Every day I run-run-run as if along a string—do this, do that—to get myself out there to dangle in windy space on the corner, waiting for the school bus—have to get there on time, on time! And I’m never ready to do everything on time, the way she wants it, the way all grown-ups seem to want you to do things, and the way even Santa Claus and God must want you to do things, but I’m always running as if tied behind a moving car.
I was eager to go to school in kindergarten, and even in first grade. A boy across our worktable told me that his brother told him that in second grade everything would change and not be fun anymore. And then the teacher separated us for talking too much, and after that we weren’t friends anymore. And he was right, because now I’m in second grade, and even though I can already read most things, whatever it is that’s happening in second grade, I’m never ready. They make it go too fast.
“Hurry up!” Mama says.
In the bedroom I pick up a sock and look it over, wondering if all this time I’ve been ignoring some secret indication of right and left. A worn place on the heel is there, and the defuzzed threads crisscross in a way I never noticed before.
I put the sock on one foot. I look down at the other sock, the shoe, the shoelaces, and here I am again in the time-stopping bog that seems like my own more natural state, a somehow shameful and stolen state of blank staring at the limp foot-pattern flatness of a sock suspended over my one bare foot, and at an untied shoelace falling like a napping grass snake across the other already sock-accomplished foot.
I look at the tops of my feet, my knees, my legs, the palms of my hands, the blue veins. In and out, in and out, my breath is going, on and on, as if I have nothing to do with it. My heart is thumping through my whole body, and I must be thumping and breathing all the time like this, even when I’m not noticing it. Even asleep, my body must be throbbing, buzzing, keeping itself alive every second to the tips of my toes, my fingernails, my hair. But I’m not telling it to do this. It’s alive on its own, with me inside. How does my body know what to do?
I wonder if it all might stop during the night when I’m not watching. If I should die before I wake. It seems we pray so God won’t make us die in the night while we’re not looking. I pray the Lord my soul to take. But no! I don’t want somebody taking my soul, leaving my body for bugs to eat! And then what? Would I be in heaven? Would Mama cry? Would Daddy be mad?
I don’t want to go to heaven! I want to stay on earth!
Outside the bedroom window, a dragonfly left over from summer sits on the screen as though exhausted, but his mission incomplete. I tap the window and he jumps off. Then there is a short time, a long time—I don’t know how much time, but it seems all time dissolves into watching a silvery green dragonfly helicopter from branch to branch of the no-longer-flowering bushes. Will he die soon?
“Are you in there daydreaming?” Mama says from far away down the hall.
The dragonfly darts away, then darts back, as if having forgotten something over here, then darts over there, then darts to a different spot, as if now a decision is going to have to be made. It seems that dragonflies are as busy as everyone else.
“Are you ready yet?” she’s calling me from another room.
I look down at the second sock, start putting it on.
“If you miss that bus again today, I am not going to take you,” she calls.
And what would happen then? I wonder. Would she really let me miss school every day if I didn’t make it to the bus on time? I don’t think so. But that would be fine with me. I’d rather be left alone to play barefoot in the woods and the fields behind our house. (Visions of rabbits and horned toads and quail skittering away from my invading feet, visions of the abandoned chicken coops.) Then what about the next day? And the next day? Would she let me go on that way, missing school, having said it?
Everything would be different then. How far would it go? Would that one change make everything else change completely, like in The Wizard of Oz? Dorothy was missing school all that time, but the story doesn’t mention her having to make up work when she went back. Did they ask a lot of questions? Was everybody mad?
And what about Pinocchio? He did set out to go to school but then got sidetracked into having too much fun, and that turned out to be bad. And he kept forgetting about telling the truth. Then everything changed for him, like in a dream.
“I’m coming in there,” says Mama from far away.
And what about Alice? When she followed that white rabbit, did she drop out of school and get behind? She didn’t seem to be having fun. Just like Dorothy, she was trying to get back home to her own real world. How come none of these kids has to go to school? Maybe all those stories are about dreams, and this is something that you’re supposed to know already. Is that real? Can you go into another world like that? I think some stories are real and some are not, but grown-ups do not seem to want to tell you which are which.
“I don’t want to ruin it for you,” they say.
Ruin what?
Or they cock their heads and smile and say things like “If you believe it, then it is true.”
But that is not what I want to know!
It seems like the main thing grown-ups want is for you not to find out anything about what’s real. They close the doors. When you come into the room, they stop talking.
I asked a boy at school about this, but he just laughed and said that I was a big baby, so of course I’m supposed to know something about this already. And you can’t ask!
So here I am, in a kind of box, walled in on one side by school and my mother’s voice shouting, “If you miss that school bus . . .” (Visions of the trundling sunflower-bright country school bus bristling with noisy children passing me by. Visions of walking through the high grass fields behind our house, trudging alone up to the school, slinking into my seat late, curious eyes turned onto my red-hot face, my mother-chosen dress.)
On another side, there’s the window, which in summer would be an open window to all outside, trees budding and blowing, fresh-cut grass smells wafting through the screen, grasshoppers, frogs, crawdads, horned toads. But now there’s only this one leftover fading green dragonfly, and the silver shine of sunlight across the chilly screen.
