by Jerry
The doll sits inert on the bed. Amy has learned how to make hospital corners and her small fingers take care to smooth the sheets down. Not wanting to handle her pillow too roughly, she coaxes it into plumping.
Time to go to school.
“Morning darlin’,” her father says as she bounds down the stairs. His speech is slurred on a piece of toast.
“Morning.” Amy walks past him, holding herself perfectly straight, and goes to the refrigerator. She stares at the wallpaper as she makes a peanut butter sandwich, glancing occasionally at the distorted reflection her father makes in the toaster. She sucks peanut butter off her fingers and wipes them off on a towelette. She washes the butter knife in the sink and wipes her hands again. And again. She forces herself to let go of the towel.
Plastic bag. Lunchbox. Small can of juice.
“Goodbye,” she says.
“Goodbye, now,” he answers.
The walk to school feels good. Five blocks, straight down the avenue. There are tall hedges to her left; she plays a game of thug and vigilante. A thug is in the hedges, where she can’t see him, but he won’t jump out after her. If he does she’ll flip him over her shoulder and watch his skull splatter on the sidewalk.
She likes the rough-hewn wood of the school doors, the bronze doorknobs embossed with the seal of the School Board. It all seems very medieval and towering, a light-and-dark green-walled city. She climbs the flight of stairs to kindergarten, turning around thick plates of glass-imprisoned chickenwire. The thug waits behind every turn; she can’t see him through the milky glass. Her heart stills every time she rounds a partition . . . but he is gone. Run away. Waiting. Next time. She’s sure.
Her teacher tells the class to say “No” to friendly strangers who sit in cars in the neighborhood. Amy shrugs. It doesn’t concern her.
Recess. “Amy, you’re supposed to be taking a nap.”
Amy closes her eyes, fakes it.
She sits by herself in a corner with wooden puzzles. The girls are touching each other’s dresses and sharing tiny pots and pans. She doesn’t watch the boys. She wants to play with building blocks but she’ll have to get them away from the boys. The wooden pieces of the puzzle will do.
“Amy, you’re supposed to work on one puzzle at a time.”
She knows the correct response. “I’ll clean it up.”
“All right.”
Later, one of the boys fluffs Amy’s dress and she flattens herself against the window and shouts at him. The puzzles lie in a jumbled heap.
“Okay. Okay, shh. Enough, Amy.”
Not enough. Not enough. Amy blinks. She says calmly, to the boy. “Stay away.” He listens. Off to the side, two girls are arguing noisily over a plastic doll. Tearfully, they engage in a tug of war with it.
Forcing her hands to stay steady, Amy cleans up the puzzles, remembering which pieces belong to which puzzle. Gloating secretly, she congratulates herself.
Kindergarten, she decides, is not a place to make friends.
Damn, it’s Tuesday.
Before I’m out of bed I’m into the routine I wanted to avoid. My nails are at my scalp and I am scratching furiously. My dandruff falls gently, like fresh snow glinting in a shaft of sunlight. My knees are dusted. When I see no more flakes my scalp will be clean, perfect. I shake my head back and forth, like one of those water-filled paperweights they sell around Christmastime. White crescents have nestled under my nails.
Carefully, I ease myself into stopping, and make my way to the shower. The hot water on my scalp is agonizing. I won’t be able to shampoo for days.
”Show me how you love me.” My ex-husband wraps my hair around his hand and jerks my head back to plant a kiss on my lips.
We are exiting from a fancy restaurant where he has paid for ahandsome dinner. “You’re a good cook,” I kid him. “Thank you.”
”I’ll take it out in trade,” he kids back.
Tired, I lean against the tiled wall and turn up the heat in my shower water. It splashes between my breasts and leaves an angry red splotch. The faucets are hidden in steam, now, but I am still shivering. It’s times like this when the elaborately-handled cleaver in my kitchen seems my most precious possession. I let my tears mingle with the water. No one will know, that way.
I luxuriate in a powder-blue towel big enough to double as a bedspread. Purely business dress: mahogany colored skirt and blazer, matching vest. Pink tailored shirt to soften the austerity a bit. Small amber worry beads.
