He would begin by building two bedrooms and one small bathroom on the back of our house. The boys would sleep in one and Maggie and I in the other. The twins would sleep in Sophie and Tipa’s old room and Momma could stay where she was. He had talked to Marvin Struthers, he said, and Marvin had agreed to change the zoning for our house to allow four power meters, so our tenants would pay their own electric bills. Momma would have to calculate the cost of water into their rent, he said.
“I can’t think about this,” Momma finally said. “I’m going to put my fat behind in the bed. I need to rest.”
Uncle Louis blew out a sigh, exasperated.
“I can help you,” Timmy said.
“Good, son, I’ll need your help.”
“Sure! We can all help!” Maggie said.
“I ain’t washing no more clothes and cleaning no more bathrooms! That’s that!” Livvie said. “Probably gone lose my job anyhow, ain’t that right, Mr. Louis?”
That horrible possibility hung in the air for a moment, scaring the breath out of me.
“You don’t have to, Livvie. Don’t worry about it,” I said quickly, “I’ll do that.”
Uncle Louis looked at us and said, “I don’t know how my sister gave birth to all of y’all. She’s so lucky and she doesn’t even know it, ’eah?” He came across the room and put his hand on my shoulder. “Susan, you ain’t gone be washing no laundry for nobody but your own family. You need to study. And Maggie? Don’t worry about helping me with the building. It’s man work. You just help your momma and sister take care of the little ones with Livvie. And Livvie, don’t you worry. I’m paying your salary for now, ’eah? This family needs you now worse than ever!”
Saturday brought the sounds of hammers and power saws as Uncle Louis had arrived to put our butts back into gear. I climbed up to the cupola to observe. Five men, all friends of my father’s from his construction business, showed up from nowhere to help. Uncle Louis shook their hands and slapped their backs as each one arrived. Mr. Struthers arrived with his toolbox. The hammering got so loud it made me want to scream. Then two black men rolled up in a broken-down pickup truck and the group became quiet.
“Did y’all know Hank?” I heard my Uncle Louis calling to them.
“Sure did. He tried to help our children with getting a new school! Miss Harriet told me what y’all was up to. Figured iffin he could build for us, we could build for him.”
Oh, shit, I thought, here it comes. The papers were full of race trouble and the Island men weren’t too keen on working alongside colored men.
“All right,” Uncle Louis said, “thank you. Come join us. I’m Louis.”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Louis, call me Sam. This is my friend Albert.”
They all shook hands. The other men all shook their hands and I almost fell out of my perch. They might be rioting in Alabama, but on Sullivan’s Island, things were okay. And I guessed my daddy had something to do with that.
Maggie found an after-school job on King Street in Charleston, Henry had a paper route and, by that afternoon, Timmy had blisters from the hammer. I resigned myself to running the family baby-sitting service, first for my baby sisters and then for other families on the Island. In one week, Uncle Louis and the men had framed the addition to our house. Hammer! Hammer! Hammer! The next thing you knew, it had a roof that matched the rest of the house. Hammer! Hammer! Hammer! The wiring went in and the walls were closed.
By the nineteenth of December, the Island Gamble had grown another appendage. She was looking downright mythological, like one of those eastern religion figures with all the arms. The two new bedrooms were far from finished, and they sure weren’t decorated, but they were good enough to sleep in, according to Uncle Louis. And the bathroom? Well, the plumbing worked, but it wasn’t exactly the bridal suite at the Waldorf Astoria, whatever the hell that was except a place we were always invited to move to when we complained.
Livvie’s cousin Harriet had been there all day Sunday with her, moving us from our old rooms upstairs to the new addition on the back of our house. They moved up and down the steps, heads wrapped in kerchiefs, carrying on laughing like we weren’t even there. But that’s how Livvie always was when Harriet was there.
