Бетти Смит - Maggie-Now

It wasn't a room, really. It was a corridor with a window.

It was an oblong partitioned off Maggie-Now's room.

There was space only for Denny's cot and a small dresser.

He had tacked a Dartmouth pennant to the wall. She smiled, remembering he had traded two of the flags he had taken from the cemetery for it. He had two flags left from the handful he'd swiped from the graves two years ago. They stood in an empty soda-water bottle next to his mother's picture. The photograph had been made soon after her marriage.

To Denny, thought Maggie-Now, Mama will always be a young woman whom he's never seen.

Then there was a dirty baseball with a strip of bicycle tape covering a tear in the horsehide and one of Maggie-Now's good sauce dishes, holding a dozen blue clay marbles. His glass shooters were gone and she surmised that he'd played a bad game that day.

There was the inevitable ball of tin foil. Like other kids, he garnered discarded cigarette packages and gum wrappers, the foil of which he added to the ball. When it got as big as a baseball and twice as heavy, it was believed that any junkman would give you a dollar for it. To make sure it would be heavy enough, Denny had placed an iron washer in the core of it.

He was making a rubber ball, too. It started with a wad of paper and every rubber band he could get was stretched and wound tightly around it. It went slowly.

He'd been working on it for months and it was only the size of a golf ball. He persisted because he knew if it ever got to be the size of a regular ball, it would be the bouncingest ball in the whole world.

On an impulse, Maggie-Now picked it up and bounced it. It hit the ceiling on the rebound. She scrambled after it awkwardly, her hands cupped to catch it before it bounced again. She missed it and had to c base a couple of more bounces. Denny giggled into his pillow.

"That's enough out of you," threatened Maggie-Now. "If you don't go to sleep. ."

A newly-made slingshot on the dresser caught her eye.

The kids called it a beanshooter. It was made of a crotched twig which she suspected was broken Of a tree in the park when nobody

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was looking, two strips of rubber and a square of fine supple leather. She felt the leather.

"Oh, no!" she moaned. "Oh, no!"

She picked up his shoes and, as she had feared, the tongue of one of them had been cut off and used in the slingshot.

"Oh, Denny," she said despairingly, "what did you do to your good shoes?"

"Don't start no conversations with me," he said, afraid of a scolding, "because I'm sleeping like you told me."

When she put his shoes away under his cot, she saw his sled there where he liked to keep it until it snowed again.

But now it was spring. Soon it would be kite-flying time and he'd get sticks and tie them together into a sort of rhomboid and paste a sheet from the colored comics of the Journal over the frame and tease her for rags which he'd tear into strips and knot together for a tail, and hint for two cents to buy a ball of cord to fly it.

Maybe I'll buy him a ready-made loon kite this year. It would he nice if we could afford to get him a two-wheel bike, but. . Maybe there'll lee some money for a catcher's mitt. Oh, well, Papa can get him a new baseball, at least.

Still and all, he seems content with what he has or makes or gets on his own. He has what the other boys have. If he had less, he'd be sad. If he had more, he wouldn't fit in with the other boys. Anyway, he seems satisfied.

She smiled toward her mother's photograph and said aloud: "You know. It's relative?"

"What-cha say?" asked Denny sleepily.

"Nothing. I'm going to turn the light out now." She did so.

"Don't close the door all the way, Mama."

"Afraid? "

"Naw."

"I'll leave it open anyway. For air," she added tactfully.

Preparing for bed, she thought: Funny that something that makes me so very happy makes Denny so sad and worried and Papa so mad and worried. Papa, she thought scornfully, who makes believe he's got another woman! As if he could've kept it a secret all these years if he did have one! Still and all. .

Gratefully she settled into bed and started to recall dreamily her whole wonderful evening with Claude; what he said, what she said how he had looked when he spoke to her and the won 1 ~98]

derful nuances of the silences made by the pauses in the conversation.

But she was so tired from the long walk so used up emotionally from her father's antagonism and her brother's concern that she fell fast asleep in the middle of severing all over again the thrill when he had tucked her arm into his.

THE next morning, when Maggie-Now went to the baker's for the morning buns, the neighborhood seemed to be in a state of excitement. Since President Wilson had addressed Congress, wild rumors had been flying around.

Some said war had already been declared; others, that it was merely a question of hours before it would be declared. Some body said that Hamburg Avenue was going to be renamed Wilson Avenue.

She passed some men waiting for a streetcar to take them to work. One said his wife had kept him up half the night urging him to change his name from Schmidt to Smith. Mr. Schmidt told the others that the way he looked at it he was an American citizen, no matter what his name was, but his wife thought no one would give him a job with a German name like that. Another man said that as soon as the war started the bosses would get down on their knees begging men to work no matter what their names were.

Maggie-Now bought a morning paper. She set it next her father's coffee cup and told him of the talk of war being declared. He merely grunted and told her that just the same he was going out that night; war or no war.

Maggie-Now spent the day in an ecstasy of preparation.

She pressed the last of her three dresses, a summery, flowered print made like her other two. She got out her last summer's white pumps and cleaned them. She bought a cake of geranium-scented

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soap and washed her hair with it. She rinsed her hair in lemon juice and water and sat out in the sun to dry it.

Later in the day, she took a bath with the scented soap.

She lathered and rinsed, lathered and rinsed until her skin was almost stiff. She dried herself and dusted all over with Mennen's Violet Baby Talcum Powder. She braided her hair, pinned it up and buffed her fingernails.

When she had dressed, she went upstairs to see the tenant about keeping an eye on Denny in case her father carried through his threat to spend the evening with his mythical (as MaggieNow firmly believed) woman friend.

There was an understanding that landlords did not make friends with tenants, especially when both occupied the same house. It was considered right that a tenant should not be burdened with social obligations toward the landlord. The tenant should be free to come and go. Also, friendship would weaken the landlord's right to request prompt payment of rent and his privilege of making it uncomfortable for the tenant when he defaulted in paying the rent.

Maggie-Now knew that by asking a favor of the tenant she was giving up her right to dun Mrs. Heahly for last month's unpaid rent. She was willing to risk this, however, rather than possibly miss out on her evening with Claude.

Maggie-Now felt uncomfortable and turned her head away when she saw the look of apprehension on Mrs.