I was excited. A white person’s house! I mean, I been in Billie’s house before (he’s my friend back at home). But that was different. He was white, but I always knew he didn’t represent the true white people. He was the trailer park version. Like the imitation cereals Dad would bring home thinking we wouldn’t know the difference. Dolores Quimby was brand name.
The house was just like I thought it would be inside. Like I’d seen on TV and at the movies. Big and shiny and clean. Wide open rooms you could just walk through with your arms stretched out wide. Light coming in everywhere. The smell of potpourri. The smell of clean. The kitchen was long and neat and had flowery patterns on the frilly country curtains. I stared at the glass jars lined along the tops of the cabinets. Dolores must’ve read the look in my eyes.
“Those are preserves,” she said. Her cheeks growing even larger.
I looked up at Mama. “Reserves?”
Dolores grabbed a pan that was hanging in the air. “Sometimes when we don’t eat everything we grow, we can preserve them in glass jars, and they’ll last for years. Berries and vegetables and all sorts of things. And when we get hungry, we can go back and eat ‘em when we get good ‘n ready.”
“Won’t they be rotten?” I couldn’t imagine Mama cracking open a dusty bottle of furry old vegetables that were just as old as me and actually having to eat ‘em. I barely wanted to eat the ones she cooked straight from the frozen food section.
“Nope, ‘cause the jar seals nice and tight and keeps all the air out…keeps it nice and fresh and tastin’ good.”
Guess I had to get used to this country way of doing things. I stared up at the ceiling, then leaned over to Mama and whispered, “Why are the pans hanging in the air like that? Is that so roaches won’t get in ‘em?”
* * *
Ms. Dolores, that’s what Mama told us to call her, cooked us a big ol’ country breakfast. I mean big. Fresh biscuits with butter she said she made from cow’s milk. I still can’t understand how that happens. Scrambled eggs Ms. Dolores said were fresh from the chickens…everything was so fresh here. Whatever we ate was just squeezed or just laid or just something. Kinda made me sick thinking about it. About all the animals while I ate. Stuff just falling out of ‘em or being squeezed out of ‘em and us just sitting here waiting to eat it.
Ms. Dolores’s son, Forest, ate breakfast with us, but her husband, Brad, was out of town. Forest. Interesting name. White people’s names were so different. I know we had our Shauntays and Dauntays and Keishas. But they had their Summers and Winters, Aprils and Autumns. I guess Ms. Dolores was staring out at the trees when she came up with the name. Good thing she wasn’t out on the farm looking at a cow or something.
After we ate, Ms. Dolores took us to what she called the Family Room where we all sat and talked. Forest came too. He was about Cybil’s age. Tall and skinny with a head full of dirty blonde. About the same color as Billie’s, except that Billie put the “dirty” in dirty blonde. Forest made the color look clean. He kept swinging his curls out of the way while he talked. White people and their hair. It was so neat watching them. Combing their fingers through it. Twirling it around. Tossing it back and watching it fall perfectly back into place.
The room had gone quiet. Everybody was looking at me. “What’s wrong?”
Dad said, “We’re waiting for an answer.”
I looked around. “To what?”
Dad’s brown eyes grew the size of golf balls. “Forest asked how you liked the Fort Cody Trading Post.”
“Oh, it was great. I brought a gun.” I nodded.
“Bought a gun,” Mama said.
“Yeah.” I nodded.
“That’s cool,” Forest said. “I like that place too.” He looked at Cybil and Solange. “What did y’all get?”
Solange said, “I bought a little Indian doll with a baby on her back. I forgot what they call it. A papoo, or something.”
“It’s called a Pa-poose,” Grandma said, pushing out each syllable. “Y’all kids today don’t know nothing about Indians, but they supposed to be teaching you American history. They only tell you what they want you to know. Buffalo Bill Cody,” she said, like it had put a bad taste in her mouth. “Indians were here first, and the white man pushed ‘em out and they get the monuments.”
I wished I could’ve snatched Grandma Edith’s words from the air with the speed of sound before they reached Ms. Dolores’ and Forest’s ears. That was the kind of thing you think, not say out loud. Why couldn’t Grandma have lost her teeth this morning? I stared down at my lap. My eyeballs were like paperweights. Even the silence in the room had a sound.
I finally peeked up at Ms. Dolores. She smiled and tossed her long, dark brown hair over her shoulders. “My father is half Omaha. I’ve heard that all my life.”
Relief.
* * *
Solange asked Forest, “What’s in that little building over there?”
“It’s a trailer. My grandma’s house.”
I had finally seen a house even smaller than ours back at home. Forest showed us around while his grandmother was out at the grocery store. He said she should be gone for a while so it was okay. The creaky metal screen door bounced behind us. As soon as we stepped in, mothballs, eucalyptus, and Pine Sol hit me like a bully after school. The “old” smell.
The place was stuffy and hot. Forest cracked a window. “Grandma stays so cold all the time. Remind me to close this before we leave,” he said. The narrow hallway was stacked with piles of yellow newspapers and books. Frameless pictures and portraits covered the walls like peeling skin. Made me wanna scratch.
I looked around. “Old people. They hold on to everything.” Forest looked back at me. “My grandmother’s old too,” I said. There was a big black and white portrait of a young woman on the wall. “This your grandmother?”
“Yup,” Forest said.
She must’ve had a big life. Knew a lot of people judging from all the faces on the walls. But something about the tiny trailer seemed like locking the dog in the basement when company came. At the end of the hall in the little living room was a huge flag I didn’t recognize pinned up on the wall. “What’s that?” I asked Forest.
“A flag.”
“I know that, but of what?”
He shrugged. “I dunno. Been there forever.”
Maybe his grandmother was an immigrant. Probably the country she was from.
“Oooh-Oooh,” Cybil and Solange sounded like a pair of owls. It was a bedroom full of dolls. Shelves of ‘em. White dolls with puffy pink cheeks, little red lips, and curly blonde hair. The dresses covered their feet, making ‘em look like little angels in bonnets.
Solange bounced like a basketball. She reached up. “Can I hold one?”
“No!” Forest shouted. “Grandma don’t let nobody touch ‘em. Only she can. If something happened to one --”
The screen door bounced. I froze, hoping it was Ms. Dolores. But slow, dragging footsteps sounded…Please don’t let it be…
Forest said, slow and sorry, “Hi, Grandma.”
Me, Cybil, and Solange looked like The Three Stooges the way we bumped into each other trying to find a hiding place. Maybe we could hide and slide out when she wasn’t looking. But the old woman was in front of us now. She dropped her grocery bag and sounded like somebody had her by the throat. Like a whispering gremlin. “Who are they?”
“Calm