1950s SMALL TOWN LIFE: AND SHE GIGGLED AND SHE LAUGHED AND SHE DIED OF IT

We are crouched there, my best friend Marie and I, behind the floral upholstered rocking chair, giggling. Twin auburn-haired nymphs, tiny frames shaking, suppressing laughter, holding our crossed arms pressed hard against our stomachs,
"And she giggled, and she laughed and she died of it," my maternal grandmother intones quietly, She sits with her back to us in the thickly padded chair, its tapestrylike upholstery of woven colors a busy contrast to her monotonous, one tone voice.

 Maybe the thick cotton padding of the chair has blunted our cries behind her as we fight to stay quiet. She makes no move to look behind her, nor does she say anything to us. Atop the mirror in the blue leather jewelry box sitting on the chest of drawers beside her chair, a tiny ballerina dances to a minuet. The rocker is suddenly still. We cannot see my grandmother, and now we cannot hear her.

A quiet interlude of perhaps 30 seconds ensues during which we alternately look toward, then away from, each other, since a direct look renews the silent spasms of laughter. It clearly is becoming painful to both of us. When I look at Marie, her face is red, her cheeks filled with unreleased air, and I can feel a hot prickly blanket of heat moving up my own face. It has reached from my upper neck, where it joins my head, to the space right above both eyes. I feel it creeping up my forehead and think my head will surely burst if it reaches the pinnacle.

The rocker begins to move noiselessly, rhythmically. We hold our breath, looking at each other, wonder in our eyes. The voice seems detached, otherworldly; it floats to us not over the back of the chair, but rather around it, enveloping us in a sad cloud that suffocates our laughter.

"And she giggled, and she laughed, and she died of it," Granny says softly to no one. "YES," she says emphatically, "she giggled, and she laughed, and she died of it."

We are suddenly terrified, the kind of fright that comes when curiosity leads you too far into something you don't understand. Like walking too far into the woods on a dark night, then hearing a night scream that you can't immediately identify. Running as fast as our short legs would carry us, we race toward the kitchen where my mother is cooking lunch. The smell of fried chicken fills our noses and brings some small comfort, the familiar partially replacing the terror.

It is a school day, and at five, Marie and I are too young to attend public school with our siblings. We round the corner of the enormous walnut dining table, knocking over the captain's chair that Granddad always occupies at meals, and run smack into Mother in the kitchen doorway. We both burrow into her apron and wrap our arms around her tiny waist. Even after six children, she maintains the shape that seems to define her extended family: long, tall, and thin. Marie has burrowed in just as close as I.

"Girls," she says, "a slight admonition in her voice. What were you doing?'

I sense she already knows.

"Nothing," we lie.

"Granny is fragile, girls. She must be left alone. She'll come have lunch with us in a while. For now, you girls must not bother her."

We occupied ourselves for the next hour on the "side porch," a screened area with padded wicker couches and chairs, just off the dining room, but near enough the kitchen that we could not help but overhear some of the conversations that took place there.

Often, it was my grandfather, talking about the price of commodities. And in those conversations, always, always, talking about soybeans. It was the early 1950s, and all my parents talked about was cotton. My grandfather spoke like a professor teaching a class on soybeans. He read a lot, and the conversations sometimes took a bend toward the last book he had read, and I always tuned out when he started on his erudite discussions of this subject and that subject. He had lots of ideas, most not conventional. And he dressed every day like he was going to work, with a tie and sweater and dress pants, but he had been retired as long as I remembered. 

My mother listened to everything in rapt attention; she adored her father. He was the only person who called her Libby, his special nickname for her.  But her own life now, taking care of six children and a husband who had grown up as an only child, left her precious little time to dwell on the "what ifs" of the latest philosophies put forth by idea sellers. She filled each day with cooking, washing, keeping books for the gins, looking after the younger children, taking part in school activities, and sponsoring the local 4-H club. On Sundays, she and the six children always went to Sunday School and church, where she often taught or assisted in teaching a class.

Still, you could tell she really enjoyed the intellectual stimulation Granddad provided. His ideas were less conventional than hers. He studied various philosophical ideas, but Mother had come to her own belief and faith. As a child, she had attended church, but her father never took her or attended. A lady took her to the Christian Church where Mother learned the foundational principles of Christianity. As an adult, she was baptized, expressing her faith in Christ publicly. Because she loved her dad, she listened to him respectfully,but she had her own strong beliefs.

"And she died, Dad? Just like that?" I could hear the concern in my mother's voice.

"Yes. Our first baby- Lenore. She was sick, and we took her to the doctor. He held up some keys, dangled them over her, and she giggled and she laughed. He sent us home, saying she'd be okay. She died a day later. Your grandmother never really got over it, I don't think, even though she had seven of you kids after that."

"She never got over it, maybe that's why when we were growing up….."

It was Mother's voice. My ears perked up like a dog hearing the first mournful notes of a siren. I silently motioned to Marie to follow me.

We crept through the door from the side porch to a storage room just off the kitchen. One door led from the storage room to the side porch, another from the storage room directly to the kitchen. It was dark and cluttered, and the door to the kitchen was tightly closed. One table-like shelf ran the length of the south wall, and another the distance between the two doors on the north and east walls. They looked like gangly preteens, with their unusual four foot tall legs, spaced about three feet apart. The aged wood, with its gray, well- worn boards, looked splintery, so we edged carefully up under the one on the north wall by the kitchen door

. It wasn't easy. We had to step over several rusted gallon cans of paint, an assortment of small garden implements, well-used by my Granddad, who always had a beautiful garden each year with fresh vegetables that he shared with us and with his neighbors.

