Janice D. Soderling has fiction, poetry and translations at many print and online journals. Her fiction and flash fiction can be read at Mason's Road, Turtle Quarterly, Twelve Stories, Short, Fast and Deadly, 42Opus (USA), New Walk, Horizon Review, MsLexia (UK); The Chimaera (Australia), Montreal Review, The Fiddlehead (Canada) and other venues. Glimmer Train Stories has awarded her work a first prize and two honorable mentions. Her collection of short fiction was a semifinalist in the 2011 Leapfrog Press competition. She is assistant fiction editor at Able Muse.
Multiplication and Long Division
I pretended not to notice when Mr. Perkins crowded himself into the back row seat beside Awfully, who was new in our sixth grade class and wore a bra. He opened an arithmetic book and cleared his throat with ineffectual little grunts.
Mr. Perkins put his arm around her. His hand flicked across the pink fuzz of her angora sweater as if by accident. I could see this out of the corner of my eye because I sat in the back row too, a couple of empty seats away. The day before Awfully started in our class, Mr. Perkins told me I wasn’t paying attention and he moved me to a corner seat without a window. No one sat in front of Awfully or in front of me, not since the Janson twins left to live with their grandmother.
Now and then he turned a page with his left hand. Awfully never said peep. She just sat real still staring at the textbook, listening to Mr. Perkins explain.
That first Friday it happened, that first time Mr. Perkins squeezed himself behind Awfully’s desk, I felt relieved I was not the prettiest girl in the class. And I was glad my name was Beth Ann and not something fancy.
**
The war had been over about a year when beautiful Ophelia Lee joined our class and became Awfully, and I am talking now about the Second World War, which you may think is ancient history, there having been so many other wars since then. History repeats itself. That is not just a trite and overworked phrase. History repeats itself, Ophelia Lee’s history too. I am grateful that I have no children, especially that I have no daughters.
Ophelia Lee was the second new girl in our class that fall. The first one was Marlene whose parents had grown up in Riverdale. Marlene’s grandfather owned the County Gazette which came out three times a week. Her cousin Marianna was in our class too.
Marlene’s father had been an officer in the Army and now he was going to be president of the bank because R. L. Simpson was stepping down. R. L. was nearly eighty and glad to turn over the reins to a younger man now that the terrible war was over. That’s what it said on the front page of the Gazette
The caption under his photo read Awarded the DSC for extreme gallantry. Wounded in France in 1944. Marlene was high society as soon as she put her saddle shoes over the Riverdale town line.
Ophelia Lee was not. Already during morning recess of her first day she stood alone, surrounded by a circle of children staring at her, saying nothing. I stood there too, looking her over. So did Marlene, standing so self-important beside her cousin, though she had only been in our class a week. No one talked except Flash Pfenderhauser, who made short work of Ophelia Lee.
Flash Pfenderhauser asked, "What did you say your name was?"
And she told him, smiling, "My name is Ophelia Lee. What’s your name?"
He groaned, "Awfully! How could your folks name you Awfully. That’s an awful name." And everybody laughed. So did I if the truth be known.
That’s how easy it was to make her miserable forever.
There were other reasons not to be nice to her. For one thing, she had no father. I mean, everybody has a father, but hers was not there and it was not because he was still in the military or dead in the war. Her parents were divorced, a word my mother pronounced to end with a hiss and a hard t.
Awfully’s teeth were whiter than ours and her eyes were bluer than anybody’s and her hair, such hair. It was the blondest we had ever seen, long, and fell in thick swishing curls around her anxious face.
She wore a locket on a gold chain and a rhinestone barrette. She wore a ring with a little glass stone on her wedding ring finger. We all knew what a wedding ring finger was. It was the finger to be saved for a wedding ring. Marlene asked me later, "Do you think it’s a diamond?"
"Don’t be silly," I said. "Didn’t you see it was red? Probably a ruby."
And we were silent then, both of us awed. For a few minutes we were united by our jealousy of this intruder, a child who wore jewelry. A child of a divorced mother. A child whose name was so beautiful that it had to be thrown down and trampled in the mud.
There was more. Our mothers worked, they reminded us all the time, Can’t you see I’m busy working, but Ophelia Lee’s mother worked for a living. Mrs. Bedford was a beautician. She took over Beulah’s Beauty Parlor on the corner of Main Street and Peach, two of the nine short paved streets that made up the Riverdale grid.
