
I
ever did was to come here and get my hair cut. I think it's a
wonderful
story.”

Mr. Edward wheeled in one of the bell-shaped driers that Mona had noticed in the other room. It grew on a tall stem like a gigantic lily and had a long tendril of wire. Mr. Edward adjusted the bell over Mona's head, snapped a switch and released a small warm tempest that swarmed suddenly through her hair, and filled her ears with a gentle roaring.

Miss Pearl leaned forward asking a question that Mona couldn't hear. She supposed it was something about whether or not she was comfortable and nodded her head absently. There she sat in her small windy cave staring at Miss Pearl's long eyelashes against her cheek, and the contented smile that curved her lips. Her face looked pretty and a little bit foolish; and yet she was brave and strong and adventurous, and had worked hard since she was a little child. Sometimes people are not the way they look, thought Mona. It was a great surprise.

She was so absorbed in these reflections that it came as a frightful shock when Miss Pearl gave her back one of her hands to look at. All five nails had been painted red as blood! Mona was horrified and fascinated at the same time. Cuffy would faint dead away if she ever saw them, but they were so beautiful! Like little red shells, or curved rubies, or even drops of sealing wax, but nothing at all like fingernails. After all, I can take it off when I get home, Mona told herself. I'll just keep them this way till I get back and look at them once in a while.

“They're perfect,” she said, and Miss Pearl's smile was more pleased than ever as she began on the other hand. By and by, when Mona's hair was cooked enough she reached over and switched off the tempest. In the sudden clear stillness Mona could hear the lady in booth twelve telling someone about how she'd eaten something that disagreed with her.

“Well, my dear, I was in agony!” she was saying. “Absolute agony. And
hives!
Well, I had hives the size of fifty-cent pieces all over me. I kept wondering could it have been the lobster? But my husband, Mr. Elenbogen, said, ‘Why, Grace, you
know
lobsters never affect you.' Then I wondered maybe it was that rich dessert. That's what I think it must have been, that rich dessert.”

“Maybe it was the combination,” observed a patient voice.

“No, I think it was the dessert. You know I almost
never
eat dessert,” said the woman as if this were a fact of the most vital interest.

“There we are, honey,” Miss Pearl said, wheeling away the drier, and beginning to take the hairpins out.

“I feel like a baked potato,” Mona remarked, “and I look a lot like one too.”

“Now you just wait, honey,” Miss Pearl told her. “You just wait till we get rid of these old pins and Mr. Edward combs you out. You won't
know
yourself.”

And it was true. Ten minutes later, after Mr. Edward had combed and brushed and snipped and fussed over her hair, Mona did not know herself. Great curls and puffs and ringlets frothed above her shoulders and on her forehead. The result exceeded her wildest expectations. She was awed by the beauty of it. Why, I could go into the movies this minute, she thought; only what would Cuffy say?

“Honey, you're a picture!” exclaimed Miss Pearl, clasping her hands in admiration. “I bet you somebody's going to cause quite a sensation when she goes home. I bet her daddy won't know her; he'll be tickled to death!”

Mona had a small pang of misgiving when she thought of Father. Tickled to death wasn't exactly what she expected him to be. But maybe he'd like it when he got used to it.