As we sat there under the shelves, with their voluminous stacks of newspapers, the Ennis Herald, Dallas Morning News, and years and years of magazines, Time, Life, Reader's Digest, National Geographic, all read cover to cover by Granddad, I looked up and imagined that the shelves were weakening under that weight like a swaybacked horse carrying a heavy rider. Marie saw me looking up and immediately tilted her head up and back, bumping the wall softly.

"What was that?" I heard my sharp-eared Mother ask.

Too long a pause.

"Maybe a rat," Granddad said loudly.

At that, Marie and I scrambled out from under the shelves toward the door to the side porch, knocking over paint cans and garden tools, each of us hitting our head, but on different things. She hit the support post, which slid silently away toward the middle of the room, while I banged full body into the edge of the door leading to the porch.

We scrambled over each other and had already slammed the door and sat down breathlessly on the wicker couch, propping our feet up, our toes meeting in the center, as if we had been there all day., when we heard the groan of the shelves giving way, nails pulling from the wall, wood collapsing. The whoosh sound made by the four-foot fall of the newspapers and magazines caused a rush of air that jiggled the door on its hinges and sent a strong puff of wind out under the doorjamb, little bits of paper, dirt and dust flying out with it.
I heard a little cry from my mother in the kitchen, then the squeak of the door from the kitchen to the utility room as it swung open and banged against the wall.

"Oh, thank goodness, Dad. They're not in here."

"Well, it's just a little mess. It won't be much to clean up," Granddad said.

Marie and I looked at each other, rolled our eyes. Twenty years of buildup, stacks and stacks of newspapers and magazines. My kind grandfather didn't think it'd be much to clean up.

Mother suddenly appeared and opened the door to the side porch from the dining room.

"Come to lunch, girls. Dad and I are starved." Then she moved to the master bedroom to escort Granny, my diminutive Granny, with her silken brown hair swept loosely into a French twist, to lunch.

I could still hear the strains of the minuet in my head. Eerie somehow now-its tune accompanying a tiny porcelain ballerina who endlessly spins and spins and spins.
Installed