Main Street and Peach Street were the two most important streets, because the post office and the bank were at their intersection. Beulah’s Beauty Parlor was one flight up over the post office, across from Dr. Allen’s dentist office. The five-and-dime was on one side of Main Street and the Hi Fashion Clothing store on the other. Adelaide Crosby ran the Peach Street Grocery store by herself since her husband flew the coop. She was old and played the piano at our church. Above the bank was the Masonic Lodge which my uncle belonged to, but which my dad made fun of. I knew that the corners of Main Street and Peach was where people who thought they were something rubbed shoulders with poor people who were in town just to pick up a package from Sears and Roebuck or get a tooth pulled.
**
In early December we were assigned roles in the Christmas pageant. Mrs. Perkins, who was grade school principal, walked into our classroom like she always did, without knocking. She nodded to Mr. Perkins when she came in, you could never have told they were married, if you didn’t know it.
Mrs. Perkins was a short lady. She was almost as short as Ophelia Lee. She reached only halfway between her husband’s waist and his shoulders and he was not a particularly tall man. Mrs. Perkins came to our classroom to announce that Ophelia Lee would be Mary in the Christmas pageant, and Frederick Pfenderhauser would be Joseph.
I heard a displeased little snort from Marianna who had been practicing holy smiles in her little pocket mirror for days. And since Marianna’s mother was home economics teacher at the high school, I figured that the role of Mary was wrapped up and delivered.
Joseph was always a farm boy, because a live goat and sometimes a fall lamb were tied on stage during the Nativity pageant and sometimes they got feisty and had to be calmed down. It was not so hard to be Mary. All Mary had to do was to sit on one side of the stage holding Jesus in swaddling clothes while the rest of us were called forward to recite a verse about Santa or the Christ Child or sing a carol off-key and then lay down a gift that the Ladies Aid later distributed to the sick and needy. Mary was always a town girl. Awfully and her mother lived in a rented house on the outskirts of Riverdale, a little house on a shirt-tail patch of land not big enough to raise a turnip. So Awfully was not exactly a country girl, but certainly not a town girl.
The room was very quiet after Mrs. Perkins made her announcement. She nodded again at Mr. Perkins and he nodded back and she marched out. He handed out our arithmetic test like he did every Friday, looked at his watch and said, "You have forty-five minutes starting now, apply yourselves." Then he went to sit beside Ophelia Lee, who scooted over obediently. What else could she do? She did not look happy, but what else could she do?
As for the rest of us, he called us knuckleheads and hopeless cases and sometimes cracked the boys over the head with a wooden ruler. His eyes narrowed when he looked over the tests. He gave us the grades he thought we deserved. My report card grades in arithmetic were only average and never as high as Marianna’s though I scored better than her on every single test, even if her mother was a teacher.
Just before the noon bell rang, Mr. Perkins stood and told Marlene to collect the papers and put them on his desk. Then he collected his busy fingers and moseyed out of the classroom. I can imagine now where he went and what he did there, but it was out of my range of understanding then. He took his nasty, tobacco-stained fingers and left Ophelia Lee sitting on her side of the seat, staring miserably down at her test paper.
As soon as Mr. Perkins was out the door, the boys started horsing around. Everybody took up their lunch. Awfully took out a paper bag on which her mother had written Princess Ophelia Lee in black crayon. No one ever commented that, she was like a princess in a way, the kind of unhappy princess with long blond hair that wicked kings lock up in a tall tower. None of the boys ever tried to pinch her food though her lunches were better than everyone’s, even Marianna’s. And Marianna’s mother was an expert on lunches. She held talks on nutrition at the PTA meetings where my mom was vice-president even though we lived in the country. Mom would never have written Princess Beth Ann on my lunch bag, and anyway I had a lunch pail, no matter that it usually contained bologna and cheese sandwiches and oatmeal raisin cookies and an apple.
Awfully’s sandwiches were not bologna and cheese slapped between two slices of homemade bread. Her sandwiches were tuna fish salad or ham and cheese between diagonally cut slices of store-bought white bread with the crusts trimmed off. She used little pink paper napkins. She had a squat thermos of hot cocoa and a pink plastic mug. I checked out her lunch every day. Easy peasy, since the back of the room was empty except for us.
Marianna spread out her lunch like she was exhibiting it at the county fair, saying a prissy "Hands off" to Flash Pfenderhauser who wore bib overalls and was sweet on her. He sat across the aisle and pilfered something tasty from her desk every day.
