The Little Friend (48 page)

All the fear of the past twenty-four hours came thundering down upon her, and along with it was a fear that she could not name. Timidly, she asked: “Where’s Edie?”

Harriet’s mother looked puzzled. “At home,” she said. “Why?”

The toast was cold, but Harriet ate it anyway. Her mother sat down at the table with her and watched her, with her elbows on the table and her chin propped in her hands. “Is it good?” she said presently.

“Yes, maam.” Because she did not know what was wrong, or how to act, Harriet concentrated all her attention upon her toast. Then her mother sighed; Harriet glanced up, just in time to see her rise from the table in a rather dispirited manner and drift from the room.

“Ida?” whispered Harriet, as soon as they were alone.

Ida shook her head and said nothing. Her face was expressionless, but big glassy tears swelled at the bottom lid of her eyes. Then, pointedly, she turned away.

Harriet was stricken. She stared at Ida’s back, at the apron straps criss-crossed over her cotton dress. She could hear all sorts of tiny noises, crystal-clear and dangerous: the hum of the refrigerator, a fly buzzing over the kitchen sink.

Ida dumped the dust-pan into the pail beneath the sink, then shut the cabinet. “What for you told on me?” she said, without turning around.

“
Tell
on you?”

“I’m always good to you.” Ida brushed past her, returned the dust-pan to its home on the floor by the hot-water heater, next to the mop and broom. “Why you want to get me in trouble?”

“Tell on you for what? I didn’t!”

“You sure did. And you know what else?” Harriet quailed at her steady, bloodshot gaze. “Yall got that poor woman fired over at Mr. Claude Hull’s house.
Yes you did,
” she said, over Harriet’s stutters of astonishment. “Mr. Claude drove over there last night and you should have heard how he talk to that poor woman, like she’s a dog. I heard the whole thing and so did Charley T.”

“I didn’t! I—”

“Listen at you!” Ida hissed. “You ought to be ashamed. Telling Mr. Claude that woman try to set the house on fire. And what you do
then
, but priss yourself on home and tell your mama that I don’t feed you right.”

“I didn’t tell on her! It was Hely!”

“I aint talking about him. I’m talking about
you.
”

“But I
told
him not to tell! We were in his room, and she banged on the door and started yelling—”

“Yes, and what you do then but come home and tell on me your own self. You’s mad at me when I left yesterday, because I didn’t want to sit around after work telling stories. Don’t say you wasn’t.”

“Ida! You know how Mama gets mixed up!
All
I said was—”

“I’ll tell you why you did it. You’s mad and spiteful that I don’t sit around all night cooking fried chicken and telling
stories when I gots to get home and do my own work. After cleaning up for you folks all day.”

Harriet went outside. The day was hot, sun-bleached, soundless. She felt as if she’d just had a tooth filled at the dentist’s, pain blooming plum-black in her rear molars, walking through the glass doors into the glare and withering heat of the parking lot.
Harriet, is somebody waiting to pick you up?
Yes, maam, Harriet always said to the receptionist, whether somebody was waiting or not.

From the kitchen, all was silence. The shutters of her mother’s room were closed. Was Ida fired? Somehow—incredibly—the question caused her no pain or anxiety, only the same dull puzzlement as when she bit hard on the inside of her cheek after a novocaine shot and it didn’t hurt.

I’ll pick her some tomatoes for lunch
, said Harriet to herself, and—squinting against the glare—went to the side of the house, to Ida’s little vegetable garden: an unfenced plot, twelve feet square, badly in need of weeding. Ida didn’t have space for a garden where she lived. Though she made them tomato sandwiches every day, she took most of the other vegetables home with her. Almost daily, Ida offered Harriet a kindness of some sort in exchange for help in the garden—a game of checkers, a story—which Harriet always refused; she hated yard-work, could not bear the dust on her hands, or the beetles, or the heat, or the stinging hairs on the squash vines which made her legs itch.

Now her selfishness made her feel sick. Many painful thoughts clustered about, pricking at her ceaselessly. Ida had to work hard all the time … not just here, but at her own house. What did Harriet ever have to do?

