“I wanna go play with Judy,” Faith proclaimed one day.
Jean winced at Faith’s brassy voice. “You can after lunch. Right now we have to feed Hap.”
“I wanna go now. Naaoow. Naaoow.” Her whine stretched out the word. It was a horrid sound.
“Be quiet.”
“Naaow.” Jean thought she had probably brought on the sound herself, or her condition had. Her unresponsiveness to facial expressions taught Faith early that a pout to show displeasure wasn’t going to get any action. Either she might as well forget it and do as she was told, or she had to resort to stronger measures: Faith learned the tantrum.
“Here. Feed your brother.”
“No.” The word exploded with finality. Jean walked toward her, fuming, but before she got there, Faith threw herself on the kitchen floor, kicking and screaming.
“Faith Ingraham Holly, stand up.”
“Naaoow.”
Jean pursed her lips. How did Faith learn to do that when she’d never seen it and it must feel terrible?
“Sit up.” Jean’s voice rose higher.
“Naaow.” More kicking and crying. Jean went for her to pull her up. Faith bit. Jean bit back. Faith screamed louder and wiggled out of Jean’s grasp. Jean’s anger flushed hot. Here was a perfect child with nothing to cry about, acting like a wild animal. And Hap, with everything to cry about, strapped into his highchair gurgling, dear Hap, content with the world. Faith was going to stand up. Jean grabbed what she could find—it happened to be Faith’s hair—and yanked her upright. The shock silenced her.
“You’re going to stand up and help me. Then you’re going to eat your own lunch at the table like a lady. Then you can go to Judy’s.”
Faith was sullen for the rest of the day, and Jean was rigid and shaken. She didn’t want to admit she didn’t know how to handle her own child. By bedtime, remorse had tarnished victory, and Jean felt a need to reestablish closeness with this fireball. She sat down on the edge of Faith’s bed. To talk about the incident would be to dilute the lesson she wanted to remain firmly planted, yet she didn’t want to dislodge a love essential to both of them. Jean stroked Faith’s head and played with her curls, twirling them over her forefinger, using her hand as a comb. The curls stretched through her fingers until they sprang free. It was soothing to both.
“Maybe you’ll have a nice dream tonight.”
“I’m going to dream the same dream I did last night.”
“What was that?”
“I dreamed about a whole box of hand-me-downs from cousin Lancey.” Her voice was a drowsy murmur.
“You did? What was in the box?”
“Dresses. Pinky ones.” There was a long pause between slow words. Jean sensed the misty region between sleep and wakefulness which put the close on the little one’s day. She wished she could drift off to sleep so early and without worries.
Faith rolled over onto her side and her arm fell across Jean’s hand. Jean stroked the little hand. “I love you,” she whispered.
“I love you too, Mommy.” Carefully, trying not to move the bed, Jean stood up to go to the next child.
She had survived one more day, but the problem of needing to do things faster would still be there tomorrow. Eventually, it came to an impasse; she needed help. She wanted to run her own house, but she had to face it. For the present anyway, it was too much for her. She took on more piano pupils in order to hire Mamie—monstrous, tobacco-chewing, bellowing and black.
Mamie sidled her way into the family fabric, watched the wrestling matches in the evenings on the family’s television, slapped her leg whenever something delighted her, spit in a pot under the most comfortable chair which she claimed as her own, and commandeered all domestic chores. When Franny and Ed dropped in one night, Mamie, sitting in her chair directly in front of the television, let out a whoop. “Lawdy, I knew if I took my teeth out, we’d get company.” Mamie cornered Franny in the kitchen, leaned over her and in a breathy whisper asked, “Are you sure they can’t see? Saturday morning, sure as I’m standing here, I saw Mr. Holly back that truck down the drive.” A week later, Mamie ambushed Franny outside and announced, “You’re right, Miz Nelson. Yesterday at breakfast I flapped my arms in front of their faces an’ they didn’t even blink.” Franny, ever faithful, told Jean everything.
Week by week Jean felt Mamie become more autocratic, and it made her uneasy. Because she was desperate for help, she permitted Mamie’s encroachments, each one a small thing if taken singly, but together, they made Jean feel she had lost control of her own house. She walked around looking for something to do. She set herself the simple chores of spraying for flies and watering the plants in the window boxes. “Ma’m, you’re gonna drown them violas,” came Mamie’s booming voice. Jean retreated into quietness.
Forrie did just the opposite. Once Jean overheard Forrie backtalk an order from Mamie with “I don’t have to. You’re not my mother.”
