Scratched

by Elizabeth Tallent

  Because of their ultra-narrow windows our front doors had had to be custom-made, and when my father said the phrase he drew it out—cus . . . tom . . . maayaade—to convey Tennessee-boy bewilderment at ending up with a wife so elegant no ordinary door could possibly suit her. There was another thrust to his drawl: he could pay for such whims. He could! Who had once been barefoot and whipped with briar canes! From the real and unreal door shone twin rectangles of day, so narrow and slittily vertical they seemed to warn Take the world in small slices.

  If you did go out, there was the lawn. Between you and nuclear annihilation: the lawn. Every house had one. Children ran barefoot in grass bred specially for sheen and lushness. Lawn flowed into lawn and only the fathers could tell where the lawn belonging to one house stopped and the lawn belonging to another began. When they mowed the fathers had to intuit the boundaries, and if a father was wrong and mowed over into another lawn both trespasser and trespassee were dismayed and would stand on the invisible line shaking their heads. While mowing the fathers inscribed the positions of dandelions on the lawn map each father kept in his head, and when he was done mowing the father went back to mete out dandelion poison from a sprayer with a nozzle. At the edge of a lawn being mowed children would collect, wanting to run over it for the prickling fresh-cut thrill. If the nap of someone’s lawn had grown out to the meadowy depth that would take an imprint of a body, there would be children lying in it in pairs, scheming, or in groups, cloud-watching with everybody’s heads together and bodies rayed out. We lay there absorbing the heat from each other’s scalps as if we were one giant daydreaming brain that ran the cosmos. Revulsion struck and we jumped up. Each child in turn would clasp hands with the child at the center of the lawn, and this child, It, spun in circles anchoring the outer child’s wheeling hand-clasped orbit until speed and helplessness fused and It let go and centrifugal force sent the outer child staggering across the grass, running to keep up with (it felt like) his own body and then (what made it a game) freezing into a wrenched statue that could be rigidly upright—one-legged variants were favored—or crouching with arms queered at temple-dancer angles or bent vertiginously backwards, spine arched, worrying ants might climb into your hair. Frozen, you could see only one or two others from the corner of your eye, but there was the feeling of everyone’s being frozen near you and for some reason that was a wonderful feeling, looser and sexier and lighter than lying with everyone’s heads touching but every bit as telepathically binding. In our stop-time machine nothing moved, in the whole contorted array not a single cocked arm or tensed leg stirred, and there we stayed in our arduous heart-beating immobility while It walked among us. Only It was free to survey the entire lawn, and It took Its time choosing from the museum of wrecked children. Whoever It touched on the shoulder, that was the winner. It was unerring about which pose evoked the worst calamity and in this game alone of all our games we never felt aggrieved or argued otherwise. Older, I would read geographer Jay Appleton’s theory that because we evolved on the African savanna a level expanse of grass excites in our brains a sense of belonging and rightness. A lawn, any lawn, was our new world and we rolled back and forth to get it over all our skin.

  Below, at the bottom of the lower flight of stairs, there was no real basement, only the cement-floored laundry room and, adjoining that, my sister’s and my basement-feeling bedroom whose high-up windows were obscured by thorny Russian cedars planted too close to the foundation. These were as menacing as anything with the word Russian attached to it would have been, then. At first as succinctly expressive as bonsai, the cedars had grown lusher and higher than foreseen, merging into a bristling green-black stole draped along the intersection of house and lawn. In thunderstorms they scratched with such avidity at the windows it was hard to believe they were not animals, but plants. Whatever light made it through the cedars was stained in transit, and despite its pristine white octagonal-tile floor, suited to a surgical suite, our bedroom was as faintly, naggingly green as a dirty aquarium. The seeping dreariness of its light was a bad match for the room’s basic design: unsparingly linear, it was meant to be a radiant enclosure whose perfect white walls and floor repelled any shady attempt at privacy. It was an anti-adolescence box. An invisible line, electrically alert to infringement, divided the room into my mayhem and my sister’s princessdom, orderly down to the ballerina who rose and began pivoting when the lid of the music box was lifted. She slid up from a secret ballerina crevice and it was hard to tell what emerged first as the lid was cracked up, the preliminary tink of the waltz or her teensy profile. I hated her, that ballerina, avatar of discipline and prettiness no bigger than a candle flame and with two roles, velvet hiddenness and dainty performance. When my sister was gone I would crank the music-box key as tight as it would go and watch her whiplash through her pirouettes. If she’d snapped off, I would have hidden the body. Sometimes I went as far as imagining myself bravely lying my way through my sister’s tears, my mother’s accusations: Don’t look at me! I don’t know what happened! The audacity of my imagined lie (not that they would have been fooled) tempted me to twist the key harder, but the manic dancer maintained her toehold. Matching blankets hospital-cornered on the twin beds on warring sides of the room displayed still more ballerinas, dawdling en pointe or taking their bows: their demureness wicked through furry pink polyester to coat my skin as I slept.

