ZAIDIE
I PEERED THROUGH THE CURTAIN AT THE PAIR COMING UP THE walkway. “They’re here!” Ma kept her eyes on the TV as if she didn’t hear me.
The first thing I noticed was the solitary button hanging by a thread from the kid’s corduroy jacket. It was a boy’s coat like the one Jon wore in the spring, though hers was at least two sizes too small. She was holding on to a cigar box as if she expected someone to take it away.
“It’s a colored kid, Ma.”
After rousing herself from what Jimmy called her headquarters, Ma snuck a look out the side window. “Dear Lord.”
The last time we took in a colored, Jimmy had to beat the tar out of Mark Zarella for calling him a bad name. Not that Jimmy didn’t use the word himself sometimes—just not about our kids.
Ma held the handle of the inside storm door and talked through the glass like she still hadn’t decided whether she was going to let them in or not.
“Two weeks, Nancy,” she said. “Tops.”
“Good afternoon to you, too, Mrs. Moscatelli.”
When the theme for The Edge of Night came on the TV, Ma’s eyes turned toward the sound. At that point, no one was paying any attention to the kid with the dangling button. Her expression was blank, as if it didn’t matter where she went. I’d seen that look before.
Ma gave her a once-over the way she might examine a roast in Edward’s Market and turned back to the case worker. “You said she was six.”
“It’s freezing out here. You gonna let us in or what?” Nancy exaggerated a shiver.
“Damn right it’s cold, and that sorry excuse for a jacket wouldn’t keep a doll warm. Where’s her stuff?”
“Don’t worry. I already requisitioned the department. In the meantime, I thought you might have some of the kids’ old clothes around.”
“Oh, that’s what you thought, huh?” Reluctantly, Ma opened the storm door and allowed the two to enter.
“You told me she was six,” Ma repeated. “A six-year-old white girl. Like I don’t catch enough guff from the neighbors already?”
Nancy dropped the file she was carrying on the card table where Ma did her jigsaws, disrupting the yellow sun she’d worked on all morning, and helped Agnes out of her skimpy jacket.
“Look at that beautiful hair,” Nancy said. “We’re guessing her father might be Italian.”
“And he might be the Pope, too.” Ma shook her head. “Louie’s not gonna like this.”
By then, the boys were flanking Ma and me. They stared down the Emergency like an opposing army.
Jimmy swept back a wing of brown hair with the flat of his hand. At thirteen, he was beginning to suspect he might be handsome, but he wasn’t sure. “And you said we were done taking in Emergencies, Ma.” He smirked at me. “At least this one won’t be sleeping in my room.”
“Louie’s not gonna like this at all,” Ma repeated. It wasn’t clear whether she was speaking to Nancy, to the girl with the dangling button, or to herself.
Jon, who was in his mimicking phase, removed his thumb from his mouth and shook his head. “Louie not gonna like this.”
Jimmy sauntered over to Ma’s table and flipped open the folder. “Agnes Josephine Juniper,” he read. “Sounds like someone’s grandma. And look, she really is six, Ma. It says right here. Date of birth: April 4, 1953. Are you a midget, kid?”
Fortunately, the girl with the dangling button was as oblivious to my brother’s insults as she was to everything else. Was she deaf?
Instead of punishing Jimmy like she would have done to me, Ma lifted her eyebrows in Nancy’s direction. “Well?”
“There have been some growth issues, but she’s not going to be here long enough for you to worry about it.” The dismissive flip of Nancy’s hand indicated that Agnes’s size was the tip of the iceberg.
“Do you want to see my Ginny doll?” I said in a voice loud enough to drown out Ma’s reluctance, my brothers’ mockery, and the case worker’s weariness. I attempted to take a hand the kid was holding behind her back, but she winced and pulled away. That’s when I noticed the cast.
“Sorry,” I stammered. And then to Ma: “I—I didn’t know she was hurt.”
“Another thing no one bothered to tell us.” Ma glared at Nancy.
“We’re looking at ten days here; I promise. Aggie here’s had a rough time of it and you’re the best home I’ve got.”
Ma drew her mouth into a straight line, irritated by the obvious flattery. “So you’re giving me a colored kid who doesn’t have a coat or a pair of mittens to her name. Now I hear she’s got stunted growth and a broken hand—and God knows what else.”
“Not colored. Indian.”
“In this neighborhood, she’s colored. And even if I had the time to run back and forth to doctors, we’ve only got the one car.”
Nancy’s eyes flickered over the room, taking in the toys that were scattered everywhere, a bowl of unfinished Cheerios Jon had left on the coffee table that morning, and the rug that hadn’t been vacuumed in weeks, as if to ask what exactly kept my mother so busy. Finally the case worker’s gaze settled on Ma’s headquarters: a ratty armchair, a card table for her jigsaws, the small TV with foil-lined rabbit ears, and a staggering pile of books on the floor. Reader’s Digest Condensed books mixed with the ones she made Jimmy bring home from the library. Raise Your Child’s IQ with Classical Music, How to Stop Thumb Sucking, and the dog-eared Start Planning for College Now.
Research for a doctor degree in useless information, Dad called them.
Ma opened her eyes wide the way she did when anyone implied she was a less than perfect housekeeper: Go ahead and say it.
Like everyone else who was the recipient of that look, Nancy thought the better of it. “By the time her next appointment comes up, she’ll be with her new family—speaking of which, I’m due for the home visit in about—” She consulted a rhinestone watch I had been envying since her last visit. “Gosh! Fifteen minutes ago. How about I give you a buzz tomorrow and see how she’s settling in?”
