At the Far End of Nowhere Read online

  Every night, before I go to sleep, I kneel beside my bed and pray: “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. Amen.” Then I say a list of God blesses that gets longer and longer: “God bless Daddy. God bless Jimmie. God bless Spence. God bless….”

  I don’t like the taste of milk. So, Jimmie gives me coffee-milk. It starts out as warm milk with a little bit of coffee added for flavor. As I get older, I ask for more and more coffee in the milk.

  My daddy makes me a little rocking chair—just my size—and paints it pink for me. After supper, I like to rock in it, sip from my mug of coffee-milk, and read out loud from a big storybook called A Patchwork Quilt of Favorite Tales. The book is full of pictures of all the storybook animals and people. I like to feel the words as I shape them with my lips and send them out to float across the room. I pronounce all the words just so, and put all the ending letters on them. I make the animals and the people in the stories talk in different voices.

  If I mess up a sentence, I get upset with myself and read the sentence again and again before I can go on.

  “If you keep going,” Jimmie says, “you can figure it out.” She gets impatient with me sometimes and calls me a fussbudget, or “Miss Priss.”

  My daddy calls me “an old soul.”

  If I don’t know a word, I show it to my daddy and he pronounces it for me. My daddy likes to look up words in the dictionary, and he knows all kinds of magical-sounding words—like asafetida and excelsior and psithurism.

  Ours is the last house on the block, next to a store. The other houses have backyards shaped like rectangles, but the store cuts off part of our backyard into the shape of a triangle. I have an imaginary jump rope. I turn my arms around and around and pretend to jump it. I can count to one hundred and not miss. I like to watch Miss Beulah across the alley in her yard. She wears a sunbonnet when she comes out to water her roses.

  Miss Beulah calls over. “What are you doing, child?”

  “I’m jump-roping.”

  “Your mother ought to go get you a real jump rope,” she says and goes back inside, toting her watering can.

  Sometimes, I pretend I’m the little small red hen from my storybook. I dress just like the little hen. I wear a little apron, a shawl, a sunbonnet, and Buster Brown lace-up shoes just like hers that my daddy bought me from Mr. Gambini. I carry a little pair of scissors in my apron pocket just the way the little small red hen does in the story.

  While I am outside, walking “picketty-pecketty” and pretending to gather sticks, I leave my door unlocked. The cunning fox sneaks in, hides behind the door. He jumps out at me and I fly up to the rafters—this is when I flap my pretend wings and run up to the top of the back-porch steps. The fox runs around and around below me until I get dizzy and fall off my perch. That’s when the fox catches me, stuffs me in a sack, swings the sack over his shoulder, and carries me back toward his den. But the fox gets very tired in the hot sun. He is lazy, and stops to have “forty winks.”

  So then, while the fox is napping—just like the little hen—I use my scissors to cut my way out. I play a trick on the fox by pushing a big stone into the sack. Then I run back home.

  The fox wakes up, carries the sack back home, and dumps the big stone in the pot of water Mother Fox has “on the boil.” So, just like the little red hen, I outsmart the wicked old fox. Instead of boiling me for supper, he and his wife get terribly scalded and die.

  I am safe at home, living a quiet life, and sweeping the hearth in front of my pretend fireplace. The End.

  Jimmie goes to the Food Fair once a week, and usually I go with her. She tells me to hold onto the back of her skirt so I won’t get separated from her and get lost. It’s just a few blocks down the street, so we walk there. We roll the grocery bags back in the big baby carriage I used to ride in as a baby.

  One day, I let go of Jimmie’s skirt in the store and wander down a long candy aisle. I see a big bag of M&Ms; it’s open, and pretty candies are spilling out. My sweet tooth gets the best of me, and I go over and start eating the spilled candies. When Jimmie comes back to find me, she gets very upset.

  “Stop that, Lissa. That’s stealing!”

  I don’t know I am stealing, but I feel very guilty. I will never do that again.

  Another day, when we take our groceries up to pay for them at the cash register, the checkout lady tells Jimmie the store is having a coloring contest. They will be giving prizes to the winners. Jimmie takes one of the Campbell’s Kids coloring books home for me to color. I know that Daddy still wants me to color right-handed, but I want to do a good job and win the contest, so I color the pages when Daddy’s not around. But I keep falling asleep when I’m coloring, and all the pages have to be colored by the end of the week. Spence finishes coloring them for me.

