Alice and Mattie
July 14, 2010
The leader of the pack of six sisters in Alice’s family was the third-born, Mattie (1911-2000). Today she would have been ninety-nine.
They grew up poor in a little Midwestern village called Carson (pop. 400), and the family was so large (nine altogether, counting the baby, a boy) that their mother needed them to do chores. Some, like Mattie (the reader, the saver, the keeper of memories in the making), took the chores seriously. Others, like Alice (actually Alice alone), did not.
When Mattie was twelve and Alice was eight, Alice’s job was to wash the lunch dishes. She didn’t care for it. One day she traded this task for Mattie’s job, which was to take the large tin milk jug to the dairy a few blocks away, get it filled, and haul it back home. Mattie washed and dried the dishes while Alice played stickball in a nearby vacant lot with friends. When the dishes were neatly stacked away, she brought the milk container out to the lot.
Alice saw her coming and cast aside her stick. She took off in the opposite direction. Mattie, carrying the jug, pursued her. Furious. They ran up and down Main Street, passing the dairy itself several times. Finally, Alice bolted down an alley and into a back yard that contained an outhouse. She locked herself inside. Mattie banged on the door, but no luck. Even sitting locked inside someone’s outhouse was more preferable to Alice than taking the milk jug to the dairy, or at least more preferable than giving up. So Mattie finally turned around, walked back to Main Street, got the jug filled, and carried it home.
Seventy-five years later, Mattie still told this story. Alice always laughed. But so did Mattie. They became good friends, the best of friends, the closest of sisters.
Alice (age 13) and Mattie (age 17)
July 14, 2010 at 6:51 am
This one goes immediately to My sister! I can hear her laughing now–remembering a story or two about us at 13 and 17. I LOVE THESE STORIES.
July 14, 2010 at 7:13 am
Wow, they could almost be twins! The milk jug story is hilarious. Your mom was a scamp!
November 11, 2010 at 9:17 am
[...] their lazing around reading books, their chasing one another all over town with milk pails (see Alice and Mattie), their tantrums and jealousies and very real devotion to one another, and all the rest of their [...]
November 20, 2010 at 9:40 pm
[...] sister Mattie had worshiped the moon all her life, spoke of it often, and all through our childhoods held each of [...]
December 31, 2010 at 3:41 pm
[...] dragged me,” Mattie said, still not recovered at 86 from LaRue’s coercion. Mattie, a reader and not a whistler [...]
February 21, 2011 at 11:26 am
[...] was about six,” she said, “and Mattie was ten. She and Mama (Martha) and I had been out at Aunt Christina’s farm for a [...]
February 21, 2011 at 11:26 am
[...] about the expansion of one’s inner life to a nearly unbearable richness. I remember my Aunt Mattie, when she was eighty-six, telling me that she felt happier than ever, except in childhood when [...]
March 10, 2011 at 1:20 pm
[...] from her bed in the upstairs room where she and her five sisters slept. She lay squeezed between Alice and Pearl. They slept soundly, as did the three others—Marie, LaRue, and Lillian—in another bed [...]
March 29, 2011 at 9:48 pm
[...] Mattie was ten years old the summer of 1921 when her cousin Siri moved to town and got a job at the post office. All day Siri stood behind a narrow window on one side of a high-ceilinged room with a wooden floor, and Mr. Peaks, the druggist, stood at his own counter on the pharmacy side. Farmers, merchants, and housewives drifted in and out for pills, powders, syrups, letters, packages, and stamps. Mattie, a child in love with books and the moon, soon fell in love with Siri too. [...]
March 31, 2011 at 7:28 am
[...] sister Mattie had worshiped the moon all her life, spoke of it often, and all through our childhoods held each of [...]
May 8, 2011 at 10:26 am
[...] was there in Bismarck visiting her with my daughter Marla. Mattie was out in the yard. Mama and Marla and I were sitting in the living room when Mama’s head [...]
June 4, 2011 at 12:22 pm
[...] remembers, and they are not hers but Henry Lee’s). For that event, she’d worn one of Mattie’s dresses to stand on stage and read the winning essay to the entire high school. She always recalls [...]
June 28, 2011 at 1:02 pm
[...] Mattie was in charge of Alice’s haircut. She trimmed one side and then trimmed the other to match. It was uneven. She tried again, and then again, until she’d cut off so much hair it was too short to be considered a bob or anything else, other than a mistake. [...]
July 14, 2011 at 12:16 pm
[...] “The kickball field?” [...]