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

“We understand,” I said. At some point during this exchange Lyn and I had arranged ourselves side by side, and were holding hands tightly.

“When my son was your age, he never got to play like you girls do,” said the woman. “He had to work hard; so do I. We get these trees from down in Jersey, and then we make the furniture. Two times, three times, I almost lost a finger from the saw.”

The man inside the truck said something sharp to her in the language they shared, and she quickly gave us a broad smile, though her eyes remained the same avid black points. “Do you girls think that your parents would like to buy some furniture?” she asked, changing her voice and waving her hand at the tangle of pine in the back of the truck. “It’s for the lawn.”

“You’ll have to ask my mother,” I said, staring past the woman to the place where the man had spat. On the smooth gray paving of the street, it made a wet circle that was vanishing fast in the noonday heat.

Many families in the neighborhood, including mine, bought furniture from the people with the red truck. Gypsies was what they were, my father told us that night at dinner, shaking the ice thoughtfully in his glass of tea. We were eating roast chicken and corn on the cob and garden tomatoes, a magical summer menu, and the air from the kitchen fan was making my mother’s hair dance above her face. “They used to come through Philadelphia all the time when I was young,” said Daddy. “Crowds of them, first in wagons and then in big old cars. They were tinkers—used to fix pots. It’s strange to see them doing this kind of work.”

“Do they steal children?” I asked abruptly.

Beside me, Matthew snickered. “They wouldn’t want you!” he whispered, poking my foot with his. I ignored him.

“Gypsies stealing children is just an old tale,” said my mother. “Sarah, you have to eat all the kernels on the cob, or else you won’t get another ear of corn.”

“Those Gypsies just seem dangerous to have around the neighborhood,” I persisted. “And that lady said that it was a crime for colored to live like this, and after that the man spit in the street.”

“Spat,” corrected my mother automatically, and she looked over at my father with a wry smile.

“Well, everybody’s got… to… feel… better… than… somebody,” said Daddy, drawling his words out progressively slower until they were as slow and exaggerated as the Uncle Remus record we had. He had the compressed look about his cheeks that he got whenever he was about to tell a joke, one of the complicated civil rights jokes he swapped with my lighthearted uncle Freddy. “Most of the world despises Gypsies, but a Gypsy can always look down on a Negro. Heck, that fellow was right to spit! You can dress it up with trees and big houses and people who don’t stink too bad, but a nigger neighborhood is still a nigger neighborhood.”

“James! Stop!” said my mother sharply, and Daddy stopped, though he kept the tight look on his face for the rest of the meal. Matthew and I kept glancing at him from the corners of our eyes; we’d never heard him talk that way before.

After dinner I met Lyn down at the swim club. It was the nicest time of day to swim, when the parking lot was almost empty and the shadows from a line of poplars stretched over the cooling grass. While adults chatted quietly in lawn chairs and teenagers began to dance to sentimental records on the jukebox, we played complex underwater games. Around sunset the pool always began to seem a mysterious body of water of undefined dimensions, full of shadows and dim corners; when we lay on our backs and floated, looking up, the evening sky was a tender blue, and the odor of chlorine over everything was a strong, beneficent, healing scent. We were always wonderfully exhausted after these swims, lugging our damp towels home in deep silence through the darkening cricket-lined streets as if the power of speech had been washed out through our pores.

That evening as we were walking home down Franklin Place, we heard the noise of a motor behind us and looked around, surprised to see the red truck. The stack of furniture was much reduced, and the dark-haired boy was standing up, leaning on the back of the cab. The truck paused, its motor chugging like a train engine in the quiet street, and the woman opened the cab door to call out hello to us in a friendlier voice than she had used before. “You went swimming,” she said. “Was it fun?”

“It was OK,” I said, thinking that if she got out and tried to grab us, I would run up the nearest driveway and pound on the door of Mr. Nansemond, an elderly bachelor from St. Kitts who grew blue hydrangeas.

“You girls want a ride down the street?” asked the woman, and when we said “No,” she gave the same kind of harsh chuckle she had given that afternoon. “We’re going to drive back to Jersey now, so goodbye to you. Just remember you are lucky little girls to live here.”

She slammed the cab door, and the truck roared off into the darkness. I hugged my wet towel and said to Lyn, “They wanted to kidnap us.”

“Oh, no they didn’t!” said Lyn stoutly. “Don’t be such a chicken.” But she looked at me with eyes that were very round and bright. For a minute we stood feeling small in the warm summer evening with the big shadowy trees rustling over our heads, and then we took off down the street as if hobgoblins were pursuing us. We gave long, shrill, panicky whoops as we ran, and we didn’t stop until we stood safely at our front doors.

The next morning I took a look at