It's Friday.
Chapter 3. A BRIGHT BLUE DAY
Somehow Maddie could not buckle down to work.
She sharpened her pencil, turning it around carefully in the little red sharpener, letting the shavings fall in a neat heap on a piece of scrap paper, and trying not to get any of the dust from the lead on her clean arithmetic paper.
A slight frown puckered her forehead. In the first place she didn’t like being late to school. And in the second place she kept thinking about Wanda. Somehow Wanda’s desk, though empty, seemed to be the only thing she saw when she looked over to that side of the room.
How had the hundred dresses game begun in the first place, she asked herself impatiently. It was hard to remember the time when they hadn’t played that game with Wanda; hard to think all the way back from now, when the hundred dresses was like the daily dozen, to then, when everything seemed much nicer. Oh, yes. She remembered. It had begun that day when Cecile first wore her new red dress. Suddenly the whole scene flashed swiftly and vividly before Maddie’s eyes.
It was a bright blue day in September. No, it must have been October, because when she and Peggy were coming to school, arms around each other and singing, Peggy had said, “You know what? This must be the kind of day they mean when they say, ‘October’s bright blue weather.’”
Maddie remembered that because afterwards it didn’t seem like bright blue weather any more, although the weather had not changed in the slightest.
As they turned from shady Oliver Street into Maple, they both blinked. For now the morning sun shone straight in their eyes. Besides that, bright flashes of color came from a group of a half dozen or more girls across the street. Their sweaters and jackets and dresses, blues and golds and reds, and one crimson one in particular, caught the sun’s rays like bright pieces of glass.
A crisp, fresh wind was blowing, swishing their skirts and blowing their hair in their eyes. The girls were all exclaiming and shouting and each one was trying to talk louder than the others. Maddie and Peggy joined the group, and the laughing, and the talking.
“Hi, Peg! Hi, Maddie!” they were greeted warmly. “Look at Cecile!”
What they were all exclaiming about was the dress that Ceclie had on – a crimson dress with cap and socks to match. It was a bright new dress and very pretty. Everyone was admiring it and admiring Cecile. For long, slender Cecile was a toe dancer and wore fancier clothes than most of them. And she had her black satin bag with her precious white satin ballet slippers slung over her shoulders. Today was the day for her dancing lesson.
Maddie sat down on the granite curbstone to tie her shoelaces. She listened happily to what they were saying. They all seemed especially jolly today, probably because it was such a bright day. Everything sparkled. Way down at the end of the street the sun shimmered and turned to silver the blue water of the bay. Maddie picked up a piece of broken mirror and flashed a small circle of light edged with rainbow colors onto the houses, the trees, and the top of the telegraph pole.
And it was then that Wanda had come along with her brother Jake.
They didn’t often come to school together. Jake had to get to school very early because he helped old Mr. Heany, the school janitor, with the furnace, or raking up the dry leaves, or other odd jobs before school opened. But today he must have been late.
Even Wanda looked pretty in this sunshine, and her pale blue dress looked like a piece of the sky in summer; and that old gray knitted cap she wore – it must be something Jake had found – looked almost jaunty. Maddie watched them absentmindedly as she flashed her piece of broken mirror here and there. And only absent-mindedly she noticed Wanda stop short when they reached the crowd of laughing and shouting girls.
“Come on,” Maddie heard Jake say. “I gotta hurry. I gotta get the doors open and ring the bell.”
“You go the rest of the way,” said Wanda. “I want to stay here.”
Jake shrugged and went on up Maple Street. Wanda slowly approached the group of girls. With each step forward, before she put her foot down she seemed to hesitate for a long, long time. She approached the group as a timid animal might, ready to run if anything alarmed it.
Even so, Wanda’s mouth was twisted into the vaguest suggestion of a smile. She must feel happy too because everybody must feel happy on such a day.
As Wanda joined the outside fringe of girls, Maddie stood up too and went over close to Peggy to get a good look at Cecile’s new dress herself. She forgot about Wanda, and more girls kept coming up, enlarging the group and exclaiming about Cecile’s new dress.
“Isn’t it lovely!” said one.
“Yeah, I have a new blue dress, but it’s not as pretty as that,” said another.
“My mother just bought me a plaid, one of the Stuart plaids.”
“I got a new dress for dancing school.”
“I’m gonna make my mother get me one just like Cecile’s.”
Everyone was talking to everybody else. Nobody said anything to Wanda, but there she was, a part of the crowd. The girls closed in a tighter circle around Cecile, still talking all at once and admiring her, and Wanda was somehow enveloped in the group. Nobody talked to Wanda, but nobody even thought about her being there.
Maybe, thought Maddie, remembering what had happened next, maybe she figured all she’d have to do was say something and she’d really be one of the girls. And this would be an easy thing to do because all they were doing was talking about dresses.
Maddie was standing next to Peggy. Wanda was standing next to Peggy on the other side. All of a sudden, Wanda impulsively touched Peggy’s arm and said something. Her light blue eyes were shining and she looked exited like the rest of the girls.
“What?” asked Peggy. For Wanda had spoken very softly.
Wanda hesitated a moment and then she repeated her words firmly.
“I got a hundred dresses home.”
“That’s what I thought you said. A hundred dresses. A hundred!” Peggy’s voice raised itself higher and higher.
“Hey, kids!” she yelled. “This girl’s got a hundred dresses.”
Silence greeted this, and the crowd which had centered around Cecile and her new finery now centered curiously around Wanda and Peggy. The girls eyed Wanda, first incredulously, then suspiciously.
“A hundred dresses?” they said. “Nobody could have a hundred dresses.”
“I have though.”
“Wanda has a hundred dresses.”
“Where are they then?”
“In my closet.”
“Oh, you don’t wear them to school.”
“No. For parties.”
“Oh, you mean you don’t have any everyday dresses.”
“Yes, I have all kinds of dresses.”
“Why don’t you wear them to school?”
For a moment Wanda was silent to this. Her lips drew together. Then she repeated stolidly as though it were a lesson learned in school, “A hundred of them. All lined up in my closet.”
“Oh, I see,” said Peggy, talking like a grown-up person. “The child has a hundred dresses, but she wouldn’t wear them to school. Perhaps she’s worried of getting ink or chalk on them.”
With this everybody fell to laughing and talking at once. Wanda looked stolidly at them, pursing her lips together, wrinkling her forehead up so that the gray knitted cap slipped way down on her brow. Suddenly from down the street the school gong rang its first warning.
“Oh, come on, hurry,” said Maddie, relieved. “We’ll be late.”
“Good-bye, Wanda,” said Peggy. “Your hundred dresses sound bee-you-tiful.”
More shouts of laughter greeted this, and off the girls ran, laughing and talking and forgetting Wanda and her hundred dresses. Forgetting until tomorrow and the next day and the next, when Peggy, seeing her coming to school, would remember and ask her about the hundred dresses. For now Peggy seemed to think a day was lost if she had not had some fun with Wanda, winning the approving laughter of the girls.
Yes, that was the way it had all begun, the game of the hundred dresses. It all happened so suddenly and unexpectedly, with everybody falling right in, that even if you felt uncomfortable as Maddie had there wasn’t anything you could do about it. Maddie wagged her head up and down. Yes, she repeated to herself, that was the way it began, that day, that bright blue day.
And she wrapped up her shavings and went to the front of the room to empty them in the teacher’s basket.
