Free Little Altars Everywhere by Rebecca Wells Page A

booster.
    Anyway, what we usually do is this. We swim in the morning. Then when it starts to get around noon, we pack up and walk over to Spring Creek Shop-and-Skate, which is your only roller rink and grocery store in Central Louisiana. Inside the store it is all cool, with the concrete floor under your feet and the jukebox playing in the skating rink. And they have wooden boxes with screen lids filled with crickets, and next to that they have worms and shiners for fishing. All the Ya-Yas have known Nadine, the owner, forever. And we get our bread and milk from her, and the big blocks of ice that you have to carry out to the car with these big iron tongs. If you drop that ice on your foot you’ll be crippled forever, so you better be careful. Then we go back to the camp during the heat of the day, and play with the old slot machine that Mama rigged up so it doesn’t cost a nickel to play. And we have bologna sandwiches and Fritos and Cokes and maybe take a nap or do whatever we plain feel like.
    Finally when it cools down a little, the Ya-Yas let us go without them back to the skating rink. We rent skates for a quarter. Sidda is all the time playing Nat King Cole on the jukebox. There’s this huge fan at one end of the rink that I swear you could get sucked into if you don’t watch out. I won’t skate down at that end.We put ice-cream sandwiches on Mama’s tab, and we eat them sitting on the bench. Then Lulu always goes and gets her a second one, even though she knows we’re only supposed to charge one apiece.
    I been working on my skating but I’m not what you call the greatest. Little Shep thinks he’s so tough, skating backwards and all. He thinks he’s King of the Universe in everything he does. At Pecan Grove he answers the phone just like Daddy does, putting his foot up on the kitchen stool and saying “Little Shep Walker here.” He wears cowboy boots just like Daddy and acts like he’s the boss of the world.
    Then before you know it, we’re all back in the creek for a late afternoon swim and everyone has cleared out except for only us. We wait until the sun is just starting to go down and then we take our baths. The Ya-Yas all get bars of Ivory soap and we suds up and rub that lather all over our bodies and you can hear the cicadas cranking up. And you suds up your hair, too, then close your eyes and dive into the water and rinse it out. You smell that Ivory and the creek water and see the little bitty ones with their swimsuits off, getting bathed by their mamas. And the Ya-Yas are washing their hair, too, and everybody is laughing and Little Shep and me are making our hair stand up in points.
    These are our real baths because we’d run that well dry in no time flat if we all tried to use the shower back at the camp. We get to take our swimsuits off underwater, but only the little ones can just pop up naked.
    But then one evening, Caro says, Oh, bathing with a swimsuit on is just ridiculous! And she takes off her swimsuit and flings it over by the towels, and so the older Ya-Yas go right ahead and do the same thing. And so of course all the rest of us take ours off too, and that makes it four mamas and sixteen kids skinny-dipping. We have that whole place to ourselves and they start singing one of their old camp songs:
    Once I went in swimmin
    Where there were no wimmin
    And no one to seeee
    Hung my little britches
    On the willow switches of a nearby tree
    Came a little villain
    Stole my underwear
    and left me with a smile!
    And we’re all laughing and Little Shep is trying to sing real deep like a grown-up man and Sidda’s long red hair is floating on her shoulders and Lulu is sunburned and Necie’s little ones are splashing and jumping up and down. And you can see the Ya-Yas’ breasts but they just look like Mama’s and it’s not a big deal. And we just keep bathing and playing and, oh, it is such a sweet evening. Me and Sidda take that Ivory in our hands and shoot it up into the air and when it