The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett - 8

W hen I was seven years old, Mama would point my body in the right direction and watch until I had walked through the back field. It was only another ten minutes to the schoolhouse, and this way she could get to Mrs. Cooper’s on time. I felt like a big girl walking on my own like that.

One time, I asked Mama were those little Cooper girls smart and Mama said, Yes, but not smart as you. Well I liked that. So when she told me how she taught them about forks and such, I would ask, But they are not as smart as me, right? She would smile to the one side with the dimple and say, Not even close. Like it was a secret between us. I liked that too. I got grouchy if she talked nice about those little Cooper girls too long.

But when I asked would she be teaching them the lying lesson, she got quiet. She said, All girls need to know that, but it’s up to their own mother to teach them.

The only problem was the Coopers did not pay very much. Mama said we barely made the ends meet. She would lean over our little table and say, If we can ever manage to save so much as a dime in this world, Meg, we are packing up and heading to California.

Sometimes she curved the word around like a road winding, or sang, Cal-i-for-nia, here we come! Right back where we started from! I would remind her we started from Memphis, Tennessee.

Our money situation made Mama cross to think about. On top of rent she had to pay four dollars monthly on our old Model A car that sputtered like a wet cat, drank up the gasoline, and made your teeth rattle if you rode too fast. She needed it, though, to drive to work or the twenty miles to town. Though for our basic food needs, we would drive the mile to the rolling store. It was run by a small foreign man named Rudy, and he set the whole business up like a real store right on the back of his truck. Welcome to Rudy’s Rolling Store! he would say and tip his hat at Mama. Laid out on crates he had loaf bread, soda crackers, little fishes in the can. On a ice block he set milk and bacon and store-made mayonnaise and butter, and in a basket was a selection of colored hard candy that would dazzle the mind. She usually let me pick two pieces for myself and she only occasionally got those Cooper girls one apiece.

Sometimes Mama could earn a extra dollar if Mrs. Cooper had to go out . On those nights and after school and in summer, I would go sit with a old colored Negro named Ophelia Lee. I say she was old but she did not have a wrinkle on her face, only creases from her fat. When she hugged me, there was so much of her it was like getting hugged by a couple people at once. That is a good hug. Plus her food was better and more fried than what Mama cooked at home and it all came from her garden, sweet potatoes, okra, poke salad, gourds. Flour it and fry it in fatback and it does not even taste like a vegetable. Or else take it out the jar she had put it in the year before. She would say, I don’t need no sto to make groceries. Got all I need right here in the yart.

Ophelia used to tell me stories about her own children. She had two girls, and they had names of value, Goldie and Pearl. Goldie could sing like nobody’s bidness and Pearl taught herself to read the newspaper when she was not but five years old. I wanted to meet these girls, but she said they were both growed and gone. I thought being growed was no reason to be gone. I was never leaving my mama, even if I got to be six feet tall.

But the best part about going to Ophelia’s was she raised puppy dogs for a living. You ask any kid in this world and they will tell you there is nothing like a bunch of cute puppies to entertain you for hours. Ophelia did not work for somebody, she had what you call self-employment. My mama said Ophelia was smart as a whip to set her life up like that. She had her four mamas rotating so there were puppies most all the time. The mamas would whine when I would hold one too young, but they would not snap at you ever. They were meant to hunt with their tails out when they saw something you might want to shoot and eat. When they were big enough, she sold them to a white man named Bert. Then Bert would sell them to his white friends for a higher price, because that is just the way the world works.

I would bring a bunch of puppies to the grass and lay down and let them crawl all over me, tickling my face. I remember how it felt like all the world was right. That is what I think of when I think of Ophelia and her puppies and her good hugs. That all the world was right.

Oh me and old Ophelia Lee had us some good times. If it was cold out, she would teach me to play songs on her piano.

Where did her piano come from? was what I wanted to know. She did not own any other nice things in her house. It said Wurlitzer in gold letters and had fancy brass pedals. The white keys stayed stuck down when it rained, but other than that, it sounded pretty good.

She said, Jesus brung it. I prayed and he deliver it.

Well, I sat up because I had not known it to work that way. I always prayed for a puppy to come home with me, but so far I had not got squat. So I said, Tell me how did you really get that piano.

She said, I’s praying for one and here it come floating. Down the river in the flood of ’27. It were tied up on a raft wif this here music pages and all. So Trillin poled it over and waited, but nobody come floating after it. We brung it here when we moved.

I wished I lived by a river to see what all would come floating by. I got pretty good on that piano from her lessons.

When Mama was done working, she would drive to Ophelia’s house. Every week she paid her a quarter and Ophelia would tuck it in her big bosoms. I never saw her take it out so I cannot account for how much she had down in there. It was like a bank. Some evenings, Mama would come inside and those two would smoke cigarettes. Lit from Mama’s own mouth because Ophelia had the palsy and couldn’t make the end line up with the match. It makes me think how these volunteer ladies would not be caught dead lighting a cigarette for Lucinda, the colored cook here. Or saying, How’s life treating you?

