Shoes on the Wire
by
Peggy West
* * * *
PUBLISHED BY:
Shoes on the Wire
Copyright 2011 by Peggy West
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Leaving Ambrose
Chapter II: Blackberry Bluff
Chapter III: Meeting Cookie
Chapter IV: Off the Porch
Chapter V: The Lookout
Chapter VI: Rats
Chapter VII: The Mean Boy
Chapter VIII: My Mother Becomes Ill
Chapter IX: Light and Glass
Chapter X: Caring for My Mother
Chapter XI: Cookie Disappears
Chapter XII: A Future for Cookie
Chapter XIII: The Spirit
Chapter XIV: Davey’s House
Chapter XV: Davey Leaves
Chapter XVI: My Thirteenth Birthday
Chapter XVII: Mrs. Better Homes and Gardens
Chapter XVIII: The Fight
Chapter XIX: Rebecca
About the Author
Chapter 1: Leaving Ambrose
My mother left my father because he wouldn’t come home. I stood by their bedroom door, listening in while my mother talked over the phone to my Aunt Linda about giving my father “a good jolt.” He was away all of the time at work.
When they fight, my father says to my mother, “It doesn’t matter where we go, you’ll be unhappy.” And then he jumps in his truck and drives to the lake. And my mother bangs pans all evening and gets on the phone with my Aunt Linda.
Our house was a terrible dead quiet storm. My father wouldn’t come home for a week and my mother wouldn’t get off the phone with Aunt Linda. I went back to my room and turned on my record player. I had a Beatles album. I went to my room and looked through my Beatles scrapbook then diagrammed some sentences to make me feel calm and grownup.
My mother said my little brother Davey and I were driving to see my aunt at her new house and I had to look like a little girl whose mother cared about her hair. The beautician at the beauty school said that she would give me a curly permanent as ordered although my hair was bone straight. That’s when I saw the hair I wanted in the mirror. One of the beauticians was a teenager and had straight hair that parted in the middle, with bangs. Her hair looked so beautiful, bouncing along, cool. My hair would come out frizzy and fussy with the permanent.
“That’s more like it,” my mother said when she saw me with the new permanent. Someday I would look like a teenager with casual, cool hair. I would look like the teenage beautician, that’s how I would look. For now, though, my hair belonged to my mother. The permanent made me look like a little girl. I couldn’t wait to get older.
Two days and hundreds of miles of driving in the car and we were at my aunt’s new house on Grace Point. Her rules included: shoes off and no fingerprints, “Your cousins never wear their shoes in this house and there are plenty of sinks where you can wash your hands.” She loved her new furniture, which is what you buy in a rich person’s house. There was something kissy about the way she talked. She said they looked and looked for just the right new house, but they couldn’t find what they liked so “we built.”
Aunt Linda seemed happy about her new house, which had five bathrooms. Why wouldn’t my mother smile back? She looked down and said “oh” fast and crabby. When we were alone in the guest room with all of the ruffles, my mother said, “I see that we are to be installed in the paddy-cake room. I for one do not need festive bearing down on me while I sleep.” Everybody laughs when my mother talks like that, so I laughed. She called my aunt Mrs. Better Homes and Gardens. That’s when I figured out that there was a secret war between my aunt and my mother.
Every time a car crunched over the driveway gravel, my mother looked at me with hope. We stayed at my aunt’s house for a month but my father didn’t come to get us so we had to find another place to live. She found us the worst place in the world.
Chapter II: Blackberry Bluff
We drove for twenty minutes and got out of the car at the Blackberry Bluff Housing Project Office. It was called a “garden estates” housing project. I tried right away to get over my surprise at how everything is painted orange.
The Office gave my mother directions. “We’ve put you people close to the edge and at the top of the Project.” Everybody needed a flashlight because the electricity went out a lot.
We drove up and down the long winding blocks. Hundreds of identical little houses. The hills to the right and hills to the left were smothered by small, orange houses that all looked the same. Up a hill and then down a hill, but no matter what, more orange houses.
