But Daddy looks me right in the eye and says, “I think you should consider the fact that your mother might be right.”
Mama laughs, but I don’t get it.
Well, I think, Daddy wouldn’t lie to me.
Once Upon a Time There Was the War
The first time I remember stealing something was at Fort Riley, Kansas, where we lived when Daddy came home from the war, and after that everything changed. That was when Mama first seemed to not like me. Instead, she liked that new baby best.
Once upon a time before that, when it was just Mama and me alone together in all the world, and the real voice of my mother was the voice I heard then, when during the War all she had was me, me just a baby to her, a part of the life of her body space and time, and a possession of hers as well, almost like a pet or an accessory to her. Back when it was just the two of us, Mama and me alone, Mama told me the world.
She told me how before the War, she and her friends cruised Dallas in convertibles, the red leather staining their linen summer whites, how they danced the Lindy and the Big Apple at the Adolphus and the Baker hotels downtown, their pictures in the Dallas Morning News’ society pages for every little thing, how they chain-smoked their Camels and their Lucky Strikes, needing only one match, getting lit off each other, how they went to schools up east, went to New York, saw the Cotton Club and the Battle of the Bands at the Savoy, then came back to Texas for small home weddings, which were more tasteful in the Depression, when so many were so poor.
She told me how they played bridge in their slips in Granny’s big Beverly Drive house, fans going, windows open, ice melting in minted tea as they listened to Hitler invading Poland on the radio. How that world went with Daddy, away in the war, Pearl Harbor Day written into my baby book in her school-penmanship hand when Daddy, already an officer from New Mexico Military Institute, where he’d been sent away for being a wild prankster problem child, put on his uniform and went with all the men far away to the war.
Back then, it was just Mama and me for years, all points of our two-tangency making up the primary-core us of the then-known universe, that certain voice of hers evoking the emergent becomings of me. Mama and me, Mama and me alone.
Mama and me at the dresser, her braiding her own waist-length dark hair, and then my lighter child hair, every morning without fail, putting hers into the coiled braid, mine into the two tight pigtails waving stiffly rubber-banded in the breeze.
Mama and me in mother-daughter dresses and coats, going to church, to Granny’s house, to Nana’s house, Aunt Meg’s house, Aunt Annie’s house, all around Dallas in the old black cars with the creaking clutches and the running boards.
Mama and me driving to the different army bases to see Daddy, saying “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep” wherever we were bedding down, sometimes in the car, camp followers—Fort Bliss, El Paso, Presidio, Fort Riley, Valley Forge—empty two-lane blacktop forever, cows and cotton and fences and desert and oil rigs whizzing by, windows open, the vent blowing sparks from her cigarettes into the backseat, her skirt hitched above her knees in summer, before air conditioning, the radio-scratchy cowboy songs, the big-band music, then pulling up at another strange place, her grabbing her sewing machine out of the car trunk, making cheap slipcovers to maybe stay awhile.
She chewed gum and wore saddle shoes and skirts and sweaters back then, and she popped her gum and laughed easily, and strange men were always looking at her, but she was with me, and talking a constant stream into the human tape-recorder ears and eyes of infant-child me completely tuned to what her voice and her whole body might be saying about what was happening to the two of us now, and what was going to happen next, as if to pin down through telling every detail of our busy existence, letting me in on the order and meaning of events in our small two-together life, me rarely seeing or playing with any other kids. All this to the point that I’d pay little attention to where we were going or to what else might be happening in the outside world, but only to every gesture and pulse beat of the source of the universe that was her, that was us, singing along with the radio, just happily and mostly obediently following along, getting into her big warm bed, soothed nightly by the heartbeat of her heavy-breathing, grown-up, sweet-sour-smelling body then, back then, when we didn’t have Daddy and these babies taking her attention away from just Mama and me.
Mama and me in the army-base store at Fort Riley, counting out our ration stamps every week for the checkout lady. Mama and me at the movies in Dallas, the big fancy Majestic downtown, where a man in a bow tie played the organ between shows, and then we’d gaze up at the black-and-white stories and newsreels of people in the War, cheering for our boys, booing the bad guys, the Jerrys and Nazis and Japs. Because they started it.
