The Painted Table(42)

The clerk interrupts, “What kind of sweater are you looking for?” She straightens a perfectly folded stack that Saffee had ever so slightly touched. Saffee feels like a cat at a dog show.

“Kind? Well, I . . . I mean, I don’t know. Um, these here are pretty.”

“Well”—the clerk sounds impatient—“do you want a cardigan?”

Saffee perspires. Her mother continually spouts obscure vocabulary, but Saffee has never heard her use this word. Everyone else in town probably knows what “cardigan” means.

“Well, uh, I don’t know . . . I mean, I don’t really care.”

The woman gives her a withering look.

“I mean, I guess . . . I’ll have to think about it.” Red-faced, Saffee rushes for the exit and home to ask her mother what the word means.




“Cardigan? It’s a sweater.”

“I know it’s a sweater, but what kind? A clerk at Gilbert’s asked me if I wanted a cardigan and I didn’t know what she meant. I was so embarrassed! You’re forever using big words, why not that one?”

Joann reaches for her always-handy dictionary.

“You overestimate my erudition, Saffee,” Joann says, searching.

Saffee rolls her eyes.

Joann finds that her dictionary defines cardigan as a sweater named after a Welsh earl. Not much help.

“I must need a new dictionary,” she says, checking the copyright date. “1951.” Her face lights up. “I’ll get a new one and send this one to college with you.”

With the help of a Sears Roebuck catalog, Saffee deduces that sweaters with buttons down the front are called cardigans. Joann orders one for Saffee in tan, “a good neutral color that goes with everything,” and then adds another item to the form—the most recent edition of The American College Dictionary.




Four more days. Saffee considers each garment as she slides it across the closet bar. On her bedroom floor are two almost-full suitcases, miscellaneous boxes, a portable typewriter, packages of typing paper, carbon paper, and Joann’s old dictionary.

April, sprawled across Saffee’s bed, watches her sister sort remaining items on the closet shelves. Years of habit prompt Saffee to give her a get-off-my-bed look and April scoots over to her own.

She has packed a new gray tweed suit, a coordinating sweater—pullover—and sensible pumps. Joann surmises that this is what well-dressed coeds wear to class. They had shopped together at Gilbert’s to purchase these and other items. To Saffee’s relief, her mother was, for once, on her best behavior, and the aloof clerk must have had the day off.

In sportswear, when Joann noticed a mannequin wearing Bermuda shorts and knee socks, she sputtered, “Wool shorts? One might say that’s an oxymoron.”

“Only you, Mother,” Saffee whispered.

“Saffee, that beautiful womanhood would succumb to such outrageous whims of fashion is counterintuitive,” Joann huffed.

Saffee doubts she would have the nerve to display her thickish legs in shorts on campus, but if that is the rage, she wishes she could.

Completing her assistance, Joann made Saffee a brown wool straight skirt, and from a sewing magazine, she ordered a lifetime supply of personalized labels: SAPPHIRE E. KVAALE. She stressed how important it is to label every item to be taken. Saffee is grateful for her mother’s help.

“I know you don’t want me to tell you this, Saffee,” April says, “but I’m going to miss you.”

Preoccupied with sorting through a bureau drawer, Saffee does not respond.

April continues, “I saw Mother in the basement yesterday, opening up paint cans, checking colors or something. I just hate it when she gets in one of her painting moods. I woke up in the middle of the night because she and Daddy were arguing about it. Did you hear them?”

“No.”

April buries her face in her pillow for a few moments and then says, “Saffee, when you’re here and they fight it’s not so bad, but when you’re gone . . . I don’t know . . . Maybe we can talk on the phone?”

Saffee is too preoccupied to be sympathetic. “I don’t think so. It’d be long distance, you know. They wouldn’t allow it.” Kvaale long-distance calls are reserved for passing along only the gravest news, such as the death of a relative the girls have never heard of.

“Well, how about letters?”

The coed-to-be ignores the fact that April’s voice is cracking. “I’m going to college, April. I’ll probably be way too busy for letters.”

“Well, I can still write to you,” April says with resignation and leaves the room.

Saffee pushes April from her mind. She catches a reflection of her furrowed brow in the mirror and leans closer to inspect her face. Will she be the only girl on campus who still must conceal purply-red pimples with pasty-pale medication?