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Sister Sadie What Have You
Done - P.S.
Ehrlich
Actually there were a lot of
eligible young women who could have become Skeeter’s stepsister,
but here and now there was only a fifteen-year-old coppertop with the
arguably regrettable name of Mercedes Benison, whose look of eager welcome
turned to one of moderate fury when Skeeter rolled on the floor in
ecstasies when they were first introduced.
So at the very beginning of
their acquaintance Skeeter got treated to the extremes of Sadie B.’s
expression-range, and not for the last time either.
Skeeter had come to
Demortuis to meet her mother’s getting-serious gentleman-friend Arnold
Benison. He turned out to be bashfully affable and the father of two
daughters, the elder of whom was undergoing an old-fashioned Lithuanian
wedding in order to become Alexis (Mrs. Lenny) Czolgosz. The reception
took place at the Benison house on Oswald Avenue, where the everyday
atmosphere yielded to one of rice and cake and orange blossom and the
groom’s Brut and the best man’s Aqua Velva and the photographer’s Hai
Karate. Now, Mercedes
Benison applauded ethnicity as much or more than the average Demortuisian.
But when the receptionists went so far as to put a stack of Frankie
Yankovic records on the turntable, she could take no more and had to
escape. “C’mon,” she said
to wedding guest Skeeter, who followed obediently and not just because
Sadie B. was a tallish fifteen and Skeeter a shorty not yet ten. Nor just
because she admired Sadie’s red hair, or the slinky oyster-colored
minidress and Nancy Sinatra boots that Arnold had thought unsuitable for a
wedding but was too softhearted to forbid her to wear.
No: Sadie B. was a
take-charge type, a would-be toppler of barricades, sayer of “Let’s go
this way” and meaner of “Let’s go my way.” She could contain contradictory
multitudes; what Sadie assumed, you should assume. So she went and
Skeeter tagged after in her own midget pink party frock, rubbernecking to
left and right. The city of
Demortuis (to quote its Chamber of Commerce) was the “thrivingest” spot in
the entire Middle West. You could not have proved it by Oswald Avenue,
once a genteel thoroughfare, now rankling into kitschdom. “Bummerburg,”
Sadie termed it. “This place is a tomb.”
“I like it,” said Skeeter.
“I think it’s far out.”
“Far out! Kiddo, you wouldn’t know the difference between ‘far out’ and a
fart-out.” “Would so!” said
Skeeter. It was too far-out, so nyaah to you Sadie Benison.
Whose mood was not improved
by being all dressed up in her most devastating outfit with nobody around
worth showing off to. No one but a crusty old bunch of jaspers lumping the
afternoon away on their crusty old front stoops. Bug off, creeps. And even
they didn’t whistle or go “rowrowr” at her, disgusting as that
would have been. What a fart-out life was.
“Where are we going? Is
there a McDonald’s around here? I want a Big Mac.”
“Gag! I should’ve left you
at the reception. We’re not going anywhere. The park maybe. Just keep on
truckin’.” Skeeter
approximated truckin’ down the sidewalk in her little pink pumps till
Sadie told her for God’s sake to quit it.
“Oh all right…am I walking
silent enough for you now? And this park we’re going to, how much
farther is it? What’s its name? Any hippies hang out there?”
“I wish,” Sadie sighed.
“God do I wish. It’s called Whitman Park and it’s at the end of the block
and God am I going to blow this burg just as soon as I can and take off
for somewhere real. Where things happen. Where I can
do things, my own thing, and where they haven’t even HEARD
of McDonald’s! But look at this place—”
She gestured at a stretch
of common greenery turning grey in May.
“Saturday afternoon in the
park, and nobody here.”
“What about them?” said Skeeter, indicating a smooching couple. The male
was in Bermuda shorts, the female in culottes, and Blood Sweat & Tears
oozed out of their transistor radio.
“Oh wow! Free love! Here
come the hippies!” “Well,”
said Skeeter, “maybe everyone else is at a wedding reception.”
They wandered on to the
playground area, where Skeeter promptly claimed a swing.
“C’mon Sadie!”
“That’s kid stuff.”
“I am a kid! I like to
swing! Look, I’m a swinger!”
Sadie broke up a bit at
that and took the next swing over, rocking on her bootheels and displaying
a good deal of healthy teenage thigh.
“I wish I had long
legs,” said Skeeter. “And red hair too. And freckles. And bosoms. In fact
I wish I looked exactly like you.”
“This is understandable,”
said Sadie. “Well, don’t worry, kiddo, give yourself a few years. I mean I
sometimes wish I could wear pink. Or had blue eyes like yours. And
you’re almost strawberry blonde, that’s kind of like red; we could make
you an honorary redhead—”
But Skeeter was too busy swinging with careless abandon to pay heed.
