My baby sister never cries. She doesn’t even care if you say, “I’m going to tell Daddy on you!” Nothing can make her cry. She just sticks out her tongue and laughs at you. A spatter of reddish freckles arches across the bridge of her nose, her little blonde braids stick out at an angle from her head, and she says things that are so funny the grownups repeat them to each other. She’s fearless, kisses dogs, and tells everyone in first grade the Facts of Life, which I have only recently learned about, myself, from a book our mother gave me called Let’s Talk About Life. (The first story in the book is about chickens and eggs. The next one is about frogs and eggs. Nothing becomes too clear to me from reading that book.)
My uncle calls my little sister Dynamite. We all have names besides our given ones. Older sister is the Bright One, the Beautiful One, the Good One. I’m the Too Sensitive One, the Tomboy, the Faucet. Younger sister is the Brat, the Mouthy One, and Dynamite, the best name of all.
My older sister is pretty much dynamite, herself. She has already done many good things in her life, such as always getting on the Honor Roll and, even when she was only six years old, making breakfast every morning for my mother. Of course she has a boyfriend. His name is Will, he has a big nose, and he’s handsome, with white blonde hair sticking up like a Marine cut. I want him to notice me, and he does now and then, but mostly not. That’s why sometimes I go in my room and cry, even when nothing has happened. My eyes swell, my cheeks get hot and tight, and then come the tears. “Crying again?” my mother says, looking in. Which makes me cry harder.
Every night, I promise myself I’m going to stop crying. I won’t ever cry again. But I do. I can’t help it. Every time something happens, I cry. And cry and cry. I have been crying my way through the days, the weeks, the months. I cry rivers, lakes, and oceans of tears. “There goes the faucet,” I hear. “She’s so sensitive . . . too sensitive!” I start to hate my crying. It leaves me feeling weak and helpless, but what can I do? I don’t ask for tears. They just come.
IV. Wonder Woman
My sister is waiting for me, standing near the Sternfelds’ front porch, a kind of concrete apron with two pillars. Upstairs, right above it, we have a better porch too, where my mother lets us eat in summer. My sister puts her hands on her hips. “Where were you? What were you doing?”
“Nowhere. Nothing.” I talk through tight lips.
“I was calling you.”
“I know.”
“Mom is home from work. She wants you for supper.”
“I know.”
“Were you with someone?”
“Who?”
“That’s what I asked you.”
“What?”
“Don’t be fresh. Who do you think you are, Wonder Woman?”
“Yes, yes, I’m Wonder Woman!”
I forget to keep my lips tight, and she leans close and sniffs, her nostrils drawing up in disgust. “What’s that nasty smell?”
I run around her, up the wooden steps into our apartment, and down the hall: past the room that I share with my little sister, past the door to the back stairs, then the living room and the kitchen, and into the bathroom. I lock the door and rinse my mouth repeatedly with cold water. The encounters with Herbie and my sister have upset me. I was tough, but I wanted to cry. And now I do. First I cry just a little, rubbing my shoulder and my head, where it hit the tree. I think how mad my mother’s going to be if she finds out I smoked. I shouldn’t have done it, especially not a filthy butt from the gutter, and maybe I’m going to die from all the germs. I cry harder. It’s comforting in a horrible sort of way to feel the hot tears on my cheeks.
My mother knocks on the bathroom door. “Are you in there? Are you crying again?”
“No,” I choke, and think how sorry they will all be when I die. Sad and sorry. They’ll be the ones crying then. They’ll appreciate me at last — so young, so dead.
At supper, I’m especially quiet and polite, so no one will notice my red eyes and ask if I’ve been crying again, and then notice me some more and wonder why my breath is stinky. But it’s OK, anyway, because my parents are upset, too, and not paying attention to me. They’re talking about Mr. and Mrs. Sternfeld, who might want to raise our rent. I don’t think they will, because they’re too nice. They’re not at all like Herbie. They’re both old and small with white, fluffy hair. They’re quiet little people, and they smile when they see me and nod their little white heads and say, “Nice girl! Nice girl!”