Everybody called him Flash except the teachers who called him Frederick. He answered to Flash until the day he died in the Korean War. Flash is what they wrote in the County Gazette’ saying he was an upstanding young man with a sense of responsibility and how proud we all were. That he ran fast as a flash of lightning and no one who saw it would ever forget his touchdown that got Riverdale to the state semi-finals before he dropped out of high school to work the farm after his dad had that stroke. They wrote that Flash was a hero and had been awarded a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star. I was living in Indianapolis at the time, working at a savings and loan association, but my mother sent me the clippings and wrote I guess you will be sorry to hear this, weren’t you sweet on him in grade school and she guessed his sister would inherit the farm now. But all that was much later.
After Mr. Perkins left the room, Awfully stayed on her side of the seat as if she was stuck there. I ate my bologna sandwiches and watched her chewing mournfully without looking around at the commotion in the classroom. No boys threw spitballs at her or pulled her curls. No girls told her that her locket was pretty and they wished they had one. There was an invisible line drawn around her that only Mr. Perkins stepped over. She must have been lonely and I wish I had been her friend. But I was only twelve going on thirteen, we were all only twelve or thirteen, and had been taught to obey our elders and say, "Yes, ma’m" and "Yes, sir" and mind our own business like everybody else. From what I see around me, children nowadays never do as they are told. But that is just my opinion. I worked at the West Branch Savings and Loan as head bookkeeper until my early retirement at the age of sixty and since then I spend my winters in Florida. I do not have any children. I was not the prettiest girl in the class.
**
Lots of people wondered where Mrs. Bedford had got the money. "Well, I never," my mother gasped into the phone when she heard the news. "You mean she actually bought it? Paid cash? Now I ask you, how could a divorced woman scrape up enough cash money to buy Beulah Jones’s beauty parlor?" As she talked, she was motioning for me to leave the room. "War plant? She worked nights in a war plant? Well, I never. Wait a minute." She put her hand over the receiver and told me to go wash the dishes or she would tan my hide and she wasn’t joking either, did I hear?
I don’t know whose hair Mrs. Bedford beautified at her beauty parlor during the few months she was in Riverdale. Not my mother’s, that’s for sure. My mom went three or four times a year to Ginny Mae who gave permanent waves in a back room of her house. She fell out with Ginny Mae over how often a good housekeeper should air her quilts, but by then you could buy home perm kits, and she and my aunt Beth did each other’s hair. They even did mine the week before I started high school, but it turned out frizzy and I never let them try it again.
I’m sure though that Mrs. Bedford had customers, town women who would not mind associating with someone divorced. Marianna’s mother went to Mrs. Bedford to get her hairdos, and so did Mrs. Allen, the dentist’s wife. But not Mrs. Janson, who was a surviving spouse with compensation from the government after the twins’ dad died invading Sicily. Mrs. Janson was known for taking a stand on moral issues. I heard her say so myself, one day when she came to visit in our class. Next thing I knew, the twins were gone and they never came back.
"Alma Janson," said my mom to my dad one evening at supper, "should watch what she says. Widow women are known to dwell on certain subjects in their loneliness."
I was pretending not to listen, but I saw him put a finger to his lips and she jumped up to clear the table.
**
Mrs. Bedford drove Awfully to school, stopping close to where the yellow school buses poured out country kids like feed out of a sack. It was old, but it was a Buick, and even a rattletrap Buickwas too rich for Riverdale’s blood. They arrived every morning just about the same time as our bus, the one me and Flash rode on. When Awfully opened the door to get out, I could see Mrs. Bedford adjust her rhinestone barrette, and lean over to kiss her. "See you later, Princess!"
I walked fast so that Awfully would not catch up with me. Flash always hung back and walked behind her, and once I heard him wolf whistle and say "hubba, hubba." I’ll bet she didn’t like that one bit.
Winter came early that year. There was snow on the ground by mid-November. We had just opened our geography books when in came Mrs. Bedford and Awfully.
"Mr. Perkins," she said, "I think I’m coming down with the flu. Will you make sure Ophelia Lee gets on the right bus and ask the driver to drop her off as close to our house as he can. The buses don’t run down the road to our place, but she can walk the rest of the way. If the driver would make an exception today, I would appreciate it."
"Why, Mrs. Bedford," said Mr. Perkins, "I can drive her home myself."
"We won’t trouble you with that, Mr. Perkins," she said. "But I’d be obliged if you would help her get on the right bus."
Ophelia Lee was already at her desk, but she was watching and listening. "The drivers won’t turn off the ordinary route, Mrs. Bedford. I think it is against some ordinance. I’ll see that she gets home safe. Don’t you worry about a thing."
She nodded.
"You don’t look well at all, Mrs. Bedford. You better drop by the drugstore and pick up some kind of medicine."
