Number the Stars - Lois Lowry [9]
"Goodness, Kirsti," Ellen said, "I wish my mother would get me some new shoes. I love new things, and it's so hard to find them in the stores."
"Not if you go to a fish store!" Kirsti bellowed. "But most mothers wouldn't make their daughters wear ugly fish shoes!"
"Kirsten," Mama said soothingly, "you know it wasn't a fish store. And we were lucky to find shoes at all."
Kirsti sniffed. "Show them," she commanded. "Show Annemarie and Ellen how ugly they are."
Mama opened the package and took out a pair of little girl's shoes. She held them up, and Kirsti looked away in disgust.
"You know there's no leather anymore," Mama explained. "But they've found a way to make shoes out of fish skin. I don't think these are too ugly."
Annemarie and Ellen looked at the fish skin shoes. Annemarie took one in her hand and examined it. It was odd-looking; the fish scales were visible. But it was a shoe, and her sister needed shoes.
"It's not so bad, Kirsti," she said, lying a little.
Ellen turned the other one over in her hand. "You know," she said, "it's only the color that's ugly."
"Green!" Kirsti wailed. "I will never, ever wear green shoes!"
"In our apartment," Ellen told her, "my father has a jar of black, black ink. Would you like these shoes better if they were black?"
Kirsti frowned. "Maybe I would," she said, finally.
"Well, then," Ellen told her, "tonight, if your mama doesn't mind, I'll take the shoes home and ask my father to make them black for you, with his ink."
Mama laughed. "I think that would be a fine improvement. What do you think, Kirsti?"
Kirsti pondered. "Could he make them shiny?" she asked. "I want them shiny."
Ellen nodded. "I think he could. I think they'll be quite pretty, black and shiny."
Kirsti nodded. "All right, then," she said. "But you mustn't tell anyone that they're fish. I don't want anyone to know." She took her new shoes, holding them disdainfully, and put them on a chair. Then she looked with interest at the paper dolls.
"Can I play, too?" Kirsti asked. "Can I have a doll?" She squatted beside Annemarie and Ellen on the floor.
Sometimes, Annemarie thought, Kirsti was such a pest, always butting in. But the apartment was small. There was no other place for Kirsti to play. And if they told her to go away, Mama would scold.
"Here," Annemarie said, and handed her sister a cut-out little girl doll. "We're playing Gone With the Wind. Melanie and Scarlett are going to a ball. You can be Bonnie. She's Scarlett's daughter."
Kirsti danced her doll up and down happily. "I'm going to the ball!" she announced in a high, pretend voice.
Ellen giggled. "A little girl wouldn't go to a ball. Let's make them go someplace else. Let's make them go to Tivoli!"
"Tivoli!" Annemarie began to laugh. "That's in Copenhagen! Gone With the Wind is in America!"
"Tivoli, Tivoli, Tivoli," little Kirsti sang, twirling her doll in a circle.
"It doesn't matter, because it's only a game anyway," Ellen pointed out. "Tivoli can be over there, by that chair. 'Come, Scarlett,'" she said, using her doll voice, "'we shall go to Tivoli to dance and watch the fireworks, and maybe there will be some handsome men there! Bring your silly daughter Bonnie, and she can ride on the carousel.'"
Annemarie grinned and walked her Scarlett toward the chair that Ellen had designated as Tivoli. She loved Tivoli Gardens, in the heart of Copenhagen; her parents had taken her there, often, when she was a little girl. She remembered the music and the brightly colored lights, the carousel and ice cream and especially the magnificent fireworks in the evenings: the huge colored splashes and bursts of lights in the evening sky.
"I remember the fireworks best of all," she commented to Ellen.
"Me too," Kirsti said. "I remember the fireworks."
"Silly," Annemarie scoffed. "You never saw the fireworks." Tivoli Gardens was closed now. The German occupation forces had burned part of it, perhaps as a way of punishing the fun-loving Danes for their lighthearted pleasures.
Kirsti drew herself up, her small