My mother says that this will be good for us – “light Mother a cigarette”– that it is high time for us two kids to see how the other half lived. People should see this, she said, especially your Aunt Linda. If I had that laughing look on my face the way she does, my mother would call me high and mighty.
“This is us,” she said, and we pulled into a parking lot. “Everybody out.” The kids on the monkey bars stared at us. Kids standing in front of the little houses stared at us. Kids standing in a circle turned to stare at us. “We have monkey bars,” Davey said. He ran up to the monkey bars and climbed, then jumped down when our mother said we had to see our new home. I walked behind my brother. The kids on the monkey bars stared and called out “What’s your name, girl with the brown hair?” Then they monkeyed down and stared at us with their mouths open. They were different, like they were covered in pancake batter. They smelled bad. Their hair looked sticky.
They keep yelling things at me, “I said, ‘What’s your name?’”
My insides twisted. I didn’t breathe because the air around them smelled bad.
I didn’t answer back because they don’t deserve an answer since they stick their faces in my way and stare at me. I would never speak to kids who yell at me like that.
The kitchen is small and smells funny. The washer and dryer don’t have a light above them. Two bedrooms, and I will share one with my mother, not like in our house where I have my own room. And in the bedroom there is a back door that is locked and has a sign that says “fire exit.” The whole duplex is as big as our living room and dining room in Ambrose. I stay close to my mother and tell her that I like it.
When I look out the back living room window, I see a backyard, a strip of green grass on a little hill, not like our big backyard in Ambrose. No swing set, no garden, no lilac bush, no trees, climbing or sycamore. Across the little hill, a couple of hundred yards away, sits the back of another set of duplexes with a few feet of courtyard peeking out. They put up clotheslines in between theirs and yours. Rags pinned to the line wave in the wind. No matter where you look, everything looks exactly the same.
My mother sent Davey out to play on the monkey bars. My mother and I sat on the floor because there isn’t any furniture yet. “There it is again,” she said, looking at her foot. When her foot shakes, we watch it like it is on TV. Her foot bumped against the heater. “What is this?” she said over and over. Is she cold? Maybe she’s tired. Maybe she’s happy, finally. She lay down on the floor, and I looked out the window.
Later, I looked through a pamphlet that shows a duplex that looks exactly like the one we are in. The Project started out as defense housing but when the Second World War ended, it got turned into houses for the poor.
“What’s defense housing?” I asked.
“Where you go when there’s a war on and you’re at the bottom of the heap but still expected to pitch in,” my mother answered, placing a plate on a shelf with no door. “Wait until your father sees where we’ve landed wi
thout him in the picture.”
She said he would be here in no time. I worried that if he didn’t come home in Ambrose to our nice house, why would he come to this terrible place?
Why are we here, that’s what I need to figure out. And when can we go home? But then I met Cookie.
Chapter III: Meeting Cookie
I found out who lives around the courtyard. The Stimps, who have nine children, live in a three bedroom. Next to us, on the other side of our wall, to our right, Dorothy, who’s sick. Across from us a teenage girl who stays inside but has teenage hair. There’s an empty duplex to our left, on the other side of the dirt path. That’s as much as I know.
All I can do is to sit on the porch because I’m too afraid to get off but I don’t really need to anyway. Along comes this skinny girl about my age and a little kid who looks like her. She has an uneven blonde pageboy haircut. Her clothes, which look worn out and like they’ve been through a million washes, are short. But her skin looks like shells on the beach and her eyes are bright blue. Her skinniness is what I noticed first. “Catherine Lee, nickname Cookie,” she said. “You should call me Cookie. This is Georgie.” All of the girls in her family have a nickname. “Don’t you?” She names off her aunt’s nicknames, Bootsie, Kitten, Missy. I have never heard of getting a name that is not your own. Cookie is happy with the names, laughing away; she reminds me of how my aunt talks about her new furniture, without the kissiness.