  Weeks later, I am the winner for my age group. My prize is a pair of ball bearing roller skates, but they’re way too big and fast for me. Because Spence helped me with the coloring, Jimmie gives him the ball bearing skates. She buys much smaller skates for me—without the ball bearings.

  Spence likes to go fast, and he doesn’t mind falling down. My daddy says he is reckless. Spence, Daddy tells me, tumbled down the stairs all the time as a baby, and once, when he was just four years old (which I can’t remember), Spence fell off the edge of the front steps, hard, right onto the pavement. Jimmie is always scolding Spence for running around barefoot and coming home with big gashes in his feet from stepping on broken glass. Jimmie patches him up, and then out he goes again!

  Spence learns to roller skate in a just couple of days. I can hear his skate wheels whizzing on the cement as he zooms down the pavement, all the way down to Edmondson Avenue.

  My daddy always tells me to be careful, and I am afraid of hurting myself. The first time I put on my little skates, they roll out from under me, and I fall smack on my butt. I stand up and try to hold onto the brick wall of the grocery shop next door, but my feet keep wanting to roll out from under me.

  “You gotta let go of the wall, Liss,” Spence tells me.

  “I don’t want to.”

  Spence grabs me around my waist and tries to pull me away from the wall.

  “Just hold onto me,” he tells me. But I’m too scared to budge.

  Finally, Spence helps me sit down on the sidewalk.

  “Here, let me take off one of those skates, Liss. Then you can practice on just one skate.”

  Spence shows me how to wear my skate on my right foot and use my left foot to push myself along. With just one skate, I can go all the way up to the end of the block. Not as fast as Spence, but pretty fast. Fast enough for me.

  I turn the corner at Harlem Avenue. A girl is standing on her front steps, bouncing a little red ball against a wooden paddle. The ball is on an elastic string that looks like a long rubber band. This girl can keep the ball going, almost forever, without missing. “What happened to your other skate?” the girl asks me. “You can’t skate with just one skate.”

  “Yes, I can,” I say, and keep on scuffing along down Harlem Avenue.

  With my Bazooka bubble gum, I can blow a bigger bubble than she can. One time, Spence has me compete with her. He grabs me by the arm and tugs me along to her front steps. The paddleball girl is standing with her big sister on the top step. Spence and me stand on the pavement at the bottom of those steps.

  “Here’s my sister, Lissa,” Spence says to the big sister. Her name is Ella. “I bet my sister can blow a bigger bubble than your sister.”

  “How much you want to bet?” says Ella.

  “Yeah,” says the paddleball girl. Her name is Juanita.

  “How about a nickel?” says Spence. “You can use it to buy more bubble gum.”

  “Okay,” says Ella. “It’s a bet!”

  “Yeah,” says Juanita. “It’s a bet!”

  Me and Juanita stuff as much bubble gum in our mouths as we can. We chew and chew to get the gum all soft
and wet.

  “Ready, set, blow!” says Spence.

  I blow and blow. I see Juanita’s bubble getting bigger and bigger. It gets about as big as her face, but then she stops blowing. I keep blowing until my bubble gets even bigger than my face.

  “The winner!” Spence says and pulls up my right arm as far as it will go.

  I forget to stop blowing. Then the bubble pops and sticks all over my face.

  Spence gets the nickel from Ella and takes me home to Jimmie.

  Jimmie scolds me for making such a mess of myself. She has to scrub for a long time with a washcloth and use witch hazel to get the gum off.

  Then Spence takes me around the neighborhood and brags about me. He tells me to blow another bubble to prove how big I can blow it. This time, the bubble gum gets stuck in my hair, and my daddy has to get it out with benzene he keeps under his watchmaker’s bench to clean watch parts. After that, I just blow normal-size bubbles.

  CHAPTER THREE

  MAYBE, MAYBE NOT

  SOMETIMES on weekends, Jimmie drives us way, way out into the country to visit her mommy and daddy on their farm. She drives our big black Oldsmobile. Me and Spence sit in the back seat. It’s as big as the davenport in our living room. Daddy stays at home. He doesn’t like to go out to the farm.

