"I don't, either," I confessed. "I just like the little hills."
"Katy's a fraidy-baby," Jessie said. "No, I'm not," I replied, but I knew it was true that I was.
"Ride with me, Katy, and try the big hill," Peggy offered. "I'll hold you tight, I promise. It's a treat, full-speed. And the boys, they'll call you scaredy-cat if you don't."
So I did. Peg was strong and sturdy, and I wasn't frightened with her arms tight around me. I sat in front of her, on her long wool skirt. She pulled the guide rope up on either side, put her feet firm against the steer board, and we pushed off and sailed, both of us shrieking laughter all the way to the bottom of the hill, where we had to turn sharp to miss a tree. Then we stood there and watched as the others came down: Austin on his own, belly-whopping, and Jessie, too, lying on her sled and laughing as she flew by. Finally Paul and Nellie flew past together with Laura Paisley wedged in between. But Laura Paisley was fearful and cried. So Peggy and I took her to the babies hill and left Nell and Paul on their own.
On the gentle slope Laura Paisley wasn't frightened. Peggy sent her down again and again, and I waited at the bottom to haul her back up. From there, we could hear Austin hollering as he sped down the big hill, and I could see Jessie go just as fast and call out just as loud. Now and then we heard Nellie call out, too, in delight. Looking over from where I stood, I could see her bright pink scarf fly in the wind as Paul, behind her on the sled, steered the two of them down, slicing a turn at the bottom each time. The tree at the bottom loomed like a danger, but all the sledders knew how to make the turn at just the right instant.
"Push me!" Laura Paisley begged, so Peg would give her a gentle shove and watch as she slid slowly and then tumbled, giggling, from the little sled at the bottom of the gentle slope.
Going home for lunch, I think we were all like the horses, excited and prancing. Nell, especially, was like a wild thing let loose; she teased and shouted and her voice was so shrill that Peggy murmured "Shhhh" to her in embarrassment at what others might think. But Nellie turned away with an irritated shrug and went to walk with Paul.Shedidn 't care what others thought.
6. JANUARY 1911
Nell came over to visit her sister late on a sleety Thursday afternoon. They both had Thursday off, and usually Peggy went to the library that day, often taking me with her; she said she didn't mind. Nellie always went to town, to the pictures or the shops.
But today it was too cold and wet to walk far. Nellie was in a foul mood when she came over. She pulled off her coat and boots in the kitchen and unwound the scarf from her thick, damp hair. She had had other plans, she said, but the weather made her plans fall through. Together the sisters went up to Peggy's third-floor room. Sometimes Peg let me go up there and visit when she had free time, but I could tell she didn't want me tagging along now. She and Nellie were chattering about grown-up girl things, and from my room below I could hear Nell's whoops of laughter and Peggy's quieter, more serious voice.
"They want to be by themselves," I complained to Mother, feeling left out.
She was in the little room at the end of the upstairs hall, the one we called "the sewing room" though no one ever sewed there. Mother was at the pine table with an album open on it, and she was carefully pasting things in what she called a "memory book." It was where the postcard of Niagara Falls was, and the newspaper account of Mother and Father's wedding. A dried and flattened flower was attached to one page, with a note in Mother's careful penmanship describing a tea party where a vase of pink roses had been part of the decoration. It was hard to imagine the brown faded thing as one of those roses.
Mother listened for a moment to the noises from Peggy's bedroom. She smiled. "I'm glad we got the quieter of the Stoltz sisters," she said. "Mrs. Bishop says that Nellie's a good worker but she has a very frivolous side."
"What's frivolous?"
"Silly."
"I don't think Nell is silly. She's very serious about wanting to be in pictures."
Mother raised an eyebrow. I knew she disapproved of the pictures, and I was sorry I had mentioned it. "What's that?" I asked, and pointed at a wisp of hair gathered and tied with a ribbon and attached to the page.
"That's yours, Katy," Mother said, looking at it fondly. "You were two years old and I trimmed your hair. You didn't have a lot, but it was in your eyes until I snipped it back.
"And look at this!" She pointed to a picture. "You might remember this. You and Jessie Wood were both four that summer, and Jessie's father had a new camera."
I peered at the photograph of two solemn little girls, side by side, wearing hats, and gradually I remembered that day at the lake. It was summer. It came to me in fragments, in little details.
Jessie had black shoes, and mine were white.
The air smelled like pine trees.
A cloud was shaped like my stuffed bear. Then its ears softened and smeared, and it was just a cloud, really, not a bear at all (I knew it all along); then, quickly, the cloud itself was gone and the sky was only blue.
And there were fireworks! We were visiting at the Woods' cottage there. Cottage sounded like a fairy tale: a woodcutter's cottage. Hansel and Gretel and their cottage.
But the Woods' cottage was not a fairy-tale storybook one. It was just a house. They invited my family to come to their cottage for the holiday called Fourthofjuly, which I didn't understand, and for fireworks.
I remembered the scent, the sky, the heat, the wide-brimmed straw hats we wore to protect our faces from the sun, and the white shoes and black. The shoes and stockings and dresses—even the hats—were removed, at some point, because my memory told of Jessie and me, wearing only our bloomers, wading at the edge of the lake. We chased tiny silvery fish—minnows! Someone told us they were called minnows, and we said that to each other, laughing: "Minnows! Minnows!"
After a while we were shivering, even though the day was hot. My fingertips were puckered, pale lavender. Our mothers rubbed us dry with rough towels. Jessie fretted because there were pine needles stuck to her damp feet. We played in the sand at the edge of the lake.
The parents sat on the porch, talking, while Jessie and I amused ourselves, still half-naked in the sunshine, digging with bent tin shovels in the damp sand. Jessie had a pail and I didn't. I pretended that I didn't care about her pail, though secretly I wished it were mine, with the bright painted picture printed on its metal side: pink-faced children building castles, green-blue water, foamed with white, curling behind them.