The Sisters from Hardscrabble Bay (29 page)

For a moment no one moved. Then Jessie pulled her shawl tight, planted her canes in front of her, and heaved up out of her chair.

“Jens!” she called. “Jens, go help Eddie with them wheels. They’ll jolt the baby.”

“Yes, dear.”

“And don’t bang the door going out. It might be sleeping.”

Jens held the porch door open. Idella rushed forward and helped Eddie lift the carriage onto the porch. Ethel came quietly up the steps. Idella motioned her to go to her mother, then took Eddie’s elbow and pulled him back toward the kitchen.

Jessie leaned forward onto her canes and looked down at the sleeping baby. “He’s so dolled up with clothes I can’t get a good look. Let me sit back, and you get him unwrapped, and I’ll hold him. He’ll get held by his grandma.”

Ethel reached into the carriage and removed the baby’s hat and sweater with her clumsy fingers. Both were crocheted, Idella saw, smiling.

“Keep the blanket around him so his legs don’t get cold.” Jessie was reaching for the baby with hunger. “You just hand him over to me now. Let me get a good look at him.”

He squirmed awake from all the handling, rubbing at his eyes with tiny fists. Ethel handed him to Jessie, who looked down at him, quietly, for a long time. No one moved. “Well, well,” she whispered. The baby started to whimper. “Now, now,” she cooed. Idella had never heard her use such a soft voice. “Now, now. He’s got Albert’s eyes.” She nodded. “Yes. Albert’s eyes.” She looked up. “And your mouth, Ethel.”

Ethel smiled. Jens walked over and put his hand on her shoulder.

“What about me?” Eddie said, smiling. “Don’t I show up in him somewhere?”

“Get my pitcher there, Idella—the pink glass—and make us up some eggnog. We’ll use my silver spoons there to stir it.”

Idella sighed. That was one crisis over with. She supposed there would be more. She squeezed Eddie’s hand, then picked up the pink glass pitcher and set about making eggnog. She’d always liked that pitcher. And them little spoons would have been nice to have.

Now, this is how we come to live with Jessie. We had our own rent, you know, over on Haskell Street, when Jens had a heart attack. He was over there mowing around the gully, and then he was down on the ground, and some people brought him home. The doctor said it was a slight heart attack and for him to take vitamin pills and take it easy. But he shouldn’t do no more mowing and all that business, you know. So Ethel was going to live up there and take care of them. She took her kids and went up there, and we just kept our fingers crossed, because we knew we’d be the ones that would have to go, in the long run. She stayed three weeks, and she packed up and went home. She couldn’t stand it any longer. “All while I’m up there, I have butterflies in my stomach. Every minute I’m there in that house. Butterflies in my stomach.” She had moved a few little things up there, and she moved them all back. So then we were the ones had to go.

That was in June. And in November he died, of his heart attack. And we lived with Jessie—or she lived with us—for eight years. She had her good points, but she was so hard to live with. She was impossible. You could spend the whole day making her favorite dish, say, something she’d been talking about for weeks—strawberry shortcake, maybe, from the first of the berries. You could wait and watch—I know because I did this, see—I tried to please her. I waited and watched for the berries to be just right. Real sweet. I picked just enough for her to have strawberry shortcake, and I made biscuits and whipped up the cream and got it all good and ready and surprised her with it for supper one night after she’d been feeling poorly for a spell—I brought it into the bedroom on a tray all dolled up with flowers and everything—and, by God, she sat there, had the nerve to sit there in bed leaning against the pillows that I got her, for God’s sake, in the sheets I’d cleaned—and she looks at it and says, “Them biscuits look dry, Idella. You’ve wasted them berries on the likes of them biscuits.”

Well, I wanted to kill her. They were perfect biscuits. Perfect! She couldn’t stand that, see. She was jealous of my biscuits. You could not win in that house with that woman. No one could.

So I took that shortcake away from her. I didn’t say a word. I wasn’t going to argue. I took it, and I went out to the back step, looking out over the garden there, and I sat down, and I ate it. I ate every bit. I wasn’t even hungry. I didn’t enjoy it really, even though the biscuit was perfect. But I’d be damned before I let her get a second chance at it. And I would not give her the satisfaction of getting upset. Though of course I was. Plenty. The nerve! After I tried so hard to be nice to her and to give her what she wanted.

Now, the night before Barbara was born, Ethel came up to help and stayed all night. She brought her kids. And when I got up at about seven o’clock, my water broke. So I told Ethel, and she got right up. Then her kids started coming downstairs one by one. They were little boys, nine, ten years old. We were sitting around the breakfast table, and they knew something was going to happen. Eddie drove us into Portland. Ethel went with us, and all day long Eddie and Ethel came in and out of the hospital, waiting for that baby to come. Fourteen hours.

But they’d put me out. I remember, the last I knew, the nurse said, “Now, you tell me when a pain commences to get a little worse.” So I said it, and then I never knew any more than that. Ethel told Eddie I was awful squeamish, but I only did what the nurse said. And when I came to, somewhere along the line, I said it again.

It was away round the clock till two in the morning, and I was alone in the bed, and I got up. I wanted to go to the bathroom—as it happened, there was a bathroom in the room. I had to pee, you see. And as I sat on that toilet, I thought, Have I had the baby? I must have had the baby. Finally I went back to bed, and pretty soon a nurse came in, and I said to the nurse, “I walked on that cold floor.” Why I said “cold floor” was that Jessie always harped about someone walking on a cold floor after they had a baby, and they got consumption, and they died. So I thought, My God, I walked across that cold floor. It was linoleum. What’s going to happen to me? I wondered. I’ve had it now.

But the nurse said, “That won’t do any harm.” She told me I had a little girl and what time she’d been born and so on.

