Where Did You Go? Out. What Did You Do? Nothing.

by Robert Paul Smith

  But then: facts, facts, facts. If you cut yourself in the web of skin between your thumb and forefinger, you die. That’s it. No ifs or buts. Cut. Die. Let’s get on to other things. If you eat sugar lumps, you get worms. If you cut a worm in half, he don’t feel a thing, and you get two worms. Grasshoppers spit tobacco. Step on a crack, break your mother’s back. Walk past a house with a quarantine sign, and don’t hold your breath, and you get sick and die. Play with yourself too much, your brain gets soft. Cigarettes stunt your growth. Some people are double-jointed, and by that we didn’t mean any jazz like very loose tendons or whatever the facts are. This guy had two joints where we had one. A Dodge (if your family happened to own a Dodge) was the best car in the whole world.

  We cut our fingers in that web and didn’t die, but our convictions didn’t change. We ate sugar lumps, and I don’t recall getting worms, but the fact was still there. We’d pass by the next day and both halves of the worm would be dead, our mother’s back never broke, my sister had scarlet fever right in my own house and I must have breathed once or twice in all that time, none of our brains got real soft, and we really knew that what came out of the grasshopper was not tobacco juice. But facts were one thing, and beliefs were another.

  We got our schoolbooks, and we went home and in a drawer in the kitchen was a pile of wrapping paper saved from packages, and we folded covers for the books in a certain way. Some kids came to our town from New York City, and they told us that you could go to a stationery store in New York and buy covers for schoolbooks, but we got them over lying like that. Some of the girls used wallpaper for their covers, and some of them used glue for the folded-over flaps, but they were wrong. Even they knew that. The right way was to fold it. The drawer with the wrapping paper was the drawer with the string. We were rich. We could have had a ball of string if we wanted one, I guess. But we didn’t, and nobody I knew did. We had pieces of string. To this day I cannot understand why, right now in my own house, we don’t have a drawer with pieces of wrapping paper and pieces of string. My wife, who grew up in New York, buys wrapping paper and throws pieces of string away. She doesn’t save boxes, either, or empty spools, and she doesn’t have a button box. She says that packages largely do not come wrapped in wrapping paper any more, and if they do they are sealed down with tape, and you have to tear the paper to get it off, and I guess she’s right about that, and I suppose there’s nothing really immoral about springing ten cents for a ball of twine, and our kids wear Tee shirts and pants with zippers on them, so where the hell are the buttons going to come from, but that’s all in the realm of reason and you know what kind of sense women make when it comes to reason. She doesn’t even rub the cut-off tip of a cucumber against the rest of it to draw the poison out. She doesn’t even think there’s anything wrong with the kids eating pickles and milk at the same meal. Not that they get sick from it, not that I really think they’re going to—but she isn’t even scared. Why, I tell you about this woman—she thinks it’s all right to go to the movies in the afternoon, and sleep with the windows closed, and once she let the kids have candy before lunch.

  My little boy was mooning around the house the other day—it is one of the joys of being a writer that occasionally when I am mooning around the house because I haven’t the vaguest idea of what to do about the second act, or the last chapter, or Life, or why I don’t have an independent income or a liquor store or a real skill like a tool-and-die maker or a lepidopterist or a mellophone player—I can slope downstairs and trap a child. The littler boy was mooning around. I was mooning around. He had no idea what to do with himself because his room is full of wood-burning kits and model ships to be made out of plastic and phonographs and looms and Captain Kangaroo Playtime Kits and giant balloons and plaster of paris and colored pencils and compasses and comic books and money. I will straighten this little bugger out, I said, I will pass on to him the ancient knowledge of his sire, I will teach him a little something about the collective unconscious, by God I will. “Did you ever make a buzz-saw out of a button?” I opened brightly. He thought for a while, and tried to remember what a button was, and concluded that it was something like a zipper, but he didn’t know what a buzz-saw was. He decided that a buzz-saw was like what I almost cut my thumb off with in the cellar and had out of the house by nightfall. “First thing we need is a big button,” I said, and then we went into that thing about, “I don’t know where there’s a button, for the love of God ask your mother, of course there’s a button around the house. Where? In the button box.”

