Not this boy, because Gram viewed frankfurters—wienies by another name, right?—with dire suspicion whenever she was forced to boil up a batch to feed the crew toward the end of a month’s kitchen budget, convinced that the things were made from leavings lying around the butcher shop. “Tube steak,” she’d mutter as she plopped wienies by the handful into the pot. “You might as well be eating sweepings from the slaughterhouse.” Not the best thing to build an appetite for frankfurters. But my stomach and my hunger had no time to debate that, as I was shooed out of the kitchen and told I was free to look around the house while dinner was being fixed.
I edged into the living room and onto a pea-green rug so deep I left footprints wherever I stepped. It was like walking on a mattress. Intimidated, I crept across the room, studying the unfamiliar surroundings. A big, long leathery davenport, also green but closer to that fakey shade of lime Kool-Aid, sat prominently in front of a bay window, where the sill was crammed with potted plants of kinds I couldn’t recognize. On an end table next to the arm of the davenport rested a phone, pink as bubblegum, of another type I had no experience of, with a cradled receiver and a circular dial full of numbers and letters. Whatever else this strange territory of the summer proved to be like, it definitely did not seem to be party-line country.
Across the room from all this, on either side of a fancy cabinet radio but some distance apart, bulked his and hers recliner chairs, the kind with a lever on the side that tips a person back as if to get a shave from a barber. Over what was more than likely Herman’s hung the picture of dogs sitting around a table playing poker that you see so many places, while over hers was a framed sampler with a skyline of a town—largely steeples—and a ship on the lake with a spiral of thread for smoke, and underneath those, a verse in red and blue yarn, MANITOWOC—WHERE MAN HAS BUT TO WALK, TO HEAR HIS BLEST SOUL TALK.
Yeah, well, okay, I supposed that went with the reputation of ghosts walking around town, but now what had me more interested was a cubbyhole room off the far end of the living room.
The door was partway open and I glimpsed what appeared to be a daybed under a plain gray cover. Lured by hope, when I poked my head in and saw piles of cloth of different colors atop a table and spilling onto a chair, I knew at once this must be the sewing room, even before I spotted the shiny electric Singer machine by the window. Who would have thought Kate Smith sewed her own clothes? But everyone needs a hobby, I reminded myself, or maybe in her dress-size situation, doing it herself was a necessity. Any fat girl at school got teased about her clothes being made by Omar the Tentmaker, and while I felt guilty about that uncharitable thought, there was the big-as-life fact that Aunt Kate was a much larger woman than clothing stores usually encountered.
Of greater significance to me was that daybed, just my size, really—I’d slept on any number of cots like that, jouncing through life with my parents—and I’d have bet anything this nice snug room was where I was going to be put up for the summer, special guest in a special place of the house.
? ? ?
THROUGH TAKING in these new surroundings, something else needed taking care of, and I had to retreat to the kitchen to ask.
“Aunt Kate? I need to use the convenience.”
Parked at the stove where the pot of supper—dinner, rather—was on, she gave me a funny look.
“Uhm, restroom, I mean. Toilet. Bathroom.” I finally hit on the word appropriate in a setting that wasn’t a Greyhound depot.
“It’s through there.” She pointed to the end of the hall. “Remember to wash your hands, won’t you.”
I most certainly did remember, and more than that, I took the opportunity to examine my chipped tooth in the mirror over the sink. Baring my teeth in a kind of maniac smile, I saw that the damaged one stood out menacingly from the others. A snag, in fact, the chip having left it as pointed as a fang.
Studying my reflection, I decided I sort of liked the snaggletooth sticking up that way. It made me look tough, like I’d been through some hard going in life.
My admiration of this new feature was interrupted when all of a sudden I heard singing.
I went still as stone to make sure. Yes! Distinct as anything, from the direction of the kitchen. A solo, to keep the famous Kate Smith voicebox tuned up, I bet. And not just a song, but the song! Oh man, this was almost like going to the radio show!
God bless America,
Land that I love.
Stand beside her
And guide her
Through the night with a light from above.