  Our room opened onto a hallway where there were closet doors and the foot of a flight of stairs, carpeted in beige, this lower flight ascending to the landing and its mirror image, at the other end of the landing, leading to the upper story—living room, kitchen, the master bedroom belonging to my mother and father at the hallway’s end, and opening off the hallway the small bedroom my little brother had to himself. With only the pitch of the roof high above for a ceiling, the landing possessed a proud shaft of vertical space. In this shaft were suspended, at different heights, three sleek cylindrical brass downlights whose use was forbidden since, when bulbs did burn out, replacing them was a ladder-and-swearing project that could ruin a Saturday morning. When, for my parents’ infrequent parties, the downlights’ master switch was clicked on, guests entered a movie of exalted light. Party radiance transformed my mother into a breathless charmer. Sure, for once, that there would be zero consequences, my brother and sister and I evaded her gaily unmeant warnings to get to bed—secretly we knew she liked the picture we would make for any guest happening to glance up. A row of fresh-bathed Norman Rockwell cuties, we had never made our mother weep with fury. No mischief of ours ever doomed her to a migraine. In clean flannel pajamas—shooting stars and spaceships and astronauts, a shirt that buttoned and pants with a drawstring for my brother, and for my sister and me identical ankle-length gowns in an intense pink I associated with throwing up, maybe because I had the flu the first time I wore it—the three of us crouched behind the fancy ironwork guardrail shielding the edge of the upper story from the drop to the landing to spy on the suave hair of strange men coming in from the cold starry night and the lacquered updos of the women with them and the satin linings of the coats they shed for my father to receive and drape over his arm, where they made an overlapping glamorous burden he was in charge of, just as he was in charge of all things that came from outside, and of his children in their pajamas behind the guardrail high above, his manner cunning and magnanimous, superbly male, deeply reassuring to see or be close to, as each lucky stranger was welcomed into our light.

  Along with the new house came a new school for my brother and sister and me, a compound of modernist brick buildings set down in neat playing fields, and though my mother mostly preferred our new teachers, from admiration for Mr. Strehlik she drove me back to my old school in the city for violin lessons.

  While I liked the violin as an object for its lustrous zebra-striped back and scrolled head with Sputnik-y keys and the nervous zingy E string and its parallel comrades tensely ascending the fretted neck, and I liked the inside of the violin case for its ratty scarlet
velvet whose curvy vacancy precisely answered the contours of the violin when you tucked it in, with compartments for pitch pipes and rosin and brass latches that closed with reverberant snaps, and I liked the music room for its atmosphere of devotion and its high arched windows and wood floor gleaming as if made from thousands of violins melted down and poured out and for the disorder of music stands and gray folding chairs whose backs were stamped with the name of the school that wasn’t mine any longer and the hippo laziness of black cello cases lying on their sides along the wall and the blackboard palimpsest of older students’ tricky passages, hectic flights of eighth notes disappearing into a cumulus of haphazard erasure, still, I feared Mr. Strehlik for his impatience and derision and large, corner-tilted dark eyes that had never missed a mistake and the horror of his hand redeploying my index and middle and little fingers on the strings while he chanted in his ominous accent Like THIS like THIS like THIS and his old-smelling white shirt and the bow tie he acknowledged opened him to ridicule but refused to exchange for the somber straight dark tie that would have checked, at least slightly, our abuse, which commenced as soon as the music-room door closed behind us and we ran shouting down the stairwell, singing out mocking variations on this name—Straw-LICK-y, STRANGE-icky—for four flights down to the doors that let us out into the street, and there went our separate ways, the other two girls in my class sauntering lopsided in imitation of Mr. Strehlik’s tilty polio gait, me standing bereft on a winter city street corner with the weight of my violin case as the one real thing I had hold of, since reality, or what little reality was within my ken, was banished by the hilarity I owed their performance, and once reality had gone into retreat it could be slow finding its way back, or so I was learning, on that corner on the opposite, old side of the city from our new house and my new school, and while probably another, more confident child could have handled the strangeness of being returned to a previous existence, I submitted to it with terror, bewildered by the steep old buildings with no lights in any of their rows of windows and the onset of darkness and by no one being anywhere around.