1950s SMALL TOWN LIFE: EVELYN AND THE LAST BABYSITTING ADVENTURE

Though it seemed I was no longer invited to Boy's house, Evelyn would still occasionally help my mother out by looking after us.
Evelyn didn't like to babysit, most especially with us, but that was understandable. She found herself, as a widow with three young sons, in a fierce financial situation. Since she lived just behind us, in a grass field just to the back and left of our unpainted garage as you looked out the screen door at the back of our house, it was easy for her to walk over, bring Boy, and stay for a few hours.
She didn't have a car and didn't know how to drive anyway, so most things she did were in easy walking distance. She walked to her sister's house, which was about a half mile away, and she would come over some days and help my mother iron the huge piles of clothes, khakis hung on metal stretchers, jeans, cotton blouses and dresses. It seemed endless, but she seemed to enjoy it as much as she enjoyed anything, talking to my mother who always offered a kind comment or forthright advice. If Mother overstepped her bounds, or Evelyn didn't like the advice, she just snapped her mouth shut into a tight, straight, line. I had certainly seen that facial expression more times than I wished I had.
Mother never seemed to notice, going on talking, singing, ironing, waving a cheery goodbye to her at the end of the afternoon. Evelyn would slowly amble home, her ample body swaying as she put all the weight on her left foot, then the right, her body moving like lava, slowly flowing this way, then that. I only saw her smile once, and that was when my daddy teased her about seeing a strange car at her house and wondered aloud if she was keeping something from them. She didn't blush; she gave a small snort, then a tiny smile, but no explanation.
The big sport in our town was basketball. No football, tennis, track, or golf. Too small a school for football, not sophisticated enough for tennis or golf. All three of my older siblings played basketball.
Tonight, they faced their arch rival, Frost, Texas, and the game was in Frost. Often we all went, but tonight, for reasons not explained to us, we, the three "little girls" stayed home. Probably because it was a school night and we would get back too late. Dealing with not one, but three grumpy children, might prove even more than my calm mother would care to handle.
We really didn't care; in fact, we were pretty upbeat about it because in addition to the three of us, there would also be Marie (my best friend at the time), her brother Ricky, and Boy. Six of us for Evelyn to watch, but once everyone got there and my parents and the Morrison's ( Marie and Ricky's parents) left, it became apparent that Evelyn didn't plan on doing much watching tonight. After we got over our initial disappointment and shock, we started strategic planning.
Evelyn parked herself in my older sister's bedroom for the first several hours, looking at fashion and gossip magazines; then she moved to the living room where she sat immovable in the large padded green rocker watching The Donna Reed Show and some old westerns starring Audie Murphy.
We made sure all the doors were shut to our bedroom where we all played. Initially, we entertained ourselves with some board games, simple card games, and dolls. The huge bedroom provided plenty of space for several groups to play in various areas.
Marie and I were in second grade, Jan was only 4 years old, Susan in fifth, Freddie in fourth, and Boy in fifth though he had been promoted by the goodwill of the teachers, who hoped against hope that he could catch up.
Sometimes Susan, who was an exceptional student, helped him with his homework, and sometimes he was so far behind that Marie and I helped him. Ricky was useless in that regard, and anyway, he was too busy making people miserable by general aggravation to help anyone with anything.
After about an hour, we got bored and began looking for more things to do. I had the bright idea to create a beautiful salad that everyone could eat. It wasn't that I was so crazy about salad, but I guess the lettuce seemed readily available and I didn't think Mother would notice if some of it was gone. Marie and I pulled the yellow leatherette and chrome chairs up to the yellow formica table. Then I climbed up on the steel sink drainboard and got six melamine saucers out of the metal cabinets. They had little wheat stalks stamped in their centers. We cut and arranged the lettuce in perfect little piles around the center of each plate. We left the wheat stalk visible in the center, which we thought was great invention and artistry. We reasoned that lettuce alone is not all that appealing, so we opened the heavy door of the white Frigidaire refrigerator in search of the perfect salad dressing. Uncharacteristically, there were no readily available bottles of dressing inside.
We thought of making our own out of mayonnaise, but we weren't sure what else to mix with it. For some reason, a vision of pink dressing on the green lettuce came to me. Probably because I had just gotten over a virus during which I took Pepto Bismol for my stomach. Marie initially balked at my suggestion for the dressing, but once I showed her the beauty of the two colors on the same plate, she gave in and in fact, ate it as heartily as all the other kids.
Since I had had more than my quota of the "dressing"in the past few days, I passed on the salad. I fed Jan some salad, but she wasn't very enthusiastic about it. I didn't force her to eat it after the first bite because I figured she would tell Mother. After the others ate, I suggested that we play circus, which mainly involved jumping on the beds as we moved from imaginary trapeze to imaginary trapeze. The twin beds, joined end to end in the large bedroom adjacent to the kitchen, provided a very ample Big Top area. Everyone except Boy jumped on the beds. He was not allowed to do this at home, and seemed to fear what Evelyn would do if she caught us. We encouraged him not to worry as she didn't seem to have any awareness of what we were doing at all. We had not seen her in over two hours, and she was in the next room, with the door shut and the television blaring, guns blazing and Indians yelling. I thought maybe she had gone to sleep, but I didn't see how with all the noise from the tv. I didn't want to check though.
Ricky was the first to fall victim.
"I feel sick," he said mid-jump. He crumpled down in a ball on the bed and started groaning.
"Get out of the way", Marie said, giving him a little kick with her toe. "We have to finish the act."
He rolled off the bed and hit the linoleum floor with a thump. He lay still, moaning.
Boy had picked up a comic book and was looking at it like he could read, which I doubted.
Susan had jumped on the bed for a while, but was now genuinely immersed in Louisa Alcott's Little Women. She read constantly and read books that were way over her grade level. She sat serenely with her hand resting lightly on her stomach. Every now and then, a little twinge crossed her face, like pain, but she said nothing. Jan had curled up on the bed beside her and was almost asleep. It was almost 10 o'clock.
I felt fine. Maarie and I kept jumping for about 45 minutes.
About 15 minutes before our parents returned, Evelyn magically appeared in the doorway from the living room.
"What are you kids doing?" she asked, an accusing tone in her voice.
Susan looked up from her book. "Nothing, Evelyn, really."
Evelyn eyed the wadded and crumpled bedspreads, hanging halfway off the beds.
Boy looked up for a moment from his comic book.
"It's okay, Mama."
Ricky lay uncharacteristically still on the floor, quietly moaning. Evelyn eyed him warily.
"What's wrong with you?" she asked gruffly.
"I have a stomach ache."
"Well, you wanna dose of Pepto Bismol?"
Ricky turned some odd shade of green and started gagging softly.
"Hmmmph, guess not," Evelyn snorted.
"Marie, you and Felisa straighten up those beds. Your parents will be home in a little while."
Susan had slowly gotten up and moved into the kitchen where she quietly washed the pink slime off the little salad plates and placed them carefully back in the cabinet.
Less than a half hour later, all the kids and Evelyn were gone, our parents were home, and we were in bed.
"Thanks, Susan," I whispered from the north end of one of the beds.
"That's okay," she whispered back from the south end of the other. "The colors were pretty."
We thought we had pulled it off until stupid Ricky couldn't go to school the next day. He spilled the story like a spy with a cattle prod to his temple, and my mother was quickly informed.
She verbally chastised both Marie (who stayed with us during the day while her mother taught school) and me, but that was all. As she turned on her heel, as though angry, to return to the kitchen, I thought I caught the slightest grin form in the corners of her mouth. She squelched it though. We hung our heads until she was out of sight, then picked up our dolls and put them tenderly to bed in their cribs.
"Want some salad?" I asked them.
Installed

1950s SMALL TOWN LIFE: BOY AND RAINY DAY ACTIVITIES

I can't say it was the last time I ever played with Boy, but it seems to me that after one particular long, rainy day spent playing over at Boy's house, I wasn't invited very often after that, if at all.

Whether it related to the activities that Boy and I engineered that day, or whether it ultimately related to my father's killing and eating of their rooster, Tweedle Dum, I can't really say.

