The Luckiest Girl Page 2

  “I’m going to cut some roses for the table,” said Mrs. Latham, removing her apron. “Maybe you would like to arrange them.”

  “All right, Mother,” agreed Shelley, who enjoyed flower arranging. She went into her room and began to make her bed. She tossed her pillows onto a chair and smoothed the sheets, and while she worked she carried on a mental conversation. Good-bye, Jack…no, I’m not mad at you—I’m just not going out with you anymore. In her imagination, while she pulled up the soft blue blankets, Jack answered, But golly, Shelley…Jack always said, But golly, Shelley, when she said something that worried him. Then she would say—what? I’m sorry, Jack, but you bore me stiff? No, a girl could not say that to a boy who had, in his own way, tried to give her a good time. Shelley pulled up the quilted chintz spread. There must be a way out. There had to be and soon, too. If she were seen with Jack during the first few days of school, everyone would assume she did not want to go out with any other boy and then her junior year would be just like her sophomore year—a series of Saturday nights each like the one before and the one that lay ahead.

  “Here are the roses,” Mrs. Latham called out from the kitchen.

  “All right, Mother.” Shelley went into the kitchen, where she found a tangle of roses on the draining board. She began to strip the lower leaves from the stems and drop them into the Disposall. The roses were among the last that would bloom that season and the colors, pink and red, yellow and white, showed that her mother had cut most of the blooms from the bushes to have enough for the table. Because she had so many colors to work with, Shelley decided to make a bouquet rather than a formal arrangement. She found a blue bowl and a frog in the cupboard and was sorting out the roses with the longest stems for the center of the bouquet when the doorbell rang.

  “It must be the parcel service,” remarked Mrs. Latham, and went to the door. She returned in a moment with a suit box, which she laid on the draining board while she snipped the cord with her garden shears. She removed the lid, pushed aside the tissue paper, and lifted out a pink raincoat with a black velveteen collar.

  “Mother!” cried Shelley in dismay.

  “A surprise for you,” announced Mrs. Latham gaily.

  “But Mother—” protested Shelley.

  “Now Shelley,” said Mrs. Latham comfortably, “be sensible.”

  “I don’t want to be sensible,” cried Shelley, “I want a yellow slicker. You knew I wanted a slicker. I saved my money for it.”

  “But Shelley, this will be so becoming to you,” said Mrs. Latham. “You look so sweet in pink.”

  Shelley enunciated with exaggerated distinctness.

  “Mother, I do not want to look sweet.” Sweet! How old did her mother think she was, anyway? Six instead of sixteen?

  “Now Shelley,” said Mrs. Latham in what Shelley recognized as her subject-is-closed voice, “I don’t want my daughter wearing a sloppy old slicker. Your father will pay for this and you can use your money for something else. A pretty new skirt perhaps.”

  But Shelley was not willing to let the subject be closed. She did not want a pretty skirt. She wanted a yellow slicker. An ugly yellow slicker. A slicker patched with adhesive tape. Rebellion mounted within her. She was being silly and childish and she knew it, but she had her heart set on that slicker, she had saved her money, and her mother had no right—

  Shelley was frightened. What if she did not find the courage to tell Jack she did not want to go out with him again? And what if she wore the pink raincoat her mother had selected? Then nothing would be different after all. She felt cornered, desperate. Then, feeling as if she had been building up to this moment for a long time, Shelley knew she had to do something that very instant to relieve her feelings. She looked wildly around the kitchen, snatched the roses from the draining board, and ignoring the thorns that scratched her hands, she stuffed the blooms into the Disposall, turned on the water, flipped the switch that started the motor, and stood with her back to her mother, her fingers gripping the edge of the sink, and listened with savage pleasure while the angry jaws of the Disposall chewed the roses, petals, leaves, and stems to bits.

  When the last shred of the roses was noisily ground up and washed away, Shelley stopped the motor and turned off the water. Then, taking a deep breath, she whirled around and faced her mother.