On a third side, there’s the room, my bed, the baby beds, the blond varnished dressers with dime-store decals of busily rushing Dutch girls in wooden shoes and aprons and sideways bonnets hiding their faces, carrying tulips and water buckets and brooms. (Visions of picking out the decals with my mother from the overflowing wooden filing cabinets on the dusty plank floor at the back of Mott’s Five and Dime. Visions of my mother with apron and bucket and sponge, sticking the slippery wet decals onto the dressers and the beds, sliding them into place, blotting them, smiling at them, smiling at me as if these busy Dutch girl decals were going to be so good for all of us.)
And there are all the many people around me all the time—Mama and Daddy and May-May and grandparents and neighbors and teachers and aunts and uncles and cousins and sisters and maids, and even lots more people than that, things always going on that I don’t understand. They all seem to know things and have secrets they are not going to tell. And you’re not supposed to ask. And they all seem to want things, to care so much about everything about me being a certain way.
Now I’m in this box; later I’ll be in another box. Why am I here now and not someplace else?
If I could spend enough time alone and barefoot in the woods, away from people, would magical things start happening to me like in those stories they read to me, the Girl slipping through a looking glass, a whirlwind, a rabbit hole? Could a dream world take over like that? Could the Girl take over? Is there another place to go?
Surely such things couldn’t really happen. They wouldn’t allow it. I’d get too far behind. I’d have to go to summer school to catch up. They would not allow it.
Clubhouse
Winter starts coming in with the first December days.
I hear hammering
outside. Nathan!
I climb the low three-board fence to find him at the edge of their woods next door, working on his clubhouse.
“Look,” says Nathan, pointing, and we watch as a cottontail disappears into the woods.
“He came out to see why I stopped hammering! He’s practically my pet now,” says Nathan.
“Maybe he’s the Easter Rabbit,” I say.
Nathan laughs. We both laugh.
“I came before.”
“I saw your apple core.” He starts hammering again.
“What’re you doing?”
“Fixin’ leaks. It’s fixin’ to rain.”
“Where’d you get the wood?”
“You know that new house? They let me have these nifty shingles.” He doesn’t look at me, talks like a grown-up around the nails pinched in the corner of his mouth.
I walk around his little pounded-dirt clearing, kicking fallen pecans into where he’s made a pile. In Texas, winter’s only a hint of cold yet in early December.
“Have you got your tree?”
“Yep, a big one, but we haven’t fixed it up yet.”
“We’re getting ours tomorrow,” I say. “Maybe when we go to the movie.”
“What movie?” Nathan and I talk about movies a lot.
“Something about a miracle.”
“What is a miracle anyway?”
“I don’t know—something in the Bible, I think.”
“Oh yeah.”
A drop of water hits my nose. I look up—dark clouds, wind picking up, getting cold.
“Here comes the rain!” says Nathan. Every rain is an event.
It comes down fast, a sudden storm, cold needles of drops.
“Get inside!” and he scurries off the roof and into the low door of the clubhouse—a door too small for grown-ups. I scramble in after him. It’s dark, the only light through gaps between boards and patches as it darkens outside, and water drizzles down on the corners, making puddles on the uneven dirt floor. We sit on small fruit crates.
Nathan strikes a wooden match, and the musty air fills with a burning wood and sulfur smell, the yellow light, the thrill of this forbidden act. He lights a candle stub he’s stuck in a tuna can, rests it on a shelf on the wall next to his stack of cigar boxes filled with treasures and trading cards.
“They let you do that?”
“Do what?”
We hover together, shiver and laugh as the candle lights our faces, rain dancing loudly on the roof, puddles spreading out. He opens a box with matches, stolen cigarettes, a corncob pipe, a dime-store penknife, other secret stuff.
“Want to smoke grapevine?”
“I don’t know. What is it?”
“Oh. Never mind,” he says, putting it back on the shelf. “I don’t want to get in trouble with your mom.”
“What’s grapevine?”
“Oh, it’s really nothing. You wouldn’t like it.”
“Because I’m a girl?”
“Well . . . yeah.”
“But that’s just what my mother says!”
He doesn’t answer.
“Nathan,” I say, “do you think the Easter Rabbit is small like that or big like a person?”
“I don’t know,” he says, not looking at me.
“Once I thought I saw the Easter Rabbit, and he was as big as a man. But now I don’t know.”
“Maybe you saw a man in an Easter Rabbit suit,” he says. (I never even thought of that!) “Because it seems to me if the Easter Rabbit’s real, he’s got to be a real rabbit, maybe like a extra-big jackrabbit.”
“But how would he carry all the eggs?”
“Maybe he lays the eggs like a chicken.”
“But then why don’t baby rabbits come out of the eggs?”
We laugh.
“So do you think the Easter Rabbit is real?”
He peers at me, considering. “No, not really.” He lowers his voice. “I think grown-ups made it up.”
“But what about Santa Claus? Do you think he’s real?”
“Uh . . . I don’t know about that.” He looks at the ground.
“Daddy told me when he was a kid he saw Santa Claus.”
“Yeah, at the department store, right?”