I didn't eat Tweedle Dum. It seemed sort of barbaric, and anyway, I didn't like rooster meat. My mother was of course apologetic to Evelyn, and I don't think Evelyn held it against her. In fact, I think Mother sent them a big plate of Tweedle Dum, and they didn't seem overly sad about his passing since they too had been attacked by the big old bird.

I thought my father could have done it in some other way, and I was glad I didn't see my father hit the bird with a baseball bat, killing him instantly. There may not have been any witnesses, but word got around anyway.

There didn't seem to be a lot of criticism. I myself had questions, but they went unvoiced. Of course, most people in town said they would have done the same thing as the bird jumped on my father's chest and face with his spurs and tried to rake his eyes out.

The same day that Tweedle Dum launched his last attack, I was busily playing at Boy's house. We couldn't go outside, so we had to find ways to entertain ourselves in the house.

He didn't have a lot of toys, and we soon got bored watching television. There were only about four stations to choose from, and Evelyn liked to watch game shows while we liked to watch cartoons or sitcoms. She sat in her rocker, her arms folded, her face taut, and there was no arguing with the channel choices.

Finally, Boy said we ought to go in the living room and find a board game. Only problem was, Boy didn't have any board games. Once in the living room, we shut the door and had to come up with our own entertainment. I looked around the room, furnished with only an old couch and one straightbacked wooden slatted chair. One lonely round wooden table, with no lamp or decoration, not even a doily, finished out the furnishings. Nothing to do there, but then my eyes fell upon the wallpaper.

It was a light pink color, with a pattern with some sort of farm motif. There were men, women, and children, all clad in overalls, bonnets, and hats in shades of gray and brown. They held utensils like pitchforks, hoes, and shovels and were walking in front of small trailers filled with golden hay and wheat or some crop with a grainy head . I couldn't tell for sure, but the idea was clear. They were hardworking people bringing in the sheaves like we sang about at church.

The problem with the wallpaper was that there were places on every wall where it appeared that someone had loosened the paper, then torn off good-sized pieces. This made the pattern lopsided, and left holes where there should have been people.

Boy could actually draw, having some sort of innate artistic ability. I had none, but I did have a sense of color and balance. I suggested to Boy that we replace the scenes where the paper was torn. That should improve the looks of the shabby paper ,and we thought it would make Evelyn happy.

We set to work. Boy went and searched out some crayons and yellow #2 pencils. He started drawing people in one of the holes and we agreed on my completing rainbows above their heads since I couldn't draw a person at all.

We started on the wall opposite the front door since people would see that wall first on entering and we thought if we didn't get through today, we could at least make a good start. We worked for a full hour and a half before Evelyn decided to open the door and check on us. She was going to offer us some mustard and sugar sandwiches for lunch, a staple at her house.

The look on her face was not what we expected. Her mouth opened, then shut; she started to speak, uttered some little sound, and then became utterly silent. We watched as her lips appeared to seal completely into a straight tight line. At the same time, her head and face appeared to be filling with air, causing her skin to stretch tightly, the color to turn from white to pink to reddish, and her eyes to bulge. When her head appeared the size of a medium sized balloon and on the verge of exploding, her mouth suddenly opened and all the air escaped in one long loud question, "WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?"

I was startled. By the look on Boy's face, so was he. I felt sort of scared though Evelyn had never seemed a violent woman. Boy looked scared , too. I had never heard her talk so loudly.

Then he started stammering, "Mama, mama, we wuz just trying to make things look purty, mama. Did we do somethin' wrong? Mama don't be mad. We wuz tryin' to help."

I had edged nearer the couch.  It was angled across one corner of the room., forming a triangular hole behind it. I had scoped out a way to hide back there if things got any worse. The triangle formed by the couch and the two walls would be space for me to hunker down if I needed to get out of the way. I'd just have to make a quick jump onto and over the couch.

Evelyn took a step back, looked at the wall, covered her mouth with her hands and walked quickly into the other room where we heard Bill Cullen giving out prizes on The Price Is Right.

I had never seen her cry. To me, she seemed too brittle to cry. But I definitely heard a sob, and Boy looked like he would collapse to the floor himself at any second.

We just stood there for a while, wondering what we should do. I still liked the way the rainbows looked, and I didn't see why Evelyn was so upset. The paper was ruined by the ugly holes in it anyway. I wondered if she would tell Mother.

I sat on the old rose-colored couch, kicking my feet against the worn fabric. Suddenly I didn't want to look at the rainbows anymore. I looked all around the room, but not at the rainbows or the people Boy had drawn. Let them bring in the sheaves, as many of them as could. The rest of the sheaves would have to wait for another day, maybe forever.

"Come on in to the kitchen, "a husky voice said. "I have your mustard and sugar sandwiches ready."

The rest of the day was uneventful until the last game Boy and I made up, and this was the thing that seemed to cause Evelyn to reach some sort of meltdown point. We had spent several hours entertaining ourselves on the front porch, rain pouring off the roof making us feel damp, and we wanted to come inside.

Boy motioned to me to sneak quietly into the kitchen, past the door where Evelyn sat watching afternoon soap operas. In one corner of the dark room, there was a floor to ceiling curtain, strung across between two giant nails by a ropethick drawstring. I had always wondered what was behind that curtain, but had never asked.

