Christmas After All Read online

  “A charming child,” as Lady would say. The boys hardly paid any attention to Willie Faye, but my two best friends Lucy Meyers and Betty Hodges were really nice.

  Betty and Lucy and I were invited last week to Bernadette Otis’s birthday party, and I’m not quite sure how to ask her if Willie Faye can come. I mean, if it were Lucy or Betty I wouldn’t feel funny, but I don’t know Bernadette as well. She and Martine are best friends, but she’s not snotty like Martine. Of course she lets Martine boss her around all the time.

  Funny thing is, none of this fourth-grade business or Martine’s snottiness seemed to bother Willie Faye. She worried most that Tumbleweed would miss her when she went to school. Lady said Willie Faye shouldn’t worry — “cats aren’t that deep.” But I’m not sure if Lady’s right. A cat has thirty-two muscles in each ear. That’s a fact. Ozzie told me. He knows all sorts of stuff like that. How shallow can you be with thirty-two muscles in each ear? You must pick up on a lot. We weren’t sure if Willie Faye could even go to school with me this morning because it had snowed and her shoes were falling apart. Her feet are so small. Everyone passes her shoes down to me because I have the smallest feet in the family. Gwen being the oldest and Ozzie being the only boy are the only ones who ever get new shoes, or at least in the last few years since times have been so bad. Well, Willie Faye’s feet are too small for any of my shoes, but then Ozzie went into his lab and found some electrical tape that he uses for patching together his inventions and we taped up her shoes.

  They made us go outside during recess, which I thought was rotten. It was snowing harder and was only twenty-two degrees on the thermometer outside our classroom window. I asked Miss Loritz, who was on playground duty, if we could be excused and stay in because of the sorry state of Willie Faye’s shoes. I thought this would save me from having to hang around with the fourth graders. Miss Loritz said that Willie Faye could stay in and help her wash the blackboards but that I had to go out. Willie Faye said she’d rather go outside with me.

  They won’t let us play in the park anymore because they say there are too many hobos. We have to stay in the playground because those hobos drift over from Curtisville Bottom. That’s Indianapolis’s shantytown where all the bums and really poor people who have lost their jobs during the Depression live. Most other places call them Hoovervilles after President Herbert Hoover. But we call ours after his vice president, Charles Curtis. Lady thinks it’s second-rate that we don’t call ours after the president. I never even knew the president’s first name was Herbert because Papa always called him That Fool Hoover. I thought for the longest time his name was Thatfull Hoover. Anyhow, we went outside and shivered but then Henry Thatcher started a snowball fight, and I don’t know why but somehow Ozzie got into the thick of it and we were all making and throwing snowballs. Willie Faye actually is quite good despite her size. So we were all getting nice and warmed up when Miss Gordon, the principal, came out and rang the bell for us all to come in.

  This is funny. Willie Faye has only seen snow twice in her life. She said once there was so much of it that she would have been glad to never see it again. There are many things that Willie Faye has never seen, like a toilet and a porcelain bathtub. I might start making a list.

  Later

  I finished my homework and helped Willie Faye with hers. Gwen helped, too. We’re getting her “up to snuff,” as Gwen says, in spelling and grammar. I couldn’t believe it but Willie Faye did not know what an adjective was. I never heard of such a thing. We’re starting to diagram sentences in the sixth grade. I don’t know how she will ever learn to do that without knowing what an adjective is. Well, she knows now. But how can a person spend eleven years on God’s green earth and not know what an adjective is? Our words for spelling in my class are mostly Christmas words — “wreath,” “angel” (and then to be tricky, “angle”), “nativity,” stuff like that. And then there is always a surprise word from the “hard list” that we are supposed to study each week. In the fourth grade they have a lot of Christmas words, too. There is one thing, however, that Willie Faye is up to snuff in. She draws really well.

