he appreciates a good meal and he’s got that big farm, Miriam should be nicer to him—”
“I appreciate a good meal,” said Tommy. “I haven’t had one in more than two months. Everything in the mess hall is the same color. Rice, meat, vegetables, it’s all the same color as our uniforms.”
“—and then when George Lesser left—”
“Mom, this is not only the best meal I’ve had since I left, it may be the best meal I’ve ever had,” Tommy said, very loudly, and I giggled. My mother got up and put her arms around his neck and hugged his bristly head to her chest, hard. “Thomas Alan Miller, you don’t fool me one bit,” she said.
The Langers came over next afternoon, and that was nice, too. My father and Mr. Langer were friends in that way that men are who get dragged into a friendship by their wives. But they got along fine. They would sit in the living room and drink Iron City Beer and watch baseball or football on the TV. Cissy and my mom would sit in the kitchen and have cups of tea and vanilla wafers. Mr. and Mrs. Langer didn’t have any children, so they always made a fuss over us. You’d hear people talk about them, how Henry was on disability from the foundry and ran a bait shop out of his garage, how Cissy made dolls and sold them at church bazaars and fairs, and then suddenly the voices would drop, and you’d know that they’d gotten to the kid part, those poor people, God’s will, and so on. When I was a kid it seemed like God’s will was always that bad things happened, mostly to nice people. When Eddie got his scholarship, when LaRhonda’s father started to make a lot of money, nobody ever said that was God’s will. With Mr. Venti they mainly said it was dumb luck.
“I was there when your brother was born,” Cissy said. She was heavier than my mother, and softer, too, with scented talcum powder caught in the creases of her arms like a dusting of snow. When she was happy, which was most of the time, her whole body jiggled. “I was there, out in the waiting room. I can’t lie, I wanted a little girl after Eddie, but if I had known how Tommy would turn out I wouldn’t have been like that.” I saw my mother throw her a look. Sometimes I thought that was how they’d probably been in sixth grade, too, Cissy giggling and jiggling, and Miriam looking at her sideways. Salt and pepper.
“But then we got you, Mimi,” Cissy said, raising her voice a little as though I was eavesdropping. Which I was. I figured that most of being a kid consisted of eavesdropping, trying to figure older people out and understand what they were going to do next, because whatever they were going to do next was surely going to have some effect on you.
I went down to the other end of the hallway to listen to what the men were saying in the living room, but all I could hear was the guy on television saying somebody needed to punt because it was a fourth down. “That’s for sure,” Mr. Langer said, and they all went silent.
Men silences could last forever, so I went back down the hallway to hang around outside the kitchen again. My mother and Mrs. Langer had a big bag between them and were emptying it onto the table next to their teacups. There were swatches of fabric, bright flowered stuff, polka dots, plaids. My mother was sorting them into piles.
“You don’t like that navy print?” Cissy said.
My mother rubbed the fabric between two fingers and frowned. “It won’t hold up,” she said.
That was probably what they’d been like in sixth grade, too. My mother was the practical one. Even choosing material for doll dresses, she was on the lookout for something that wouldn’t wear thin in a year or two. My mother had never bought me a dress that didn’t have a hem three inches deep so it could be let down, with a tidewater mark that showed where the old hem used to be.
“I’ve got a new line,” said Cissy, reaching into another bag. She always said that, like she was running a big doll factory instead of sitting in a tiny back bedroom of her house, hand-sewing button eyes and a thick zigzag of red embroidery thread for a mouth.