It was a good thing that somebody thought this move to the hinterlands of our house was funny. As far as I was concerned, it was a one-way, third-class trip to Siberia. There went my privacy and solitude. Maggie wasn’t any happier about it than I was, but it would’ve been useless to complain. We would’ve looked bad, spoiled and self-centered. We would have had to endure an endless harangue on how it was worse in India, where children lived in the streets. But Maggie and I knew that somehow this new living space was different from our pipe dream to become roommates in college. This was like being cell mates. Change the diapers. Warm the bottles. Rock the babies. Gimme a break. I felt like a pack mule whose burden would never end. Just fourteen years old, with only a marginally celebrated birthday anyway, and who cared about me? Happiness? It was a dream from the movies. We had rooms to rent and we had to get them ready.
Aunt Carol and Uncle Louis came by that afternoon with a truckload of old furniture, old bed frames, chests of drawers, end tables and chairs. Their castoffs would furnish the rooms upstairs. Maggie and I were to repaint them. We got busy spreading newspaper on the floor of the boys’ room, which—and this goes to show you that it’s a man’s world—was the largest. We chose a bed to paint that almost matched another chest and end table. Uncle Louis was down on one knee and, with a Spackle knife, he opened the cans of white paint for us, carefully laying their lids on the paper.
“Okay, now, y’all girls be careful,” he said. “This is primer. Goes on first, nice and thin. When it dries, and I mean really dries, then you can put on the enamel. If it gets on the floor, wash it up right away with this stuff. Don’t eat it, throw it or get it in your eyes. ’Eah me?”
“Yes, sir,” I said and saluted him. He looked just like Sergeant Bilko from The Phil Silvers Show. “He thinks we’re total morons,” I whispered to Maggie when he left the room.
“Shhh! Just get busy. He’s got a lot on his mind.”
“Right.” I picked up a paintbrush, dipped it in the can of primer and wiped it across the top of the table. “Where’s Momma? Think she’s still pissed off at Uncle Louis?”
“I don’t know. Who cares?”
“Well, if my brother barged into my house and started hammering,” I said, “even if it was a good idea, I’d kick his ass to Kalamazoo!”
“Yeah, big talk, gutter-mouth. Uncle Louis is right! She doesn’t know how to do anything. At least I’m learning how to do something.”
“That’s true. But she could be helping us, you know.”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Hey! Who brought you home last night? I saw you get out of a car up the street.”
“Swear to God not to tell?” Maggie’s eyes got all gooey.
“I swear on the cross! On the wounds of Christ! On the tears of the Mother Virgin! On the—”
“All right! Enough!” Maggie said. She lowered her voice until I could hardly hear her. “Lucius. Lucius Pettigrew brought me home.”
“Holy shit! Have you been, you know, going out with him?”
Lucius Pettigrew was the most gorgeous man in the sophomore class at Bishop England. Even I knew who he was. All the girls called him Luscious Lucius. He was from an old blue-blood family and had a reputation as a big-time make-out artist.
“Sort of. I mean, he has a car and picks me up from work. The most we’ve done is stop at the Piggy Park for a barbecue sandwich on the way home.”
“What are you telling me, the most we’ve done? Are you hiding something?”
“Susan! Good grief! What do you think? That I sit around the corner and make out with him or something?” She was smiling from ear to ear and not the least bit embarrassed or ashamed. Mrs. Simpson had successfully spread her lewd influence like a virus. Or maybe it was in the genes, although the
only slut in our family married in.
“Yeah, do you?” I was curious. Not interested for myself, you understand, just curious.
“Yeah, well, sometimes we do. So how do you like that?”
“Really?”
“Yeah, really.”
“What’s it like?” I asked. “Does he try to make you do it?”
“Susan! Where do you get these gross ideas? No! I mean, God, Susan, he tells me things and sometimes we just kiss or hug. Do it? You’re cracked in the head, you know that?”
“Do you French-kiss?”
“Well, maybe. God, Susan, why are you asking me all these questions? It’s pretty private, you know.”
“Well, if I were you and I had a guy who looked like him, I’d at least want to see what it looks like.”
“See what what looks like?”
“You know, his you know…I mean, his is probably gonna look as good as one could—”
“You are a total disgusting pig! That’s about the last thing I want to see! Good God!”
“Sure. I’d say the same thing if I were you. Ha!”