  Whoops! Have to stop writing. Mama just announced that we are going to Stout’s Shoe Store to buy Willie Faye a new pair of shoes. This is the best thing that’s happened all day. I love Stout’s Shoe Store. Of course it is sort of hard going when you know that you won’t be the one to get new shoes. But Ozzie and I love playing with the fluoroscope. You stand up on a small staircase and stick your feet under this big machine and look in through something that’s kind of like binoculars, and you get to see the bones of your feet and you can wriggle your toes and see those toe bones jiggle around. It’s the greatest. Next to going to the picture show, doing the fluoroscope is my favorite activity.

  Just before dinner

  We’re back from Stout’s. It really is the cat’s whiskers as far as shoe stores go. Willie Faye couldn’t believe the place. When you walk into Stout’s the first thing you see is this big old parrot — a real live parrot from the Amazon jungle. It’s green and blue with a touch of yellow. And sometimes it squawks hello and sometimes it says, “Get away from my cage.” It’s generally pretty rude. It did say “Merry Christmas” today and there was a big red bow on its cage. Well, Willie Faye nearly popped her eyes on that. Stout’s carries Polly Parrot shoes for children, so that is why they have the parrot. Kind of like an advertisement.

  So then we go in and Mama talks to young Mr. Stout about what Willie Faye needs, and they bring out the Brannock — that’s the metal thing you step on so they can measure your feet. Ozzie and I go off to mess with the fluoroscope. I can see Willie Faye looking overhead at the baskets whizzing on the wires. That’s how they do business at Stout’s. When you decide on a pair of shoes you take your money to a counter. They put it in a little box and send it up with the shoes in a basket to the mezzanine. Then they wrap the shoes in brown paper and send them in a bag with your change back to another counter, the pickup counter. We watched Willie Faye’s shoes come back all wrapped up in brown paper. She didn’t want to wear them home. She didn’t get Polly Parrots. She got Buster Brown oxfords because Mama felt they were sturdier even though they did cost more. Mama had a very serious expression on her face when she took out those four one-dollar bills. And then when we were coming home we passed a new soup kitchen where the city gives out free bread and food, usually soup, to people. The line was very long. It went around the corner. Mama just looked straight ahead. I know what she was thinking about — those four dollars that she had just spent on the shoes for Willie Faye and how pathetic the people in the soup line looked. Some were sitting down on the sidewalk with news­papers spread over their shoulders and knees for warmth. Lady told me that they call those Hoover blankets. Well, at least they haven’t started calling them Curtis blankets here in Indianapolis.

  P.S. We were surprised when we got home from Stout’s that Papa was already home. He was up in his little attic room where he sometimes goes when he brings work home from the office. He keeps an adding machine and an old typewriter up there. I hear the k-chirp sound of the typewriter more than the k-chung of the adding machine lately.

  November 29, 1932

  My fingers are tired from poking cloves into oranges. So I’m going to write in my diary until Charlie Chan comes on. We’ve all been making pomander balls for Christmas presents, but it does wear out the fingers. Willie Faye had never made one and Gwen says she is naturally artistic because she stuck in the cloves in a spiral pattern. Everyone is making them except for Lady, of course, who has decided to turn her old prom dress into curtains and is stitching on them. Dumbest thing I ever heard of and she wants to hang them up in our room. She saw a picture in a magazine of Jean Harlow the movie star’s boudoir and she had these filmy curtains in what they called “kidney-shaped drapery” and Lady thinks they would just be the cat’s whiskers in our bedroom. I say, who wants kidneys hanging from their windows?

  “It’s very Hollywood,” says Lady.<
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  “It’s kidneys,” says Clem.

  “Girls!” says Mama.

  “Kidneys,” says Ozzie, “make urine. You have pee pee curtains. In my old bedroom! They should be yellow.” Ozzie, Willie Faye, and I just howl. Mama says, “Francis Osgood Swift!”

  We all shut up.