I have a sister-bottle of brandy on my dressing table. Now I take a few sips . . . to quiet my thoughts a bit, and to help dull the pain while I try to brush my hair.
Kindergarten, hmm? What’s the closest public school to Amy?
And then: Heaven help her soul if she’s bearing her secrets through parochial school!
By the time I walk into my office I am prepared. I am also exhausted. The paperwork feels good, it’s mindless, I try not to think of what’s behind the rubber-stamping and the red tape. It’s only mindless when you don’t think about it.
Ben is at my desk.
“Oh, get away!” I snarl.
That lovable idiot’s filled my coffee cup with coffee again. Now he goes away. I want to tell him I’m sorry, but it’ll have to wait.
Why it is I always end up apologizing to the people who treat me like dirt, instead of the people I treat like dirt? “That question goes on the back burner,” I say aloud to myself.
A couple heads turn, turn back. They think I’m talking about a case. Never fear, folks, of course I’m talking about a case.
“Break a leg,” Ben offers blandly as I pass his door.
“Today’s Tuesday,” I remind him. “Tuesdays I break kneecaps.” And I’m out on the pavement, sweating onto the slip I carry that bears Purcell’s address.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Purcell.”
“Afternoon, Ms. Sinclair.” His handshake is warm, and dry. I cast a glance about me, fishing for Amy. She stands by the kitchen sink, holding a towel. Hiding her hands.
He calls to her. “Amy! There’s a lady here who wants to say hello to you.”
Her eyes glaze over as she folds the towel and squares its corners. She lays it down flush with an edge of chrome and walks steadily to the door. “Hello,” she says.
The three of us go to the kitchen table, where Amy sits next to her father and I am opposite them, on the other side. We begin by talking about the weather.
While Amy’s father and I exchange cordialities, Amy sits quietly with her hands stiffly folded in her lap, beneath the lip of the table. She turns to her father as he speaks and toward me as I reply. When her neck grows tired from twisting she stares at the wallpaper (small delicate cornucopias. I thought they were pretty snails until I looked more closely). Amy’s father doesn’t take his sight off me. He hasn’t glanced once at Amy and hasn’t touched her; in fact, I can easily imagine a plate-glass wall separating them.
“I was just noticing how quickly the days pass,” he’s saying. “Before you know it Amy’ll be off to college.”
“Happens to all of us,” I say, smiling. “Tell me, do you think I could talk to Amy alone? That is, if she doesn’t mind?”
His jaw hardens, ever so slightly. “If she doesn’t mind? She’s a child.”
“Amy.” I gaze into her eyes as she turns her face toward me. “Could you and I go and talk, if your father says it’s okay?” I watch her as she turns toward him for an answer. He frowns in silence and she turns back to me. Carefully, I say, “You can say no if you don’t want to. And if we talk and there’s something you don’t like or if I bother you, you go and tell your dad.”
She stares at me intently, and I can feel my eyebrows rise. Finally, she swivels back in her seat and looks up at her father. “I don’t mind,” she says sagely, “if you don’t.”
Oh, her timing is beautiful! I mentally dawdle with the thatched horns of the cornucopias. Avoid eye contact, don’t pressure. Let there be no excuses for him to refus
e us.
“No, I guess I don’t mind. But you be careful; you’re a big girl now. Yes, you may leave the table.”
Amy slides off her chair, toward me. I follow her, with a courteous nod over my shoulder.
Amy doesn’t understand what the women who visit her want. But this one has a soft voice and wide green eyes and a pretty mouth. And instead of asking, “Does your father hit you?” or, “Do you like it here?” she asks, “Isn’t kindergarten dumb?”
Are children allowed to think kindergarten’s dumb? Amy thought she was the only one who thought so. Secretly. Now she nods, feeling brave. “Will you tell my teacher?”
The lady makes a long face. “No. I won’t tell anyone anything you don’t want me to tell. I thought kindergarten was dumb.” She smiles. “That makes two of us. Betcha there’s more.”
Could it be? “How many more?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “Lots.”
They are sitting on Amy’s bed. Amykins sits in her corner and doesn’t make a sound. She is always quiet with strangers.
