Radio Waves

By

Susan Ferguson

        Me and Ricky were playing kickball with the Italian kids that lived down in the cul-de-sac when Mrs. Paul came out on her porch and was watching us. We watched her back.

        She was ancient. The Pauls were the only old people that lived on our block. They lived in the house with midnight blue shutters. Every other house on the street had shutters in crayon colors—goldenrod, carnation pink, yellow green and cornflower blue. I liked crayons. I liked radios, too.

        When she walked out to the end of her driveway and invited us all in for cookies, we said yes. Ricky and me did, anyway. The other kids, they took their ball and went on home, but Ricky followed me and I followed Mrs. Paul up the drive and up the porch steps. As we walked, I introduced us: “I’m Donna, he’s Ricky. We live in the house up there,” I said, pointing. “Not the one on the corner but the one next to it. With the sea green shutters. That’s where we live. I’m eight. I got all S’s on my report card. Ricky’s six. He just finished kindergarten. Mom says it’s my job to watch him. Do you have kids?”

        She opened the front door and we went inside. Kids could go into old people’s houses then—every old lady was somebody’s grandma. Big velvety chairs were in their living room—we had scratchy cloth ones at our house. Their sofa, their big-like-a-boat sofa, stretched the entire length of one living room wall. Above it was a painting of a girl in a fancy pink dress and a bonnet. There was a plaster statue of a naked lady wrapped in a sheet in another corner. I covered Ricky’s eyes when we walked past that.

        “You’re such a nice little girl, taking care of your brother. Do you children like cherry Kool-Aid?” Mrs. Paul said to us as she led us to the kitchen. She was one of those old ladies who smelled like she’d peed her pants and covered it up with talcum powder. The first time I noticed it, it took my breath away. But Mom had raised us so as not to say anything or act like we noticed it. Some old people just can’t, well, you know, she told us. But at that moment it didn’t matter. Mrs. Paul was going to feed us cookies. I didn’t care how she smelled.

        Ricky and I sat down at the table. I was just about to say that I liked green Kool-Aid more when Ricky piped up and said, “Yes, ma’am. I like red.”

        “Cherry Kool-Aid it is, then,” Mrs. Paul said, and she set about mixing up a batch.

        Her kitchen was shaped just like ours but hers was blue and white checkered. Ours was gray and red. We had a black kitty clock on the wall at the side of the window. Her table was wooden. I ran my finger along the top where I could feel the grain. Our table was metal, with a plain old white top. Mrs. Paul must be richer.

        Ricky and I looked around the kitchen at all the little glass things she had on little shelves on the walls. I liked the ruffly curtains and the blue checkered chairs. Ricky nudged me and pointed toward the wall above the stove where there was a plate with Jesus’ face on it.

        “That’s Jesus,” I whispered to him. “They must be Catholic.” Our whole neighborhood was Catholic, except for us and the Holy Rollers that lived up on the corner. Our family didn’t go to church except on Easter and at Christmas. No reason. We just didn’t go. Mom and Dad didn’t take us. But I knew the Jesus story. The Jesus on the plate looked so sad in his eyes, like he knew the story, too, like he knew that he was doomed.

        “I know who it is,” Ricky whispered back. “Why’s he over their stove?”

        I shrugged. I didn’t know. Maybe she needed help with her cooking.

        “Do you children have grandparents you can go visit?” Mrs. Paul asked as she ran water into the metal pitcher. Her words warbled like they were music.

        Ricky looked at me, his eyes wide, and nudged me to answer. Sure, he could answer about the Kool-Aid and point out the Jesus plate, but I had to do the talking.

        “We have our grandma,” I said. “She lives in the country. We go in the car to see her at Thanksgiving. She’s a pretty good grandma, but she’s kind of sad on account of when Grandpa died.” 

        The metal spoon Mrs. Paul was using to mix up the drink tanged with every stir, like a bell out of tune.

        I looked at her back. Her dress was aquamarine with big white fancy flowers. Aquamarine was another crayon color, one of my favorites. I pretty much liked all the greens.

