City and town life -- Fiction; Short stories, American
Late the next afternoon, us ladies that weren't tending to the supper
were trying to get the Foreign booth to look like something. The Foreign
booth looked kind of slimpsey. We hadn't got enough in it. We just had a
few dishes that come from the old country, and a Swiss dress of Berta's
mother's and a Japanese dress, and like that. But we couldn't seem to
connect up much of Europe with Friendship Village.
At five o'clock the door opened, and in walked Mis' Amachi and Mis'
Swenson from the Flats, with nice black dresses on and big aprons pinned
up in newspapers. Pretty soon in come old Mis' Marchant, that had rode
up on a grocery delivery wagon, she said. Close behind these come some
more of them we had asked. And Mis' Sykes, acting like the personal
hostess to everything, took them around and showed them things, the
Friendship Village booth that was loaded with stuff, and the Foreign
booth that wasn't.
And Mis' Poulaki, one of the Greek women, she looked for a while and
then she says, "We got two nice musics from old country."
She made her hands go like playing strings, and we made out that she
meant two musical instruments.
"Good land!" says Mis' Sykes. "Post right straight home and get them.
Got anything else?"
"A little boy's suit from Norway," says Mis' Swenson. "And my marriage
dress."
"Get it up here!" cries Mis' Sykes. "Ladies, why do you s'pose we never
thought of this before?"
There wasn't hardly one of them that couldn't think of something--a
dish, or a candlestick, or wooden shoes, or an old box, or a kerchief.
Old Mis' Marchant had come wearing a shoulder shawl that come from
Lombardy years back, and we jerked it off her and hung it up, hole and
all.
It made quite some fun for all of us. And all the time our little
strange boy was running around the floor, playing with papers, and when
we weren't talking of anything else, we were talking about him.
"Say," says Mis' Sykes, that never means to say "say" but gets it said
unbeknownst when excited, "I guess he's the foreignest thing we've got."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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