A Penny a Kiss

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by Judy McConnell


  This frivolity did not last. Our close heads must have given us away, for we heard a snap snap along the floor coming closer and stopping at our desk.

  “All right, you two!” Mrs. Bolton swept up the two pieces of paper from the book, started to raise them as an example of our naughtiness, but changed her mind and simply barked, “This is unacceptable!”

  Out to the hall we went, feeling chastised until we decided that the punishment was almost as much fun as the crime. We liked to sit on the floor in the empty hallway talking and laughing. After a half an hour Mrs. Bolton called us back into the classroom, complaining we were making too much noise. After class we were given a stiff talking to and placed in separated seats for the rest of the year and that ended my artistic endeavors.

  Timmy became my best friend as we moved up the grades, despite the pressures for little girls play with other girls, which never made any sense—Timmy was much more fun. I would spot his tan sweater in the hallway, with his straight ginger-brown hair framing his narrow face and his long feet lending a slight lilt to his step, and we would sneak off to peek at the naked pictures in the National Geographic. Mostly we stayed out of trouble. Like most kids in the forties, we were geared to obedience. To talk back to an elder was unheard of. Timmy was acquiescent, in contrast to my willfulness. He let me boss him and was forgiving when I chewed him out. Our close friendship lasted until seventh grade when a new girl named Jean entered our ranks and a burgeoning awareness of being of the opposite sex and all that might entail drove a wedge in our friendship.

  * * *

  Mostly I was on my own. As spring buds on the bushes fluttered open and rains brought tree roots to life, I broke out of the house into the surrounding woodlands, wandering endlessly, sometimes tramping across Highway 12 and through the forest of pine, maple, aspen and oak to Theodore Parkway, breathing in the odors of wet bark and oats. Without destination or timeline, I listened to the whoosh of wet leaves underfoot and felt the fresh air on my arms, stopping from time to time to smell spongy pine cones. Reaching Birch Pond, I sat on a rock and inhaled the rubbery-sage smell of still water and mud. Curious ducks ventured up and then shot off sleek across the water like marbles on glass, motionless and mysteriously silent.

  My special hideout was high on a wooded hill overlooking the curved roads of Tyrol Hills, where I sat on a carpet of long silky grass flowing between two tall oaks. Leaning against a tree, with a jacket stuffed behind my back, I occupied my own little room, walled by clumps of poplars and underbrush. From this vantage point I could observe Keith Icky’s house, where Debby, our Labrador, once ripped through the back screen porch and devoured a birthday cake cooling on a metal chair. We received a phone call.

  Occasionally I’d see the lone figure of Mrs. Gibbons or Mrs. Bloomers along the side of the road below headed for a neighbor’s house, unaware of the eagle eyes in the woods.

  Many days I settled into my wooded den and became lost in a book. I read about the feats of Lad, a Dog or Laura cozy in her underground sod house in On the Banks of Silver Creek. In Josephine Lawrence’s Stories for Girls, the golden-haired Rosemary put up with snotty siblings and troubles over which, in her conscientious, good-girl way, she always prevailed. I loved Rosemary, wanted a friend like Rosemary, wanted to be like Rosemary. In her life problems were conquered and kids took on challenges and emerged triumphant and praised.

  I would lie in my grassy lair underneath the tree, look up at the sky, and watch white cloud clusters drift in splayed animal shapes across the blue sky. If I closed my eyes, the woods began to stir and come alive with little cracking noises of hidden creatures. Sometimes the wind took up a soft moan, stirring leaves that turned and fanned in the air, and I heard the branch of a honeysuckle bush, like the one in Rosemary’s yard, whispering from its hiding place.

  There on the hill everything accommodated everything else, powered by an unknown law of nature. There was no fuss, no confusion, no complicated choices about how to act, no rough voices pressing me to be different. I could just be, no questions asked.

