With Mama, I didn’t have to pretend. “Don’t you give up, Minnie,” she’d tell me when she helped me with my schoolwork at night, letting me pace the kitchen as I memorized spelling words and helping me write out my composition papers.
I didn’t give up. Not until later, that is.
My favorite part of the week was Saturday afternoon, when Mama would take me to the Odessa Picture House. It was always just me and Mama. Penny didn’t like the pictures—not even Charlie Chaplin, which I couldn’t understand.
Mama would read the titles in my ear as Douglas Fairbanks saved Mary Pickford from the pirates or Fatty Arbuckle got into one fix or another. Even after I could read well enough to follow on my own, she still whispered in my ear. One afternoon, after laughing ourselves silly over the Little Tramp, as we walked into the sunshine and out of the blue, I told Mama I wished I were more like Penny.
She turned to me and said, “Minnie Zimmerman, if you were like your sister, who would come to the picture show with me?”
I shrugged.
“Don’t wish to be like anybody else, sweet thing,” she said, cupping my face in her hand. “You have hidden talents of your own. You’ll find your way, my girl. Don’t you doubt it.”
She believed in me, Mama did.
I was sixteen when she died.
She had been sick for most of that summer. Penny was good at taking care of Mama, just like she was good at everything else. She made her eat even as Mama’s rosy, rounded cheeks turned sunken and the color of ash. Gave her the medicine the doctor brought, even when it seemed not to help.
I couldn’t bear to stay in that room, the smell of sickness, the woman in bed who didn’t look a thing like Mama. I knew I should sit with her, read to her, talk to her like Penny did. But I couldn’t. I wish now I’d spent every minute with her.
She died quietly on a sunny September day in 1926, the kind of day she called Indian summer—warm and golden with just a hint of crispness in the air. Penny and Papa and I were all there. Mama took my hand in a papery, dry grip. I wanted to tell her I was sorry, that I hadn’t been a good daughter to her, that I loved her. But a lump like a goose egg had lodged in my throat and just kept getting bigger. My eyes burned. I buried my face in Papa’s shoulder and prayed.Please, please, please.I don’t know what I was praying for, but when I opened my eyes, she was still. So still.
The next spring, Penny graduated at the top of her class from Odessa Consolidated. She took over the house and took good care of Papa. She cooked and cleaned and made his favorite food. She did everything right, just like the good daughter she was.
I had two years left of school, but without Mama’s help, my marks got so bad the teachers told me I’d have to repeat part of my classes. I left at the end of the term and never went back.
I pretended I didn’t care.
I felt funny without Mama. Unattached. Like a dandelion seed floating on a breeze, unable to direct my own way and not knowing where I was going. Nothing could really reach me where I was, but I couldn’t reach anyone else, either. I tried to not think about it. I pretended I was fine.
Papa didn’t want me to quit school and said so. I told him I’d get a job, that we needed the money. I was right and he knew it.
I got a job at the Odessa diner with my friend Ruth. Ruth didn’t have the greatest reputation, but she was as different from Penny asnight from day, and that was a nice change. I didn’t see any harm in bobbing my hair like she did and shortening my skirts. My tips doubled and so did the number of boys hanging around when our shift was over. Ruth and I got to be good pals. She knew a lot about boys, and it wasn’t long before I did, too.
The boys were easy enough to handle. Sure, sometimes they stole a kiss or two in the picture house, but I could cope with that without missing a line of dialogue. It was part of the deal, Ruth said. They paid my way, and in return I doled out kisses like change from the cash register. I didn’t see the harm in it. Besides, Ruth said everybody did it.
Penny didn’t see things the same way. “You’re heading for a fall,” she said.
I know it was a terrible thing to say, but I figured Penny was just jealous. I’d be lying if I didn’t say it was nice to have a new beau take me to the pictures every week while Penny stayed home with her cross-stitching. When I was riding in a boy’s auto or laughing at Laurel and Hardy at the cinema, I didn’t have to think about Mama or the farm. But if Penny knew how it turned out in the end, she would have said, “I told you so,” like she always did.
For eight dollars a week plus penny tips, I took orders at the diner and carried plates loaded with eggs and bacon or steak and potatoes. It wasn’t a lot, but I felt like I was helping out. By then, I knew the farm was sinking fast because I’d been doing Papa’s books for a while. It wasn’t hard, not like grammar and spelling. The money we made on one side, the money we paid out on the other, and at the bottom, how much I could deposit in the bank. Anybody could do it. And it didn’t take a genius to see we were just scraping by, just like everybody else.
Way back during the Great War, when wheat was selling attwo dollars a bushel, Papa had borrowed money to buy the sixty acres south of our farm, putting the acres we already owned up as security. Everybody had borrowed then, with demand what it was. But by ’27 land prices had dropped so low we owed more than those sixty acres were worth. We couldn’t sell it—we couldn’t even afford to plant it, what with grain selling so low—but we still had to pay the mortgage every February and October, and taxes on the whole caboodle every March 15. Then came the drought of ’29. Everybody said we’d hit bottom and there was nowhere to go but up. But everybody sure was wrong.
In October of 1929, the crash came. Things sounded bad on Black Thursday but got worse on Black Monday. Then came the panic of Black Tuesday.
“Hard times are coming,” Papa said. Harder times than we’ve already had? I remember thinking. But Papa sure was right.
Penny turned even more thrifty, making soap and trading eggs for what we needed at the grocer. Papa repaired the old tractor with baling wire and a prayer. We patched our dresses and darned Papa’s socks until they were more darn than sock. We tightened our belts to the last notch, like Papa said, and then we made more notches. I recorded every penny in the columns of Papa’s ledger, wishing I could make some more appear, but it didn’t work like that.
When the New Year came and everyone was welcoming 1930 with something close to hope, I took a good look at the farm ledger. It wasn’t a pretty sight. Sure, we had almost three hundred dollars in the bank, but we’d need more than that to pay the taxes and the mortgage when they came due, not to mention seed for spring and hired hands for planting and harvesting. It didn’t add up, and I told Penny and Papa so.
“We’ll make do,” Papa said. “We have a roof over our headsand each other.” He took my hand and Penny’s in each of his own, so we were all linked. “If your mama was here, that’s what she’d say.”
Penny didn’t have Papa’s faith. After Papa left for the barn, she grabbed my arm hard. “We have to do something.”
Like she expected me to have some great scheme.
