Rhonda the Rubber Woman Read online

  “Whatever you want to do, Mama.” I hung my head.

  Mama reached her hand across the table and touched mine. “Georgia,” she said, “some folks grow up sooner than others.” Her round face looked pale and heavy, like dough. “I always told your daddy, bless his soul, I figured you’d be a late bloomer, but this baby is going to hurry you along.”

  “I know,” I mumbled, but I felt irked. I didn’t want to be hurried along. I never hated a person in my life but I had a bad feeling about that baby.

  “Folks will gossip,” Mama said. “We’ll just ignore them. It’s not their concern.” Her blue-gray eyes widened; she meant business.

  I nodded, ashamed.

  “Georgia…” Mama sounded peeved and her voice rose. “I don’t want you hanging your head about this. You’re going to have to show some gumption. One thing about the Sayers women, we’ve always had gumption.” She slapped her hand on the oilcloth. “And if anything happens to me, you need to be ready.”

  “Don’t talk that way.” My voice came out so loud it surprised us both. “Nothing’s going to happen to you.” My fingers started twitching. “You’ll get better when summer comes.”

  Mama sighed and looked toward the window. It was drizzling now, and a wet leaf had blown up against the window like a hand. She turned back and gave me a small smile. “Maybe you’re right,” she said and squeezed my fingers.

  After that we hardly talked about the baby except to make arrangements, and Mama and Cora did most of that.

  I was glad. I couldn’t get Reverend Mackey’s warning out of my mind, that it would be my penance. Later when it began to kick, I got scared it would be born with horns. I kept acting like my usual cheerful self but at night in my room I whacked pillows against the headboard of my bed my until my shoulders ached. Every time I thought about Mama saying to have more gumption, I whacked harder. At work I did more seams in a day than you could shake a stick at. I wished I could do seams all night, too. Doing seams kept me from going loco.

  Cora found me a doctor in Allensville, a town twenty miles away, and he delivered the baby when it was time—a little girl. It didn’t have horns, it was just an ordinary baby with dark hair and brown eyes. It was kind of cute except when it cried. Then it got on my nerves, but Mama pretty much took care of it. She’d sit on her squeaky old rocking chair hugging the baby against her chest and she’d cough and its tiny backside would jiggle. I’d tickle its little chin once in a while but the truth was I wanted to crawl up on Mama’s lap myself.

  I knew people were gossiping. I’d see the women gather in circles downtown and watch their cloche hats tilt together as I walked by sticking out like a sore throat. I just tried to ignore them. To tell the truth, I missed Carl more than I worried about being a sinner or repenting. I missed our nights on Wind Gap Junction Road.

  One Saturday when she came to visit, Cora said I should help out more with little Nancy, she was afraid Mama wasn’t long for this world, but I told her to shush up, Mama would get better when summer came. I remember we were out in the yard airing out Mama’s mattress and beating the germs out of the rugs. It was a warm spring day. Cora had jerked and pursed her lips at me talking back to her. She wasn’t used to it and I had to smile a little as I pounded away on the rugs.

  I couldn’t help being edgy and irritable, though. Summer came and Mama stayed the same. One night I dreamed she coughed all her insides up on the kitchen floor. I got home from work and there was her heart, lungs, gall bladder, and everything all over the swirly green linoleum. I screamed and when I woke up there was sweat on my forehead like little crawling bugs.

  That morning I walked to the factory, full of goosebumps. I looked at different houses around town. I stopped and stared at the rag man’s old wagon and thought about the time Florence Butz found a puppy somebody had put in it. I got an idea, and by the time I reached the factory, I put on my usual cheerful self. There was a lot going on I didn’t understand, but one thing I knew. If I pretended there wasn’t a thing wrong in the world, other folks would pretend along with me.

  2

  NANCY SAYERS, 1936

  Grandma died when I was six. We shouldn’t have been surprised but we were. Every year the doctor would shake his head and say, “I’m not sure she’ll make it this time,” and my mom would shuffle into her room and bawl and bang on walls, and Grandma would pull through.

