Peggy lived barefoot and fancy free. She took after me.
I sat on the floor, turning the forty-eight states face down until I could recognize each by its shape. New York, where my mother was working, didn’t look all that far away from West Virginia. Somehow I liked knowing that. When Sissy came by, showing off the puffed wax lips she’d bought at Calloway’s store, I saw an opportunity to get them for myself. I’d have to hurry though, before she decided to wear them. She was biting the tops off tiny paraffin bottles and sucking out the green or red sugar water that was supposed to resemble soda pop but didn’t.
“Bet I can name more states by their shape than you can,” I said.
“What you got to bet?” Her eyes narrowed.
“My Mallo Cup against those dumb wax lips?”
It was a gamble, but she went for it.
I wore the pouty red lips around the house, admiring myself in every mirror I passed before chewing the fake mouth into a waxy gob. I don’t believe I swallowed, but I may have.
To ease my guilt, I gave Sissy half of my Mallo Cup.
But not the biggest half.
My present from Aunt Lila that Christmas was a ten-carat-gold ring with a topaz birthstone. It fit perfect on my middle finger. I saved the present from my mother for last—a lavender blue music box cushioned in layers of tissue paper. I turned it over to wind it up. A silver label said the song it played was called “Clair de Lune.” I listened to it every night before I went to sleep.
It was my lullaby.
5
Forcing the Forsythia
The ground still had Christmas snow on it when Grandpa left to go back in the mines. Grandma sent him off with a dinner bucket of sausage biscuits, a thermos of steamy potato soup, and three leftover gingerbread men who were missing a couple of eyes. She looked worried to me but she didn’t let on.
“Why does Grandpa have to go back in the mines?” I asked.
“It won’t be for long,” Grandma said, brushing crumbs from the table with a whisk broom. “Just a few months so’s he can qualify for a little pension coming in every month.”
Grandpa was retired, and he was sick with silicosis, or black lung, as some had started to call it, which made him cough real bad. But once more he’d have to go down into the dank of the mines and breathe coal dust into lungs already turning to charcoal.
“That doesn’t make sense,” I said.
“No use to try,” Grandma said. “There’s no sense to be made of it.”
At the end of the day, Grandpa returned—grit in the corners of his eyes, his graying hair turned dark again with the oily dust. Many days he had to work low coal, veins in mountain tunnels too low for a man to stand upright.
Stopping outside the gate, he hacked a sharp-edged cough into a big kerchief pulled from a pocket in his bib overalls. He walked up the porch steps, still bent in the shape of the mines, working his mouth to form a smile.
One day not long after, Mother walked right in and surprised us. She was home for a whole month, she said, because the airplane plant where she worked in New York had closed to get ready to build a different plane. “Nobody left there but a skeleton crew to get the place cleaned out,” she explained.
I pictured bony people sweeping the floors and dusting propellers, all of them wearing red bandanas tied around their hairless skulls.
Aunt Lila got put on the skeleton crew, so she’d had to stay. At least that’s what Mother told us. Although it wasn’t a lie, it wasn’t the whole truth either. Aunt Lila was working the skeleton crew, but the real reason she didn’t come home was that she had got herself married to a New York fellow by the name of Eddie Kamphey. We weren’t supposed to know a thing about it, but we did. We knew lots we weren’t supposed to, but we never let on.
Mother burst in the back door, bringing with her the cold March air and a basket filled with whip-like branches.
“What are you doing with all those switches?” I asked, wondering if she was putting up a supply for the winter.
“They aren’t switches,” she said with a laugh. “They’re branches from a flower bush. I’m going to show you how to force the forsythia.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“Don’t get ants in your pants,” she said. “I’m going to show you right now.”
I watched her pare the bark from the bottom four or five inches of each branch and place the whole bunch in a tall blue vase. “Feel here,” she said, her finger gingerly running mine over a bud just beginning to swell. “The buds need to feel like that before you cut the branches. Now you go put some wrist-warm water in the vase. Make sure it covers up the bare part.”
The spigot ran bone-cold at first, gradually turning warm to hot. I held my wrist to the stream of water and closed my eyes, all the while slowly turning the faucet to cool the water. When I couldn’t feel it hot or cold, I filled the vase an inch or so past the stripped off bark and carried it back to Mother.
She nodded approval. “Now put it in the sitting room where it’ll be out of the way.”
“What about forcing the forsythia?”
“Be patient,” she answered. “That comes later.”
It was only a few weeks