  This time it was Mrs. Latham who was angry. Angry and shocked. “Shelley Latham!” she exclaimed. “Roses in the Disposall!”

  Shelley looked defiant—more defiant than she felt, because she, too, was shocked at what she had done.

  “Really, Shelley—” began Mrs. Latham, and stopped. She did not know what to say.

  Shelley remained silent. They faced each other, mother and daughter, one puzzled and hurt, the other stubborn and rebellious.

  “What’s going on here anyway?” asked Shelley’s father, entering from the living room, the morning paper still in his hand.

  “Shelley threw the roses into the Disposall,” answered Mrs. Latham. “Perfectly good roses that I had just cut.”

  Shelley thought her father looked as if he were trying not to smile. I suppose it is funny, putting roses into the Disposall, she thought suddenly—funny to someone else. But she could not feel that there was anything funny about what she had done. She only knew that, for some reason she did not understand, she felt better because she had stuffed those roses into the Disposall, as if she had ground up some of her exasperation along with the petals. But this was something she did not know how to explain to her father.

  “Shelley, sometimes I think I don’t understand you anymore,” said Mrs. Latham with a sigh.

  This did not surprise Shelley, who sometimes felt she no longer understood herself. “I just…” Shelley hesitated, not knowing how to justify her behavior to her father. “I guess…it is just that when I am bad I am horrid.”

  “I was only trying to do something for her own good,” Mrs. Latham explained to Mr. Latham, “and suddenly she seized perfectly good roses, probably the last of the season, and stuffed them into the Disposall. Destroyed them. I can’t understand it.”

  “But I don’t want something done for my own good,” protested Shelley. “That’s the whole point.”

  “What was the argument about?” asked Mr. Latham. “I wasn’t listening to this particular one.”

  “My slicker. Mother knew I had saved my money for a slicker,” explained Shelley, “and she went and bought me a raincoat I didn’t want.”

  “But that is no reason to grind up roses.” Mrs. Latham leaned wearily back against the draining board. “Shelley, sometimes I don’t know what to do with you.”

  Shelley stared at the ceiling. “Let me buy the slicker” was what she wanted to say, but instead she was surprised to hear her own voice telling her mother, “Send me to California.”

  “Now, Shelley,” said Mrs. Latham, relenting. “Don’t dramatize so. What you did was wrong, but we certainly don’t intend to—to banish you over a few roses.”

  “But I want to go,” answered Shelley, and knew as she spoke that she meant what she said. Even though it meant living in the same house with Katie, she wanted to go to California.

  “But that is out of the question,” protested Mrs. Latham. “As if we could send you all the way to California.”

  “Why is it impossible?” Mr. Latham asked. “A girl has to leave home sometime.”

  “Of course,” agreed Mrs. Latham, “but there is plenty of time for that when she is ready for college. After all, Shelley is only sixteen and young for her age at that.” Mrs. Latham acted as if there was nothing more to say on the subject. Briskly she set the blue bowl and the frog back in the cupboard and shut the door.

  “Leaving home and having the opportunity to make a few mistakes is a good way for a girl to grow up,” persisted Mr. Latham. “And this looks like a splendid opportunity for a girl who has never been more than a couple of hundred miles from home.”

  Shelley carefully examined a scratch on her forefinger. I
t was difficult to believe that her father could be serious, but it would be exciting to spend a winter in California, to wear a dirty old slicker if she felt like it, to go to a different school, and see some of the country, and meet new people—and not go out with Jack. Let Rosemary or some other girl have him. She wouldn’t care, not when she was in California. What was it like down there in California, where history was so colorful and oranges came from trees instead of bins at the supermarket?

  “Send our little girl so far away to live with someone else’s family?” Mrs. Latham’s voice expressed disbelief. “You can’t really mean it.”

  Mr. Latham continued as if his wife had not spoken. “After all, Shelley is an only child and the experience of living with a larger family should be good for her.”

  Shelley considered this. She had always liked being an only child and had felt sorry for some of her friends who sometimes had to go without new clothes because of the expense of keeping an older brother or sister in college, or who had to babysit with younger brothers or sisters. It did not matter. Even if she had to babysit with Katie, she still wanted to go to California.