        “He died last year,” I continued. “His heart broke or something.”

        “You poor dears,” Mrs. Paul said. “Was it a heart attack?”

        “It was something,” I said. “I don’t know. He died and they buried him. Our grandma did. Under a big sycamore tree in a park.”

        Ricky snickered. I elbowed him.

        The tanging stopped. Mrs. Paul took down three metal glasses.

        “Ricky likes the red one, if you don’t mind,” I volunteered.

        “And my sister likes the silver,” Ricky offered.

        Mrs. Paul poured the drink into the glasses. Half full, and no ice, even though it was summer and it was hot outside.

        We were watching her pour when there was a noise from the stairway, and the door swung open suddenly. It was a man, coming up from the basement. He was carrying a book.

        “Well, who have we here?” he asked, looking at us over the tops of his glasses.

        Mrs. Paul was setting cookies on a plate. “These poor dears from up the street have lost their grandpa,” she said to him. “Children, this is Mr. Paul. Mister, this is Donna and her brother, Ricky.”

        Mr. Paul had curly gray and brown hair. His shoulders were rounded over, like he’d been carrying a heavy load. He wore gray pants and a plaid, short-sleeved shirt. There was a wire from his shirt pocket up along his collar and his neck to his ear. He touched something in his pocket. A high-pitched whine came from whatever he was doing.

        Mrs. Paul gave me the silver glass and Ricky the red one. She didn’t pour any Kool-Aid for herself and instead, gave her glass to Mr. Paul. Then she set the plate of cookies, chocolate chip, in front of us.

        “Lost their grandpa, you said?” Mr. Paul asked her.

        “Yes,” she answered him. “Little dear says his heart broke. Probably a heart attack.”

        I didn’t know if Grandpa had died of a heart attack, and I’d never heard anyone call her husband Mister. At our house, Mom called our dad Honey.

        “That’s too bad,” Mr. Paul said, still fiddling with the thing in his pocket. “Losing a grandpa— Now that’s a tough one.” He snatched a cookie as he walked past us.

        “It was last year, Mister,” I said, hoping Mister was okay. I took a cookie. Then Ricky did, then Mrs. Paul.

        Mr. Paul chuckled and talked with his mouth full, “That’s Mr. Paul to you.”

        Ricky jabbed me with his elbow.

        “Excuse me, sir. Mr. Paul,” I said when I was finished chewing.

        He went somewhere else in the house while we talked with Mrs. Paul.

        Lots more times that summer Mrs. Paul invited me and Ricky in. Said she enjoyed the company of children and she didn’t have any grandchildren of her own.  That was okay with us— We sat at her table and drank juice or Kool-Aid and ate cookies. One time she made us toast. Another time she heated orange circus peanuts on a wire over a burner on the gas stove and fed them to us like we were having a campfire. She was boring—all she did was embroider—but she made good cookies and Mom said she didn’t mind us visiting there as long as we didn’t make ourselves nuisances.

        We ate what Mrs. Paul fed us. And we talked about our family. She seemed to give us better stuff if we told her someone was sick or dead, so I made up a story about how our other grandmother, Clara, died in a car crash. Really, she’d died a long time ago, before either Ricky or me was born, but Mrs. Paul didn’t know that, so I made up this story about how Grandma Clara died when the Pontiac she was riding in lost a wheel and drove off a mountain road and down into a forest where the car caught fire and everything burned up, especially Grandma Clara. Ricky even made a little sad face for that one. I think he might have believed me. When I was finished, Mrs. Paul opened a can of fruit cocktail and we each got our own cherry half.

        One day when we were at their house, Mr. Paul took us down to his basement to show us his workshop.  Ricky didn’t want to go down there—“what if Mom finds out we’re being nuisances?”—but I told him I wouldn’t tell if he didn’t. We followed Mr. Paul down the steps.

        “This is where I tinker,” Mr. Paul said while we were following him. We got to a dingy dusty room filled with boxes of stuff and he chuckled and waved one arm around over a workbench covered with old radios. “I’m a tinkerer.”

