Knee-high

by Barbara Herrick

She sat on the same bench every afternoon. No matter the weather or whether old "Mr. Arthur" pained her, she trudged the quarter-mile to the City Park and spread her expanding backside onto the peeling, yellow paint of the seat nearest the children's playground. Melba, the skinny, blue-haired busybody next door to Lucille at the boarding house, claimed she was "fanatic" about visiting the park.

"Why don't you stay here and watch the stories with me today?" Melba would beg. "It's so inclement outside, and I can't for the life of me figure out what obsession you have with that park bench anyhow!"

"Move on out of the way," Lucille would say. "You're going to miss As The World Turns if you don't hurry, and you might miss some big words today. Maybe we'll play backgammon when I get back."

On this October day, the weather was far from "inclement." After Lucille scanned the playground for the face of the child, she slumped into the warm bench, crossed her baggy arms over her bosom and her corny feet at the ankles, and raised her closed eyes to the sun. She rested assured scampering and giggling would alert her should children arrive unseen.

"You have an innate ability to recognize faces based on genetic indication," Melba had said once. "Why, I never would have noticed that was Mr. Marshfield's son, and you could just tell right away; it's utterly uncanny."

"Whatever," Lucille told her wizened, wordy friend, but she searched the faces of youngters in the park confident she could recognize her child's face in one of them.

The woman dozed on watch that day for the first time since moving to the town and the home near the park. For one year and three months she kept the vigil wakeful, but that day Lucille's head jerked from her chest three times to the scratch of skittering leaves, then she fell hard into sleep. She dreamed first she sat sewing metal button after metal button onto one child's bib overall after another, because she always dreamed that dream first, had ever since she retired from the factory. Sometimes she started dreaming that tired dream even before she was sound asleep, so she seriously doubted Melba's data: "No, no, you can't dream all night, honey. Dreams happen just before you wake up in the morning, when your eyelids are fluttering kind of; it's scientifically documented."

Lucille's eyelids did flutter while she dreamed her grandson tapped her on the shoulder from behind the assembly line and distracted her from the denim detail.

"I found you, Grandma," giggled the blonde, blue-eyed image. "You're it," he said, and then skipped from the concrete corridor into the center of a bright spotlight that dissolved his perfect form into translucent dust that wavered upwards in a sparkling spiral.

Lucille woke out of breath with arms raised in supplication to the sky and a trickle of spittle dripping down all her chins. The large-eyed trepidation of three or four still, speechless children drew her gaze to the playground, but she quickly looked to her loafered feet and busied herself arranging her clothes and her composure. She closed a button on her blouse to cover the roll of pasty flesh at her midriff and smoothed her flower-patterned skirt over her knees. Farther down her mounds, Lucille deliberately rolled her knee-high stockings another inch on her swollen, spider-veined ankles.

"Ha, that's for you, Nadine," Lucille said aloud and further consternated the children, apparently, for she heard the gravel under the swings and slides pellet metal poles when their sneakers scattered tracks in retreat.

Lucille understood their revulsion. When she and Nadine were youngsters, they also dreaded the decay and undecided demeanor of ancient specimens of their race. Lucille remembered a day at the traveling carnival that came every July to their town. She and her best friend since kindergarten, both eighteen and just graduated with honors from high school, paraded the midway with white anklets turned a perfect half down their unblemished ankles, swallowing and digesting the atmosphere of the fair and of their fairness. The young ladies took care to avoid the infirm, the elderly, and the unstylish.

"Let's make a pact," Nadine suggested.

"Let's," Lucille agreed, because she always agreed with Nadine.

"We will never, ever get fat, and we will never, no matter what, roll our nylons down around our ankles, O.K.?"

"O.K.," Lucille said.

Lucille might very well have kept the girlhood promise, would probably have continued to follow Nadine's advice, might be agreeing this moment with Nadine—had her ex-friend not given her very bad advice in the spring of 1966.

"Lucy, who are you trying to kid?" Nadine asked. "Mac, or whatever his name is, won't be back, and you know it."

