Ширли Мерфи - Poor Jenny, Bright As A Penny

Jenny studied him. “You are more than fair, after what Mama has done. I promise I’ll let you know if Lud quits working.”

She left his office and walked up toward school, though it would not have taken much to keep her out the rest of the day.

The air was cold and the sky that purple blue that comes before snow, with clouds racing across it. She walked in shadow one minute and brightness the next. She would be glad when she was through with school, so glad. Well, Christmas vacation was almost here. She hoisted her books and walked up through the city in long easy strides.

And that was the day Tom Riley asked her for a date. Right after Civics. He asked her to a school football game, and she dreamed happily through the rest of her classes. My first date. What will I wear? Red, I’m always happy in red. And when I wear red, Ben looks at me with—well, with more interest. How can I be pleased about a date with Tom Riley when I still get goose-pimply over Ben? She grinned at herself. Well why not? I wonder how Mama will act when Tom picks me up. I hope she isn’t nasty.

Saturday night: It was lovely, it isn’t so hard to know how to act on a date, you only act like yourself and have fun. I’m hoarse from shouting. Our team won 28 to 14. It was my first football game.

Chapter 19

The last crutch is thrown away. Mama’s hip is healed and Lud has taken her out on the town to celebrate. I hope they don’t get so blistered there’s another accident. I think Lud has turned over a new leaf. At least he has been very good to Mama. He even opened the car door for her. It was snowing when they left, our first snow of the year. It’s usually dark at six, but the snow made the sky so white and glowing it lighted everything. It changed this neighborhood and made it beautiful, as if magic had touched it. Bingo and I walked up to Dunnigan’s for hamburgers. Bingo ate three. It’s pretty nice to have money to do something like that when we want. We made the only footprints, as if we were the only two people in the world. Except once there were cat footprints across our path, and that made Bingo lonely for Sam.

*

It was a beautiful snow, but in the night the weather warmed and rain began to wash it all away. Then the temperature dropped, and the melting water froze. By morning the limbs of the trees were encased in glass-like sheaths, and the streets were thick with a layer of ice. It was a fairyland, as if the world were wrapped in glass.

But the streets were treacherous, and Mama and Lud were not home.

“They’ve had another accident,” Jenny said.

“Maybe they’re in jail.”

“I’m going to try to find out.”

The sidewalk was so slippery that Jenny nearly fell twice just walking to the corner market to phone. She returned more puzzled than ever.

“They’re not in jail, and they’re not in any hospital. You’d better get dressed for school,” she said distractedly.

“The radio just said, no school. They’re starting Christmas vacation two days early because of the freeze. All the traffic is jammed up, maybe Mama and Lud are stuck somewhere.”

“Well I’m going to finish the ironing then. There’s nothing we can do.” But she worried about Mama until, at three in the afternoon, a car in chains clunked down the street and a little old man, wearing a Western Union cap and shivering with cold, handed Jenny a telegram:

GOING TO LAS VEGAS, PROMISE HOME CHRISTMAS EVE. LOVE, MAMA

All night the freeze held. The sky was iridescent. The cottage did not darken, but was washed with luminous light. Each time Jenny woke she would see the icicles that hung from the eaves outside her window glowing like silver so that she had to get out of bed and lean on the sill. The hurt of Mama’s going away would well up in her, but it only made the night seem more unreal and beautiful.

When the moon came, the iridescence brightened. The moon cast shadows from trees and houses across the silvered earth, and cloud shadows raced across these so all was movement and light. The ice-encrusted trees flashed as the moon caught at their branches, and then the trees themselves, in the extreme cold, began to snap. The trees at the back of the lot cracked like rifle shots. Bingo woke and they stood together watching the night with wonder.

In the morning Jenny said, “We should go to the Dermodys.”

“We’re all right alone.” He had started a model of a modern school building based on medieval forts, it was spread all over the kitchen table so they had to eat on trays, and he did not want to move it. “Besides, their daughter is home.”

Jenny had forgotten, Barbara was home from college. Strangely, that made her feel lonely. Then she frowned at herself. “What a selfish klunk you are.”

*

The silver freeze melted, the snow came again, and Jenny and Bingo bought a little tree, did their Christmas shopping, and took a gift to the Dermodys. Then on the day of Christmas Eve Jenny bought a turkey, and dressing mix, cranberry sauce, and a little ham for their Christmas Eve dinner. She brought two pumpkin pies home from work, put the ham in the oven, made a potato casserole and set the table for four. The presents were under the tree.

At nine o’clock they decided that Mama and Lud had stopped on the way, so they had their dinner alone. They could hear Christmas music from the little church that huddled under the freeway and Jenny, with a sudden eager desire to have the music all around her, to be washed in music and church colors and the soft candle flicker, begged Bingo to go with her.

The music swelled around them, and the light from the candles shone against the carved pillars and rose in flickering cones up the richly painted walls. Poinsettias decked the altar—red, red. Cold fingers of air pushed across the pine floors, but people were wrapped warmly, though they had brought bits of snow in on their boots to melt in puddles. The voices of the choir swelled, dropped sweetly, turned to clear bells, then deepened to shake the timbers. Jenny was swept away in a world of music and color.

When it was over they walked home in the snow, wrapped in glory, hardly aware of anything else in the world but the sound and color that still engulfed them. Then, near home, Jenny roused herself. “Maybe they’re home now, maybe they’re waiting for us.”

But they were not. And in spite of the glory of the Christmas service, they were sad. It was Christmas Eve and they were quite alone. Mama had not kept her promise.

“We have each other,” Jenny said. “It’s all we need. Mama can’t help the way she is.”

“Yes, she can help it.”

“Well, she isn’t going to help it. We have to take her for what she is. Besides, maybe they couldn’t get back in time, maybe it’s the weather.” But neither of them believed that. At one o’clock they went to bed, and when they rose on Christmas morning they opened their presents alone.

Then the second telegram came, and each knew what it would say before they opened it. Bingo held it a long time and stared at it before they tore the envelope open. They read the telegram together, then Jenny laid it on the desk and stood looking out the window.

GOING TO FLORIDA FOR WARM WEATHER AND CHANGE OF SCENE. NOT MY NATURE TO SETTLE. PACK OUR THINGS TO SEND, ADDRESS LATER. LOVE, MAMA

After a while Jenny said, “I don’t know how I feel. I thought I would be so glad to go back to the Dermodys. But now—” She turned to face Bingo. “We were a family here. I almost thought Mama might stay settled. I can’t explain what it was—like we were doing something together. Maybe it was my working that made me feel that way.” She looked around at the bright little room. “This was our first real home—”