Again, Ma glanced wistfully at the TV set where two of her favorite characters were kissing on the screen. I always thought the only reason she allowed Agnes to stay was because she didn’t want to miss her soap.
Almost as a second thought, Nancy turned to the child. “You be a good girl, okay, Aggie? Don’t give Mrs. Moscatelli any trouble.” She didn’t appear to expect an answer.
“Agnés,” the kid corrected her matter-of-factly. It was the first word she’d spoken since she arrived. Everyone, including Nancy, was stunned.
“At least she’s not mute,” Ma said.
“No, just retarded. Kid can’t even say her own name right.” Jimmy looked at the Emergency like a steer at the fair. “A retarded midget.”
“A retarded midget,” Jon parroted, nodding.
“And you told me her name was Agnes. A six-year-old Italian named Agnes,” Ma said. “Hmph.”
“Agnés is the French pronunciation. Maybe from her father’s side,” Nancy said hopefully. “Parlez-vous Francais, Agnés?”
Ma scowled. “If she stays here, she’s going to be Agnes—and she damn well better speak English.”
The girl skimmed our faces with her dark eyes but said nothing in either language. Finally, her gaze settled on me. “Agnes go pee.”
No one seemed impressed that she knew enough to accommodate Ma. “It’s down here.” I cocked my head in the direction of the bathroom.
“The house doesn’t usually look like this,” I explained as she followed me through the rooms. “Ma hasn’t been feeling too good lately so she hasn’t been able to clean much.” It was what I always said when I brought a friend home.
Agnes, however, seemed as unimpressed by my excuse as she was by the chaos. Maybe Jimmy was right about her intelligence. He should have said slow, though. That was only polite.
I tried to give her some privacy in the bathroom, but she reached for me with her good hand and pulled me inside. Then she insisted on leaving the door open.
While she sat on the toilet, I stood in front of the mirror, pretending to readjust my barrettes. She kept her box on her lap even while she peed.
I could hear Ma talking in a voice somewhere between serious and angry. “Two weeks better not turn into three months like it did last time. Louie won’t have it.”
Agnes looked at me quizzically as she pulled up her pants. Apparently, no one had ever taught her to wipe herself.
“Louie’s our dad,” I explained. “He might look mad when he first sees you, but he’s really not. He just acts that way.”
While the negotiations continued in the foyer, I opened the medicine chest, took out Dad’s shaving cream, squirted a perfect ball of foam into my hand, and with one finger, wrote my name on the mirror. I stood up particularly straight as I pointed like Miss Robarge at the blackboard.
“That’s me: Z-A-I-D-A. But you can call me Zaidie.”
When it was obvious that she didn’t recognize the letters, I erased my name with a face cloth, taking care to clear away every trace. “Don’t you go to school?”
She gave me her opaque stare.
I looked down at her shoes, a faded pair of pink Keds with a hole in the big toe of each.
“When Dad gets paid, we’ll go to downtown and buy you some new ones at Taymor’s. And socks. A coat. And . . . and . . . do you have any barrettes?”
I unclasped the plastic shamrocks on each side of my head and attempted to clip them onto her hair, but it was too thick and tangled to hold. “Don’t worry. We’ll get you some bigger ones.”
Agnes fastened one onto the top layer of her hair and returned the other one to me. “You have that one; Agnes have this one.”
BY THE TIME we returned to the living room, Nancy was gone and Jimmy had taken off on his bike as he did every afternoon, even in the winter. Sometimes he rode to his friend Kevin’s or Bruce’s, but the days he liked best were the ones he just traveled.
“Like I own this town,” he said. And when I saw him pedaling up the hill, the hair he spent far too much time combing loosed by the wind, an enraptured expression on his face, I understood.
In her own way, Ma was traveling, too, absorbed in the love scene on her show, still sipping that morning’s cold coffee. At her feet, Jon played with his train, speaking in alternating voices as he imagined himself conductor, passenger, and crew. A Maxwell House commercial came on the TV. It was so familiar that I hardly heard it, but Agnes stopped and listened in wonderment to the tune played by the percolating coffee pot on the screen.
“Good to last drop,” she said after the announcer.
Jon glanced up at her, seeing a potential playmate for the first time. “That coffee is good to the last drop,” he repeated in his conductor voice.
“Why don’t you show Agnes where she’s going to sleep?” Ma suggested, without looking up from the jigsaw she worked on during the commercials.
Agnes, however, had wandered from the TV to the picture window, where all her attention was focused on the street.
She didn’t hear me when I attempted to call her away. Nor was she aware when Jon again asked what was wrong with her. Only touch broke the spell, causing her to jump.
“Mr. Dean come there,” she said, pointing into the deserted street.
Though I didn’t know who Mr. Dean was, her fear surged through the room, a force so powerful that Jon looked up from his train and Ma even forgot the couple who were kissing on the screen.
I put my arm over Agnes’s shoulder and led her away from the window. “No one’s coming here, Agnes. And if they try . . . If they try—Dad will call the cops. And Jimmy . . .”
“Will beat him up like the Lone Ranger; that’s what he’ll do.” Jon jumped up to shadowbox with Agnes’s bogeyman. “Jimmy and me, too.”
But Agnes heard nothing. Drawn back to the window, she repeated the dark litany we would all learn by heart in the next few weeks.
“Mr. Dean come. He come in his yellow car. That road. Mr. Dean drive his car right down there. Mr. Dean come for Agnes and he find her, too.”
At this point, she pivoted in the direction of the foyer, pointing at something that terrified us all even though we couldn’t see it.
“That door.”