by Ann
‘A. R.’
‘Now look, I don’t–’
‘It’s A. R.!’ She was getting loud and stolid again. She stood there with her skinny, scabbed knees showing from under her dress and shivered in the unconscious way kids do who are used to it; I’ve seen children do it on the Lower East Side in New York because they had no winter coat (in January). I said, ‘You come in.’ She followed me up the steps – warily, I think – but when we got inside her expression changed, it changed utterly; she clasped her hands and said with radiant joy, ‘Oh, they’re beautiful!’
These were my astronomical photographs. I gave her my book of microphotographs (cells, crystals, hailstones) and went into the kitchen to put up water for tea; when I got back she’d dropped the book on my old brown-leather couch and was walking about with her hands clasped in front of her and that same look of radiant joy on her face. I live in an ordinary, shabby frame house that has four rooms and a finished attic; the only unusual thing about it is the number of books and pictures crammed in every which way among the (mostly second-hand) furniture. There are Woolworth frames for the pictures and cement-block bookcases for the books; nonetheless the Little Dirty Girl was as awed as if she’d found Aladdin’s Cave.
She said, ‘It’s so…sophisticated!’
Well, there’s no withstanding that. Even if you think: what do kids know? She followed me into the kitchen where I gave her a glass of milk and a peach (she sipped and nibbled). She thought the few straggling rose bushes she could see in the back garden were wonderful. She loved my old brown refrigerator; she said, ‘It’s so big! And such a color!’ Then she said anxiously, ‘Can I see the upstairs?’ and got excited over the attic eaves which were also ‘so big’ (wallboard and dirty pink paint) to the point that she had to run and stand under one side and then run across the attic and stand under the other. She liked the ‘view’ from the bedroom (the neighbor’s laurel hedge and a glimpse of someone else’s roof) but my study (books, a desk, a glimpse of the water) moved her so deeply and painfully that she only stood still in the center of the room, struggling with emotion, her hands again clasped in front of her. Finally she burst out, ‘It’s so…swanky!’ Here my kettle screamed and when I got back she had gotten bold enough to touch the electric typewriter (she jumped when it turned itself on) and then walked about slowly, touching the books with the tips of her fingers. She was brave and pushed the tabs on the desk lamp (though not hard enough to turn it on) and boldly picked up my little mailing scale. As she did so, I saw that there were buttons missing from the back of her dress; I said, ‘A. R., come here.’
She dropped the scale with a crash. ‘I didn’t mean it!’ Sulky again.
‘It’s not that; it’s your buttons,’ I said, and hauled her to the study closet where I keep a Band-Aid box full of extras; two were a reasonable match: little, flat-topped, pearlized pink things you can hardly find anymore. I sewed them on to her, not that it helped much, and the tangles of her hair kept falling back and catching. What a forest of lost barrettes and snarls of old rubber bands! I lifted it all a little grimly, remembering the pain of combing out. She sat flatly, all adoration gone:
‘You can’t comb my hair against my will; you’re too weak.’
‘I wasn’t going to,’ I said.
‘That’s what you say,’ the L.D.G. pointed out.
‘If I try, you can stop me,’ I said. After a moment she turned around, flopped down on my typing chair, and bent her head. So I fetched my old hairbrush (which I haven’t used for years) and did what I could with the upper layers, managing even to smooth out some of the lower ones, though there were places near her neck nearly as matted and tangled as felt; I finally had to cut some pieces out with my nail scissors.
L.D.G. didn’t shriek (as I used to, insisting my cries were far more artistic than those of the opera singers on the radio on Sundays) but finally asked for the comb herself and winced silently until she was decently braided, with rubber bands on the ends. We put the rescued barrettes in her shirt pocket. Without that cloud of hair her sallow face and pitch-ball eyes looked bigger, and oddly enough, younger; she was no more a wandering Fury with the voice of a Northwest-coast raven but a reasonably human (though draggly) little girl.
I said, ‘You look nice.’
She got up, went into the bathroom, and looked at herself in the mirror. Then she said calmly, ‘No, I don’t. I look conventional.’
