The Umbrella Lady Read online

  “Your mother was a good teacher,” she would say. “Good teachers don’t simply fill their students with facts; they teach them how to think correctly.”

  My mother insisted on homeschooling me even though my father had thought I belonged with other children my age. He said he was even willing to spend the money on a private school. But Mama, who had her teaching certificate and until the time I was born had worked as a substitute grade-school teacher often, believed she could prepare me better for what was to come. She also claimed that teaching me gave her something important to do.

  “I’m not saying you can’t do it, Lindsey,” he told her. “I’m saying she needs to be with other children her age, although sometimes you act as if you are one of them.”

  She ignored him, which made him angrier.

  His face reddened. “You’re keeping her here to amuse you because you won’t return phone calls from our friends and do something with other wives. You think you’re punishing me, but you’re punishing us all.”

  I didn’t know what that meant, but after a while, he stopped arguing with her about it. But because of what I had seen on television and what I heard other children my age say to each other, I knew they had made friends in school and went to birthday parties and went to friends’ houses to play or had friends come to theirs. I had no friends. I never had anyone to my birthday party. I wished Mama had agreed with Daddy about it.

  Only a week or so before the fire, Mama had stopped to look at me while I was sitting on the floor watching a television show that had children my age doing things together. I could feel her gazing at me and turned to her, my eyes surely full of question marks. It wasn’t unusual to see her stop and stare at me and then move on when I looked back at her, wondering if I had made a mistake, like putting on two different socks, something I had often done because I was in a rush to get dressed. What was it now? What had I done wrong?

  “You’ll have friends, too, when you go to school. It won’t be that much longer now. Don’t be sad.”

  Was I sad? Why didn’t I realize I was sad? Didn’t sad people cry? I wondered. I couldn’t remember when I had cried last. Even Daddy had thought about that. He had looked at me at dinner one night and said, “This kid never whines.” He had said it as if that was a terrible thing. I had looked at my mother, who did seem to think hard about it for a moment and then nodded and said, “She’s precocious. She already realizes the futility.”

  I didn’t know what any of that meant, but I could see it wasn’t an answer Daddy liked. He had put his head down and eaten faster, after which he abruptly rose and left us.

  I had turned back to the television show. I didn’t agree or deny I was sad. I really wasn’t sure. She had left the room. I had listened to her going up the stairs with those very slow, ponderous footsteps, sounding as if she was climbing up forever. She might go into her bedroom, sit on the bed, and just stare at the wall as if it was a television screen. Soon after, her eyes, like melting icicles, would drip tears down her cheeks.

  Daddy had been right. She had no friends, either. No one invited her to a birthday party. Maybe she should return to teaching in a public school, I had thought. The memory of all that floated through my mind like a passing bruised cloud dragging in a storm. Just like leafless trees, the sky could look angry, too. Maybe the clouds were mad at the wind for pushing them roughly about. Sometimes I thought we were surrounded by unhappiness, and if we left the door or window open, it would spill in.

  A chill brought me back to today and this train station.

  I had no idea how much time had passed while I was sitting on the bench and coloring. I didn’t have a watch, and there was no clock on the platform. The station looked small and old, more like one in some cowboy movie I had seen watching television with Daddy. The wood of its walls was a fading gray, and there weren’t any windows on the side where I sat, just some old posters, practically unreadable, some lopsided, and a rusty-looking wheelbarrow overturned. I could see spiderwebs in it.

  Now that I was paying more attention to where I was, I realized that darkness had crept in everywhere and challenged the rim of illumination the station platform lights had created. It looked like shadows were constantly trying to invade the lit space but were bouncing off. I put my nearly finished coloring book inside my closed coat, pulled up and embraced my legs, and rocked because it seemed to keep me warmer. It was so quiet that I could hear the hum of the lights above the platform.

  I was a little tired again, so I shut my eyes and tried to think of nice things and nice times, like when Daddy and I flew a kite in our backyard and when Mama could still pluck laughter out of the air like someone picking the blueberries that grew on bushes in the woods behind our house. I could feel my face soften into a smile from the memories and lowered my head to my knees.

  That was when I heard someone say, “My, my, my. Look at what I’ve found here.”

  When I opened my eyes, there she was, standing right in front of me, a lady holding a closed black umbrella with a silver handle. I didn’t know from where she had come. No train had pulled in. She was suddenly there, as if she had taken shape from a shadow.

  “Are you waiting for a train, missy?” she asked.

  There were little brown dots over the crests of the Umbrella Lady’s cheeks and on both sides of her chin. They weren’t freckles. They looked like someone with a sharply pointed brown Magic Marker had dabbed her face when she was asleep and she couldn’t wash it off. There was even a very small one at the tip of her nose.

  Her eyes reminded me of large purple-blue marbles like the ones in a flowerpot Mama had kept on a shelf by the dining-room window. The marbles went around the inside rim. There hadn’t been a flower in it for a long time. Daddy had called it “a potted gravesite” and said, “It’s just dirt, not very attractive, even with those silly marbles you’ve placed in it so carefully. What’s the point of a pot of decorated dirt, Lindsey?”