        Ricky must have thought Mr. Paul said “tinkler.” That was one of Mom’s words. He giggled and grabbed at his shorts were his johnny was. I pulled his arm away and rolled my eyes and told him to cut it out. Then I looked back at Mr. Paul and said, “I have a crystal radio that I got from my grandpa last year, but it’s just a speaker, a crystal, a coil and a wire in the window. I don’t see how all these tubes that plug into the inside of a radio work like a crystal. Does the sound come from the electricity in the wall? How do the radio waves get in?”

        “For a gal, you know a lot about radios,” Mr. Paul told me, looking me in the eye for what seemed like a very long time.

        “My grandpa, he liked radios a lot,” I explained. “He made the crystal one for me.”

        Mr. Paul picked up a tube. “I buy these junked and replace the parts and then sell them again when I get them working,” he said. “Sometimes they’re worth some money. Most times they’re just crap.”

        Ricky bent down and picked up a small pair of tweezers that was on the floor. He held them in his hand for a moment before he said, “Here, you must have dropped this.”

        Mr. Paul snatched them from his hand, grabbed Ricky by the shoulder and hissed, “Why, you little shit, trying to steal from me.”

        Ricky wriggled free and backed away until I was between the two of them. He grabbed my hand and held it. “He was just trying to help,” I said.

        “No he wasn’t. He was trying to steal. That’s what boys do.”

        Ricky’s hand squeezed mine tighter.

        “Try to show a kid a little something and this is the thanks you get,” Mr. Paul grumbled. He grabbed us both by the shoulders and pushed us toward the stairs. When we entered the kitchen, Mr. Paul practically shoved us through the doorway and pulled the door shut behind us.

        Mrs. Paul was standing at the sink, washing some dishes. “Well, that was quick. What’d you think of Mister’s radio collection?” she asked without looking at us. Otherwise, she would have seen the surprise on our faces.

        “I want to go home,” Ricky whispered to me.

        I shook my head. “The radios were pretty neat, but we have to get home,” I told Mrs. Paul.

        “What’s your hurry?”

        “I, uh, Ricky has to, uh, Ricky has to go home,” I stammered. We started walking toward the front door.

        Mrs. Paul patted her hands against the side of the sink and picked up a dishtowel. She wiped her hands on it as she followed us through the living room. “Well, do come back,” she told us as we went outside and practically leapt off the front porch.

        Ricky turned around when we were on the grass, safe out of reach of her, and said, “Goodbye.” When he and I got to the neighbor’s driveway, he let go of my hand and said, “You can go back there if you want to. That old guy’s crazy.”

        I couldn’t blame him for the way he felt. I was scared, too, but I was older. I had to be brave. I went back alone after that. Mrs. Paul was nice. I told her Ricky had took sick with smallpox or chickenpox or some kind of pox that makes big blisters and that he couldn’t go out again till the last blister was gone. That excuse worked till about the middle of July, when one day Mrs. Paul asked me if Ricky was well again. She said she thought she had seen him outside playing with some of his friends. After that, I told her it was polio. I told her Ricky had come down with polio and that he had to sleep in the iron lung that my parents set up in our living room.

        Mrs. Paul said that was too bad. She roasted circus peanuts over the flame of the stove burner and gave them to me charred and crunchy on a china plate. Sometimes she  opened a can of apricot halves and counted halfsies – I always got six to her five.  One day she asked me if I could cook.

        I told her Mom never let me near the stove because I was too young and I might get burned.

        “A girl your age should cook,” Mrs. Paul insisted. “Why, when I was your age, I was cooking for my whole family. You should at least learn to make scrambled eggs.”

        I had just gotten there. I couldn’t turn around and leave. I said okay. I didn’t think that meant we were going to do it right then.

        She handed me an apron. It was blue, like everything else in her kitchen. I put it on over my shorts. It hung past my knees.

