Rhonda the Rubber Woman Read online

  “Gee, thanks,” I said, standing at the door, holding the papers out as though they were old socks.

  “Oh, that’s okay,” Eva said. “I thought you might want to read this.” She slipped a pamphlet out of the pack, looking down. She had the thickest eyelashes I’d ever seen and her black hair grew down on her cheeks, like sideburns. “This one is good because it’s not too long.”

  “Thanks a lot.” I started closing the door. Eva sighed, but smiled as she turned around. I felt bad for a minute, but the last thing I wanted was to get in with a Holy Roller. Holy Rollers were even lower on the totem poll than I was.

  I sat on a stuffed chair in the living room, flipped my legs over the arm, and read the pamphlet anyway. It said Jehovah’s Witnesses were preparing for Armageddon. It said we were living in the last days of the world but a new and better world was coming. It said Jehovah’s Witnesses were more moral than other people. Some of them even lived as husband and wife without sex.

  I perked up. This was just what I wanted. A better world. A life without sex. The nap of the chair started scratching the backs of my legs so I swung them off and stood, staring out the window. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to go to church with Eva just one time. One little visit couldn’t hurt.

  “So Eva, a new kid at school, asked me to go to church with her tomorrow,” I lied to my mom. “It seems like the friendly thing to do, don’t you think? She’s new in town and all.” It was Saturday morning. My mom was in the bedroom getting dressed to go out with Eddie.

  “Well, yeah, that would be friendly.” My mother gave me a sunny smile. She reached into the sleeve of her eyelet blouse and tugged on her dress shields as she studied herself in the mirror. “You can wear your blue straw hat. It’ll look cute.”

  “Yeah.”

  She didn’t ask what church Eva went to. She was too anxious to try out some new leg makeup she’d just bought. Since the war, she couldn’t get any stockings. The Rutt Ridge Silk Factory, where she worked, didn’t even make them anymore.

  They made parachutes and camouflage material instead. She and the other girls she worked with put tan makeup on their legs to look like stockings, then drew seams up the back with eyebrow pencil. It never looked like they were really wearing stockings. It looked like they were wearing leg makeup with seams drawn up the back. But you could tell they were proud of themselves for finding a way to make do.

  I stood in the doorway for a minute and watched my mom rub the thick tan liquid on her right instep, ankle, shin, and knee, her fingers working carefully and slowly up toward her thighs. I slipped outside and headed for the empty lot behind Doc’s to practice some of my double-jointed tricks. I could bend down in front and touch my nose to the ground. I could curl up into a tight ball and roll. My mom had a conniption fit whenever she caught me. “That’s so unladylike,” she’d scold. But later a kid at school would say, “Hey, Nancy, show Horse Uhler how you can twist yourself,” and that would be all I needed.

  On Sunday Eva and Daniel picked me up with a car full of yokels wearing plain cotton dresses and no hats or gloves. At the Kingdom Hall, Eva said she had to sit with her family but Virginia, one of the kids from the car, would take me in to the meeting.

  Virginia was ugly and wore huge thick glasses. “So, do you have any questions?” she asked.

  “Well, uh, yeah, I do. I was wondering if Jehovah’s Witnesses have a special way of praying?” Aunt Cora had once told me they cried out and talked in words that weren’t really theirs but came from the spirit world. She said they sometimes rolled in the aisles.

  Virginia narrowed her eyes. “That’s not a good question. You should ask how you can be saved when the world comes to an end.”

  I wanted to say, “Well, isn’t praying a part of it?” But I decided not to argue and I touched the fingertips of my white gloves together. “Okay. How can I?”

  She started spouting off the same stuff I’d read in the brochure except more boring. The only interesting thing was I could see my reflection in her glasses. The sun fell on them in a way that made my face look curved and out of shape, like in the funhouse mirrors at Dorney Park. My straw hat looked like a bright blue halo around my head with glimmers dancing at the edges. I kept staring at my reflection and Virginia seemed to think I was fascinated with what she was saying. It seemed like a trick worth knowing.

  Finally she shut up and took me inside. There were no statues of Jesus. No beads or stained glass or lighted candles. Just bare cement walls and a wood table with a pile of Watchtower magazines. We sang a hymn “Here he is who comes from Eden, all his raiments stained with blood.” Then a man with red hair and short arms got up and preached.