  That’s when I found out we don’t have a button box. We went to our neighbor’s and after a while they found a button box. Not their button box, but one that Grandma had had. We got a big button. I strung it with a loop of silk thread, and it didn’t work and the thread broke. I suppose nobody bothers making silk thread strong now, if you want strong thread you use nylon. When I was a kid, silk thread was so strong you practically cut the tip of your finger off breaking it. That was thread. We went to look for string, but all there was was a ball of very good string that was too thick. We went back to the neighbor with the button box and in her kitchen drawer there was an assortment of bits of string. We made a buzz-saw. He took it to day camp with him. The other kids thought it was a new kind of yo-yo and wanted to know where to buy one. When my kid told them his father had made it, they decided he was a liar.

  On Sunday I went over to another neighbor. He had called me because he couldn’t stand it around his house any more and wanted to come to my house, but I thought fast and said I’d be over to his house because (I didn’t tell him this) I couldn’t stand my house any more. You know, of course, that visiting in the suburbs is not so much a journey to a friend as a flight from an enemy: home. You sit around a friend’s house and after a couple of hours you are so pleased to discover that your kids don’t spit up their bottles any more—as well they might not at eight and ten—so delighted that your wife doesn’t even try to make you clip the hedge any more, that it’s going to cost him three times as much to put a new roof on as it’s going to cost you to have the porch shored up (neither of you can afford to do either), that his wife has some sort of jackass notion that men are supposed to shave and mix daiquiris for people—well, I tell you, it’s nice to get home.

  But this day I thought if I had to watch my wife do one more puzzle in the Sunday paper—she does the crossword, the diagramless crossword, the crossword-less diagram, the cryptogram, the double-crostic, the triple-crostic with a one and a half gainer—if I had to listen to one more of those puny ideas from the littler boy—the older is away at camp and I am spared disquisitions about “Isn’t it interesting that Jupiter has three freeble-tropic moons that travel in an elliptical granster with a mean clyde-bender ratio of . . .”—but the littler boy has problems like, “My counselor said he had a pet mouse and he fed him every day and the mouse got bigger and bigger and one day he exploded, do you believe that’s true, well if it was a joke why wasn’t he smiling when he told me about it?” Another fifteen minutes of this and the inside of my head telling me in louder and louder tones, “You haven’t written a line in two weeks, you’re getting older and you haven’t got a dime in the bank, and if you don’t finish the play—maybe you aren’t a writer at all. After all, you could go to an office and there would be a pile of papers on one side of the desk in the in-basket and at the end of the day you could have moved them all to the other side of the desk to the out-basket and have two weeks’ vacation with pay, and if you can’t write for two weeks, chances are you’ll never write another line as long as you live, and if you do nobody will publish it or produce it or—and drinking isn’t so much fun any more and she’s going to keep on with those goddam puzzles, she doesn’t care, and how the hell do I know. Maybe there is a disease that makes mice explode, and look at that porch, it’s going to fall down any minute.”

  Well, you go over to visit a neighbor. Oh, if he could only get away from that desk and those in-baskets and out-baskets, wha
t’s it like to be a free lance, you make a lot of money and you have your time to yourself and you meet glamorous people, and one of his kids is lying belly-down on the dining room table saying, “Moooo . . . moooo . . . oh, mooo.” Papa has some gin and you have some gin, and after a while, another of his kids slopes in and before you know it, you say, “Did you ever make a spool tank?”

  He doesn’t know any more about a spool tank than your flesh and blood knew about a buzz saw. You need a spool, a rubber band, a candle and two kitchen matches, you tell him, confident that none of these things will be available. You have a little more gin. He turns up with a rubber band, a candle, and two kitchen matches. He asks his mother for a spool. He comes back with a spool that has at least three feet of thread left on it. You relax, and this mother, this flouter of tradition, goes ahead and tells this kid he can unwind and throw away the three feet of thread. When we were kids, we had to wait at least six months for an empty spool. A spool was empty when the thread was used up. For sewing. There was one big spool in my mother’s sewing box, the kind that they use in factory sewing machines. It would have made a spool tank bigger than any on the block. On the block hell, in the world. It would have used rubber bands cut from an inner tube and a wax washer cut from a plumber’s candle and pencils instead of matches. I wanted that spool more than I have wanted anything else in my life until I was fifteen and saw Mary Astor. I’m still waiting for it. It had thread on it, and when the world was running right, kids who wanted spools had to wait for empty spools.