Boy pulled the curtain back, revealing the biggest pile of laundry I had ever seen , and silently motioned for me to jump in. It was a small mountain, and we began to dive into it, burrow under like rabbits in their warrens, bump into each other head to head, jump up like whales breaching, and fall down backwards fulllength, doing flips, somersaults, and cartwheels.

We were able to do this quietly for about three minutes, but then we couldn't contain the hilarity or our laughter, and that caused the end of our game.

Evelyn came barreling into the kitchen, snatched the curtain back, gave us the most disgusted look I had received up to that point in my life, and said absolutely NOTHING. Scary. She scowled at me, pointed to the door, and pointed Boy to his room.

It was not the perfect ending to a perfect day. I ran home, and I never did know if Evelyn told my mother what we had done to her wallpaper. That was probably dwarfed by news of the death in midafternoon of Tweedle Dum.

Anyway, after that day, Boy and I hardly ever played together. I would be starting first grade soon and making new friends, and both Boy and I would find out that a tonguelashing from Evelyn was going to seem tame by comparison to events of the next few years.
Installed

1950s SMALL TOWN LIFE: SUSAN, THE CONSCIENCE

I hadn't seen Boy in about two weeks, not since I grabbed the toy car for the second time and ran home. Well, I had actually seen him once, at Mr. Bittner's store, but he wouldn't look at me. I had run there on impulse after seeing a television commercial for a Mars Bar candy bar that prompted me to run barefoot on the gravel road to the store to pluck one off the shelf and run out shouting back over my shoulder to Mr. Bittner to "charge it".
Boy was pretending to read a Superman comic, turning pages quickly one after another. I didn't think he could read, but if he could, I was certain he couldn't read that fast. It had to be a ruse. I left without speaking to him, but my heart hurt a little as I ran home, hoping fervently that I hadn't missed much of the Mighty Mouse cartoon.
Even though I had several friends my own age in Purdon, I actually liked to play with Boy. Most of the time he let me be the boss and decide what we were going to play, and he often gave in to my wishes, the exception being the silver car.
It had been about two weeks since I got the car back for myself. I sat it on the chiffarobe, but every time I looked in the mirror or opened the small closet door beside it, the car stared at me. Susan had asked one evening about dusk why I didn't leave it over there at Boy's house since he didn't have nearly as many toys as the six of us had. Now she sounded like Mother. I didn't answer. I just hugged Monkey even tighter, squeezed my eyes shut, and tried mightily to go to sleep.
Monkey had been the highlight of my fifth birthday as I proudly took the $5 I had been given by my parents and bought him at F.W. Woolworth Dimestore. He looked so merry and mischievous, he seemed a worthy companion. Besides, in the several years I had owned him, he had never once griped at me for something I had done.
Susan, though. She was not nearly as congenial with me as Monkey. She was like having a conscience sitting in your room all the time. Always reading her books, she seemed wise for her years. She was older, but I was scrappier, so we mostly avoided physical confrontations At least Susan did. I often hoped matters would become physical because I could hold my own with her there, but not if she started using her big words and ideas. It was hard to find a comparable comeback when she presented her "oh so logical" arguments. Our fights sounded like a duel between a philosopher and a lobotomy patient.
Susan: "Felisa, I think you should let Jan (our youngest sister), play with your dollbaby because she is younger than you and she doesn't grasp the concept of sharing yet."
Felisa: "No, it's my doll, and I don't wanna share."
Susan: "Felisa, just set a minimum time limit, let her have the fun of playing with her, and when she is satisfied, you can have your doll back, and she will forget about her. Remember what Gelene taught you in Sunday School?" Weirdly, we always called our parents' friends by their first names, but in a respectful way.
Felisa: "No, it's mine and I don't wanna share." The Sunday School comment hit me like a stone thrown directly at the gut though, as I really liked Gelene and wouldn't want her to know I didn't like to share. Susan hadn't threatened to tell her- yet!
A lengthy pause arced lazily between the beds in the stifling air of the bedroom. I hopped up and turned on the huge buzz fan, hoping to drown out Susan's voice. She was looking directly at me with brown eyebrows raised behind her black rimmed glasses. She looked too much like an adult, and I felt uncomfortable. I ran to my bed, snatched the baby doll, and threw it hard at Susan.
"You smell sweaty," I yelled, and ran through the kitchen and out the back door. I had grabbed the car on my way out and put the tiny metal toy in the waistband of my shorts.
On a list of fears, snakes were number one, and the dark was a close second. It wasn't quite dark yet, but the sky was moving stealthily toward it. I had on my tennis shoes, so if I stepped on a snake, I hoped it would roll off my shoes and slither away. I hadn't ever seen any snakes in the pasture right by the house, but I hadn't walked in the tall Johnson grass like I was doing now either. Before, I had always stuck to the paths made by feet traveling the same worn grass day after day.
After pushing open the heavy iron gate, I let it swing shut pulled by the strength of the large spring my dad had installed at the base of it to make it easier to open and shut. I crept along the fence, staying close to the barbed wire since the grass was a little shorter there.
Once I made it to the back side of our garage, I could see Boy's house. Someone turned a light on, the first since darkness slid across the landscape, eclipsing the sun.
I hesitated, edging up against the weathered paintless boards of the old building. It looked like a big wind could cause it to sag eastward and collapse, but we still kept our cherished Buick inside.
Courage resurrected, I headed south along the barbed wire fence, bending at the waist. I hoped no one was outside, and I would bet they were all inside watching Gunsmoke. Grass cut at my legs, making little marks that brought blood, and I let out a little muffled scream when I stepped on a snake that turned out to be a stick from a large oak tree in Boy's yard, its branches drooping low over the fence. When I got even with the screened porch that ran the entire width of the side of his house, I forced myself to take about ten more steps. My best pitch, and the car went over the fence, landing with a little thud and a puff of dust in the dirt that Evelyn called a side yard.
Bolting for home, I secretly hoped Boy found the car soon. Maybe he'd ask me over to play.
Installed