  “Never forget, we are imperfect beings, descended from the wretched sinner, Eve,” he said.

  “Remember,” he said, “we offend Jehovah twenty-seven times a day. Every one of us.” I looked around. Kids stared at their shoes. Grown-ups shook their heads, and I wondered what sins they hid behind their frowns. Little things, I was sure. Gossip, maybe. Backbiting. Coveting a neighbor’s something or other once in a while. At least they knew enough to frown and repent. My mom always sat in church smiling and staring straight ahead, looking innocent as a baby.

  The red-headed man rambled on about the millennium. I would rather have seen people talk in a weird language and roll in the aisles. But at the end he said, “Remember, it is better to be persecuted than to be popular,” and I perked up. Maybe I fit in with the Holy Rollers after all.

  On the way home we stopped at one of the girls’ houses for milk and cookies. She lived in the sticks, but her house was like a normal one you’d see in Marysville, with windows and a roof and a kitchen. I was surprised. I thought people from the sticks lived in shacks, like Charlie Chaplin.

  As she handed me a glass of milk, the girl asked me, “So whose kid are you?” The old panicky feeling rushed through me, but I was getting older and smarter. I came up with a story Mrs. Stiles would have been proud of. Mrs. Stiles often wrote on my compositions, “Such a lively imagination.”

  “Uh, well, the truth is I live with a woman named Georgia Sayers,” I said, “but she isn’t my real mom. My real parents were the Foul Rift Lovers. Uh … have any of you ever heard of the Foul Rift lovers?”

  They shook their heads.

  “Well,” I explained, “they lived on two different sides of the Delaware River at Foul Rift. Foul Rift is the most dangerous part of the river. The current is so strong boats get sunk and people crack their heads on the rocks and die.”

  I took a sip of my milk. It tasted terrible, as though the glass had been washed with Bon Ami.

  “Well, once a beautiful girl named Carrie who lived on the Pennsylvania side fell in love with a handsome man named Keith from the New Jersey shore, and he would swim over to meet her. Their love was so strong he was the only person ever able to swim across Foul Rift and live.”

  I liked them staring at me.

  “Eventually Carrie and Keith got married and he moved in with her family. It was like a movie, they were so happy. Then to celebrate their first anniversary, they took a boat out together and the Foul Rift current got stronger than it ever had before and their boat sank. They were never found.”

  “Oh, no,” Eva said. I was quiet for a minute. You could hear the crunch of cookies between teeth.

  “Sometimes on moonlit nights folks say you can see them out on the water,” I said.

  “Wow. That’s so sad. But so romantic,” Eva sighed, her mouth hanging open like a little pink tunnel. Virginia gave her a dirty look.

  “What nobody knew,” I finished, “was that Carrie had a baby before she died. That was me. Her parents were too old to take care of me so they gave me to Georgia Sayers. That’s why I don’t look anything like Georgia.” I loved calling my mom by her first name.

  “So how did Carrie know Georgia?” Virginia asked. I stared at the stringy brown hair and glasses. People who were so ugly shouldn’t talk so much, I thought.

 
“She just did,” I snapped. “I don’t know every little thing.”

  Virginia scrunched up her face and my heart started racing. I remembered people from Carpenter’s Corner worked at the Rutt Ridge Silk Factory. Suppose one of their moms or dads knew my mother. So I quickly added, “Some people tell other stories about Georgia, but they’re not true. This is the real truth. But you have to promise not to tell because Georgia wouldn’t like it. She promised she wouldn’t let people make a fuss over me.”

  “Oh, we won’t tell,” Eva gushed. I believed her. After all, their pamphlets said the Jehovah’s Witnesses were moral and trustworthy. Plus Eva depended on me to help her get through math.

  Besides, I was so thrilled with how smoothly the story had all come together, I could hardly sit still. I liked the Holy Rollers better all the time. Maybe God really was beginning to hear my prayers.

  Daniel drove us back to his and Eva’s house, and I strutted home from there feeling light as air. I passed Bobby Felker, a cute kid from school, and his father, Barney, putting tin cans in the scrap metal bin outside the five and dime. I gave them a sunny smile. They smiled back and I got chills across my neck. I crossed Broadway daydreaming I was standing at the door of a wooden riverside house waving to Bobby as he rowed across Foul Rift smiling at me.