‘Conventional?’ said I. She came out of the bathroom, flipping back her new braids.
‘Yes, I must go.’
And as I was wondering at her tact (for anything after this would have been an anti-climax):
‘But I shall return.’
‘That’s fine,’ I said, ‘but I want to have grown-up manners with you, A. R. Don’t ever come before ten in the morning or if my car isn’t here or if you can hear my typewriter going. In fact, I think you had better call me on the telephone first, the way other people do.’
She shook her head sweetly. She was at the front door before I could follow her, peering out. It was raining again. I saw that she was about to step out into it and cried ‘Wait, A. R.!’ hurrying as fast as I could down the cellar steps to the garage, from where I could get easily to my car. I got from the back seat the green plastic poncho I always keep there and she didn’t protest when I dumped it over her and put the hood over her head, though the poncho was much too big and even dragged on the ground in the front and back. She said only, ‘Oh, it’s swanky. Is it from the Army?’ So I had the satisfaction of seeing her move up the hill as a small, green tent instead of a wet, pink draggle. Though with her tea-party manners she hadn’t really eaten anything; the milk and peach were untouched. Was it wariness? Or did she just not like milk and peaches? Remembering our first encounter, I wrote on the pad by the telephone, which is my shopping list:
Milky Way Bars
And then:
I doz.
She came back. She never did telephone in advance. It was all right, though; she had the happy faculty of somehow turning up when I wasn’t working and wasn’t busy and was thinking of her. But how often is an invalid busy or working? We went on walks or stayed home and on these occasions the business about the Milky Ways turned out to be a brilliant guess, for never have I met a child with such a passion for junk food. A. R.’s formal, disciplined politeness in front of milk or fruit was like a cat’s in front of the mass-produced stuff; faced with jam, honey, or marmalade, the very ends of her braids crisped and she attacked like a cat flinging itself on a fish; I finally had to hide my own supplies in self-defense. Then on relatively good days it was ice cream or Sara Lee cake, and on bad ones Twinkies or Mallomars, Hostess cupcakes, Three Musketeers bars, marshmallow cream, maraschino chocolates, Turkish taffy, saltwater taffy, or – somewhat less horribly – Doritos, reconstituted potato chips, corn chips, pretzels (fat or thin), barbecued corn chips, or onion-flavored corn chips, anything like that. She refused nuts and hated peanut butter. She also talked continuously while eating, largely in polysyllables, which made me nervous as I perpetually expected her to choke, but she never did. She got no fatter. To get her out of the house and so away from food, I took her to an old-fashioned five-and-ten nearby and bought her shoelaces. Then I took her down to watch the local ship-canal bridge open up (to let a sailboat through) and we cheered. I took her to a department store (just to look; ‘I know consumerism is against your principles,’ she said with priggish and mystifying accuracy) and bought her a pin shaped like a ladybug. She refused to go to the zoo (‘An animal jail!’) but allowed as the rose gardens (‘A plant hotel’) were both pleasant and educational. A ride on the zoo merry-go-round excited her to the point of screaming and running around dizzily in circles for half an hour afterwards, which embarrassed me – but then no one paid the slightest attention; I suppose shrieky little girls had happened there before, though the feminine youth of Seattle, in its Mary Jane shoes and pink pocketbooks, rather pointedly ignored her. The waterfall in the do
wntown park, on the contrary, sobered her up; this is a park built right on top of a crossing over one of the city’s highways and is usually full of office-workers; a walkway leads not only up to but actually behind the waterfall. A. R. wandered among the beds of bright flowers and passed, stooping, behind the water, trying to stick her hand in the falls; she came out saying:
‘It looks like an old man’s beard’ (pointing to one of the ragged Skid Row men who was sleeping on the grass in the rare, Northern sunlight). Then she said, ‘No, it looks like a lady’s dress without any seams.’