So all our men had to go away to kill all the Jerrys and Nazis and Japs. And that was a lot of people to kill, so no one could make it stop, this evil machine grinding away out there, blowing up towns, chewing up babies and grandmothers, all our men gone away to dark, sad, wild-hair-kerchiefed other countries where people speaking in strange other tongues were unlucky enough to have been born.
Mama and me at the kitchen table at Granny’s big Beverly Drive house, where Papaw was serious, almost about to cry, and was giving Mama some papers to keep, saying those papers proved she was adopted by him, and not a Jew. He said “just in case.”
Afraid it might be coming to suck us in and make us suffer like people in newsreels were suffering, we fought against being afraid. We believed, hands and arms linked, lockstep, all together, the same music, direction, purpose, and goal; we sang along to the bouncing ball, to the surge of energy when everyone realized together that everyone else was singing, too, letting all the singing inside you come ringing out as loud as you wanted, safe in the crowd, in the dark—“The Man on the Flying Trapeze” and “The Sunny Side of the Street”—singing and believing in our boys, our flag, silver linings, that jaunty little ball showing us what and how to sing next. We clapped and cheered; we belonged; we sat back into the very meaning of us, holding on to that beat to which we could go ahead and live our good soldiers’ positive-thinking, team-playing, true-blue lives, in step, hand in hand to the marching music, the upbeat, swing-beat music, the clear and simple music of that time.
Mama and me wearing hats and gloves together in a downtown department store where I had to be careful to hold on to Mama because I could so easily find myself mistakenly grabbing onto the skirt of a strange woman with mean green eyes high above me, frizzy red hair sticking out from a pointed hat like Mama never wore, making that strange woman look electrocuted right in the midst of the bright, noisy confusion of rows and racks and blank-face mannequins, lettered placards, dizzying piles and stacks of shirts and dresses and coats and pots and pans and toys, shiny products high and low, people rushing, clerks with glasses on ribbons and hairnets and ruffles at the neck, saying “May I help you? May I help you?” and then sending the little tube canisters zinging around the store on wires I could see from the mezzanine, where I finally would find Mama ordering cloth unfurled and cut from a bolt like ribbon for giants, and where Mama would take way too long picking out patterns and buttons and bindings and threads and zippers and snaps and hooks.
I’d lean over the banister, saying mezzanine, mmezzzanniine until it turned nonsensical, watching the zinging tubes of money and paper crisscrossing the whole space of the amazing, buzzing, clanging, cash register–ringing department store.
All I wanted was to get my turn upstairs on Santa’s lap, telling how I wanted a real rubber baby doll like I saw in the girl upstairs’s apartment at Fort Riley. But sitting there, I looked up and saw a real man looking down, winking at me, black hairs in his nose, and I froze and didn’t tell anything.
“She’s shy,” I heard Mama say, and “She’s big for her age.”
Mama walked so fast on the street past the plate-glass windows showing Christmas scenes, I was running to catch up.
“So does that mean Santa gets toys from t
he same place the men get jeeps and tanks for the war?”
“No, that just means the North Pole elves can’t get rubber for toys, because all the rubber’s being used up for Daddy and the other men in the war.”
“But if Santa can fly, and knows who’s bad and who’s good all over the world, then why can’t Santa just, POOF, make some rubber of his own?”
“Because that’s the way it is. We have to pray for the war to be over, and then we can have those toys again.”
“Does Santa have something to do with the war?”
But she stopped answering. And I wanted to ask how did Santa bring toys to the kids in the unhappy war countries. Is it just for us, the lucky ones, lucky because we believe—and over there they don’t believe? Are they being punished for something over there? If we couldn’t have rubber dolls, then they must not have a lot of things. Santa could bring food and blankets like the Red Cross. Would he bring toys? Would they still be expected to be good all the time, with the war?
