AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I knew the Vernons well enough—or, at least, I knew Mrs. Vernon. Her only child, Sissy, had been in school with me from kindergarten on, and I had been at the class picnic last year, over at Durham’s Pond, when Sissy drowned. She was a strange, frail, sickly girl, absent from school a good part of the time. She usually carried a wadded-up Kleenex in one hand because her nose was constantly running. When we were little and had to square dance or line up with partners—something where you had to hold hands—people fought to avoid Sissy because they didn’t want to touch the hand that held the wad of Kleenex. But that was about as close as anyone came to paying attention to her. As far as plainness goes, I’m hardly one to speak, but at least I was unmistakably around and alive. Even before she died, Sissy was a kind of ghost, always just out of the picture, always just out of your mind.
She drowned on a cool overcast day—the kind of day that seems impossibly misplaced in summer. A few people were swimming despite the weather, but most of us were sitting along the grainy beach at the end of the pond near the parking lot. Bobby Peterson and Wayne Turner were out in a canoe and started hollering. They’d found her behind the big, wooden float. She was lying face down in the water with her arms and legs spread out as if she were making a snow angel. The boys tipped the canoe over trying to bring her in, and finally Mr. Malm, the gym teacher, had to swim her to shore using the cross-chest carry. He gave her artificial respiration, but you could tell it was too late. She’d always been pale, but stretched out on the beach under an overcast sky, her skin was the same steely color as the water in the pond. Her lips were a dark, purplish blue. She was the first dead person I’d ever seen, except at a funeral. It was the same for a lot of the kids.
Standing in the circle that gathered around while Mr. Malm worked on her, I had a painful feeling, totally selfish. I kept thinking that I’d lost a chance to do something good. I wished I’d said something to her—anything, a compliment on her bathing suit, a warning not to go in the water for an hour after she ate. I wished I’d noticed her, just that day. Later, walking home, I remember thinking that all of us who’d been there were tainted—that we’d allowed it to happen, and now our lives were forever changed. But the next day was sunny and warm. School let out, the lines grew at the Dairy Queen, the city pool opened, summer carried on. The only remembrance was a story in the paper in which Dr. Baker said Sissy hadn’t been eating anything and hadn’t got a cramp. He said he didn’t know why she’d drowned, that it was an anomaly. I didn’t know what the word meant until I looked it up in Bunny’s dictionary. Then I understood perfectly.
Anyway, Sissy was seriously religious—even at school, she’d talk about “putting herself in the hands of God.” (After she drowned, Tom went around saying that God must have held her under too long.) She and her mother belonged to a strict Protestant church—something Baptist, with no dancing, no makeup, no card-playing—that met in a small, converted barn just outside of town. The church—the barn—was terribly plain. Someone whitewashed it periodically, and a large, wood cross had been fastened to the door, but there were no stained glass windows, no soaring arches. The yard had even been cleared of trees. Every now and then, Bunny and I would happen to be driving by on a Sunday when people were streaming in or out. I would watch them and feel so sorry. Compared to my life with Bunny, their lives seemed so empty, so flat—as barren as the stark, white building in which they worshiped.
When I moved into the Vernons’ house, they put me in Sissy’s bedroom, on the second floor, at the end of the hall. The room, at first, was startling. Sissy had filled it with an enormous collection of religious figurines. All the shelves and tops of things were covered by little statues, most of them of Jesus. The statues were everywhere, lined up like toy soldiers. Mrs. Vernon said they were imported from Mexico, where artisans made them from plaster and gave them their bright coats of paint. Sissy ordered her collection from catalogues, starting when she was five. By the time she died, she’d put together a collection that ranged all over the life of Jesus. He was there as a baby—in a crib, being stared at by farm animals, or sitting in Mary’s lap under a halo. As a teenager, He was portrayed pacifying beasts and doing carpentry and just talking to a few old men. And then there was the adult Jesus section, lots of statues of Jesus carrying the cross, or blessing someone, or simply standing in His robe, His arms stretched at His sides, and His palms open. With His long, solemn, bearded face, Jesus looked about the same in all the figurines except one—a little statue of Him walking along a rocky road. Sissy placed that one facing the wall on the end of a shelf above the bed. One day, as I lay there it occurred to me that something was strange: Why would she have Him walking into a wall? So I stood on the bed to get a better look. It was Jesus, all right, the robes were flowing behind Him, and His palms were open. But in this figurine, He didn’t have a beard and His hair was short. He looked young and ordinary and a little like George Gobel. Sissy must have been embarrassed for Him.
