When I Was a Little Girl/Chapter 9

by Zona Gale

IX

NEXT DOOR

The house next door had been vacant for two months when the New Family moved in. We had looked forward with excitement, not unmodified by unconscious aversion, to the arrival of the New Family.

“Have they any girls?” we had inquired when the To Rent sign had come down.

They had, it appeared, one girl. We saw her, with wavy hair worn “let down” in the morning, though we ourselves wore let-down hair only for occasions, pig-tails denoting mornings. She had on new soles—we saw them showing clean as she was setting her feet daintily; and when we, who were walking the fence between the two houses, crossed glances with her, we all looked instantly away, and though it was with regret that we saw her put into the ’bus next day to go, we afterward learned, to spend the Spring with her grandmother in a dry climate, we still felt a certain satisfaction that our social habits were not to be disquieted.

Nothing at all had been suspected of a New Boy. Into that experience I came without warning.

I was sitting on the flat roof of my playhouse in the fence corner, laboriously writing on the weathered boards with a bit of a picket, which, as everybody knows, will make very clear brown letters, when the woodshed door of the house next door opened, and the New Boy came out. He came straight up to the fence and looked up at me, the sun shining in his eyes beneath the rimless plush cap which he was still wearing. He was younger than I, so I was not too afraid of him.

“What you got?” he inquired.

I showed him my writing material.

“I wrote on a window with a diamond ring a’ready,” he submitted.

I had heard of this, but I had never wholly credited it and I said so. Besides, it would wear the ring out and who wanted to wear out a diamond ring to write on a window?

“It don't wear it out,” the New Boy said. “It can keep right on writing forever and ever.”

“Nothing can keep right on forever,” I contended.

He cast about for an argument.

“Trees does,” he produced it.

I glanced up at them. They certainly seemed to bear him out. I decided to abandon the controversy, and I switched with some abruptness to a subject not unconnected with trees, and about which I had often wondered.

“If you was dirt,” I observed, “how could you decide to be into a potato when you could be into an apple just as well?”

The New Boy was plainly taken aback. Here he was, as I see now, doing his best to be friendly and to make conversation personal, to say nothing of his having condescended to parley with a girl at all, and I was rewarding him with an abstraction.

Said he: “Huh?”

“If you was dirt—” I began a little doubtfully, but still sticking to the text.

“I ain't dirt,” denied the New Boy, with some heat.

“I says, if you was dirt—” I tried to tell him, in haste and some discomfort.

He climbed down from the fence on which he had been socially contriving to stick, though his was the “plain” side.

“There ain't any girl,” he observed with dignity, “going to call me dirt, nor call me if-I-was-dirt, either,” and stalked back into the woodshed.

I looked after him in the utmost distress. I had been dealing in what I had considered the amenities, and it had come to this. Already the New Boy hated me.

I slipped to the ground and waited, watching through the cracks in the fence. Ages passed. At length I heard him call his dog and go whistling down the street. I climbed on the fence and sat looking over in the deserted garden.

Round the corner of the house next door somebody came. I saw a long, gray plaid shawl, with torn and flapping tassels, pinned about a small figure, with long legs. As she put her hand on the latch, she flashed me her smile, and it was Mary Elizabeth. She went immediately inside the shed door, and left me staring. What was she doing there? What unexpected places I was always seeing her. Why should she go in the woodshed of the New Family whom we didn't even know ourselves?

After due thought, I dropped to the other side of the fence, and proceeded to the wood-shed door myself. It was unlatched, and as I peered in, I caught the sweet, moist smell of green wood, like the cool breath of the wood yard, where I had first seen her. When my eyes became used to the dimness, I perceived Mary Elizabeth standing at the end of a pile of wood, of the sort which we used to denominate “chunks,” which are what folk now call fireplace logs, though they are not properly fireplace logs at all only “chunks” for sitting-room stoves and trying to look meet to new estates. They were evenly piled, and they presented a wonderful presence, much more human than a wall.

“See,” said Mary Elizabeth, absorbedly, “every end of one is pictures. Here’s a wheel with a wing on, and here’s a griffin eating a lemon.”

