The Undertaking of Tess Read online

  The eggs are nice and fluffy this morning. I think I’m getting pretty great at cooking. Maybe I’ll be a detective who also owns a coffee shop someday and Birdie could be a waitress that everyone would come to order breakfast from because she’s so damn cute.

  “You look just like Doris Day. How did it go yesterday?” I ask Louise when she comes out of the bedroom in a peach dress and white heels. When she sits down at the table, I slide the eggs outta the pan onto a plate and set it down in front of her. “Did you sell many hats?”

  She won’t answer me, but I have to keep trying to break the ice. She’s not mad at us, for once. She’s ticked-off because Daddy died, so now she has to work for a living. Birdie and me are two days into one of her cold shoulders that started after the fourth day she took the bus to—TURNER’S TOPPERS—to start the salesgirl job because we were down to our last dime. Louise was excited about getting dressed up and out of the house, at first, but that wore off by the third day when her feet started to hurt, and she began hating waiting on people like she’s, “Some kind of servant.”

  I spoon up a bite of eggs and try again. “Do you like working with Mrs. Turner?” People say there are no dumb questions, but that one is. Just having to listen to the shop owner’s nasally voice all day would upset anybody’s tummy. Even God can’t stand it. I heard that Father Ted had to fire her from the choir a few months ago because her mucus singing was making the congregation throw up their Holy Communion wafers. “Does her husband ever tell her a good story about Boppa that she tells you when you’re sorting out the hats?” Mr. Turner is a teller at the same First Wisconsin Bank that my grandfather works at. Boppa used to be a fireman, but he keeps money safe now from bank robbers. He’s a guard with a gun, but he also plays practical jokes on the customers too. He spends every Saturday morning at Ernie’s Magic Shop on Center Street buying hand buzzers, fake vomit, and snakes that jump outta peanut cans. “Has she heard about any great tricks he pulled lately?”

  This is the longest Birdie and me have gone without seeing our grandparents since we’ve been born and we miss them so bad. Daddy used to take us out to their stone house in the country every Sunday, but Louise won’t let us visit them. I think she’s still steamed that they couldn’t give her more cash than twenty dollars at the funeral. They can’t help it if they don’t have a pot to pee in.

  Birdie said to me last week, “I miss Gammy and Boppa. Can you call them up and tell them to come over here?”

  I did like she asked, but maybe they couldn’t hear the phone ringing because they were crying doubly loud since Daddy is the second kid they’ve lost. Their daughter died before I was born so I have only seen pictures of her in an old scrapbook. She was an itty-bitty thing, like Birdie, but her name was Alice. I don’t know which sickness Alice had because Gammy keeps mum on the subject. She lets her flowers do the talking. She planted a memory garden at her house for her dead daughter, and I bet she does the same for her dead son when spring comes again. I’ll help her, so that will prove that famous saying: a labor of love is true because she won’t pay me, but that’s okay. I have some other ideas how to get money in case Louise quits her job because she can’t stand waiting on people or hearing Mrs. Turner’s nasally voice, or if she doesn’t find a husband. If we can’t pay the rent, sleeping under the stars instead of a roof might not be that bad, but we still need to eat, especially Birdie.

  I won’t deliver the Sentinel newspaper on our red Schwinn the way some of the boys in the neighborhood do. Just like I do every Friday to check what’s playing at the Tosa Theatre, I’ll ride our bike over to Bloomers on Fond du Lac Avenue and ask the owner, Mr. Yerkovich, if I could make vases up for him because I know a lot about flowers from playing in the cemetery, but also from working in the garden with Gammy. Alotta people die and get married around here, so Mr. Y has to work hard on so many funeral arrangements and wedding bouquets that his wrists got sprained and now they’re permanently floppy, so he could probably use the help. I might even be able to teach him a thing or two about arranging since I am half-English and flowers are in my blood same as they are in Gammy’s. They are not in Boppa’s. Mischief runs in his veins because his family came from the same Old Country that our mother’s family came from—the Emerald Island—which sounds really luxurious, but I think, like a lot of things in life, it sounds a lot better than it really is. Except for that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow … I could really go for that! If I could find Louise some treasure, she wouldn’t need a new husband, and Birdie and me won’t have to have a different daddy. She could quit her job at Turner’s Toppers and get in a better mood, which also means she’ll get off Birdie’s back because she’ll be too busy laying around on hers eating bon-bons and reading Photoplay magazines.