Two other girls had stayed in Sissy’s room since she died, but Mrs. Vernon told me she hadn’t changed a thing. The room seemed that way—neat and perfectly arranged, like a room in a photograph. There was a wooden bureau, crowned with a doily, a small wooden desk with drawers underneath that still held Sissy’s school papers and report cards. (One day, when I was bored, I thumbed through them—she got mostly B’s and C’s and incompletes.) Her teddy bear still sat in a chair in the corner. The bed was covered by a yellow crinoline spread. And circling all around the room was some terrible, light pink wallpaper, decorated with bunches of daffodils tied by a ribbon. Two pictures cheered things up a bit: a painting of Man o’ War, standing in the winner’s circle with a wreath dangling over his neck, and Sissy’s fifth-grade class photograph. I was there in the second row, a skyscraper against the horizon.
The room had one window, just above the bed, and for my first few days, I spent most of my time staring out. The window faced the back yard, looking into a creaky oak tree with a branch like an old gray dog’s leg that passed just beside the house. On the other side of the lawn, over a fence, was a house belonging to the Porter family. Their only son, Ernie, was Tom’s age and had joined the navy. Mr. Porter’s mother now lived in Ernie’s room. She was very old and sometimes, looking out, I’d see her staring back across the yard at me.
That first weekend, Mrs. Vernon came up every few hours to see how I was doing and to urge me to come down. She was a thin, pale woman, always wearing an apron and constantly wiping her hands on it. I kept telling her I needed time to think. As the hours passed, she became more persistent. Finally, she knocked and stepped tentatively into the room. “How are you feeling?” she asked.
“Okay, thank you.” I still couldn’t say more than a word or two at a time. The effort was too exhausting after all the thinking I’d been doing. I felt cut off, though. I wanted her to go away, but to like me.
“I’m sure everything will work out,” she said.
I nodded.
“I’m sure,” she repeated. She relaxed slightly and looked around the room. It was early afternoon. The air was so still I could see dust particles in the light shafts, and the only sound was the angry buzz of flies against the window screen. “I get such pleasure out of this room,” she said. “It has so many memories. Sometimes, it seems that Sissy and I spent days up here together without ever coming out. I suppose you think that’s silly.”
“No, not at all.”
“She was always so delicate.…” Her voice trailed off, then came back. “She thrived in this room, like a hothouse flower. I wish you two had been better friends.” Mrs. Vernon took a few steps toward the end of the bed and placed her hand on the wall, touching it gently, as if it were a living thing. “Sissy picked out the wallpaper,” she said. “Do you like it?”
“Ahh.…” I should have lied and said yes, but my mind was so tired I couldn’t think quickly enough.
“I know,” she said, smiling, catching me before I’d had time to recover. “There is a lot of pink.” With her finger, she traced one of the bright yellow bouquets. “But Sissy loved daffodils. They were her favorite flower.”
“They’re beautiful.”
“We were rather lucky to find this print,” she said, stepping back to inspect the wall. “We got it from Fanzone’s Hardware, but Mr. Fanzone was keeping it in the stock room in back. One Friday night we went down to the store and looked over everything. Nothing was quite right. Mr. Fanzone wanted to close up, but the Eberhardt girl was working there then. You know, the one with the port-wine stain on her cheek.”
“Rosie.”
“Yes, Rosie. What a shame. Such a pretty girl otherwise. Anyway, she’d remembered seeing this in back and finally brought it out. As soon as they’d blown off the dust and unrolled it, Sissy yelled, ‘That’s it!’ She was so happy.
”
I could see it all: Sissy, the dust, the Kleenex squeezed in her hand. There was something deathly about the scene. “Gee,” I said.
“Yes.” Mrs. Vernon folded her hands at her waist and for a moment drifted with her thoughts. Suddenly, she stiffened and walked over to straighten the Man o’ War picture. Then she fluffed the teddy bear and propped him up again in the chair. “Well, I’m glad someone can use the room,” she said. “It’s a room that’s meant to be lived in.”
“Yes.”
She moved to the bureau and ironed the wrinkles out of the doily with her hand. “Now, I’m off to do some weeding,” she said. “Would you like to join me? The fresh air and sunshine would probably do you good.”
Her back was turned, and I quickly grabbed a book from a shelf under Sissy’s nighttable. “I thought I’d do some reading,” I said. She pivoted and I waved the book at her.
“Oh, how smart of you. What is it?”
I had to look. It was En Français, Sissy’s French text. I held it out for Mrs. Vernon to see.
“Why, that’s Sissy’s book.” Her face lit up, then darkened suddenly. “I suppose I should have taken it back to the high school.”
“I’m sure they don’t mind.”
