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After a while she didn’t do that anymore, she ate her lunch upstairs in the cloakroom, alone.
I would like to think that it was Wanda who pointed Frances out, when we stood in line ready to march into the classroom, as the girl we were always trying to avoid. But I could have been the one who did that, and certainly I went along with the joke, and was glad to be on the side of those who maintained the business of raised eyebrows and bitten lips and suppressed-but not quite suppressed-giggles. Living out at the end of that road as I did, and being easily embarrassed, yet a show-off, as I improbably was, I could never stand up for anybody who was being humiliated. I could never rise above a feeling of relief that it was not me.
The hair ribbons became part of it. Just to go up to Frances and say, “I love your hair ribbon, where did you get it?” and have her say, in i
“Where did you go after school yesterday?”
“Chicago.”
“Where did your sister get her permanent?”
“Oh, in Chicago.”
Some girls would clamp their mouths down on the very word, and their chests would heave, or they would pretend to have hiccups till they were half sick.
I didn’t avoid walking home with Frances, though I certainly let it be known that I didn’t choose to do that, but did it only because her mother had asked it of me. How much of this special very feminine persecution she was aware of, I don’t know. She may have thought there was some place where girls of my class always went to have lunch, and that I just went on doing that. She may never have understood what the giggling was about. She never asked about it. She tried to hold my hand, crossing the street, but I pulled away and told her not to.
She said she always used to hold Sadie’s hand, when Sadie walked her to school in Chicago.
“But that was different,” she said. “There aren’t any streetcars here.”
One day she offered me a cookie left over from her lunch. I refused, so as not to feel any inconvenient obligation.
“Go on,” she said. “My mother put it in for you.”
Then I understood. Her mother put in this extra cookie, this treat, for me to eat when we had our lunches together. She had never told her mother that I didn’t show up at lunchtime, and that she could not find me. She must have been eating the extra cookie herself, but now the dishonesty was bothering her.
So every day from then on she offered it, almost at the last minute as if she was embarrassed, and every day I accepted.
We began to have a little conversation, starting when we were almost clear of town. We were both interested in movie stars. She had seen far more movies than I had-in Chicago you could see movies every afternoon, and Sadie used to take her. But I walked past our theatre and looked at the stills every time the picture changed, so I knew something about them. And I had one movie magazine at home, which a visiting cousin had left. It had pictures of Dea
“My father and mother used to sing in the Light Opera Society,” she said. “They sang in The Pirates of Penzance.”
Lightopra-sussciety. Pirazapenzanze. I filed those words away but would not ask what they meant. If she had said them at school, in front of others, they would have been irresistible ammunition.
When her mother came out to greet us-kissing Frances hello as she had kissed her good-bye-she might ask if I could come in and play. I always said I had to go straight home.
Shortly before Christmas, Mrs. Wainwright asked me if I could come to have supper the next Sunday. She said it would be a little thank-you party and a farewell party, now that they were going away. I was on the point of saying that I didn’t think my mother would let me, but when I heard the word farewell I saw the invitation in a different light. The burden of Frances would be lifted, no further obligation would be involved and no intimacy enforced. Mrs. Wainwright said that she had written a little note to my mother, since they didn’t have a phone.
My mother would have liked it better if I had been asked to some town girl’s house, but she said yes. She took it into account, too, that the Wainwrights were moving away.
“I don’t know what they were thinking of, coming here,” she said. “Anybody who can afford to wallpaper is going to do it themselves.”
“Where are you going?” I asked Frances.
“Burlington.”
“Where’s that?”
“It’s in Canada too. We’re going to stay with my aunt and uncle but we’ll have our own toilet upstairs and our sink and a hotplate. My dad’s going to get a better job.”
“What doing?”
“I don’t know.”
Their Christmas tree was in a corner. The front room had only one window and if they had put the tree there it would have blocked off all the light. It was not a big or well-shaped tree, but it was smothered in tinsel and gold and silver beads and beautiful intricate ornaments. In another corner of the room was a parlor stove, a woodstove, in which the fire seemed just recently to have been lighted. The air was still cold and heavy, with the forest smell of the tree.
Neither Mr. nor Mrs. Wainwright was very confident about the fire. First one and then the other kept fiddling with the damper and daringly reaching in with the poker and patting the pipe to see if it was getting hot, or by any chance too hot. The wind was fierce that day-sometimes it blew the smoke down the chimney.
That was no matter to Frances and me. On a card table set up in the middle of the room there was a Chinese checkers board ready for two people to play, and a stack of movie magazines. I fell upon them at once. I had never imagined such a feast. It made no difference that they were not new and that some had been looked through so often they were almost falling apart. Frances stood beside my chair, interfering with my pleasure a little by telling me what was just ahead and what was in another magazine I hadn’t opened yet. The magazines were obviously her idea and I had to be patient with her-they were her property and if she had taken it into her head to remove them I would have been more grief-stricken even than I had been when my father drowned our kittens.
She was wearing an outfit that could have come out of one of those magazines-a child star’s party dress of deep red velvet with a white lace collar and a black ribbon threaded through the lace. Her mother’s dress was exactly the same, and they both had their hair done the same way-a roll in front and long in the back. Frances’s hair was thin and fine and what with her excitement and her jumping around to show me things, the roll was already coming undone.
It was getting dark in the room. There were wires sticking out of the ceiling but no bulbs. Mrs. Wainwright brought in a lamp with a long cord that plugged into the wall. The bulb shone through the pale-green glass of a lady’s skirt.
“That’s Scarlett O’Hara,” Frances said. “Daddy and I gave it to Mother for her birthday.”
We never got around to the Chinese checkers and in time the board was removed. We shifted the magazines to the floor. A piece of lace-not a real tablecloth-was laid across the table. Dishes followed. Evidently Frances and I were to eat in here, by ourselves. Both parents were involved in laying the table-Mrs. Wainwright wearing a fancy apron over her red velvet and Mr. Wainwright in shirtsleeves and silk-backed vest.