  When you come out, my mother had told me, you wait here on this corner, and I’ll swing by and pick you up. Ten minutes, half an hour, eternity. Winter ached under my breastbone. I had been here before—the profound here of waiting and needing. This was something my mother did that I never quite believed she did and so when she left me somewhere I failed to foresee that she wasn’t coming for me, and this saved me some anxiety but meant that whenever I emerged to find she wasn’t there it came as a shock. This first shock was followed by others: because my serious nearsightedness had not yet been diagnosed, I was repeatedly duped into thunderous relief by cars that looked vaguely like ours. I had learned to peer closely. If I thought of trying to get back into the school and find Mr. Strehlik, the memory of having ridiculed him rose up and shamed the impulse out of existence. He would long since have left the school by some other door anyway. I must have known he would have been utterly unwilling to take charge of me, but my long wait on that corner had killed reason, each bitter winter breath an infusion of fairy-tale trustingness, and if he had appeared I would have followed Mr. Strehlik anywhere. My mother, I understood, respected him—at least, her voice in conversation with him was enthralled and deferential. Who was I to despise the person she trusted to coax beauty from my intractable fingers? For him to do that, to try to do that, cost good money and meant I had to be driven across the city though there was a music teacher at my new school who was good enough for other mothers’ children. Not mine. What my mother expected of this man with his large wounded corner-tilted eyes and inscrutable origins was the transformation of my ugliness and awkwardness into talent, which he might be able to do because he was European. At bottom I understood nothing could justify the exposure of mercurial Mozartean sensitivity like his to sawing discords like mine, and I condemned him for submitting to this travesty. No matter how badly he needed money, he shouldn’t have tricked my mother into believing there was hope for me. For a fastidious, hypervigilant, disliking mind like hers the onset of hope was as deceptive as infatuation: she just couldn’t see what was right before her eyes. And then she did, and what was right before her eyes was me, and not being good at anything, I could not help her. If I had been good at something I could have pleased her: it wasn’t impossible. If I had been good at things she would have been as serene as mothers were meant to be in 1963. There had been no warning that a beautiful woman could end up with a child so backwards and ill at ease that it would reflect badly on her mother. As it was I threatened her life and that was more than enough to justify my mother’s leaving me standing on the corner forever. Shame was weirdly consoling, since it graced the inexplicable endless wait with a reason. A cause. The cause was me. Not long ago, when I was only a little smaller, a little more childlike, I had had a chance at perfection. It was possible for a child to do every single thing right if the child would only pay attention. If I had paid attention the station wagon would pull up in front of me and I would climb in to the sound of my mother’s voice asking How was your lesson? and the inside would be warm and the clean smell of our car would set off the scent of her perfume, and as soon as my seat belt was latched my mother would face front with the collar of her coat turned up and after punching a couple of buttons on the radio and finding nothing but ominous male voices calculating the distance from the Russian ship carrying nuclear missiles to the shore of Cuba, which was all there was on the radio lately, she would sigh and punch in the dashboard lighter and fire up a Salem Light for the drive home. There on the winter street corner I vowed from then on I would pay the most exquisite attention the world had ever seen. I would be a creature of infinite attention. Whatever was wanted or needed, it would all be done right, and by me, because I was changing right then and there on that street corner, I was transfigured and how could such transfiguration fail to make the station wagon materialize from the dark? At long intervals a car stopped at the stop sign of my corner, but it was never a station wagon and the driver never turned his head to wonder why a child was standing there—it wasn’t an era when you worried about a child on her own or felt compelled to ask the child if she was lost. Dirty snow meant the violin case couldn’t be put down without getting ruined, and I kept changing hands, one freezing on the handle of the violin case, one tucked deep into a pocket. Soon it was very dark. It seemed impossible I had ever been anywhere as beautiful as the music room.

