Cathy Adams

What Ramona Made

 

 

When Ramona was a very little girl, she could shake diamonds out of her head. She felt better when they cleared, so she shook her head a lot. The stones fell, glittering, from her ears, her hair and sometimes her nose, but no one paid attention. The adults around her simply said that she should sit still, calm down, and stop shaking her head. It’s bad manners, they said. No one noticed the diamonds but Ramona. So as time went by she learned to stop shaking her head so much, and the diamonds came less and less until one day she shook it and nothing fell but a few flakes of dandruff. No one noticed that either.

 

At age six, Ramona saw a television show with dancers, the kind that wear big head ornaments festooned with rhinestones, draped with pearls, and lined with feathers floating several feet outward on either side. Surely these young women must have shaken diamonds from their heads when they were young. Their costumes looked like spangled swimsuits but there wasn’t a chance they’d ever been in water. There wasn’t much actual dancing because the head ornaments were so big the dancers could hardly move except for their legs. They marched up and down steps, held their arms out, and kicked. That impressed Ramona, but her real question was one that only a child would have. How did they live their lives with those enormous things on their heads? She had concluded that the head pieces were somehow permanent, that those women walked around like that all the time, and oh how impossible that would have made the things that Ramona hated to do anyway, like taking a bath, bending over to pick up her toys, or even brushing her hair. If she had one of those feather-covered things on her head maybe her parents would excuse her from the more unpleasant tasks of childhood. Trying to make one from the feathers she plucked from her mother’s feather duster and some plastic pearls she’d received as a Mardi Gras gift did not bring the results she had hoped. Her mother yelled at her for ruining a perfectly good Williams Sonoma feather duster and made her throw the glued together mish mash of her most creative efforts in the trash can.

 

By the time she was twelve she was sneaking cigarettes from her mother’s purse and sitting on the back stoop listening to Sonic Youth on tiny earphones. By the time she was nineteen she forgot that there were ever diamonds in her head at all. So when she found a fist-sized yellowed cardboard box full of the glittering stones tucked away inside her Barbie Dream House in the back of her closet, she could not think of how they got there. She wasn’t even sure they were real until she held them in her hands. Holding one up in front of the window and looking at the brilliance in the dimming daylight, she decided they must have been left by the last people who’d lived in their house. Her family had bought the house when she was no older than two, but the Barbie Dream House was hers, a Christmas gift from her grandmother when she was in pre-school. Ramona remembered having trouble staying still the year she received the Dream House. Notes had been sent home to her parents from the Playtime Day School where she attended “classes” three hours a day. “Why the hell do they call it playtime if the kids are expected to sit in their seats all the time?” Ramona’s grandmother had railed.

 

In the closet, Ramona got down on her knees and began pulling out the items that blocked the Dream House: a box of CD’s, mismatched shoes, a stuffed penguin, and the plastic princess scepter she’d carried for three Halloweens. Tugging at its left side, she turned the house so that she could see it better. The pink and purple hot tub on the right side of the third floor was smashed from a pair of roller skates that had been thrown on top. In the center the den with the purple sofa and the big screen TV mounted directly over the fireplace, something her father had said was “wrong,” was still intact. The left side contained the elevator, the best part of the house. That was where she had discovered the box. She didn’t even remember what made her reach down the shaft into the now broken pink plastic elevator carriage. She hadn’t been looking for anything. She had inexplicably put down her book, gone to her closet, and pushed aside enough junk so that she could put her hand down inside, and there it was, as if it had been waiting for her to remember it had been there all along.

 

She thought the shiny stones must be worth something even if it turned out that they were not real diamonds. There must have been over fifty of them. A few were tiny like grains of rice, but most were much bigger, and at least ten of them were big as the molars in the back of her mouth. Ramona squeezed one eye shut and held one up to the window light. She looked at the orange sun through a marquis shaped stone for so long it left a bright spot on her eyes long after she lay on her bed and closed them. When she opened them again it was dark and the bright spot in her vision jumped around her ceiling.