  If Mr. Yerkovich and his best friend, Mel, didn’t need any help around Bloomers, I could solve crimes and charge people. A lot of bad stuff goes on in this neighborhood, so that shouldn’t be a problem, but if it is, I could also blackmail somebody.

  After I’m in our bed at night and get done practicing singing and thinking about my TO-DO LIST and I still am not sleepy, I pull on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt and climb out our window when the weather isn’t bad. I don’t put on my sneakers so I can pretend to be an Indian while I walk around the neighborhood and look in windows and backyards and the insides of cars. People who sleep like rocks have no idea how much goes on at that time of night, more than you would ever imagine. I know all sorts of things that our neighbors would like to keep hush-hush for money. Like, after Mr. Lerner gets off the second shift from the Feelin’ Good Cookie Factory, instead of going straight home, he goes to Miss Peshong’s house on Wednesday nights. I bet he’d pay me to keep my trap shut about how the two of them sit on the swing out back, eat those chocolate chip cookies, and neck each other while his wife is sawing logs in their bed. I’d feel half-bad about blackmailing Mr. Lerner because I really can’t blame him for wanting to nibble on Miss Peshong, who is the other librarian at the Finney Library. The good-looking one. Not Mrs. Kambowski. She’s a battle axe.

  I try again to make Louise talk at the breakfast table by asking her, “Is there something wrong with your eggs?” because she hasn’t touched them.

  Like there are two stones tied around her neck, she lifts her head, takes a puff off her cigarette, drives the butt into the middle of the egg pile, and gives Birdie a snake look, hooded like that. This means she’s unhappy with something that my sister is doing and that I better do something about it ASAP.

  Since I’m not that nuts about Louise in the first place and almost everything that comes out of her mouth is bad news, I like it when she stops talking to us, but the silent treatment makes my sister’s jitters worse. I press hard on the top of her leg. She’s bouncing it against the table and making the food look as nervous as she is. Even worse, she’s doing the most annoying bad habit that gets under our mother’s skin. “You’re humming,” I tell her. “Knock it off.”

  Louise gives us a bad look, pushes her chair back, and before she leaves for the day, I say, “Please, please don’t forget that Birdie … I mean, please don’t forget that Robin Jean needs new shoes for school. She can’t fit into her penny loafers anymore. Could you stop at Shuster’s and pick up a pair on your way home from the hat shop? And two pairs of Wigwams? Please? She wears four and a half. Thank you very much. You look beautiful.”

  I think my imagination must be running away with me because Louise almost looks like she’s gonna cry when she leaves the kitchen and heads straight out the front door. She didn’t say no, so I hope that was a yes to the shoes, even though she hasn’t gotten her first paycheck yet.

  I tell my sister, “Okay. You can hum again, but not too loud.” I need to listen for the roar of the woody heading down the street out the open kitchen window so I know for sure that Louise has, as Zorro would say, vamanos-ed. This is my favorite window to stick my head out of in the springtime because right below it is where the pink peonies blossom, and b
oy, oh, boy that smell is heavenly. Gammy told me that peonies stand for bashfulness, which I don’t have, so I don’t know why I love them so much. Lilacs are my second favorite. They smell terrific, and they’re my favorite color.

  When I can’t hear the woody’s muffler ratting against the street anymore, I push my chair back and tell Birdie, “Time to get the show on the road!” She’s barefoot. She hasn’t said anything, but I bet her sneakers don’t fit her anymore either. “Get your socks and my old sneakers.”

  It didn’t take me long to do the breakfast dishes because Birdie licked all the plates clean, so when she goes to our bedroom, I pull the bread out of the box and make us two oleo and sugar sandwiches because they’re her favorite and the bread is fresh. Since she’s ascared outta her wits to come with me to the graveyard today, I am making sure there are refreshments to keep her calm. She gets jumpy jumpier if there’s no food in the vicinity. I wish I had something for dessert, but we can always swing past Mr. Linley’s grave and pick up the box of chocolate-covered cherries that his lady friend leaves for him.