Once, feeling we had become friends enough for it, I ran her a bath and put her clothes through the basement washer-dryer; her splashings and yellings in the bathroom were terrific and afterwards she flashed nude about the house, hanging out of windows, embellishing her strange, raucous shouts with violent jerkings and boundings-about that I think were meant for dancing. She even ran out the back door naked and had circled the house before I – voiceless with calling, ‘A. R., come back here!’ – had presence of mind enough to lock both the front and back doors after she had dashed in and before she could get out again to make the entire tour de Seattle in her jaybird suit. Then I had to get her back into that tired pink dress, which (when I ironed it) had finally given up completely, despite the dryer, and sagged into two sizes too big for her.
Unless A. R. was youthifying.
I got her into her too-large pink dress, her baggy underwear, her too-large shoes, her new pink socks (which I had bought for her) and said:
‘A. R., where do you live?’
Crisp and shining, the Little Clean Girl replied, ‘My dear, you always ask me that.’ ‘And you never answer,’ said I.
‘O yes I do,’ said the Little Clean Girl. ‘I live up the hill and under the hill and over the hill and behind the hill.’
‘That’s no answer,’ said I.
‘Wupf merble,’ said she (through a Mars Bar) and then, more intelligibly, ‘If you knew, you wouldn’t want me.’
‘I would so!’ I said.
L.D.G. – now L.C.G. – regarded me thought fully. She scratched her ear, getting, I noticed, chocolate in her hair. (She was a fast worker.) She said, ‘You want to know. You think you ought to know. You think you have a right. When I leave you’ll wait until I’m out of sight and then you’ll follow me in the car. You’ll sneak by the curb way behind me so I won’t notice you. You’ll wait until I climb the steps of a house – like that big yellow house with the fuchsias in the yard where you think I live and you’ll watch me go in. And then you’ll ring the bell and when the lady comes to the door you’ll say, “Your little daughter and I have become friends,” but the lady will say, “I haven’t got any little daughter,” and then you’ll know I fooled you. And you’ll get scared. So don’t try.’
Well, she had me dead to rights. Something very like that had been in my head. Her face was preternaturally grave. She said, ‘You think I’m too small. I’m not.
‘You think I’ll get sick if I keep on eating like this. I won’t.
‘You think if you bought a whole department store for me, it would be enough. It wouldn’t.’
‘I won’t – well, I can’t get a whole department store for you,’ I said. She said, ‘I know.’ Then she got up and tucked the box of Mars Bars under one arm, throwing over the other my green plastic poncho, which she always carried about with her now.
‘I’ll get you anything you want,’ I said. ‘No, not what you want, A. R., but anything you really, truly need.’
‘You can’t,’ said the Little Dirty Girl.
‘I’ll try.’
She crossed the living room to the front door, dragging the poncho across the rug, not paying the slightest attention to the astronomical photographs that had so enchanted her before. Too young now, I suppose. I said, ‘A. R., I’ll try. Truly I will.’ She seemed to consider it a moment, her small head to one side. Then she said briskly, ‘I’ll be back,’ and was out the front door.
And I did not – would not – could not – did not dare to follow her.
Was this the moment I decided I was dealing with a ghost? No, long before. Little by little, I suppose. Her clothes were a dead giveaway, for one thing: always the same and the kind no child had worn since the end of the Second World War. Then there was the book I had given her on her first visit, which had somehow closed and straightened itself on the coffee table, another I had lent her later (the poems of Edna Millay) which had mysteriously been there a day afterwards, the eerie invisibility of a naked little girl hanging out of my windows and yelling; the inconspicuousness of a little twirling girl nobody noticed spinning round and shrieking outside the merry-go-round, a dozen half-conscious glimpses I’d had, every time I’d got in or out of my car, of the poncho lying on the back seat where I always keep it, folded as always, the very dust on it undisturbed. And her unchildlike cleverness in never revealing either her name or where she lived. And as surely as A. R. had been a biggish eight when we had met weeks ago, just as surely she was now a smallish, very unmistakable, unnaturally knowledgeable five.