  “I prefer city life,” he says when he kisses me goodbye.

  We drive out from the city where all the houses and stores are close together and there are lots of big buildings and cars and pavements. The farther we go, the farther apart the houses and stores are. Then the roads start to go up and down more and get skinnier and there are steep hills and curves, and for a long time there are hardly any other cars. We go past long fields with wheat and tall green cornstalks so thick you can’t see through them. Then there are cows and horsies and barns. I know we are almost there when we get to a little town Jimmie calls Grangerville. It has four gas stations and a drugstore and a hardware store and a Twin Kiss soft ice cream place and four stop signs where two roads come together that Jimmie calls the Crossroads. Then we turn left at Sweeney’s grocery store and go a little farther past what Jimmie calls the Nike Missile Base. It’s behind a tall chain fence, and a soldier in a little house guards the big double gate. Jimmie says they keep missiles there to protect us from the Russians who are our enemies.

  We turn right and go what Jimmie says is seven-tenths of a mile, and then we are at Granddaddy Friedrich’s and Grandma Magda’s chicken farm. We drive up the bumpy driveway. The old house has a big front porch that pokes out under two big trees. Jimmie says they are Norway maples that Granddaddy planted there for shade. The windows at the side of the house seem to watch us as we drive around to the back and go in through the back porch to the kitchen. The kitchen is where the grownups sit around a big round table, eating or talking. The dining room is next to the kitchen, but it’s kept closed up most of the time, except in the evenings when Granddaddy goes in there to watch the television.

  One day, Grandma and Jimmie send me into the dining room to take a nap on the sofa in there. Grandma closes the door so she and Jimmie can talk about grownup things they don’t want me to hear. When I wake up, I play by myself for a while under Grandma’s big dining room table. I pretend to be a kitten, and pounce at the light as it dances through the lace tablecloth. After a while, I crawl out from under the table, across the scratchy rug to the door, and call out, “Meow?” Where is everybody?

  Spence must be outside somewhere with Granddaddy. I can hear Jimmie out in the kitchen, helping Grandma Magda fix supper. I am tired, and I don’t feel so good. I want something to eat. I go out to the kitchen and tug at Jimmie’s skirt.

  “I’m hungry,” I say.

  Jimmie is talking to Grandma Magda. They don’t seem to hear me. So, I tug harder at Jimmie’s skirt and shout as loud as I can, “I’m hungry!”

  “Jimmie, make that child stop whining,” Grandma says.

  I am very angry now. Why are these big people ignoring me?

  Grandma Magda is very large and very fat. I heard Daddy say once to Jimmie, “I feel sorry for your father, Jimmie. He’s henpecked. It’s your mother who rules the roost.”

  So now I pretend Grandma Magda is a big, fat hen perched on a big roost above the kitchen table. The roost is drooping and swaying under her fatness.

  “You need to discipline your daughter now before it’s too late,” Grandma says.

  “I think maybe she just needs a little something to eat to tide her over till supper’s ready,” Jimmie says.

  “Mark my words, Jimmie. You’re going to spoil that child if you don’t punish her.”

  I don’t like the sound of that word—punish. It makes my heart hurt. I’m so hungry I’m getting dizzy and my head aches. I pull at Jimmie’s skirt harder. Jimmie pushes me away. I let go and let myself drop to the floor. I scream and cry and start to roll around on the floor. Grandma Magda is bending over me now. She slaps my face. I scream and kick and hit back at the big, fat hen who is hurting me.

  In my head, I hear words I’ve heard somewhere. Some of them are repeating, repeating, repeating inside my head:

  One, two, buckle my shoe

  Three, four, open the door

  Five, six, pick up sticks

  Seven, eight, lay them straight

  Nine, ten, a big, fat hen…

  A BIG, FAT HEN

  A BIG, FAT HEN

  A BIG, FAT HEN!

  “She’s throwing a tantrum,” Grandma Magda says. “Put her out in the car until she calms down.”