  “But I couldn’t bear to let her go so far,” said Shelley’s mother.

  “I think she should go,” Mr. Latham stated flatly.

  “Daddy!” cried Shelley, while Mrs. Latham looked at her husband in silence.

  “She may not have another chance like this.” Mr. Latham went on as if Shelley was not listening. “When she is ready for college we won’t be able to send her any farther than the state university, and going to school a hundred miles from home with the same crowd she knew in high school and coming home for all the holidays is really not leaving home. I think nine months away from home with a family with other children would be a valuable experience.”

  Shelley’s parents were talking about her as if she were not present, the way they must talk about her when she heard their voices, low and earnest, after she had gone to bed.

  “But California—” protested Mrs. Latham. “How would she get to San Sebastian?”

  “Fly,” answered Mr. Latham.

  “But she would have to change planes,” Mrs. Latham pointed out.

  “She has to change buses when she goes downtown,” said Mr. Latham.

  “Please, Mother, I want to go,” insisted Shelley. “It’s only for a school year and not a whole year. And I would write every week. And it isn’t as though I were going out into the world to—to seek my fortune. I’ll be living with a family, a family you know, and I would be back next June. Please, Mother! Daddy, make her let me go!”

  “Shelley is right,” agreed Mr. Latham. “It isn’t as if she were going to live with strangers.”

  “Yes, Mother,” Shelley persisted. “And I have my school clothes all ready and all I would have to do is pack and have my records transferred and a few things like that. Say I can go. Please say I can go!”

  “I seem to be overruled,” said Mrs. Latham, admitting defeat with a rueful smile.

  “Mother!” cried Shelley joyfully, and at the same time she was deeply touched by her mother’s smile, which showed so plainly how much it hurt her mother to let her go.

  “I hope this is the right decision,” said Mrs. Latham, still turning the whole discussion over in her mind. “Nine whole months. If only California were not so far away—”

  “Oh, Mother, everything will be all right,” Shelley insisted, eager to reassure her mother. “I know it will be all right. Everything is going to be wonderful!”

  Slowly Mrs. Latham folded the tissue paper over the raincoat and replaced the lid on the box. “How much a lovely raincoat like this would have meant to me when I was sixteen,” she remarked sadly. “I was sixteen during the Depression and I wanted a raincoat more than anything in the world. I had to carry a shabby old cotton umbrella to school and I was so ashamed of it.”

  Shelley was silent. It hurt her to see her mother look so sad. She wanted to say, But this is not the Depression and I don’t want a raincoat, but she could not say it. She could not say to her mother, I am not you. I am me.

  The ring of the telephone interrupted Shelley’s thoughts. “It’s Jack,” she remarked as she picked up the receiver.

  “Hi, Shelley,” said the familiar voice. “Has anything exciting happened?”

  “Yes!” answered Shelley, for once glad that Jack had asked that question. She was eager to tell her news to someone, to make sure it was really true. The rest, she knew, was going to be easy. All she had to do was say good-bye. And in California, she was sure, she would find the boy she had always wanted to meet.

  Chapter 2

  As the plane began to lose altitude to land at the Vincente Municipal Airport, the landing field nearest San Sebastian, Shelley fastened her seat belt with trembling fingers. It was ridiculous for her fingers to behave that way. She was eager to begin her new life. Of course she was. It was just that everything had happened so fast and the world seen from the air was such a strange place, like a giant relief map. Cars were ants on ribbon highways and farms were old-fashioned crazy quilts. Lakes were puddles, trees on the mountains had toothpick trunks, and finally in California so much of the map was flat and brown with dust-colored hills like miniature circus tents. It did not seem real at all.