Cookie said, “So why would you want a plain old regular name like ‘Catherine’ anyway?” She looked me right smack in the face, not where you talk to someone and look the other way with your radio to your ear. Maybe she’s allergic to something and that’s why she can’t stand still.
Cookie kept talking and smiling at me and jiggling around. As though I wanted to be there. As though I planned to listen to someone talk about nicknames all day. Or to come up with one for me. But Cookie stood talking and smiling, and I laughed and looked where she pointed. She was like the little magnet terrier puppies our old neighbors had on their coffee table. You held one in each hand and the magnets worked like there was a spell.
Cookie hadn’t ever seen albums before. “Beatles?” she said. How can you be a kid and not know who the Beatles are? “They are the living end.” “What’s the living end?” “It’s just an expression that teenagers use.”
“Who around here has a record player?” “Not us at our unit, but we have a TV where you have to jump on the floor real hard like it’s the playground to get the picture to stop rolling.” Cookie flipped my album covers around and actually reached into the album cover to pull out the record.
She wants me to walk through the Project with her.
“I’m not leaving here.” I just sit on the porch step. This Project place is not like any place I have ever been before. Every duplex is orange and every porch is gray. Every duplex has the same number of windows. Monkey bars, courtyards, no trees, little tiny lawns. On our street in Ambrose, everybody’s house has a different color and big yards with trees. You can’t get lost because you walk in straight lines not curves like these housing project streets. You can tell by what color the house on the corner is how far away your house is. Whoever heard of living in a place where everything looks the same? And everything looks old.
Cookie said, “You won’t get lost. You can always find your unit by the shoes on the wire. You live on the courtyard next to the shoes on the wire.” A pair of tennis shoes were tied together and flung over an electrical wire. They dangled, with the toes pointing toward our duplex.
“I said I’m not going anywhere.” Besides that, I’m too old to play on the monkey bars. And I have to help my mother unpack.
“You could even come to my unit sometime. Across the street is where we live. But you have to knock 1-2-3 and say my name three times, then we’ll answer. Only that. We won’t answer if you don’t say ‘Cookie Cookie Cookie’ three times.”
Word is out that I am afraid of the Project. Kids buzz me, calling me a sissy, scaredy-cat. I tell them I’m busy reading so leave me alone. I hold a book on my lap. Cookie said “Come on, come on,” twinkling away. I shake my head “no.” Then when I’m alone again, I try to get up from the porch step and it feels like someone is shoving my forehead and I just fall back down.
I sit on the porch steps with a pad of paper and a book, diagramming sentences, not reading. I have fear in my stomach. What if I got lost if I got off the porch? No one will notice that I’m lost. I’ll wander around, alone for days, knocking on identical doors. I’ll feel stupid asking people, “Do I live here?” They will think why doesn’t that stupid girl know where she lives?
Cookie comes to our porch every day, twice a day, and sits with me, smiling and twinkling away.
When are we going home? I want to ask my mother. Not on your life, my mother says to my aunt.
Cookie figured out how to get me off the porch.
Chapter IV: Off the Porch
My biggest fear is getting off the porch and having to talk with the Project kids. I sat on the edge of a step when all of a sudden Cookie and Georgie ran across the street like somebody was chasing them.
Cookie said. “Sometimes I get afraid of things and don’t leave our unit for outside.” She knew how afraid I was.
Cookie knelt on the courtyard pavement by our porch and said something to Georgie who ran to the bars and flung himself like a baby bird from the ground to the third from the top bar.
“Everybody makes fun of me,” I said.
She didn’t think that it was funny that I was afraid. Nobody should laugh at anyone else’s afraidness. “It’s safe on the monkey bars.”
Then I stood up, and for once it didn’t feel like someone was trying to push me down. I followed her. We monkeyed to the top. Our eyes were almost level with the shoes on the wire.
