Aunt Toosie was out on her porch, too, in a dress of pink and white checks. Sandra Lee shook her head so that her yellow curls bounced. She looked at me through her long lashes and twitched her little nose in a shy smile, all for Aunt Eveline’s benefit. I didn’t get another smile out of her the whole school day.
That afternoon I was sitting at my dressing table, doing my nose-shortening exercise. Aunt Eveline says I have my father’s Family Nose and it is very aristocratic, but I’d like it better if it were less aristocratic and more like the one in my mother’s portrait. So I’m shortening it. I had a piece of adhesive tape across the bridge to keep my nose from humping, and another stuck on the sides and looped under like a sling to lift it. I had been sitting there for five minutes and my nose was just starting to shorten, when I heard Aunt Eveline clumping up the steps and heading straight for my closed door. I ripped off the adhesive tape and pretended to be combing my hair.
No knock.
“Addie, dear, I baked cookies for you and Sandra Lee to take to Sister Elizabeth Anne when you go for catechism. ‘Who made me?’ ”
“ ‘God made me,’ ” I snapped back like a parrot.
“ ‘Why did God make you?’ ” Aunt Eveline not only knows the answers, she knows all of the questions in the Baltimore Catechism.
“ ‘God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him in the next.’ ” Not a preposition out of place.
“Good. Your nose is red. What happened to it?”
“Nothing. It’s not red.” If I said I had a cold, she’d give me milk of magnesia and put me to bed.
“It is too red.” Sandra Lee’s face popped around the door. “And swollen! What are those two pieces of adhesive tape for?”
She had come in my house and up the stairs silently, and I knew from the expression on her face that she already knew what the adhesive tape was for, and that, therefore, she must have been looking through the keyhole. You just don’t get any sneakier than that!
By that time, my whole face was red, but Aunt Eveline was off on her favorite subjects, cleanliness and manners.
“Now, Addie, wash your hands after playing with that dog.” Aunt Eveline couldn’t get in the habit of calling Pumpkin by her name. “And please remember to say ‘Yes’ and ‘No, Sister Elizabeth Anne,’ and not ‘uh-huh’ and ‘un-un.’ And, Addie, comb your hair before you leave. It looks like a bird’s nest.”
Before Aunt Eveline could come up with suggestions of what to do so that my hair would look less like “monk in the bush,” I hurried to the bathroom, splashed water on my hands, slapped my hair with a brush, and, tearing back through my room, grabbed my catechism, charged down the steps, and banged the screen door as hard as possible so that, with a little luck, it would hit Sandra Lee as she followed close behind me, smirking and twitching her little nose.
The nuns that teach our school live at the end of our block, and Sister Elizabeth Anne is always waiting for us on the front porch in a caned rocker, her rosary in her hands, her slightly crossed eyes looking more or less in our direction. Aunt Kate says one eye is looking at Heaven, but I have never been able to decide which one. There are two empty rockers next to Sister Elizabeth Anne, and we sit down in a row facing front, rocking and staring through the screen.
The lessons are a special favor to Aunt Kate from Sister Elizabeth Anne, who went to school with Aunt Kate. Sandra Lee and I have already been confirmed after years of catechism, but this, in Aunt Kate’s opinion, is not enough insurance against the ever-present threat of heathenism.
“ ‘Why did God make you?’ ”
“ ‘God made me [rock] to know Him [rock] and to love Him [rock] and to serve him in this world [rock, rock] and to be happy with Him in the next [rock, rock, rock].’ ” I could say it backwards.
“ ‘Who is God?’ ”
“Uh [rock, rock] uh, ‘God is’ [rock] ‘God is the creator of ’ uh, [rock, rock] of uh, [nose twitching, lashes batting] uh . . .”
“ ‘God is the creator of Heaven and’?”
“ ‘God is the creator of Heaven and’ uh . . . [rock, rock] and uh . . .”
“ ‘And earth and’?”
“Uh, ‘and earth and’ uh . .
“ ‘God is the creator of Heaven and earth and all things’!” I shouted.
“You must let Sandra Lee have a turn,” Sister Elizabeth Anne said.
After half an hour of rocking, uh-ing, and nose twitching, Sister Elizabeth Anne stood up, satisfied we knew the lesson. I tried to pretend I wasn’t in a hurry to leave and edged forward in my rocker slowly. Sandra Lee pretended she was having such a good time she hated to leave. Gazing up through her lashes and smiling shyly, she leaned back in the rocker and rocked forward on my toe.
I leaped in the air, banging into Sister Elizabeth Anne. Something fell to the floor with a tinkling sound. The silver heart that is supposed to hang from Sister Elizabeth Anne’s starched white scapula was lying at my feet.
“An omen!” she cried, smiling at me. “Someday, perhaps, you will become a nun!”
Sandra Lee piously crossed herself and said sweetly, “Amen!”
I stared in horror at Sister Elizabeth Anne, draped in black, every hair on her head trapped inside a kind of religious helmet. Me, a nun? What about Edmond? My art? My mouth hung open while I silently prayed, Please, God, don’t make any mistakes about me. Let my secret life come true and let me develop and—and make Sandra Lee a nun.
I forgot to say good-bye and thank you, and ran home.
“Holly’s coming!” Nini said before I could get the screen door open. “And Tom says he took Pumpkin to the park. And ain’t it wonderful that Holly’s coming?” Usually, you can sit in Nini’s kitchen, thinking your own thoughts while she moves around singing “Pack Up Your Troubles” or some other World War song, but today, she couldn’t stop talking about her granddaughter from Chicago. She sipped her cafe au lait and nibbled at bread spread with cane syrup, her steady diet.
“Wait till you see Holly! That’s some girl! Smart, just like you!”
“Nini,” I asked, bored with Holly, who wasn’t coming for another week, “when my mother was growing up, was she like me?”
“No,” she answered shortly.
“Sandra Lee said she was quite a girl.”
Nini looked at me sharply. “What she mean by that?”
“I’m asking you what she means.”
Nini’s dark eyes, matted in pure white and framed in her black face, took in all of me. “You just keep to your business,” she said. “Ain’t no use digging at the past.”
“Well, I’d just like to be like her, that’s all, my own mother, and how can I be when you won’t tell me what she was like and I never knew her?”
“How you ever gonna know her when she’s dead? You just aim to be like your Aunt Eveline, that’s what,” Nini said crossly.
“Why?”
“A happy woman, that’s why.”
“I don’t think I want to be like Aunt Eveline,” I said carefully. “I am sure I will never wear lavender.”
“Lavender means grieving. Nothing wrong with grieving when the time comes.”
“Yes, but Aunt Eveline and Aunt Kate are always grieving—they’re always mourning for somebody! They