  The trees didn’t say much, but as the minutes ticked by their presence came to life. Just be natural, they hinted, be like us. Animated sounds bubbling at the edge of the wide marsh below drifted up the hill. Here I felt comfortable, alone with the world at my feet, looking down on the neighborhood where I knew every stone and nook, with my house just out of view around the hill. Here I was safe, undisturbed, connected, and detached but still felt I belonged.

  Mike and Smitty, my constant companions, were game for anything. Mike, a golden retriever with a rich burnt-gold coat and a noble face, lived two houses away and was more than happy to go anywhere on earth. Smitty was more of a baby and ran to my side at sudden loud noises, but as an imposing German shepherd he had a reputation to maintain, which he enforced by barking wildly at strangers. He bounded up from his house next door when I whistled and couldn’t wait to take off. The dogs were indefatigable. We roamed for hours and they never stopped flying through the trees to investigate this or that, tails beating back and forth.

  Dogs in those days ran free with no restrictions, could visit whomever they liked, poop where they wanted, and sleep under any old bush. Most dogs really didn’t have many places to go by themselves and wandered around the yard sniffing or lay on the back stoop waiting for indoors and company. A readiness something like my own.

  * * *

  Death was an unknown. I was faced with its overpowering mystery one late fall afternoon, when I rounded the crest of a hill overlooking Brownie Lake and stood looking down at a brown pool of water far below, hushed and immobile in the approaching dusk. There was some curious movement going on at the far shore, half-hidden by the heavy brush, and I made out miniature figures running down the slope. They were focused on something I couldn’t clearly see. Some bulge, a mottled form, was lying at the edge of the water. Side-stepping down the hill, I broke through branches and made my way down to the bank.

  As a reached the bottom and peered across the ate I made out a group of men in wool caps carrying bundles of what looked like blankets, bobbing down the slope in an eerie rhythm. A couple of the men clutched the ends of two long poles between which stretched a limp cloth or canvas. People following in their wake were gathering at the waterfront, and three boys in faded jackets stood carelessly in the wet muck and stared at the form in the water, looking pale as if the disintegration at their feet had metastasized through their own cells.

  As I drew near, I made out a body stretched out among the limp reeds, the lower half buried under the water, its skin splotched purple and black and the features of the face washed into neutrality. The body looked like it belonged more to the mucky swamp than to the dry banks above—the water seemed already to be claiming its own, penetrating and absorbing the loose flesh, drawing the corpse into its black depths.

  I was aware of an inscrutable powerlessness enclosing the rescuers and me. What had once been a person was no longer within our ranks and was now more swamp than mortal, more vegetable than animal. The semi-human form seemed remote, and there was an inference emanating from its monotone stillness that we were all contained in the watery grave—a call of the inevitable.

  Watching the medics carry the corpse away through the dense brush, I became aware that I was only a minuscule spec in the design of the universe and that some cosmic mastery could at will draw me into an unknowable vastness. A wordless, insistent fear penetrated my body, driving out all other emotions. I pictured my family sitting together around the radio in the blue time of evening that closes the day, drawn by the drone of voices from the console and the crackle of Dad’s newspaper. The image was dim and the figures remote as if projected from the long end of a telescope. I was overcome with a terrifying sense of separation. Sweat covered my temples, maybe from having stumbled and clawed my way down the slope or maybe it was the apparition of raw fear that lay there at the edge of
the lake.

  Where did this fear of the unknown come from? Anger was a known thing, it propelled you to get things done, and it provided a valve to release all those pent up charges. But fear, as I learned in later years while trying to untangle the source of my neurosis, lurked behind most other emotions and appeared to stem from two main threats: pain and annihilation. As the saying goes, pain is inevitable, while suffering is optional. And that leaves extinction, preceded by separation and emptiness. There are times when a child believes there is nowhere to turn and slips into a muggy pool of loneliness.

  Such theorizing didn’t take place until years later—at the time I only sensed I’d been exposed to some Truth the mystery of which was hidden in the depths of Brownie Lake.

