For the next few months the state of affairs at Linnet"s house could have been charted as exactly as the season"s temperatures. When she came hollow-eyed to school to fall asleep with a crayon clutched in one hand, it was either that Daddy had come home and they"d gone to the Drive-In Theater to celebrate, or Daddy had gone away again after a long holler fight the night before.The school year rounded the holiday season and struggled toward spring. One day the children in Group Two sat in the reading circle studying a picture in their open primers.
"How is this bus different from ours?" asked Miss Peterson.
"It"s got a upstairs," said Henry. "Ours don"t got-" he caught Miss Peterson"s eye-"don"t have upstairses."
"That"s right," nodded Miss Peterson. "How else is it different?"
"It"s yellow," said Linnet. "Ours aren"t yellow."
"Our school buses are," said Henry.
"They"re really orange," said Linnet. "And when we go downtown, we ride on the great big gray ones."
"Well, let"s read this page to ourselves and find out what these children are going to do," said Miss Peterson.
A murmuring silence descended, during which Miss Peterson tapped fingers that pointed and admonished lips that moved. Page by page, the story was gone through. Then tomorrow"s story was previewed, and the reading group was lifting chairs to carry them back to the tables.
Linnet lingered, juggling her book under one arm as she held her chair.
"You know what, teacher?" she asked. "Last night we rode on the bus a long ways."
"Downtown?" asked Miss Peterson.
"Farther than that," said Linnet. "We even had to get off our bus and get on another one."
"My! said Miss Peterson. "You must have had fun!"
"I almost didn"t get to go," said Linnet. "Mother was going to leave me with Mrs. Mason, but she couldn"t. We knocked on the front door and the back door but she wasn"t home."
"So you got to have a pleasant ride after all, didn"t you?" asked Miss Peterson.
"Mother cried," Said Linnet. "All the way home."
"Oh, that"s too bad." Miss Peterson"s heart turned over at the desolation on Linnet"s face.
"She didn"t cry till we left the motel," said Linnet, lowering her chair to the floor and shifting her book. "You know what, teacher? The lady at the motel got mixed up. She told Mother that Mrs. Luhrs was in one of her cabins."
"Oh, did you go to the motel to visit some relatives?" asked Miss Peterson.
"We went to find Daddy. The lady said Daddy wasn"t there, but Mrs. Luhrs was.
But how could she be Mrs. Luhrs when Mother is Mrs. Luhrs? She wasn"t in thecabin.
"Well," said Miss Peterson, wondering, as she had frequent occasion to, how to terminate a conversation with a child un.o.bviously.
"The money went ding ding in the box just like in our song," said Linnet.
"The money?"
"Yes, when we got on the bus. It went ding ding just like our song."
"Well, how pleasant!" cried Miss Peterson in relief. "Now you"d better get started on your writing or you won"t have time for your fun-paper before lunch."
"It makes me so mad I could spit," she said later to Elsie Estes over the kerthump of the ditto machine she was cranking. The machine was spewing out pictures of slightly drunken cows, mooing at lopsided calves. She stopped and examined one of the pictures critically. "Well, they"ll know what they"re supposed to be-after I tell them."
Miss Peterson started the cranking again. "Why can"t that mother manage to keep something from the child? There"s no reason to drag Linnet through the nasty mess. Maybe if they had six kids, neither one of them would have time to-Do you want any of these, Elsie?"
"Yes, I guess so," said Miss Estes. "I don"t know about that. Look at my Manuelo. He"s got six brothers and sisters in school and only Heaven knows how many more at home, and papa turns up muy boracho nearly every payday and I get a blow-by-blow account of it next morning. Then Manuelo has a new papa for a while until the old papa beats the new papa up, and then it"s all bliss and beans till papa goes on another toot."
