After a week or so, Carlotta appeared in my class at school. I didn’t know how old she was, although she seemed older than the rest of us. She was a big girl, dark olive skin, hooded eyes that burned like coal, and heavy black hair that hung past her shoulders. When I stood next to her I felt colorless, my pale skin and eyes and hair boring. But what made Carlotta irresistible to me was the way she dressed. Gold hoops threaded through holes in her ears and colored bangles ringed both arms almost to her elbows.
One skirt I admired to the point of it being a sin had tiers of red and purple and magenta, each gathered onto the next, with sequins and ribbons and rickrack sewn in meandering rows. When she walked, gussets of lace flowed around her ankles and tiny mirrors on the hem danced in the light.
I wanted Grandma to make me a skirt like that, but she never would. She laughed and said she expected I’d be a sight to see swarping around in a gypsy skirt.
Carlotta didn’t come to school every day, and she was way behind in most everything. Shy and quiet in class, she never answered a question or asked one either. I got to be her friend, at least sort of, because on the way home from school I told the boys who taunted her to shut up their big fat mouths. She slowed, deliberately I thought, so I could catch up, and we walked all the way to my house together. Carlotta waited while I ran in to ask Mother if I could go to Peggy’s house. I would go to Peggy’s after I went to Carlotta’s, so I convinced myself it wasn’t lying. It wasn’t telling the whole truth either, but it was the best I could do.
Mother was sitting on the floor stripping layers of white enamel from the baseboards in the dining room. Our house had layers of enamel covering the oak floors and trim. Mother spent hours scraping that old paint off. She’d already finished the stairs and banister railings. It was a lot of work, but it would be worth it once done, or so she said.
She looked up, swiping her hair back with her sleeve. “You can go, but make sure you get yourself home on time.”
I had the run of the neighborhood as long as I got home in time for meals, did not go inside anyone’s house, and stayed within hollering distance. Otherwise, I needed permission. Mother and Grandma and Grandpa had to know where I was going and who I was going with and what I was going for and who else was going to be there. I tried to back out of the room before she had a chance to add her usual, “You be careful and don’t you go anywhere else and you make sure you are back in this house before suppertime and don’t you be running on that red dog road.” She hollered after me, “I mean it now.”
“Yes ma’am,” I said, crossing my fingers ahead of time for lies I would tell.
I was pretty sure I was the only liar in our family. Grandpa was a Pentecostal preacher and he never lied, or at least I’d never caught him at it. He caught me though, and it wasn’t the first time either. Before he handed me a nickel for the offering at church and one to spend at Beaver’s General Store, he asked if I’d studied my Sunday school lesson.
“Yes sir,” I said.
Grandpa allowed he didn’t believe that was possible without divine intervention. He knew for a fact my lesson paper had been in the backseat of the car since services last Sunday and here it was Saturday already.
“I was planning on reading it. Honest I was. It was just a little white lie.”
“I don’t care how you color it,” he said, “a lie is a lie.”
He unpeeled the blue and white wrapper from a cake of Ivory soap. Although he had threatened to wash my mouth out before, this time he meant business. Hoping to wash the lying out of me once and for all, he ran the soap under the spigot to juice it up, then swiped it over my stuck-out tongue. I ran to the sink and splashed water in my mouth, sputtering and spitting bubbles. Seeing me froth at the mouth started Grandpa chuckling and that got me and Grandma to laughing. When we got over it, I complained my mouth tasted like old dishwater.
“Lies,” my grandpa said, “should always leave a bad taste in your mouth.”
In church the next day Grandpa preached on “The Truth about Lies.” It could have been a coincidence.
On the way home we stopped for our usual cone of ice cream, and he didn’t mention lying a single time. One thing about Grandpa, he didn’t carry a grudge.
With the taste of soap hardly out of my lying mouth, I followed Carlotta through the field, then over the hard road, brazenly crossing the line I wasn’t allowed to cross. A small tent near the highway had a sign out that said:
FORTUNES TOLD INSIDE
MADAM VADOMA KNOWS ALL,
SEES ALL, TELLS ALL
A woman in gypsy dress sat outside the tent husking a bushel basket of corn while she waited to unveil the past, present, and future for anyone with a couple of dimes to spare.
Carlotta weaved through a maze of tents and wagons and horses, and as I scrambled to keep up with her, I tried not to notice the dark eyes peering at me. We ducked inside a tent that had the front flap partway open. A rug unrolled
