In my neighborhood, the doors and windows were never locked, and in the warmth of summer, each was flung open at all hours like a gaping maw, gasping for one last long pull of cool air. I still believed in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the assumption that humans would always ’be’. After all, weren’t they called human beings?
The only fear in my young life was that of the Rag Man. On an irregular basis, a dappled-gray horse pulling a large cart, clomped down my narrow street, and sitting atop an enormous pile of rags and old clothes was an aged black man with wild and wiry hair crying out “Rags–Rags–Rags for Sale.” In order to keep me from straying far from my home, I was threatened repeatedly by my parents: “The Rag Man Will Get You If You Don’t Watch Out!”
And so it was on a hot and sticky late July morning, that I trudged down the steep steps from my bedroom, dressed in pink plisse pajamas, blond ringlets all askew, rubbing the overnight sleep from the corners of my eyes, and dragging an old woolen blanket with its wide stripes of red, green and yellow. A large stain from a vomited glass of purple grape juice acknowledged a faded bull’s eye in the very center of the blanket. Although it had been cleaned many times, the process was without success and thus, the blotch had become a part of my short, almost seven-year old history.
I could hear my mother humming even before I reached the large but spare kitchen with the patched linoleum floor, and the big old gas stove. In the corner by the back door was the painted wooden table with four mismatched chairs: Mine, daintier than the rest, my brother’s missing a bottom rung which my dad had sawed off much earlier in a rant to keep his feet on the floor, and my mother’s–tall and narrow with a flowery ruffled pillow on the seat. My daddy’s was the largest of all and had been painted many times over–most recently In bright red lacquer.
The old, burled Philco radio was playing “Pennies From Heaven” and mother was bending over the gas oven to light it with a safety match, humming to the tune. She was a very pretty woman with short, black curly hair–the product of perms and dyes, and she was quite trim. Today she was dressed in pants which was unusual for women, but she had always been, as they say, “ahead of her time”. She smoked, enjoyed her afternoon cocktails, had a wicked sense of humor, and was a bit of a flirt.
“Good morning, Sunny,” she whispered, as she hugged me and kissed the top of my head. “Today’s the day, isn’t it?” I responded by squeezing her around the waist. I breathed in mama’s scent–tobacco and Sen-Sen, and as usual, the combination of the two comforted my heart. “I could smell the cherries all the way upstairs,” I whispered.
Mama had wrapped a a brightly patterned scarf around her head to prevent any wayward hairs from falling into her baking. The scarf, a Five and Dime purchase sometime back, could be found covering her head when cooking, around her waist when dressing up or dangling from her pocketbook when shopping. It was vibrantly colorful and she knew it was an attention grabber.
“I’ve been up ever since your daddy left for work. First the picking, then the cleaning, and I just finished the dreadful pitting, and you know how much I hate that part! Thank goodness I hadn’t used up all our sugar ration for the month.”
“I would’a helped you pit,” I said disappointedly. This was to be a very special pie–my daddy’s birthday pie. He always requested a sour cherry pie, the cherries ripe and pendulous from our very own tree, rather than a birthday cake.
I knew mother and daddy were happy with each other because they whispered together, hugged a lot, and at night, even though I wasn’t allowed to jump on the mattress in my bedroom, thru the thin walls, I could hear them jumping on their mattress. Their low sighs of ‘oh, oh, oh’ kept a rhythmic cadence to the twanging of the bedsprings. That was fine with me–I had always been told that as a child, I didn’t have the privileges of an adult, so I looked forward to jumping on my mattress when I grew older.
Last week, mother gave me an empty coffee can and a broken spoon and I padded out to the garden, scooped dirt into the can, ran water into it from the garden hose, and mixed it into a slurry. After dumping it out, I fashioned an ashtray, let it bake in the hot sun and painted it. The sections in my Prang paint box were lacking of most colors, but there was still plenty of black, which was a manly color. I smiled as I imagined his surprise, and the ashtray piled high with his stubbed-out Lucky Strikes.
Today, mother would help me wrap it with left-over tissue, and hopefully some ribbon from her sacred, brightly decorated ribbon box, which she kept on the very top shelf of her closet, pushed way to the back and underneath a hat box–out of the reach of tiny exploring hands. It contained a wondrous rainbow of assorted, wound up and reverently placed strings and ribbons from past holiday gifts, gently pressed with a slightly cool iron to rid them from the worst of wrinkles.
The Philco playing, my mother humming, the astringent odor filling the air from the cherries not yet sugared, and my brother Teddy away at summer camp for another week, which meant a short reprieve from his badgering: could life be more delicious?
“Is it okay if I go outside for a while?”
“Sure thing, Sunny. Just remember, we have some wrapping to do.”
With an emphatic “yes ma’am,” I dragged my blanket out the back door, down the porch steps, and bare-footed my way into the yard where the early morning sun and tiny droplets of dew reflected on the uneven border of flowers like so many sparkly diamonds. With wonder, my eyes took in a smattering of rag-tag hollyhocks, scattered four-o’clock with their black seeds just begging to be gathered, and a few pitiful pansies which had sprung up uninvited from the previous year.
A favorite pastime my mama and I shared was the private time when we would spread my scruffy blanket over the still moist grass and lying on our backs, would regale each other with make-believe stories about the cloud formations. After a while, the wool would become damp and smell just a little like the wet coat of my Irish setter ‘Girl’, after a summer shower. She had disappeared quite mysteriously a few weeks back while expecting her “who’s the daddy” puppies, as my papa would say.
I lay there staring at the sun, counted slowly to fifteen–squeezed shut my eyes, and the image of the sun burned itself into the back of my head. The radio interrupted Glen Miller with the latest news of the war, the cupboard doors in the kitchen were opening and closing, and the fragrant aroma from the pie now in the oven, began to tickle my nostrils.
Suddenly, I became aware of a commotion from inside the house and the Philco began blaring. The brightness of the sun still danced behind my tightly shut eyes, but on that day, I stopped believing in Santa Claus and discovered that human beings did indeed stop ‘being’; and in the next year of school, when I began spelling larger words, wasn’t it curious that “smother” was “mother” with an “s”.
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Seventeen years later, the old Philco sits in my kitchen–its innards long since regurgitated into a trash bin; but now, the hollow of it is the keeper of secrets: the scarf, wound so tightly around my mother’s nose and throat, some letters found hidden in the ribbon box, and a bit of evidence I’ve recently uncovered that might shed light on her murder, still unsolved after all these years.
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