The Sisters (17 page)

If not for Sally, she might have given up her plan weeks ago. “Do you want a life or not?” her friend demanded whenever Rainey said she didn’t know if she could go through with it. All spring before graduation, and during the two months since, she’d watched an eight-man crew knock down what was left of Carson’s Feed Store, clear the lot, lay a new foundation, and raise the pitched-roof shape of the new Burger Chef. Last week, the sign had gone up, and she’d taken a walk down there, specially, to smile up at the mustached chef rising like a chimney out of the red kite-frame border. A black crossbar declaring
HAMBURGERS
anchored the kite at the center and seemed to keep it and the happy chef hovering safely just above the ground. She hadn’t seen the sign lit up yet, but Sally, who had stopped at a Burger Chef on a trip to Indianapolis, had told her every part of it seemed to float in the night sky, glowing white, orange, green, red, and gold.

Rainey had stood for a long time on the other side of the street, studying the chef’s face, almost praying to him, really. A shiver of fear mingled with delight rushed up her spine as she thought of what her parents would say to that.

A job,
she had mentally urged the chef.
Please, a job.

A job meant money. Money meant she could enroll in September in the bookkeeping course at the junior college right along with Sally. And the course meant that soon, in just a year or two, she could have a nice job in an office in a city like Louisville or Indianapolis, a little apartment for herself or a bigger one to share with Sally, a closet full of beautiful clothes, a dresser drawer for nothing but gloves, and maybe even a car of her own.

She leaned over the dresser and looked in the mirror, seeing, instead of her own face, the familiar chef smiling back at her. Silently, she mouthed the words
I’m counting on you. My only hope.
It was the sort of corny thing people said to each other on
Love of Life
or
The Secret Storm,
which her mother—icy glass of cherry No-Cal in hand—devoted herself to every afternoon, but the words seemed appropriate at this moment. To get out of Newman, she needed to be able to wave her very own bankbook at Mother like a sword. Unlike Alma, she didn’t have a former local boy like Gordon Crisp coming back on schedule from his first year of practice in podiatry to marry her. Everybody knew Mother couldn’t abide the Crisps and didn’t much like Gordon, but that hadn’t stopped her from throwing Alma’s success in Rainey’s face. It had gotten worse when no one asked Rainey to her junior prom, unbearable when she again had no date for her senior prom. And then, when Alma showed up with Gordon a day early for Rainey’s graduation and announced she was expecting—that’s when Rainey had decided absolutely that she was going to listen to Sally.

Rainey had waited for nearly two weeks after her graduation to tell her parents her plans to take classes at the Anderson County Junior College come fall, just so it wouldn’t look like she was trying to steal Alma’s thunder, much as she wanted to get back at Alma for stealing hers. Resistance—even an outright battle—she expected from her mother, but it took her up short when even Daddy answered with a tight, almost practiced phrase that snapped, like closing a book: “That’s not for you.”

“Foolishness,” her mother had added before Rainey could ask Daddy what he meant. Mother had just plowed on with, “Are you forgetting how you had to repeat the third grade? And then it took that nice Miss Lewis all that extra work so you could pass your history class that one year.”

“But, Mother, I was sick…” Rainey began. Why was it that she was the only one who ever seemed to remember that? Chicken pox, mumps, German measles, and a polio scare all in the same year, and then those two months in bed with a broken leg her first year of high school.

But neither one of them was listening. Mother said, “Come mash these potatoes, now,” and Daddy was already doing the word jumble in the paper, and Rainey couldn’t find a way to bring the subject up again with him.

Close as they were, she couldn’t ever be quite sure where Daddy stood on anything, except that he loved her, but it was his manner of loving that confused her most. She knew he wanted the best for her, but what was that, and how did he know? Did it have anything to do with what she wanted for herself, with what she thought would make her happy? Did it even leave room for her to figure out what that was?