Mama and me at Granny’s house under her Christmas tree in look-alike quilted satin robes, smiling for the camera, taking pictures to send to poor Daddy in North Africa, acting happy, waiting for Santa, living in that small King’s-X interval, knowing that that day of world peace was on its way, and we just had to trust and wait with the true-believing women friends, the aunts, the grandparents, the maids, the card games and dominoes, the making do with homemade toys, homemade Christmas lights with painted globes and black electric tape, with Sunday bacon fat–fried chicken dinners with biscuits and gravy and fruit salad, the victory gardens, the army blankets, the having the measles with a big red QUARANTINE! sign on the door, the radio, the Victrola, the war news, the letters and telegrams, grown-ups reading the letters and telegrams and newspapers to each other in hushed and excited voices, me not understanding a thing about Germany, Japan, North Africa, Italy, Hitler, the Jews, Roosevelt, MacArthur, Eisenhower, Patton, but being mad, sad, or worried right along with the grown-ups because of the war that was their war, the war that their youth poured into, the bottomless-pit, endless war that stole their youth, but to which they gladly gave their youth, and valued that giving gladly to the war of their America and that of all their friends.
To not go and give gladly was to be no friend of theirs. They were all agreed on being all together about everything about it, in spite of men captured, men coming home in wheelchairs, or with no hands, or burned red all over except for goggle marks, or just not coming home at all.
We got good at this waiting that was our life. We dreamed of World Peace, when Our Boys would have killed all the bad Jerrys and Nazis and Japs, and the war would be over, and all the daddies who had not been killed already would come home.
I dreamed my tall heroic, First Cavalry Division daddy would come riding up our sidewalk on a silver horse, teeth and medals flashing, all of us laughing, jumping, waving arms! Daddy would reach down and scoop me up onto his horse to ride with him. And all the toys and cartoons and photos and bouncing balls would come magically alive like in the movies, singing, bouncing along the sidewalk beside happy, smiling, me and Daddy! Daddy and me.
After that there would be World Peace, and no one would fight ever again, or kill one another, or drop bombs, or probably even raise their voices, or disagree or act ugly or be rude or throw things or even have to get sent away from the dinner table, but then everyone all together would just work and believe and be good and be happy, happy, happy all the time, all the time, no exceptions allowed at all.
That was when Daddy was just a photograph and a story about the War. He was Faraway Soldier daddy in North Africa with General Patton.
But then later, he was poor broken, war-wounded daddy at Valley Forge Hospital, where finally I did get to see him, after a long car trip and much talk about going to “see Daddy.”
But the real Daddy we saw then was small and strange and quiet in a stiff white plaster cast that covered him all over, an itchy white torture-jacket, his thin neck and arms sticking out like a turtle stuck on its back to die. And he spoke in a thin, sad voice, not to me at all, but only to Mama, not the Daddy I expected looking over from far away over Mama’s shoulder at me on a chair in the corner with a big square carton of melting vanilla-bean ice cream on my lap while they talked in low grown-up tones I couldn’t hear, two together, and me left out.
Mama and I were at the Walgreens counter eating club sandwiches after that, and a nice man in uniform came and talked just to me. Mama was looking at his ribbons. He asked Mama, “Are you married?” And she said, “Yes, I am,” looking proud of herself. I wanted to stay and talk with that man who seemed to want to talk to me, but Mama made us leave.
That was before the real Daddy came home and I got kicked out of Mama’s big bed.
Then, when the real Daddy finally did come home, he ruined everything. I had to sleep alone, far away in my own room. Then she had that first new baby, so everything changed between Mama and me, and she wouldn’t tell me things anymore.
Daddy came home again and again—home to our first Dallas apartment from the war, then away again for operations, then home again to Fort Riley, to teach tank warfare, where Daddy was sort of okay for a while, with us having that first new baby there, a tiny red thing of no use, as far as I could see.
At Fort Riley, I was always being left with a maid named Frankie, who was mean. I knew Frankie hated us because I saw her face one time when Daddy was talking at the table about someone who was not supposed to be in the Officers’ Club. And then Mama said “Hush,” and then Daddy said he didn’t care. And then something mean was in Frankie’s face.
