Now they’re standing here, as if waiting for me to do something. I tease thread from the back of the button. Why do some threads come loose? I wonder. Perhaps this button will come off, fall and roll away under chairs, be lost.
“Fine, I think,” Daddy murmurs. Daddy’s standing next to Mama now, his hand lifted to touch her arm.
His eyes quickly glance over, not to my eyes, never really to my eyes when Mama or anyone else is around, it seems to me, but more to the placement of the object of me next to and on the other side of Mama from where he stands.
Mama stands between Daddy and me, her hands poised as if a holding position, at the center of our threesome. I look away from the headlight-beam grown-up eyes and the hot, humming center of us that seems to me to be located somewhere between them.
I want in. I want to be good.
Daddy’s shifting from one foot to the other foot for the third time now, his bad foot bothering him, I can tell. Then they speed up time, as if we have to keep up with something that’s supposed to happen.
If only I could have asked Daddy why that man who you could see wanted to be the daddy in the movie kept acting as if there were something so wrong with that little girl in the movie who didn’t believe in Santa Claus.
Something sad and embarrassing and wrong.
And that they couldn’t really talk about.
At first, I was surprised to be taken to a movie with this kind of little girl in it, because she was not at all the kind of little girl they want. I wanted to know more about that girl.
Daddy will sometimes tell me things. But at the movies, there are too many things Daddy will not sit still for. He can’t sit still for long anyway, because of the feet.
He’ll leap from his seat like he did tonight when that Santa Claus man first came on and said, “You are making a mistake! You are making a mistake!” as if this were something important.
I was about to ask Daddy, but Daddy was up and gone by the time the mother in the movie was hiring the man to be the department store Santa Claus in the big New York City parade, and the man decided he would do it because, he said, “the children mustn’t be disappointed.” But Daddy didn’t wait around for that part.
By the time Daddy came back, it seemed that something was wrong with the little girl’s mother that put her in a bad mood all the time. And of course the little girl could not feel good until her mother felt good first.
I’m aware that I have not yet been excused. Released. Dismissed. I look away from the two of them standing here waiting for me to do something they already have in mind. I try to ease away from that one hand of hers that is returning now to hold casually but firmly on to my shoulder, holding me in place.
Mama leans down to me, changing her manner and her voice. The braid swings loosely down, and so does the nightgown. I see the small breasts tight against her body, the nipples pink erasers vibrating as she talks.
“Well, how was the movie?” she’s saying brightly. “Was it a good movie?” And she’s smiling and nudging me as if to play a little game, but I don’t get it.
“Did you like that movie? Did you and your daddy have fun? Did you thank your daddy for taking you out for such a nice time?
Mama’s eyes catch mine, little lights, little hooks in them, as she leans the full moon of her irresistible face down to right in front of my face, and as she is speaking so closely to me in that voice that grown-ups use for talking to babies and small children, and to dogs and cats and birds in cages when other grown-ups are around. When Daddy is around.
Daddy’s shifting from one foot to the other. He looks down at me with his black bird-eyes.
I’m tempted to go ahead and like Daddy, not only on a trial basis. Sometimes I want to like him. Sometimes it seems Daddy wants me to like him. But then sometimes it seems that Daddy wants me to know that he doesn’t care if I like him or not, because it’s all about something else.
On this particular night, he did spend the whole evening taking me to the movie, and then out for ice cream, and not even once saying anything about my being too fat to be allowed to eat ice cream. Even when the woman with the hairnet at Preston Road Pharmacy brought the ice-cream sundae just for me and only the coffee for him, Daddy didn’t say anything, even when both our eyes rested on those soft vanilla-bean scoops, the satiny fudge sauce, the whipped cream, the cherry on top. When I took the first toothache-cold bite, I waited in my head to hear Daddy call me “Fatty,” but he didn’t say it, didn’t even give me that look. He didn’t take bites with his coffee spoon without asking, either. He just let the ice cream be mine.