 

On Tuesday morning she put three of the stones in her jeans pocket and drove to Thurgood Jewelers. Mr. Thurgood’s father had opened the store back when Ramona’s grandmother was young enough to be getting an engagement ring from Ramona’s grandfather. Many engagements in Ramona’s town had begun with a trip to Thurgood’s, but that was before the mall opened up on the other side of town. It was before Ramona had been born. Most customers now just needed a new watch battery or a necklace repair. The engagement ring display at Thurgood’s was paltry.

 

Ramona began speaking before she even reached the counter where Mr. Thurgood stood polishing a silver baby’s cup. “Can you tell me if these are. . .worth anything?”  

 

Mr. Thurgood replaced the cup in the case and looked through the bottom of his glasses at the clear stones Ramona held out in her sweating hand. He took one between two fingers and began wiping it clean with a handkerchief he produced from his back pocket. “You mean you want to know if it’s real?”

 

She rolled her eyes. “If it wasn’t real I wouldn’t be looking at it. I mean, is it worth anything?”

 

“Well,” said Mr. Thurgood, glancing up to acknowledge the remark, “if it’s a real diamond, then it might be worth something.” He eyed the remaining two stones on her palm. “Where’d you get these?”

 

“My grandmother.”

 

“Mmm, yeah,” he said. “Heirlooms from the grandma.” Words that his tone said he had spoken many times before. “Lemme get my loupe.” In no hurry, Mr. Thurgood moved to another counter and rummaged through a drawer until he pulled out a pair of tweezers and a small black instrument. Returning to the counter where Ramona waited, he flipped the lens out from the covering, gripped the diamond in the tweezers, and held the loupe to his right eye. In a few seconds he inhaled sharply and said, “Let me see the other ones.” He repeated the procedure with the other two, looking at each one for a long time before looking at another and then beginning the process again. When he finished, he said nothing but carefully placed the three stones on the counter.

 

“Well?” Ramona tilted her head to catch his eye. Mr. Thurgood was pursing his lips and staring downward.

 

“Not a flaw in any of them.”

 

“So, they’re real?”

 

“Uh-huh. High quality too,” said Mr. Thurgood. “Wherever your grandmother got these, she got the best.”

 

“I think maybe she got them at Sears,” said Ramona, but she didn’t know why she said that. The words just fell from her mouth. She slid her fingers toward the stones but stopped about an inch away. For a few more seconds both she and Mr. Thurgood just stared down at them. They glittered as if a flame flickered underneath the glass counter.

 

“Mmmm, no, these didn’t come from Sears,” said Mr. Thurgood.

 

Ramona scooped the stones up into her hand and pushed them back into her pocket so quickly it caught Mr. Thurgood by surprise. Ramona turned to go.

 

“Hey,” he called out to her as she neared the door. “Don’t go pawning those. You won’t get near what they’re worth. You’ve got something valuable there. More than you know.”  Ramona pulled the door open and departed with the sound of the bell ringing as the door shut behind her.

 

Ramona sat cross-legged on the pink carpet of her bedroom and ran her fingers through the diamonds in the cardboard box. She held her left hand out straight with her fingers together and placed diamonds in the crevices, three rows of sparkling stones all in different shapes shining along the length of her fingers. She tilted her hand and let them fall back into the box and sighed. She made up her mind. Leaning back against her bed, she held the box in her lap and waited for her parents to return from work.

 

At the sound of the garage door opening, she went to the kitchen, anticipating her mother. In a few moments her mother was dragging herself through the door, juggling her bag and keys in one hand and two plastic grocery bags in the other. “Mom,” said Ramona, “I have something. Something real valuable. More than you know.”

 

Her mother dropped the bags on the table and flung her keys on the counter. “What’s that?”

 

“I don’t know where they came from.”

 

“Who’s they?” Her mother said, scratching her head and shoving a quart of orange juice in the refrigerator door.

 

“There’s no they. I’m talking about something I’ve got,” said Ramona.

 

Her mother looked up suddenly. “Oh Ramona, I’ve told you since you were fourteen to be careful. Did you see a doctor?”

