My mother had to use a megaphone when school started. Having spent the summer sleeping until noon every day, my siblings and I couldn’t be roused with anything less than a mighty roar. Once we were awake and up, we still needed the booming voice to referee our pre-breakfast battles:
“Those are my sox; if you don’t take them off right this minute I’ll break your leg!” . . . “Somebody used my toothbrush! Ecchhh!!” . . . “Are you going to stay in that bathroom forever?” . . . “Gimme my hairbrush; I paid for that with my own money!” . . . “I dare you to hit me! I dare you! I dare you! I dare you! Mom! He hit me!!” . . . little things like that.
Mama made the mistake of driving us to school on the first day because we were loaded down with school supplies. On the second day, we were screaming, “Walk a whole block in this heat? You’ve gotta be kidding!” Mama knew that if she drove us to school on a lovely, warm, late summer morning, we’d make demands come February, with three feet of snow and a wind-chill factor of 65 below. No, she just shoved us out the door and made us walk. We limped, dropped our books, lingered and loitered, in the hopes that she would change her mind. Never happened.
Mama knew better than to get too comfortable with the beginning of school. In a week, the school had figured out a way to dismiss at noon on Monday, cancel classes on Tuesday, and send the students on a field trip with her as chaperone on Wednesday.
Once all three of us were in school, Mama entered the work force and Daddy decided she needed a cleaning lady. On the day the cleaning lady arrived, Mama took the day off. She got up at five-thirty, scrubbed the floors and put up fresh curtains. “Nobody should think we’re pigs.” When the lady arrived, Mama had hot coffee ready for her. They sat and compared aches and pains, including a few heartaches, recipes, husbands, children and blood pressures. When she left they cried on each other’s shoulders, and mama promised to come and help her with her house real soon.
Bed making in our house began earlier than in most, and more suddenly. It started with either two or three of us on the bedroom floor, depending on which bed Mama overturned first. If we didn’t come to quickly enough, we often found ourselves folded up in a mattress. Or Mama would pretend to be considerate. She wouldn’t wake us. “You want to sleep? Sleep. Sleep. Sleep.” And she would pull the sheet out from under us, start pounding the pillows with a carpet beater, and proceed to make the bed with us in it.
One morning, I was sent home by my teacher moments after I arrived at school: “Young lady, you look sick. Go right home and tell your mother to put you to bed.” I walked into the house before Mama had left for work. I announced, “The teacher said I’m sick and that I should go to bed.”
“Are you sure you can’t sit up? I just made the bed!”