Hat Pin
We lived in a little corner of downtown on the edge of where the other houses were, in what Mom called a frame house, built way before she was born. Now it’s used by a real estate company, but it still looks like a house. There’s a closed-in front porch with lots of windows, as wide as the house. We never used it like rich people who sat around with coffee and newspapers; it was just a storage area for bikes, lawn chairs, things that could stand being cold because it wasn’t heated.
We kids, me Candace, my little brother Jimmy and little sister Carrie, used to play board games on the floor, which always needed paint but never got it. It was also one of the places we played house. There was always a mom and a dad, sister, brother, and whoever got last pick was the baby. We weren’t very advanced. It was easy to imagine the house activities; we knew what Mom did. We’d stand by a card table and pretend it was the sink where we washed dishes, and right next to it the stove for cooking hotdogs and grilled cheese sandwiches. A little ways off we’d do kid things like play with dolls or trucks. It was always indoors scenes, because it was called house. Whoever played Dad would eat and read the paper, maybe watch TV, and when he went to work he’d say goodbye and go to a far corner of the porch and say, “work, work work,” because that’s all we knew about it. What did we know about what goes on at an insurance company? Of course it could be a different dad, say a doctor who operated with pencils to imitate scalpels, though we didn’t know that word then, or a fireman who screeched like a siren and hoisted a broomstick like a firehouse up to the third floor.
One time we were so busy we didn’t notice a knock on the door, and then its opening. As the oldest I stood up from helping Carrie to diaper Tommy, the kid next door, who got baby this time, and faced the woman who had suddenly appeared there inside the porch. She was taller than Mom who was inside doing real mom things, but I didn’t know what to say when a stranger enters your house. If it’s outside you don’t talk to them. So I was confused.
The woman, who wore a small black hat over her gray hair and held a purse across her stomach as though that would protect it, said, “Hello children, I knocked but you didn’t hear me.”
I guess that made it alright, but I wasn’t sure. “I’ll go get my mother.”
“Yes, I’d like to speak with her.”
But then I thought, I’d send my little brother Jimmy, who was being the plumber fixing pipes under the card table, to get her. Then I could stay and watch the woman. I didn’t like the look of the hat pin in her old lady hat. Grandma had some on her dresser, so long and sharp even though they had smooth pearl heads. I’d watch her thrust them through her hat and ask her if it hurt. I guess not, because she just smiled at me then.
Jimmy, who was already eight and lorded it over the two younger kids, made a big deal about putting down his wrench, really a monster crayon, and wiping his hands on his shorts before he crawled out from under the sink and went into the house.
There wasn’t any place for the woman to sit down, but I did wonder if there should be, she was so old. It wasn’t just her hair, but the wrinkles that grooved down her cheeks on either side, like they could have been little dark rivers. Still, she stood up pretty straight, not like my grandma who couldn’t anymore.
My mother, with a dusting of flour on her nose–she was baking today–came charging through the door from the house, which banged into Carrie’s tricycle that shouldn’t be there. She had this odd look, not one of her usual ones which were either happy and nice, or irritated and scolding. This one looked scared somehow, maybe because her eyes were so wide open. I could tell she didn’t want this woman in the house. Maybe she didn’t like the hat pin either.
Mom told us to go back to our play, in her normal voice, except it was higher than usual. She didn’t tell us to go inside, which I thought she might do. Maybe she didn’t want us to think this was any big thing. Just a person she didn’t want to talk to. Grandma looked a little like this woman but lots of old people did. This was in the days when there were as many thin grandmas as fat ones. So Jimmy went back under the card table, and on top of it I set up Chutes and Ladders to distract Carrie who pulled at her braids and kept staring at the adults from the floor where she had Tommy wrapped in a blanket that was supposed to be a diaper.
I made Carrie and Tommy stand up at the side of the table facing away from the adults; Tommy so short his chin only reached the tabletop where he plunked it down and made crazy eyes, but I kept to the side where I could still watch.
