The Painted Table(13)

“Be quiet, April.” Saffee seizes her sister’s hand and retreats across the yard and into the house.

Midgie watches them go.




The kindergarteners, their faces full of dreams and wonder, sit on the floor and sing with high voices, hardly in unison, “Si-ilent night, hooly night . . .’round yon vir-ir-gin mother and Child.”

Singing along, and contentedly rocking with the rhythm, Saffee admires the lopsided green paper wreaths adorning each of the classroom’s tall windows. It’s Christmas! She’s not quite sure what it’s all about, neither the tinsel part nor the spiritual part, but this year she’s been touched by the magic of it. On sudden impulse, she purses her lips and begins to blow with enthusiasm.

Astonished, Miss Jessup says, “Sapphire Kvaale! We don’t whistle Christmas carols! Go stand in the cloakroom!”

Hot tears of mortification and contempt flow freely as Saffee buries herself behind her wool winter coat that hangs alongside a forest of others. Hadn’t her mother said that kindergarten would be fun? On the first day, Saffee knew she had been duped when she and her classmates had to tearfully bare their arms for polio vaccinations. Every morning boisterous, chattering children hurry by her as she dawdles four blocks to the intimidating redbrick building. She is usually late. The heavy outside door never yields to her pull. She leans against it, nose running from the cold, until someone passes by in the hall and opens it for her. In the classroom, she is tongue-tied when others speak to her. If forced to reply, she mumbles, hiding her face in her hands.

But this morning she had not been late because speculations about Christmas prompted her to be happy. Her father had placed a tree right in their living room and her mother had strung it with colored lights and added silver tinsel. There had been talk of a baby named Jesus and Christmas presents. How wonderful it all was. Why wouldn’t whistling be an appropriate expression of joy? Now she hears her classmates sing, “Oh, what fun it is to ride in a one-horse open sleigh.” She stares at the wood floor, made muddy with melted snow from eighteen pairs of rubber boots.

That evening Saffee sits at the supper table stirring patterns of gravy into her mashed potatoes, round and round, round and round, until she has a plateful of uniformly brown mush. Her right foot kicks a steady tempo against the table leg as she broods over the morning’s humiliation.

She had been so proud of learning to whistle, and she didn’t have that many things to feel proud about. Certainly not the playground races she always lost or the paintings she always smeared. But she had learned to whistle! . . . and foolishly dared reveal her new talent. During naptime, snot-nosed Alan had pointed a pudgy finger at her and sing-songed, “Saffee’s sappy, Saffee’s sappy,” and then, “Sappy, sappy, sappy.”

She formulates a desperate emergency plan: she will stop going to kindergarten. Of course, she’ll need parental cooperation.

“Mommy?” She waits for a reply, but Joann stares into some middle distance between here and there and doesn’t respond.

“Mommy, listen.” Still no answer.

“Mommy!”

“Eat yer potatoes, Saffee,” Nels says.

“Mommy! Please, listen to me!”

April bangs a spoon on her high chair. “More?” she begs, pushing her bowl around the tray.

Saffee watches her mother absentmindedly spoon another helping of applesauce from a serving dish and plop it onto April’s “no-touch” plate, divided so that foods don’t mix.

“Mommy! I need to talk to you!”

Her father frowns. “Don’t bother your mother, Saffee,” he says sternly.

In spite of Nels’s jovial, back-slapping ways in public, his unmistakable message to Saffee is that she must suffocate all spontaneity. Spontaneity is a problem. Bland is good. So be as bland as cold mashed potatoes. Therein is safety; safety is a virtue; risk is not to be tried. Saffee instinctively knows that his instructions are meant to avoid igniting her mother’s “nerves,” and she is sure he would also want her to exhibit this restraint at school. Whistling had violated her father’s limiting philosophy.

Saffee shovels potatoes as fast as she can, swallowing with difficulty around the growing lump in her throat. She must get away from the table, but will be prevented if her plate is not clean.

“I’m done!” she blurts and tramps from the kitchen.

Her tears are angrier now than they were in the cloakroom. She’s always hated her mother’s silent staring. And she hates kindergarten. She will never go back.

Saffee stands biting her lip in the middle of the darkened living room, lit only by the strings of lights glowing on the Christmas tree. She stares at their reflected colors on the light gray carpeting that her mother is so proud of. Joann never misses a chance to comment, “It’s a Gulistan, you know!” Whatever that means, it must be something wonderful.