The Wonder of Charlie Anne (14 page)

I reach Becky first and grab on to the back of her dress and pull and it tears and then Becky falls and screams that her dress is all ruined. Just a few more strides and I will be close enough to overtake Ivy and I pump my arms and look for strength from I know not where and gain on Ivy. But what I am not counting on is that Mirabel will be sitting on the porch, mending.

“What is it with you two?” she says.

“Look!” screams Ivy. “Look what Charlie Anne is hiding.” Then Ivy runs right up on the porch and drops my yellow trousers onto Mirabel’s lap and Becky is still screaming on the lawn and I know my goose is cooked.

Well. We have to walk Becky home and I have to go, too, because Mirabel is going to make me tell Mrs. Ellis how I ripped Becky’s dress and how I am sorry, and I must beg her pardon and use my best manners while I am doing it. We will talk about the trousers and about being with that colored girl when we get home, Mirabel tells me, and this gets Ivy and even Becky laughing, and I tell Becky if she does not quit it, I am going to make sure that more than just her dress is ripped up.

“Are you threatening me, Charlie Anne?” she says in that whiney voice of hers, and I lunge at her, but Mirabel pulls us apart before I can get at her face.

“What’s gotten into you?” Mirabel takes Becky’s hand and heads toward the Ellis house, and I have to pick up the back of the line, behind Ivy and Birdie, who keeps asking me, “What was that yellow thing, anyway?” and I have to keep saying, “Shush your mouth up, Birdie.”

“And don’t drag your feet,” Mirabel yells back.

Belle and Anna May are watching our parade, and
Belle wants to know why I am looking so miserable. Poor, poor, pitiful Charlie Anne, I tell myself as we walk up the hill, and even Olympia and Minnie and Bea come running out to see where we are all going.

Across the road, Old Mr. Jolly’s house is looking all happy with its new door, and now there are sky blue shutters. After a while, I get a little tired of hearing me telling myself what a terrible, troubled life I am having, how nothing is turning out the way I want, and I decide I need to give myself a good talking to, and I do. When I am done, I am feeling all yelled at, and right then and there, as we turn into the Ellis driveway, I tell myself that someday I am going to teach that Ellis family a few manners. Lord knows they need some.

Mrs. Ellis takes one look at Becky all ripped up and dirty and starts boo-hooing, and then she asks about a hundred times, Are you all right, dear? and then she decides Becky is all right, but she gives Mirabel a what-kind-of-family-are-you look anyway.

Mirabel is very unhappy to be standing there, and I bet she is wishing she sent us on our own. Then Mrs. Ellis looks down to see if we have shoes on or not, which of course we do not, and this makes Mirabel’s frown come back.

“What shall be done?” Mrs. Ellis wants to know.

Mirabel clears her throat and gives me the
why-aren’t-you-apologizing look, and I give Ivy and then Becky my most terrible mad look, and then I turn to Mrs. Ellis and say as mannerly as I can, “Please pardon my bad manners, ma’am.”

Ivy and Becky snicker, and I look off back toward Old Mr. Jolly’s house and wish more than anything that I were sitting at the table listening to Phoebe reading, and drinking sweet raspberry tea. Instead, I hear Mirabel suggest that maybe I could mend Becky’s dress.

Mrs. Ellis thinks about it for a moment and decides it is a good idea. She tells Becky to change and bring back the dress, and while she is at it, to bring the pile of mending from the back parlor that needs doing.

“I am not good at mending,” I say.

Mrs. Ellis looks at me sharply. “Children need to learn their place, wouldn’t you agree, Mirabel?”

“Well, yes, I certainly do,” says Mirabel, and then Becky is standing in front of us with a pile of clothes so high you cannot even see her face, and then Mirabel isn’t looking so sure about things.

“If she wasn’t Sylvie’s child, I wouldn’t be so forgiving, you know,” Mrs. Ellis says. “Bless that woman’s sweet soul, she always had something kind to say to everyone.” Then Mrs. Ellis takes the stack of clothes from Becky and piles it into my arms.

“We’ll need these back before church on Sunday.
Now off you go, you have a lot of work to do,” she says, waving her arm and sending us on our way, without ever once inviting us in.

I am so weighed down under my bundle that I can hardly see Ivy laughing at me the whole way home.

Mirabel puts my trousers in her rag box and tells me to stay away from them, and she decides the only thing to be done is to step up my lessons. Each night she sits in the rocking chair and I sit in the rail-back chair so I can learn to sit up straight without slumping, plus I am learning to mend.

“Tiny stitches,” says Mirabel, over and over. She is making us each a new pair of underpants out of feed sacks. My pair has a rooster on the back.

“I’m not wearing those!”

“You will, and you will be grateful to have undergarments. Some girls don’t have any at all.”

I roll my eyes.