1950s SMALL TOWN LIFE: “BOY", THE BADBOY

I was mad enough to attack an armadillo if I could find one. I needed to vent my childish rage on someone or something. Stomping across the gravel driveway, past the recently bloomed purple dahlias in mother's flower bed, I jerked open the screen door and let it slam.
"Mother! I yelled. "Are you here?"
"In here," came a muffled voice.
I followed the sound to my parents' bedroom. It was the only room in the house with a temperature less than 80 degrees today because it had the only air conditioner. Sometimes I would beg to sleep in my parents' room, cajoling, crying, whatever it took. They occasionally relented and let me make a pallet in the area that abutted the outer wall of the large walk-in closet. It had been built as an afterthought, after the need for storage trumped the need for space in that room. My sister Susan, along with me and our friends, liked to play in the closet, but always posted a lookout since Mother strictly forbade it. More often, the sleep request was denied, but I tried to remember to bring it up every two to three days during the summer.

"Felisa, you need to sleep in there with Susan. She will be lonely without you." Mother often offered a lame excuse for the refusal. "Anyway, you'll be in third grade in September. You're too big to sleep in here." What did that mean? I certainly didn't know! How do you get too big for air conditioning?
Susan, hearing this whole exchange, rolled her eyes. She was three years older than I, her calm bookishness a clear contrast to my proclivity for perpetual activity. The large room we shared had been the dining room, but was converted to bedroom space after my birth. I was the fifth child of six, the second or third to be greeted with consternation by our paternal grandmother, who had only raised one child, our father, to adulthood. Her firstborn child, a boy, had died at age 18months after tragically drinking coal oil. I heard vague stories that a babysitter was responsible for leaving the coal oil on the floor, but I never got up the nerve to ask Nettie about it. It was one of the few taboo subjects in our home.
Our bedroom was large, and each of us three girls had her own twin bed, two of them set end-to-end, lining the outside wall so that each faced a big window, the third placed opposite them on the inside wall. The windows were open every season except winter and permitted air to freely enter the room. In the daytime, the air was often warm or hot, but at night, it was fresh and cool, no matter how hot the day had been. A huge and heavy gray steel fan, its two-part shape resembling some huge round robot, kept the air circulating in the room, and shorty pajamas were the standard uniform for summer nights. Cottons were cooler than nylons and the preferred material for nighttime.
Occasionally, Mrs. Bittner, our neighbor, told Mother how she heard me talking in my sleep. It embarrassed me, but there was nothing I could do about it. I was known to have a very active sleep/dream life, and once scared my grandmother, Molly Jeanette, whom all of us called Nettie , when I was spending the night at her house in Corsicana. Nettie told me the next morning that she had been awakened by a commotion and woke to see me jumping up and down on the small twin bed that occupied space in the same ample bedroom with her. I was also making sounds like an ape . It took a few seconds, but then I remembered that my cousin Phil, about seven years older than I who was also spending the night , had read me a bedtime story about apes kidnapping a woman and taking her into the jungle. Then I remembered my dream about apes taking me into the jungle.
"I guess I was fighting off the apes," I laughed.
"Well, tonight, you and Phil need to find another sort of bedtime story to read," Nettie cautioned.
"MooooTHER!!!!" I yelled again, impatient this time.
"Right HERE, Felisa. In the closet."
"I'm mad at Boy!!! I wailed.
"Oh?" Mother paused, folding clothes and putting them in a brown pasteboard box. The pause…..I noticed that Mother often did this with me. My brothers and sisters seemed to get instant answers.
"He stole my yellow metal race car and now it's silver because he scraped the paint off it, but I know it's mine. He says it's his. He stole it and scraped the paint off it and he's lying about it." I stomped my foot hard. My face was contorted, but Mother seemed to be suppressing a smile.
"Where is the car?", Mother asked tentatively.
"Right here," I unfolded my palm to reveal the small car.
"Oh, I see. Well, how did you get it?"
"I just grabbed it and ran. I threw some dirt at him too when he started chasing me."
"Well, I suspect he could have caught you if he'd really wanted. He's ten, you're only seven . And he's a foot taller than you are."
"That's wrong, isn't it? He wouldn't admit it."
Mother hesitated a minute. A soft look moved like a shadow over her face.
"Yes, it's wrong for someone to take what is someone else's. She paused. "How many cars do you have, Felisa?"
"Five or six," I guess.
"And how many does Ed…uh, Boy, have?" Ed possessed a name, but for some reason no one ever understood, not even me, I called him Boy, and my family honored it, as did Ed.
"I guess he only has the one he stole," I retorted, feeling my cheeks flush as hot lines ran up my face.
"Felisa, I'm not going to make you do this, but I want you to think about something. Boy may be having trouble admitting that he took something from you, and that's wrong. But if you have six cars, and he only has one, and if you give him the car, then you don't have to be mad about it anymore. You and Boy can still play together, and if you give it to him, it's a gift, not something that is stolen. If Boy did steal it from you, maybe he will realize he was wrong. Would you like to go over there and give it back?"