My heart speeded up like a race car. I wanted to start walking around the Project. It has to do with Cookie.
Ten minutes later we got down and walked past the monkey bars and courtyard so that I could show Cookie the car that we had driven all the way from Ambrose. She pointed to the duplex across the street, one with an upstairs, not like ours that is flat all the way through. She wants me to come over someday. She said that I should knock the secret code.
Cookie hasn’t shown up at our courtyard for two days, and I’m worried about her. When I walked to the street, my stomach felt terrible from fear. I crossed the street. Instead of looking right and left first, I just made a beeline straight for her door. I knocked 1-2-3 Cookie Cookie Cookie. Cookie let me in. She led me upstairs to the bedroom she shared with her little brother. The room was almost empty. The closet didn’t have that many clothes in it, just three hangers with clothes on them and then empty space. When I asked her where their beds were, she looked around as though she lost something. Then she patted two orange blankets, more orange than the duplex, on the floor. I asked her, “Where are your pillows?” and she patted a stack of newspaper.
I kept looking around like everything was normal. I told her that everything was very nice.
Then she pulled a small box from a cardboard box that she used as a nightstand. She showed me her necklaces, each wrapped in dirty tissue paper. “Sarah Coventry. My mother sells it at parties.” Cookie held one up to the light coming from the window. “A ruby,” she said. There weren’t any curtains at the window. Instead, a gold torn shade dirty with her fingerprints covered the top half of the window. She said she was supposed to wear it on special occasions only. “But it’s a secret,” she said, about the Sarah Coventry jewelry parties. “If The Office finds out I have these, they’ll make us pay more rent. Or kick us out. Don’t tell anyone. And don’t get the necklace too close to the window or they’ll see it.” We ran downstairs.
I decided not to notice the papers all over the floor and how it needed to be swept. Her mother would be at a Sarah Coventry party until late. Cookie opened a can of spaghetti and heated it in a pan on the
stove. No, she wasn’t going to have any. She would eat dinner later. Cookie kept smiling, but I couldn’t smile. I didn’t want to touch the drain board in the kitchen because it was gooey.
I left their duplex a few minutes later and when I walked between two cars I almost threw up from the smell in her duplex.
The oldest Stimp girl who always wears her mother’s clothes, even her shoes, walked by and looked at me funny. She’s a year younger than me, I found out. But she’s one of the oldest Stimp kids.
I’m good at finding a place to go away and think and even at the Project I found the perfect one.
Chapter V: The Lookout
I called my place the lookout. A secret hiding place where no one knows where you are. I was sick of the Project and everything looking alike so I walked outside of the Project by two blocks. I walked shady ground that had not dried yet this summer, like the forest floor at the lake where the deer laid down. A few more steps and I stood in a little meadow, the Project behind me. On each side there were trees with soaking wet leaves from last winter’s rain when I hadn’t known about such a place as a housing project. I walked past ferns that had leaves so long that a lost toy might be found there. I carried a book in my hand.
I found a big gray boulder to sit on. I sat down with my book, my back to the Project. There was broken bottle glass ground into the dirt and pebble. I looked down to see the airport. A plane took off. Then it was at about my eye level.
I got sad fast. All of these weeks living in the Project, I had imagined quietness, the kind you find in a forest. Not silence exactly but when the air seems like everything is the same. At the lake, the mornings my father and I walked through the woods to get to work, we talked about the difference between silence and absolute stillness. The absence of sound, that’s stillness, he said. No, I said, absolute stillness is all sounds at once and you can’t pick one out from the other. When it’s still, nothing can trap you. Everything is at the same height.
I wish my father would find me. I could picture him walking up the path with his hands in his pocket. Fathers always returned the books I read. Just in the nick of time. You have to love what is there, my father told me when I cried years earlier. Things are never what you think they’re going to be. In fact, picture the way it’s going to be, put your whole heart into it, and then put your money on the fact that it won’t be that way. So you love what is there while you hope for a better time.