All She Ever Wanted (7 page)

When I walked through the front door that afternoon, Daddy lay sprawled on the couch, nodding his way through a World Series baseball game. He had the volume turned way up so he could hear it above the sound of Annie’s wailing. “How was the party?” he asked.

“Good.”

“Good? That’s all—just ‘good’? Did she like the present we got her?”

“Yeah, I guess so. I had fun,” I said without enthusiasm. “Look at all the stuff she gave me.”

I had the Hula-Hoop slung around my neck, and I was holding the goody bag high above my head to keep it away from my brothers. They could smell candy the way sharks scented blood, and they had moved in quickly for the kill, circling around me. I wished I had a secret hiding place where I could stash it. The boys were forever taking my stuff and ruining it. They’d already busted open my doll bottle to see how it worked and ripped the cellophane off my magic drawing slate so they could stick it on the TV screen and scribble over their favorite cartoons. My dolls had suffered so much abuse from Poke and JT that Betsy Wetsy looked more like a disaster victim than a baby. Barbie had barely survived her lobotomy before being scalped. If I didn’t eat all of my goody-bag candy before sundown today, I could kiss it good-bye.

“I’ll bet the Hayworths have a big house, huh?” Daddy asked. “And lots of fancy things, like a color TV?”

“Yeah. It’s really nice.” I sat down beside him on the couch, stuffing candy in my cheeks like a squirrel. He chased Poke and JT away and started asking me a lot more questions about the Hayworth home, ending with the unfathomable one: “Do they have a dog?”

I didn’t want to think about their house anymore, but Daddy seemed to be the only person who was interested in hearing about the party, so I snuggled up beside him, sharing all the details. I even dared to ask him if I could go to Sunday school with May Elizabeth and her family tomorrow.

“So they’re religious people, are they?” Daddy asked. “What church do they belong to? Do they all go, even Mr. Hayworth? Every Sunday?What time?”

He sounded so interested that I wondered if he wanted to come, too. His smile grew broader and broader as I answered all his questions. Then he hugged me and said, “Sure, honey. I think it would be a wonderful idea for you to go to Sunday school.” He turned off the TV and hurried next door to borrow the neighbors’telephone. We didn’t have a phone because Uncle Leonard didn’t want the FBI listening in on his conversations.

I felt weary from all the excitement of the party and nauseated from eating so much candy. I went to my room, still clutching my Hula-Hoop, wondering where on earth I could hide it. But when I saw my mustysmelling mattress that never seemed to have a sheet and remembered May Elizabeth’s puffy, canopied bed, I ran outside to the backyard and cried.

I walked to Park Street Church by myself the next day and stood out front for a long time watching for the Hayworth’s Cadillac. “Kathleen, you came,” May’s mother said when she spotted me. She sounded overjoyed. May Elizabeth seemed less than pleased as she looked me up and down. Her mother took my hand and led me inside as if I were part of the family. Sunday school was about to start.

Students from all grades met in a group in the church basement. We sang songs with a lot of hand motions, and the kids tossed quarters and dimes into an offering basket. When it was time to divide into smaller groups for our lesson, the room dissolved into chaos as kids scraped chairs across the cement floor and the teachers unfolded screens to make partitions.

“We’re in a class with the fourth through sixth graders,” May told me above the din. “We meet upstairs in the sanctuary.”

I stared at her, dumbfounded. I thought of my mom’s sanctuary and knew I must have misunderstood. “What? The
sanctuary
?”

“Yeah,” she nodded. “Upstairs.”

I pictured everyone crowding inside a smelly old outhouse behind the church, and I backed away. “There’s no way I’m sitting in a sanctuary!” I said as I bolted toward the door. May ran after me.

“Wait… wait… where are you going?”

“Sanctuaries smell horrible, and they have spiders and flies.”

“What are you talking about? There aren’t any spiders. And it smells real nice. Come and see.”

I remembered how different my house was from May’s, and I thought maybe the rich people’s sanctuaries were nicer, too. I let her lead me upstairs. The church sanctuary was beautiful, with stained-glass windows and polished wood pews. It smelled like flowers and candle wax. I didn’t see any spiders—or any holes to pee in, either. But I was still confused by the word “sanctuary,” and for years I thought God had a pretty nice outhouse.

