The Little Friend

Harriet—offended by her forward manner—gazed back at her stolidly. She didn’t see any reason to be more polite to Hely’s mother than Hely was himself.

“I’m sure she understands, don’t you, Harriet? We’ll have her over next time we cook hamburgers in the yard. Besides, if Harriet came, I’m afraid we wouldn’t have a cupcake for her.”

“One cupcake?” shrieked Hely. “You only bought me one cupcake?”

“Peanut, don’t be greedy like that.”

“One isn’t enough!”

“One cupcake is plenty for a bad boy like you.… Oh, look here. This is hilarious.”

She leaned down to show them the Polaroid—still pale, but clear enough now to make out. “Wonder if it’s going to come out any better?” she said. “You two look like a couple of little Martians.”

And it was true: they did. Both Hely and Harriet’s eyes glowed round and red, like the eyes of little nocturnal creatures caught unexpectedly in car headlights; and their faces, dazed with shock, were tinted a sickly green from the flash.

CHAPTER

3

 ——

The Pool Hall

Sometimes, before Ida went home for the evening, she set out something nice for supper: casserole, fried chicken, sometimes even a pudding or cobbler. But tonight on the counter were only some leftovers that she wanted to get rid of: ancient ham slices, pale and slimy from sitting around wrapped in plastic; also some cold mashed potatoes.

Harriet was furious. She opened the pantry and stared in at the too-tidy shelves, lined with dim jars of flour and sugar, dried peas and cornmeal, macaroni and rice. Harriet’s mother rarely ate more than a few spoonfuls of food in the evenings and many nights she was happy with a dish of ice cream or a handful of soda crackers. Sometimes Allison scrambled eggs, but Harriet was a little sick of eggs all the time.

Cobwebs of lassitude drifted over her. She snapped off a stick of spaghetti and sucked on it. The floury taste was familiar—like paste—and triggered an unexpected splutter of pictures from nursery school … green tile floors, wooden blocks painted to look like bricks, windows too high to see out of.…

Lost in thought, still chewing on the splinter of dried spaghetti—her brow knotted cumbrously in a way that brought out her resemblance to Edie and Judge Cleve—Harriet dragged a chair to the refrigerator, maneuvering carefully to avoid setting off a landslide of newspapers. Gloomily, she climbed up and stood in it as she shifted through the crunching packages in the freezer compartment. But there was nothing good in the freezer, either: only a carton of the disgusting peppermint-stick ice cream that her mother loved (many days, especially in the summertime, she ate nothing else) buried in an avalanche of foil-wrapped lumps. The concept of Convenience Foods was foreign and preposterous to Ida Rhew, who did the grocery shopping. TV dinners she thought unwholesome (though sometimes she bought them if they went on sale); between-meal snacks she dismissed as a fad derived from television. (“Snock?

What you want with a snock if you eat your dinner?”)

“Tell on her,” Hely whispered when Harriet—glumly—joined him again on the back porch. “She has to do what your mother says.”

“Yeah, I know.” Hely’s mother had fired Roberta when Hely told on her for whipping him with a hairbrush; she had fired Ruby because she wouldn’t let Hely watch Bewitched.

“Do it. Do it.” Hely bumped her foot with the toe of his sneaker.

“Later.” But she said it only to save face. Harriet and Allison never complained about Ida and more than once—even when Harriet was angry at Ida, over some injustice—she’d lied and taken the blame herself rather than get Ida in trouble. The simple fact was that things worked differently at Harriet’s house than at Hely’s. Hely—as had Pemberton before him—prided himself on being so difficult that their mother was unable to hold on to any housekeeper over a year or two; he and Pem had gone through nearly a dozen. What did Hely care if it was Roberta, or Ramona, or Shirley or Ruby or Essie Lee who was watching TV when he got home from school? But Ida stood at the firm center of Harriet’s universe: beloved, grumbling, irreplaceable, with her large kind hands and her great moist prominent eyes, her smile which was like the first smile that Harriet had ever seen in the world. It tormented Harriet to see how lightly her mother treated Ida sometimes, as if Ida was only passing through their lives and not fundamentally connected with them. Harriet’s mother sometimes got hysterical, and paced around the kitchen crying, and said things she didn’t mean (though she was always sorry later), and the possibility of Ida being fired (or, more likely, getting mad and quitting, for Ida groused continually about how little Harriet’s mother paid her) was so frightening that Harriet could not allow herself to think of it.