Instead, Daddy started telling about when he was a kid like me, how the kids then would go to the drugstore after school, how things were in those days in drugstores and in candy stores, when one penny would buy a paper bag of licorice sticks you could chew on for a week, when the boys wore knickers and caps and played Red Rover and marbles and kick the can. He told me how he worked after school in his father’s cycle shop, where men of the small town in Utah—where he was born, the eldest son and namesake to his misfit Italian father and his red-haired Scottish Mormon mother from a prominent Salt Lake City pioneer family—would come by the shop and talk to his father about the new bicycles and motorcycles. He told me how they held the motorcycle races—the first West of the Mississippi, he said, his voice becoming quieter and quieter—and how men who later became famous as race-car drivers or as big shots at General Motors, or for this or for that, came to those races from all across the country, and how he knew them all by name, and how they all knew him.
“Is that really true?”
“Yes, that is all really true,” he said, and his eyes looked a certain way that made me know it was true.
The excitement for him lay with the new machines, the Iver Johnsons, the Harleys, with the famous men of the time, Edison, the Wright brothers, when the new machines were changing the world, and knowing his place there in his father’s forward-looking small business. He seemed to have a vision of something about his father saying, “You didn’t see him when he was young.”
His eyes looked off, seeing something standing there next to us, believing in it. He even stopped moving his feet and knees, and I could sit there watching him in the mirror behind the counter until I could almost see my big, gruff, half-crippled daddy as an eager freckled boy in knickers among tall men, and I was letting down my guard with him.
He was forgetting about paying attention to something about me, was being friendly, as if I were a regular person, not someone he had to pretend something with, so that I was forgetting about ice cream, and forgetting to wonder why we’d done this unusual thing of going out together, Daddy and me. And when my ice cream softened, I stirred the chocolate and vanilla together cake batter–smooth, and I gave my daddy a bite.
I saw the surprised look in Daddy’s eyes, his forehead smoothing, his mouth working the cold spoon. And then Daddy and I both smiled right at each other, right into each other’s eyes, and right at the same time. And then he said we had to go.
But now here he is, standing by the door behind Mama, foot tapping–ready to end our good-night scene, while Mama’s leaning over to peck me on the forehead. He has a crooked grin.
I should have asked him some things while I had him to myself. I know that soon they’re going to turn out the light and leave me in that dark room where something sits in the corner watching and waiting for its chance.
In the movie, the little girl had no daddy. She had only a mother who talked in a serious voice, telling her there was no such thing as Santa Claus.
That was surprising. I looked over at Daddy, but he did not look back.
And in the movie, the two of them were not looking for a daddy, and yet the mother seemed to be so worried about things like fairy tales and Prince Charming, about believing in things that were not true. “No fairy tales!” she said.
Then along came this man from across the hall who wanted to be the daddy. You could tell. And the m
an was nice. But then the man seemed to think something was wrong with the mother and with the little girl, and he wanted them to change.
Then along came this other man with a white beard, who told everybody he was Santa Claus. And he got the job. The little girl pulled his whiskers in the store to be sure that not believing was really the correct policy. But I knew that was silly, because he could have had a real beard and still not been Santa Claus.
So then after that, people started saying this man was more than “a little bit crazy, like painters and musicians,” and they all started arguing about whether the man was crazy or whether he was Santa Claus. Then they sent him away to a hospital to sit around in his bathrobe looking sad.
I kept looking over and wondering why Daddy brought me to this movie where the little girl and the mother did not believe in Santa Claus. Was he now going to be the one to tell me the truth about this? Did Mama know about this?
But Daddy hunched down eating popcorn, his eyes bright as he looked at the screen, watching the man trying to cheer up the mother and the little girl. But the mother did not want to be cheered up, so the little girl couldn’t be cheered up, either, because, of course, she had to wait for her mother. So then Daddy jumped up again.