"Well, I"m kind of worried. There, I gave you forty-five, just in case. I met Mrs. Luhrs at a PTA meeting several weeks ago. She looks-well, unstable-the mousy-looking kind that gives you a feeling of smoldering dynamite-if dynamite can smolder. Poor Linnet. I see now where she picked up the habit of .pressing three fingers to her mouth. But I don"t like it at all. Linnet"s such a sweet child"
"You could break your heart over any number of kids," said Miss Estes. "I found out long ago we can"t reform parents and it"s flirting with termination of contract if we try to. Remember how worried you were over your MexicanoChino last year? Didn"t do either one of you any good, did it?"
"No." Miss Peterson stacked tomorrow"s work papers, criss-crossing them. "And he"s in the Juvenile Home now and his father"s in the insane asylum. Elsie, when my emotional storm signals go up, something"s cooking. You wait and see."
Several weeks later, Linnet leaned against Miss Peterson"s desk and asked, "How much more until lunch, teacher? I"m hungry."
"Not very long, Linnet. What"s the matter, didn"t you eat a good breakfast this morning?"
I didn"t eat any breakfast," said Linnet, her eyes half smiling as she awaited the expected reaction.
"No breakfast! Why, Linnet, we always eat a good breakfast. Why didn"t you eat one this morning?" "I got up too late. I almost missed the bus."
"You"d better tell your mother to get you up earlier," said Miss Peterson.
"She didn"t wake up, either," said Linnet. "The doctor gave her some sleeping stuff so she won"t cry at night, and she didn"t hear the alarm clock. She said one morning without breakfast wouldn"t hurt me. But I"m hungry."
"I should think you would be. It"s only fifteen minutes till lunch time, dear.
That isn"t very long."
Then, about a week later, Linnet came to school resplendent in a brand-new dress, carrying a huge box of crayons.
"Even a gold and a silver and a white one, teacher!" She was jiggling around excitedly, her newly set curls bobbing with an animation that they hadn"t shown in months.
"You know what, teacher? Daddy came home last night. I woke up and I heard him tell Mother he was through with that double-crossing b.i.t.c.h and he"d never go away again."
Before Miss Peterson could gather her scattered senses to question Linnet"s terminology, the child was borne away by an enthusiastic mob of cla.s.smates who wanted to try out the gold and silver and white crayons and admire the new dress and the ruffled slip under it . . .
"How long do you suppose it will last?" asked Miss Estes at lunchtime over the Spanish rice at the cafeteria serving table. "The poor kid must feel like a Yo-Yo. Don"t look now, but isn"t that your Wayne squirtin" milk through his straw? He just made a bull"s eye in my Joanie"s ear. Who"ll do the honors this time you or me?"
It lasted a month.
Then Linnet crept around again in the schoolroom, not even caring when Henry took her white crayon and chewed it reflectively into a crumbled mess that he had trouble spitting into the wastebasket when discovered. Again her three trembling fingers crept up to cover a quivering mouth. Again she forgot simple words she had known for months, and again she cried before trying new ones.
One day the reading group laughed over the story of Spot dragging the covers of Ally to wake her up. They all had wide-eyed stories to tell about how hard they were to wake up or how incredibly early they woke up by themselves. Then Miss Peterson was dismissing the group with her automatic, "Lift your chairs, don"t drag them."
"You know what, teacher? That"s just like Daddy and Mother this morning," said Linnet softly. "They didn"t get out of bed, so I fixed my own breakfast and got ready for school, all by myself."
"My, you"re getting to be a big girl, aren"t you?"
"Yes. When I got up I went in their bedroom but they weren"t awake. I pulled the covers up for Mother because her shoulders were cold. Her nightgown hasn"t got any sleeves."
"That was thoughtful of you," said Miss Peterson. "Who combed your hair for you if she didn"t wake up?" "I did." Linnet flushed. "I can get me ready."
"You did a pretty good job," acknowledged Miss Peterson, ignoring the crooked part and the tangled back curls.
When Linnet brought up the smudged, straggly writing paper that had again replaced her former neat and legible ones, Miss Peterson wondered why this morning, when Daddy was home, Linnet"s work hadn"t improved.
"You know what, teacher?" Linnet was saying. "Last night Mother promised she wouldn"t cry any more, not ever again. And she said Daddy won"t ever go away again."
"Isn"t that fine?" asked Miss Peterson. "Now you can have lots of fun together, can"t you?"