        She showed me how to crack the eggs so that the eggshells didn’t break into tiny pieces that would fall into the egg white. She showed me how to empty the insides into a measuring cup and add a little milk and melted oleomargarine. She shook a little pepper and a little salt into the mixture, and then she showed me how to light the burner with a wooden match.

        “Keep your hair away from the flame,” she said. “That’s how fires start.”

        I pulled my hair back behind my ears and turned on the gas. Then I struck the match against the strike plate and held it near the little holes of the burner. The blue flames leapt in a hurry from one hole to the next and the next, and soon the whole ring was burning blue.

        She showed me how to turn the flame low, and then she set a black skillet on the burner and sliced off a wedge of oleomargarine to go into the pan.

        “You turn the burner down so the oleo just melts and turns into oil, and then we pour the egg mixture in to cook.”

        The oleo slid around in the bottom of the black skillet for a moment. Its corners  began to soften. In a matter of seconds it was no longer oleo, just several oily streaks across the bottom of the pan.

        “Okay, now pour the egg mixture in slowly,” she told me, handing me a spatula. “I’m going to go call Mister.”

        I picked up the measuring cup, but I hesitated.

        “I’ll be right here,” she said as she stood at the doorway. “Go ahead. Besides, Jesus is watching.”

        I looked at the Jesus plate. There were cobwebs on Jesus’ hair. I poured the egg mixture in a runny glob and watched it spread out slowly toward the skillet edges. I held the spatula above it, not sure what I should be doing.

        “Mister,” Mrs. Paul shouted down the basement steps, “our little girl’s making you some scrambled eggs. They’ll be ready in just a minute, if you want to come on up and wash your hands.”

        The egg mixture started to dry out a little around the edges. “What should I do?” I asked Mrs. Paul.

        She looked at the skillet. “Use your spatula to stir them around. You want to mix them up so they cook evenly.”

        From the basement Mr. Paul shouted back that he was busy and couldn’t be up for a while.

        I stirred the eggs around.

        “Use the spatula to turn them over,” Mrs. Paul said to me. Then she shouted down the stairwell, “We’ll just have to eat them without you.”

        He shouted back, “Can’t you have her bring them down?”

        I slid the spatula underneath the mixture that was gradually coagulating into yellow curds. “Like this?” I asked Mrs. Paul, lifting a little section of egg and turning it over.

        “That’s exactly right,” she said.

        She came back to the counter and took two pieces of bread out of a bag and slathered them with oleo. Then she took a plate from the cabinet. “We’ll let this first batch be for him. You can take them down to him when they’re done.”

        The eggs were no longer shiny or runny. “I think they’re finished,” I told her. I was sweating from being so close to the heat and flame.

        “I do believe you’re right,” she said, looking over my shoulder.

        I handed her the spatula and took off the apron, relieved that my cooking duties were over and I could go back to being a girl again.

        Mrs. Paul picked up a blue oven mitt and put it on, then picked up the skillet and took it from the stove.

        While I wiped my forehead with the bottom of my blouse, Mrs. Paul scraped the scrambled eggs out of the skillet onto the plate between the two slices of buttered bread. She took a fork from the silverware drawer and handed it to me.

        “If you’ll take these down to Mister, he’ll be grateful,” she said. She handed me the plate. I held it in both hands.

        “I don’t know if I can make it down—”

        “Of course you can, dear. There’s the same number of steps at our house as at yours. Of course you can. Now run along,” she said. She sounded almost eager to get me out of her kitchen.

        “Are we going to make more?” I asked. “For you and me?”

        “When you come back up. They only take a minute.”

        That made me feel better, that I’d get to taste what I fixed. Carrying the plate, I turned and went down the stairs.

        Mr. Paul was in his workshop, sitting on a chair, the guts of one of his radios spread out before him.

        “Mister, I brought you your eggs,” I said, looking left and right at my feet as I walked through the clutter of boxes.

        He looked at me over his glasses and set down the tube he was holding.

        I extended the plate at arm’s length toward him.