  Later

  Mama looked up from her sewing and said, “Ozzie, turn on the Spartan.” I could see that Willie Faye didn’t know what on God’s green earth she was talking about, until Ozzie got up and turned on the radio. We have a Sparks Worthington Spartan 31. Ozzie says it is the best radio made today. We bought it a couple of years ago when business was better at Greenhandle’s. Lady says it looks like a tombstone. But Gwen says it looks like a beautiful French cathedral — like Notre Dame in Paris, France. Gwen has been to Paris to study. She went two years ago with a group of students from Wellesley College, the school she went to outside of Boston. She couldn’t go back this year because we couldn’t afford the tuition. So now she works at the Bobbs-Merrill publishing company here in Indianapolis. She doesn’t mind that much because she gets to meet a lot of writers and Gwen dreams of becoming a writer. Anyhow, I think the Spartan is just plain beautiful. It stands nearly a foot tall on the table. Its dark amber-­colored wood just gleams. The speaker screen through which the voices come out is shaped like the fantail of a peacock with thin curved ribs of wood between the sections. But the best part is the dial. It has what they call a shadow projection. There is a little halo of honey-colored light around it and the pointer works like a shadow when you move it through the arc to the different stations.

  Heavens, they are starting to play the Esso Gasoline music. Papa isn’t down yet from his room. Esso Gasoline and Motor Lube is the sponsor of the show. Papa usually is here early for Charlie Chan and he didn’t come down for the six o’clock news, either, and they were talking all about President-elect Roosevelt and his New Deal, which is supposed to help end the Depression. Next to their children I think Mama and Papa love Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt the most. They are crazy nuts for Mr. FDR.

  It’s snowing really hard now outside and the windows are getting all lacy with frost. Tumbleweed has settled near the heating vent and I swear little puffs of dust are coming up from his fur. Clementine said that she heard that a good way to bathe a cat, because Lord knows you can’t really bathe them with water, is to brush them with a mixture of baby powder and baking soda. Willie Faye looks as if she’s not too sure.

  Still later

  I hated supper tonight. It was meatless meat loaf. I think we should just call it weird loaf. It has every­thing but meat in it — peanuts, cottage cheese, rice. It’s cheap. We hardly ever have meat anymore, except for chicken, because we raise them in the garage. But we only have chicken maybe once a month or so at the most. The other disgusting thing we always are having is O’Grotons. O’Grotons means you put cheese and flour in every­thing to thicken it up and then stretch it out. So we have something like hot dog and potatoes O’Groton and Mama puts just about two hot dogs all cut up in the whole thing and a bunch of potatoes and then stretches it with the cheese. It’s vile. But we are not allowed to say anything bad about food. This riles Mama and Papa like nothing else. We can get a real punishment for it — like being sent away from the table or not allowed to go out or something. They say there are too many starving families in these days of the Great Depression and we better darn well eat what is put in front of us or just shut up. Mama actually said the words “shut up” when I complained a while back about the cabbage O’Groton. I had never heard her say that before in my life. She is very gentle-spoken except when it comes to food.

  Charlie Chan was good tonight. And that’s another thing that Willie Faye had never heard about — the great Chinese detective. Except he’s half-Chinese and half-Hawaiian so that means he’s really American, even though Hawaii is only a territory. I had that argument with snot-nosed Martine Vontill. Anyhow, it was a murder tonight on the show but there was no body! And guess what? A parrot that Willie Faye and I agreed must look just like the one at Stout’s was the main witness. It squawked out, “Murder, bloody murder!” Charlie has two sons, Number One Son and Number Two Son. Number One botched up good. And guess what Charlie said about him? “Sometimes quickest way to brain of young sprout is by impression on other end.” Papa laughed, he really laughed. We haven’t heard Papa laugh in weeks, maybe months. And you should have seen Mama’s face when he laughed. She just beamed. I swear if she had been sitting by the windowpane all the frost would have melted.

  November 30, 1932

  Jackie came back today and was in the kitchen when Willie Faye and I came down for breakfast. I don’t know who was more shocked, Jackie or Willie Faye. I’m not sure if Willie Faye had ever seen a colored person before, at least one as big as Jackie, and I don’t think Jackie had ever seen an eleven-year-old as teensy-weensy as Willie Faye. They just plain stared at each other for a good ten seconds. Jackie is our housemaid. She helps Mama cook and clean and she kills the chickens we keep in the coops in the garage. Jackie is the one who got us started on chickens. She has a cousin south of the city who raises them, and then she started herself and now she has all kinds of chickens: brown leghorns, white leghorns, Rhode Island Reds, barred rock bantams, wyandottes. Mama and Papa can’t really afford to pay her much anymore so instead we give her food and all our old clothes, but she keeps bringing us chickens. Jackie says no sense looking for a job anywhere else. She’s been here too long and is too old to change.