Those two talked low while I practiced piano or played with dogs. I remember Ophelia all the time saying, You doing the best you can, Charlie. I guess that is where my mama got that from.

I remember Mama saying, Thank God I’m out of that damn business in Memphis.

And Ophelia saying, Don’t get on yoself, you do what you gotta do to get by in this worlt.

Sometimes Mama would talk about him . I heard her say, And the coward doesn’t even have the decency to write me back.

Ophelia would shake her head and say, Ain’t nuttin you can do ’bout mens.

I fell asleep in Mama’s lap if they talked very long.

Do you remember the feel of your mama’s arms carrying you inside to bed at night? Was she singing “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love, Baby”? If she was not, you have missed out. And who would think a mama who taught a girl to brush like you mean it and tried to be both the mama and the daddy would one day up and leave you behind? Walk out on the claim she was just going to the store.

The last summer I lived at home, Rudy’s Rolling Store stopped rolling. Mama reckoned he had gone out of business like the rest of the damn United States of America. Now we had to spend on gas to drive the forty minutes to town for groceries. I did not mind one bit. Oxford had so many things to look at, even if you could not afford them. My favorite was the Golden Rule five-and-ten. You could just as well get a tube of lipstick as a new checker set for under a dime. That’s what I call good variety.

We would go order our groceries to pick up later and head on over to the lending library upstairs in the city hall. This was a room with nothing but BOOKS. I never saw my mama so happy as when she was in that library. She had to stop attending school at grade nine, which she said was very lucky for a girl. I would like to tell her that is still lucky. I only made it to grade five. And I might as well be locked up in jail for all I get to see of town now. It is hard to believe that bustling world is just down the road from the Orphan.

One evening, Mama came to pick me up from Ophelia Lee’s early. It must’ve been fall because we were learning about the Pilgrims and Indians in school and I still had on my paper hat with paper feathers stuck to it. Mama barged in the door and her face was red and frowning and she was crying and breathing through her mouth.

I said, What is it, Mama, what’s wrong—

She told me to Go wait. In the kitchen, Meg.

Course I fussed and when Mama pushed me in the direction of the kitchen, I could feel her hands shaking. I put my ear to the door but what I got was cut up and confusing, something about a letter and have to find a new job and living with his wife and goddamn fountain in the yard and I was near dying to know what was going on, and then I heard her say:

I think that damn witch wrote the letter.

For a week Mama was so furious she could hardly talk right. I kept my teeth clean and minded my p’s and q’s and tried not to make a mess. I got what I could out of her, which was like getting water from a stone. What it came down to was, somebody had wrote Mrs. Cooper a awful letter saying something terrible about Mama, so Mrs. Cooper fired her on the damn spot.

I said, Tell me who wrote that, Mama, tell me who this witch is I will kick her teeth in she will be drinking dinner from a straw when I finish with this woman. I had heard that on the radio.

She would not answer that. Just put her hand up.

If I kept on, she got tears, begging me, Please, Meg, I need you to leave it at that. What we need to worry about is me finding a new job.

My questions ate me up. Who, what, where, and why. We spent a lot of time scrubbing floors, the kitchen, the little lean-to lavatory. Anytime I asked about it, something got cleaned.

Mama searched every newspaper she could get her hands on to look for a job. She went to every store in town and every back door asking to tend to their kids or clean their house.

After no luck, she drove to the college in town, offering students rides in our beat-up car. She would come home with twenty or thirty cents, but the gas ate into her earnings. Plus the man drivers would try and run her off just because she was a woman.

After only a few weeks, things were starting to thin. Mama tried to hide it, but you do not have to be that smart to see that your supper is getting less tasty and you are looking instead of buying. Supper was generally beans with ham. Cornbread with ham. Field peas with ham. It was a three-month ham leg the Coopers had given her almost three months before, so it was always something plus ham. You would not think I would miss it like I do now, seeing how we ate us so much ham.

She said, I did it once, I can do it again. I’ll just start over. Again. She said that to her dressing mirror a lot.

The lady came looking for rent the first of December. Mama said, I promise I’ll have it soon, I’m just waiting on a thing to come in. The woman said she would kick us out if we kept that up.

When I said Mama was not scared of anything, I had not known about this one, living without a living. Mama said she was scared they’d come collect the damn car and then what.

I better go to town and see if I can sell some rides.

Since it was near sunset, she took me on down to Ophelia’s. We ate some fried foods and played on her piano. When I woke up the next morning, I was in my own bed.

I asked her, Did you sell any rides, Mama?

She said, Just one. It paid pretty well, though. But she did not look too happy about it.