The lesson that first morning was about Jesus and the lepers. At first I thought the teacher was saying “leopards,” and I wondered how anyone dared leave home in Jesus’day with packs of wild cats wandering around.

Then the teacher explained that lepers were people who had a terrible disease that made their body parts turn rotten and fall off. This gruesome piece of news delighted all of the boys, and Ron Hayworth started to sing:

“Leprosy is crawling all over me. … There goes my eyeball into my highball. …”

The white-haired teacher, Miss Trimble, had to repeat, “Boys… boys…” over and over in her shaky voice until order was finally restored. When I learned about the fruit of the Spirit a few years later, I decided that Miss Trimble must have had patience the size of a watermelon.

When she finally managed to quiet everyone down, she explained that the disease was contagious and anyone who touched a leper was very likely to start losing a thumb or a nose, too. To avoid this disaster, the lepers had to stand at a distance and shout “Unclean… unclean!” so people would know to stay away from them.

“But Jesus walked right up to those lepers and touched them,” Miss Trimble told us happily. Ron and the other boys fell silent momentarily, impressed with Jesus’courage. Then the teacher told us that not only did all of Jesus’fingers and toes stay where they belonged, but the leprosy magically disappeared from the lepers’bodies when He touched them, just like the pictures on my magic drawing slate disappeared when I lifted the plastic.

I didn’t understand all the deep, spiritual principles the teacher was trying to make that first day, but I certainly understood that there were two very different classes of people involved—lepers and non-lepers. Uncle Leonard had drilled the truth about class distinctions into me ever since I was as small as Annie, and I knew that the ruling elite always picked on the underdogs—the lepers. When I looked at the Sunday school lesson in those terms, I liked Jesus. He was for the little guy—sort of a kindly, magical union negotiator.

The teacher gave each of us a colorful, eight-page newspaper to take home and reminded us not to forget our memory verse for next week. Then she prayed for us in her shaky voice and dismissed us. The moment she did, the boys turned their newspapers into airplanes and held a contest to see who could land theirs on the organ pipes first. May Elizabeth and I went out into the hallway, where Mr. and Mrs. Hayworth were waiting for us.

“Would you like to stay and go to church with us, Kathleen?” she asked.

The hallway and sanctuary were filling up with families, and I could see that, once again, I wasn’t dressed like everyone else. For one thing, every girl in sight had on black patent leather shoes shined with Vaseline, and I had on sneakers without any socks because I hadn’t been able to find any clean ones that morning. The ladies and girls all wore hats and white gloves, including May Elizabeth and her mother. It seemed to be required attire. One family with three daughters was wearing hats that resembled a set of dishes: the mother wore the dinner plate, the oldest daughter the soup bowl, the middle one the salad plate, and the youngest one the tea cup.

“No, thank you,” I mumbled. “I have to go home.”

“Are you sure?” Mrs. Hayworth asked, smiling. “We’d love to have you.” I shook my head and shuffled toward the door. “Maybe you can worship with us next week,” she called after me as I hurried away.

I spent all afternoon searching for a place to store my Sunday school paper where the boys wouldn’t wreck it. I wanted to learn the memory verse for next week so I could win a prize. I could think of only one place to hide it where the boys would never go: Mom’s sanctuary. Somehow, it seemed appropriate.

On Monday morning May Elizabeth burst into our classroom with shocking news. “Our house got broken into yesterday!” she told us breathlessly. “The thieves stole Ron’s transistor radio and his reel-to-reel tape recorder and Daddy’s new color TV and some money and a couple of kitchen appliances and a whole bunch of Mommy’s jewelry and her fur coat. …” She paused to gulp another breath. “They even took the liquor bottles right out of Daddy’s cabinet!”

We stared at her in slack-mouthed horror. This was just like a TV show. If only Perry Mason or the cops from
Dragnet
were around to solve this terrible crime. We all felt bad for her family’s losses, but I could tell that May Elizabeth was reveling in the drama of it all.

“They broke in while we were at
church
!” she huffed, as if that was the lowest blow of all. She had everyone’s attention as she finished with, “Daddy says we’re going to get a watchdog!”