Then there was a part at the end with a trial, a judge, and a lot of grown-ups talking, where I did not understand why, if that bearded man in the movie really was Santa Claus, were all the grown-ups in the movie and in the audience laughing so hard when those big sacks of letters to Santa Claus were emptied in the courtroom. Was it all a big joke?
Was that man really Santa Claus or not? What is the answer? I really want to know the answer! Why is it so hard to get the answer to this question?
And I want to know more about that little girl.
I look up into Mama’s face. The clear dark eyes that seem so secure in some secret knowing. The high, serene forehead that has no doubt. The cool smiling lips that are not telling. Her beautiful yet invincible face. Her invincible yet sweet face. Her blandly sweet and yet knowing face. Her hand is on me, as her hand is always on me. I am hers.
Daddy’s watching me from far away again now. Something not unfriendly is in Daddy’s eye as he watches Mama and he watches me from high and far away.
I feel my eyebrows might be slightly lifted, and I try to lower them in a natural-appearing way.
“It was a good movie,” I say, working to brighten up my voice, but it comes out sounding all wrong. I try to join in, but we all three know now that she had to tell me to do it.
If only I could have a big brother or even a big sister, someone older, or just someone—I need someone—who will tell me at least what it is that we are pretending.
That movie was telling me something. It was clear from that movie that if that little girl was going to have a happy mother and a happy daddy and a nice happy house with a swing in front—and you cannot just go around being happy until you have all these things in place—then that little girl was going to have to go ahead and believe in Santa Claus and in all the things in which we’re supposed to go ahead and believe.
“I had a nice time. Thank you,” I say to the floor. I grin, showing a good-child face. They stand and look as if they do not know what to do with the problem of me.
I slip away from Mama’s grasp. I slide away from their disappointment. I slither away from their poised huddle and down the hall to our children’s bedroom. I pull the door almost closed with one lizard hand.
I put my coat on a hanger into the dark closet, careful to be quiet, to go with little light, and to jump quickly back from the yawning closet cave before anything in there can thrust out a claw and grab me. I hold my breath against the shadows, taking care to tiptoe so as not to wake the two little sister babies Mama’s so crazy about now, in the way of the good and well-trained responsible eldest reptile child that I am.
In the bathroom, I brush my teeth and wash my face. I scrub until my cheeks sting. I wring out the washcloth, fold it, and place it in exactly the way I have been taught to do, all the time perfectly aware of the fact that something scaly with one eye in the middle of its forehead has been watching me all this time from the shadows in the hall—something that is waiting for its chance.
On tiptoe, I can see the eyes of me in the mirror. I don’t like my eyes, and yet I look.
Is that the face that is me? I don’t look like my dark-eyed mother. My face is red, freckled, the eyes light, the eyebrows lifted. I prepare to look, as if afraid of seeing something watching from behind. I can’t look at myself without myself looking back.
I hear their voices. I hear my name. I hear them say “she,” as if something’s wrong.
In the hall, I stay on the path of light from the bathroom until I see the lamp next to the bed. I walk slowly and casually, because I know that if that thing in the hall sees me hurrying or being afraid, it will jump me. And when it jumps me, it will have a big grin on its face.
The Sheik of Araby
After we say “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep” and God bless everybody, and Mama goes out, I lie in the dark, hearing the babies’ moist breathing, and I listen to the sounds of the two of them walking around the house—her light, clicking heels—even her slippers have high heels—and his heavier-on-one-foot clump-CLUMPing, a great injured bird looking for a place to land.
I hear the jingle-crash of keys and coins hitting the dresser. I hear their talking rising and falling, the words unclear, but the tones and rhythms, their back-and-forth, are the night music of our lives, weaving in and out with one radio song after another—“Sentimental Journey,” “Night and Day,” “Tumbleweed,” “Stardust.” I sing along, often rocking and singing myself to sleep.
On this night, I don’t hear fighting or yelling or crying. There’s no slapping, no falling down, no slamming doors, no phone calls, no Daddy’s tires squealing, skidding gravel all the way to my midnight bedroom windowpane on this night, either, after they think I’m long asleep, like the babies.