“Faaaar out!” she swooped, down and out and up: “Helter Skelter! Comin’
down faaaast!” Party frock and petticoat fluttering, down and in and back:
“Tell me tell me tell me the answer—”
“I know the answer,”
Sadie assured her. “I know all the answers. You got any questions about
Life, kiddo, just pass them on to me.”
Skeeter immediately wanted
to know why she had to chew with her mouth closed while eating seafood,
did Sadie get it? “See” food? Like “for all to see?” Cackle-ackle-ackle!
Her companion maintained
tightlipped silence for a minute or two, then went “Knock knock.” Who was
there? Howard. Howard who?
“How weird of you to ask that question,” said Sadie, gratified when
Skeeter fell off her swing in hysterics. “You okay?”
“Hey! I never get
hurt.” “You live with your
grandmother, right? Out in Marble Orchard?”
“Yeah, but not just with
her,” said Skeeter, resuming her swinger career. “There’s Supertimmy and
New Junebug, my two ponies.”
“Oh you lucky! God I’d love
to have even one pony.”
“Well, I’ve also got this guinea pig named William, I was going to call
him Billy Boy ‘cause I thought he’d be great to play hide-‘n’-seek with,
you know, ‘Ohh-ohh where have you been, charming Billy?,’ but he’s really
dull even for a guinea pig and won’t eat anything but graham crackers. You
can have William if you like.”
Sadie chose not to pursue
this handsome offer. “So how long haven’t you lived with your mom?”
“Oh, I dunno. Three or four
years? She’s only got this apartment, see, on Harding Street, with this
kitchen sink that backs up every so often. (Yuggh.) You should hear her
yell at the landlord. Gramma says I’ve got her tongue, what do you think?”
Skeeter exhibited the tongue in question in Sadie’s direction, then paid
another visit to Gigglesville.
“So what happens…” went
Sadie, crossing her legs and attracting the eye of Bermuda Shorts even as
he smooched Culottes. “What if, say, your mom and my dad were to get
married?” “I hope they do,”
said Skeeter, who hadn’t thought about it. “Your dad’s a sweetie. He
blushed when I kissed him.”
“Well, he is nice,” Sadie allowed. “For a drugstore manager. I mean
that’s such an Establishment job.”
“What do you want him to
be, a drug dealer?” “What
do you know about dealers, kiddo?”
“Hey! I get around,” said
Skeeter, swinging up and down.
“Oh wow, I bet… Your mom
seems like fun. And Dad’s been so lonesome since my mother died. What
about your father?”
“Oh, he’s a major or something” (swing high) “in the Marines. He sends me”
(swing low) “cards and money and stuff.”
“Is he in Vietnam?”
“Probably.”
“That’s disgusting!”
“Hey, he wanted to go. They
kept turning him down, see, when he wanted to be an astronaut.”
“An astronaut! That’s
disgusting too, all those millions of dollars spent on the moon instead of
down here on Earth.” And Sadie held forth for some little while on her
opinion of Project Apollo, from which Skeeter might have learned a lot had
she not been paying closer attention to the park fauna.
“I love squirrels,” she
remarked. “What?”
“Squirrels! They’re so cute
‘n’ stupid, I could look at them all day.”
These enormous red ones had
appeared in Marble Orchard during a raging blizzard the previous December,
the day of her Grampa Otto’s funeral. Like giant flying Rockys they had
flung themselves out of nowhere onto the Otto birdfeeders, and looted
them. “I stood at the
window all day long watching those squirrels in the snow, and just laughed
and laughed. Everyone thought I was being weird and my mom got so
mad, but it was funny… I wish I could get a squirrel to come eat
nuts from my hand. But I can’t ever keep still long enough, and anyway I
don’t have any nuts.”
Sadie, uncrossing and recrossing her legs, suggested that Skeeter needed
to learn yoga. And (despite her exasperation at Skeeter’s immediate “Yoga!
What if I make a boo-boo?”) she demonstrated the basics of om mani
padme hum, which soon had Skeeter rolling on the ground again.
“Oh forget it! You
are being weird! Come on, we might as well go.” They left the
playground and started back. “Our folks shouldn’t get married anyway,”
Sadie added. “Why not?”
“What they really ought to
do is live together. You don’t need a piece of paper from the City Hall to
guarantee you happiness.”
“No, but a Big Mac’d sure help.”
“Gag! You are one crazy
kid, you know that? Still… it’d be kind of nice to have a sister.”
“You have a sister.”
“Oh, Alexis. And you think
your guinea pig’s a bore.”
