reading the Minneapolis Star, tapping his index finger at intervals down the page.
“What are you doing, Daddy?”
“They’re called obituaries, Honey. Listings of people who’ve died. I like to say a little prayer for each soul. What’s on your mind?”
My heart slams my shirt.
“Mom says I took an apple when I wasn’t supposed to.”
“Did you?” he asks evenly, his eyes avoiding the fruit-shaped bump.
“No, Daddy.” I gesture my innocence. On cue the apple drops to the floor, bump, bump, bump and rolls to his feet.
His face goes dark as Lent.
“Young lady, come here.” In one swift movement, he yanks down my jeans, puts me over his knee, swats me once on the bottom, pulls my jeans back up and sets me back on quaking feet. It is the only time he ever does so.
“That was wrong. You disobeyed your mother and you lied about it. Take this back to her and apologize. Don’t ever try anything like that again.”
I am flabbergasted, horrified, ashamed. Daddy’s never been mad at me before. Cast out of Eden, by an apple no less. But you just don’t lie to Mr. Integrity.
•••
Beyond our long unfriendly davenport, upholstered in a nubby puce child-repellent fabric, bookcases teem with Churchill’s World War II books, Mein Kampf, Civil War books, Steinbeck, Fulton J. Sheen, Conan Doyle, Poe, Hemingway, Chesterton, fat and varied Michener volumes, and Books of the Month.
Further random titles include A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Call It Sleep, My Name Is Asher Lev, Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, Blackboard Jungle, and Pardon My Blooper. This book screams us with laughter: “Ladies and Gentlemen, President Hoobert Heever!” “The fog is as thick as sea poop!”
Our low polished-slab wooden coffee table makes the perfect Steeplechase horse jump for me early Sunday mornings when everyone’s asleep. Look, Life, and Saturday Evening Post are scattered on it now, along with Erector Set instructions, phonics sheets, somebody’s speller, a couple Scrooge McDuck comics, Perry Mason’s The Case of the Velvet Claws, and the butt-filled red plaid beanbag ashtray.
While Mom has a taste for serious lit—Dickinson, Byron, Shelly, Millay, Phyllis McGinley—she loves a nap and a paperback. Her trip to Rexall Drugs is not complete until the cashier rings up a couple mysteries with the Pepsodent. Josephine Tey, Mary Renault, Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie—she goes through them like we go through milk. Neither a driver nor a walker, Mom escapes family chaos in books.
St. Thomas More, patron saint of lawyers, presides over the carved desk. Dad graduated law school, but practiced only a short time before getting into broadcasting. Luckily, St. Thomas is also patron saint of large families.
And here’s our aquarium of angelfish, black mollies, and guppies, which only Dad can feed them. I mean it.
The screened porch out back is the best place to be in a storm—not out or in. Smell the greeny rain, feel its mist spray softly through the screen, quake unharmed in the body-rumbling thunder. Maybe you’re on Dad’s lap in the wicker rocker, and he’s telling you the story of Candyland, where trees and flowers are made of licorice and gumdrops and chocolate. In fall our porch is our turkey refrigerator. Twenty-two pounds.
•••
Let’s go up my flying stairs. I’ll save the sunroom for last.
Three stairs at the bottom, then a landing. Off to one side above the telephone table is a funny little hole in the wall whose origin we never knew. It is the exact diameter of a cigarette, and one day someone pops in a Pall Mall. Shortly thereafter, Tom sketches a simple face around the cigarette. This ballpoint fresco stays for years, with various augmentations—a mustache, a few penciled phone numbers. Ours is that kind of house. Neglect might induce creativity. A good joke stays put.
Up the remaining steps, past the door to the teeny balcony where Ro stuck her knee between the rails and firemen came and sawed her free.
Like everything else in our house, sleeping arrangements seemed to shift constantly. How do seven children grow up in a four-bedroom house? Sequentially.
The Littles regularly move in and out of this tiny daisy-flecked bedroom. Early on, that’s where I slept, or tried to, in a bunk bed upper berth while brother Skip in the lower routinely kicked my mattress. When he moves to the big boys’ room, Ro and I share. When I move, it’s Ro and Jim. Then just Ro.
•••
Now pass the clothes chute (once a plunger got stuck there).
Here’s my room from Kako when she joined the convent. Me and my mom and Tom put new wallpaper of blue with pink flowers on. Wallpaper paste smells good like Cream Of Wheat.
In my room I like to be by myself. When my feelings get hurt, flop on bed and scream in pillow. When I am bad they send me here.
I’m proud of Kako to be a nun so kind and loving. She is good, which I wish I could be. I’m like a stick on the ground who wants to be a ruler on teacher’s desk, but how?
Sometimes I stay overnight at the convent, which I hope rubs off on me. I thought I’d see nun hair at night but they wear nightcaps.
On my walls I put my saint, my pennants, my black paper shadow a State Fair man cut, shelf of statues of two colts grazing and Morgan horse, china lady of my birthstone and two china nuns playing baseball that I had three but dropped the catcher and she broke.
In my window seat I read Bookmobile books, which comes by our school on Wednesdays. Get King of the Wind, Misty of Chincoteague, Black Beauty and every book of horses I love so much. Tame them, ride them, care for them, they always love you. I read everything about and draw them. If I only had one horse I would be happy as a millionaire. Or even just more horse statues.
Kako left me these three dolls of foreign lands to look at but I don’t. Dolls are boring. I would give them to Ro but she’d pull them apart. If you’re a girl you’re supposed to have dolls but what do they see in them? Why pretend they walk or run around or talk when you can? Go outside and do it yourself.
The other thing I like in here is make things: cards, pictures, or of Play-doh that smells so salty and good or paint paint-by-numbers though I hate numbers, or sentences I really like to make.
Making makes you happy. Better than Monopoly because at the end you have something to give away or keep. But that’s not easy.
You can’t get it right, only so you feel okay if you stop. Everything goes wrong. Glue spills or your hand wrecks the line. All you want to do is throw the whole thing out because you spent all this time and all you have is something ugly. Sometimes you feel so bad and mad you never want to make another thing. Stomp outside to play or read your book.
But nothing’s interesting or your eyes can’t keep on your sentence and then you know you want to get it right so try again. And sometimes it’s pretty good.
Next is our bathroom, big enough to walk back and forth of it. Our shower never works, so there Mom hangs her nylons.
Over the tub are sticker penguins washing