They are quiet in there for once, and seem to be getting along. I think they’ve closed their door. I wonder what they’re doing in there.
I want to be part of the us that includes the two of them. I hold myself in readiness to be what they want, and I watch them, am never not watching them, holding onto myself.
They don’t know I’m not asleep in here the way they think I am, but am keeping watch, fighting the giving up, the stepping off that too-deep step that sometimes starts a floating down to hit the ground, to waken with that sudden What’s happening? jerk. They think when they put me to bed and turn out the light, that’s the end of it. But that is not the end of it.
I can still hear their muffled talking in there all the long way down the hall, but it’s getting quieter. Then they turn off the radio.
Silence. Darkness. Silence.
I lie in my bed like a small worm curled upon itself. I am this small worm. And I am lying alone on a chilly beach near the edge of the black ocean of night washing across the whole world outside of our house. The ocean laps darkly at the edges of us.
I hurry up and pray for Jesus to keep me from dissolving away into the dark, saying “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep” a few times, but this makes me afraid I might “die before I wake.” I say my own prayers, over and over, like a chant.
I sing “Jesus loves me—this I know, For the Bible tells me so,” and then I’m rolling around clutching the covers, trying to focus tightly all my longing into a single prayer arrow arcing shakily upward by the force of I do believe. I do! I do!
A speeding silvery glimmer, sparks flying in its wake, my arrow gathers speed, pushes right through the ceiling, the trees, the clouds, the syrupy moonless night, all the way out to some farther-beyond-outer, lighter and glowing-brighter place where transparent-paper cutout figures of God on His Throne, and Jesus and Mary and Santa Claus and the Three Wise Men and Ozma of Oz and the Blue Fairy are standing together, underwaterishly undulating up there among purple-and-gold-tinged clouds, sparkly
stars and comets, little heat-wavy things, small puffs of blue smoke, all surrounded by angels, cherubs, fairy godmothers, all looking down at me from a sky so far away with sad smiles, as if they have things to say to me, as if they would like to explain all kinds of things to me, but something is holding them back.
I tighten my whole body to make them know how hard I am believing in them, and how sincerely I am trying and begging and wishing for even just one of them to come down from that hidden world you have to be afraid of all the time, to please come and shed some light around me, some Truth into me.
I pretend my arms are tied behind my back, and then that my arms and feet are tied to the corners of the bed. I rock back and forth, straining against imaginary bindings, toward I don’t know what. Surely they’ll see up there how much I do care, how I am not just one of the regular people who don’t care. Surely they’ll look down and see I’m doing all I can do to be as worthy as anyone has ever been worthy of the sort of special appearance that all the Bible stories they read to us in Sunday school testify to their having made in the past to certain other people—usually in the desert, but not always.
I want this special appearance. I need this special appearance. Please, God, let me be the one to receive this special appearance.
They will, of course, understand that I am still too young to go to the desert.
I imagine being the Virgin Mary and having God appear. The Holy Ghost. What is that? Then later, she has the baby Jesus. I don’t get it. And what’s the difference between an angel and a ghost? They say angels are real, but then that ghosts are not real. But what about that Holy Ghost business?
Surely some minor angel will favor me. I know if I keep doing this for a long-enough time, I will be worthy and surely one of them will appear. I would be happy with just the briefest appearance of an angelish something. Anything. Give me anything!
Because then I can make up my mind about some things.
It’s the Three Wise Men that I’d most like to talk to. Who are these Three Wise Men? How did they know about the star? How did they get to be so wise? What are the things the Three Wise Men know that make up all this wisdom, and is this knowledge still around for someone like me to find out? And are the Three Wise Men still alive, or are they up in Heaven the way I imagine, along with Jesus and all those others? Come down, Three Wise Men, and help me to understand! Tell it all to me! Please! I am waiting and waiting for you!
Hap and Hazard and the End of the World Page 6