  The thing that bothered me about the spool tank I made the other day (it ran magnificently, as always, and I expect some shrewd fellow is going to bring out a goddam kit for kids to make them, with a plastic spool and a fiberglas washer and a super-latex band), the thing that bothered me is I think I made it at the wrong time. I don’t think it was the spool tank season.

  You see, when I was a kid, the year was divided into times. There was a time when you played immies. There was a time when you played stoop ball. There was a time when you built kites. There was a time when you made parachutes out of a handkerchief and some string and a rock. There was a time when you made spool tanks. There was a time when you played football. There was a time when you played Red Rover, and statues, and one and over and Buck Billy Buck and ringeleveo. Everybody did it. It was like the trees coming into green. There was something that clicked, and the gears shifted, and we all got up in the morning and put our immies in our pockets because that was the day everybody started to play immies. And when the immie season was over, we all knew it. We didn’t even talk about it. It was just the end of the immie season, and one morning we stopped playing immies and started making kites, because overnight it had stopped being immie time and started being kite time.

  There were other divisions: up until, say seven, boys could play hopscotch. Then, the iron door slammed. From there on out, hopscotch was for girls. On my block, no boy could ever, at whatever age, skip rope. Once in a while, a boy could play higher and higher, which was simply two girls holding the skipping rope (a piece of clothesline, and I’ll get into that later) higher and higher while a boy jumped until he got his foot caught in the rope and fell on his face. Girls could ride boys’ bikes, but boys couldn’t ride girls’ bikes. Girls could play tag, but not leapfrog. (My, we were backward children.) Girls could carry their books in both arms across their bellies, but boys had to carry them in one hand against their sides. Girls could play immies, occasionally, under great conditions of tolerance, but not mumbly-peg—until around fourteen, when boys would let girls do anything, having plans for later that night, under the street lamps.

  That’s another thing. Now it is summer, in this perishing suburb where I live, to which we moved because when we lived in the city, we had to go away every summer so the kids could learn about grass. There are the long evenings, and you can hear what the neighbors are saying, and the other night we went out in the back yard to lie on our backs on a blanket and watch the meteor showers, and there is the big problem of the gardeners who overinvested in tomato plants (for years the littler boy could not be talked out of his belief in elves, because mysterious figures appeared in the night and left boxes of tomatoes at the back door) and dogs would be lying in the middle of the road with their tongues lolling out except there is a law saying they must be leashed until five o’clock, so they loll leashed, and cats hide in the weed jungles, and we see baby rabbits caught in the headlight glare, and the neighbor for whose son I built a spool tank came around with a day-lily the size of my head that smells like a sixteen year old girl (not the lady or my head, but the lily). And the town is a tomb. There are no kids, the Pied Piper has been by.

  It is summer, and there are the long evenings under the street lamps to talk to girls, to watch the big kids talking to girls, to tease the big kids talking to girls, to be hit by the big kids talking to girls, to play Red Rover, to sit on the porch steps and listen to your father tell Mister Fenyvessey what he thinks of the Republicans, to tell your best friend what your father told Mister Fenyvessey and what Mister Fenyvessey told your father, and what words your father used. It is summer and it is time to get a jelly glass and fill it full of lightning bugs and tie a piece of gauze over the top and take it to your room, and very late at night to see that your finger, where you touched the lightning bug, is glowing too.