        “They smell delicious,” he said to me, sliding his hands over mine as he took the plate. “Have you tasted them?”

        I stammered. “No, sir, these are for you.” I held out the fork for him.

        He looked the plate over and smiled at me, then took it and set it on the workbench. Then he took the fork from me and speared a piece of egg.

        I thought he was going to eat it.

        “Looks like you’ve got everything you need,” I said to him cheerfully, the way I’d seen waitresses do at a restaurant, and started to walk away.

        He gripped my arm. “Nearly everything,” he said. “You forgot the salt and pepper but we won’t mention it to the missus.”

        I started to tell him they were already in there, but he put his hand under my chin and held it tightly, and with the other hand moved the fork toward my mouth.

        “But those are yours,” I said between clenched teeth as I looked him in the eye.

        “Open your mouth,” he said and he lifted my chin.

        I opened my mouth. He put the bite of egg on my tongue. It was warm and soft and tasted slightly of salt. He set down the fork as I chewed slowly.

        Then, without a word, he put his hands on my waist and pulled me to him, between his knees, so my body was against his. His breath smelled like medicine, and I could smell hair cream or shaving stuff. I could feel his heat. He was so close that I saw two of him, like I was cross-eyed. He put his lips out to kiss me. When his lips touched mine, not like a grandpa’s, I turned away so he could kiss my cheek instead.

        For what seemed like a long time he held me. His fingers bunched up the cloth of my blouse and he slid his hands up under the fabric, brushing his fingers against my skin. His touch was gentle but odd, cold and strange. I thought I heard the thing in his pocket make a squeak.

        “Stay still,” he whispered against my cheek, “or you’ll get into trouble.”

        I closed my eyes. I could still taste the egg on my tongue. I could smell his breath. I opened my eyes and looked at the tubes on the workbench and tried not to think about what he was doing. The delicate filaments, the intricate coils of wires and shiny metal plates inside the glass tubes—how did radio waves turn into sound in there if the tubes were sealed tight and no air could get in? My radio set was a whole lot simpler—just coils of copper wire around a toilet paper roll, out there where everything could reach them, plus the wire that pulled everything in. His breathing grew more ragged as his hands roamed over my body. I looked past the tubes and the little stack of tools to the plate of eggs that by now had grown cold. Mr. Paul’s radios were so much more complicated. My stomach felt fluttery. I didn’t want to be sick.

        He took a deep breath, shifted in his chair and eased me away from him. He looked into my eyes as he smoothed down my blouse, then he gave me a little smile the way someone would thank someone without talking. I looked at his eyes. He looked far away, even through his glasses.

        “Thank you, Donna,” he said to me, nodding at the plate. “Thank you for the eggs.”

        I nodded back to him and walked away. When I got to the bottom of the stairs, I straightened my blouse and my shorts. I wanted to look normal. Then I took the steps two at a time. Mrs. Paul was waiting for me with a new egg mixture ready.

        “Did Mister like his eggs?”

        I shook my head. “I think so. I have to go.”

        “Are you sure? These are all ready. There’s enough for both of us.”

        “Maybe another time. I just remembered that our family is going someplace and I have to get ready.”

        “Where are you going?”

        “I’m not sure. Some place with Ricky. We have to go to the hospital for an operation for Ricky,” I told her, anxious to get out of their house. The egg smell was making me sick to my stomach. “Ricky’s getting better but he needs an operation.”

        Mrs. Paul held out her arms to me, like she wanted to hug me. I didn’t want to hug her. I could still smell him on me. “Come here, honey,” she said.

        “I have to go.”

        She touched me on the shoulders. “You give Ricky a hug for me,” she said, wrapping her arms around me.

        My arms hung limply at my sides. She smelled like pee. I held my breath until she let me go.

        “Yeah,” I said, turning toward the living room. “I’ll see you later.”

        She followed me to the front door. I opened it and walked down the steps. For a moment, I stood there in the grass, looking up at her and the midnight blue paint around her front door. Should I tell her or let it go?  What would I say?

###