Читать книгу The Future Homemakers of America - Laurie Graham - Страница 14

‘Okay, girls. Here’s what I got so far.’ Audrey was getting ready to air-drop supplies for Kath and John.

‘Cheez Whizz, Sugar Pops, Campbell’s Soup, two cans of franks, can opener, Oreos, nylons, Chesterfield’s …’

I said, ‘I don’t think they use smokes. All that time we were pacing the floor there, I never seen any sign of cigarettes.’

‘Well maybe they’d like the chance to start,’ she said. ‘Jeez, Peg, I’m just trying to help. Then I got cornflakes and Pepsodent, and I thought we could throw in a fifth of Dewar’s.’

Gayle said, ‘How about cupcakes? Can they get Hostess cupcakes?’

She was real keen for us to take her out there, introduce her to Kath and John, ’cause all she’d heard from us since we got back was about them sleeping in their kitchen and having a open-air privy. Course, Gayle was from Carolina, almost into Tennessee, so she could just have been feeling homesick.

Betty was grounded. The way she told it, it was her own wish to spend more time making their quarters into a real home. She showed me some damnfool thing she’d done with a folding table, General Issue, and a mile of pink cretonne, sent her by her cousin.

‘See,’ she said, ‘I just made it up like a skirt, cover those ugly old legs, then I thumbtacked it down, with this real pretty wrapping paper to cover the top. Now if I can get my hands on a nice piece of bevelled glass, I’ll have the darlingest dressing table on the base.’

I said, ‘You okay, Betty? Ed’s not giving you a hard time?’

‘I’m just fine,’ she said. ‘Now, you give my best regards to Kath and John, and I’d like you to take them a little something from me.’ She handed me that bar of Ivory soap like it was a piece of the True Cross.

We drove out one morning, after I dropped Crystal. Betty said she’d have loved to mind Sandie, only Deana and Sherry had caught some terrible skin condition, highly contagious, got it in the school yard, rubbing up close to urchins probably never seen a bath tub in their lives, so they were home, painted with violet-coloured lotion, grizzling and tormenting each other. So Sandie came with us, sitting in the back with her mom and Gayle, begging for more when Lois rolled down the window, pretending she could hear the Thing out there, coming to get us.