As for talking with her mother about it, well, she might as well have said she wanted to work her way to China on a fishing boat. Girls got married: That’s as far Mother’s imagination went, though she never suggested how Rainey might manage it. Apparently, she believed that if Rainey just stayed busy for a few years with housework, eventually a boy she knew from school or church would grow up enough to get a job selling insurance and buy her a house in town.

Well, she wasn’t going to wait around for some nameless, faceless boy who decided he wanted her just because he was ready to settle down and she was all that was left. One last look in the mirror, a flick of the comb to right a wispy brown curl above her ear, a swish of rosy lipstick, and she was ready.

The dining room clock chimed nine times. She’d planned everything well. It was a little warm for mid-June, but even with walking slowly to keep from raising a sweat, she could easily make it to the Burger Chef by ten o’clock. The manager wasn’t due with applications until 10:30, so if there weren’t many people in line outside, she could walk another half block down to the library to freshen up in the restroom and rinse her mouth with a sip of cold water from the fountain.

Taking a deep breath, and then another, Rainey tucked a fresh handkerchief, her comb, and lipstick into her clutch bag, opened her bedroom door, and stepped into the hallway as lightly as she could. The sweet smell of strawberries thickening into jam carried through the house on the steam drifting from the kitchen. Her mother had been determined to teach her the whole process, from cleaning and stemming the berries to labeling the jars, so Rainey had been forced last night to whine and act the brat a little to assure her chance this morning of slipping out of the house. A well-timed “
Da-a-
dy,” at the dinner table had led him to say, “Bertie, let her be for now.” And though her mother had tightened her lips and said, “It’s time she learned,” they all three knew the matter was settled. Her father had schooled his wife and daughters to understand that while family disputes at any time were never desirable, at the dinner table, they were intolerable. What they also knew, in spite of the family show of pride in Alma, was that Rainey was her father’s favorite and that, in small things anyway, he would give in to her. Once the job was in hand, she was sure she could bring her father around to her side about college. After all, if what he wanted was for her to find a nice man to take care of her, she could meet a better class of men working in some professional office. And Daddy’s support alone would silence Mother.

Five steps took Rainey from her bedroom to the hall doorway. Another three steps into the dining room and she could peek quickly into the kitchen. If a batch of jam was cooking, her mother had to be at the stove, stirring and checking for signs of gelling, which meant she would be in the nook beyond the sink, out of sight from the dining room. To her relief, Rainey could hear her mother in the kitchen, half-humming, half-muttering, but could not see her, so she backed through the dining room into the living room and to the door, taking care to turn the knob silently, to pull the door not quite to, and to catch the screen door on the porch before it could bang shut. In another moment, she was turning the corner onto Locust Avenue, on her way, free.

When she got to the Burger Chef, no one was waiting at all, and even though it still wasn’t 10:30, a man in a white shirt with a red bow tie waved her inside from one of the tables in the dining area. “Looking for a job?” he asked. She nodded and took his hand while he introduced himself as Mr. Buchanan, the manager. Smiling in the empty-eyed way of ticket takers at the fair, he asked her if she’d finished high school—
yes
—if she had any work experience—
no, unless he counted working concessions at basketball games
(he did)—and if she was planning to get married anytime soon. Next thing she knew, he’d shoved some papers across the table for her to fill out, then pointed behind the counter and told her she could go back there and dig in the boxes until she found two uniforms in her size. After that, he said, the crew manager, Millie—a fiftyish woman Rainey recognized as a waitress from the Blue Goose Diner—would show her how to work the grill and assemble sandwiches.

Before Rainey knew it, her skin was coated with a thin film of grease and sweat, and it was four o’clock. She was to report for training again at nine o’clock tomorrow morning, and so on for the rest of the week, and then on the Monday after, the restaurant would open and she’d work an alternating shift of days and nights. She didn’t say anything to Mr. Buchanan about the bookkeeping course, figuring by the time September came she’d be such a valuable employee that he would let her get all her hours in on nights and weekends.

