Lizzie
Lizzie was the sick one, the one who wasn’t supposed to live past seven or eight. But Mama kept her wrapped up warm and dry, and made special foods to build her up. She never went to school or even out to play. Lizzie always wore white, right down to her gloves and stockings. Clean, white, and pure. That’s how I always think of her. Mama said Lizzie had a heart murmur; Doc Tate told her that when Lizzie was just a baby.
So, Lizzie was different from the rest of us. She never got dirty, or fought with us, or ran around. Her skin was like milk, and her eyes seemed to look inwards instead of out. She read books a lot and did fancy needlework. She sat in her chair by the fireplace all day, every day, her head bent over her embroidery. The colors Lizzie worked in were pale, too, like her—pink and robin’s egg blue and the pale green of new spring leaves. She seldom spoke. That is until we took in Cousin Francine’s son, Ned.
Ned had a job at the high school teaching English. One evening after supper, Ned asked Lizzie if she would monogram some handkerchiefs for him so they wouldn’t get confused with Pa’s in the wash. She just nodded.
The very next day, Ned came home with a hank of maroon floss he’d gotten at the mercantile. After supper, he pulled a chair over next to Lizzie’s and sat right down with a pad of paper and a pencil, and the two of them had a conversation about how she should sew his initials on the corners of those handkerchiefs. Mama set the rest of us to doing our lessons at the table after she’d cleared it, and I could hear clear as anything Lizzie and Ned talking and laughing and arguing over the design. Lizzie, laughing and arguing! I noticed Mama glancing over every few minutes, and I could see she wanted to warn Lizzie not to get too excited. You could see that Lizzie’s cheeks were getting pink, and she waved her hands around. She even reached over and took the paper and pencil from Ned, laughing while she did it and even bumped him with her elbow like she was making a joke. Lizzie was getting downright rowdy, and Ned was laughing like she was a comedian down at the Grand Theater like they have on Saturdays before the two-reeler. I kept making mistakes in my arithmetic homework because I was so amazed to hear Lizzie acting like a real person.
The next morning Lizzie was sitting in her chair by the fireplace, bent over her sewing when I came down to breakfast. Her needle flashed in the light from the fire, and the fine, maroon letters seemed to dance on the linen, and there was a stack of finished ones piled in the basket by her feet. “ EO’dF” each one said—Edward Frank O’day—and in real fancy letters, too. That was Ned’s real name, and when I told her she had the letters confused, she informed me that “the initial of the surname is always in the center.” I had to ask what a surname was. “It’s your last name,” she said with a sniff, as if she couldn’t be bothered to answer any more stupid questions.
After that day, Lizzie’s embroidery took on a whole new color. She asked Mama to send to the mercantile for bright colors—red and royal blue and orange and emerald green and purple. She stopped embroidering flowers and little birds and made dragons and sunsets and fanciful creatures I couldn’t even name.
Six months later, when Ned left to take a teaching job in Williston, twenty miles away, Lizzie left with him.
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