  “Well, I guess you had a good time with Eva,” my mom said. She’d taken off her church dress and sat at the kitchen table in her slip drinking a cup of coffee and smoking. She’d put her spectator pumps out on the fire escape to air.

  “Yeah. I sure did.”

  “Well, I guess it’s nice to go to church with someone your own age,” she said. She leaned over the table to stub out her cigarette and I could see inside her brassiere. I turned away.

  “Yeah,” I said, staring at the linoleum. I decided I didn’t care if the Jehovah’s Witnesses did have boring meetings. I didn’t care if people did make fun of them. I was going to become one. I wanted to make up for the sins of the wretched sinner Eve and the wretched sinner Georgia. I wanted to be saved before the world came to an end. I wanted to live in paradise on earth.

  But Virginia ruined everything. I found out on Wednesday after book hour at the library.

  My mom was sitting on the sofa with red eyes and droopy shoulders. Aunt Cora was there. “I want to talk to you,” she said. “Your mom is too upset.”

  In the kitchen Aunt Cora sat me down next to her and told me what had happened. Virginia had blabbed everything to her mother, and her mother told Mrs. Mackey at the beauty parlor. Mrs. Mackey told Reverend Mackey, and he called my mom. He’d offered to talk to me, but she’d said no, Cora would come up from Clinton and do it. I was grateful for that. I loved Aunt Cora. I had once overheard Uncle Walt gripe about her driving up to Marysville so often but she told him Grandma had made her promise to keep an eye on Georgia. Uncle Walt had said, “Jesus P. Christ, that’s gonna do a lot of good, isn’t it? She’s already a slut,” and I heard him slam a fist into the palm of his hand. But Aunt Cora was used to my uncle’s temper. She had just said, “Oh, shush, Walt,” and kept on coming anyway. Aunt Cora cheered me up with stories about her job at a music store and her jokes and big-city smells—spicy, smoky, bittersweet smells that reminded me there was a whole other world somewhere.

  “Nancy, I’m sure you know that was a very bad thing to do … to lie like that,” my aunt said now. Her blue eyes in her perfect face looked straight at me in a way my mother never could. I didn’t even mind her scolding me, I was so glad to see her. In fact, I kind of liked it, her face tilted toward me, her breath warming the air between us.

  “It was just a joke,” I lied, but I had to turn away. I stared for a minute at the Bless This House cross-stitch above the stove, then looked back at my aunt. “We were just some kids sitting around telling jokes. Making up stories.”

  Aunt Cora’s voice got quiet. “Jehovah’s Witnesses wouldn’t sit around after church making up stories,” she said. “And certainly not about their parents.”

  I jerked in my chair at the word “parents.”

  My heart jumped. This was the first time anybody in my family had ever said anything about my situation. Suddenly I couldn’t look at Aunt Cora. Suddenly the air in the room was pushing against my chest. I felt like I couldn’t breathe, as though Aunt Cora had stirred up a voice that was always deep inside me, asking, “Do you think he cares a fig about you?”

  “I’m sorry.” My mouth felt dry. I clenched my fists until they hurt.

  Aunt Cora reached over and put her hand on my shoulder, her eyes watery. “Go in and tell your mother. There’s nothing else you can do.”

  I shuffled into the living room and whispered, “I’m sorry. I thought everybody was just kidding around.”

  My mom didn’t answer. She was so upset she didn’t even bounce, just sat there with empty eyes, smoking and rolling the cellophane wrapper from her Raleighs into a tight little ball.

  Watching her, I wasn’t sorry at all. I was furious. Why couldn’t she say something? Why couldn’t she tell me the real story? What was so dark and terrible about having me that she couldn’t even say it out loud? I felt rumbles in my stomach like thunderstorms rising.

  4

  GEORGIA, 1942

  I thought we’d have a lot of fun—me and Eddie and Cora and Walt—sort of a double date. Walt’s such a card I thought Eddie’d get a kick out of him.

  Things started fine. We were at the Tip Top Tap Room over in Richmond Township. It was nicer than the tap rooms in town. It had a ladies’ entrance and a polished wood bar with a pyramid of glasses stacked upside down. Walt and Cora were drinking bourbon, Eddie had a beer, and I had a Pink Lady.