“You don’t want to be able to see the stitches, see?” She holds up my new underpants and shows me the seam. She keeps checking to make sure I am sewing in a straight line.

While I am doing this, Mirabel reads:

Mirabel looks up at me. “All right, Charlie Anne. Let’s think for a moment about what that means.” She puts the book on her lap and sits back in her rocking chair and waits for the words to sink into me.

I watch the last of the sun dip down below our barn. I do not know why Ivy does not get these lessons, when she needs them more than me.

“Well?” Mirabel looks over her glasses and straight into me. “What does that mean?”

I take a giant breath and swallow all the words inside of me. I shrug.

“It means that you need a loving, generous nature if you are to get on in this world. I’m surprised you can’t see that.” And with that, Mirabel is off again:

I feel the walls of my heart tightening, boxing me into this room with Mirabel.

“A quiet and generous spirit. That is what you should be striving for, Charlie Anne.”

Oh, happy day! New shoes arrive for all of us from Papa, plus a letter with money and four lemon drops inside. His handwriting is small and pushed together, and I can only read a few words anyway, so Ivy has to read it.

Papa says that thanks to President Roosevelt, the government has a lot of roads it wants built, so there is plenty of work. Thomas is even taller now than Papa. There are new shoes for Peter, so Papa does not know about Aunt Eleanor. He wants Peter to write to him and tell him how high the corn is, and if he is measuring week by week.

I feel my heart splitting for Peter. There is a return address for Papa, and I stuff the envelope in my pocket.

I will try and write to Papa about all that happened to Peter, but first I try on my new shoes. I am so happy to be slipping them on and tying them up and walking around in them that I don’t hardly even feel the leather pressing hard on my skin. I tell them if they don’t stop snapping when I walk, I’m going to sound just like Mirabel.

I hear Mama calling out to me, telling me to come up and let her have a look at my new shoes, but I tell her no. She should have thought of wanting to see
things like new shoes before she let Peter go. Now I have Rosalyn and Phoebe to show things to.

Papa’s letter puts Mirabel in a good mood. She tells me I can have the day to myself, “after you finish up that mending.”

I make tiny stitches like she tells me. I just don’t make a lot of them.

I have to wait about a hundred years to show Phoebe my new shoes. Mirabel has to walk down to the garden and see about the tomatoes and pick some cucumbers and stop at the privy so she can read the Sears catalog for a while. Then she goes and looks at the weeds we call lamb’s-quarters, because you can eat them, and she’s been thinking of canning them, just in case the hard times are even worse than we’re expecting. Then she beats the rug from the parlor against the porch, and next she goes hunting for the place where Minnie is hiding her eggs.

I head out to the butternut tree and tell Anna May and Belle the good news, that Papa is alive and well, and while I do that, I do a little looking for Big Pumpkin Face. I have not seen her in a few days now.

While I am looking inside the barn and the cellar and the hen roosts, I tell her she better be quick and olly olly oxen free and come out. But Big Pumpkin Face stays hidden, and my feet start telling me if I crawl on my belly through the high rye grass and jump quick over
the stone wall that Mirabel won’t even see. I tell Anna May and Belle to be quiet, and they look at me and wonder what the dickens I am slithering around like an old garden snake for. They come over for a closer look.

“Go away,” I say, sounding very stern.

I have a big dirt stain across the back of my dress and a grass stain across my belly, plus there are rips from the blackberry bushes. I run across the road, remembering how I haven’t had a bath for several days.

Then Phoebe comes shooting out of the barn on her swing, one arm draped out beside her, and she’s wearing her red pepper red trousers, looking graceful as a swan. As she flies back to the barn and then back out again, she points her toes up, and I believe she is tiptoeing and that she could dance straight up to the moon if she wanted. I can hardly breathe.

“A turn,” I croak as she soars out past me again. “Please, can I please have a turn?”

“Watch how I do it!” Phoebe screams, laughing, and I have to watch her fly past me over and over again, probably a hundred more times, and she’s all particular about the way she points her toes.

“I KNOW HOW TO DO IT, PHOEBE,” I say, feeling another frown spread across my face. “I KNOW HOW TO SWING.”

Old Mr. Jolly comes walking up from the brier patch, carrying big clippers in his hands. He is
watching Phoebe fly right over him. He has cuts on his arm, and his face is looking how my heart is feeling: annoyed, and like maybe Phoebe shouldn’t always get to be the luckiest frog in the pond.

“Phoebe,” he calls. “I believe your friend here would like a turn.”

It takes about a hundred more minutes for Miss Red Pepper Pants to slow down. I am afraid she might see the rooster on my underpants because my dress is so short and Mirabel won’t let me near my trousers in the rag box. I think I hear Mama calling me from up on the hill, telling me not to worry about my underpants. I tell her I am still not talking to her. She tells me that she understands and that she is sorry about everything.