I WAS AN old hand at waking up in new places, worlds each as different from the last one as strange planets visited by Buck Rogers while he rocketed through the universe in the funny papers. In fact, when my father’s series of dam jobs landed us at the Pishkun reservoir site, we were quartered in an abandoned homestead cabin wallpapered with years’ worth of the Great Falls Tribune’s Sunday funnies. The homesteader must have had insulation on his mind more than humor, randomly pasting the colorful newspaper sheets upside down or not. Little could match the confusion of blinking awake in the early light to the Katzenjammer Kids inches from my nose going about their mischief while standing on their heads. But that first Manitowoc morning, opening my eyes to attic rafters bare as jail bars, the thing on the wall hovering like a leftover bad dream, my neck with a crick in it from the stove-in pillow, I had a lot more to figure out than why Hans and Fritz were topsy-turvy.
Such as how to get on the good side of the Kate, as Herman tellingly designated her. Plainly she was something unto herself, by any measure.
And so, determined to make up for my dumb jump to the wrong conclusion last night—although was it my fault both she and Kate Smith were the size of refrigerators and shared jolly numbers of chins and dimples and all in all looked enough alike to be twins?—I dressed quickly and headed downstairs.
Nice manners don’t cost anything, Gram’s prompting followed me down the steps. C’mon, Donny, Donal, Red Chief, I pulled myself together, it shouldn’t be all that hard to remember to be polite and to speak mainly when spoken to and to not mix up when to look serious and when to smile, and similar rules of the well-behaved. Hadn’t I gotten along perfectly fine with tons of strangers on the dog bus? Well, a couple of drivers, the ex-convict, and one fistfight aside.
Surely those didn’t count toward the main matter, which was to survive for the time being in a household where Aunt Kate seemed to wear the pants and Herman tended to his knitting in the company of beings with names like Winnetou and Old Shatterhand.
In the light of day it was clear that if I knew what was good for me, I had better fit somewhere in between them, tight as the fit might be, and strolling in at breakfast with a sunny “Good morning!” and the white lie “I slept real good” ought to be the place to start.
Only to be met, before I even was out of the stairwell, by raised voices.
“Will you kindly quit playing with your food? How many times have I told you it’s disgusting.”
“Same number I telled you, it helps with the digestion.”
“Toast does not need help!”
“Hah. Shows what you know. More to it than feed your face like a cow.”
Whoa. I backed off to the bathroom, out of range of the blowup in the kitchen, in a hurry. Staying in there a good long while, I ran the faucets full blast and flushed the toilet a couple of times to announce my presence, and finally cracked the door open to test the atmosphere. Not a sound of any kind. Deafening silence, to call it that, was spooky in its own way and maybe not an improvement, but I couldn’t stay in the bathroom permanently. Mustering myself, I approached the deadly quiet kitchen.
Herman was nowhere to be seen. Aunt Kate was sitting by herself there, in a peppermint-striped flannel robe and fuzzy pink slippers that would never be mistaken for part of Kate Smith’s wardrobe, drinking coffee while reading the newspaper spread open on the table. “There you are, sugarplum.” She looked up as if reminding herself of my existence, before I could say anything. That voice made the simplest greeting musical. “Did you sleep all right, poor tired thing?”
Nervously I met that with “Like a petrified log.”
There may have been a surprising amount of truth in that, because sunshine was streaming through the window at quite a steep angle. I checked the clock over the stove and was shocked to see it was nearly nine. On the ranch, breakfast was at six prompt, and no small portion of my shock, beyond sleeping in halfway to noon, was that she and Herman started the day so late and casually. Their plates, one littered with dark crusts of toast, still were on the table. I was no whiz about schedules, but I doubted that time zones alone accounted for such a difference.
“Now then,” Aunt Kate said with no urgency, licking her finger and turning a page of the newspaper, “what in the realm of possibility can we get you for breakfast, mmm?”