  When I arrived back at the house, I pulled out a new Tarzan book while Mother stirred fried potatoes in an iron skillet and reached up in the cupboard for a tin of paprika. The warmth of the stove and the smell of toasted garlic swarmed around me and all thoughts of death melted into the circle of steam hovering over the stove top.

  * * *

  During third grade, a new girl showed up at school. Patsy was a grade ahead of me. A big hefty girl with wide puffy shoulders, it was clear she was not to be messed with. My being the tallest girl in the third grade didn’t impress her, and behind my tallness and urge to be in the forefront she sensed a timidity that drew her predatory instincts. After a few weeks observing the lay of the land, Patsy set about establishing her position. When the bell for recess rang, she followed me to the playground and ran up to the swings where I stood waiting my turn.

  “I’m next,” she shouted, running ahead of me as the swing came to a stop and a student stepped off, “You had extra turns yesterday. Move away.”

  “No, I didn’t!” I cried trying to grab the swaying swing seat, but Patsy lashed out and grabbed one of the ropes, squeezing her body onto the seat. With a wild push she arched up into the air and dropped back down, sweeping me out of the way.

  From then on it was war. If I were sledding down the hill alongside the school, Patsy would grab the piece of cardboard I was using as a sled and disappear around the school building, cackling. One time she discovered the rooms of the little house Jean McIntyre, Snookie Styles, and I had marked out in the earth at the edge of the woods and furnished with abandoned logs, stones, and old towels. Patsy tore through, kicked out the wall marks with her heels, then with broad sweeps of a branch obliterated all signs of our work.

  “I’ll get my brother after her,” exclaimed Snookie. Furious, the three of us concocted a plan to line her coat pockets with wads of used chewing gun. The plan fizzled when Mrs. Graves confiscated the ten packets of Spearmint I had squirreled in my desk. Jean vowed revenge.

  But it was me she was after.

  During the afternoon recess, Patsy would gather the kids lounging against the walls and offer to start a game of tag. “You know the rules,” she cried. “The one who’s it counts to fifty and you can’t peek.” She looked around and saw me hanging by one arm from a swing post. “Judy’s it!” and with a yell she flew around the side of the school house, followed by eight or ten girls. When it was her turn she chased after me furiously. At one point I turned my head to see her red-headed, square-jawed face speeding towards me yelling, “There goes Judy Brat-ford! Get her!”

  Several times she lunged at me, threw me to the ground and pummeled me on the back until the ruckus drew a teacher who put a stop to it—for the time being.

  “Now girls, you must try to get along.” After seeing our passive faces, all signs of wildness erased, the teacher added, “Run along and behave yourselves.”

  Stifling my shame, I mustered up a defiance. But before I could conjure up a foolproof scheme for getting back at her, loud peals rang out from the schoolhouse door where the principal, Mr. Williams, stood flicking a wooden-handled bell back and forth, calling us inside. My revenge would have to wait.

  Patsy continued her rampages after school. She and her family had moved in four houses down the street from me so we shared the same bus stop. At the afternoon drop off she would scream “BRAT-ford” as I walked ahead of her down the road and disappeared around the corner of my house. Sometimes she chased me through the yards as I dodged around trees, but she could never catch me. Propelled by panic, I was faster. My mother told me to ignore her. Yeah, sure. How do you ignore a bee with a mission?

  One day her loud yowling pierced my brain like a firecracker, releasing a mounting cache of anger. The bolt stormed through me, releasing mounds of rage, raw after weeks of defensiveness. As she hurled towards me, yelling that I was a “scaredy-cat,” I dashed from behind an oak tree, leapt on her back with a fierce yell and toppled her to the ground. One of her arms had twisted behind her when she fell and I pressed the weight of my body against it, keeping my heel pressed down on her neck.

  When she lifted her head, I pressed her face into the dirt with my foot and she uttered a moan. With a thrust of her large shoulders she managed to pull herself up, but before she could get to her feet I flew home, carrying my victory with me. Patsy returned to her house with a torn face and sore arm, while I was untouched. The win was small, but it counted. At school I received no more cat calls from Patsy.