  Eddie looked good. Even though it was winter, he was wearing a yellow cotton shirt with loose sleeves that got tight at the wrist. He said it had once belonged to one of the Flying Wallendas. Eddie had snappy clothes.

  “So, did you hear the one about the insurance man who asked a couple if there was any insanity in the family?” Walt joked.

  We shook our heads.

  “The wife said, ‘Only that my husband thinks he’s the head of the household.’”

  Everyone hooted.

  Walt’s eyes went glinty. He was getting started. “Well, if you ask me, I’d tell you the Army has it all wrong to not draft married men.”

  “How come?” Cora smiled and lit up an Old Gold.

  “Because they’d be the only recruits who really know how to take orders.”

  Cora snorted from laughing and inhaling her cigarette at the same time.

  I nudged Eddie. “See, I told you. Isn’t Walt a card?”

  “Yeah. A real pistol.” Eddie’d been tapping the plastic stirrer that came with my drink on the table, and now he tapped it on my fingers, looking down. His hands were almost as small as mine. After he finished all my fingers, he looked up and gave me a wink and a smile. It felt good being part of a couple.

  We had another round of drinks. The Andrews Sisters sang “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” from the jukebox. Cora and Eddie wiggled in their seats to the music, Cora’s shoulder pads bouncing up and down. Walt rolled his eyes but then the glint in them went out. Cora had started doing a patty-cake with Eddie to the music, and you could see Walt didn’t like it. His face changed, like in the movie, “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” Maybe he’d put down too many. Walt could be a mean drunk.

  He looked at Eddie. “So, I don’t know about you, little guy, but me, I’m ready to sign myself up. I’m going to go kill me some Krauts.” He eyed Eddie’s club foot.

  Eddie just smiled, but I saw a little tic around the edges of his mouth.

  “I guess you can take care of all the gals us GIs are going to leave behind on the homefront.” Walt grinned but it was all teeth. There wasn’t anything friendly to it.

  Cora poked him. “Oh, Walt, with your flat feet you’ll probably be right here on the homefront yourself. You can take care of all the gals yourself.”

  Eddie laughed. He’s like me. He
ignores insults. I like that about him. He took a swig of his beer and licked his lips. The yellow light in the bar seemed to go orangey and harsh. It made me blink.

  We weren’t having any fun any more, so we left the Tip Top and went back to the apartment. Walt made a beehive for my room and passed out. Nancy was asleep in the other bedroom.

  Eddie and Cora and I sat in the parlor.

  Cora flashed Eddie her flirty smile “Tell me, Eddie, being in the circus business, do you ever meet any fortune tellers?”

  Eddie leaned back on the blue plush sofa. It had started snowing on the way home, and a lock of his hair was wet, falling over his face. It made him look a little like Clark Gable, I thought as I sat alongside him. Only smaller. “Ah, fortune tellers,” he said. “You betcha. You betchur boots. All’s you gotta do is name ‘em, honey. I’ve met ‘em.” Eddie called girls “honey.”

  “I’ve always thought I’d like to get my fortune told,” Cora said from the easy chair, “but Walt says it’s crap. Dirty gypsies peddling superstitious crap.” She grinned saying the word “crap.” Cora loved to shock people more than ever since she got married. Walt egged her on. “I guess men think they already know everything.”

  “Not me,” Eddie said. “I’ve had my fortune told probably a hundred times. Madame Rachel. The Omniscient Olga. Bernadette from Bengal. I’ve been to ‘em all. Of course, being in the business, they do me for free.” He rearranged himself on the sofa and picked at some of the loose pleats in the sleeve of his shirt. I felt the cushion shift underneath us.

  “Is that right? Do they use a crystal ball? Tea leaves or what?” Cora’s eyes were as bright as neon signs. Me, I was like Walt. I didn’t care for fortune tellers. I didn’t like dirty people either, plus I didn’t want to worry about the future.

  Eddie pushed the hank of hair off his forehead. “They’re all different. Some read cards. Some read your palms. Tea leaves. Coffee grounds. All kinds of things. Madame Sharon over in West Virginia felt the bumps there. Told my fortune by feeling the bumps on my head. There’s a lot of ways people who have the gift can see the future.”