  She was down in the southern part of the state at a funeral. Mama said that she hoped Jackie wouldn’t show us pictures, like last time, of the dead person all laid out in the coffin. But Ozzie and I hope she will. She goes to a lot of funerals. And every time she comes back from one she seems to bring a couple of chickens with her. She has a soft spot for chickens, at least until she kills them.

  Mama called Bernadette’s mother about the birthday party and it is fine for Willie Faye to come. But when she hung up she just shook her head kind of sad­like. I asked what was wrong. And she just said she thought Mrs. Otis was worried about Mr. Otis. Then Lady said she had seen Mr. Otis selling apples at the corner of New York Street and Meridian by University Park. Mama just gasped and said, “Don’t tell your father.” Mama went absolutely white. And just last night she was beaming and shiny enough to melt the frost. I don’t like these times. I don’t care whether it’s Christmas or not. There’s something kind of scary going on.

  Later

  I got bored in geography today and started making a list of all the things that Willie Faye has never heard of. Here it is:

  Porcelain bathtubs

  Toilets

  Charlie Chan

  Jean Harlow

  Adjectives

  Buck Rogers

  Popeye

  Dick Tracy

  Papa is back early again. I’m hearing more k-chirp than k-chung from up there. Lady thinks that he is writing to apply for new jobs.

  Willie Faye told us the story of her and that pumpkin. That pumpkin weighed over two hundred pounds and Willie Faye grew it all by herself. The pumpkin-growing part was interesting but not nearly so much as the rest of the story. She grew it by feeding it pans full of milk. Yes indeed! She told me that when a pumpkin’s vine gets to a certain thickness you can notch it and then kind of push it down into a pan of milk. It will sop up the milk and it makes it grow like crazy. This is unbelievable but a pumpkin can grow between four and six inches in just twelve hours. Its main growing time is between seven in the evening and seven in the morning. Willie Faye’s pumpkin grew so big that they had to borrow a neighbor’s truck to take it to the fair in some town called Amarillo.

  When they brought it back from the fair, Willie Faye’s mother said pumpkins that big lacked in flavor and there wasn’t much you could do with them. So her father was going to chop it up and feed it to the hogs. But then Willie Faye said before he did that could he chop a little door and a window i
n it, and hollow it out a bit. She had always wanted a playhouse in a pumpkin! Now, isn’t that the keenest idea? So he did. He had to use a big saw to do it. She said it was kind of sticky playing inside, but really lovely at sunset. She had the door and window facing west and she said when the sun streamed through, it turned every­thing gold inside. Even her skin looked gold and shimmery.

  Ozzie said the funniest thing. He said that she should have put wheels on it, then gotten those pigs to carry her to a ball like Cinderella when she went and met her Prince Charming. Well, we all just howled at that. But then Willie Faye told us what finally happened to her pumpkin house. It started to get kind of soft around the edges from squatting in that hot Texas sun, and she reckoned — this must be a western word, Willie Faye always says “reckon” — that it would start to cave in and that she would have just a few more days of playing in it. So one morning after a cold night she went out to the pumpkin house. She crawled in and she said she just froze. There was a whole mess of rattle­snakes. Lucky for her they were still kind of drowsy. But then one of them woke up. He coiled up on top of the heap of other snakes and reared his head like he was about to strike. Willie Faye backed right out of that pumpkin house!

  And this was not her first meeting up with rattle­snakes. Her daddy got bit by a snake once and her mother had to carve an X with a big sharp knife right in the bite and suck out the venom.

  Willie Faye is a very interesting person. She may not know about some things, but she’s got a whole mess of other stuff that she knows about and she tells it all very fine.