I kicked at the floor and studied the Chinese pagodas and wise looking men in Chinese hats on the wallpaper.
"Ok" Mother said, sensing this might not be easy.
"Well, I will, but he has to say he's sorry."
"We'll see," Mother clicked her tongue, and her eyebrows were raised. "Do you want me to go with you, or do you want to go alone?"
"I'll go by myself," I said, resigned.
Tennis shoes squeaked softly on the wooden floor, the back screened door whipped open with a whack, popping loudly against the facing as it slammed shut, pulled sharply by the tightly wound spring at its base. Gravel, kicked roughly, flew in all directions. Small feet pounded away at the spare Bermuda runners, hungry for water, crushing them further into the hard black earth. By the time I reached Boy's house, 40 yards southeast of ours in what used to be a pasture, my chest hurt and I was breathing like a mad bull, red-faced, and spent. I leapt the three steps up to the wide front porch and fell against the screen, my tiny fists rapping on the door. Evelyn, Boy's mother, answered.
"You here to see Boy?" she asked flatly, with what I interpreted as a scowl, a permanently etched sour look to her face. I saw only the etching, not the acid of events that formed those hard lines. She opened the screen door before I could answer. Boy was slouched on the old navy blue brocade couch, his legs loosely attached to his body. He was assiduously avoiding the springs that were poking through letting the cotton stuffing escape. He looked dejected, and he was not laughing even though he was watching one of my favorite episodes of I Love Lucy where she was dancing down the stairs in a nightclub dance routine with a six foot tall feather hat.
I scuffed my shoe on the pink linoleum, actually on the gray wood floor beneath, since I was standing at a worn place in the doorway. Years of feet stepping across the threshold had worn completely through the linoleum to the floor beneath.
"Here Boy," I said, looking slightly down at those pink flowers, never letting myself look directly at him. "I brought you this." I handed over the now unpainted car, the silver primer glowing in the glare from the television.
Evelyn gave Boy a questioning look that seemed to become accusing, and he squirmed uncomfortably. He slowly rose, his legs seeming to reattach themselves as he got to his feet.
"Aw, that," he said. "You can keep it if you want it. It ain't no big deal anyway." He seemed to be acting nonchalant for Evelyn's sake. She was watching him very closely. I felt tensions flittering around like hummingbirds, moving back and forth between Evelyn and Boy.
"Here," I thrust it toward his hands. "Whosever it was, it's yours now. It's just an old car. Girls don't play with cars anyway."
"Thanks,Felisa. Wanna play in the dirt for a while?"
Some unseen emotional force exited the room. Evelyn stopped looking suspicious, Boy started smiling as he opened the door off the screenedporch at the side of the house, and I didn't feel like throwing dirt or kicking rocks. I sat down with Boy, strange playmates though we were, and dug, spooned, poured and sifted dirt for an hour until I heard the back door of my house slam as usual and my oldest brother Elton call me to supper.
When I headed home, Boy didn't chase me and I didn't throw dirt at him. And I don't know why, the idea just seized me as I stood up and took off running for home; I reached down and scooped up the metal car where it sat in the dirt and stuffed it into the pocket of my cotton shorts . As I glanced back, Boy stood watching me, his mouth agape.
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1950s SMALL TOWN LIFE: THE BARTLETTS

I liked the Bartlett kids, at least the two that were about my age. There were about a dozen of them. They made our family of a mere half dozen kids look smallish and wimpy by comparison. They had a few that were already married, probably in their late teens. Then they seemed to have one in each of the grades up to about the 10th which is when most of them dropped out of school or got married. I guess I never noticed that even though there was one of them in each of the grades with my older four siblings, none of my siblings ever befriended them or asked them home for supper.

But I made up for it. I befriended Lila, who was one year older, and Reba, who was one year younger than I. One particular fall day, I invited them over after school. We decided to help my mom out because she was away working at the cotton gin as a bookkeeper, a job she did part-time in the fall, to help my dad when the cotton ginning season was in full swing.

There were a few dishes in the sink, and Lila pulled up a stool and started making large plumps of soap suds and blowing them about the kitchen. I didn't say anything because I had never washed dishes, not with any seriousness anyway, and I thought maybe that was the way you did it. Anyway, I liked the way the suds floated up in the air, their little iridescent bubbles twinkling like kitchen stars, and the way they landed soft as a cloud on the yellow leatherlette of the kitchen chairs. Spread out there, they looked like miniature snow-filled lakes, and even as they dripped over the chair edge and plip-plipped onto the floor, I found myself lying prone on the thick, green linoleum following the water's path till it ran down the slight slope of the floor back toward the sink.

