HILLSBORO
Before the final bell on Ruth’s last day of school, the boys and girls gathered around her desk to sing “For She’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” Miss Cooper, laughing at Ruth’s surprise, handed her a shoebox filled with popcorn balls, told her to serve her classmates.
As she placed a popcorn ball wrapped in waxed paper in front of each of her classmates, Ruth imagined what she’d say about the party afterwards.
Miss Cooper read aloud Ruth’s favorite, “Curfew Shall Not Ring Tonight,” as the pupils sat at their desks eating slowly, wanting the salty sweet taste to last. There was a soft sound of surprise when each reached the middle. Miss Cooper had stuck a large spearmint gumdrop in the center of each popcorn ball. She smiled at their excitement, and read on, sounding plaintive, as she’d told her pupils to do:
Then she climbed the slimy ladder,
On which fell no ray of light,
Upward still, her pale lips saying, Curfew shall not ring tonight!
It tastes of its beautiful green color Ruth thought, sweet and fresh. A surprise inside a surprise.
Miss Cooper ended the class as she always did, standing before them and saying, crisply, “Please rise, Fifth Grade. Dismissed!”
Ruth stayed behind. She was too shy to tell Miss Cooper that the plaid dress she was wearing was her favorite of Miss Cooper’s dresses, how she loved seeing the white collar splayed across the dark plaid. “Thank you for the party. I was so surprised.”
“I was happy to do it,” her teacher told her. “It’s been a pleasure having you in class.”
“It was lovely,” Ruth said, looking at the potted plants in the window, at the red flowers on the geranium. “It’s so lovely here.”
Miss Cooper handed the shoebox back to Ruth. “I made extra so your sisters could have a share in our little celebration.”
It was time to go. There was nothing more.
She wanted to talk to her mother about the party, say she wished she had a popcorn ball for her too. “My,” she hoped her mother would say, “Miss Cooper must think a lot of you.”
But Ida and Evie ran into the kitchen to tell their mother.
“Did you wipe your feet?” Her mother was at the table sorting through a pile of navy beans to soak for tomorrow. “Popcorn balls. That isn’t so much.”
For all the world, Ruth thought, as if she made a plate of popcorn balls every afternoon for them to eat when they came home from school.
“It was a party,” Evie said. “For Ruth.”
“Miss Cooper had no business making such a fuss,” Ruth’s mother said. “Does she think you’re going to Timbuktu?”
She got to her feet. “You do this now, Ruth.”
Ruth disliked the cold, hard feel of the small beans in her hands, disliked the musty smell they left in her fingers. Tomorrow, she thought, when they eat these for supper, I won’t be here.
Ruth was to live in Hillsboro with her mother’s cousin Patrice and Patrice’s husband Ted. Patrice and Ted had come to visit last month one afternoon just before Christmas, bringing a crate of oranges and a Parcheesi game.
Ruth stayed in the cold parlor with the grownups. Cousin Patrice made a fuss over her, bent down to kiss her forehead, curled one of Ruth’s ringlets over her finger. “So pretty.”
Her mother had rolled Ruth’s hair up with rags the night before. Ruth said she couldn’t sleep with the rag bundles on her head.
“They’re just like little pillows,” her mother told her.
After a while, Ted went outside and persuaded Ida and Evie to play ball with him. Ruth could hear him calling out “Good catch,” and “Nice try,” as Cousin Patrice asked her about school.
“You’re a fine little scholar, then,” Patrice had said with satisfaction. “The same as I was.”
When Ted came back Ruth’s mother told her to bring the coffee.
“My, you’re a quick stepper, Ruthie,” Patrice said, and then, to Ruth’s mother, “Of course she’ll also have plenty of time for play and schoolwork at our house.”
When Ruth came back with the tray Ted took it from her. “Let me help you with that,” he said, smiling down at her. Ruth liked his easy manner, liked how he’d winked and handed her a cookie from his own plate when he saw she wasn’t included in the refreshments.