  Then one icy November morning in 1937, Grandma got up early for some Vicks VapoRub—she said it helped her breathe—and the next thing we knew we heard a thud from near the bathroom. We found her stretched out in the hallway, staring up at the green and lavender flowered wallpaper, a dark splotchy stripe along one wall where she’d reached out to steady herself to walk ever since I could remember. She had the jar of VapoRub in her right hand and an astonished look on her face, as though she still wasn’t ready. My mother screamed and I had to call Aunt Cora to come up from Clinton quick.

  My mom collapsed on the staircase, sobbing into her folded arms. I watched her shoulders jiggle underneath the blue chenille bathrobe, then tiptoed downstairs and outside to sit on the stoop in the cold gray dawn watching for Aunt Cora’s rattly Packard. I couldn’t stop thinking of the story Aunt Cora always kidded me about how when I was born, the nurse handed me over and I squiggled and let out a howl, scaring my mother so much she shrieked, threw her hands up, and I flew. I fingered the bump on my right-hand temple, hard and knobby like an old dog biscuit. They’d used bugs to suck the blood out. Leeches. Aunt Cora said it was disgusting the way they put those slimy-looking worms on my little head, and you could hear the sucking noises.

  They had the funeral in the living room. Grandma was in a casket with a pink taffeta lining. Aunt Cora whispered to me, “You don’t have to look if you don’t want to,” but I stepped right up. They shouldn’t have chosen pink lining, I thought. It made Grandma look too washed-out. None of the Sayers girls had ever looked good in pink. Except me. With my dark hair and skin, I could wear pink. Tears started in my eyes that Grandma had to be buried all surrounded by pink. I would have chosen blue. Grandma loved blue. I leaned forward and looked at her powdered face and felt cold in my bones. “Please come back,” I whispered. “Please come back as a ghost. I miss you so much.”

  I glanced over at my mother, who was staring straight ahead, eyes as pink as pickled eggs. I wanted to run up to her but I wasn’t sure I should. She’d always chucked my chin and said, “Isn’t that cute? Just like a greeting card,” when I snuggled on Grandma’s lap, but every time I tried to climb up on my mom’s lap, she laughed and went bony and remembered something she had to do. Now she sat stiff as a pole on her folding chair except every once in a while she bounced. My mom bounced a lot. Nerves. I worried about my mother’s nerves, worried that one day she’d start to bounce and not be able to stop. She’d be like those balls that bounce along on the screen during sing-along nights at the movies. Except she wouldn’t be just a bouncing ball on a screen. She’d be a bouncing person.

  3

  NANCY, 1942

  I knew my mom had boyfriends but at least she never brought anyone around to the apartment when I was little. I was glad. I hated how the kids teased, “Hey, it’s Harry, Dick, and Tom, havin’ fun with Nancy’s mom.” I hated thinking of my mother doing anything funny with men. When I was eleven, I decided I was a virgin birth. My dad visited my mom in a dream, and the next thing she knew she was pregnant. I decided I was supposed to be a savior, like Jesus. I liked the idea of being a savior, but then I’d get to school and want some attention so I’d do my Carmen Miranda imitation where I’d hold a banana over my head, roll my eyes, and sing “Ay Ay Ay Ay.” Later I’d go home and feel let down, realizing I probably wasn’t a savior after all. The only good thing I ever did was let kids copy my homework, but that was to make them like me.

  Anyway, things got worse when I was eleven and my mom met Eddie Jeffers.

  Out of the blue, she came home from work one day and said, “I’m … uh … hav
ing a guest tomorrow night, and when he gets here, you should … uh … well, after dinner, you should go right into your bedroom and do your homework.” We were in the kitchen, where I was doing fractions.

  I felt my chest go weak. “A man?”

  She giggled and put her purse on the counter, her blond hair fresh and fluffy. “Now, Nancy, you know children are supposed to be seen and not heard.”

  She lit a cigarette, shook the match out and dropped it into a green glass ashtray on the kitchen table, then flicked on the radio and walked into the bathroom. I drew a baby with a deformed arm on my math paper. I drew a girl with missing ears.

  “Rosie the Riveter” started playing; an announcer came on and said, “Young ladies, if your brothers or boyfriends are off defending democracy, do your part, as well. Take a war job. Be the woman behind the man behind the gun.”

  “Nancy,” my mom called out, “did you get these water spots on the spigot? Haven’t I told you a thousand times to wipe off the spigot? What would a guest think?”

