“Hazel’s got everything she needs to get married but she just lacks one thing,” the old woman would say.
Hazel drove all over the country to dances with other girls who worked in Kinkaid or taught school. On Sunday morning she got up with a hangover and took coffee with aspirin and put on her silk print dress and drove off down the road to sing in the choir. Her mother, who said she had no religion, opened up the store and sold gas and ice cream to tourists.
Hazel hung over the ironing-board yawning and tenderly rubbing her blurred face and the old woman read out loud, “Tall industrious man, thirty-five years old, desires make acquaintance woman of good habits, non-smoker or drinker, fond of home life, no triflers please.”
“Aw, Mom,” Hazel said.
“What’s triflers?” May said.
“Man in prime of life,” the old woman read relentlessly, “desires friendship of healthy woman without encumbrances, send photograph first letter.”
“Aw cut it out, Mom,” Hazel said.
“What’s encumbrances?” May said.
“Where would you be if I did get married?” Hazel said gloomily with a look on her face of irritable satisfaction.
“Any time you want to get married you can get.”
“I got you and May.”
“Oh, go on.”
“Well I have.”
“Oh, go on,” the old woman said with disgust. “I look after my ownself. I always have.” She was going to say a lot more, for this speech was indeed a signpost in her life, but the moment after she had energetically summoned up that landscape which was coloured vividly and artlessly like a child’s crayon drawing, and presented just such magical distortions, she shut her eyes as if oppressed by a feeling of unreality, a reasonable doubt that any of this had ever existed. She tapped with her spoon on the table and said to Hazel, “Well you never had such a dream as I had last night.”
“I never do dream anyway,” Hazel said.
The old woman sat tapping her spoon and looking with concentration at nothing but the front of the stove.
“Dreamt I was walking down the road,” she said. “I was walking down the road past Simmonses’ gate and I felt like a cloud was passing over the sun, felt cold, like. So I looked up and I seen a big bird, oh, the biggest bird you ever saw, black as that stove top there, it was right over me between me and the sun. Did you ever dream a thing like that?”
“I never dream anything,” Hazel said rather proudly.
“Remember that nightmare I had when I was sleeping in the front room after I had the red measles?” May said. “Remember that nightmare?”
“I’m not talking about any nightmare,” the old woman said.
“I thought there was people in coloured hats going round and round in that room. Faster and faster so all their hats was blurred together. All the rest of them was invisible except they had on these coloured hats.”
Her grandmother put her tongue out to lick off some specks of dry tobacco that were stuck to her lips, then got up and lifted the stove lid and spat into the fire. “I might as well talk to a barn wall,” she said. “May, put a coupla sticks in that fire I’ll fry us some bacon. I don’t want to keep the stove on today any longer’n I can help.”
“It’s going to be hotter today than it was yesterday,” Hazel said placidly. “Me and Lois have a bargain on not to wear any stockings. Mr. Peebles says a word to us we’re going to say what do you think they hired you for, going around looking at everybody’s legs? He gets embarrassed,” she said. Her bleached head disappeared into the skirt of her dress with a lonesome giggle like the sound of a bell rung once by accident, then caught.
“Huh,” the old woman said.
May and Eunie Parker and Heather Sue Murray sat in the afternoon on the front step of the store. The sun had clouded over about noon but it seemed the day got even hotter then. You could not hear a cricket or a bird, but there was a low wind; a hot, creeping wind came through the country grass. Because it was Saturday hardly anyone stopped at the store; the local cars drove on past, heading for town.
Heather Sue said, “Don’t you kids ever hitch a ride?”
“No,” May said.
Eunie Parker her best friend for two years said, “Oh, May wouldn’t even be allowed. You don’t know her grandmother. She can’t do anything.”
May scuffed her feet in the dirt and ground her heel into an ant hill. “Neither can you,” she said.
“I can so,” Eunie said. “I can do what I like.” Heather Sue looked at them in her puzzled company way and said, “Well what is there to do here? I mean what do you kids do?”
Her hair was cut short all around her head; it was coarse, black, and curly. She had that Candy Apples lipstick on and it looked as if she shaved her legs.
“We go to the cemetery,” May said flatly. They did, too. She and Eunie went and sat in the cemetery almost every afternoon because there was a shady corner there and no younger children bothered them and they could talk speculatively without any danger of being overheard.
“You go where?” Heather Sue said, and Eunie scowling into the dirt at their feet said, “Oh, we do not. I hate that stupid cemetery,” she said. Sometimes she and May had spent a whole afternoon looking at the tombstones and picking out names that interested them and making up stories about the people who were buried there.
“Gee, don’t give me the creeps like that,” Heather Sue said. “It’s awfully hot, isn’t it? If I was at home this afternoon, I guess me and my girl friend would be going to the pool.”
“We can go and swim at Third Bridge,” Eunie said.
“Where is that?”
“Down the road, it’s not far. Half a mile.”
“In this heat?” Heather Sue said.
Eunie said, “I’ll ride you on my bike.” She said to May in an overly gay and hospitable voice, “You get your bike too, come on.”
May considered a moment and then got up and went into the store, which was always dark in the daytime, hot too, with a big wooden clock on the wall and bins full of little sweet crumbling cookies, soft oranges, onions. She went to the back where her grandmother was sitting on a stool beside the ice-cream freezer, under a big baking-powder sign that had a background of glittering foil, like a Christmas card.
May said, “Can I go swimming with Eunie and Heather Sue?”
“Where you going to go swimming?” her grandmother said, almost neutrally. She knew there was only one place you could go.
“Third Bridge.”
Eunie and Heather Sue had come in and were standing by the door. Heather Sue smiled with delicacy and politeness in the direction of the old woman.
“No, no you can’t.”
“It’s not deep there,” May said.
Her grandmother grunted enigmatically. She sat bent over, her elbow on her knee and her chin pressed down on her thumb. She would not bother looking up.
“Why can’t I?” May said stubbornly.