Alexis, it seemed, had spent years acting as though she were Sadie’s
mommy—Arnold’s, too. And even that wouldn’t have been so bad had Alexis
not been so awfully dress shields and pantygirdle and Julie Eisenhower
about it, so essentially “Mrs. Lenny Czolgosz”—
Pause in midphilippic to
laugh. “She made me go with her when she was picking out her patterns and
stuff, right? God you should’ve been there—I found this big white
maternity smock and shouted, ‘Alexis! This is just what you’ll need for
your wedding gown!’” Even
so: it might be nice to have a little sister of one’s own. To show
and tell and teach things about Life—
“You mean one you can boss
around,” said her intended. “You think you can boss me around, do you? No
way!” Sadie lapsed into
speechlessness and remained there the rest of the way out of the park,
till just at the verge where they encountered some newcomers and Skeeter
blurted, “Wow! Real live Negroes!” right out loud.
“SSSHHHH!… Get over
here! What is the matter with you? They prefer to be called
‘Blacks,’ or ‘Afro-Americans!’”
“I like the way they
dress,” said Skeeter. “You
got that right,” said one of the newcomers.
Sadie was still lecturing
about race relations and social injustice when they reached the edge of
Oswald Avenue. Here Skeeter found it necessary to punch her on the arm.
“Ow! What was that for?”
“Slug-Bug went by,” Skeeter
explained, pointing to a passing Volkswagen. “Look, there goes another—”
“Ow! Quit it! Who do
you think you’re punching, squirt?”
“Gee, Sadie, I thought it
was you.” “Well cut it out!
I mean it!” “Are you
bossing me again? We’re not sisters yet, so nyaah.”
“You’re not going to live
long enough to be anybody’s sister when I get hold of you—come back here!”
The Whitman squirrels were
then treated to the spectacle of a leggy young redhead chasing a cackly
pink midget back into the park, and losing her in the underbrush.
“All right, where are you?…
Aw, come on, kid—your mom’s not going to like it if you go disappearing.”
Skeeter popped out of the
shrubbery with a sudden “YAAAAA,” causing Sadie to gasp and fall to her
knees. “You little bozo! If
you’ve ripped my pantyhose I’ll strangle you with ‘em!”
“I didn’t rip them,
you fell. I was only trying to give you a hug.”
Sadie, her knees still
bequeathed to the dirt, held out a solemn pair of freckled arms that
Skeeter approached and nimbly dodged as Sadie lunged and missed and landed
on her elbows this time.
“Well tsk,” went Skeeter in response to the fallen one’s profanity. “Look
what you’ve done. Made a mess of your pretty dress. What am I going
to do with you?” The
question, for a murderous moment, seemed rather what was going to be done
with-and-to Skeeter Kitefly. But then Sadie unbent her coppery brows and
said, “Oh well. I guess I can always tie-dye it.”
“That’d be COOwull! Can I
help?” Sadie glanced at
her, jocose and twinkle-eyed and not yet ten. “You can help me up. No, no,
come back and help me, I’m too tired to fight, and I’ve got these damn
boots on… uffff. Thanks.” She went through the motions of brushing herself
off, with Skeeter’s energetic assistance. “Ow. Stop!… okay. So: if my dad
and your mom do get whatever’d, what about you? Would you move here and
live with us?” “Sure!”
“What about your
grandmother and guinea pig and what’s their names, your two ponies?”
“Oh,” said Skeeter, and
considered. “Well, I could always go visit them. Except William; he’s too
dull. Besides, I won’t need two ponies when you teach me how to
drive.” “I haven’t
learned myself yet—” “And I
wouldn’t mind having a sister either, a big sister, think of it! I could
borrow all your clothes when I get big enough, and your makeup and jewelry
and stuff, and then when you split for Somewhere Real I’ll get your room
and furniture and everything. Maybe your car too, and all your old
boyfriends.” “Oh really!
You’ve got a lot to learn about Life, kiddo.”
“And you’re going to teach
me! Oh Sadie! You can teach me all about sex and drugs and yoga, and
you’ll try to boss me and I won’t let you, and we’ll have such
freakin’ fun. This is going to be great! We’ll get our folks together, and
be sisters forever and ever. I can hardly wait!”
And if Sadie B. had any
second thoughts at this point, they didn’t get aired as Skeeter went
skipping off, afoot and lighthearted, truckin’ on through a patch of
dandelions and kicking into puffereens all those as had not already
inherited the wind. •
[Sadly, The Sidewalk's End is now gone from the Web. Above is a
replica of their November 2002 publication.]
Copyright © 2002-2008
by P. S. Ehrlich; All Rights Reserved. |