  Then there was my father’s profile—my father about to drive right by! His hat, the set of his jaw, the black frames of his glasses! My father at the wheel of a strange car, my father who had come for me even if he was slow to turn his head and see me. Then he did. He was not smiling, that was all right, he had things on his mind, fathers did, I had hold of the door handle and it opened, it swung wide and I was hoisting the violin case into the silence, nudging it over between us with my hip, ducking my head, saying Daddy while fitting my cold self in, swinging the door shut, hearing the good click, feeling the car pull away from the corner, looking down at the neat white toes of my saddle shoes, realizing the radio was off when my father always had it on because he needed to know how close the Russian missiles were to Cuba, he needed to keep them from getting there at all costs, hearing the driver say Little girl, I’m not your father. Not believing it. Looking once, fast, closely at the face of the man driving, who was not my father. Saying Oh.

  Knowing I had not paid attention.

  Saying I’m sorry.

  He said I’m going to have to let you out. I didn’t say anything. He said I think the best thing is if I drive around the block and let you out right where you were. He must not have had any children, he had none of the ironical, rebuking style of intimacy fathers then showed to other people’s children, as if all children were slightly in the wrong and it was natural for a father, any father, to point that out. Besides which, suburban fathers knew the most private things about all children. A father might say So I hear you hat
e your new baby sister, and that would be seen as winsome proof he was good with children. This driver who was not my father was not using the droll voice of a charming father. He wasn’t ingratiating or comical. But maybe he believed those things would have scared me even more.

  I said again that I was sorry.

  He didn’t answer, he didn’t tell me it was all right.

  I didn’t want to turn my head to really look at him because the quick glances that were all I’d seen so far were dismaying: he was more and more absolutely not my father and that fact was gaining in shockingness. He had not said Put your seat belt on. I looked down at the matching scuffed white toes of my saddle shoes since they at least had not changed and I needed something known and stable and if all I could have was the toes of my shoes I would take that. He wasn’t saying anything. Very likely he could not think of anything to say that would not worry me. I was aware that the words It’s going to be all right had not been said and that nothing like them had been said and there had been no reassurance and I was beginning to think of him as a strange person, though that was a dangerous thought to entertain. His spare sentences were only his thinking aloud about what ought to come next: I’m just going to drive right around the block. I believed he was angry at having to go around the block and out of his way. I could tell some routine had been broken and the rift threw him off balance, like my mother whenever I wrecked a plan of hers. I understood that for certain adults any measure of uncertainty could generate great, formal-seeming anger. Was he in fact angry, was he unsure? I wasn’t going to be able to tell. I couldn’t bear to look at him because he was anguishingly himself and not my father. He didn’t want to talk to me. He wanted to drive around the block to let me off right where I was before and that’s what he did. As his car pulled in alongside the corner a station wagon nosed up behind it and at the station wagon’s wheel was the incredulous face of my mother. I threw the door open, jumped out, slammed the door of the car belonging to the man who wasn’t my father, and looked through the window at him. He looked back. He didn’t seem bothered or in a hurry now that I was out of the car at last. Neither of us wanted to stop looking because now we could look and all the looking we had wanted to do was present between us as we tried to tell each other it was all right. It was all right between us, unlikely though that was, and it was always going to be all right. It was just two people telling each other in one long look that nothing had gone wrong and in its way that was the most essential look I’ve ever exchanged with anyone. The station wagon rolled forward to urge his car to get a move on, and it did, it turned the corner and was gone, and in its place was the station wagon whose door I opened and my mother saying What did you just do! Who was that? Where is your violin!