“Goes with your moccasins, you are halfway to Indian,” he puffed up my estimate of myself even further. His long face crinkled in a surprisingly wise smile. “You are right to use it as lucky piece and rub it often. Luck is not to be sniffled at, wherever it comes from.”
Stoking up with a fresh cigar, Herman turned back to Hoyle and how to arm me for the hen party, running his finger down the canasta page black with rules. “Hah, here is oppor-tun-ity. Hoyle don’t say you got to put meld down anytime quick.” Reaching over, he grabbed up the cards I had melded and tucked them back in my hand. “Bullwhack the hens. Hide what you will do, yah?”
It took me a few blinks to rid myself of the mental picture that conjured and figure out he meant “bushwhack.” Then to grasp his idea of an ambush, by holding back meld cards so Gerda and Herta wouldn’t have a clue to what was in my hand, until the twin card-playing demons blindly discarded something I had a bunch of and could snatch up the pile and put together melds like crazy.
“Eye-dea is, surprise their pants off,” he formulated, already tracing through the dense print for further stunts I could pull. I giggled. That would put them in the same league as the undressed womanhood peeking various parts of themselves out from card to card. Canasta Herman-style was proving to be worth ever so much more close attention than that of Aunt Kate.
? ? ?
IN OUR SESSION THE NEXT DAY, my amazed partner praised my new powers of concentration and confidence and what she unknowingly termed a better feel for canasta. “That’s more like it,” she declared, celebrating with a chunk of peanut brickle. “Honeybun, I knew you could do it. All it takes is patience, mmm?” If you didn’t count whatever could be squeezed out of a French bible and a lucky arrowhead wearing condoms.
“All righty right,” she munched out the words, “you’ve learned the hard way what a canasta is. Let’s don’t futz with it anymore today.”
My ears must have stood straight out at that. Hearing one of Gram’s almost cusswords come from high-toned Aunt Kate shocked me all the way through.
Nor, it turned out, was that the end of her capacity to surprise. After popping another piece of brickle into her mouth, one for the road, she rose from her chair and beckoned me to follow her. “Come see, honeybunch. A certain seamstress has been working her fingers off,” she all but patted herself on the back, “and I have something to show you in the wardrobe department.”
Wardrobe. I knew that meant clothing, and lots of it, and instantly I envisioned what must be awaiting in the sewing room.
Oh man! Suddenly, something made sense. The sewing machine zinging away during the soap operas, her shooing me off when I tried to bring up the matter of the missing money—all this time, she’d been busy making shirts and the rest to surprise me with. Those baby-blue stares of hers sizing me up in the best sort of way, when I’d unkindly thought she was in the habit of eyeing me as if I were a stray left on the doorstep. What a relief. I wouldn’t have to go back to school in the fall looking like something the cat dragged in, after all.
Giddy with this turn of events, I revamped my attitude about everything since I arrived. No wonder she stuck me away in the attic, in order to have the sewing room produce what I most lacked, a wardrobe! Forgiving her even for canasta, I nearly trod on her heels as she paraded us across the living room, dropping smiles over her shoulder.
“I do hope you like what I’ve done,” she was saying as we entered the snug room full of piles of fabrics, “I put so much work into it.” She plowed right into the stack on the daybed.
“Ready?” she trilled, keeping up the suspense. “Usually I have a better idea of the size, so I had to guess a little.” Of course she did, unaccustomed to making things for someone eleven going on twelve.
“I bet it’ll all fit like a million dollars,” I loyally brushed away any doubt.
“You’re too much,” she tittered. “But let’s see.”
Proudly she turned around to me with an armful of cloth that radiated colors of the rainbow, and, while I gaped, let what proved to be a single garment unfold and descend. It went and went. Down past her cliff of chest. Unrolling along the breadth of her waist, then dropping past her hamlike knees without stopping, until finally only the tips of her toes showed from beneath the curtain of cloth, striped with purple and yellow and green and orange and shades mingling them all, that she held pressed possessively against her shoulders.
“My party outfit,” she said happily. “The girls will get their say, but I wanted you to see it first.”
It was a sight to be seen, all right, the whole huge buttonless sheath of dress, if that’s what it was. Straight from the needle of Omar the Tentmaker, it looked like.
Still holding the wildly colored outfit up against herself, she confided, “They wear these in Hawaii. I came across a picture of one in a National Geographic.” Crinkling her nose with the news, she informed me: “It’s called a muumuu.”