Lucille said, "He might. And what if he won't? Look at her, Nadine. She's just perfect. Belinda is the only reason I want to go on anymore."

"She's a beauty, hon. I love her too. You know I'm not arguing that. But she deserves better, and you know that too. Nobody knows better than you, I wouldn't give up one of my kids for anything in the world, but my kids have a daddy, and I'm not getting welfare to feed them. You've been waiting for that traveling salesman to come back the whole nine months you carried her and now the whole nine months since she was born."

"I know."

"You have to go back to the factory this month if you're going back, and how can you pay somebody to watch her and pay your bills on top of that. Your mother and sister already said they wouldn't keep her for you, and I can't watch her either and work."

"But Nadine, I waited thirty-five years to have my baby girl. I'm happy, for the first time. Please don't tell me to give her away. I'll die."

"Oh, Lucy, it's your own damn fault you didn't have a baby before. Tim Martin wasn't good enough for you that year we went to State, was he? And don't think I forgot what you did to my Dan before we got together. Then there was that Jim guy at work. You could have had umpteen kids by now. Don't make that face at me. You know I'm right. Besides, nobody is asking you to give her up, not exactly. Your brother and sister-in-law promise they will raise up Belinda and let you see her all the time. John and Jenny can't have any babies, and they live in that big house, and they both have real good jobs. Honest, it would be better for everybody all the way around. Will you just think about it, Lucille, O.K.?"

"O.K.," Lucille said.

Lucille did not die, even though she was fairly certain she might when her sister-in-law finally did get pregnant by her brother and they put Belinda out for adoption to a couple in this town who changed her name to Katrina and never let Lucille visit her or call her or send her a birthday card. Instead of dying, she worked at the factory, she ate, and she coldly ignored her family members and old friends, especially Nadine. She also avoided interacting with anyone who might become a new friend, but she closely monitored the grapevine as reported on her assembly line. She knew Belinda/Katrina grew up in this town, played in this park, married a local man in 1988, and gave birth to a child in 1990. Her imagination supplied the child with a penis, blonde hair, and blue eyes—similar to those of a certain encyclopedia salesman who worked on commission through the county over the winter of 1964-1965.

"God, he was handsome," Lucille told the wind.

She had some trouble lifting her frame from the bench, but then she was all right except for some prickles in her left foot. She watched the sleepy foot fumble to keep up with his partner all the way home, concentrated on striking the concrete walk slowly and steadily, precisely and deliberately, Melba would call it. She had no reason to hurry home. She knew what waited for her—a boring game of backgammon, a loquacious lecture, and a cold supper.

But Lucille felt a worry start to flutter in her old chest when she arrived at the house to find the porch swing swinging empty of Melba and her mouth. She sat down on the swing and waited for half a minute, wondering. "Where are you, you old wordy wart?" Lucille hollered off the record. When Melba, a waitress at the truck stop on the by-pass in her "productive" life, came bustling through the screen door balancing a tea tray, a board game, and a barrage of platitudes, Lucille immediately lost her battle against relief and pleasure at the sight and sound.

"Shut up for a minute," she said. "Put that stuff down and set here beside me. I need to talk. Please. O.K.?"

"Certainly," Melba replied. But instead of crowding onto the swing, she pulled a rocker from over by the door and placed it in front of the swing. She seated herself across from Lucille, folded her hands, cocked her head, opened her ears, and served iced tea silently. Not once during the evening did she interrupt her friend.

.

Melba usually accompanied Lucille to the park after that talk. Sometimes their conversations became so entertaining, Lucille forgot why she waited on the park bench. Gradually the excursion became a form of physical and mental exercise the women enjoyed early in the morning or late in the evening, which allowed them to watch the afternoon soap operas every once in a while.

"It's just about too glacial for me out here on this bench today," Melba explained a few days after the Christmas holidays. "What say we head on back, but we can walk on around past the parlor and get more exercise and maybe stop and play a little bingo. I just know you'll like it. It's superb."