“Well, you don’t have to worry about seeing one. You look like such a slob, you’ll never even get a date!”
“Well, you’re so damn skinny, nothing but a bag of bones, I can’t believe he wants to kiss you! And wait till his family finds out! They’ll have a fit!”
“Shut up, Susan. Just shut up.”
I shut up. We painted in silence. Ever since Maggie went to work in the city, things between us had started to change. She wore makeup all the time now and tweezed her eyebrows. She washed her hair every single morning. She even brushed her teeth about a thousand times a day.
Uncle Louis posted a sign for the rented rooms at the end of our driveway on the same day he stapled Christmas lights around our back door. I don’t know what we did before staple guns. In our house they held up shades, lights, wires, you name it. Don’t forget black electric tape! Whatever you couldn’t staple, you could tape. But when Uncle Louis hammered that sign into the ground, I got a funny feeling. Maybe something exciting would happen. ROOMS TO RENT! DAY, WEEK, OR MONTH! INQUIRE WITHIN! CALL 744-0812.
Maybe a movie star or somebody famous would take a room to rent in our house and discover us. Who knew? I was standing there with Maggie, looking at it, reading it over and over.
“I hope Lucius doesn’t see it,” Maggie said.
“Why?”
“Because then he’ll feel sorry for us and think we’re poor.”
“We are poor.”
“No, we’re not. We have enough and I have a job.”
“Right.” You have a job and live in dreamland, I thought. I have four children, a chain around my neck and I’m hoping movie stars are moving in. “Well,” I said, “things could be worse.”
Saturday, the twentieth of December, brought a knock at the back door. We were at the supper table, everybody except Maggie, who was probably parked up some dirt road with Lucius.
“I’ll get it!” Timmy said. He jumped up and ran for the door.
“Hi!” I heard Timmy say. “Sure, come on in!”
“Thanks,” said a male voice.
My momma stood up from the table, scraping the chair along the floor. Livvie turned around from the stove, Henry reached over for some more bread, and Timmy gave him a karate chop just for the hell of it.
“Hi! I saw your sign and I was wondering if there’s still a room for rent?”
He smiled and he had lots of dimples. Deep ones. And brown eyes with gold flecks. Beautiful eyes, black lashes. His nose was sort of big, and his mouth was kind of wide. He made me nervous and I didn’t know why. He just kind of filled up the room. He was smart and funny and, boy, was he cute.
“Why, yes! Yes, we have rooms available!” Momma said. “What’s your name, son?”
“Oh, sorry! I’m Simon Rifkin. I didn’t mean to disturb your dinner, I was just riding by and saw the sign…”
“Oh! Don’t worry! We were just finishing. Would you like some soup? Livvie made wonderful okra soup! She uses a ham bone to flavor it. Delicious! I’m Marie Catherine Hamilton, and these are my children, well, some of them, that is!”
“It’s nice to meet you, Mrs. Hamilton.”
He shook her hand and waved at us. He was wearing a navy blue windbreaker with a little yellow alligator on the top left side of it and khaki pants with a white shirt. I sat there like a tub of lard while Momma droned on. I’ll bet he’s over twenty-one, I thought.
“Why don’t I show you the room and you can tell me something about yourself. My brother, Louis, says I should find out everything I can about somebody who wants to live in my house. I mean, after all, a lady has to be careful, don’t you think so?”
“Yes, ma’am.” He caught my eye and winked at me. It was a friendly wink, one that said to me that he knew Momma was gonna blab and blab and he’d take it with good humor. My neck got hotter and hotter. He wasn’t that tall. No, probably only about five feet, nine inches. Why was I sweating? And why was I wearing this nasty old sweatshirt? Livvie looked at me and raised her eyebrows.
“What?” I said.
“Nothing, chile. Finish up your cornbread. Henry? You want some more?”
“Sure!”
She knew. She always knew. Henry held his bowl up to her and I fished a kernel of corn out of the bottom of my mine. Simon Rifkin. What kind of name was that? Who was this guy?
A few minutes later Momma led Simon into the room like a pet dog or something. “Now, will you have some soup with us, Simon?” she asked.
