Chapter Five

The next morning at breakfast, Dad, Grandma and I were careful not to mention the words “Christmas” or “tree” to each other. We seemed to have made a momentary truce, and breakfast was proceeding as usual. Dad was telling me a lot of things I didn’t think were important, about sitting up straight and getting your elbows off the table, and I was telling him a lot of things he didn’t think were important, about what we were going to do at school that day, and Grandma wasn’t paying any attention to either of us because she was trying to get a pancake all the way from the stove to the table without putting it on a plate. She would pick it up from the skillet with her spatula and then whirl around and try to get it to land on somebody’s plate instead of on the floor. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t.

Grandma always did everything the hard way, which was just her nature. She would rather risk dropping the pancakes than dirty another dish. She saw that as her kind of individualism, but my dad found it very irritating, and I thought it was just plain funny. The three of us seldom had the same reaction to anything. As I look back on it now, I see that our differences had a lot to do with enriching my life, but at the age of ten, I saw them only as the cause of all my troubles.

A pancake hit the floor just then, and Grandma gave a little snort of a laugh and stomped her foot on the floor as though to punish herself for missing the target.

“Whoopsie!” she said, and flung the fallen pancake halfway across the kitchen and into the sink. My dad always said she would have been a heck of a shortstop, but this morning he didn’t find her slapdash way of doing things very amusing.

“If you don’t hit my plate with one of those pretty soon,” he said, “I’ll have to leave for work without my breakfast.”

“Here, Dad, you can have one of mine,” I said, and started to scrape one off my plate onto his.

“No!” said Dad, and quickly put his hand protectively over his plate. “I wouldn’t touch one of those with a shovel. The way you eat, Addie, you’ll be lucky if you live past ten.”

That was his clever way of saying that he didn’t approve of what I put on my pancakes—peanut butter and jelly.

“I’m the tallest person in the fifth grade, so I guess I’m eating OK,” I said. “And there’s really no reason why a person shouldn’t put peanut butter and jelly on pancakes. After all, they’re made of flour, just like bread, and you put peanut butter and jelly on bread, don’t you?”

“I don’t! And I don’t want any lectures on what pancakes are made of either. I’ve been eating them all my life. When I can get ’em, that is,” he said, and looked meaningfully at Grandma.

“Comin’ up!” shouted Grandma, like a short order cook, and spun around and shot one in the direction of his plate. It landed half on his plate and half on the oilcloth, and she looked quite satisfied with that. Dad just shook his head silently and slid the pancake onto his plate, and I pressed my lips together hard to keep from laughing.

After Dad left for work, Grandma managed to aim a couple of pancakes at her own plate and sat down at the table. I took my plate to the sink, and she noticed for the first time what I was wearing—my usual costume of jeans and red flannel cowboy shirt with green piping around the collar. I had put green rubber bands on my pigtails to match the green trim on my shirt, and I thought that was Christmasy enough for anybody the last day before Christmas vacation. Grandma didn’t agree.

“You’re not going to school like that the last day before vacation!” she said. “This is the day you open presents in your class. You ought to wear something good. Go put on your red plaid circle skirt and red sweater.”

I knew from experience I would never win an argument about clothes with Grandma, so I groaned a lot and dragged myself into our bedroom and changed. I hated wearing skirts because I had to wear old-fashioned heavy cotton stockings that were held up by a horrid garter belt.

In the wintertime, Grandma always made me wear “snuggies” and warm cotton undershirts, and when they were combined with garters and long stockings, I felt miserably uncomfortable and tied up. I was gangly and skinny, and I hated having my knobby knees sticking out from under my skirt. Besides, it was cold. I made a horrible face at myself in the mirror as I dressed.

I finally got into the whole get-up, right down to my sturdy brown oxfords, which I wore every day. I was never allowed to wear tennis shoes or penny loafers or, what I wanted most of all, cowboy boots, because they would “ruin” my feet. The only other shoes I had besides my sturdy oxfords were my black patent leather Mary Janes, which I wore to church on Sunday. Then I had to take them off right away when I got home, because even Mary Janes would ruin my feet.

I never knew why so much time was spent worrying about feet, except that my father had been rejected by the army in World War I because he had flat feet. When he went back to school, he was the only boy left in the class, and he had been so embarrassed that he dropped out in the eleventh grade. I, however, didn’t plan to go into the army, so I didn’t see what difference it made if my arches were high up or flat as a pancake. But then, grownups always had a lot of strange ideas. At the shoe store in Omaha, the man put your foot in a weird machine, and then you looked down through a scope of some sort, and in the middle of this screen filled with green light, you could see the bones of your foot—your own foot skeleton wiggling around—and the man could tell you if your feet were getting ruined and if you needed a bigger size this year. I seemed to need a bigger size about every six months.

