The Great Gilly Hopkins

The couch was brown and squat with a pile of cushions covered in graying lace at the far end. A matching brown chair with worn arms slumped at the opposite side of the room. Gray lace curtains hung at the single window between them, and beside the window was a black table supporting an old-time TV set with rabbit ears. The Nevinses had had color TV. On the right-hand wall between the door and the brown chair stood a black upright piano with a dusty brown bench. Gilly took one of the pillows off the couch and used it to wipe every trace of dust off the piano bench before sitting down on it.

From the brown chair Miss Ellis was staring at her with a very nonprofessional glare. Mrs. Trotter was lowering herself to the sofa and chuckling. “Well, we been needing somebody to rearrange the dust around here. Ain’t we, William Ernest, honey?”

William Ernest climbed up behind the huge woman and lay behind her back like a bolster pillow, p

oking his head around from time to time to sneak another look at Gilly.

She waited until Mrs. Trotter and Miss Ellis were talking, then gave little W.E. the most fearful face in all her repertory of scary looks, sort of a cross between Count Dracula and Godzilla. The little muddy head disappeared faster than a toothpaste cap down a sink drain.

She giggled despite herself. Both of the women turned to look at her. She switched easily and immediately to her “Who, me?” look.

Miss Ellis stood up. “I need to be getting back to the office, Mrs. Trotter. You’ll let me know”—She turned to Gilly with prickles in her big blue eyes—“you’ll let me know if there’re any problems?”

Gilly favored Miss Ellis with her best barracuda smile.

Meantime Mrs. Trotter was laboriously hefting herself to her feet. “Don’t worry, Miz Ellis. Gilly and William Ernest and me is nearly friends already. My Melvin, God rest him, used to say that Trotter never met a stranger. And if he’d said kid, he woulda been right. I never met a kid I couldn’t make friends with.”

Gilly hadn’t learned yet how to vomit at will, but if she had, she would have dearly loved to throw up on that one. So, lacking the truly perfect response, she lifted her legs and spun around to the piano, where she proceeded to bang out “Heart and Soul” with her left hand and “Chopsticks” with her right.

William Ernest scrambled off the couch after the two women, and Gilly was left alone with the dust, the out-of-tune piano, and the satisfaction that she had indeed started off on the right foot in her new foster home. She could stand anything, she thought—a gross guardian, a freaky kid, an ugly, dirty house—as long as she was in charge.

She was well on the way.

THE MAN WHO COMES TO SUPPER

The room that Mrs. Trotter took Gilly to was about the size of the Nevinses’ new station wagon. The narrow bed filled up most of the space, and even someone as skinny as Gilly had to kneel on the bed in order to pull out the drawers of the bureau opposite it. Mrs. Trotter didn’t even try to come in, just stood in the doorway slightly swaying and smiling, her breath short from climbing the stairs.

“Why don’t you just put your things away in the bureau and get yourself settled? Then when you feel like it, you can come on down and watch TV with William Ernest, or come talk to me while I’m fixing supper.”

What an awful smile she had, Gilly thought. She didn’t even have all her teeth. Gilly dropped her suitcase on the bed and sat down beside it, kicking the bureau drawers with her toes.

“You need anything, honey, just let Trotter know, OK?”

Gilly jerked her head in a nod. What she needed was to be left alone. From the bowels of the house she could hear the theme song from Sesame Street. Her first job would be to improve W.E.’s taste in TV. That was for sure.

“It’s goin’ to be OK, honey. I know it’s been hard to switch around so much.”

“I like moving.” Gilly jerked one of the top drawers so hard it nearly came out onto her head. “It’s boring to stay in one place.”

“Yeah.” The big woman started to turn and then hesitated. “Well—”

Gilly slid off the bed and put her left hand on the doorknob and stuck her right hand on her hip.

Mrs. Trotter glanced down at the hand on the knob. “Well, make yourself at home. You hear now?”

Gilly slammed the door after her. God! Listening to that woman was like licking melted ice cream off the carton. She tested the dust on the top of the bureau, and then, standing on the bed, wrote in huge cursive curlicues, “Ms. Galadriel Hopkins.” She stared at the lovely letters she had made for a moment before slapping down her open palm in the middle of them and rubbing them all away.

The Nevinses’ house had been square and white and dustless, just like every other square, white, dustless house in the treeless development where they had lived. She had been the only thing in the neighborhood out of place. Well, Hollywood Gardens was spotless once more. They’d got rid of her. No. She’d got rid of them—the whole stinking lot.

Unpacking even just the few things in her brown suitcase always seemed a waste of time to Gilly. She never knew if she’d be in a place long enough to make it worth the bother. And yet it was something to fill the time. There were two little drawers at the top and four larger ones below. She put her underwear in one of the little ones, and her shirts and jeans in one of the big ones, and then picked up the photograph from the bottom of the suitcase.

Out of the pasteboard frame and through the plastic cover the brown eyes of the woman laughed up at her as they always did. The glossy black hair hung in gentle waves without a hair astray. She looked as though she was the star of some TV show, but she wasn’t. See—right there in the corner she had written “For my beautiful Galadriel, I will always love you.” She wrote that to me, Gilly told herself, as she did each time she looked at it, only to me. She turned the frame over. It was still there—the little piece of tape with the name on it. “Courtney Rutherford Hopkins.”

Gilly smoothed her own straw-colored hair with one hand as she turned the picture over again. Even the teeth were gorgeous. Weren’t girls supposed to look like their mothers? The word “mother” triggered something deep in her stomach. She knew the danger signal. Abruptly she shoved the picture under a T-shirt and banged the bureau drawer shut. This was not the time to start dissolving like hot Jell-O. She went downstairs.

“There you are, honey.” Trotter turned away from the sink to greet her. “How about giving me a hand here with this salad?”

“No.”