That night, through my bedroom floor, I hear Herbie talking to his parents in his loud, excited voice. My little sister is sleeping in the opposite bed. Nothing wakes her up. Herbie’s yelling now, and I feel scared for his parents. I wish I could go down there and zap him, like Wonder Woman. One zap for shoving me, one for yelling at his nice little parents.
V. Eyes
Every morning in the cold weather, before my father leaves for work, he runs down the back stairs from our apartment to the unheated shed on the ground floor. Sometimes I get up early and run down the stairs after him. In the shed, he pulls up the trap door in the floor, and we go down another flight of stairs into the cellar. It’s dark down there. As my father feeds the banked night fire shovelfuls of coal, it leaps and roars into life inside the furnace. If Daddy’s not in too big a hurry, he lets me dig into the coal bin and feed the glowing heart of fire. It’s hard, heavy work, but I don’t ever cry when we do this.
Nor do I cry when I play with my girlfriend Eva in the shed in warmer weather. Eva’s the crybaby, then. She’s chubby and always wants to play stupid things like Tea Party and never anything good like Spies. It’s a new game I’ve made up. We have to be very quiet, which Eva doesn’t like. We can’t giggle or snort or make any sounds. She doesn’t like that, either. And we can only play the game in our shed, because right next to it is the Sternfelds’ shed, and we can’t play the game without the Sternfelds’ shed.
The way you play is this: tiptoe to the wall that separates the two sheds and press your eye against the wall where the thin vertical slats meet. If you get the right angle, you can see into the Sternfelds’ shed, and if you’re lucky, you can catch Herbie across the room, near the little window, mixing things in jars and beakers. And then — and this is the point of the game — you can make up stories about him. Sometimes he talks to himself. He makes noises and grunts. Sometimes he laughs. He’s crazy, or might be a genius. Or both, I think. In comics and movies, mad-genius-scientists’ eyes always flash like his. Plus, I notice, his lips are very, very red.
“So what!” Eva says, when I point this out. “It’s boring.”
She won’t play any more with me. I don’t really care, because I’m never bored when I make up my stories or watch Herbie through the slats. Sometimes it crosses my mind that this game is something else my mother wouldn’t like me to do. Stop, I tell myself, but I don’t. I don’t want to stop.
Once or twice, Herbie looks toward the flimsy wall separating us, and seems to look at almost the exact spot where I’ve got my eye. It scares me. Stop, I say to myself again. But I go on making up stories about Herbie. I go on playing Spies. It’s almost like crying, something I tell myself not to do, but do anyway, except that Spies is better. It’s stories, like the books I read, but what’s so good is that they’re mine. No one can say anything about my stories, because no one knows about them. They’re all in my head, like the chant I do every time before I play Spies — Herbie be there. And he is there, day after day, almost as if he knows what I’m doing and is a willing part of my game and my imagination.
One day, when I put my eye to the crack between the boards and peer into the Sternfelds’ shed, Herbie is there again, but not across the room. He is right there, standing by the wall, staring back at me, his face puckered with concentration. He has a hypodermic needle in his hand. Faster than I can take in what’s happening, he raises the needle and pushes the plunger. A stream of hot liquid shoots between the slats and into my eye.
For an instant, there’s a stil
lness, as if nothing has happened. Words form in my mind. She froze with terror. I’m making up a story about this. That is the way to do it, to keep things from hurting. In the next instant, my eye begins to pulse and then to burn and hurt more than anything has ever hurt. I stumble up the back stairs, calling for my mother — my mother, I want my mother.
She sits me in a chair in the living room, the best chair, my father’s reading chair. She wraps ice in a dishtowel for me to hold against my eye and runs to the phone. My eye feels as if it’s held in place by the frailest of threads, as if any wrong movement will snap it free. I sit like a ramrod in the chair, focused on holding my eye in my head and the pain far back in my mind, where I can almost see it — a rush of blazing white. If I can keep the pain back there, in that white place, then my eye might also stay in place.
Soon the doctor comes. He produces a light from his bag and looks into my eye with it for a long time. Then Mrs. Sternfeld is there, squeezing her apron between her hands, patting my head and my shoulder. “She’s good, a good girl,” Mrs. Sternfeld says.
