Sarah Phillips by Andrea Lee (beach books .TXT) 📗

Judge Ramsgannett, plump, brown, and silver-haired in his big black car; Lyn’s mother, the dreamy-eyed Mrs. Yancy, on her way to the A&P in a creaky yellow station wagon; Freddie Monroe, a college junior, in a little green sports car that seemed to Lyn and me to be the final word in sophistication.

After a while, wiping our sweaty faces, we sat down on the curb. We started talking about ponies, and about a scheme I had to package the mulberries that grew on a tree in my backyard and sell them to the patients at a nearby hospital. Lyn thought it was a great idea. “Charge ten cents a bag, and we’ll get rich!” she said, and hitched up her shorts to scratch a mosquito bite on her thigh.

Down the street came Walter, Lyn’s little brother, sucking on a blue Popsicle.

“Hey, Walter, where’d you get the Popsicle?” I called.

“Good Humor,” murmured Walter, slurping. He was a sturdy-legged boy of five, who, with his bulging brow and protuberant light-brown eyes, looked a little like a baby dolphin. The Popsicle, dissolving in the heat, had left a trail of purple splotches down the front of his Woody Woodpecker t-shirt. He stopped and regarded us warily.

“Give us a bite,” said Lyn.

“No!” exclaimed Walter, jumping as if he’d received an electric shock. He stuck out his bluish tongue at us and ran toward the house, hopping over our two bicycles, which we’d left in the driveway.

“I’m gonna tell Mom you were eating before lunch!” Lyn shouted after him. “And don’t you dare drink from the hose again!”

“He drinks from the hose and gets his clothes disgustingly wet,” she explained to me.

“Disgusting” was one of Lyn’s favorite words: just saying it filled her with such glee that she lay back on the grass beside the curb and waved her thin legs in the air. I flopped back beside her, and lay staring up into the branches of the big sugar maple that stood in the Yancys’ front yard. It was almost noon, and the sun overhead struck straight down through the green maple leaves, making discs of light that a hot breeze shifted over our faces. In the treetops the cicadas were going wild, stretching their harsh note up into the arid spaces unprotected by shade; around us, near and far, was the drone of a dozen lawnmowers.

I was thinking, with a savoring sort of delight, that soon it would be lunchtime—cream-cheese-and-jelly sandwiches, I hoped—and that in a few weeks my brother, mother, father, and I would leave for the cottage we rented every summer at the beach in New Jersey; and that sometime—not too soon—after that, the leaves on the big maple would turn yellow, and Lyn and I could make a leaf fort the way we had last fall. That was the best fun of all: the ring of leaves heaped up so high it seemed like a castle keep, the cold, brilliant sun of autumn overhead, the smell of smoke from leaf piles burning up and down Franklin Place, and the two of us giggling snug and protected in the center, our hair and clothes full of leaves.

Just at that moment a truck turned onto Franklin Place, and Lyn and I jumped up to get a look at it. Trucks were unusual on our street, and this was the strangest one we’d ever seen: a large battered red pickup, its dusty hood and fenders scarred with patches of rust. It carried in back a high, tangled mass of odd-looking furniture that turned out to be tables and chairs knocked roughly together out of pine branches, the way Lyn and I sometimes made benches for our dolls.

The man behind the wheel had dark skin but was not a Negro; he looked a bit like one of the Indians we saw constantly defeated in TV westerns. He wore a green plaid flannel shirt; his face was a weathered mass of cords and seams, and his oily black hair was slicked back from his forehead. Beside him was a woman with the same kind of ropy brown face, and in the back of the truck, perched in a kind of niche in the furniture, rode a black-haired boy of about fifteen. The truck slowed and stopped beside us.

“Little girls, do you live around here?” the man called out to us.

“Right down the street,” I said, and Lyn pointed silently up her driveway.

The woman in the truck opened the door, climbed out, and came around to us. Up close, we could see that her black hair, pulled back in a rough ponytail, was dyed a dry red at the front. She wore a long, faded yellow skirt, rubber sandals, and a gray t-shirt with one of the joke insignias you could get printed at the Atlantic City boardwalk. Hers read “Siberian Salt Mines,” and under the loose gray fabric, her long breasts swayed back and forth in a way in which our mothers’ well-contained bosoms never did. There was something frightening and wild about the outfit, and about the woman herself; she grinned at us, and we saw that one of her front teeth was broken in half.

“Is this neighborhood all colored?” she asked, in a voice that had an accent to it, and also a tinge of complaint or lament.

“I guess so,” said Lyn, almost whispering.

The woman gave a harsh chuckle. “It’s a real crime for colored to live like this,” she said, putting a hand on her hip and looking up and down the street with small dark eyes that had the same glistening brightness, the jumpy intensity, of the eyes of a crow that had once alighted for an instant on my bedroom windowsill. She said a rapid phrase in a strange language to the man in the truck, and he scowled and spat heavily into the street. The boy in the back of the truck lifted his chin and stared at Lyn and me.

“You are very lucky little girls,” continued the woman.