“No, no thanks. I gotta get back to the city.”
“All right, next time. Well, then, it’s all settled. You’ll move in Monday?”
“Yes, ma’am. Nice meeting all of you! Well, see you then!”
The door slammed, Livvie jumped at the noise and I leapt to the window to watch him walk to his car. He had a little dark green British MGB convertible. Cool. He walked to it, zipping his jacket, opened the car door and looked up at the house. He saw me staring at him through the window. He waved at me and I waved back, blood rushing back to my face like a rocket.
“I have to call Louis!” Momma said. “A hundred dollars a month! This is wonderful!”
While washing the supper dishes we learned everything that Momma had found out about him.
“He’s from where?” Livvie said.
“Michigan! Can you imagine? So far from home, poor boy. He’s a student at the Medical University! A doctor! Anyway, his father is a doctor too, and he’s divorced, and guess what?” She whispered, “He’s Jewish!”
“Big deal,” I said.
“Well, it could’ve been, Miss Smarty Pants. Your Uncle Louis wasn’t too thrilled about that, because, you know, Jews are peculiar sometimes.”
I just rolled my eyes. “Momma, Jesus was a Jew,” I said.
“That’s a lie and you know it! The Jews killed our Lord and that’s why Uncle Louis was a little worried.”
“Momma. The Romans killed Jesus,” I said. “At least that’s what it says in the Bible, if you can believe what you read these days.”
“Well, no matter about that. It’s just that, well, I don’t want you to go discussing his religion with him or his daddy’s divorce either. It’s not polite and we don’t want to be too nosy, do we?”
And she went on and on. I mean, here came the best-looking guy I’d ever seen in my whole life and my momma had to have something to say about his religion! Maybe she was afraid we’d stop going to Mass. Maybe she wanted to convert him so she could sit next to the Blessed Mother in heaven. They say that for every sinner you brought to wash away their heathen sins in the Catholic baptismal font of conversion, you got a guaranteed seat practically in the lap of the Blessed Mother, if and when you got to heaven.
“I told him that I had prayed every night to Saint Joseph,” Momma was saying, “who is the patron saint of families, by the way, to send a nice person to live with us. I told him that so he??
?d know we’re Catholic. Anyway, good old Saint Joseph came through! I have to remind myself to light a candle for him tomorrow. Such a reliable novena! Oh! This is such good news! And, guess what else?” She whipped out a check for a hundred dollars from inside her blouse. “Deposit! Louis never said anything about deposit money! I thought of that myself! Ha! We have an extra hundred dollars now and Christmas is gonna be all right. What do y’all think? Should we get a turkey?”
I hadn’t seen Momma so animated in years. She was really happy and it was catching.
“No more ham?” I said.
“I want a drumstick! Does he play ball?” Timmy asked.
“I don’t know! You’ll have to ask him!” she said.
“Can he fish?” Henry asked.
“I don’t know that either! We’ll have to find out!”
“Want to know what I think?” Livvie said.
“What?” Momma said.
“I think Gawd send this boy to take y’all’s mind away from your own worry. He needs a family and y’all need something to set y’all sailing back to the land of the living! He’s just the right thing! Yes, sir! He’s a Gawdsend, sure enough.”
Sunday after Mass, Maggie and I went with Uncle Louis and Aunt Carol over to Mount Pleasant to buy a Christmas tree. It was cold for a South Carolina day, but that added to our excitement about the holiday.
I was excited for another reason. One more day and Simon Rifkin would be sleeping under our roof. I had one short day to turn myself into a girl and, unfortunately, Maggie was the only person who could help me.
We lifted Christmas trees from their piles and stood them up, debating their various shortcomings and assets.
“Too bare in the front,” Maggie said.
“Top’s crooked,” I said. “Hey, Maggie? What do you think? Should I cut my hair?”
“I’ve got sap all over my hand. I hate that.” She pulled another tree from the pile. “Yes, you should cut your hair. It looks like a rat’s nest. You know I always tell you that if you’re not willing to take care of long hair you shouldn’t have it. And you live in a ponytail.”