 

“A what?”

 

“A doctor. That’s what you’re supposed to do, you know. When these things happen.” She slammed the refrigerator door shut and turned her back on her daughter. “Has there ever been a day in your life when you thought about having some kind of direction?" She threw her hands up in the air but still would not look at her daughter. “And now this.”

 

“And now what?”

 

“I can’t deal with anything tonight.”

 

“Mom, I have something really special.”

 

“I guess that’s what they teach you to call it nowadays in school. They’re so afraid of damaging kids’ self-esteem,” her mother said. She held her hands up in protest. “Can we deal with this in the morning? Just let me have a rest. And don’t tell your daddy when he gets home. You know how upset he gets if you give him bad news first thing.”  

 

Ramona returned to her room and took out the box once more. She placed it in her lap and gently took off the lid. Soon, she heard the sound of her father’s Chevy in the driveway and then the sounds of him and her mother talking in the kitchen. She made out an occasional word like golf, Thursday, and dinner. The refrigerator door opened, shut, opened, shut. Cabinet doors opened and shut. Drawers opened and shut. Ramona put her hands over her ears and squeezed her eyes shut. When she opened them again the diamonds were still glittering in the dingy box lying on her lap. She sighed hard and then looked up at the top shelf of her closet.

 

The hat she chose was yellow, a bright yellow like an Easter chick. The brim turned upward and then dipped at an angle over the forehead in a dramatic sweep. Atop the brim a paler yellow sheer veil was twisted up and over the crown like a funeral shroud.

The veil had not aged nearly as well as the woven material of the hat. The fabric was flecked with brown spots from decades of sitting untouched in a hat box in Ramona’s grandmother’s closet. The hat had been transferred to Ramona when she was twelve, an age that Ramona knew was far too old for dress-up but not to her grandmother who had thought her granddaughter would be thrilled to receive it. This was the first time Ramona had taken the hat from the box in seven years. She suddenly wished her grandmother was alive to see her finally playing dress-up.

 

The transparent fabric had long since rotted and pulled off easily. The search for a glue gun and glue sticks required Ramona to rummage through three drawers before finding them nestled in a wad of ribbons, pipe cleaners, and lace. “Ramona’s such a crafty little thing,” her mother used to say to friends. “Yes, I’m a crafty little thing,” said Ramona as she plugged the glue gun into the wall and listened to the popping sound it made as it began to heat. Then she laid four glue sticks on the floor and set to work.

 

It took her mother all of two days to notice the box on her bedroom dresser amidst the swirl of scarves, stacks of books, dirty coffee cups, and a crumpled-up blouse with a missing button. “Good grief, what is this?” she muttered and lifted the lid from box right as her cell began to ring. Inside was the yellow hat, now lined in shiny, glued-on baubles across the brim from left ear to right. Larger ones were spaced an inch apart across the crown. A new, bright green ribbon replaced the aged yellow fabric that had once ringed the hat. Her mother turned the hat one way and then another, frowning. “No, I heard you,” she said to the caller. “I was just looking at this thing Ramona made.” She turned the hat over and looked inside the crown. “I don’t know what this is. Sometimes I think she just does these things for attention.” The voice on the other end sounded again. “No, it’s just some gaudy, plasticky thing she made.” She dropped the hat back in the box and turned away from the dresser. “I swear,” she shook her head, “she's starting nursing school this fall whether she likes it or not.” She turned, grabbed the box from the dresser, and shoved the lid back on. Ramona’s mother talked on the phone all the way through the front door and down the driveway to the street where she deposited the hat Ramona made into the trash can.

 

 

Cathy Adams’ latest novel, A Body’s Just as Dead, was released in 2018 by SFK Press. Her writing has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize. She is a short story writer with stories published in Utne, AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review, Barely South, Five on the Fifth, Upstreet, Southern Pacific Review, and 45 other journals from around the world. She earned her M.F.A. at Rainier Writing Workshop, Pacific Lutheran University, Washington. She lives and writes in Liaoning, China, with her husband, photographer, Julian Jackson.