She thought of putting it in her pocket to give Ida and Evie because Ted had taken a liking to the cookies and she could see there weren’t going to be any left as they’d hoped. Except, she guessed, her mother would be embarrassed if she did, so she ate the cookie herself, slowly.
She’d seen the money on her father’s desk when she’d come back to the room.
After New Year’s, when school started again, and Ruth had started to wonder if she might not really be leaving, her parents called her into the parlor again.
“When times get better, when we get back on our feet,” her father said, “we can do something different.”
“It’s a good chance for you,” her mother said. “If you apply yourself to your studies, they may send you to high school for a year or two.”
The day after the party, Mr. Kroger from North Farm came over in his car to take them to Hillsboro. Evie looked inside the car at the glossy black seats and started to cry, because she couldn’t ride in the car with them.
“For shame, a big girl like you,” said her mother and pushed her towards Ida who’d been put in charge for the day, but Ida, Ruth thought, had no more sense than a broody hen.
The two men sat up front, talking about the car, a Model A Tudor Sedan, new this year. Mr. Kroger had gotten his in gray. “Old Henry Ford always said you could get the Model T in any color you wanted, so long as it was black. Well, not no more. They had it in green too.”
“The gray looks awfully fine.”
“See that? It’s a fuel gauge so you always know how much gas you got. Didn’t even have to pay extra for it. They’re putting it in all the Fords now.”
“This is the car for me,” Ruth’s father said. “When I get a car.”
“It’ll go up to sixty-five miles an hour,” Mr. Kroger laughed comfortably. “Of course, we won’t be doing that today.”
But the car was going fast, Ruth thought. When they passed the school she didn’t have a chance to see who was out front.
“We should have gotten a valise for you,” her mother said. That morning she’d folded Ruth’s other dress, her underclothing, nightgown, and stockings in a paper sack and she’d said that then too, about Ruth needing a valise.
For a time, they drove beside what Ruth believed to be a river because it was big and fast moving. Ruth hoped Ted and Patrice would take her there sometime and she asked her mother its name.
She didn’t know, and Ruth would have gone on not knowing, but her mother broke into the men’s talk, saying Ruth wanted to know what river that was.
Mr. Kroger smiled at Ruth over his shoulder. “It’s the same old creek that runs back behind our place, Little Missy. It’s high this year because of the snowfall.”
“I thought it was a river too,” her mother said across the seat, “so you’re not going so very far after all.”
In Hillsboro, they drove through town before they came to Cousin Patrice’s house. Mr. Kroger had been there before and he drove them past the school he thought would Ruth would attend.
“That’s a big place,” her father said. “Could it be the high school?”
Mr. Kroger said no, drawing their attention to the playground out front. “You’re going to have some fun on them swings.”
Ruth gasped when she saw the house, the painted white bricks gleaming behind a stand of pine. “It’s so pretty.”
“That’s wasteful,” her mother said. “There’s no need to paint bricks.”
“Nice place,” Mr. Kroger said as he turned the car into the paved driveway, and to Ruth’s father, “Notice the smooth stop? Because of the mechanical drum brakes.”
“Ain’t that something?”
Her mother clutched Ruth’s skirt. “You be good. Do everything they tell you. Don’t talk back.”
“She’s always been a real good girl,” her father said.
“A peach,” Mr. Kroger agreed.
Ruth’s mother was left to manage on her own because Mr. Kroger didn’t want to get out of his car. The sunshine made her blink and she stumbled a little, when she first stepped down.
The door to the house opened and Cousin Patrice and Ted came out and stood on the steps above them.
“You can come home,” Ruth heard her mother say, “any time you want.”
Ruth heard the longing in her mother’s voice but when she looked back she saw her mother had frozen to the spot, become a part of the brightness, encased in a glittering sheath of ice. She turned again, and walked towards Patrice, drawn by the joy in her new mother’s face.