I stared over her shoulder, fascinated. There they were. And there were grapes and a chandelier and a crooked street. . . .

Some moments later we were aware that the kitchen door had opened, and that somebody was standing there. It was the woman of the New Family, with a black veil wound round her head and the ends dangling. She shook a huge purple dust-cloth, and I do not seem to recall that there was anything else to her, save her face and veil and the cloth.

“Now then!” she said briskly, and in a tone of dreadful warning. “Now then!”

Mary Elizabeth turned in the utmost eagerness and contrition.

“Oh,” she said, “I come to see about the work.”

The New Family Woman towered at us from the top of the three steps.

“How much work,” she inquired with majesty, “do you think I'd get out of you, young miss, at this rate?”

Mary Elizabeth drew nearer to her and stood before her, down in the chips, in the absurd shawl.

“If you'll leave me come,” she said earnestly, “I'll promise not to see pictures. Well,” she added conscientiously, “I'll promise not to stop to look at ’em.”

How much weight this would have carried, I do not know; but at that moment the woman chanced to touch with her foot a mouse-trap that stood on the top step, and it “sprung” and shed its cheese. In an instant Mary Elizabeth had deftly reset and restored it. This made an impression on the arbiter.

“You're kind of a handy little thing, I see,” she said. “And of course you're all lazy, for that matter. And I do need somebody. Well, I've got a woman coming for to-day. You can begin in the morning. Dishes, vegetables, and general cleaning, and anything else I think you can do. Board and clothes only, mind you—and them only as long as you suit.”

“Yes'm. No'm. Yes'm.” Mary Elizabeth tried to agree right and left.

Outside I skipped in the sun.

“We’re going to be next-yard neighbours,” I cried, and that reminded me of the New Boy. I told her about him as we went round by the gate, there being no cross piece for a foothold on that side the fence.

“Oh,” said Mary Elizabeth, “I know him. He’s drove me home by my braids. He doesn't mean anything.”

“Well,” I said earnestly, “when you get a chance, you tell him that I wasn't calling him dirt. I says if he was dirt, how could he tell to be a potato or an apple.”

Mary Elizabeth nodded. “Lots of boys pretend mad,” she said philosophically, “to get you to run after them.”

This was new to me. Could it be possible that you had to imagine folks, and what they really meant, as well as tending to all the other imagining?

“Can't you stay over?” I extended hospitality to Mary Elizabeth.

She could “stay over,” it seemed, and without asking. This freedom of hers used to fill me with longing. To “stay over” without asking, to go down town, to eat unexpected offerings of food, to climb a new tree, as Mary Elizabeth could do, and all without asking! It was almost like being boys.

Now that Mary Elizabeth was to be a neighbour, a new footing was established. This I did not reason about, nor did I wonder why this footing might not be everybody's footing. We merely set to work on the accepted basis.

This comprised: Name, including middle name, if any, and for whom named; age, and birthday, and particulars about the recent or approaching birthday; brothers and sisters, together with their names, ages, and birthdays; birthstones; grade; did we comb our own hair; voluntary information concerning tastes in flowers, colours, and food; and finally an examination and trying on of each other's rings. The stone had come out of Mary Elizabeth’s ring, and she had found a clear pink pebble to insert in its place. She had, she said, grated the pebble on a brick to make it fit and she herself thought that it looked better than the one that she had lost, “but,” she added modestly, “I s'pose it can't be.”

Then came the revelation. To finish comparing notes we sat down together in my swing. And partly because, when I made a new friend, I was nervously eager to give her the best I had and at once, and partly because I was always wanting to see if somebody would understand, and chiefly because I never could learn wisdom, I looked up in the apple tree, now forsaken of all its pink, and fallen in a great green stillness, and I told her about my lady in the tree. I told her, expecting now no more than I had received from Delia and the Eversley girls. But Mary Elizabeth looked up and nodded.

“I know,” she said. “I've seen lots of ’em. They's a lady in the willow out in our alley. I see her when I empty the ashes and I pour ’em so's they won't blow on her.”

I looked at her speechlessly. To this day I can remember how the little curls were caught up above Mary Elizabeth’s ear that morning. Struck by my silence she turned and regarded me. I think I must have blushed and stammered like a boy.