  I’m working at the counter next to the sink, so I can’t see Birdie when she comes back into the kitchen. “You almost set?” I ask.

  “Like a table!”

  “Birdie!!!” I drop the sandwich-cutting knife down on the counter and spin around. “You told a good joke!”

  “I heard it on the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show yesterday,” she says with a proud smile. I understand why Louise doesn’t love me, but the Bird? How can she resist those dimples?

  I can’t help myself. When my sister looks at me so adorably, even though I’m trying to act strictly business, I stop pulling our picnic together, and give her a huge hug. She doesn’t smell like herself—sweaty, and sweet like candy. She smells like L&M cigarettes.

  Uh-oh.

  “Honey?” I wonder if when she was licking Louise’s leftovers if she accidentally swallowed the cigarette she stuck in the eggs. When we do the supper dishes, Birdie sometimes picks a butt off our mother’s plate and puts it in her mouth so she can put her lips where her mom’s have puckered up. I put my sister an arm’s length away. “You didn’t accidentally …?” But out of the corner of my eye I see that the orange filter rolled onto the floor next to the table leg, and that’s a huge relief because Birdie could eat a butt. Almost nothing she would do would surprise me anymore. She’s like a living, breathing … “Gotcha!” If he was still here, Daddy would be proud of her because a day doesn’t go by that she doesn’t scare the hell outta me, sometimes more than once.

  I crouch down, tie the laces on my old sneakers, and then I get back to slipping the sugar sandwiches into the brown paper bag. Looking for a grave is hard, hot work, so I grab two bottles of Graf’s root beer out of the fridge and stick a church key in my shorts pocket. That makes me smile. (Daddy called bottle openers that because of the confessions everyone makes in the bar when they get soused, but that’s not the only reason. He thought Pabst Blue Ribbon walked on water.)

  I scrunch the top of the lunch bag down and ask Birdie, “You ready?”

  “It’s Freddy,” she says with a giggle. “Let me in.”

  She shoulda quit when she was ahead, but as we jump down the back porch steps and run toward the black iron cemetery fence I tell her, “Good one! Two for Two!” and laugh at her dumb joke because with school starting tomorrow, my sister’s gonna get called “Bird brain,” and probably “Pee Brain,” since I’m sure everybody in the neighborhood saw the sheet with the yellow stain that Louise hung off the front porch. The poor kid could use all the compliments she can get.

  Jump before You Fall!

  I’m singing, “Oh, what a beautiful morning, oh, what a beautiful day,” when Birdie and me are running toward the cemetery fence, but that’s just to keep her spirits up because no matter how many times I tell her that we have all day to look around for Daddy’s pretend grave because Louise won’t come home until after work, she’s not buying it.

  And now she’s got me worried. If for some unknown reason, Louise didn’t stay at the hat shop all day … Jesus H. Christ. That would be very bad. She might even have what is known as a nervous breakdown if she found us over here. Even though she is not a great mother, she’s all we got except for Gammy and Boppa, who love us a lot, but are too old and sad to take us in after the men in the white coats haul Louise away.

  I know a lot about this subject because Mrs. Brown down the street had a nervous breakdown. She did something so naughty and not nice that they shipped her off to a santatorium. She was on her front porch waving a butcher knife and yelling—I could hear her all the way down the block—“I didn’t want to poison Scruffy! I had to! He was talking to me … telling me to cut Hardy’s thing off in his sleep!” She got to come home from the santatorium after a month, so I see her and her thirteen kids hogging a whole pew during Mass every Sunday. She doesn’t seem jollier to me, just sorta sleepy. (Jimmy Brown told me in confession line last week that he’s still really mad at his mom. Not because she poisoned Scruffy, but because his father threw out all the sharp knives and now the whole family has to use spoons to cut their meat and that takes so long that he misses the first half of The Honeymooners when it’s on.)