Some tomatoes. She’ll like that
. She picked some bell peppers too, and okra, and a fat black eggplant: the summer’s first. She piled the muddy vegetables in a small cardboard box and then set to work weeding, gritting her teeth with displeasure. Vegetable plants—save only for the vegetables—looked like overgrown weeds to her, with their sprawling habits and rough, ungainly leaves, so she left what she wasn’t sure about and only pulled the weeds she was certain of: clover and dandelion (easy) and long switches of Johnson
grass, which Ida had a tricky way of folding so they made a shrill, unearthy whistle when she put them between her lips and blew a certain way.

But the blades were sharp; and it was not long before one of them had sliced a red seam like a paper cut across the base of her thumb. Harriet—sweating—reared back on her dusty heels. She had some red cloth gardening gloves, child-sized, which Ida Rhew had bought for her at the hardware store last summer, and it made her feel terrible even to think about them. Ida didn’t have much money, certainly not enough to spend on presents; even worse, Harriet disliked the garden so much that she had never worn the gloves, not once.
Don’t you like them little gloves I gave you?
Ida had asked her, rather sadly, one afternoon while they were sitting on the porch; when Harriet protested, she shook her head.

I do like them, I do. I wear them to play in.…

You don’t have to tell me a story, baby. I’m just sorry you don’t care anything about them
.

Harriet’s face burned. The red gloves had cost three dollars—for poor Ida, nearly a day’s work. Now that she thought about it, she realized that the red gloves were the only present that Ida had ever given her. And she had lost them! How could she have been so careless? For a long time, in the winter, they had lain neglected in a galvanized tub in the toolshed, with the pruning shears and the hedge clippers and some other tools of Chester’s.…

She left her weeding, uprooted shoots scattered harumscarum across the dirt, and hurried to the toolshed. But the gloves weren’t in the galvanized tub. They weren’t in Chester’s tool-bench, either; they weren’t on the shelf with the flowerpots and fertilizer; they weren’t behind the caked tins of varnish and Spackle and house paint.

On the shelves she found badminton rackets, pruning shears and handsaw, numberless extension cords, a yellow plastic hard hat like construction workers wore; more garden tools, of every description: loppers, rose-snips, weed-fork and shrub rake and three different sizes of trowel; Chester’s own gloves. But not the gloves that Ida had given her. She could feel herself getting hysterical.
Chester knows where they are
,
she told herself.
I’ll ask him
. Chester only worked on Mondays; on other days, he worked either for the county—pulling weeds and cutting grass, in the cemetery—or at odd jobs around town.

She was breathing hard, in the dusty, gasoline-smelling dimness, staring at the litter of tools on the oily floor and wondering where to look next—for she had to find the red gloves;
I have to
, she thought, her eyes darting over the mess,
I’ll die if I’ve lost them
—when Hely ran up and poked his head in the door. “Harriet!” he gasped, clinging to the door frame. “We’ve got to go get the bikes!”

“Bikes?” said Harriet, after a confused silence.

“They’re still there! My dad noticed my bike was gone and he’s going to whip me if I’ve lost it! Come on!”

Harriet tried to focus her attention on the bicycles, but all she could think of were the gloves. “I’ll go later,” she said at last.

“No! Now! I’m not going by myself!”

“Well, wait a little while, and I’ll—”

“No!” Hely wailed. “We have to go now!”

“Look, I’ve got to go in and wash my hands. Put all this junk back on the shelf for me, okay?”

Hely stared at the jumble on the floor. “All of it?”

“Do you remember some red gloves I used to have? They used to be in that bucket there.”

Hely looked at her with apprehension, like she was crazy.

“Garden gloves. Red cloth with elastic at the wrist.”

“Harriet, I’m serious. The bikes have been outside all night. They might not even be there any more.”

“If you find them, just tell me, all right?”

She ran back to the vegetable bed and tossed the weeds she’d pulled into a big, careless pile.
Never mind
, she told herself,
I’ll clean it up later.…
Then she snatched up the box of vegetables and ran back into the house.

Ida wasn’t in the kitchen. Quickly, without soap, Harriet rinsed the dirt off her hands at the sink. Then she carried the box into the living room, where she found Ida sitting in her tweed chair with her knees apart and her head in her hands.

“Ida?” Harriet said timidly.

Stiffly, Ida Rhew swung her head around. Her eyes were still red.

“I—I brought you something,” Harriet stammered. She set the cardboard box down on the floor by Ida’s feet.

