She hummed one of the tunes, and after a while in the hot, empty house by herself she felt the tears come in her eyes. Her throat got tight and rough and she couldn’t sing any more.
Quickly she wrote the fellow’s name at the very top of the list--MOTSART.
Ralph was tied in the wagon just as she had left him. He sat up quiet and still and his fat little hands held on to the sides.
Ralph looked like a little Chinese baby with his square black bangs and his black eyes. The sun was in his face, and that was why he had been hollering. Bubber was nowhere around. When Ralph saw her coming he began tuning up to cry again. She pulled the wagon into the shade by the side of the new house and took from her shirt pocket a blue-colored jelly bean. She stuck the candy in the baby’s warm, soft mouth.
‘Put that in your pipe and smoke it,’ she said to him. In a way it was a waste, because Ralph was still too little to get the real good flavor out of candy. A clean rock would be about the same to him, only the little fool would swallow it. He didn’t understand any more about taste than he did about talking.
When you said you were so sick and tired of dragging him around you had a good mind to throw him in the river, it was the same to him as if you had been loving him. Nothing much made any difference to him. That was why it was such an awful bore to haul him around.
Mick cupped her hands, clamped them tight together, and blew through the crack between her thumbs. Her cheeks puffed out and at first there was only the sound of air rushing through her fists. Then a high, shrill whistle sounded, and after a few seconds Bubber came out from around the corner of the house.
She rumpled the sawdust out of Bubber’s hair and straightened Ralph’s cap. This cap was the finest thing Ralph had. It was made out of lace and all embroidered. The ribbon under his chin was blue on one side and white on the other, and over each ear there were big rosettes. His head had got too big for the cap and the embroidery scratched, but she always put it on him when she took him out. Ralph didn’t have any real baby carriage like most folks’ babies did, or any summer bootees.
He had to be dragged around in a tacky old wagon she had got for Christmas three years before. But the fine cap gave him face. There was nobody on the street, for it was late Sunday morning and very hot. The wagon screeched and rattled. Bubber was barefooted and the sidewalk was so hot it burned his feet. The green oak trees made cool-looking black shadows on the ground, but that was not shade enough. ‘Get up in the wagon,’ she told Bubber. ‘And let Ralph sit in your lap.’
‘I can walk all right.’ The long summer-time always gave Bubber the colic. He didn’t have on a shirt and his ribs were sharp and white. The sun made him pale instead of brown, and his little titties were like blue raisins on his chest. ‘I don’t mind pulling you,’ Mick said. ‘Get on in.’
‘O.K.’ Mick dragged the wagon slowly because she was not in any hurry to get home. She began talking to the kids. But it was really more like saying things to herself than words said to them. ‘This is a funny thing--the dreams I’ve been having lately. It’s like I’m swimming. But instead of water I’m pushing out my arms and swimming through great big crowds of people. The crowd is a hundred times bigger than in Kresses’ store on Saturday afternoon. The biggest crowd in the world. And sometimes I’m yelling and swimming through people, knocking them all down wherever I go--and other times I’m on the ground and people are trompling all over me and my insides are oozing out on the sidewalk. I guess it’s more like a nightmare than a plain On Sundays the house was always full of folks because the boarders had visitors. Newspapers rustled and there was cigar smoke, and footsteps always on the stairs.’ Some things you just naurally want to keep private. Not because they are bad, but because you just want them secret. There are two or three things I wouldn’t want even you to know about’ Bubber got out when they came to the corner and helped her lift the wagon down the curb and get it up on the next sidewalk.
‘But there’s one thing I would give anything for. And that’s a piano. If we had a piano I’d practice every single night and learn every piece in the world. That’s the thing I, want more than anything else.’
They had come to their own home block now. Their house was only a few doors away. It was one of the biggest houses on the whole north side of town--three stories high. But then there were fourteen people in the family. There weren’t that many in the real, blood Kelly family--but they ate there and slept there at five dollars a head and you plight as well count them on in. Mr. Singer wasn’t counted in that because he only rented a room and kept it straightened up himself.
The house was narrow and had not been painted for many years. It did hot seem to be built strong enough for its three stories of height. It sagged on one side.
Mick untied Ralph and lifted him from the wagon. She darted quickly through the hall, and from the corner of her eye she saw that the living-room was full of boarders. Her Dad was there, too. Her Mama would be in the kitchen. They were all hanging around waiting for dinner-time.
She went into the first of the three rooms that the family kept for themselves. She put Ralph down on the bed where her Dad and Mama slept and gave him a string of beads to play with.
From behind the closed door of the next room she could hear the sound of voices, and she decided to go inside.
Hazel and Etta stopped talking when they saw her. Etta was sitting in the chair by the window, painting her toe-nails with the red polish. Her hair was done up in steel rollers and there was a white dab of face cream on a little place under her chin where a pimple had come out. Hazel was flopped out lazy on the bed as usual. ‘What were you all jawing about?’ It’s none of your nosy business,’ Etta said. ‘Just you hush up and leave us alone.’
‘It’s my room just as much as it is either one of yours. I have as good a right hi here as you do.’ Mick strutted from one corner to the other until she had covered all the floor space. ‘But then I don’t care anything about picking any fight. All I want are my own rights.’
Mick brushed back her shaggy bangs with the palm of her hand. She had done this so often that there was a little row of cowlicks above her forehead. She quivered her nose and made faces at herself in the mirror. Then she began walking around the room again.
Hazel and Etta were O.K. as far as sisters went. But Etta was like she was full of worms. All she thought about was movie stars and getting in the movies. Once she had written to Jeanette MacDonald and had got a typewritten letter back saying that if ever she came out to Hollywood she could come by and swim in her swimming pool. And ever since that swimming pool had been preying on Etta’s mind. All she thought about was going to Hollywood when she could scrape up the bus fare and getting a job as a secretary and being buddies with Jeanette MacDonald and getting in the movies herself.
She primped all the day long. And that was the bad part. Etta wasn’t naturally pretty like Hazel. The main thing was she didn’t have any chin. She would pull at her jaw and go through a lot of chin exercises she had read in ft movie book. She was always looking at her side profile in the mirror and trying to keep her mouth set in a certain way. But it didn’t do any good.
Sometimes Etta would hold her face with her hands and cry hi the night about it.
Hazel was plain lazy. She was good-looking but thick in the head. She was eighteen years old, and next to Bill she was the oldest of all the kids in the family. Maybe that was the trouble.
She got the first and biggest share of everything--the first whack at the new clothes and the biggest part of any special treat. Hazel never had to grab for anything and she was soft.