"I don't know," Lucille said. "Sometimes I get a feeling, sort of scary and exciting, like maybe today would be the day I would see him, and today I feel like that. What if ..."

"Oh yeah, sure honey, we'll linger awhile in that case. I completely commiserate." Melba snuggled down into the hood of her royal blue parka and smiled understandingly out of a fur-lined tunnel.

"The bingo parlor is 'superb', you say?" Lucille's words followed white breath through chattering teeth.

"Oh yes, indeed. You'll adore bingo. And did you know that's where Mr. Marshfield goes almost every single afternoon?"

"Who?" Lucille asked.

"Mr. Marshfield, Coy, the one with the son who looks just like him, the one who kept asking you to dance at the Christmas party. Don't be silly, Lucy—oh, I get it, you're being rhetorical, aren't you, like we were talking about yesterday? Good one! Wait! I'm coming. Wait up, Lucy!"

.

Flowers in the park blossomed bright and big that spring due to the efforts of a group of retired women who dubbed their club The Park Beautification Committee. After obtaining permits from the city council, the industrious oldsters organized bake sales, rummage sales, auctions, and lotteries sufficient to fund hiring professional landscapers. Lucille and Melba, joint chairpersons of the club, only infrequently enjoyed the park nowadays, what with the committee activities, bingo, dancing, aerobics sessions at the boarding house led by Mr. Marshfield's son, and Melba's newest passion, bridge.

"I surely do admire your proficiency at the table, Lucy," Melba said. "Are you absolutely certain you never played before? You are just ... really good. I can't even think of a fancy enough word for it."

"Well, thanks, partner," Lucille said. "It's good to be appreciated. Say, what will we cook for the game next week at our place. Let's ask that nice Loretta at bingo for that chicken salad recipe she was talking about yesterday."

"Sounds like a splendid idea. Hey, Lucy, look over at those purple and yellow pansies. Aren't they magnificent? All the beds are gorgeous and smell just delightful. And it's not even Easter yet. I eagerly anticipate the summer flowers."

"Mmmmm!"

"Speaking of Easter," Melba continued, "are you going or not?! It must have taken enormous humility for your sister to invite you again. Just think, a family dinner. If I had family living, you better bet I would hustle expeditiously to be with them."

"Mmmm."

Lucy, honey, your friend Nadine is coming with her whole family too, and I can't help it, it might not be my place, but I can't refrain myself—it's not right being estranged from your friends and family—why, it's deleterious."

"It's 'dele' what? Never mind, I know what you mean. Melba?"

"Yes?"

"Will you go with me?"

.

"Is this not the most glorious June morning you have ever witnessed? I declare those pansies are even more proficient than when we were here last time. Smell! Whew, this new bench feels pretty good, huh? How many times did we saunter around the path anyway? Hey, what are you laughing about?"

"Just thinking about something Nadine's granddaughter told me at Easter," Lucille said. "She told me I was lucky to have a friend like you."

"Well, I'm ... glad."

"Well, Melba my dear, I can top that—I'm exuberant!"

Just as the friends rose to leave, an easier task for them both these days, Melba grabbed Lucille's arm to still her talk and looked first into Lucille's eyes and then at the playground.

"Hush, look, look, Lucy, it's him I think!! Look, the blonde boy with the pug nose squatted down on the ground tying his shoe. Look!"

"I think so too," Lucille answered from her seat back on the bench with Melba sitting beside her still clutching her arm. "He is very beautiful, isn't he?"

"Yes, and oh look, Lucy, look at the woman coming to help him. She looks just exactly how I would imagine you looked at that age. It really is them! What will you do?!?"

"Don't get your knickers bunched up in a knot. I don't have to do anything. Let's just sit here a little while longer, and then we'll go on over to bingo, O.K.?"

"O.K."

Thirty minutes later, Lucille bent over, reached up under her sweatpants legs, rolled her stockings up from the tops of her running shoes to just below her knees, and jumped to her feet.

"I'm ready," she said.

Copyright © Barbara Herrick 2003