“They used to make us take silly naps,” the lady says. “In the middle of the day! Only babies nap in the middle of the day. Now me . . . I used to sleep with my eyes open. All night! Everybody else had to close theirs.” Amy draws herself up to her full height. “I sleep with my eyes open, too!”
“Really!” The lady frowns, a little. “I thought I was the only one. I could tell when a shadow was even thinking of moving.”
Amy is smiling now. “Me too.” Did grownups do this?
Grownups were grownups. They could do whatever they wanted to. “Did you really go to kindergarten?”
“A long, long time ago. Wanna know how long ago?”
“Yes!”
“All right,” she says low, with a sly smile. She whispers, “My teacher was a dinosaur.”
Praise the heavens, she can still laugh!
Her father—Ernest—is very quiet outside the bedroom, probably still in the kitchen reading a newspaper. Let him think I’m asking her questions out of a textbook. Let him think I glean nothing from what she tells me.
I shift a little on the soft, pliant mattress and the doll begins to tilt. Gently, Amy straightens it. Her fingers are deft and her touch is too light. Much too light.
“Have you had her for a long time?” I ask.
“A year.” She purses her lips. “Maybe two. I don’t remember.”
If I had a doll like that I’d remember when I got her. But I’m groping now, I don’t know much about dolls. They were dead plastic when I was a kid, I was always given dolls and I’d twist their heads off. I’d wanted a chemistry set.
“What’s her name?”
She looks sad. “Amykins. Like my name but with a ‘kins’ after it.”
She looks like you, too. I open my mouth to speak and a numbness grips my stomach, as though I am about to trespass, about to trample the grass on someone else’s lawn. “I only had plastic dolls,” I say, “and they didn’t look as nice. If they were nicer I guess they’d be like friends. And they wouldn’t be dumb, either, like kindergarten.”
Amy’s face is working. A smile creeps into her cheeks but it’s a sad smile, sad and tender. Like a ceramic and bejeweled Madonna with tears in her eyes. She nods at me.
I glance about the room. Next to me, Amy takes a deep breath. I remark on a plastic bathtub boat on her dresser as she composes herself.
“When I was five,” I said, “my bathtub boat was made from a wooden spool after it was out of thread. Of course, the spools aren’t wooden any more, but they used to be.” I gesture with my hands. Amy is looking at me, all eyes. “And there would be a rubber band, and a matchstick, and that would be the motor.” My hands make circling motions. “I’d wind the matchstick on the rubber band until it was tight, then put the whole thing into the water and let it go and it would race to the other side!”
She is enthralled. “You made a boat? All by yourself?”
“No. No, I don’t even remember how to put one together, but the spools are too light for that now, anyway,” I say. “My father used to make them for me.”
“Oh.” Thoughtful. “Was he a nice man?”
“Sometimes.” I notice, with an inner jolt, that my smile is as sad as Amy’s. “Sometimes he was very nice.”
“Mine, too.” She frowns. “Sometimes.”
She looks at me and her breathing quickens. I want to say, Tell me! Don’t hold it back, it doesn’t have to be a secret! I’m here to help you!
Patience. We must be as children, innocent and trusting. The last thing she needs to see now is another adult out of control.
I say, “I’d like to be your friend. Talk to you again.”
She says, “I have to ask my daddy.”
“I know. That’s all right.”
As we return to the kitchen, Ernest looks up from his newspaper. He is sitting in the same seat as before. There is a soft smile on his face but his voice is guarded. “Well? Did you have a nice chat?”
Amy grins. “Ms. Sinclair told me about boats made from wooden spools.”
His eyebrows shoot up. “I remember those,” he says, smiling with some relief. He tells me, “I’d have thought that was before your time.”
Amy stares at me. She probably doesn’t think anything could be before my time.
“You flatter me. Perhaps Amy and I can talk again?”
Amy asks him, “Please?”
“Why, I’d think Ms. Sinclair has friends her own age,” he tells her, looking at me. “Just as you should have friends your own age.”