Mamie retorted, “You say somethin’ like that again, I’m gonna chop your tongue out, chop your tongue out, chop your tongue out.” Her voice raised an octave with each repetition so that she sounded fearsome, even to Jean. She suspected that Mamie’s towering figure convinced him, quivering and wide-eyed, that she could. It was just one more wedge driven in to separate her not just from housework but now from raising her own children as well. Jean ached with the conflict of needing Mamie and hating her dominance.
Forrie and Mamie’s little war escalated. Jean heard about it only after the fact, in the darkened privacy of bedtime tucking-in weeks later. Apparently Mamie had taken a saw without asking from Forrie’s tool kit to cut a bone for Rusty, their new dog. “So I kicked her in the shin,” Forrie said simply. “But I told her I was just swinging my foot and it hit her leg.” Evidently, Mamie didn’t buy it. In somber, seven-year-old tones appropriate to the gravity of the incident, Forrie related how she picked him up by the shoulders and cracked his head a few cracks on the kitchen window sill.
Two furrows deepened in Jean’s forehead and she took a long, ponderous breath. It was courageous of him to tell her, but wrong for him to kick her. It was also wrong of Mamie to punish so viciously. “You shouldn’t have kicked her,” she said softly. Beyond that, the problem was too knotty. She never spoke to Mamie about it. She didn’t want the confrontation. She never told Forrest, either. He’d only smoulder at her inaction.
Nevertheless, she needed Mamie’s help. Mamie kept a close watch on Hap and ushered him into the more advanced world of potty training. “Hap, go pawt pawt,” she shouted several times a day, interspersed with “Hap, close mout’.” One thing about Mamie was undeniable; she had standards. She stomped through the house one afternoon and announced, “This house is terrible, Miz Holly. Everything’s filthy.”
Jean couldn’t believe her ears. She felt sure Mamie’s hands were on her hips. That was the limit. Seething, she put hers on her hips, too. She wished she knew exactly what direction to glare. “Did it ever occur to you that if my house weren’t dirty, you wouldn’t have a job?”
Jean could hardly wait until Hap could go “pawt pawt” by himself. The first time he did, Jean was bursting with triumph. “Look what Hap did,” she announced to Mamie. But it might only be a fluke. She waited. Then he did it by himself the second time. When he did it the third, Jean was resolute. She grabbed her checkbook, strode across the breezeway to where Forrie now had a separate room, and found him amid the jumble of his erector set. “I know you can print nicely if you’re careful. It’s time you learned how to write a check.” She spelled out Mamie’s name, told him the amount and signed where Forrie told her to. “Mamie, where are you?” she called, turning back to the door.
“Right here, Miz Holly.” Mamie’s voice came from only a few feet away.
Jean held out the check. “I don’t need you any longer, Mamie. You can go.” The words sounded glorious.
Mamie was outraged. She snatched the check out of Jean’s hand and stomped back into the house. It only made Jean smile. Firing Miss Andrews had never felt as good as this. The next time she cleaned, she discovered Mamie’s tobacco pot on the floor under her chair. With gusto, she hurled it in the trash. The sound of smashing pottery had all the grandeur of a Beethoven crescendo. In that act, she reclaimed full command of domestic operations—with Faith’s help.
Plump and aproned, no more than three feet tall, Faith played house with a vengeance. Soon she seemed to take Mamie’s place, ordering Hap to close his mouth and commanding Forrie and Billy to put away their toys. It sounded cute at first, and it was certainly preferable to Mamie’s bellows, but Jean sensed that trouble lay ahead.
When Faith was nearly five, the family could finally have pancakes on Saturday mornings. Although Jean could cook many things, she couldn’t turn pancakes. She loved them, but hadn’t had any for years. So when Faith begged to make them, Jean set her on a stool so she could reach the stove. It might inflate her already queenly ego, but that was a risk she was prepared to take; the rewards would taste divine. Stirring up muddies with Judy Nelson in the dirt of Pop’s brickyard was sure to become a thing of the past, a childhood cut short by need. Pancake batter was real.
Betty Kenworthy and her husband Warren came one Saturday morning and found curly-haired Faith nearly hidden by a massive apron. Her chubby cheeks were flushed and she was bent down over the stove.
“Oh, Mrs. Kenworthy,” she said, and let out a monstrous sigh. “I’m so tired. I wish they’d quit eating.”
“Are there any more ready?” Jean asked and held her plate out with a smile, enjoying the turnabout.
“She’s cute as a button,” Betty said in a low voice, leaning into Jean’s ear. “A pink-cheeked darling.”