  The plane landed on the runway with a gentle bounce and as it taxied toward the airport building that a moment ago had looked like a shoe box, all Shelley could think of was that now she could unpin the ten-dollar bill that her mother had insisted she pin to her slip in case she lost her purse when she changed planes. Shelley had not wanted to pin that bill to her slip—at sixteen she was certainly old enough to hang on to her purse—and she had started to protest but had thought better of it. Talking about the ten-dollar bill and what she should do if she lost her money had helped fill those last awkward minutes at the airport this morning, when she was about to leave home for the first time in her life and suddenly discovered she did not know what to say to her mother and father. And what was even more surprising, her mother and father did not seem to know what to say to her. Oh, they said the expected things like Be careful of strangers, and Study hard, and Don’t forget to write, but Shelley knew that these remarks were only meant to fill up the long minutes until her plane was announced.

  Shelley unfastened the seat belt and remembered how surprised she had been to learn that at sixteen there were so many things a girl could not say to her mother and father—things like I’m both glad and sorry to be leaving, and I really do feel dreadful about grinding up those roses in the Disposall, and Please don’t look so sad behind your smiles—nine months isn’t forever and I’ll write often.

  The heat, as Shelley stepped through the door of the plane, was like the blast of a hair dryer against her face. She walked down the steps and as soon as she stepped onto the concrete, the door was shut behind her, the steps were rolled away, and the plane, her last link with everything she had known, was heading down the runway once more. I’ll pretend I’m a stranger in a foreign land, Shelley told herself, and tried to feel a little braver. Somehow her legs carried her through the gate toward a woman with curly hair touched with gray whom she recognized as Mavis.

  “Shelley!” cried Mavis Michie. “How wonderful to see you after all these years! We’re so glad to have you!”

  “I’m glad to be here.” Shelley smiled shakily. “Mother sends her love.”

  Mavis led the way to a battered station wagon. As they left the Vincente airport and headed toward San Sebastian, Shelley settled back for her first look at California from the ground. In that spot California was flat and brown, shimmering in the heat, and not at all what Shelley had expected, although exactly what she had expected she did not know. Something lush and tropical, perhaps.

  Mavis pointed to a row of towering trees and identified them as eucalyptus. Shelley noticed that their smooth trunks were shedding their bark in long, ragged strips. She had never seen a tree shed bark before and had, in fact, been told that a tree
could not live without bark. Apparently things were different in California. In the distance, against the mountains they were approaching, was a row of palm trees, the first Shelley had ever seen. They looked to her like a row of shabby feather dusters balanced on their handles. Then the station wagon rattled across a bridge and Shelley was shocked at what she saw below. There was no water in the riverbed. Never in her whole life had Shelley seen a river without water.

  Next the station wagon passed a stretch of orange trees. A grove, thought Shelley, and not an orchard. How tidy it looked. The trees were round, with branches so low they touched the ground. The green oranges looked as if they might have been hung among the leaves for decoration. Even the soil beneath the trees was arranged in neat furrows.

  “What are those round metal things between the trees?” asked Shelley.

  “Smudge pots,” answered Mavis. “If there is danger of frost, the pots, which are filled with oil, are lighted to keep the oranges from being frostbitten.”

  “You mean they heat up the outdoors?” Shelley asked incredulously.

  Mavis laughed. “Enough to save the crop.”

  Then Shelley saw a startling billboard that announced in big red letters, Rain for Rent. Shelley could not believe what she read until a closer view revealed the words, Farm sprinkler systems for rent or sale. The next sign that attracted her attention was painted orange with black letters that proclaimed, Giant Orange 300 yards. Now I know exactly how Alice in Wonderland felt when she fell down the rabbit hole, thought Shelley, as she watched to see what a Giant Orange might be. It was a roadside stand shaped like an orange, which bore the sign, Fresh tree-ripened orange juice. Foot-long hot dogs.

  Shelley felt reassured as they entered the town of San Sebastian. She saw much that was familiar—a J.C. Penney store, Shell and Standard service stations just like those at home, a theater advertising a movie she had seen only last week. It was the setting for the familiar that was strange to her—the dry heat, the palms, the orange trees, and, everywhere, dusty geraniums actually growing outdoors in the ground.