Then they brought the baby in to me. She had a small scar on one side of her face. Forceps, you know. Her forehead was kind of red there, but it went away. She weighed over eight pounds. A lovely baby.

Now, Donna and Paulette and Beverly came much quicker, just a few hours. I didn’t do too much suffering. When the pains got to be a little bit bad, they gave me something. And I had good, healthy babies. Four girls, all seven years apart.

Of course, when Paulette was coming, Eddie was hoping for a boy. When he found out it was a girl, he went up to Haskell Street to Mrs. Graham’s, right across from the hospital, to tell her. He was so disappointed. She said, “He rang the bell, and I went to the door, and his face was long, and I thought, Oh my God, something’s happened to Idella or the baby. Something awful has happened.” And she said, “Mr. Jensen, what is the matter?” “Well,” he said, “I got another goddamned girl.” She talked him out of it, you know. She was a motherly person. She said, “Well, it’s a healthy baby, isn’t it? The baby is good?” and he said, “Yes, it weighs ten pounds,” and she said, “Well, that’s all right. Maybe the next one will be a boy.” And when he saw the baby, he couldn’t help but love that little girl.

It was after Paulette was born that we started the store. They were building houses all around us, and we thought, Gee, if there was a grocery store here, it might be good. So I said, “Why don’t you take that old chicken house and fix it up and make it a store?”

Eddie’s parents had the chickens. Eddie could not stand to clean them and feed them and do what had to be done. Who could blame him? Working all day and then come home to that mother and those chickens. And me, of course. So I did the most of it.

Well, finally we got rid of the damned chickens. It was too much. And that’s when we made the store—out of the chicken house. That was my idea. Eddie took the credit, but it was my idea. We moved the chicken house over across the field and cleaned it out, of course, and remodeled and added quite a bit onto it, and we set it up on the Gorham Road and made it into Jensen’s Drive-In Store. And I stood there in what was the old chicken house, behind that counter, for many years. Eddie said I stood there clucking. He thought he was so funny saying that “Idella’s in the old chicken house clucking away.” If he was to get any sort of joke going, he always drove it into the ground. “I suppose that makes you the rooster,” I finally said. Course he liked that.

Jensen’s Drive-In Store. Eddie was proud of that name. He thought it was real catchy, ’cause drive-in movies were big at the time we opened it. I saw so many people day after day, year after year. And I got to know them some, to know what was happening. If someone got a new baby or a cat or the like, they were as apt to tell me as anyone. I was a known figure! “Mrs. Jensen,” I was.

I was at that store every morning to open up and every closing time. It’d be after ten at night. And many an afternoon as well, many, standing at the register in that store. Course, I had George to help. He lived across the street, and he worked for me in the afternoons. George . . . he was, well, what is the word? It’s all the rage now—they have a term for it. He liked men, if you know what I mean. Though of course Eddie never knew. It went right over his head. Thank God from all of us.

George lived for years with Randall. He was my best worker. He’d wash the floors unbidden. Oh, I appreciated that so much. We laughed a lot about little things and enjoyed the customers together, their quirks—and little incidents.

There was one time I was over at the store, one morning—I was all alone, I was fiddling with something in the back there, and I happened to look out the window. And I’ll be damned if I didn’t see a moose run right by! A full-grown moose. Honest to God. And there was no one else there. I had no witnesses. And then in comes Jerry Masterson to get his daily pack of cigarettes—every morning like a clock—and I said, “Jerry, Jerry, a moose! I saw a moose run by the window!” And he looks at me and says, “You been drinking, Idella?” Thought I was putting on. So we run over to George’s there across the street to see if he’d seen the moose, and he said, “No, no, Idella, no moose this morning. A couple of squirrels, but no moose.” Well, they both thought I’d been drinking. But I insisted. I was adamant! And they come back over to the store with me, and we looked all around outside—and, by God, George found a moose print, right there behind the store. He proved that I’d seen that moose. Oh, we laughed about that over the years. “Seen any moose this morning, Idella?” Jerry would ask. “Not a one,” I’d say, and we’d both start laughing. Or some mornings, just for the fun of it, I’d say, “Three.”

We never did hear any more about that moose. But George found the print—unmistakable.

Good old George. I did hear stories some about parties with young men over at Randall and George’s. I never knew what to believe. He was a good worker, I know that. Though Barbara said she saw him at Old Orchard Beach one night and he was holding hands with a man. I don’t know if it was Randall. Life is funny. So much goes on you’d never dream about.

Well, since we didn’t have chickens, we got eggs to sell at the store from the egg lady who lived up the hill. Now, what was her name? I knew her as a child growing up. We were in the one-room school together out in Scarborough that year me and Avis got to go to school. She was the prettiest little thing. Long golden hair. She’d wear a big bow on top of her head. Big bows was the fashion. My hair was too thin to maintain a bow like that. Hers was thick and luxurious, and her bow would sit proudly on top of her head all day long. Mine would droop and sidle over.

Well, for some reason the egg lady married Jimmy Forrest! They lived up the hill from us. Them Forrests were a weird bunch—from way down country somewheres. One time I heard that she and Jimmy were living in a car! Can you imagine? For a month or two, it was. People coming into the store would comment. When I saw them, they were driving around in it delivering eggs, and it looked regular enough. But I heard from more than one source that they slept in there, too, instead of beds. With a dog! I felt sorry for her. She herself was always so ladylike and genteel.

Well, when we got our new couch, me and Eddie, I offered her our old one. I can’t remember her name, and I should. I felt bad offering up that old couch. That couch had a history. It used to be Eddie’s parents’. It was in the living room up at the house when I met him, and it was still there years later when we moved in to help take care of things, and I don’t think it had been sat upon many times in between. It was for company, which after that first visit I wasn’t.