At home, the first wave she had to flail against was over how she’d been gone all day without even a word to her mother. “What do you mean, doing a thing like that? You’ve been brought up better!” Right then, Daddy came in from work, so Mother shouted more loudly to make sure that before he had even reached the kitchen he not only heard her fury but understood the reason for it. “Slipped out the door like a thief, with nary a word! And with me there in that hot kitchen, working to put up those strawberries before they spoiled. You ever think what might have happened if I’d slipped hauling that big canner full of jars off the stove? There I’d be on the floor, burned and dying and calling out for a girl that doesn’t care a straw for a soul but herself!”

Rainey stood still, eyes lowered, as she had been taught by countless bare-handed whippings to do. She pressed her lips into a practiced expression of shame, which served now to stop a smile from taking over, for she knew that, more than anything, her father hated her mother’s hysterical rants. Daddy pulled out a chair and sat down at the kitchen table, propped up his elbows, cupped his forehead in his palms and waited for Mother to wear herself out, which she did in a minute or two.

For a moment, everyone was silent—Daddy still with his head in his hands, Mother poised in front of the refrigerator with a spoon raised and drawn back like a mallet, and Rainey leaning into the wall, but not slumping as if she didn’t care.

Mother spoke first. “What are we going to do with this girl?”

Rainey straightened up, gathered a wad of her skirt in her hand, and waited for her father to look at her. When he did, he asked almost casually, with no hint of accusation or disappointment, “So where did you go?”

“I walked up to the new Burger Chef to see about getting a job,” she said. “I was the first one there.”

He smiled a little at that, but not enough that her mother could see. “You get it?”

Rainey nodded, still not risking a smile. “I’ve been training all day.”

Daddy arched back in his chair and reached up with one hand to massage his neck, then twisted his head back and forth and from side to side until a tiny dull snap signaled a vertebra sliding back into place. He took a pack of Marlboros from his shirt pocket and rooted behind the butter dish and the napkin holder for his lighter. A shaft of sunlight coming through the window of the back door, just behind him, caught a few specks of sawdust in his oiled hair and made them sparkle. He tapped a cigarette out of the pack, lit it, and then, after four full drags, said, “You know you’ll have to get yourself there and back.”

“Sure, Daddy.”

He knocked a long ash into the chipped saucer he used for an ashtray and stubbed out the flame gently so he could finish the cigarette later. “All right, then.” He looked at Rainey and then at Mother, who had put down the spoon and was now clenching and unclenching her fists at her sides. “No harm in it I can see.” He got up and started out of the kitchen. Rainey stopped him long enough to kiss his cheek and whisper, “Thank you, Daddy,” when he passed. He squeezed her hand, two times quick.

He hadn’t even asked what she wanted to do with the money. Marveling at how easy it had been, she turned to leave, having forgotten about her mother, thinking now only of stripping off her oily clothes and getting a quick bath before dinner.

“You—Rainey Jean Jorgensen,” said Mother, resettling a pot lid a little more loudly than necessary. “You won’t last the summer.”

July

What Rainey liked best about her job was scooping up the freshly drained and salted fries and shaking them into the little paper envelopes. She liked the busy times, too, when she felt quick and efficient, smiling a bright welcome at a customer, punching the keys on the cash register, and moving back and forth behind the counter, arranging the order on a tray or settling it into a carryout sack she opened with a snap.

Tuesday nights were usually slow, especially after eight o’clock, so there wasn’t much to do except wipe up the tables, refill the straws and napkins, or—tonight—sneak glances at the stocky boy in the front booth. He’d finished his third burger more than an hour ago, and since then he’d sat with his legs stretched out along the bench, tapping the table, watching her. If he’d ever been in before, she hadn’t noticed him, but now, with no one in the restaurant except herself and the new hire, Cindy, who was busy cleaning the grill in the kitchen, Rainey couldn’t help it. He was maybe twenty or twenty-one. Not much to look at—short, at most a couple or three inches taller than she was, with eyebrows and eyelashes so pale there seemed to be none, leaving only the purplish rims underneath to bring attention to his light blue eyes. But his hair was interesting—thick, curled in red-gold locks, like the hair she imagined on boys in fairy tales, and when Rainey concentrated on this, she began to like him.