The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate

I ran out of there and did my best to forget the conversation, but it nagged at me all the way to the river like a tooth beginning to go bad. All joy had fled the morning. Mother was awakening to the sorry facts: My biscuits were like stones, my samplers askew, my seams like rickrack. I considered my mother’s life: the mending basket that never emptied, the sheets and collars and cuffs to be turned, the twenty loaves of bread to be punched down each and every week. It’s true that she didn’t have to do all the heavy cleaning herself—she had SanJuanna for that. And a washerwoman came on Monday and spent the whole day boiling the clothes in the dripping laundry shed out back. Viola killed and plucked and cooked the chickens. Alberto dispatched and butchered the hogs. But my mother’s life was a never-ending round of maintenance. Not one single thing did she ever achieve but that it had to be done all over again, one day or one week or one season later. Oh, the monotony.

The day didn’t begin to look up until I caught a spotted fritillary butterfly. They were swift and elusive and difficult to net. I knew Granddaddy would be well pleased, plus it helped keep my mind off cooking and mending. When I got home, it took me a whole hour just to set the delicate body in preparation for mounting, and by then I had forgotten what an ignorant girl I was. Just as well, as the campaign to bring me up to domestic scratch was, without my knowledge or cooperation, ginning up in earnest.

The campaign gained momentum when Miss Harbottle decided that all the girls in my class would enter their handiwork in the Fentress Fair. This was distressing news. I found sewing a waste of time, and I had been easing along doing the minimum. My work could charitably be described as sloppy, like Petey’s cocoon. Stitches dropped themselves and later reappeared at random so that the long striped scarf I was knitting bulged in the middle like a python after dining on a rabbit. I fancied that a malevolent Rumpelstiltskin crept into my room at night and undid my best work, turning the gold of my efforts into pathetic dross on a wheel perversely spinning backward.

Although she’d been watching my knitting to some degree, it had been a while since Mother had inspected my fine sewing. One day she asked to check my work. I reluctantly took her my sewing bag, and she poked through it for a minute. “You did this?”

“Yes, Mother.”

“Are you proud of it?”

Was I proud of it? I pondered this. Was it a trick question or not? I couldn’t tell; I didn’t know which way to flop. “Uh . . .”

“I’m asking you, Calpurnia.”

“No, ma’am, I guess I’m not too proud of it.”

“Then why don’t you do work you can be proud of?”

I thought again. I had no snappy answer, so I had to fall back on honesty. “Because it’s boring, ma’am?” A truthful answer, but one I knew to be foolish, even as it exited my mouth.

“Ah,” said Mother. “Boring.”

A bad sign when she repeated your own words back to you like a parrot. Now, parrots. Those were some interesting birds, living to such a great age that they were passed down in the family will. Why, Granddaddy had told me about a parrot who had lived past his century and learned over four hundred conversational phrases, as acute a mimic as any human being . . .

“Calpurnia, I don’t believe you’re . . .”

Although I doubted I’d be allowed a parrot (Granddaddy had also told me they were very expensive), this didn’t necessarily exclude the possibility of something smaller, a cockatiel, say, or maybe a budgie. . . . Mother’s lips were moving. . . . Something about practicing?

“Have to do better . . .”

A budgie would do as the bird of last resort. They could be taught to speak, couldn’t they?

“When I was your age . . .”

And if I had a budgie, would I be allowed to let it fly loose in the house? Probably not. It would drop white dollops like antimacassars on the good furniture, and that would be the end of that. And you couldn’t forget Idabelle the Inside Cat in her basket by the stove. Maybe I could let it fly in my bedroom. It could perch on my headboard and chirrup in my ear, a pleasant sound—

“Calpurnia!”

I jumped. “Yes, Mother?”

“You’re not listening to me!”

I stared at her. How could she tell?

“You’d better listen to me. This situation is intolerable. Your work is unacceptable. I expect better from you, and you will do better, do you understand me? I’m surprised Miss Harbottle hasn’t sent me a note about this.”

She had. Two, in fact.

“You will show me your work every night until the fair.”

This meant that I’d have to pay more attention for a few weeks. Gloom tolled its heavy bell in my ear. I was a marked girl.

IT WAS GETTING on in the day. I’d had an inordinate and unfair amount of homework, and there were a couple of hours of decent working light left. I headed for the door at top speed. Mother sat in the parlor reviewing her housekeeping accounts. “Calpurnia,” she called, “the river again?”