“I’m sure we both do,” I reply. “But I’d still like to talk to Amy again. Just because I had dinosaurs for teachers doesn’t mean she and I can’t be friends. And I suppose,” I add wistfully, “that the times I’m not here I’ll just be sitting with a whole lot of papers to work on.”
He gives me the slightest of nods. “I will consider it,” he softly says. I can look into his eyes and see the fevered working of cogwheels. The girl, certainly, is not to be underestimated, but the man has a brilliance as well. I must not for a moment forget that.
As he helps me on with my coat he leans close to my ear and says, “If you had dinosaurs for teachers, need I ask what you think taught me?”
The sun is going down now.
Amy could slip out with Amykins, if they really tried hard enough. Once they snuck out of the apartment with Daddy’s keys and spent half the night in the alley. Then they got scared because if he woke up he would come after them. The pavement was cold and hard and gritty, but above them the sky was clear with stars, all cozy in that thin strip between apartment buildings. It almost hurt to go back inside.
She could live in the trains. She heard some people did that. And you could go anywhere you wanted to, you could see the world.
Now it was getting dark again.
It wasn’t the lady’s fault that he would come in again. It wasn’t! It wasn’t any of the ladies’ fault. He wanted to make it their fault. They’d visit Amy and then he’d keep coming in, and coming in. More often than ever before. As though they had whispered before, like he used to whisper to Mommy behind closed doors: if you visit then I’ll visit, she’ll think you’re doing it too, you’ll see.
Now Amykins is crying.
You’re a computer, you’re not supposed to have feelings! Why can’t I cry like you do?
Amy takes a deep shuddering breath and moves the metal lip that locks her bedroom window. She strains to push the window up. It moves a little. It moves a little more. It moves too slowly. Amy’s arms hurt but she keeps pushing, pushing, she’s opening the crypt, she’s escaping from the haunted house like they have in the cartoons. She wishes Amykins was programmed to have strong arms.
Amykins is crying harder.
I can’t hide you. I can’t hide you anymore.
Amy crawls on the floor until she finds the spatula from her Little Miss Kitchen Set. She begins to hack at the dried paint jammed in the sl
iding tracks in the window.
“What’s that noise?”
“Just playing!” Believe me oh please believe me.
The spatula looks as though someone took a bite out of it.
A breeze comes in through the crack and tickles Amy’s neck. The alley looks so small from here, small like the Little Miss Kitchen Set. Is the plastic clock ticking? Amy thinks she hears it; she’s never heard it tick before. She didn’t think it could.
The window’s stuck and it won’t move any more. But Amy can fit through with Amykins. Quickly she returns to the bed and cuddles the doll to her and rushes back to the window. She hears a muffled cry against her chest. “Mama . . .” Her blouse is staining with tear water. Or pee water. Or both. The breeze is stronger now. Her legs are still warm indoors but her hair is outside, blowing in the wind.
There is a crash behind her, a door slamming into a wall very far away. Her legs are lifted high up and everything moves backwards. The bottom of the window hits her in the head, is she falling now? No, there’s no more wind, everything’s spinning but there’s no more wind. No more wind. It’s hot inside, where is the sidewalk, the little cracks in it? Where is the cool little corner, where is the train?
He is pressing her into the mattress, his arm is across her throat. There are spots playing in her head.
“Don’t you ever, ever do that again!” he bellows. It sounds as if he bellows but his voice is very far away. Amykins is screaming. Where is Amykins? Amy’s hand, her right hand, holds an ankle. The syntheskin on the ankle is going too soft, she’s squeezing it too hard. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
The arm presses harder. Amy can’t hear anything now, but her father’s face is red and livid and his mouth keeps yelling something. It is very quiet.
Now her father is shaking Amykins. Her syntheskin is black and blue and yellow in some places; when did she let go? Amy can’t feel her hands, only the arm on her neck. When did she let Amykins go? I’M SORRY I’M SORRY I’M SORRY. She can’t hear anything because somebody is screaming inside her head. Everything has spots.
Did she hear the door shut?
I’M SORRY I’M SORRY I’M SORRY I’M SORRY i’m sorry i’m sorry i’m sorry i’m sorry imsorryimsorryimsorry sorry sorry sorry sorry . . .