"That’s where I’m headed right now." She looked in Awfully’s direction and blew her a kiss before she left. I would die if my mom had done that.
**
Marianna, being one of the school’s most popular girls, never paid me much mind. One day in December during the noon recess, I walked into the Girls’ Room and found her leaning over the sink, crying. This was a few days before the Christmas pageant when she was not going to be Mary. I asked her was she sick, and she said no, she was going to kill Awfully, had I seen when Flash gave her his toboggan cap at recess?
Well, yes, I had seen that, the boys were having a snowball war and Awfully had blundered right into the line of fire. Flash’s snowball knocked her down and he ran over to help her up. Which sure surprised me. He brushed the snow out of her hair, then took off his toboggan cap and pulled it down over her curls. Then danged if he didn’t pat her cheek, real friendly like, like you would pat a cute little dog, before he ran shouting back into the snowball fight.
When we trooped in after recess, Awfully dropped the toboggan on his desk as she passed by. He didn’t look up at her, but he grabbed that cap and grinned like he’d found a two-dollar bill on the road. I saw it all. I was walking right behind her.
"Did you see him put his stupid cap on her head?" Marianna repeated, "Well, did you?" She sounded like my mom asking me had I made my bed, so I told her indignantly that yes, I saw it and Awfully needed to be taken down a peg or two.
Marianna splashed water on her face. "Don’t tell anyone I was crying. This is just between you and me, okay?"
I was pea-green over Marianna and Marlene, because they went to Jasper once a week for acrobat and tap dancing classes. I asked my mom if I could take lessons too. She said that if I thought we had money to waste on that kind of foolishness, I had another think coming. But I practiced on my own and could do everything I’d seen them do when they were showing off during recess.
"Would you like to see me do the split?" I asked Marianna while she was smiling at herself in the mirror.
"No," she said, "Why should I?" and added, "I’m getting a Mickey Mouse wristwatch for Christmas. I already saw it." Then the first bell rang. When we were walking down the hall, she said, "I don’t think you can do the split at all. Not the right way. You have never taken acrobatic lessons."
That hurt, and when somebody gets hurt, they hurt somebody back. So when I got to my desk, I looked over at Awfully and said as loud as I could, "Don’t think I don’t know what you’ve been up to," although actually I was feeling more glad than sad that Flash Pfenderhauser had given her his toboggan cap to wear. It served Marianna right.
Awfully got red in the face, and Mr. Perkins said real sharp, "Beth Ann, sit down and stop making a disturbance."
The next day, instead of singing class, we rehearsed for the Christmas pageant. I had a long poem, "Twas the night before Christmas", which I learned by heart in no time. Miss Anderson, who everybody believed would never get over the loss of Billy Joe McLean, who died when his destroyer went down, was in charge. She told me I had a memory like an elephant. I was so proud I nearly bust my buttons.
Marianna thought she was so smart, but she could not even remember the eight lines of "In a lowly crib in Bethlehem". Finally Miss Anderson told her she could read it from a paper. I don’t know if it was because her mother was a teacher or because Miss Anderson just got so exasperated she gave up.
After lunch, I went down in the basement to the Girls’ Room hoping to find Marianna there crying again. I intended to show her that I could do the split as well as she could. But instead of a weeping Marianna, I found a weeping Awfully, who really did look awful. She was holding onto the sink for dear life and throwing up. Her hair was hanging in the vomit.
I could have been kind then, but I wasn’t. I could have gone over to her and put my arm around her, but I didn’t. I could have gone to get Miss Anderson who had the first aid kit, but I didn’t. I just watched her puking into the sink and then I walked out.
When I got home that afternoon, my mom was on the phone. She said, "What! In the family way? Oh, my god. Oh! My! God! Wait a minute. Beth Ann, go stir the chili. If it burns, I’ll burn your tail. And close the door behind you."
At supper she said to my dad. "I have to go to a PTA officers’ meeting tonight."
"You had a meeting last week," he said.
"I’ll explain later. I may be late, so get Beth Ann in bed by nine."
**
Ophelia Lee was not Mary in the Christmas pageant. She did not even come to the pageant. Flash, who was destined never to be an old man, wore a long, white beard and stood behind Marianna keeping the goat calm. Marianna saved the day by learning the Mary role at the last minute. That’s what she told everybody anyway. How hard is it to sit on a stage holding a doll! Lucky she had practiced all those holy smiles.
