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Mommie cooked simply-grilled meat and a steamed vegetable was our usual fare, while Aunt Peggy's food was heavier and spicy. One night she fixed pork chops with string beans for dinner. The meat was overcooked, the flavoring strange, the string beans a pile of mush accompanying a quarter of the plate. Mommie has always said I had to taste everything and show manners when I was a guest. I managed to swallow the meat, but refused the string beans.

Uncle Paul, his voice cracked by emphysema, ordered me to eat my string beans in his Billy Goat Gruff tone.

I refused.

He insisted, and I refused instantly. Aunt Peggy tries to intervene, joking that Uncle Paul has been a corporal in the army and sometimes it seemed he had never left. He cut his hazel eyes at her, warning her to stay out of this. Then he looked at me.

"You're not leaving this table until you eat your vegetables," he declared.

"I won't and you can't make me!" I shot back.

The battles lines had been drawn. They wouldn't let me leave, but I could make dinner unpleasant for them. I scraped the string beans from one side of the plate to the other with my fork while kicking the table underneath with my heavy oxford shoes.

Finally I was sent upstairs, to my room above the kitchen. Mommie had never made me eat food I didn't want. She would never have banished me from the dinner table. I stomped on the gray linoleum floor, knowing the noise would interrupt Peggy and Paul's dinner.

I heard murmuring below-Paul wanted to come upstairs, but Peggy was telling him firmly to let me get it out of my system. I would show them. I dragged my desk chair to the top of the stairs and pushed it down. It rattled down the steps with such a ruckus that it startled even me, but when no one came, I picked up the little pink stool from the night table and sent it down to. Then all my dolls. And then my books.

A nice-nice heap was growing at the front door of the stairs when the phone rang. I could tell from Aunt Peggy's voice after she answered that it was my mother. I redoubled my efforts then, screaming and crying as loud as I could.

After a while, Aunt Peggy called me to the phone. I pounded down the stairs, grunting and sobbing as I stepped over the pile of furniture on the landing, drooling, my eyes nearly swollen shut from my crying. Taking the phone from Peggy, I poured out the whole story to Mommie. I thought surely she would come on the next bus and save me from these mean people and their nasty food.

Instead she just listened and then quietly said, "You must do as Peggy tells you."

I protested, but she repeated herself and she told me to go, immediately, and apologize to Paul. Her quiet voice carried more authority than all of his haranguing. I hung up the phone and did as she said.

Then Aunt Peggy made me carry everything up the stairs.

In Aunt Peggy's house, I spent hours on my rocking horse, Harry.

Harry had been a present to me from my mother's then boyfriend, an Italian janitor from the Bronx. I had named him after the singer Harry Belafonte, whose 1956 Calypso album had just become the first album to sell over a million copies. "Day-O" was one of my favorite songs, not least for its refrain, "Daylight comes and me wan' go home."

Peggy and Paul had placed Harry opposite the big upholstered chair where Peggy liked to sit while chatting on the phone. I would Pat Harry's neck the way I'd seen the Lone Ranger pat his horse, Silver, on TV, and Harry would come alive. When I spurred his hide, his hollow body answered with a sound as big as the echo across a valley. Away we'd ride, Susannah of the Mounties and Harry, traveling through the Western Territories.

I imagine that I was a girlish Barbara Stanwyck, chasing the bad guys through the crags and gullies in the northern Rocky Mountains. Mother had left me to tend the ranch by myself for a couple of days while she helped the army scout Indians down In Georgia.

Peggy and Paul would watch as I rocked back and forth, oblivious to my surroundings. Once Paul looked at Peggy nervously. "Hey you think she's all right?" he asked. He said "all right" in the tone you use when you are wondering if someone's cuckoo.

When I was a teenager, Peggy told me this story with a conspiratorial laugh and a wrinkle in her eye, as if the answer might still be in doubt. She recalled approaching me on one particular occasion as I rocked away in my own little world.

"June," she called.

No response.

"June," she called again."

Sitting on Harry in the corner of the dining room, I looked out over a ridge at the morning fog. Gradually, shape occurred. It was oval, the color of autumn leaves. I strained to make it out and vaguely heard my name. Then the room came into focus, and I found myself looking into Peggy's lean, caramel-colored face. She wore a concerned expression.

"Come on," Aunt Peggy said. It's time for your bath and to get ready for bed.

Bathing together was a daily ritual for Mommie and me: we luxuriated in a tub of bubbles and giggled over the day's events like two girlfriends having tea.

"We don't have any bubble bath," Aunt Peggy said the first time I asked her for my bottle of bubble bath.

"Are you going to get in the tub with me?" I asked.

"No, this is your bath."

"But if it's my bath, why can't I have bubbled? I persisted.

"I told you, we don't have any. Besides, you'll spill them all over the floor and make a mess."

"I don't make a mess in New York," I whined.

"Child, get in that water and stop making such a fuss," Peggy responded, exasperated.

The water barely reached my waist. Exposed, my chest and shoulders felt cold. Mommie and I filled the tub chest high in New York, but the water pressure in Atlantic City was so low that filling the giant claw-foot tub would have taken forever. Besides, Aunt Peggy worried about the water bill. I submerged a washcloth in the water the way Mommie did to cover herself and leaved back, but the ceramic surface of the tub felt cold against my skin, and I jumped back, splashing water onto Peggy-thus making the mess she had predicted.

I tried to create bubbles using a bar of Ivory soap. But instead, of bubbles, a scummy film appeared in the water.

"Ush! Dirt! I want to get out!"

"That's dirt from you," Peggy said, handing me a worn washcloth. "Here, take some soap and scrub that dirty neck."

"If there were bubbles, there wouldn't be any dirt," I muttered.

Peggy sighed and got down on her knees. She took the washcloth, put some soap on it, and started scrubbing my arms and face and the back of my neck. Her hands were larger than Mommie's, her fingers more slender, her nails longer, filed into ovals, ridged and unpolished. Occasionally, a nail poked through the threadbare washcloth and caught my skin, each pinch a reminder that this was not New York, that Mommie wasn't here, and that there were no bubbles.

"Ow!" I said, as Peggy's finger dug inside my ears.

"Did I hurt you? I'll be softer, "Peggy said.

Mommie wore no rings, but Peggy wore three on her left hand: a diamond wedding band and engagement ring on the third finger and a jade oval on her pinkie. Now she removed the rings and placed them in the metal soap dish that hooked over the side of the tub. I watched them floating in the soapy water as Peggy attacked the dirt on the back of my neck. The shadow there never disappeared. Mommie told Peggy it was a birthmark, but to Peggy, it looked more like caked dirt.

By the time she gave up, that washcloth was worn through.

 
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