Hap and Hazard and the End of the World

by Diane DeSanders

  “Believed in what?”

  “Oh, just believed,” she said.

  The photograph shows four people reclining on rough-cut grass, mowed as a simple opening in a field, with grass tall and seeding against a white fence with a box-column newel post before which they’re gathered together. Leafy trees and sky behind them halo the dark heads of a woman and three men, all in old-fashioned summer Sunday clothes, stiff collars and pinned-up hair loosened on a breezy afternoon. All four on the grass are touching, arms around one another, a smiling young Nana with her arms around both men at the back, one slim hand curving absentmindedly around the collar of one, but her face turning toward the other, as if saying something funny. He, in turn, has laid both forearms across the shoulders of the man with glasses in front. And the man with his forearms on the other man has a different appearance—darker, thick-haired, large-boned, smiling also. It’s GranDad, the Italian. You see them there in that different world, so long ago, so young and slim, relaxed and happy and full of grace.

  GranDad’s room is next to Nana’s, completely different, sleek, with elevated bed, dark woods, huge closets and mirrors, dressing room and bath modern with black tile, a desk, a fireplace, a painting of a naked woman, pale skin against dark drapes, and an artist at an easel. An entire wall is mirrored on one side of GranDad’s room. When we sit in there, everyone keeps pretending not to be watching themselves, watching one another.

  I walk through all the rooms. I open closets, where Nana keeps boxed handkerchiefs, toys, and boxes of Arpège perfume for gifts. I look for the things that might later appear with tags saying “From Santa.”

  Party noises go on downstairs. No one has missed me yet. Oliver has disappeared also. How does he get away so fast? He knows how to be invisible, like me.

  I open the door to the attic stairs. These stairs are scary, creaky, dark, climbing narrowly up to the huge attic, and it smells musty up there. I turn on the light and start up.

  There’s a commotion, footsteps, and then Oliver appears at the top, and with a stiff face turned away from me, he hurries down, rudely brushing past me and out the door.

  I slip and almost fall down the stairs when he goes past. My knees feel funny. My throat hurts. My eyes sting. Why does he act that way to me? Hasn’t he always known me? Don’t I know him? Why will he not even look at me? Why was he hiding up here all alone? I can’t catch my breath all the way on up into the attic, where I have to wait for this crying feeling to pass so that no one will have something to tease me about.

  But I wasn’t doing anything to him! I wasn’t following him! Was I? I was not! I’d forgotten all about him! I had! I was just wandering around, and it seemed like something led me to where he was without my telling it to do so.

  But what if it’s true I was looking for him, not even thinking about doing it? What’s so bad about that? All I want is for him to talk to me! I’m not one of the little kids! Why can’t we be friends? Why can’t he be nice? Why?

  I still cannot get a deep breath. Whenever I see Oliver’s smooth face, his soft dark eyes, like Mama’s, even though he was adopted as a baby, it always seems to me that we know each other. Doesn’t he see it? It seems to me that there was a time when we played together and were friends. But the truth is, the picture in my mind is the blowing curtains in the summer bedroom at Granny’s house.

  The attic is a long room, wood-floored, wooden eaves above, lined with wooden closets and shelves. I like the bareness of it, the smell of wood. I peer into the attic closets filled with winter clothes, and the mothball smell stops my tears.

  I sit down next to a big dollhouse that was supposed to be mine but now is everybody’s and nobody’s, because Mama said they were so disappointed when I didn’t seem to want it that much, and now I can never play with it anyway, with all the little cousins around grabbing things, breaking things, losing things, ruining everything. This always happens. Why do I have to be put in with them instead of with the much more interesting grown-ups?

  It’s true I never liked this dollhouse. It reminded me of a dollhouse that was in the office of this doctor Mama took me to one time to find out what it was that was wrong with me. She’s always trying to figure out what’s wrong with me. The doctor wanted me to play with this doll family he had while he watched me and asked questions about Mama and Daddy that I knew even then not to talk about with some strange man. Plus, there was the way he looked at me—too interested. Then he came out and whispered to Mama, as if I weren’t standing right there hearing it. So this dollhouse sits day and night, no one playing with it, year after year, in the attic dust.

  I do like to sit up here by myself and look through the musty old books. Some have Daddy’s name or Uncle Ted’s name written inside in child-writing. Many Oz books, Arabian Nights, Hardy Boys, Jerry Todd, and Poppy Ott books. Nana lets me borrow them to take home and read and then bring back. Poppy Ott and the Freckled Goldfish is my favorite, because it seems like the secret-club world of boys, and they talk the way Nathan talks.

  There are dormer windows on both sides of the attic that look out through tree branches to the front and back yards so far below that they look like dollhouse yards, with dollhouse people walking around.

  I look down and see GranDad and Uncle Ted standing next to the fish pond, talking. GranDad likes to fiddle with his fish pond, and Uncle Ted is talking to him while he does it. Then I see Daddy clump-CLUMPing out to stand with them. Uncle Ted turns and walks back toward the house. Daddy talks to GranDad, then turns and walks away also, but toward the garage. GranDad stands there looking down at his fish.

  I go back down the attic stairs, then down the wide, curving front stairs. No one seems to notice my gliding quietly through the house, especially when we first arrived, the grown-ups greeting one another, getting drinks, wanting to talk and laugh together. No one’s looking for me.