No, I think. I’m not interested in being a good girl. What I’m interested in is not crying. Since I ran up the stairs, I haven’t uttered a word of complaint or shed a single tear. I don’t understand exactly why I’m not crying. Maybe I don’t want to cry in front of strangers. Or maybe this is too important for tears. Tears are the easy way, the way I’ve always gone, and now I’ve chosen — or been allowed — to take another way. Silence. Quietness. Waiting. Watching.
“Well,” the doctor says at last, “a fraction closer, and she would have lost her sight in that eye.”
His words make an immediate, deep impression on me, deeper than the pain, deeper than the fear or the memory of Herbie’s resolved expression as he released the acid. In years to come, I never forget those words or lose a sense of gratitude that my sight was spared.
It may be from that moment that I begin to take the world in through my eyes with a special intensity. It is from that moment that I stop crying. Although I don’t know it then, sitting in that chair in our living room, I have passed over a line — the invisible line between childhood and whatever it is that comes next. Not adulthood, not that quickly, but the beginning of the long, long walk into another world.
“The years during which my family lived in a second floor apartment on First Street in Glens Falls, New York, stay in my memory as a series of sharp, brief snapshots. To write ‘In the Blink of an Eye,’ I collected a number of those snapshots and put them together to see how they connected to one another and what their greater meaning might be.
The events, both large and small, of the story, all took place. I picked up a cigarette butt from the gutter, played marbles with the boys, and ate raw rhubarb and crab apples. I climbed trees, had a friend named Eva, and went down into the cellar with my father in the winter, where he let me shovel coal into the furnace. My older sister called me to supper, and my younger sister kissed dogs, and my mother sure did hate smoking.
And, yes, our landlord’s son shot acid into my eye through that thin vertical space between the boards separating our shed from his. And the doctor was called, and I didn’t cry, and he said those words about my eyesight which I never forgot. The acid and the doctor happened in the same space of time, one morning or, more likely, one afternoon (I’ve forgotten which), but did everything in the story happen sequentially, one moment after another, the way things do in a story — in this story?
No. Our minds, our memories, are like erratic cameras. They snap quickly, this picture, not that one, another, then for days or weeks perhaps, not a single picture, then a whole series. It will be years after the moments we’re all living through now before we discover which pictures were developed, which won’t fade. And when we see these pictures in our mind’s eye, we’ll attach special significance to them.
I do, anyway. I think it means something that I remember the moment I stopped crying. And having written this story, I understand, for the first time, how that moment is linked to my having become a writer. Life is ultimately a mysterious unfolding of events. It’s impossible for me, now, to imagine myself as anything but a writer. Still, I wonder . . . would I have become a writer if I’d gone on sobbing my way through life?”
My sister, brother, and I didn’t have a dog, but we sure could have used one around dinnertime. Our dog would never have had to beg for table scraps, for we promised sincerely in our mealtime prayers always to feed Rover the main course. It wouldn’t have been so much for love of dog, but for survival. You see, our mother, known throughout the neighborhood as “Miss Essie,” was still refining her cooking skills. Until we could persuade our parents to let us have a dog, we sat at the dinner table with wax sandwich bags hidden in our pockets, especially when Miss Essie served “Hackensack,” our code word for mystery stew.
“Rosalind, Russell, and Rita! Don’t get up from that table ’til you eat every bit of that food,” Miss Essie commanded. Then she’d stand there and not leave until we began eating.
Since we knew we’d be at the table for a long time, we came up with experiments to amuse ourselves while our parents watched television in the other room. Our favorite food test, the pork-chop drop, was devised by my eleven-year-old brother Russell, our resident scientist.
“Tonight we will continue our study on speed and density,” Russell said, holding up his pork chop.
“I’ll count, I’ll count!” I volunteered, lowering my face to plate level.
Rosalind, the oldest at twelve, turned toward the living room to confirm that the coast was clear, then gave the “go ahead” for the pork-chop drop.
