The Anything Box

'At your house?' Mom massaged her hand where the shopping bag handles hadcrisscrossed it. 'Come in. Sit down.' We had two chairs and a bench and two
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apple boxes. The boxes scratched bare legs, but surely they couldn't scratch a
stack of bricks.
'No, thanks.' Maybe she couldn't bend! 'My husband will be away several
days and I don't like to be in the house alone at night.'
'Of course,' said Mom. 'You must feel awfully alone.'
The only aloneness she knew, what with five kids and two rooms, was the
taut secretness of her inward thoughts as she mopped and swept and ironed in
other houses. 'Sure, one of the girls would be glad to keep you company.'
There was a darting squirm and LaNell was safely hidden behind the swaying of

our clothes in the diagonally curtained corner of the Other room, and Kathy
knelt swiftly just beyond the dresser, out of sight.
'Anna is eleven.' I had no place to hide, burdened as I was with Danna.
'She's old enough. What time do you want her to come over?'
'Oh, bedtime will do.' Mrs. Klevity peered out the door at the darkening
sky. 'Nine o'clock. Only it gets dark before then—' Bricks can look anxious, I
guess.
'As soon as she has supper, she can come,' said Mom, handling my hours as
though they had no value to me. 'Of course she has to go to school tomorrow.'
'Only when it's dark,' said Mrs. Klevity. 'Day is all right. How much
should I pay you?'
'Pay?' Mom gestured with one hand. 'She has to sleep anyway. It doesn't
matter to her where, once she's asleep. A favor for a friend.'
I wanted to cry out: Whose favor for what friend? We hardly passed the time
of day with Mrs. Klevity. I couldn't even remember Mr. Klevity except that he
was straight and old and wrinkled. Uproot me and make me lie in a strange
house, a strange dark, listening to a strange breathing, feeling a strange
warmth making itself part of me for all night long, seeping into me—
'Mom—' I said.
'I'll give her breakfast,' said Mrs. Klevity. 'And lunch money for each
night she comes.'
I resigned myself without a struggle. Lunch money each day—a whole dime!
Mom couldn't afford to pass up such a blessing, such a gift from God, who
unerringly could be trusted to ease the pinch just before it became
intolerable.
'Thank you, God,' I whispered as I went to get the can opener to open
supper. For a night or two I could stand it.
I felt all naked and unprotected as I stood in my flimsy crinkle cotton
pajamas, one bare foot atop the other, waiting for Mrs. Klevity to turn the
bed down.
'We have to check the house first,' she said thickly. 'We can't go to bed
until we check the house.'
'Check the house?' I forgot my starchy stiff shyness enough to question.
'What for?'
Mrs. Klevity peered at me in the dim light of the bedroom. They had three
rooms for only the two of them! Even if there was no door to shut between the
bedroom and the kitchen.
'I couldn't sleep,' she said, 'unless I looked first. I have to.'
So we looked. Behind the closet curtain, under the table—Mrs. Klevity even
looked in the portable oven that sat near the two-burner stove in the kitchen.
When we came to the bed, I was moved to words again. 'But we've been in
here with the doors locked ever since I got here. What could possibly—'
'A prowler?' said Mrs. Klevity nervously, after a brief pause for thought.
'A criminal?'
Mrs. Klevity pointed her face at me. I doubt if she could see me from that
distance. 'Doors make no difference,' she said. 'It might be when you least
expect, so you have to expect all the time.'
'I'll look,' I said humbly. She was older than Mom. She was nearly blind.
She was one of God's Also Unto Me's.
'No,' she said. 'I have to. I couldn't be sure, else.'
So I waited until she grunted and groaned to her knees, then bent stiffly
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to lift the limp spread. Her fingers hesitated briefly, then flicked the
spread up. Her breath came out flat and finished. Almost disappointed, it
seemed to me.
She turned the bed down and I crept across the gray, wrinkled sheets, and
turning my back to the room, I huddled one ear on the flat, tobacco-smelling
pillow and lay tense and uncomfortable in the dark, as her weight shaped and
reshaped the bed around me. There was a brief silence before I heard the
soundless breathy shape of her words, 'How long, O God, how long?'
I wondered through my automatic bless Papa and Mama—and the automatic
backup, because Papa had abdicated from my specific prayers, bless Mama and my
brother and sisters—what it was that Mrs. Klevity was finding too long to
bear.
After a restless waking, dozing sort of night that strange sleeping places
held for me, I awoke to a thin chilly morning and the sound of Mrs. Klevity
moving around. She had set the table for breakfast, a formality we never had
time for at home. I scrambled out of bed and into my clothes with only my
skinny, goose-fleshed back between Mrs. Klevity and me for modesty. I felt
uncomfortable and unfinished because I hadn't brought our comb over with me.
I would have preferred to run home to our usual breakfast of canned milk
and Shredded Wheat, but instead I watched, fascinated, as Mrs. Klevity
struggled with lighting the kerosene stove. She bent so close, peering at the
burners with the match flaring in her hand that I was sure the frowzy brush of
her hair would catch fire, but finally the burner caught instead and she
turned her face toward me.
'One egg or two?' she asked.
'Eggs! Two!' Surprise wrung the exclamation from me. Her hand hesitated
over the crumpled brown bag on the table. 'No, no!' I corrected her thought
hastily. 'One. One is plenty,' and sat on the edge of a chair watching as she
broke an egg into the sizzling frying pan.