How It Happened in Peach Hill by Marthe Jocelyn Read Free Book Online Page B

ma’am.”
    “Do your best. I will be here at half past eight.”

8
It is a lucky omen to meet
the same person twice when
you are out on business.
    My mother believed in the power of costume; her dresses could best be described as foreign. She favored hot colors, orange and scarlet and peach. Her skirts were longer than the current fashion and folded about her like the robes of a rajah’s wife. Her colored stockings arrived in brown packages through the post, and she bought them by the dozen. Mama would never dream of getting a bob—her luxurious black hair was part of her professional wardrobe.
    Mama thought people were more likely to trust a spiritual advisor who wore a disguise.
    “A priest, for example. Very dramatic, all in black. And look at the Pope! Now, there’s a daring costume for a homely man.”
    Part of Mama’s allure was to appear exotic, uncommon, a keeper of mystery and magic. She always looked ravishing, but as for me, I had never coped well with dresses. Mostly I wore silk smocks with loose, pajama-like trousers underneath.Mama ordered them from a Chinese lady in San Francisco, who also made fireworks. My only dress, the black one I wore for callings, had too many strings and pockets underneath to make it sensible for school.
    “Since they’re so damn insistent that you get an education, you can go naked as far as I’m concerned,” said Mama with a dismissive sneer.
    “I’ll make you a skirt,” offered Peg. “But I won’t have time until the weekend.”
    “I suppose I could just wear my own clothes,” I said. “The others already know what I look like. Who would I be trying to impress?”
    Sammy Sloane’s face appeared in my mind’s eye, exactly the person I’d be trying to impress, but I couldn’t admit that out loud. I imagined Sally Carlaw and Delia de Groot cackling behind their hands.
    “You could borrow my Sunday skirt,” suggested Peg. “Until Saturday. I’ll make you something of your own then.”
    “Oh, Peg! Thank you!”
    Sammy smiled at me while Sally and Delia turned away in jealous awe.
    Back when I was six, when most children were in the first grade, Mama was La Bella Flora, the fortune-teller for Lenny’s Famous Fun Fair. We lived in a real caravan, painted like a Gypsy wagon, and we traveled up and down the East Coast, pausing in towns for a couple of nights at a time. But that autumn, when I was six, Lenny broke his leg in a fall from the practice trapeze, and we stayed in a place called Turkleton for several weeks. All of us carnival kids went tothe local school, to keep the authorities off Lenny’s back. There were four others besides me: the nine-year-old Turino twins, who performed as savages and ate raw meat; Greta, the Fat Lady’s dainty daughter; and Isabelle, my first friend, who was eight and could already speak four languages.
    I was placed in the first grade.
    My mother had taught me to read when I was three, so even back then I was bored to weeping with the Elson Reader. I was learning to juggle, and I knew the trick to lying on a bed of nails. I’d tried the trapeze and watched a man eat fire every night. First grade didn’t hold much allure.
    On what was to be my first morning at Peach Hill Primary, Mama sat home in a bath full of lavender-scented bubbles, daring me to go through with it. I walked out the door with Mrs. Newman and closed it firmly behind me.
    Half an hour later, studying the rows of six-year-old heads in front of me, I cursed my own pride.
    The letters of the alphabet marched across the top of the blackboard in Miss Carruthers’ classroom. Paper oak leaves frolicked up and down the door frame.
    “This is Annie, boys and girls. She will be joining us in room 102. Please make her feel welcome.”
    Everyone clapped politely. Miss Carruthers pointed to an empty miniature desk and I felt like a rhinoceros blundering my way to the back row. We stood to salute the flag and then bowed our heads and said a prayer. Little faces kept