But she was such a nice little ghost. And so solid! Ghosts don’t run up your grocery bills, do they? Or trample Cheez Doodles into your carpet or leave gum under your kitchen chair, large smears of chocolate on the surface of the table (A. R. had), and an exceptionally dirty ring around the inside of the bathtub? Along with three (count ’em, three) large, dirty, sopping-wet bath towels on the bathroom floor? If A. R.’s social and intellectual life had a tendency to become intangible when looked at carefully, everything connected with her digestive system and her bodily dirt stuck around amazingly; there was the state of the bathroom, the dishes in the sink (many more than mine), and the ironing board still up in the study for the ironing of A. R.’s dress (with the spray starch container still set up on one end and the scorch mark where she’d decided to play with the iron). If she was a ghost, she was a good one and I liked her and wanted her back. Whatever help she needed from me in resolving her ancient Seattle tragedy (ancient ever since nineteen-forty-two) she could have. I wondered for a moment if she were connected with the house, but the people before me – the original owners – hadn’t had children. And the house itself hadn’t even been built until the mid-fifties; nothing in the neighborhood had. Unless both they and I were being haunted by the children we hadn’t had; could I write them a pychotherapeutic letter about it? (‘Dear Mrs. X., How is your inner space?’) I went into the bathroom and discovered that A. R. had relieved herself interestingly in the toilet and had then not flushed it, hardly what I would call poetical behavior on the part of somebody’s unconscious. So I flushed it. I picked up the towels one by one and dragged them to the laundry basket in the bedroom. If the Little Dirty Girl was a ghost, she was obviously a bodily-dirt-and-needs ghost traumatized in life by never having been given a proper bath or allowed to eat marshmallows until she got sick. Maybe this was it and now she could rest (scrubbed and full of Mars Bars) in peace. But I hoped not. I was nervous; I had made a promise (‘I’ll give you what you need’) that few of us can make to anyone, a frightening promise to make to anyone. Still, I hoped. And she was a businesslike little ghost. She would come back.
For she, too, had promised.
Autumn came. I didn’t see the Little Dirty Girl. School started and I spent days trying to teach freshmen and freshwomen not to write like Rod McKuen (neither of us really knowing why they shouldn’t, actually) while advanced students pursued me down the halls with thousand-page trilogies, demands for independent study, and other unspeakables. As a friend of ours said once, everyone will continue to pile responsibility on a woman and everything and everyone must be served except oneself; I’ve been a flogged horse professionally long enough to know that and meanwhile the dishes stay in the sink and the kindly wife-elves do not come out of the woodwork at night and do them. I was exercising two hours a day and sleeping ten; the Little Dirty Girl seemed to have vanished with the summer.
Then one d
ay there was a freak spell of summer weather and that evening a thunderstorm. This is a very rare thing in Seattle. The storm didn’t last, of course, but it seemed to bring right after it the first of the winter rains: cold, drenching, ominous. I was grading papers that evening when someone knocked at my door; I thought I’d left the garage light on and my neighbor’d come out to tell me, so I yelled, ‘Just a minute, please!’ dropped my pen, wondered whether I should pick it up, decided the hell with it, and went (exasperated) to the door.
It was the Little Dirty Girl. She was as wet as I’ve ever seen a human being be and had a bad cough (my poncho must’ve gone heaven knows where) and water squelching in her shoes. She was shivering violently and her fingers were blue – it could not have been more than fifty degrees out – and her long, baggy dress clung to her with water running off it; there was a puddle already forming around her feet on the rug. Her teeth were chattering. She stood there shivering and glowering miserably at me, from time to time emitting that deep, painful chest cough you sometimes hear in adults who smoke too much. I thought of hot baths, towels, electric blankets, aspirin – can ghosts get pneumonia? ‘For God’s sake, get your clothes off!’ I said, but A. R. stepped back against the door, shivering, and wrapped her starved arms in her long, wet skirt.
‘No!’ she said, in a deep voice more like a crow’s than ever. ‘Like this!’
‘Like what?’ said I helplessly, thinking of my back and how incapable I was of dragging a resistant five-year-old anywhere.
‘You hate me!’ croaked A. R. venomously. ‘You starve me! You do! You won’t let me eat anything!’
Then she edged past me, still coughing, her dark eyes ringed with blue, her skin mottled with bruises, and her whole body shaking with cold and anger, like a little mask of Medusa. She screamed.
‘You want to clean me up because you don’t like me! ‘You like me clean because you don’t like me dirty!