We threw the dice a few times and the little kids moved their pieces, while Jimmy headed back under the table with his pretend wrench. Mom and the grandma person were talking, but it seemed more like they were poking each other with their words. Then the woman put a hand up to her hat, and I was afraid she’d pull out that awful pin so I nearly toppled the table over on my way to shove Mom back out of the way, but I made it look like I was chasing around the way kids do. Mom fell back against the two-wheeler I outgrew last year, and she took a lot of time to set it up again when she stood up.
“Candace, what are you doing?” Her eyes were still hard from talking to the woman.
“Mom I need to ask you something.”
She stood there looking at me and at the same time over my shoulder at the woman.
“In private.”
“Just a minute honey, we have company.”
I didn’t think it was company, and she was using it like a code word. So I gave her a look with raised eyebrows like monkeys do at the zoo who can wrinkle their foreheads even if they’re young. She knew what it meant. This was important.
She took my shoulder and whispered in my ear. “Don’t worry honey, I’ll handle this.” Then her smile that always meant everything was alright, but it was a little tight around the edges of her mouth.
So I went back to Chutes and Ladders, which was all messed up, but it was OK because we remembered where we were before.
I thought the adults would go outside, but the old woman tensed her legs against her narrow skirt and I could see her thighs, kind of strong looking against the other side of those little blue flowers all over her skirt.
Once when I was five, a lady like this came to the door and Mom didn’t even let her into the porch. It was about me not coming back to Sunday school, and why not. And Mom telling her I had come home crying about the crucifixion and that wasn’t something for a five-year-old. I was proud of her then, because she didn’t let that lady tell her what to do. But this was different because this woman was inside the house, even though it was only the porch.
The old lady pulled a letter out of her purse and handed it to Mom, but Mom let it just hang there dangling from those bony fingers. It had something red on it, like a circle, so it was probably important. When she tried to shove it into Mom’s hands, Mom let her arms drop, so the woman put the letter onto the card table, right next to the longest chute. I didn’t touch it, not if Mom wasn’t going to.
The woman said something angry, like a mad teacher when the kids were throwing spit balls. But Mom wasn’t a kid and she said something mad back at her. Then the woman did something so fast I couldn’t believe she was an old lady. She took that hat pin out and waved it around in the air and I thought she was going to kill mom so I screamed and ran into mom and all the kids ran to the corner of the porch except Jimmy who still had things to do to those pipes.
The next thing we knew is she was out the door, letting it bang behind her. But there on the table the six-inch hat pin trembled from being stabbed through the letter and the chute and into the table, the pearl end bobbing like some pale head of an alien with no eyes.
We all rushed to Mom, and hugged any place we could reach, and then Mom went straight to the porch door, her whole body against it. I heard the rusty creak of the lock that we never used because it was just a storm door. The real door was between the porch and the house.
She stayed there for a while, and I could see her breathing even from the back where the straps of her apron crisscrossed over her back. I sometimes wore it too because I liked the white ruffles on it.
When she turned around she hugged us all again, and then took my head in her hands and kissed my forehead.
“You did the right thing, Candace, I’m proud of you.”
I think that was not letting the woman come inside the house, but she didn’t say that.
That was our last summer on the porch. That fall we moved into an apartment. But we could still play house on the front stoop when it wasn’t raining. I liked to lie on the smooth concrete things on each side of the stairs, because they were like little slides, though not slippery like a real slide. We could even play Go to the Head of the Class if it wasn’t windy because then it would swoop all those question cards away. That wasn’t a problem on the old porch.
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Mary Lewis has an MFA in creative writing from Augsburg University, an MS in Ecology from the University of Minnesota, and taught in the Biology Department of Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. In 2023 two of her stories were nominated, one for a Pushcart prize, and another for both the 2023 Best of the Net Anthology and the Best American Series. Her work has appeared in dozens of journals, including: Antigonish Review, North American Review, Persimmon Tree, The Spadina Literary Review, and The Woven Tale Press.