For Christmas I got all the usual things, things I needed like underpants and socks, wrapped up like they were special. I got a pink plastic purse which I pretended to like. I would rather have had a Mickey Mouse watch. "What’s the heck’s this?" I asked surprised when I opened a package containing a garter belt and a pair of nylon stockings with seams, and Mom shot a goofy smile at my dad. I ruined the nylons the first Sunday I wore them to church. Dad was racing the motor as I climbed in the back seat with the stockings full of runs and Mom said, "Young lady, do you have any idea what those cost?" Dad said, "Well, I tried to tell you, didn’t I?" She looked out the car window sighing all the way home.
Ophelia Lee did not come back to our class after the Christmas holidays. I knew something was mighty wrong, because my mom was on the phone more than usual, even oh my-ing away on Christmas Eve. When we went visiting, the ladies stopped talking whenever I walked into the room. If I stayed real still, they forgot about me. Whether they were Baptists or Methodists or Church of Christ, they had opinions about good mothers and bad mothers and working mothers and divorces. They kept asking the same question, "But the father?"
They kept asking, but nobody, it seemed, could come up with an answer.
**
It was the first school week of the new year, a dark and dreary Friday, when snow turned to slush, then froze to ice, and more snow fell. The wind blew cold.
Mr. Perkins passed out the mimeographed arithmetic tests, picked up his ruler and headed in my direction. My desk was against the wall and since the Janson twins and Ophelia Lee had disappeared, I was alone in that corner. He was just bending his knees when I said real quick, in a low voice, "I’ll tell my mother," and he straightened up and went back to his desk smacking the ruler against the palm of his hand. He sat reading until the noon bell rang. He looked my way sometimes, but I just stared back.
After school when we were walking out to the school buses, we saw the sheriff’s car pull up.. They eased into the teachers’ parking lot and stopped. Nobody got out that I could see,just sat with their hats pushed back. A light snow was falling and the windshield wipers were going back and forth, back and forth. Flash Pfenderhauser stood outside our bus looking at the police car until Charlie, our bus driver, yelled at him, did he aim to walk home or was he riding?
The school buses drove off, one behind the other, a long yellow caravan headed for the country roads. Just before our bus pulled away, I saw the police officers step out of the cars and hitch up their belts. They were packing sidearms.
Flash Pfenderhauser was usually the nosiest kid on our bus, never a dull minute when he was around, but now he wasn’t yelling and carrying on. He craned around in his seat until we turned the corner, looking back at the school as two troopers and the sheriff and his deputy marched up the long sidewalk. Then he just slouched down and kept quiet, his toboggan cap pulled down over his ears and eyes.
The snowplows had cleared the main highways, but the gravel roads were hard going for our old bus. It was already dark when I got home. My mom was in the kitchen baking oatmeal raisin cookies and listening to the radio.
"Hands off," she said routinely." I was getting kind of worried about you. Do you think we’re going to get a blizzard?"
"Danged if I know," I said.
She said, "Don’t say danged. Girls shouldn’t swear. Try to be more ladylike."
The radio was turned up loud and Red Foley was singing, and I started horsing around like I was on stage and singing along in a high voice, I knew all the words to all the songs that on the radio. Mom shook her head and laughed. The record ended and she asked in a suspiciously casual voice, "Did you used to play with Ophelia Lee Bedford before she went away?"
I stared at her, pop-eyed, to let her know it was a stupid question, because I stopped playing when I started the sixth grade, playing was for little kids. "Nope," I said.
"You didn’t?" She sounded relieved, but she wasn’t looking me straight in the eye to make sure I was telling the truth.
"Heck, no," I said. "She’s about as much fun as a bucket of lard."
Mom looked like she might cry and said, "Would you like some cookies?"
I was flabbergasted. Instead of telling me not to say heck, she was offering me cookies when it was nearly time for supper! I knew that I was being rewarded for not playing with Awfully Bedford. The DJ put on a new record and I started singing again to make Mom laugh. "I wanna be a cowboy’s sweetheart, I want to learn to rope and to ride..."
But instead of laughing, she turned around quick and wiped her eyes with her apron, so I took the cookies she’d handed me and grabbed a couple more while her back was turned, and skedaddled out, yodeling at the top of my lungs.
Ophelia Lee never came back to our class. Mr. Perkins never came back either. On Monday, we had a substitute teacher who stayed the rest of the year. She gave me my best grades in arithmetic ever.
It was a sorry mess and a damned shame, said my dad to my mom, but it was word against word and he guessed there was no way they could make those charges stick. Ophelia Lee and Mrs. Beford left Riverdale. So did Mrs. Perkins, though it wasn’t her fault, my mom said, and she felt downright sorry for her. Both the Perkinses resigned though and moved upstate, and good riddance to him, said my mother.
