Lesley Kagen - Good Graces

I ask, “How’s Mrs. G been feelin’?”

Ethel sighs hard enough to flutter the curtain above the windowsill where Mrs. Galecki’s medicines, over ten bottles, are lined up.

She says, “Her gut’s still actin’ up. Gotta go pick up some more Pepto. That’s what Mr. Lou recommended for this sorta thing.”

My future father-in-law and Ethel Jenkins are friendly because she has to go to the drugstore all the time to get the pills Mrs. Galecki needs to take every day to keep her going, which Ethel doesn’t mind because Henry’s father acts toward her the same way he acts toward everybody else. Gentlemanly. Not like the vegetable man at the Kroger. He treats Ethel like she’s week-old cabbage.

“Would you say hello to Henry for me when you go?” I miss him and our visits. Next time I know that Troo can’t get into anything she shouldn’t, when she’s locked in our room for disobeying Mother again, that’s where I’m heading. “Please tell him I’ll get over there really soon to count Ramblers.”

“Will do,” Ethel says, stirring my Ovaltine. She is such a great cook. Gets all that malty grit to dissolve just perfect so there’s only smoothness going down your throat. “Ya heard anything more’bout the orphan boy that disappeared?”

That’s the way it is in the neighborhood. It’s like living with a hundred Chet Brinkleys. No matter where you go-the park, the playground, Mass, the Five and Dime, the library-you can’t get away from the hottest subject. Even if the last thing you want to do is think about it anymore, rotsa ruck. Everybody’ll be flapping their lips about Charlie’s running away from us and Greasy Al running toward us-well, limping toward us-until another disaster happens, which could be at any minute. When we lived in the country, all I ever had to pay attention to was not getting too close to the chickens, who have the worst personalities, but here in the city… it’s the people you gotta watch out for in more ways than one. They can egg your worry on and even if you are doing your absolute best to keep it under control, they won’t let you with all their jibber jabber.

“Thank you,” I say, when Ethel sets down the lilac glass that’s sweating as bad as the both of us. “All I heard about Charlie is that he’s still missin’.” I pull up the neck of my T-shirt to dry myself off and Ethel uses her arm on her forehead because she’s already got her hands full. She’s taken the blue bowl of strawberries to the counter and is holding a small sharp knife to slice them up real thinly between her fingers.

“Miss Bertha’s friends with Sister Jean from the orphanage,” Ethel says. “She come over for a visit and was real broke up. Told us that boy was really something. And how the Honeywells are so disappointed to have lost him. Father Mickey is tryin’ to put some men together to go lookin’ for him.”

I don’t tell her that Father Mickey probably doesn’t give a hoot about some orphan kid, he just wants the poor-box money back. The church loves moo-la-la. If it isn’t paper drives, it’s fish fries or Bingo. They’re always asking to give until it hurts. Especially lately. Father Mickey says we need to build more classrooms onto the school. All the money that gets taken in will go to finishing the new wing, but even if that’s a good cause, I notice people’s pinched faces when they drop dollars into the collection plate on Sunday. They have to work hard for their money, almost all of them at the cookie factory.

Ethel says, “That Father Mickey sure is something. Easy on the eyes, too.” Music is coming out of her bedroom. I can’t barely hear it, but her body is having no trouble keeping the beat. It’s swaying. “Ya know what I been thinkin’, Miss Sally?”

“What, Ethel?” I say, snitching a berry out of the bowl.

“I been thinkin’ I’m gonna switch myself over to the Catholics.”

“Oooh… nooo… nooo… I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” I say, in the same no-nonsense voice she uses on me when I come up with an idea that she thinks stinks. “That… that would be like takin’ that shiny orange dress of yours and tradin’ it in for a… burlap sack.”

Mother lets Ethel take me down to her church on 4th and Walnut Street sometimes. It’s in an old store that has the sign: JOE KOOL’S SMALL AND LARGE APPLIANCES FOR THE DISCRIMINATING hanging above the door. The basement windows of the church are stained, not with glass, but who cares? The whole congregation dances and shouts even when the Reverend Joe Willow is sermonizing. I have already decided that when I grow up, that’s what I’m gonna be. A Baptist. Mary Lane said she’d do it with me. I’m sure more for her hungry tummy than her hungry soul. She went down there with me and Ethel a coupla times so she knows all about the fried chicken and colored greens they put out after the service.

“You’ve got the wrong idea about our church,” I tell Ethel. “You’ve only been up there for funerals. You don’t know how bad it can get.”

“ Mmmm … hmmm .” In southern, that means, Go on, tell me more.

“You gotta starve yourself for hours before you receive Holy Communion.” Ethel would especially not like that part. She adores a big country breakfast with ham first thing every morning. She wouldn’t like the taste of the body and blood of Christ. He’s really bland. (I’m too nervous to bring this up to anybody who might know the answer, but isn’t swallowing down Jesus kinda like being a cannibal?) “And the nuns, they got ways of torturin’ people that are worse than the Red Chinese.”

“That’s nothin’ but your big ’magination talkin’,” Ethel says with a snort.

“No, it’s not! Swear to God. The sisters tied Mary Lane down and dripped holy water on her forehead after they caught her peepin’ on them.”

“Sounds to me like that girl was spinnin’ one of her no-tripper tales,” she says, still slicing away at those berries, making them not too thin so they fall apart, but not too thick either. “I only know the one nun. Sister Jean seems real nice.”

“She’s only bein’ nice to you because ya aren’t a Catholic.” Ethel doesn’t understand how those crabby penguins work. “You can’t believe how bossy they are. They’re the brides of Christ so that makes them almost as powerful as priests,” I say, hoping that I’m getting through to her. “If you join up, you’ll be under all a their thumbs. Even in your dreams they can come after you.”

“Well, I sure wouldn’t like that.” No, she wouldn’t. She needs her beauty sleep and takes pride in her freedom. “Here I been thinkin’ that was a place of worship all these years. That only goes to show ya how wrong a body can be about something, don’t it? Thank you kindly for the warnin’, Miss Sally.” Ethel’s teeth are enormously white. She sucks on lemons to make them that way. She shouldn’t be smiling, though. I’m not kidding around. “But I’d be keepin’ my voice down ’bout that church stuff if’n I was you,” she says.

As usual, the smartest woman I know is right. Catholics are not supposed to even think something bad about the church, so saying it out loud has gotta be worse.

Ethel lifts her chin and nods it at the window. “Ya wouldn’t want Father Mickey to hear ya.”

I jump up off the stepladder and almost knock it over. “Father’s right outside?”

“He’s out back with Miz G. Surprised ya didn’t see them when ya got here.”

Shame on me. I was in such a hurry to escape from Fast Susie that I wasn’t paying attention to the details. I creep over and inch back the white kitchen curtain. Just like Ethel said, there’s Mrs. G in her wheelchair under the crab apple tree and Father Mickey’s by her side. “What’s he doin’ here?”