  Mama had seemed not to notice or care. Maybe she was always expecting a new flower would just appear, because she would often pause to look at it. She did that so often that I grew into the habit of looking at it first thing in the morning, too, hoping the flower would be there.

  “Yes, I am waiting for a train,” I said now. “Thank you for asking. I’m waiting for my father to return first, and then we’ll board.”

  I did that quite perfectly, I thought. I’m a little lady. Mama would flash one of her recently infrequent smiles if she had heard me. Part of homeschooling was something she called social graces. She would show me how to walk and sit and greet people. If I did it right, she’d clap and hug me. I knew I wouldn’t get that from a teacher in public or even private school.

  Lately, however, whenever she had smiled, she looked like she had just risen and was surprised it was daytime, even if she had been up for hours and hours. And then her smile would float off and evaporate. She would return to what Daddy had called “her face drenched in sleepwalking.” She had cut back on my homeschooling, too. Sometimes it barely lasted an hour before she would get that far-off look in her eyes. I had to do a lot more to amuse myself.

  The Umbrella Lady glanced behind her and then down toward the other end of the station platform before she looked longer and with more interest at me. She was tall, with shoulders that seemed as wide as Daddy’s. In the dim light, her face and neck were yellowish white.

  “Where did he go? The station is closed.”

  She sounded angry, and I wondered if she was some sort of train-station clerk. She wasn’t wearing any sort of uniform, nor did she have a badge. The hem of her gray dress stuck out from under her heavy wool black coat. Her black shoes had thick, wide heels, and she had black socks that went up under her skirt.

  “I don’t know exactly,” I said. “He wanted to buy us things we need right now.”

  “What things?”

  I shrugged. I didn’t want to list anything. “Things. We don’t have very much with us. I know he wanted a newspaper,
and he was getting me some books.”

  She started to smile but abruptly stopped and looked quite upset.

  “When is he supposed to come for you? There are no more trains tonight. And why wouldn’t he take you to buy things, if that’s what he’s doing?” She asked her questions with her head tilted a little, as if she was testing me to see how I would answer, if I knew the answer.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I had begun to wonder that myself. Mama would never, ever leave me alone like this, and she would surely be very angry at him for doing so now. But I couldn’t tell her. I couldn’t tell her anything, ever again, and I certainly wasn’t going to tell the Umbrella Lady.

  “Did he say anything else?” she asked. “Well?” She sounded like someone who had run out of patience and would soon be stamping her feet.

  I looked again for him. I didn’t want to say anything that would get him in trouble. Maybe this lady really was some sort of policewoman in a disguise. I recalled Daddy accusing Mama of being one when she had confronted him with something on our credit-card bill, but I had no idea what it was or why she was so angry.

  “My father said, ‘Work on this until I come back,’ ” I said, and took out my coloring book to show her. Maybe that would stop her from asking all these questions, I thought.

  She plucked it out of my fingers and looked at it, turning it around to look at the back and then the front again.

  “Is this brand-new?” She brought it to her face and closed her eyes. “It smells brand-new and still has the sticker that tells its price on the cover.” She looked very suspicious.

  Did she think Daddy had stolen it?

  “Yes. He bought it for me today or yesterday, and a new box of crayons, but he didn’t give them to me until we were here and I was sitting on this bench.”

  “Why didn’t he give them to you on the train?” she asked. She looked even more upset now. “You’d think he’d know enough to do that. For children, it’s boring just sitting on a train. Well?” she followed again when I didn’t answer instantly. She scowled and looked quite disapproving.

  I shrugged. It wasn’t a mystery and certainly nothing to get as upset over as she was. “He forgot and fell asleep. Then I fell asleep, too. He wouldn’t wake me up just to give them to me.”

  She paused, her scowl slowly disappearing. Then she took a deep breath that lifted her bosom up against her coat. She tilted her head back, as if she wanted to look down at me from a great height.

  “Sleep is the best way to travel,” she said, nodding. “Most children will if they have to travel long.”

  She started to smile again but stopped.

  “But giving you things to do is just as good. He should know that. Even my father knew that, and he wasn’t fond of children. But fathers and mothers were children once, too. They should remember all that when they have children of their own. Some people turn their childhood memories off like a faucet because they can’t stand remembering, and some people should shut them off because they never stop babbling about how much better things were then. They can rupture your ears.”

  She paused and looked harder at me.

  “Which one are you? Someone who can’t stop remembering or someone who should?”

  I shrugged. I didn’t want to tell her I had memories I wanted to stuff in a hole in the ground. It would surely make me cry, and she would have many more questions.

  “I don’t know. I turn my faucet off and on, but I’m too young to remember much yet.”

  “Very clever,” she said, nodding. “You know how to avoid an answer, and yet you are very honest. I like a little girl who is honest and clever at the same time.”

  She flipped through the coloring book and continued nodding, with a look that was now full of approval and delighted surprise.

  “The colors you chose are perfect for each and every thing you’ve colored in, and not a color out of the lines. It’s all very good,” she said. “If I were going to give it a grade, I’d give it an A plus, plus.”