  Because Birdie would really hate living in an orphanage if Louise has a nervous breakdown, I’m gonna ask Miss Peshong to look up how you can tell if someone is having one—other than poisoning your talking dog—in the Encyclopaedia Britannica the next time I’m at the library. I’ve been trying to get up there for a week now because they have this book called Freaks of Nature that looks really interesting, and the newest Nancy Drew, The Secret of the Golden Pavilion, looks great too. I also got some other questions that I’ve been wondering about that the pretty librarian should have the answers to. She knows the Dewey Decimal System and you gotta be smart to figure that damn thing out.

  LIFE’S LITTLE MYSTERIES

  Why does Nancy Drew have a friend who’s a girl, but is named George?

  How does Father Ted find all those Pauls?

  Why did Daddy have to die?

  Who is Charlie McCarthy?

  Have you ever heard about anybody resurrecting besides Jesus?

  Do you have any books about sisters who wet their beds?

  What is a slut?

  What is the fastest way to give someone hardening of the arteries?

  I scurry over the cemetery fence and drop to the other side without a hitch, then I tell my sister through the black bars like I do every single damn time, “Stick your foot there, okay, now boost yourself up and don’t forget to suck in your tummy.” Maybe I shoulda made her wear her Playtex girdle today. “More.”

  Birdie makes it to the top after a couple of tries, but instead of listening to me when I tell her, like always, “Now swing your left leg over and make your way down,” she stopped at the top. She’s teetering.

  “Jump before you fall on one of the points!” I say.

  “I … I can’t. I’m too ascared!’

  “Quit being such a worry wart,” I tell her after I shift into my Glinda, the Good Witch of the North voice because that’s the nicest one I have. I’ll pull out my Wicked Witch of the West one, though, if she doesn’t start listening to me better. “Louise won’t be home until five thirty. The church bells will let us know when it’s time to head back.” That doesn’t work. She’s still wobbling. I need something more powerful to talk her into disobeying our mother. “When we get the box of chocolate-covered cherries offa Mr. Lindley’s grave, we don’t have to share, you can have all of ’em!”

  That does the trick. Candy almost always does.

  Birdie licks her lips, and swings her other leg over, but instead of carefully sliding down, she yells, “Geronimo!” and goes sailing through the air and down to the ground like braveness came over her all of a sudden. I am not happy about this. What if her wild streak is coming out like when she sticks her head outta the car window or rings head-stuffing Mr. Johnson’s doorbell?

  I
help her up off the ground and stare into her light eyes. They are a little too wide, so I point to one of the parts of the cemetery that I haven’t scouted out yet and say, “Let’s start searching over there,” to remind her that we’re here to find Daddy’s pretend grave and not go weirder or wilder. As I hurry off in that direction, even though I’m the boss of us, I ask her if that’s what she wants to do because she should get a vote, that’s the American way. “S’awright?”

  No answer. No laugh.

  When I turn around to see why not, Birdie isn’t shadowing me like she’s supposed to. She’s standing still and looking back at the black iron fence. Her lips are moving, and she’s smiling her head off like she’s talking to me, but she’s not. Oh, no! Maybe that’s why her eyes were so wide! It wasn’t a streak coming over her, she’s … she’s going blind like … Helen Keller!

  I trot back to her, hold up three fingers in her face, and say, “Count ’em.” She does, so her eyes are working fine, so what the …? Is she talking to herself? Like all crazy people do? If she does that in front of our mother…. I get ahold of her ear, just a little, and tell her in my Sister Raphael voice, “No talking to yourself. That’s not allowed!”

  She usually buckles right under when I use the nun’s crotchety voice, but this time she swats my hand away and giggles. “I’m not talkin’ to myself, silly,” she says. “I’m talkin’ to Bee.”

  “Talkin’ out loud to bees is also not allowed. Same goes for flowers, rocks, houses, cemetery fences, and … and just about anything else but dogs, people, and God is not a good idea. I’m warning you, Bird.” I get her by the shoulders and squeeze really hard. I hate to scare her like this, but a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do. “If you keep this up, they’re gonna throw you in the snake pit.”