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“Better watch out yourself,” I snapped, annoyed and embarrassed to be so yanked away from the stars. I realized suddenly how cold the wind had become. She laughed merrily and, still walking backward, doubled her speed. She was not likely to run into anything. She never stumbled or bumped into things. That, she seemed to be saying, was what I did—often enough for both of us.
Grandma was prone to arthritis and did not go out on a winter’s night, even to prayer meeting. So once home, we had to tell her all about the concert. Caroline did most of the talking, singing a snatch of this or that to remind Grandma of a carol she claimed never to have heard before.
“Did you sing the Holy Night one again?”
“No, Grandma, remember, I told you Betty Jean Boyd was doing that this year.”
“Why was that? She can’t half sing like you can.”
“Caroline sang a different one this year, Mother.” My mother was making cocoa for us and calling in a word here and there from the kitchen. “Betty Jean sounded very sweet.”
Caroline gave me a look and snorted out loud. I knew she was expecting me to contradict Momma, but I wasn’t going to. If Caroline wanted to be snobbish about Betty Jean, she could do it on her own.
Caroline had begun to imitate Betty Jean’s singing of “O Holy Night.” It was almost perfect, just a fraction flatter and shakier than Betty Jean’s voice had been, the o’s and ah’s parodies of Betty Jean’s pretentious ones. She ended the performance with a mournful shriek more than a little off pitch and looked around, grinning for her family’s approval.
All the way through I had expected my parents to stop her, invoking, if nothing else, the nearness of the neighbors. But no one had. And now, she had finished and was waiting for our applause. It came in the form of a smile working at the firm corners of my father’s mouth. Caroline laughed happily. It was all she desired.
Surely Momma would protest. Instead she handed Grandma a cup to drink in her chair. “Here’s your cocoa, Mother,” she said. Caroline and I went to the table for ours, Caroline still smiling. I had a burning desire to hit her in the mouth, but I controlled myself.
That night I lay in bed with an emptiness chewing away inside of me. I said my prayers, trying to push it away with ritual, but it kept oozing back round the worn edges of the words. I had deliberately given up “Now I lay me down to sleep” two years before as being too babyish a prayer and had been using since then the Lord’s Prayer attached to a number of formula “God blesses.” But that night “Now I lay me” came back unbidden in the darkness.
Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.
“If I should die…” It didn’t push back the emptiness. It snatched and tore at it, making the hole larger and darker. “If I should die…” I tried to shake the words away with “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, for behold, thou art with me…”
There was something about the thought of God being with me that made me feel more alone than ever. It was like being with Caroline.
She was so sure, so present, so easy, so light and gold, while I was all gray and shadow. I was not ugly or monstrous. That might have been better. Monsters always command attention, if only for their freakishness. My parents would have wrung their hands and tried to make it up to me, as parents will with a handicapped or especially ugly child. Even Call, his nose too large for his small face, had a certain satisfactory ugliness. And his mother and grandmother did their share of worrying about him. But I had never caused my parents “a minute’s worry.” Didn’t they know that worry proves you care? Didn’t they realize that I needed their worry to assure myself that I was worth something?
I worried about them. I feared for my father’s safety every time there was a storm on the Bay, and for my mother’s whenever she took the ferry to the mainland. I read magazine articles in the school library on health and gave them mental physical examinations and tested the health of their marriage. “Can this marriage succeed?” Probably not. They had nothing in common as far as I could tell from the questionnaires I read. I even worried about Caroline, though why should I bother when everyone else spent their lives fretting over her?
I longed for the day when they would have to notice me, give me all the attention and concern that was my due. In my wildest daydreams there was a scene taken from the dreams of Joseph. Joseph dreamed that one day all his brothers and his parents as well would bow down to him. I tried to imagine Caroline bowing down to me. At first, of course, she laughingly refused, but then a giant hand descended from the sky and shoved her to her knees. Her face grew dark. “Oh, Wheeze,” she began to apologize. “Call me no longer Wheeze, but Sara Louise,” I said grandly, smiling in the darkness, casting off the nickname she had diminished me with since we were two.
4
“I hate the water.”
I didn’t even bother to look up from my book. Grandma had two stock phrases. The first was “I love the Lord,” and the second, “I hate the water.” I had grown fully immune to both by the time I was eight.
“What time’s the ferry due?”
“The same time as always, Grandma.” I wished only to be left to my book, which was a deliciously scary one about some children who had been captured by a bunch of pirates in the West Indies. It was my mother’s. All the books were hers except the extra Bibles.
“Don’t be sassy.”
I sighed and put down my book and said with greatly exaggerated patience, “The ferry is due about four, Grandma.”
“Doubt but there’s a northwest wind,” she said mournfully. “Likely to be headed into the wind all the way in.” She rocked her chair slowly back and forth with her eyes closed. Or almost closed. I usually had the feeling she was watching through slits. “Where’s Truitt?”
“Daddy’s working on the boat, Grandma.”