  “No! No! Don’t! Please, Jimmie! Don’t!” I cry and scream as Jimmie carries me out to the Oldsmobile. It’s parked in the driveway under one of the big Norway maples. Jimmie locks the car door on me. I scream and scream and watch her walk away, up the front-porch steps, back into the farmhouse.

  I scream until my throat hurts and my sides hurt. I am panting hard. I’m trying to get the air to come back inside me. My skin is sucking in against my ribs. I can’t breathe! I think I may snuffocate to death.

  I press my face to the car window. I watch and wait for the white door on the front porch to open, for Jimmie to appear. It seems like forever. I’m still waiting. I am too tired to cry anymore. I just wait and wait. Something inside me seems to break. My heart wants to split open and stop ticking.

  Finally, the white door opens and Jimmie comes out to the car.

  “Are you ready to behave?” I hear Jimmie’s voice through the glass on the car window that separates us.

  I just nod. I am too tired to say anything. I am like a broken watch. I stop ticking. Jimmie leads me back inside. I will try not to cry so much anymore. I will be-have, be-have, be-have.

  Later that year, when my Grandma Magda dies, I don’t cry at all. Now I am being have.

  I am a very good reader. I love to read. My mother, Jimmie, lets me read out loud to her when she is combing my hair. I read to her from The Bobbsey Twins and Old Man Rabbit’s Dinner Party and lots of those Little Golden Books, stories about Snow White and Cinderella, and Mother Goose rhymes. I like the one that goes:

  There was a crooked man, and he walked a crooked mile.

  He found a crooked sixpence upon a crooked stile.

  He bought a crooked cat, which caught a crooked mouse,

  And they all lived together in a little crooked house.

  But, for some reason, it does bother me that everything is crooked and not perfect.

  Jimmie calls the people who live in the house right next to us colored people. Daddy sometimes calls them a name that starts with an n, but Jimmie says I mustn’t repeat that word because it isn’t nice.

  “Why are they called colored people, Jimmie?”

  “Because they aren’t white like us. Their skin is a different color, it’s dark, and they have different ways.”

  Sometimes, when Daddy is smoking his cigar out on the front steps, he sees a very dark colored man named Curtis washing and polishing a big shiny black car at the curb. Curtis wears a roll
ed-up lady’s stocking over his hair. He waves at Daddy and calls out, “How you doin’, Mr. Power?” He has a big white smile and seems very friendly.

  Daddy is not very friendly back. He just nods and halfway tips his straw hat and mutters something about Curtis always showing off his Cadillac with the whitewall tires.

  One day I leave my Lady and the Tramp coloring book and my new box of giant crayons on the floor in the little room right behind the front door that Daddy calls the vestibule. When I come back, my crayons are gone. I see a little colored boy running away with them down the block. I tell Jimmie and Daddy, but the little boy is gone, and I never get my crayons back.

  Another time, I leave my red tricycle out front on the pavement while I walk with Spence up to the grocery shop. Next thing I know, a little colored boy comes running past us, gets on my tricycle, and rides away as fast as he can pedal down the block. Spence runs in and tells Daddy a little colored boy just took my tricycle, but Daddy is working on a watch and gets mad and starts cursing and using the n-word I’m not supposed to say. So Spence tells Jimmie, and she walks with me and Spence around the whole neighborhood to look for my tricycle. We go up and down alleyways, and finally I see my red tricycle in a backyard. Jimmie talks to a colored woman who is pinning up wet clothes on a line. Jimmie tells her what happened and shows her the special number my daddy carved on the handlebars to show that it belongs to me. The woman looks tired and sad. She just waves her hand at my tricycle and says, “Go on, take it.” One of the back tires has a slash in it, but Daddy fixes it for me.

  Daddy says our house is called a row house because it stands up like a brave soldier in a row of other houses with no spaces between them. That is why, one day, our house almost catches on fire. Jimmie smells grease burning in the kitchen in the house right next to us, where Curtis lives with his sister Mabel and her children. There is just a wall between us and that house, and the wall starts to get hot, and Jimmie smells smoke. I watch while she runs over to the yard next door and raps on the back door. Nobody answers. Jimmie calls the firemen, and they come in a big red firetruck and break down our neighbors’ door and spray water all over the place.