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.
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