  “I’m sorry,” I mumbled. We had a lot of neatness rules since Grandma died and we moved into an apartment above Doc Gummerman’s drugstore. No finger prints. No scuff marks. My mom waxed the old cracked linoleum every other week and we walked on hankies for two days until it settled. And she cancelled the newspaper. She said it smudged things too much.

  “I’ll wipe it off,” I said, heading for the bathroom. The radio went staticky as I walked away.

  “No, never mind, I’ll do it myself.” My mother had taken her dress off and was standing at the sink in her slip wiping the chrome, her bosom jiggling underneath the lace as she rubbed. “I want it done right.” Her cigarette crackled in a tin ashtray on top of the toilet tank.

  I stopped. The sound from the radio was almost all static now. I slouched into the living room and stood staring at a ceramic wall decoration my mother had bought at a church bazaar of a devil sitting on a swing in the middle of a bunch of green grapes. He was dressed all in red. Red pointed hat, red suit, red boots, and he had a smile on his face. I’d always thought he looked too cute to be a devil, but somehow he scared me all the more for it. He reminded me of Reverend Mackey. The reverend came around once a week saying the Lord wanted him to help his Baptist families in distress. I didn’t like being a family in distress, and I especially didn’t like Reverend Mackey. His skin was too oily, like cheese in the sun, and he smiled as though he had gas pains. I always had to stay in my room when he came.

  Sometimes I tried to listen to them through the wall. I’d hear Reverend Mackey preach about sins of the flesh and ask my mother questions, then I’d hear her little-girl voice quiet as whispers, but I could never make out what she said. Before he left, he always gave her a health tip, loud enough so I could hear it. Try some potato water for that chapped skin. Remember, honey for the tummy, world’s best pick-me-up for low energy. Once he brought around a gizmo he said he’d invented. You hooked up some wires around your ears and ankles and it was supposed to suck the poisons out of you. My mom tried it a couple of times but Aunt Cora busted out laughing when she saw it.

  Now my mom came into the living room. She’d turned off the radio and looked friendlier. She had her purse. “Uh, look, why don’t you go get some hot dogs and I’ll boil them for dinner.” The butcher had started staying open late for war workers. “Here.” She pulled out a dollar and gave me two meat coupons. “Go get some hot dogs and buns.” She tugged out another dollar and smoothed a wrinkle in it. “And stop at the bakery and buy some cream puffs. We’ll have a nice meal.”

  The next night Eddie came to dinner. My mom took off early from work and cleaned as if the King of Siam was visiting. She sent me out to buy beef pasties from the church. The Methodist ladies held bake sales twice a week. On Wednesdays they made pasties. Friday was doughnut day.

  “Stop at Doc’s and get three nice slices of Boston cream pie,” she said. One good thing about living above Doc’s, we spent a lot of time there. My mom hated to cook. “All that work, peeling and chopping and measuring, and then you eat it in five minutes,” she complained. “It’s easier to go downstairs for a melted cheese sandwich.” I loved the people at Doc’s, Ben Kleeber, who worked at the bank and looked like Tyrone Power, and Bob Bruch, who was an usher at the movies and always good for a laugh. They’d come in for Cokes and joke around with us and I’d feel proud of my mom for a while, with her sunbeam yellow hair and her hourglass figure. I’d feel sorry for kids whose moms had backsides that heaved when they walked and you couldn’t find their waists anywhere, like the President’s wife, Mrs. Roosevelt.

  Sundays were special. We’d get all dressed up. “It’s important to put your best face forward,” my mom would say. On Sundays we’d order something extra to go with our sandwiches. Potato salad with sliced egg on top or jello cubes with whipped cream for dessert. But then later when we went back upstairs, my mom would stop trying to put her best face forward. She’d chain-smoke, stare at the linoleum, and talk to me in a voice like a kid giving a boring geography report. Sometimes if a love song came on the radio, she’d look up at me as if I hurt her eyes and go into the bathroom.

  At 5:30 p.m., the doorbell downstairs rang. I heard my mom giggle as she answered, then footsteps on the stairs. Eddie sounded like he was purposely thumping his foot every other step.