“Not always. She’s no angel,” Jean muttered. She knew that behind those bright button eyes that friends always cooed about lurked a mischievousness that, like the other children, exploited her situation. Faith scraped her peas onto the floor just as her brothers did, a practice which soon taught Hap the same. But when Faith didn’t do it with corn, her favorite, and the others did, she was sure to tattle on them. Often Jean caught them if she remembered to feel their plates just before the end of a meal, but she suspected they frequently got away with it, dropping spoonful by spoonful during the course of a meal. Jean wondered if Faith made faces at her or stuck her tongue out when she made her do something disagreeable. Franny had seen Forrie and Billy do it, so Faith probably followed suit. They had all learned how to lift the glass cover off the candy dish in the living room without making a sound; she could never keep it stocked.
The same with peanut butter. Faith and Judy could climb soundlessly onto the kitchen cupboard to steal spoonfuls of it. If Jean walked into the kitchen soon after, she could smell it on the spoon they usually left in the sink. Short-sighted kids, she thought. Then she remembered with chagrin how simple-minded she and Tready had been when they forgot to flush their cigarette butts down the toilet and how Father had known even before they came downstairs. Maybe someday she’d have to tackle that problem, too. But for now, the problem was smelling peanut butter before mealtime, not cigarette smoke.
“You’ve been into the peanut butter again,” she said at least once a week.
“How do
you
know?” That had become Faith’s standard taunt, whatever the issue.
“George tells me,” she said, naming the parrot who was the newest addition to their household. “He’s a watchful pair of eyes, and he’s very loyal. To me.”
“Mo-om, parrots can’t do that.”
“How do
you
know?” she challenged her back. “Are you a parrot?”
When Faith eventually figured out that she’d have to brush her teeth afterward to escape being caught, Jean still won. Toothpaste smelled too, and toothbrushes remained wet for a while. And what kid would voluntarily brush her teeth in the middle of the day?
The ultimate skullduggery occurred in the enclosed patio. Just inside the three-foot adobe wall by the row of rose bushes was forbidden fruit, a kumquat tree that produced its miniature fruit from May to August. Jean loved the piquant fruit and its infinitesimal sting that numbed her lips momentarily, but one person loved it more: Faith. The rule was that you did not take any kumquats without asking. When the edible rind achieved its maximum sweetness, the fruit still packed a load of puckering power, and Jean knew to be wary. She had to enlist Franny’s detective resources, too. Faith and Judy had matching shorts with oversized pockets and when Franny noticed both girls wearing them on the same day during kumquat season, she phoned Jean from her kitchen. By craning her neck, she could see across the field to the kumquat tree and keep Jean apprised of the escapade.
“They’re doing an army low-crawl around the house under Forrest’s office window. Can you believe it?”
“It’s their game,” Jean answered. “They pretend they won’t be seen that way.”
Franny described how the girls awkwardly picked each kumquat—from the back of the tree, of course, so missing fruit wouldn’t be noticed. They were careful not to yank the fruit or do anything to disturb branches or make noise. If the take were particularly grand, Jean would be able to smell the sweet orange odor on their breaths and the jig would be up. The old apple tree in the garden of Eden was nothing compared to the forbidden fruit of the kumquat tree in the south patio. Like its more ancient cousin, it became the center of many a moral lesson.
“How many did you eat?” Jean asked casually, later in the day, to try to catch her off guard.
“How many what?” Faith shot back.
“You know. Kumquats.”
“None. I didn’t eat any.”
Dishonesty was becoming a big problem. She had to recognize it. Forrest already had. He’d come home snarling about his workers. “They just slap up a crooked wall and think, ‘good enough for the boss; he’ll never know.’” When he fumed at the general tendency many people had to lie or withhold information from the blind, Jean shrank with helplessness.
He became fierce in his lectures to the children about absolute honesty. When he’d catch Billy or Forrie sneaking away from him, he’d call them back in a thunderous voice. “Listen you guys, if you two don’t start acting right and telling me the truth, I’m gonna cloud up and rain. Sell you back to the Indians, that’s what I’ll do. Now look me in the eye, you couple of hamburgers.” It wasn’t the words, silly in themselves, but the intensity of their delivery which sent the children whimpering. Sometimes he sounded so ridiculous Jean had to leave the room and muffle her laughter. Yet
he
got results. They knew it was too serious for comfort when he’d threaten them with any mention of Indians. She imagined Forrie’s spindly body quivering, and Faith’s gaze riveted to the ground, when Forrest lit into them.