My Brother Louis Measures Worms Read Online Free Page B

“No . . . no . . . no.”

Louisa May and the Facts of Life
    M rs. Slocum’s plan to expose us all to the facts of life came a little too late. Everybody in our neighborhood had already been exposed to them, although we didn’t know it at the time, and didn’t understand that sex had reared its ugly head right across the street in the unlikely person of Louisa May Fuller.
    Louisa May and her sister Alma lived on the corner in a little gray cottage, and were described by my cousins from Elyria as “crazy old maids.” But Louis and I had known the Fuller girls all our lives, and didn’t think they were very strange. “Not strange at all,” my father often said, “compared to some of your mother’s family.”
    Alma was the older of the two, and therefore the head of the family, so she made all the big decisions, like how to get ready for Judgment Day. Louisa May decided what to have for dinner and when to paint the house. Louisa May did the washing and the cooking; Alma did the needlepoint and cross-stitched pretty thoughts on all the dish towels. Louisa May scrubbed the kitchen floor and waxed the furniture; Alma picked up the living room and straightened the doilies.
    They both were officers of the Women’s Missionary Society—Louisa May rolled bandages, made layettes for African babies, collected and mended everybody’s used clothing for the mission boxes and kept careful track of the organization’s funds; Alma was in charge of devotions every other month, which accounted for most of the pretty thoughts on the dish towels. However, despite this lopsided division of labor (or maybe because of it), they got along very well, agreeing on almost everything except Alma’s special concern: a great passion for searching out and recording the genealogy of the Fuller family, which was a matter of very little interest to everyone else, including Louisa May.
    After much correspondence, Alma would establish a family tie with somebody in Ponca City, Oklahoma, or East Orange, New Jersey; and she would throw up the window and sing out the news to Louisa May in the garden. “Mr. Fuller, in East Orange, is a third cousin twice removed!” she would call, hoping vainly for some enthusiastic response. But Louisa May just didn’t care about all these far-flung connections and considered Alma’s fascination with the subject a terrible waste of time, and a little silly into the bargain.
    â€œIt’s not as if we came from anything grand,” she used to tell my mother, “and even if we did, what would be the good of knowing it?”
    Louisa May’s hobby was babies. She adored babies. To be sure, nobody in the neighborhood was known to harbor an active dislike of babies, but Louisa May went to the opposite extreme, and seemed to view each individual baby as the beginning and end of all human wonder. Wherever a new baby appeared, there too was Louisa May, hard on the heels of the doctor.
    My mother was fond of her, and she worried about her. “Louisa May,” she would say, “you ought to get married. It’s just a shame, the way you love babies, that you don’t have a family. And you don’t want to wait forever. You’re thirty-eight years old and it’s time you had your own babies. Now, you just find some nice man and marry him.”
    â€œOh, Mrs. Lawson,” Louisa May said, “I don’t want to get married and have to fool with some old man around the house.”
    â€œBut he wouldn’t be old!” Mother insisted. “You want a respectable young man who’s a good provider.”
    â€œWell, I don’t want any young man either,” Louisa May always said. “I don’t know. . . . Sometimes I ask myself, Would it be worth it to put up with a husband so I could have a baby? But I just can’t seem to decide it would. Alma and I have our own ways of doing and things go along pretty