  She paused and squinted at me.

  “It’s almost all done. You must have been working on it carefully for hours and hours. Has it been hours?” she asked suspiciously.

  “I think so,” I said. “I don’t have a watch.”

  “Oh, you don’t need a watch to know you’ve been here long. We all have a built-in tick-tock. You know just when it’s morning. You know just when you’re hungry, and you know just when you’re tired enough to go to sleep. What else would a little girl like you need to know?”

  “I need to know when my father will return,” I said. I almost added, thank you very much, but didn’t because it would surely make her feel foolish.

  She smiled. I guess I was making her happy, and she looked like someone who needed to be happier. Maybe that was why she stopped to talk to me. She couldn’t be pleased about her graying light-brown hair. I thought she had it cut too short. It was so thin that I could see the little bumps on her scalp because of how the station-platform lights shone on and behind her head.

  “You’re such a smart little girl. Some parents can’t handle their children when they are so smart. They ask too many questions. For them, it’s like too much rain. You can’t ask for no rain, can you? That’s a drought, and nothing will grow, just like if children don’t ask questions, they won’t grow.”

  I didn’t know what to say. She sounded right, but I had never thought of questions that way, and for a moment I worried that I hadn’t asked enough and I wouldn’t grow. I looked anxiously at her, expecting her to tell me more. She seemed very wise.

  “Did your parents ever tell you to stop asking questions?”

  “No,” I said quickly. I almost added, but often they would act like I hadn’t asked anything.

  “I see,” she said.

  “Are you waiting for a train, too?” I asked. Maybe she was hoping she could ride with Daddy and me.

  “What?” She smiled softly. “Is that what you think? I told you there are no more trains tonight.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe you’re waiting for someone who’s coming on a train. Are you?”

  “There are no trains leaving, and there are no trains coming tonight. But you are inquisitive. See? You are full of questions. That’s good. You’re bound to grow up fast,” she said, and then paused. “Maybe too fast. That kind of little girl gets into big trouble if she is not guided correctly.”

  I didn’t know what she meant. How do you grow up too fast? And how could she say there would be no more trains? Daddy told me we were getting off to get on another one. She just doesn’t know, I thought. Daddy had the train schedule in his pocket, didn’t he?

  She handed my coloring book back to me and stood straighter, pulling her shoulders back but keeping both palms down on the handle of her umbrella. She looked left and right again. We were still alone on the train platform, and the only thing I heard was a car horn far off to my right, sounding mournful and sad, like a lost goose. We often heard them over the lake near our house.

  “There’s probably nothing sadder in the world than a bird losing its sense of direction,” Mama once told me when we were both sitting outside and listening. “A panicked bird will fly in circles until it dies.”

  We couldn’t see the birds, so I wondered how she knew any had lost their sense of direction. I sort of felt like that right now. I knew Mama had felt like that often.

  There wasn’t anything nice about where I was right now. There was nothing pretty to look at or interesting to hear. The bench was feeling hard and uncomfortable, and I was tired of talking. I didn’t like what I smelled around me, either. It made my stomach growl. I thought the Umbrella Lady would realize all that and would leave if she wasn’t waiting for someone and there was no train for her to catch, but she leaned toward me, both her hands still on the handle of her umbrella, looking like someone I had seen on television who was about to do a dance with an umbrella.

  With her face so close, I could see tiny pimples under both her e
yes, which were really that purple-gray color like some of the flowerpot marbles. Her eyebrows had little gray strands in them, too. I sat back a little more, because she was close enough to kiss me. Also, it took her longer than it would take most people to speak again. She was staring hard at me and thinking too much, I thought. Maybe I was thinking too much. Daddy accused Mama of that all the time.

  “The long silences in this house are unhealthy,” he had told her. He had looked at me and then added, “The kid hardly speaks. I wonder why?”

  When Daddy spoke to Mama like that, the silences only got longer and deeper.

  “What’s your name?” the Umbrella Lady asked finally, like someone who just remembered it was an important question to ask.

  “Saffron,” I said.

  She nodded and said, “Good,” as if that was the right name. Most people when they heard my name would smile and say, “How unusual, but fitting.” They were thinking about the color of my hair.

  “Saffron Faith Anders,” I said.

  “Well, you are the first Saffron I have ever met. Do you like your name?”

  No one had ever asked me that. The Umbrella Lady asked as if she could change it if I wanted it changed.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Well, Saffron Faith Anders, I think you should come home with me. You probably haven’t eaten, and you are probably a little cold. Maybe more than a little, huh?” She pinched the collar of her coat closer together to emphasize how cold it was. “Brrr,” she said, shaking her head. “Yes, you’ll come with me, okay?”

  “But if I go with you, Daddy won’t know where I am,” I said, a little annoyed that I had to tell her something any grown-up would know.

  She thought a moment and then raised her right hand, her forefinger up. She shoved it into her dark-blue overcoat pocket and came out with a pencil that looked like it had been sharpened down to the size of a thumb. There was some fuzz around it that had come out on her fingers. She blew it off like someone blowing out birthday candles.