The object of the pork-chop drop was to compare the hardness of that night’s pork chops to those of dinners past. Usually Russell would hold the chop about two feet above the plate and let it drop, while Rosalind or I counted the side-to-side reverberations of the pork chop as it hit the dinner plate. The thinner and harder the pork chop, the higher the drop count.
All we knew about food was what Mommy cooked, and the cold sandwiches and stewed spinach they served in the school cafeteria. Living in Seaside, California, we were separated by thousands of miles from our grandmothers, aunts, and cooking cousins who lived in New York, Virginia, and North Carolina. Eating in restaurants and fast-food places were frivolities we knew nothing of. Above all, we adhered to Miss Essie’s firm rule, which was never to eat dinner at anyone else’s house. She never gave a reason for her rule — other than the promise of a spanking, and we never thought to question her. As soon as our friends’ fathers drove up to their driveways from work, we were to go straight home. Up until 1966, when we were twelve, eleven, and ten, Rosalind, Russell, and I believed that oil-soaked pork chops flattened to blackened sand dollars and cemented rice that defied separation was how food looked and tasted.
It was when Daddy replaced our black-and-white model with a color TV that we got an inkling about the texture and appearance of food from the outside, taste being the only missing component. We would sit in the dark before the glowing screen, oohing and aahing over a parade of McDonald’s and Crisco Oil commercials, not to mention those sitcom dining-room scenes where platters of succulent meats and brightly hued vegetables graced the table.
“Mommy, how come our French fries don’t look like that?” I’d exclaim, for ours were oily olive, dark brown, or black — certainly not golden brown and crinkled like the fries in the commercials.
“That’s how white people cook,” Mommy would reply, seemingly unaffected. Or, “That’s not real — that’s TV.”
These answers worked initially, but being inquisitive children, we began to ask our friends what they ate and how it tasted. We dared not ask them to smuggle out samples of their mothers’ cooking — at least I didn’t, believing Miss Essie was omniscient.
One thing was for certain. Daddy and Mommy didn’t eat what we ate. They ate first and separately at some secret parent banquet where they drank Pepsi and laughed, and children were not allo
wed within earshot. To compound the mystery, Miss Essie did not permit us inside the kitchen while she was cooking their supper. We were to stay outside until she called us in for our own.
This only caused more speculation about what our parents ate and why we could not have any. Naturally we came up with a plan to investigate. The plan called for us to end our kickball game promptly at four-thirty in the afternoon. That was when Billie Holiday and Miss Essie sang “Ain’t No Body’s Business” while hot popping grease applauded in the kitchen.
“It’s the only way,” Rosalind insisted. “Me or Russell will do it. Pick one.”
“Why my arm?” I wailed, limply offering it to her. “Why can’t we use your arm?”
“Because you’re the baby, and Mommy will do anything for her Rita Cakes.”
I stuck out my tongue, rankled by a nickname that I had outgrown.
Rosalind yanked my forearm, then sucked hard until a red flower appeared on my skin. We stood back to admire it. Although it didn’t swell as we had hoped, the red blotch was convincing.
Phase two of the plan then went into effect: As Agent X brought sobbing Agent Y in through the front door, Agent Z stationed himself at the back door, gateway to the kitchen. Just as Rosalind had predicted, Miss Essie dropped her potholder to attend to me.
“See, Mommy! A bee stung me.”
Mommy, somewhat skeptical, inspected the fading wound, then took me into the bathroom for some first aid. This was all we needed to get our investigation of the grownups’ food — or what Russell called the “fact-finding expedition” — under way.
We conferred at the dinner table that evening. Rosalind and I listened intently as Russell described the meats, vegetables, and starches he’d discovered.
“Sounds like chicken-fried steaks to me,” Rosalind said.
“Chicken-fried steaks?” I gasped, unable to comprehend a two-meat dish or why anyone would want to eat it. All that chewing! I couldn’t recall ever eating a steak, but was sure I wouldn’t have liked it. And fried chicken always needed Kool-Aid to wash it down. I shuddered and asked my brother, “What else?”
When I Was Your Age, Volume Two Page 2