“Can you see them too?” I asked. “In trees and places?”

“Why, yes,” she said in surprise. “Can't everybody?”

Suddenly I was filled with a great sense of protection for Mary Elizabeth. I felt incalculably older. She had not yet found out, and I must never let her know, that everybody does not see all that there is to be seen in the world!

One at a time I brought out my treasures that morning and shared them with her, as treasures; and she brought out hers as matters of course. I remember that I told her about the Theys that lived in our house. They were very friendly and wistful. They never presumed or frightened one or came in the room when anyone was there. But the minute folk left the room—ah, then! They slipped out

“But the minute folk left the room—ah then!”

from everywhere and did their living. I was always trying to catch them. I would leave a room innocently, and then whirl and fling it open in the hope of surprising them. But always They were too quick for me. In the times when the family was in the rooms and They were waiting for us to go, They used to watch us, still friendly and wistful, but also a little critical. Sometimes a whole task, or a mood, could be got through pleasantly because They were looking on.

Mary Elizabeth nodded. “They like our parlour best,” she said. “They ain't any furniture in there. They don't come much in the kitchen.”

It was the same at our house. They were always lurking in the curtained parlour, but the cheery, busy kitchen seldom knew them—except when one went out for a drink of water late at night. Then They barely escaped one.

How she understood! Delia I loved with all the loyalties, but I could not help remembering a brief conversation that I had once held with her.

“Do you have Theys at your house?” I had asked her, at the beginning of our acquaintance.

“Yes,” she admitted readily. “Company all this week. From Oregon. They do their hairs on kids.”

“I don't mean them,” I explained. “I mean Theys, that live in between your rooms.”

“We don't let mice get in our house,” she replied loftily, “Only sometimes one gets in the woodshed. Do you use Choke-'em traps, or Catch-'em-alive traps and have the cat there?”

“Catch-them-alive-and-let-them-out-in-the-alley traps,” I told her, and gave up hope, I remember, and went on grating more sugar-stone for the mud-pie icing.

Mary Elizabeth and I made mud pies that morning too, but all the time we made them we pretended. Not House-keep, or Store, or Bakery, or Church-sale none of these pale pretendings to which I had chiefly been bound, save when I played alone. But now every pie and cake that we finished we two carried carefully and laid here and there, under raspberry bushes, in the crotch of the apple tree, on the wood-chopper's block.

“For Them to get afterwards,” we said briefly. We did not explain—I do not think that we could have explained. And we knew nothing of the old nights in the motherland when from cottage supper tables scraps of food were flung through open doors for One Waiting Without. But this business made an even more excellent thing of mud-pie baking, always a delectable pastime.

When the noon whistle was blowing up at the brick yard, a shadow darkened our pine board. It was the New Boy. One of his cheeks protruded extravagantly. Silently he held out to me a vast pink substance of rock-like hardness, impaled on a stick. Then, with an obvious effort, more spiritual than physical, he extracted from his pocket a third of the kind, for Mary Elizabeth, on whose presence he had not counted. We accepted gratefully, I in the full spirit of the offer. Three minutes later he and I were at our respective dinner tables, trying, I suppose, to discuss this surreptitious first course simultaneously with our soup; and Mary Elizabeth, on her way home, was blissfully partaking of her hors d'œuvre, unviolated by any soup.

“What are the new children like, I wonder?” said Somebody Grown. “I see there are two. I don't know a thing about the people, but we can’t call till the woman at least gets her curtains up.”

I pondered this. “Why?” I ventured at last.

“Because she wouldn’t want to see us,” was the reply.

Were curtains, then, so important that one might neither call nor be called on without them? What other possible explanation could there be? Perhaps Mary Elizabeth’s mother had no curtains and that was why our mothers did not know her.

“Mary Elizabeth is going to help do the work for the New Family, and live there,” I said at last. “Won’t it be nice to have her to play with?”

“You must be very kind to her,” somebody said.

“Kind to her!” It was my first horrified look into the depths of the social condescensions. Kind to her—when I remembered what we shared! I thought of saying hotly that she was my best friend. But I was silent. There was, after all, no way to make anybody understand what had opened to me that morning.