  I held my breath as they walked in. He was small and skinny, sort of like Fred Astaire. He had creamy skin for a man, with dark hair and a mustache. Then I realized why he had thumped on the stairs. One of his legs was shorter than the other one so his right shoe had a big sole on it thick as a brick. “So this is Nancy,” my mom said, a look of desperation in her eyes, as though she wished I was a bunch of daisies she could plunk into a vase of cold water and forget about.

  “How do.” Eddie smiled at me. A lock of his hair sprang out of place and fell down over his forehead.

  I mumbled, “Hello.”

  “I brought ya little sumthin’,” Eddie said, still smiling. He reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a small package wrapped in wrinkled blue and yellow striped paper. I didn’t want to touch it after it had been in his pocket. I looked at my mom, who was bouncing a little.

  I took the present and opened it. It was one of those straw thingamajigs you get at carnivals where you stick your fingers in and pull, and the next thing you know, you can’t get your fingers out again.

  “So if ya like it, there’s plenty more where it came from,” Eddie said with a laugh. Eddie sold carnival novelties—plastic dolls and wax teeth and combs shaped like fish. Marysville was on his route.

  My mother and I were stiff at dinner, but Eddie didn’t seem to mind. He rattled on and on with circus stories in a voice like Popeye. My mom beamed and laughed and said a million times, “Isn’t that something?” I pushed pieces of meat and potatoes around on the green plate with the ribbed edging as though they might form the words that would answer my prayers.

  Eddie laughed at his own jokes. His laugh sounded like he was sniffing, and once it looked like there was a piece of snot underneath his nostril, but it could have been cooked onion. My mom pretended not to notice.

  After dinner, I went into my bedroom and stared at the swirly purple and green wallpaper and daydreamed about the places I was going to run off to someday. Decatur, Illinois. Fargo, North Dakota. Pierre, Wisconsin.

  I decided to become a Catholic. I’d prayed to God a zillion times to change things, and it never worked, so I figured being a Baptist wasn’t good enough. I knew about Catholics because a lot of Italian kids at school went to the Catholic church, and I listened to them. I was a pretty good snoop.

  I pictured myself rubbing my hands on the bloodstained legs of a statue of poor Jesus on the cross and kissing his feet and eating wafers and drinking wine. I’d put statues of saints in the bedroom, wear a necklace of glass beads, and say Hail Marys, so the Lord would finally hear me. A letter would come or the phone would ring and someone would say there had been a mix-up wh
en I was born. I really belonged to a family in Tallahassee, Florida, and they would come and hug me and say “Our baby,” and take me home with them and buy me a red velvet dress like the one in Reddick’s Fashion Center window to make up for all the misery I’d been through.

  The problem was I didn’t know whether you could just become a Catholic or if you had to be born one like you were born German or Welsh or Polish. Most of the Catholics at school were Italians and hung out together like the rich kids and the future farmers.

  Then in fourth period math class I got my chance. A new girl, Eva Giacometti, had just transferred to Marysville from Carpenter’s Corner. She sat by me and had trouble with math, so I helped her out.

  It took me a while to work up my nerve. I could be a bigmouth when I clowned around, but I usually went tongue-tied if I had be serious. Finally one day at recess I plunked down next to Eva on a bench alongside a group of boys playing basketball and just blurted it out. “Uh, Eva, do … uh … they allow visitors at your church? I … uh … thought it would be fun to go to church with you some Sunday.” I looked away, nervous. Leroy Burnham kicked at a ball but stepped on it and fell forward on his knees. I winced.

  “Well, sure,” Eva said. I looked back at her. “We go to meetings at the Carpenter’s Corner Kingdom Hall. My older brother Daniel drives a bunch of us over every Sunday.”

  Carpenter’s Corner Kingdom Hall?

  I gasped. Eva wasn’t Catholic. She was a Holy Roller. Leave it to me. I picked the only Italian Holy Roller in town.

  I thought fast. “But … uh … I have to ask my mom first. I mean, I really want to come to your … uh … church, but I have to ask my mom. I’ll ask her tonight and let you know if she says I can go, okay?” I started backing away, bumped into a water fountain, felt myself go red, and rushed in to Mr. Pennymacher’s science class.

  “Well, sure,” Eva called after me, and practically as soon as I got home from school, she came around with a pile of pamphlets telling how wonderful it was to be a Holy Roller.