  A week later as we walked from the bus, Patsy’s mother came out on the front stoop, called us into the house and offered us lemonade. We entered slowly, uncertain, but her mother was so friendly and oblivious that we followed her meekly into the den. She had set out some records for us to play and a painting set with drawing tablets on the table, along with the lemonade and crescent-shaped rolled cookies. Patsy and I sat on the floor and munched the cookies.

  “You want to paint?” Patsy asked.

  I twisted my mouth down. “Uh, I don’t know,” I said unenthusi­astically. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be there and I didn’t like painting. Yet here was an intriguing invitation. I felt myself warming up. We sat silent for some time, as if waiting for the referee to come in and tell us when the game would start.

  “I can stand on my head,” Patsy said finally.

  “So can I! That’s easy!”

  Before long we were doing acrobatics on the thick wool carpet. I could stand on my head longer than Patsy and evidently a headstand was all Patsy could manage. I showed her how to stretch her legs over her head while lying on her back and touch the floor with her toes.

  “It’s easy for you, you’re so skinny,” she said.

  “No, you can do it too.” We did backward summersaults, hand­stands, and performed some fairly decent cartwheels. Patsy was a natural—chunky but strong. She worked on a backbend and could touch the floor behind her with her hands if I held on to her middle.

  After that we spent whole afternoons at gymnastics, our feuding ended. The next year she moved away with her family. I wasn’t even glad she was gone.

  There were other trials in store. An annual skin-splitting, blood-raging, mind-battering, inevitable event filled me with dread. Every fall Mother marched me like clockwork downtown to the Medical Arts building where Dr. Werness wielded his instruments of torture. He ignored my protests. My teeth were naturally soft, and with no fluoride in the public water and my constant munching on hard candy—the pacifier of the day—I was a dentist’s dream: a mouth full of gaping cavities. As we drove along in the car, I stared stiffly out the window like I was heading for an execution. The cheeriness of the receptionist only exaggerated the abyss between her mood and mine. “How are we today?” she would chirp. I was the target and they were ready for me.

  Mother and I waited in stiff brown chairs. On the wall loomed a gigantic drawing of a three-dimensional set of teeth with roots in vivid reds and whites, looking like a steel trap, and I imagined the teeth springing from the wall and pinning me in the chair. I fidgeted and stared at the wall. Mother was looking nervous too, as an ordeal for me was an ordeal for her.

>   A nurse approached and bid me follow her down a long hallway that seemed to get smaller as we reached the end. Finally I stood at a gaping doorway where the shadow of the dentist loomed like the statue of Rhodes, backlit by the one window in the room. I had no choice but to go in. Dr. Werness was all smiles and motioned me into a huge pit of a chair. I lay sunk into the leather folds and stared up at Dr. Werness with his receding hairline and wide nostrils. On the top shelf of the white equipment chest, where the tools he used to scrape, pick, probe, and stab at the insides of mouths were kept, stood ceramic replicas of the seven dwarfs, lined up in a row.

  Dr. Werness picked Sneezy from the group and set him on the tray below. This was to be mine at the end of the day’s session. I already had Dopey and Doc at home, stuck in the back of my bureau drawer, as far out of memory’s sight as possible. Sneezy was not tempting. There was nothing he could offer that would have induced me to stay willingly in that cavernous chair.

  Dr. Werness swung the circular tray forward where his silver picks were lined up evenly on a white cloth. I listened to the water swishing around in the white porcelain spit bowl next to my elbow, hissing a sour soda spray. A drill hung above me, a silver tool of torture, its neck swung around and looped into the retaining arm. It hovered in the air near the dentist’s arm, ready to plunge into my mouth and find a raw nerve. By now my facial muscles were contorted and my hands were twisted in knots. Clouds of sweat had accumulated in my palms.

  “Now this won’t hurt much,” said the dentist.

  I’d heard that before. Dr. Werness lied. I dug my back into the leather chair and pushed my toes against the foot rest.

 

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