Читать книгу I Will Not Leave You Comfortless - Jeremy Jackson - Страница 10

A Good Party

Mom stood near the top of the stairs—just her torso and head visible to me—and judged my room not yet acceptably clean.

“But I put everything away,” I protested.

“You pushed your toys into a pile. You haven’t made the bed.”

It was Labor Day and we were off from school.

“Why do I even have to clean my room?” I asked. “I didn’t invite Grandma here.”

“Think about how many times Grandma has had your birthday at her house,” Mom said calmly. “Think about how many cakes she has made you, even when it wasn’t your birthday.”

“I didn’t keep count!”

Then Mom calmly appealed to my sense of responsibility and asked for my cooperation to make this a good day for Grandma. She didn’t threaten punishment or raise her voice or anything. It was one of her most potent ploys. I had no weapon against it. She just asked for my help in this very adult way and then walked back down the stairs. I wasn’t even sure why I was so mad. Perhaps because I saw no prospect of fun in the entire day.

Elizabeth was coming up the stairs.

“I’ll help you, Jeremy,” she said.

I was kneeling by the window, looking out. Elizabeth started making the bed. “Grab the other side,” she said.

I got up and helped.

“It’s a big birthday for Grandma,” Elizabeth said. “She’s seventy.”

“I know,” I said.

“When I turn seventy, will you throw me a birthday party?”

I laughed at such a ludicrous prospect. “Okay.”

“I want lots of balloons and a lemon cake with a sugar glaze. Can you remember that?”

“By the time you are seventy,” I said, “I will be too old to remember anything, so I will probably get you a chocolate cake instead. Or angel food, since that’s what old people like.”

We plopped down my pillows. We were done making the bed.

“Well, I’ll be too old to remember what I asked for,” Elizabeth said, “so I will eat whatever cake you put in front of me. Anyway, thanks for throwing me my seventieth birthday party.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“But for now, it’s Grandma’s day.”

When the first car arrived—earlier than expected—I was the greeting committee. The car brought Grandma, Grandpa, Great Aunt Clarice, and Great Aunt Billie. I was enfolded by my grandparents and kissed. I wished Grandma a happy birthday and I offered to show her the ducks. Grandma said that she surely would be interested in seeing all those ducks she’d been hearing tell of. But before any organization toward such a duck quest could be mounted, two more cars pulled up, bringing Great Uncle Emmet; Great Aunt Rowena; Linda; Craig; Craig’s older brother, Brian; and Grandma’s cousin John D.

Our long kitchen table was covered with the pieced gingham tablecloth Mom had finished recently, and as soon as they walked through the door, Grandma, Clarice, Billie, and Rowena began cooing over it. The tablecloth was a patchwork of browns, reds, golds, and blues, each square about as big as a piece of toast. I had spent hours in the vicinity of the tablecloth’s manufacture—sometimes playing under the kitchen table even as Mom was sewing on top of it.

“It’s the first time we’re using it, Mildred,” Mom said. “In honor of your birthday.”

“Oh, well, I . . . it’s just wonderful.”

I looked at the tablecloth and touched it. It was wonderful. I hadn’t realized that before.

Then Grandma saw the cake and said, “Goodness gracious! That’s a pretty cake. Did you help make it, Jeremy?”

“No.”

“Now, Jeremy helped me do some baking while he was visiting us last month,” Grandma said, “so I know how good he is at it.”

“Is that so?” said Aunt Clarice. “Well, I’ll swan. Do you want to be a baker when you grow up, Jeremy?”

I shrugged.

At each place setting there was a pint jar of our home-canned goods—either apple butter, peach jelly, or tomato sauce. These were favors for our guests. And the top of each jar was decorated with a little skirt of fabric and labeled with the name of one guest. That was how everyone knew where to sit. Grandma sat at the head of the table at the far end, which was the important place to sit. Usually that’s where Grandpa sat. The windows and sunlit yard were behind her.

Us five kids sat at the card table in the study, and we could hear all the laughing and talking going on in the kitchen. Susan went into the kitchen for more rolls, but the adults said they were keeping all the rolls, and for some reason this made them laugh louder than they had laughed all day.

The cake was iced with whipped-cream frosting and had a drizzle of chocolate sauce that curtained down its sides. Mom had bought some new kind of candles—almost a foot long and about as thin as a strand of yarn—and we put all twenty of them into the cake and lit them. Despite their thinness, the candles burned with vigor, and as we sang “Happy Birthday” to Grandma—while I stood at her shoulder—what started as a flickering halo above the cake became something of a miniature conflagration.

“Oh, land sakes alive,” Grandma exclaimed when it came time to blow out the candles. “Jeremy, help me blow these out!” I did.

It was a pretty cake, and we served it with “slices” of sherbet that Susan and Mom had made to look like watermelon wedges by freezing layers of sherbet in a bowl: lime for the shell, a thin layer of lemon, then watermelon speckled with chocolate chips.

In the living room, we sat around while Grandma opened her presents. We had secretly arranged for everybody to bring a funny “seventy” present. We gave her a soup mix made with seventy pinto beans, seventy navy beans, seventy lentils, seventy black-eyed peas, and so forth. Linda gave her a necklace made with seventy paper clips strung together. Each present made Grandma laugh more than the one before it, and she said that this was the best birthday she could remember. “I don’t ever recollect having received such hilarious presents,” she told us. “And, Linda, I’m thankful for the paper clips because I’m almost out . . .”

Finally, people headed outside to go see the ducks. Mom was finishing clearing the table. I was on the back porch, pulling on my rubber boots. Grandma had lingered in the kitchen. Everyone else was already outside.

Grandma offered to help Mom.

“I’ve got it in hand, Mildred. I’m not going to let you clear dishes at your own birthday party.”

“Now, that was a fine meal—you put out a fine spread for us—and what with that cake and the ice cream that you and Susan . . . It’s all sitting well—my stomach is having a good day. Been so touchy lately. I’m just really happy to have everybody here today, and all the planning and work you did . . . I appreciate it all.”

“You’re more than welcome.”

“And we’re all having a good time. Least I am!”

Outside, it had become overcast. We all walked down the hill to the pond, which had shrunk during the summer. The exposed shores were soft and stank of rot. Algae rimmed the water. It had become difficult to tell the baby ducks from the adults. They had grown up. I gave Grandma a full commentary: the saga of how one duck—given to me less than two years ago—had become forty ducks. How they nested anywhere and everywhere—in an old tire, on a pile of bricks, in a stump—and how we hunted down their eggs as a form of population control.

A little later, back at the barn, Elizabeth got out the horses, and a few of us rode them around while the older folks watched us and talked. Midafternoon, they got in their cars and left, all of them at once, and the five of us stood there at the end of the sidewalk, waving, and then we stopped. Our family. It had been a long morning getting ready, and it had been a good party, but now it was over. It went by fast.