“No, no, in his living room on Christmas morning—saw him come down the chimney and everything!”
“Your Dad?” He looks at me now. “He told you that?”
He picks up a knife and a piece of wood and starts carving on it. “I don’t think so,” he says to himself.
“Cross my heart and hope to die,” I say, making the cross-my-heart sign on my chest with my finger.
“Stick a thousand needles in your eye?”
“Yes!”
“You have to say it!”
“Okay, cross my heart and hope to die, stick a thousand needles in my eye, he told me that!”
“Your dad did that, huh?” He’s bent over his carving now.
“Why?”
“Oh, nothing, I thought it was just your mom.”
“What?”
“Oh, nothing,” he says, holding up his carving. It’s two U-shapes with dots in them.
“Tits, man, tits! Pretty good, huh?” He laughs in a mean way.
“What do you mean ‘just your mom’?”
He starts carving again, not answering me.
“Tell me!”
The way I see it, Nathan and I are partners in an ongoing investigation of the unknown and mysterious grown-up world, so reporting back our findings and observations is a matter of great seriousness. And I want to know that this unspoken pact is still on. So why is he acting this way?
“You’re lucky you have parents who love you,” he says quietly.
KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK!
We both jump. The little door opens, and Mrs. Calder is there, leaning down with a big umbrella, shouting over the rain.
“What’re you-all doing out here? Honey, your mom is looking for you! It’s dinnertime! Go home! Go! A little rain won’t hurt you! Nathan, you come in with me right now! Is that a candle? You know you’re not supposed to have matches out here. . . .”
I run out, climb the slippery wooden fence, run, slip on wet grass, fall down, get up, run, run, run, and by the time I get home, I’m drenched.
I stand shivering inside the back door, smelling dinner, and disaster, hearing Daddy yelling about GranDad and Uncle Ted as I come in the back door.
Oh no! Daddy is mad—I better hide!
They don’t see me at first; then they do. Mama hushes him.
“Where have you been?” she says to me in a voice that is trying to be mad.
“I . . . I was just . . .” Uh-oh! What will Daddy do?
But when Daddy turns and looks at me through the doorway, sees me standing there dripping wet and shivering, he smiles, as if he enjoys seeing some adventures.
“What are you up to, kid?” he says, grinning.
You never can tell.
A Moth, a Toad, a Bat
Mama bends to kiss me, and the long dark braid falls across the light from the rooms beyond. Daddy and I have been to a movie and are taking off our coats. It’s late for me to be up.
We three are in the small entry hall—Mama, bending down now to me; Daddy, whipping off his coat, impatient at being really much too warm in such a coat, then Daddy standing aside, watching Mama and me. I’m holding my coat across my chest, looking down and away, but still seeing the two of them the way a plant sees the sun, even turning my eyes away from their two lines of vision, hot searchlights sweeping around, to each other briefly, then converging, focusing their hot attention, both at once, on me. I pretend I do not notice being scrutinized by their grown-up eyes.
I see the dim nightlight at the far end of the hall, where the babies are asleep. I’ve usually already been put to bed back there, if never asleep, by this time of night, but listening, praying, rocking, singing, running and rerunning the entire everything of what has so far been revealed.
&n
bsp; Mama’s ready for bed in the see-through red nightgown. I can see her nipples and her belly button, and her hair down there and everything. Daddy and I are both seeing them at the same time.
“Go and put something on,” Daddy says to Mama. Mama laughs in a funny way, turning with a sideways mouth. Daddy puts his coat into the closet, looks over his shoulder as though taken by surprise, then closes the closet door with a jerk, as if something’s secret in there.
Mama’s hand, as shiny as the yearbook-beauty face I watch her smooth at her mirror with the nightly cold-cream, is on my shoulder. Mama turns, casting a passing glance at me, and whispers to Daddy.
“How did it go?”
I pretend not to hear what they say to each other. I stand looking down at an anchor-stamped coat button. The navy blue thread is frayed, starting to break away.
I pick at it.
Why didn’t Mama go to the movie with us? Why did just Daddy and I go to this particular movie? Because I heard her talking on the phone about this movie and about some kind of a problem about me.
I saw the front curtains move as Daddy and I were turning in, the two of us side by side on the car seat in the dashboard light, me up front where Mama sits, instead of me in the back with the babies, trying to figure out what the grown-ups are talking about up there. I looked over at Daddy’s sharp profile against the windows half-open for the balmy-cool mix of Texas December air streaming through, blowing across both of our thoughts and feelings, which were hovering together, it seemed to me, Daddy and I gliding through a city suburb, a rural highway, unlit country roads—a rabbit in headlights on the road, a moth, a toad, a bat, a neighbor on a bicycle, a dark-skinned maid at a bus stop whose eyes met mine.
As the driveway gravel crunched at my realization that this time and chance of my being alone with Daddy was ending now, there were so many things I wanted to say, things I wanted to ask. As the headlights swept the front of the house, shadows running across the lot, I could have sworn a curtain shivered in the wake of some quick-motion back into the house, Mama in there watching for our return, as if there were some reason for this unusual thing of Daddy and I going out at night.
Hap and Hazard and the End of the World Page 5