The night of the Winter Entertainment, the air was blessedly still, and the moon was almost full. It shone on the eastern fields in the usual way, enormous and unknowable, lighting Charlotte’s path to the truck. Clare had helped Neva glue flakes of mica all over the cut-paper raindrops and snowflakes and tiaras that were required for the program, and as Charlotte laid them in the back of the truck, she stopped to look up at the constellations she knew, a short list that began with Orion and ended with the Pleiades. At the single night meeting of the Mythology Club, Harley’s dad had allowed them to look through his telescope and she had stared at Jupiter while Harley’s dad was saying, “There’s a storm on Jupiter that could hold two earths like peas in a pod.”
A storm so big it could hold our whole world twice over and so enduring that astronomers had been watching it since 1665—that was what Harley’s dad had said. She scanned the sky for Jupiter, trying to remember if it shone in the west or southwest, and when she found the brightest of the white lights, she imagined storms more powerful than the ones that swept Kansas, winds blowing unchecked on an even larger plain. She felt the shiver she sought, the tiny fragile nothingness of herself, and then it was gone, replaced by the wool blanket she held in her hands, the paper props, and the excitement of having somewhere to go after dark. She didn’t care if it was Aldine’s big moment to show off. Charlotte had washed and curled her head for this. She had cleaned the dust off every stitch and crevice of her Sally shoes. She had patted her forehead and cheeks with the face powder her mother kept on her dresser. She was going to enjoy herself.
Charlotte had arranged to ride to the school with her father in the truck, thus ensuring that he would not take Aldine. Clare would drive Aldine, Neva, and their mother in the Ford. When she’d written out those lines from Venus and Adonis, she didn’t mean them to induce Aldine to flirt with their father. Far from it. She’d intended it to be a little trial for Clare and maybe even a boost, and, sure, she had to admit it, a little amusement for herself. It was Clare’s handwriting she’d imitated; no one would’ve thought anything else. Her father’s penmanship, when he wrote down in the account book what they earned and what they spent, was better than her own. How for the love of God could Aldine have failed to notice that? And how could her willful ignorance have knocked down the perfectly sturdy walls of Charlotte’s plan and left them far behind? Really, it was as if Aldine could control men just by willing it so.
Charlotte had been in the barn that day because the barn was a place to go when she wanted to get away from everybody and it was too cold to go outside. She read sometimes, if there was something to read. Sometimes she napped in what had been the horse’s stall with Artemis curled beside her. She added things to her notebook. She’d been napping that day, in fact, or she would have told her father she was there. The first thing she heard was Aldine’s singsongy brogue, and when Charlotte peered out through the rails, it was like watching a play, except with bad lighting.
Now they were all coming out on the porch, chattering to each other and pulling on coats, the bright scent of Joy in the air, the perfume from Opa that her mother saved and portioned out by the half drop, so this was a sure sign that she wanted to make the event a special occasion, too. Neva’s hair was French braided and pinned into loops that she kept taking off her mittens to touch. Charlotte had moistened Neva’s cheeks and eyelids with cold cream, then crushed a little mica between her fingers and touched it to Neva’s face, a trick Charlotte learned in Dorland. Neva would be both a fairy and a snowflake in the play, provided that her cough stayed quiet. Clare wore a tie with his old plaid barn coat and it looked as if he’d oiled his hair. His pale face was moony and handsome in its own way, and Charlotte felt a little sorry for him, remembering that he had stayed home while she was larking around with Opal in Abilene, that he’d been waiting for a turn that didn’t come. And her plan to play Cupid had failed, too, at least for him.
Aldine stepped out of the house, but she might just as well have stepped from the pages of Vogue or Harper’s Bazaar, beaming with expectant pleasure, ready to take her place in the spotlight, all dark hair and eyelashes and ungodly thinness, her feet small and graceful even in laced-up boots. It wasn’t fair to despise Aldine for this, but she did just the same. Aldine never met Charlotte’s gaze now, not since the day in the barn. Charlotte knew her father hadn’t done anything with Aldine that afternoon, but there had been something odd about her father’s look, something that reminded her of that day in the post office when she caught him seeming like someone other than her father, and there was something too meaningful in the wretched way he held Aldine’s boot, kneeling before her, telling her she shouldn’t go. No, he hadn’t done anything wrong, but he’d been poised to, and she couldn’t stand it, she just couldn’t, and without even knowing what she was doing she’d felt herself standing up and walking toward them and saying, Hullo, Dad. She didn’t blame her father. He was just a man and inside every man was a boy, and as could easily be seen, every boy could be twirled on his own axis by the right girl. And Aldine was the right girl for just about every boy in the county. So the blame went where it belonged—to Aldine, for being pretty and skinny and spritely and talking in that trilling way that everyone with a thingie found so charming. For visiting her father alone in the barn. For living with them month after month and seeing everything they did not have. And she blamed herself, too, just a little, for making the dumb love letter and slipping it into her book.
“Time to go,” her father said, cranking the Ford for Clare and then hopping into the truck. Without a look at anyone else, Charlotte quickly slid in beside her father and, under the storm of Jupiter, they drove toward Stony Bank School.
32
Neva didn’t care if Emmeline rolled her eyes. Neva loved the Winter Entertainment. She and Melba had the best parts. The songs were vivacious. Her Ray Fairy costume was vivacious. Melba was a vivacious Cloud Queen. That was one of their hard spelling words, vivacious, but it was ever so perfect.
She adored the program that Mrs. Odekirk had typed twenty times so that each member of the audience could have a “nice memento.” She and the Josephson girls (except Emmeline, who said she would work on her math instead) had glued each sheet to stiff purple paper that Mrs. Odekirk had gone to Kress in Dorland especially to buy, and Neva planned to keep hers forever and ever.
***A WINTER ENTERTAINMENT***
FEBRUARY 1933
PRESENTED BY THE STUDENTS OF STONY BANK SCHOOL
***