  But not in our town. The kids are at camp, because, for Heaven’s sake, what are the kids going to do with themselves all summer? Well, it would be nice, I think, if they spent an afternoon kicking a can. It might be a good thing if they dug a hole. No, no, no. Not a foundation, or a well, or a mother symbol. Just a hole. For no reason. Just to dig a hole. After a while, they could fill it with water, if they liked. They might find a stone that they could believe was an axe-head, or a fossil. They might find a penny. Or a very antique nail. Or a bone. A saber-tooth tiger’s kneecap. Or if they didn’t want to fill the hole with water, they could put something in it like a penny, or a nail, or an axe-head, or a dead bird and cover it with dirt and leave it there for a while, so they could dig it up later and see what happens to something that you leave in the dirt for a while. We usually forgot to dig it up, or forgot where we had buried it, but once it was a turtle which had made itself dead, and when we dug it up, some obliging beetles had eaten it clean, and I had an empty turtle shell, and that was a good thing to have.

  About the Red Rover. We used to use the names of cars. And if it was a hot evening and you didn’t want to run, you picked out an obscure name like Simplex, and to this day I can hear the calls in the summer evening under the street lamp. “Pierce Arrow, come over. Hupmobile, come over. Locomobile, come over. Stanley Steamer, Kissel, Moon, Essex, come over. Go-wan, there’s no such a car as a Buckboard. Is there, Piggy, is there. It’s a kind of a car, not a make of a car, it’s like saying, Coupe (and that was coo-pay) come over. Mercedes-Benz, come over. Hispano-Suiza, come over. Isotta-Fraschini, come over.” Oh, we were a cosmopolitan crowd.

  The kids could have watered the lawn in the summer. I could have watered them when I watered the lawn. When I was a kid, you watered the lawn by standing there and holding the hose and spraying it back and forth. In arcs, and in fountains, and in figure eights, and straight up in the air, energetically, and dreamily and absentmindedly, washing the walk, and the porch and the window screen and your father in the living room reading the paper. You dug trenches with the stream from the hose and filled milk bottles and garbage cans and the back seats of parked cars. And if it was a grownup watering the lawn, you hung around until he said, “Why don’t you kids go ask your mothers if you can get in your bathing suits and I’ll spray you,” and you pounded home and got into the scratchy wool bathing suit and pounded back and there, I tell you, was Heaven on earth, getting wet on a front lawn on purpose.

  But now we have sprinklers that are scientific and you can sit indoors watching some people play Red Rover on television while your sprinkler crawls along its hose, spraying a predetermine
d pattern.

  It was a hot day, and the clouds gathered and the rain came, the heavy heavy fat drops of summer making quarters on the sidewalk, and in every house screen doors slammed, and it was, “Mother, mother, can I,” and all over the block kids ran out, in their scratchy woolen bathing suits, dancing up and down in the rain. The kids could have done that in the summer.

  They could have found their best friend and gone for a long walk, kicking a can, and after a while, lying on their backs against a hedge somewhere, looking up in the sky and speculating. They could have done the same thing, alone, in the back yard, seeing the shapes swimming in the sky. I forget how old I was when I asked somebody about it, and I was told that those wonderful gliding changing spots were imperfections in the fluid of my eye-ball, that what I was seeing was in my eye. In your eye! For so long, for a child’s years, the sky was full of wonder, these shapes were in the sky, the sky was full of transparent things that swooped and swam. They were almost invisible, and, I thought, almost bodiless, they were there, but you could go right through them, they were animals that lived in the air. You see, we didn’t go around talking about things like this. It’s only now, that I am grown up and know everything, that I talk about this.

  LYING AWAKE AT NIGHT, KNUCKLING MY EYEBALLS so that I could see the flashes of light, the fireworks that only I knew about. Taking off the rubber band that I had wrapped around my thumb, tight, so that I could feel the prickles, the electricity, the exquisite torture of the slow removal of the garter. Going to sleep with my right big toe in my left hand, my right arm wrapped around my head holding the lobe of my left ear, to find out if I would wake up that way in the morning. Sitting on the back steps with my friend and a milk bottle, putting in a piece of licorice, and some medicine he had found when his mother cleaned out the medicine chest, and some salt and some pepper and a bit of chocolate, some raspberry jam and a piece of iron, a little ketchup and a rubber band, water and milk and a little square of watercolor paint prized out of my sister’s paintbox. Shaking it up and wishing we had something to make it fizz, and daring each other to drink it, and tasting it, and saying it’s good, it really is good.