Dully, Ida stared down at the vegetables. “What am I going to do?” she said, and shook her head. “Where will I go?”

“You can take them home if you want to,” said Harriet helpfully. She picked up the eggplant to show it to Ida.

“Your mama say I don’t do a good job. How I’m supposed to do a good job when she got newspapers and trash stacked clear up the walls?” Ida picked up the corner of her apron and wiped her eyes on it. “Alls she pays me is twenty dollars a week. And that aint right. Odean over at Miss Libby’s gets thirty-five and she aint got a mess like this nor two children to fool with, either.”

Harriet’s hands felt useless, dangling at her sides. She longed to hug Ida, to kiss her cheek, to fall in her lap and burst into tears—yet something in Ida’s voice and in the tense, unnatural way that Ida sat made her afraid to come any closer.

“Your mama say—she say yall are big now and don’t need looking after any more. You’s both in school. And after school, yall can take of yourselves.”

Their eyes met—Ida’s, red and teary; Harriet’s round and ringing with horror—and stayed together for a moment that Harriet would remember until she died. Ida looked away first.

“And she’s right,” she said, in a more resigned voice. “Allison’s in high school and you—you don’t need anybody to stay at home all day and watch out for you any more. You’s in school most of the year anyway.”

“I’ve been in school for seven years!”

“Well, that’s what she tell me.”

Harriet dashed upstairs to her mother’s room and ran in without knocking. She found her mother sitting on the side of the bed and Allison on her knees, crying with her face pressed into the bedspread. When Harriet came in, she raised her head and, with swollen eyes, gave Harriet a look so anguished that it took her aback.

“Not you, too,” said her mother. Her voice was blurred and
her eyes drowsy. “Leave me alone, girls. I want to lie down for a minute.…”

“You can’t fire Ida.”

“Well, I like Ida too, girls, but she doesn’t work for free and lately it seems as if she’s dissatisfied.”

These were all things that Harriet’s father said; her voice was slow and mechanical, as if she were reciting a memorized speech.

“You can’t fire her,” repeated Harriet shrilly.

“Your father says—”

“So what? He doesn’t live here.”

“Well, girls, you’ll have to talk to her yourself. Ida agrees with me that neither of us are happy with the way things have been working out around here.”

There was a long pause.

“Why’d you tell Ida that I told on her?” Harriet said. “What’d you say?”

“We’ll talk about this later.” Charlotte swung around and lay down on the bed.

“No!
Now!
”

“Don’t worry, Harriet,” Charlotte said. She closed her eyes. “And don’t cry, Allison, please don’t, I can’t stand it,” she said, her voice trailing fitfully away. “It’ll all work out. I promise.…”

Screaming, spitting, scratching, biting: none of these were adequate to the rage that blazed up in Harriet. She stared down at her mother’s serene face. Peacefully her chest rose; peacefully her chest fell. Moisture glistened on her upper lip, where the coral lipstick had faded and feathered up into the tiny wrinkles; her eyelids were oily and bruised-looking, with deep hollows like thumb-prints at the inner corner.

Harriet went downstairs, leaving Allison at her mother’s bedside, smacking the banister with her hand. Ida was still in her chair and staring out the window with her cheek cupped in her palm and as Harriet stopped in the doorway and gazed at her sorrowfully Ida seemed to glow up out of her surroundings with a merciless reality. Never had she seemed quite so palpable, so fixed and robust and marvelously solid. Her chest, beneath the thin gray cotton of her faded dress, heaved
powerfully with her breath. Impulsively, Harriet started over to the chair but Ida—the tears still glistening on her cheeks—turned her head and gave her a look that stopped her where she stood.

For a long time, the two of them looked at each other. The two of them had had staring contests since Harriet was small—it was a game, a test of wills, something to laugh about but this time it was no game; everything was wrong and terrible and there was no laughter when Harriet, at last, was forced to drop her eyes in shame. And in silence—for there was nothing else to do—Harriet hung her head and walked away, with the beloved sorrowful eyes burning into her back.

————

“What’s wrong?” said Hely when he saw Harriet’s dull, dazed expression. He’d been about to let her have it for taking so long, but the look on her face made him feel sure that they were both in big, big trouble: the worst trouble of their lives.