Reba, who was not nearly as industrious as her older sister, started skating around in the suds, faster and faster, until she couldn't stop and slid directly into the kitchen window at the far end of the table. I heard a little crack sound and noticed a long line now dividing the 30 inch square plate of glass. Reba looked a little sheepish and as soon as Neila, who had heard the telltale splitting of glass, entered the room, she started making up the most outrageous story about how the crack happened. Lila had glanced arround when the window cracked, but now she appeared engrossed in her dishwashing so much that she didn't even stop when Neila started trying to get to the truth.

Just then, we got a reprieve. The phone rang, and there was no one else to answer it except Neila.

"My daddy will beat my butt," Reba whimpered. "We cain't pay for no window. We cain't pay for nothin'. He'll whup me for sure."

Lila, with her back to us, started humming. She was actually the more socially adept of the two, but she was acting like someone on a distant planet right now. The dishes squeaked as she rubbed them with the dishcloth.
"Which plate is yours," she asked without looking.
"What?!"
"Which plate is yours. Don't you each have your own plate?"
"No!", I snapped. "We all eat off all the plates. No one has a special one."
"Oh," she said limply.

I turned my attention back to Reba who seemed to be shrinking, puddling toward the floor.
"Don't worry about it," I reassured Reba. "My little sister threw a baseball through my parent's bedroom window playing "Annie Over", and it was the window with the air conditioner in it. My daddy wanted to get mad, but my mother wouldn't let him. Just let me do the talking."

"No, Mother, they're fine.," I heard Neila say. "Felisa brought home two friends, and they seem to have cracked the kitchen window. I'm not sure what happened yet. No one is hurt. Ok, see you in a few hours."

Neila hung up the bell-shaped receiver on the wallphone. I was sure that in a few minutes, it would be all over town that we had a cracked window since Molly Townsend, the telephone operator, liked to listen in on phone conversations. She seemed to especially like to listen in on ours, since six kids and a laconic mother made for interesting happenings quite often. Her own life, by comparison, was dull, except when her brother Buzzard, who was well-liked when sober and mean as a rodeo bull when drunk, came home after too much of the drink supposedly named for another bird, Wild Turkey. He was unable to support himself in the the totality, so she had lent him room and a place to stay if he would contribute to her household expenses. He did, and she made him make his bed neatly every morning, and hang his clothes in the wardrobe, not pile them on the floor.

"Ok." Neila squats down to our level. "What happened here?"

We look down at our dusty tennis shoes, silent.

"Felisa?" she asks accusingly.

I hesitate. Then tentatively......"Well, we were playing in the soapsuds, and..............

"And?"

"I can't really tell because something really bad could happen if I do."

"What bad could happen?"

"Well...........how much do windows cost?" I query.

"Oh yes, the cost......well, not much. Daddy will gripe, but he'll fix it or have one of the men at the gin fix it. The cost is not much. But you could have been hurt, whichever one of you did it."

"Reba's daddy will whup her if he finds out," I blurt out, unable to hold in this information any longer.

Neila raised one eyebrow, probably at the "whup" pronunciation.

"Oh, I see," she says. Understanding filled her hazel eyes. "Well, then. Is anyone cut? Let me see your arms and fingers."

We hold them out. She surveys them carefully. Reba's toughened skin next to my still babyish fingers. Her raggedy, bitten nails, next to my neatly trimmed ones.

"Don't worry. Just clean up this mess and yall go out and play something else that's not so dangerous."

I couldn't wait till Mother got home because Lila had asked me if on Saturday we could hike to their sister's house about two miles down the road in a cottonfield.

Mother would probably let me go. I could tell she felt sorry for the family. Once, she had offered to pick the girls up for a covered dish supper for a 4-H club banquet at the school. When the girls came out with a package of cheap weiners as their culinary offering, Mother found a way to make them into a tasty dish that people actually ate.

On the one and only visit I remember making to their house, the two girls insisted that I stay for the evening meal. I didn't eat very much because it seemed like too little food for too many people, and nobody insisted that I take the best piece of meat like we did at our house when we had company. I told them I didn't eat much meat, which was a lie, but it made me feel better not to eat it.

Their mother had come in from work wearing a white nurses' aide uniform. She worked at a nursing home in Corsicana, a larger town about twenty miles away. She looked real tired, and she didn't even seem very happy to see her kids like my mother always did when she got home. She just yelled at us to "Fill in that hole!"

Lila had had the bright idea to try to dig up her dead dog to see what he looked like after three weeks in the ground. Fortunately, we never could find the exact spot where he was buried. We got pretty hungry doing all that digging though, and Lila went to the house while Reba and I kept digging exploratory holes trying to locate Jeebie. Lila came back with three plastic cups filled with about 1/3 cup of dry oatmeal with sugar tossed on top. It wasn't something I had ever eaten in that particular form, but I was hungry. We had to make a pretty quick trip to the house to get some water to wash it down with, so we held our throats and made dying of thirst sounds and ran up the thick creosote logs to the heavy plank front porch.

Shortly after supper, I made an excuse to go home. I still wanted to play with Reba and Lila, but I wanted them to come to my house in the future. I didn't want to go over there. Even though they both seemed really happy and not to notice, I could feel and almost see a dark, sad cloud that hung over their mother.
I had an urgent question to ask Mother as soon as I got home too, since Reba had whispered something secretly to me just before I left when it was becoming dark, about a girl getting "scraped" on the railroad tracks; I was naturally concerned since the tracks ran right in front of our house.
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