Standing in the Rainbow - Fannie Flagg [28]
“But I do!” Bobby protested. “Come here and look at all these big red spots all over me and I feel sick. . . . Come and look.” He pulled up his pajama top for her to see. “Look at these spots, they’re getting redder by the minute, and I feel sick and I think I have a temperature, feel my head.” But Anna Lee ignored him and said as she left, “Stay in bed—I don’t care, I hope you do get a whipping.” Bobby got up, mumbling and grumbling to himself, and put on his clothes and went to the kitchen to find his mother, who promptly handed him a banana. “Here, eat that on the way to school.”
“But, Mother—” he said.
“I don’t want to hear it, Bobby. Now you go on before you’re late.” He mumbled some more under his breath and stomped down the hall and out the door, slamming it behind him.
At about 2:00 that afternoon Bobby’s teacher called.
“Dorothy, I just wanted you to know that I had to take Bobby down to the sick room because he was all broken out in red spots. Ruby says he’s come down with measles and needs to be quarantined.”
Dorothy was alarmed. “Oh, no. Tell Ruby I’m on my way to get him right now, and thank you for calling.”
Dorothy could not have felt any worse and Bobby played the part to the hilt. “I told you I was sick, Mother,” he said in a thin voice and by the time Anna Lee got home from rehearsal, at 5:30, Bobby was propped up in his bed like a king, his every whim catered to. His bed was covered with loads of new comic books his father had brought home for him from the drugstore. He had already been served ice cream, two Cokes, and a 7UP, and his mother stood by ready to do his slightest bidding. When Anna Lee walked into the room, Dorothy looked at her daughter with stricken eyes. “Your brother has the measles—the poor little thing really was sick.” Bobby lay back and smiled weakly for her benefit and waited for Anna Lee to apologize. But instead of an apology she looked at him in horror and said, “Measles!” and ran out of the room to scrub her hands and face.
She was terrified of contracting a pimple, much less the measles. She had a performance to do. She was president of the Drama Club this year and was in the upcoming school play. It wasn’t until Nurse Ruby assured Anna Lee that she could not catch the measles twice that she consented to go anywhere near him. Even then she wore gloves and a scarf over her face. She could not afford to take any chances. Not only was she in the school play, she was the lead!
Mother Smith, Jailbird
UNLIKE HER SON, Doc, who was easygoing, Mother Smith was a thin feisty little woman who had been quite a beauty when she was younger. Born in Independence, Missouri, right down the street from Bess Wallace, who eventually married Harry S. Truman. He and Mother Smith had once played the “Missouri Waltz” together on the twin pianos, and she often remarked about the president, “I met him on his way to greatness.”
Mother Smith had always been a free-spirited woman, long before it was fashionable; she said you could not be born and raised in a town called Independence and not have it affect you. And it must be true: She had been one of the state’s early suffragettes and in 1898 she, along with a group of her college girlfriends, had marched on Washington to fight for votes for women and had been arrested for disturbing the peace. This is a story Bobby and Anna Lee loved to hear over and over. “They sure threw us in the old hoosegow that day,” she would say, then laugh and add, “Your grandmother may be a jailbird but we finally got the vote!” And although she was already in her forties at the time, she had been the first woman in town to get her hair bobbed. She had also visited a speakeasy in Kansas City, gotten a little tipsy on a teacup full of bootleg gin, and had played a