After that, I saw Frankie pinch our new baby and make it cry. I was going to tell Mama about this, but Mama never believed me.
Frankie told me if I touched down there, I would get worms. I said she was not my mother, and then Frankie slapped me while I was wet in the bathtub, which hurt.
Frankie said if I pushed my chair back like that, I was going to fall backward and knock my teeth out. I said I would NOT! And then I did fall backward and I did knock out one tooth right in front. And I saw Frankie smile. How did she know that?
I had Cookie, the first dog, to play with in the yard, but then Cookie had to be “put to sleep,” because Daddy’s commanding officer’s mean little boy teased her until she finally bit him. All the grown-ups thought that little boy was the nice one and Cookie was the bad one, but they were completely wrong! I wanted to tell them that, but Mama was too busy to listen, and it was too late. So it was clear that grown-ups do not know everything.
But I carried my Raggedy Ann everywhere then because of her smile face on one side, her asleep face on the other, and because of the secret heart printed on her chest, which I could look at anytime I wanted to see it whispering I love you.
What I really wanted was a rubber baby doll like the one the girl upstairs in our apartment building had from before the war, with all-over soft rubber skin instead of a chipped hard plaster painted face and hands and feet and a limp, dirty cloth body like my baby doll. The girl upstairs’s doll made my doll seem used up and sad. Her doll felt almost like that real baby Mama brought home and spent all her time with now, even though all it did was sleep and eat and fuss and cry.
But we couldn’t have a rubber doll like that because of the war, and that girl wouldn’t let me hold her doll for long. I had to wait for World Peace.
That girl was older, and had a lot of toys from before the war. She had a dollhouse full of tiny furniture, tiny dolls, with little bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen with tiny wooden cabinets, doors that opened and closed, even dishes and lamps. I wanted to be left alone with this dollhouse, to turn each thing over in my hands, work the moving parts, but all that girl wanted was to make me go into her mother’s closet and play dress-up.
Before we went in there, I saw the thing I had to have. It was a tiny white toilet with two tiny moving lids with tiny moving hinges. If only I could get enough of holding it, working the moving p
arts, then maybe I could put it back later.
But did I really think anything? My hand just reached out and took it, the taking getting behind me, like swallowing too big a bite and just getting on to the next thing. It was small and so easy to slip into a dress pocket. Maybe no one would notice such a small thing.
But they did notice. The next day, the girl and her mother and my mother stood over me in a big quiet room for what seemed like forever and kept asking, “Why did you do it?” with their sad, mad faces too close to mine.
“Why, why, why did you do it? Why? Tell us the truth! Tell us the truth!”
All I could do was say, “I don’t know, I don’t know why.”
Mama said that I had “broken her heart,” because she was “so disappointed in me,” and after that her face was different every time she looked at me. She just didn’t like me anymore after that.
She started watching for me to do something bad, yelling, “Do not steal!” But I was only looking into her purse to see what was kept in there that she always had to have.
Now it’s Mama and Daddy, and it’s Mama and babies, and it’s Daddy alone, and it’s me alone, out on my own, out looking for somebody to be my friend.
And even now, everywhere I look, I see things I could steal.
I CAN SEE THE LONG-AGO DUSTY ROAD and the hill I walked up from the Fort Riley apartments one time to get away from Mama, who was with the new baby, and who was mad at me, always mad at me—and away from that other woman sitting in the yard, who said I was a bad girl and that they were going to cook and eat my pet frog for dinner.
I can see myself walking up to the high grassy fields to wait for Daddy. I can see the torn-up dirt road up there, deeply rutted and layered in dust that rose into the wind, swirling up and scattering the cloud of gnats that followed me up there, getting into my eyes and nose. A fat brown grasshopper blew onto my skirt and clung there as if to a friendly giant.
I looked back and saw the flat land, the late-summer dry grass, the faraway dome of light sky, the toy blocks of apartments where Mama was busy fixing dinner, and I did not see another person anywhere. It was a long way out there for me.
Hap and Hazard and the End of the World Page 3