Suddenly I had the same funny feeling in my stomach that I had on the day we went shopping for May’s birthday present. I couldn’t help wondering about my daddy’s detailed questions after the party and why he had particularly asked about a dog. I wanted to talk to him about it so that the funny feeling would go away, but when I got home from school that afternoon Daddy wasn’t there.

“He left for work yesterday while you were at church,” Mommy said. “He’ll be on the road all week. Why?”

“I just wondered… never mind.” I felt scared and angry at the same time, and I didn’t know why. I went into our bedroom to try to think things through and discovered that my Hula-Hoop was gone. I heard my brothers laughing maliciously in the backyard, and I ran outside.

“Stop! Give that back!” I yelled. “You’ll break it!” The boys had tied my Hula-Hoop to a tree branch with a piece of rope and were about to use it as a swing. I raced across the yard but was too late. The hoop snapped in two beneath Poke’s weight, and he tumbled to the ground on top of JT. I walked away in tears, hoping the collision had broken both of their necks.

That Halloween, May Elizabeth invited me to go trick-or-treating in her neighborhood. The rich people on her side of town actually gave out treats; our side of town was better known for its tricks.

“You can go with her,” Mommy said, “but you have to take Poke and JT.”

“Mommy, no!” I wailed. “I won’t have any fun if I have to drag them all over town with me.”

“Well, someone has to take them. They’re too little to go trick-ortreating by themselves.”

“Can’t you or Daddy or Uncle Leonard take them?” I didn’t think it would require much make-up to dress up my uncle as Frankenstein.

“Fine,” Mom said in a voice that told me it wasn’t. “Your brothers don’t have to go trick-or-treating this year. But you’ll have to share all your candy with them when you get home.”

I took the boys.

May Elizabeth dressed up as a fairy princess in a long, glittery gown with feathery wings on her back. She wore a rhinestone tiara on her golden curls and carried a magic wand with silver streamers. Mommy said that the boys and I could dress up as hobos, but I didn’t see a whole lot of difference between our costumes and the way we usually dressed. Poke and JT didn’t care about costumes, anyway—they were after the free candy. They each carried a paper bag to collect their loot, but they walked up and down the streets eating the candy as fast as people handed it to them, scattering a trail of Milky Way and Tootsie Roll wrappers behind them like dead leaves. JT had three lollipops sticking out of his mouth at the same time. They gorged themselves until their faces turned green.

We saved May Elizabeth’s house for last because her mother was going to give us hot cocoa and a ride home. We rang the doorbell as if it was any other house, and May and I stood giggling on the doorstep as we waited for our treats. Poke was suspiciously tranquil.

“Trick or treat!” we chorused when Mrs. Hayworth opened the door.

“Oh, my! Who do we have here?” she asked. She was pretending to be surprised, but a moment later her expression changed to genuine shock as Poke leaned inside the doorway and threw up on her gold shag carpeting. JT, who mimicked everything Poke did, promptly threw up alongside him. May Elizabeth screamed.

I closed my eyes, wishing May could wave her magic fairy princess wand and make me disappear.

Chapter
7

D
id you write up your list for Santa, yet?” May Elizabeth asked a few days before Christmas vacation. Nearly four months had passed since school had started, and amazing as it seemed, we were still best friends.

“No… not yet,” I mumbled. She must have noticed that I quickly ducked my head, and she knew me well enough by then to know that I was avoiding the question.

“What’s wrong, Kathy?”

“Santa Claus doesn’t come to our house.” I gave what I hoped was an indifferent shrug so she’d know I wasn’t asking for pity. “Uncle Leonard called him a fraud and the creation of greedy capitalists, so I think Santa’s mad at us.”

“Santa doesn’t get mad, silly. He only cares if you’ve been naughty or nice.”

“Yeah, well, my brothers were born naughty,” I said hopelessly. “They would have set the hospital nursery on fire if they could have gotten their tiny little fingers on some matches. The word
nice
isn’t in their vocabulary.”

“But you’re nice, Kathleen.”

I shook my head. Santa seemed to avoid our whole neighborhood every Christmas. I had always figured that there weren’t enough “nice” kids on the block for him to put his sleigh and reindeer at risk. Danny Reeves would have climbed up on the roof of the house as soon as Santa’s back was turned and hijacked his bag of toys. And Charlie Grout would probably make reindeer burgers out of Dasher and Dancer.