Playing With Matches by Carolyn Wall Page B

Through tears I asked, “But—could I have paper? Andpencils, sharp pencils?” The pages of my old notebook were written on, full of scribblings that seemed infantile. My two pencils were worried down to nubs.
    “Well,” Auntie said. “I suppose so. Meanwhile—would you like to walk over to the Maytubbys’ with me? Look in on their missus, take them a jar of jam?”
    Oh, misery , I thought. Plain undecorated hurt. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. “No,” I said. Then, “Yes, Auntie, please.”
    But friendship, it turned out, was dandelion fluff. I sat on the Maytubbys’ porch and waited for Auntie while the children scattered, and I was left with my sorry and broken heart.
    Claudie didn’t talk to me for the rest of the year, and school plodded on, one day oozing into the next.
    Then summer came.
    It meant cool dips in the shallows, and the Fourth of July. Like everyone else along the False River, we lined up our chairs and drank lemonade and watched sparklers and bottle rockets zing over the water and listened late into the night while Black Cats banged and made all the dogs howl.

10
    O ne night after dark, I slipped out the window and down the drainpipe and lattice, and over to Mama’s house. I stood on the porch, looking in through the window. A single lamp was lit in the parlor and Mama was dancing to the radio—slow, bluesy music, her steps long and smooth. She had a bottle in her hand. The hem of her dress was caught over one wrist, lifted and whirling like a red wing.
    I went in through the kitchen and leaned in the doorway.
    “Well, hi, there, darlin’,” she said. “Where you been?”
    I didn’t bother with an answer. I never did. She’d put me at Auntie’s, so she damn well knew.
    “Come on in here an’ let me show you a few steps.”
    I eased out on that wood floor that was polished by my mama’s feet, and a hundred men. I knew they paid for more than a dance.
    She must have had a good day. “Come on upstairs, girlie girl, and let’s see what trouble we can get into.”
    The steps were steep and narrow, and I wondered what it would have been like, growing up in this house. There was an old refrigerator in the kitchen, but I never saw food on her table andI didn’t know what was behind the cabinet doors. The bathroom was off the kitchen. I’d guessed it was for company. I’d used it a time or two, thinking of the men in gray uniforms who’d stood there peeing in the way that men do, hitting everything but the bowl. The floor was always sticky, and I dared not touch the seat.
    Upstairs, there were beds in all three rooms, and each was made up with fine sheets and a pretty spread. In Mama’s room, in her private space, every surface was filled with glass bottles of nail polish and rouge, eyeliner and hair color, foundation creams and stopper-topped perfume.
    She sat down on a low bench in front of the little table she called her vanity. She picked out a few bottles. “Come over here, darlin’. Let’s see what you look like all shined up.”
    That was a joke.
    “Shine” was our name. I was Clea June, daughter of Clarice Shine who owned five hundred kinds of sweet-smelling things. “Go on and let that bottom lip hang down for me,” she said.
    And I did, while she swiped lipstick on me, and powdered and rouged my cheeks, and I closed my eyes tight while she brushed on color and thickened my lashes. She clipped earrings on my ears. I could feel them bump-bump against my neck.
    “Now see?” she said. “Lookie there at your elegant self.”
    I opened my eyes. What I saw in that mirror stole away my breath. I did look like her, peach-shaded and rosy, scarlet cheeks and lips. She stuck a silver comb on top of my braids.
    “Well,” she drawled. “Don’t you look fine.”
    And then it was gone, that soft curve of her mouth. It stretched out thin. “Go on now. Get out and leave me in peace.”
    She followed me down the narrow stairs, and sank to the floor like her knees were liquid.