The Painted Table(8)
A few weeks later, when she is certain, Joann excitedly writes to Nels about the baby.
Maybe this one will be a boy! Nine months from Portland is sometime in May. Please come home by then, Darling! His name will be Nels Jr., of course. But if it’s a girl, I think May would be a good name, don’t you?
He answers.
A family of four—wow! I’m trying to imajine us with two kids. I hope I’ll be able to get my job back at the dairy after the war. I hear it’s against the law for GI’s jobs to disppear. Take good care of yourself, sweetheart. I wish you didn’t have to work so hard. Remember, I’m gonna live thru this war and be back to take care of everything—and everybody. I hope I get there before the new baby does.
Joann conceals her pregnancy from Maude and the others as long as she can. But halfway into the fourth month, fatigue and a ballooning belly rule she must tell. Not eager to house a woman in “that condition,” especially whose husband is nowhere to be seen, the Pearlmans quickly decide she will have to leave. They offer to help her find an apartment. Joann has saved almost every penny she has made under their employ, as well as Nels’s pay that arrives every month. She is prepared to make do, at least financially.
On her last day, Grandma Pearlman is irritable and refuses to say good-bye to Joann. “Who knows what your replacement will be like?” she whines. But with her slender, blue-veined hand, she motions Saffee to draw closer and lifts a tissue-paper-wrapped package from her lap.
“This is one of my milk-glass plates,” she warbles. “I’m a hundred and one years old now, and this plate is as old as I am. It’s for you, girlie-girl. Don’t break it.” Glancing at Joann, she adds, “Your mother will take care of it for you.”
Not sure how she should express her delight, Saffee grins broadly and says, “Yes, ma’am.”
Joann and Saffee move to a sunbaked, stucco apartment building built into a typically steep San Francisco hillside. They settle into a top-floor, two-room unit, accessed by an outdoor stairway. When the Murphy bed is lowered in the living room, it fills most of the space. There is a window seat where mother and daughter look far into the distance, all the way to a sliver of ocean where a man they know crisscrosses dangerous waters. The kitchen is just large enough for a two-burner stove, an icebox, and a small table. In this private, pleasant place, while they wait for the baby, and in spite of Nels’s absence and the demands war has placed upon Joann, Saffee and her mother have the best months they will ever have together.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE BABY SISTER
Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divvy. A kiddley divey too, wouldn’t you?”
“Sing it again, Mommy! Sing it again!” Saffee begs, laughing and bouncing on the Murphy bed. Joann repeats the song, enjoying its silliness as much as Saffee.
“What are you singing, Mommy? Tell me!”
“If the words sound queer and funny to your ear, a little bit jumbled and jivey, sing, ‘Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy.’”
It still doesn’t make much sense to her, but Saffee happily joins in the next round of “A kiddley divey too, wouldn’t you?”
Singing each evening as they lounge on the bed, their spirits lift in a magical way. Mixing off-key voices with laughter, Joann sings in something of an alto range and Saffee mimics with her four-year-old lilt. They sing as loudly as they dare, bouncing gently in time on the bed, in deference to Joann’s “condition.”
“My Bonnie lies over the ocean, my Bonnie lies over the sea . . . Oh, bring back my Bonnie . . .”
When they tire of singing, Joann reads poetry.
And they wonder, as waiting those long years through
In the dust of that little chair,
What has become of the Little Boy Blue
Since he kissed them and put them there.
Joann weaves a blue ribbon through the cloverleaf-shaped cutouts around the edge of Grandma Pearlman’s milk-glass plate and places it on a shelf above the sofa. Saffee beams. The beautiful plate is something of her very own.
While Saffee naps, Joann, a study in loneliness, spends more and more time at the window seat. Pairs of chatting women, most likely military wives, stroll with their young children along the pine-needle-strewn path of the wooded hillside next to the building. Joann notices the seeming ease in which they converse. Occasionally, at the bathroom mirror, she enters into barely audible, imagined conversations with these unsuspecting women. She refrains from such dialogue when Saffee is nearby.
Indulging her weaknesses, Joann rarely suggests that she and Saffee leave the apartment. When they do venture out for short walks on the hillside path, Joann stays on the alert for dogs and averts her eyes from passersby. She can’t hide her bulging middle, but she tries to mask her insecurities with head-held-high aloofness, all the while holding tightly to her little girl’s hand.