Carla Mae arrived just as I finished dressing, and we went into the living room to make the Christmas card that would go with Miss Thompson’s fabulous blue glass jewelry box. I drew a sleigh and reindeer, and Carla Mae watched.

“I just don’t know how you do it,” she said. “You’re really good.”

“I don’t know how I do it either,” I said. “It just comes out.” I had never been able to figure out why I could draw and other people couldn’t. I found it very mysterious, but I was grateful that I could.

“Should we put ‘For Miss Thompson’ or ‘For Sylvia Thompson’?”

“Miss,” said Carla Mae, always mindful of propriety.

“How about ‘Miss Sylvia Thompson’?” I said, not wanting to be too stuffy. Carla Mae nodded.

“Boy, I wish my name was Sylvia,” I said.

“How come?”

“I hate the name Adelaide … and Addie! Yuck! When I grow up, I’m going to change my name!”

“You can’t change your name!”

“You can do anything you want when you’re grown up.”

“I’m going to wear a long, white dress and a veil,” she said dreamily. “And get married.”

“Well, I’m going to be a painter and live in Paris, France, and never get married!”

Carla Mae gave me a disgusted look. I always wondered how we could be such good friends when we had such different daydreams for ourselves.

We were all restless that day in school, waiting for the gift exchange in the afternoon. Finally, the moment arrived. Delmer Doakes put on the Santa beard and hat we had made for him in art class and began to distribute the gifts. As he took each gift from under the tree, he would call out the person’s name and that person would go to the front of the room, read the tag, open the gift and show it to everyone. There was a lot of giggling and groaning over ugly gifts and dumb gifts and gifts between boys and girls who didn’t like each other and even more giggling over those who did. Then Delmer called Tanya’s name.

She went up and took the gift from him and read the tag. “Merry Christmas to Tanya Smithers from Adelaide Mills.” Carla Mae and I exchanged evil glances.

Tanya tore open the package, and with an expression of great distaste, drew out the ugly brown wool gloves I had found at the Clear River Variety Store. The whole class snickered and groaned, well aware that I had deliberately given her an icky present. She was aware of it too.

“Thanks!” she said sarcastically, and sat down.

Delmer called my name next, and I went up and was handed a tiny box. When I saw who had drawn my name, I turned bright red.

“Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, to Adelaide Mills,” I read, “From Billy Wild.” Everybody snickered. They were always teasing Billy and me about liking each other. I opened the little box, and there inside was something absolutely horrifying. I stood there looking at it until Miss Thompson said, “Hold it up Addie, so everyone can see.”

I flashed it quickly in front of the class, hoping they wouldn’t see what it was, but they all howled, and I turned from red to purple and sat down quickly. Horrible Billy had given me a heart-shaped locket! In front of the whole class! I shoved the box down into the pocket of my cardigan and silently swore that I would never speak to him again.

Delmer called Miss Thompson’s name next, and I was thankful the attention turned from me.

“What a beautiful card,” she said, when she saw it. “I’ll bet I know who made it.” That compliment took my mind off my embarrassment, and then she unwrapped the blue box. Everyone gasped when she took it out, and when she lifted the lid and it began to play “The Blue Danube,” the class broke into applause.

Miss Thompson said it was certainly the nicest and most tasteful present she had ever received, and we all applauded ourselves again.

Carla Mae and I were busy whispering about what a great choice of gifts we had made when I heard Miss Thompson ask who didn’t have a Christmas tree at home. I didn’t know why she was asking, but I put my hand up before I realized how embarrassing it would be. Surely I was the only one, and everyone spotted my hand before I could get it down, and I turned crimson. Then I realized that there was another hand up. It was Gloria Cott, from the only poor family in town. I knew they had no money, but I was surprised that the Cotts were really too poor to buy a Christmas tree. My reason, after all, was just some stubborn quirk of my father’s, but I was afraid everyone would think we were poor too. Miss Thompson looked surprised to see my hand raised, and I wondered what she thought.

“As you know,” said Miss Thompson, “we usually leave all the school Christmas trees up during vacation and then have a big bonfire on the playground when we come back from vacation, but this year I thought it would be better to give our tree to someone who doesn’t have one at home. Since there are two people … I guess we’ll choose a number between one and ten, and the closest will take the tree home.”

I felt a surge of excitement, and I knew right then that I was going to win the tree. Dad had taught me how to play the odds on choosing between one and ten, and I was sure I had a better chance than Gloria.

Gloria chose first and chose 8, and I knew she didn’t know how to play the odds. I chose 7. I wasn’t even surprised when Miss Thompson said the number was 5, and I had won. I couldn’t take my eyes off the tree for the rest of the afternoon.