Зенна Гендерсон - The Anything Box

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
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
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.
"Hard or soft?" she asked.
"Hard," I said casually, feeling very woman-of-the-worldish, dining
out—well, practically—and for breakfast, too! I watched Mrs. Klevity spoon the
fat over the egg, her hair swinging stiffly forward when she peered. Once it
even dabbled briefly in the fat, but she didn't notice, and as it swung back,
it made a little shiny curve on her cheek.
"Aren't you afraid of the fire?" I asked as she turned away from the stove
with the frying pan. "What if you caught on fire?"
"I did once." She slid the egg out onto my plate. "See?" She brushed her
hair back on the left side and I could see the mottled pucker of a large old
scar. "It was before I got used to Here," she said, making Here more than the
house, it seemed to me.
"That's awful," I said, hesitating with my fork.
"Go ahead and eat," she said. "Your egg will get cold." She turned back to
the stove and I hesitated a minute more. Meals at a table you were supposed to
ask a blessing, but—I ducked my head quickly and had a mouthful of egg before
my soundless amen was finished.
After breakfast I hurried back to our house, my lunch-money dime clutched
securely, my stomach not quite sure it liked fried eggs so early in the
morning. Mom was ready to leave, her shopping bag in one hand, Danna swinging
from the other, singing one of her baby songs. She liked the day nursery.
"I won't be back until late tonight," Mom said. "There's a quarter in the
corner of the dresser drawer. You get supper for the kids and try to clean up
this messy place. We don't have to be pigs just because we live in a place
like this."
"Okay, Mom." I struggled with a snarl in my hair, the pulling making my
eyes water. "Where you working today?" I spoke over the clatter in the Other
room where the kids were getting ready for school.
She sighed, weary before the day began. "I have three places today, but the
last is Mrs. Paddington." Her face lightened. Mrs. Paddington sometimes paid a
little extra or gave Mom discarded clothes or leftover food she didn't want.
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
She was nice. "You get along all right with Mrs. Klevity?" asked Mom as she checked hershopping bag for her work shoes."Yeah," I said. "But she's funny. She looks under the bed before she goesto bed." Mom smiled. "I've heard of people like that, but it's usually old maids
they're talking about."
"But, Mom, nothing coulda got in. She locked the door after I got there."
"People who look under beds don't always think straight," she said."Besides, maybe she'd like to find something under there."