Orphan Train(67)
The following morning, at 9:00 A.M., Mr. Nielsen pulls up in a blue-and-white Studebaker with silver trim and raps on the front door. Mrs. Murphy has been so generous that I now have two suitcases and a satchel filled with clothes and books and shoes. As I’m closing my bags Miss Larsen comes to my room and presses Anne of Green Gables into my hands. “It’s my own book, not the school’s, and I want you to have it,” she says, hugging me good-bye.
And then, for the fourth time since I first set foot in Minnesota over a year ago, everything I possess is loaded into a vehicle and I am on my way to somewhere new.
Hemingford, Minnesota, 1930–1931
The Nielsens’ home is a two-story colonial painted yellow with black shutters and a long slate walkway leading to the front door. It sits on a quiet street several blocks from the center of town. Inside, the floor plan is a circle: a sunny living room on the right leads into the kitchen in the back, which connects to a dining room and back to the foyer.
Upstairs I have my own large room, painted pink, with a window overlooking the street, and even my own bathroom, with a large porcelain sink and pink tiles and a cheerful white curtain with pink piping.
Mr. and Mrs. Nielsen take things for granted that I’ve never dared to dream of. All the rooms have steel air vents with black-painted scrollwork. Even when no one is home, the water heater is on, so that when they come home after work, they don’t have to wait for the water to heat up. A woman named Bess cleans the house and does the washing once a week. The refrigerator is stocked with milk and eggs and cheese and juice, and Mrs. Nielsen notices what I like to eat and buys more of it—oats for breakfast, for instance, and fruits, even exotic ones like oranges and bananas. I find aspirin and store-bought toothpaste in the medicine cabinet and clean towels in the hall closet. Every two years, Mr. Nielsen tells me, he trades in his car for a new model.
On Sunday morning we go to church. Grace Lutheran is different from any place of worship I’ve ever seen: a simple white building with a steeple, Gothic arched windows, oak pews, and a spare altar. I find the rituals comforting—the tried-and-true hymns, sermons by the mild-mannered, slope-shouldered reverend that emphasize decency and good manners. Mr. Nielsen and other parishioners grumble about the organist, who either plays so fast that we jumble the words or so slow that the songs become dirges, and he can’t seem to take his foot off the pedal. But nobody actually protests—they just raise their eyebrows at each other midsong and shrug.
I like the assumption that everyone is trying his best, and we should all just be kind to each other. I like the coffee hour with almond cake and snickerdoodles in the vestry. And I like being associated with the Nielsens, who seem to be generally regarded as fine, upstanding citizens. For the first time in my life, the glow of other people’s approval extends to, and envelops, me.
LIFE WITH THE NIELSENS IS CALM AND ORDERLY. EACH MORNING AT five thirty, six days a week, Mrs. Nielsen makes breakfast for her husband, usually fried eggs and toast, and he leaves for the store to open for the farmers at six. I get ready for school and leave the house at seven forty-five for the ten-minute walk to the schoolhouse, a brick building that holds sixty children, separated into grades.
On my first day in this new school, the fifth-grade teacher, Miss Buschkowsky, asks the twelve of us in her class to introduce ourselves and list one or two of our hobbies.
I’ve never heard of a “hobby.” But the boy before me says playing stick-ball, and the girl before him says stamp collecting, so when the question comes to me, I say sewing.
“Lovely, Dorothy!” Miss Buschkowsky says. “What do you like to sew?”
“Clothes, mostly,” I tell the class.
Miss Buschkowsky smiles encouragingly. “For your dolls?”
“No, for ladies.”
“Well, isn’t that nice!” she says in a too-bright voice, and in that way it becomes clear to me that most ten-year-olds probably don’t sew clothes for ladies.
And so I begin to adjust. The kids know I’ve come from somewhere else, but as time passes, and with careful effort, I lose any trace of an accent. I note what the girls my age are wearing and the style of their hair and the subject of their conversations, and I work hard to banish my foreignness, to make friends, to fit in.
After school, at three o’clock, I walk directly to the store. Nielsen’s is a large open space divided into aisles, with a pharmacy in the back, a candy section up front, clothes, books, and magazines, shampoo, milk, and produce. My job is to stack shelves and help with inventory. When it’s busy, I help out at the cash register.