Linnet turned her head away. "Daddy doesn"t like me any more."
"Oh, surely he does," protested Miss Peterson. "All daddies love their little girls."
Linnet looked up at her, her shadowy eyes and pale little face expressionless.
"My daddy doesn"t. Mother let me take him a cup of coffee last night while she was doing the dishes. He drank it and said, "h.e.l.l, even the coffee around here is enough to turn your stomach. Beat it, brat." And he pushed me and I dropped the empty cup and it broke."
"But if he isn"t going away any more-"
"Mother told me that." Linnet"s eyes were full of unchildlike wisdom. "She told me lots of time before. But she didn"t hear Daddy swear."
"Well, it"ll be nice if your mother doesn"t cry any more."
"Yes," said Linnet, "When she cries, I cry, too."
Miss Peterson watched Linnet go back to her table and start her fun-paper.
Poor cherub, she thought . . .
"Do you suppose I ought to do something about it?" she asked Miss Estes in the cafeteria.
"Do what?" asked Miss Estes. "Call the sheriff because a father swore at his child and called her a brat?"
"You know it"s more than that. An unwholesome home environment."
"What would you do?" asked Miss Estes, nibbling her square of cheese. "Take her away from them? In that case you"d have to take half the kids in the nation away from their parents. Nope, as long as she"s fed and clothed and carries no visible scars, you can"t invoke the law."
"Maybe I could talk with her mother."
"My, you are a neck-sticker-outer, aren"t you? She"d probably spit in your eye."
"I"m awfully uneasy-"
"It"s the beans. They didn"t cook them long enough today." After the buses had gone, Miss Peterson saw a lonely little figure sitting in one of the swings.
"Oh, whirtleberries!" she thought. "Who missed the bus this time?"
"Hi, teacher!"
"Why, Linnet! How did you ever come to miss the bus?"
"I didn"t miss it. Mother told me not to come home on the bus today. She said someone would come after me."
"Is she busy somewhere this afternoon?" Miss Peterson dropped into the swing next to Linnet, savoring the quiet of the empty playground.
"I don"t know." Linnet was opening and shutting a little blue-and-white box.
"What"s that?" asked Miss Peterson.
"It"s empty," Linnet"s voice defended. "Mother wouldn"t care. She lets me play with empty boxes. But not with medicine in them."
"That"s right," said Miss Peterson. "We never play with boxes that have medicine in them."
"Mother got this at the drugstore yesterday. It had medicine in it then."
"Yesterday?" Miss Peterson was surprised. "But it"s all none."
"It was Mother"s sleeping stuff." Linnet snapped the box shut again.
Miss Peterson was curious. "Let me see it, Linnet." She took the box and turned it over in her hand. There was only a prescription number and Take as directed on it.
"You know what, teacher? She put an awful lot of sugar in Daddy"s coffee before I took it to him, and he doesn"t like very much sugar. Maybe that"s why he got mad last night."
"Could be," said Miss Peterson grimly. "Where did you get this box, Linnet?"
"It was on Mother"s dresser by her coffee cup. When I went in this morning to see if they were awake, I found it. It was empty. I took her cup back to the kitchen."
Miss Peterson sat eyeing the box for a long minute. Of course it couldn"t be.
Children so often exaggerate and draw mistaken conclusions. Add to that an overly imaginative teacher and you could dream up some mighty weird situations. But . . .
"Let"s play something while you"re waiting," she said. "Let"s play What Comes Next. You know, like we do with the picture stories in our workbooks."
"Okay, teacher!" Linnet"s eyes lighted with pleasure.
"Now," said Miss Peterson. "Your mother started to wash the dishes last night.
What Comes Next?"
"And I got to dry the knives and forks and spoons!" added Linnet."Yes. Then your mother poured your daddy"s coffee. What Comes Next?"
"Oh, you missed What Comes Next!" laughed Linnet. "Mother put a lot of the sleeping stuff in Daddy"s cup. She said Daddy was getting restless. Then she poured the coffee."
"Then you took it to your daddy?"