  I go check where Daddy might be. I watch him stomp out of the room, where a group of men are talking about Lyndon Johnson. Daddy’s yelling, “Johnson and Rayburn are crooks!”

  Papaw carries a letter from Lyndon Johnson in his breast pocket and shows it to people. Daddy cringes at this, jumps up, and leaves the room when he pulls it out.

  I wander back to the center of activity, the porch that used to be screened in before Nana and GranDad were the first ones we knew to get central air conditioning, so now it’s all glassed in and decorated fancy. And here they all are.

  Nana sits on the side near the entrance in a wrought-iron chair with people around her. She sees me coming in and smiles.

  “Come over here and let my friends see you,” she says, then presents me to the blond lady who always carries a fancy paper umbrella she calls a “parasol,” because she’s allergic to the sun. Her husband has a thin mustache. Nana always says how this woman is trapped with having to be young all the time because she made the mistake of marrying a younger man, but how this woman is her good friend.

  There are two children with their parents—a little boy with red hair and something wrong with his foot, and a tall blond girl named Ann, who’s older and never says much to me or to anyone. They go to private schools.

  I look around for Oliver. Then he comes in from the living room with Papaw and some other people, and then Daddy comes in, saying, “So when are we going to have this Easter egg hunt?”

  Papaw goes Ho-ho-ho-ho, and Daddy dashes for the bar again.

  I look at Papaw. I can’t see anything that makes him so different except that he’s noisy and wet and always seems to have his eye on me. They say Papaw’s a Jew, but he’s not foreign-looking or dark. He has kinky slicked-down brown-gray hair, small light eyes, and a jowly face covered with tiny pink veins.

  Oliver is smooth-skinned, with dark hair and eyes, but no darker than those of Granny or Mama, who are not Jews. So what is it that makes Papaw and Oliver Jews anyway? They’re always around with us at Christmas and at Easter, and the rest of it seems to be secret, something you’re not supposed to ask.


  I can’t ask Mama anything now while she’s chatting with Aunt Celeste. They stand facing each other at an angle, holding cigarettes and clinking drinks with their red-nailed jeweled fingers, laughing a lot, talking chummily yet guardedly together out on the patio with their beautiful clothes and their diamond-cut ankles, sleek birds circling, feathers out.

  Aunt Celeste, with her shiny black pompadour, sharp blue eyes, red lipstick, and white pancake makeup, reminds me of the porcelain Japanese-lady lamps in Nana’s guest room. She wears black and white, turquoise silk underneath, and a ring with a big purple stone and little turquoise stones around it on her small-boned, tanned hands, which don’t match her face, holding a pink-paper cigarette. She talks in a deep, gravelly voice, and I could stare and study her for hours, but she looks down at me like the Wicked Witch in Snow White. She does not like me.

  Mama wears her hair in the usual thick-braid crown, with her usual gold loop earrings and diamond rings, none of which matters at all beside that face that she has. And she wears a jade green ribbon-knit dress she made herself, carefully knitting all the thin ribbons into sections and then ironing the sections and sewing them together into, magically, a dress that clings and hangs like green silk chain mail, showing her to be far and away the most elegant of them all.

  Mama’s told me her stories about how she and Aunt Celeste play bridge every week with their friends, who’ve all known one another from long before air conditioning—from high school, from sororities and clubs for nice people, lucky people—and how they married brothers who went away to war, one coming home a decorated Air Force hero over France, the other coming home off balance, broken.

  Nana stands up and then leads everyone outside for the Easter egg hunt. GranDad’s already standing outside in his wide pleated slacks next to the fish pond. First, he comes hurrying over to the brick steps to pat our ankles and socks with fat pink-and-blue flannel pillow-puff squares to keep the chiggers off, the sulfur powder yellowing everyone’s ankles. Then he goes back out and starts tapping his foot for his fancy goldfish to come and eat, calling the children to come and look at how he’s trained his goldfish, but I’m the only one who goes over there to look.

  The grass is golf green–smooth and tight. Clipped boxwood and low redbrick walls march around in perfect formation, marking this section from that, framing areas and levels of the yard, where row upon row of tall red Darwin tulips are nodding behind overflowing mounds of purple-and-white pansies that fill the formal borders. Nana says she’s fed them so much bonemeal, you could pinch off pansies out of there for an hour and never see a gap. And it’s true that there are bowls of pansies all around the house. Nana loves how their little faces look up at you.

  The fish pond is at the back, with tall trees behind it. GranDad stands out there beside a gnarled Wisteria tree that drips purple blossoms onto a white wrought-iron bench and wafts its scent over the whole yard. Colored eggs peek out here and there. Every year, Nana and Elise decorate dozens of hard-boiled eggs the like of which you could spend your whole life of Easters trying to duplicate and never get it right—deep solids, rich whorls and squiggles on the multicolored ones, each egg a fantastic work of art, some with white wax designs or names written in Nana’s slanting hand, three or four for each child.

  The little kids chase each other across the lawn, Easter ruffles already torn, white cotton gloves lost, hats and barrettes askew, white socks and patent-leather Mary Jane shoes wet with grass clippings and sulfur dust, each clutching his or her fancy Easter basket, tripping, spilling out the jelly beans and Brach’s chocolate cream eggs, which Margie snatches up, and then the screaming fighting and crying begins.

  Orange-and-white goldfish swarm up for the fish food GranDad sprinkles on the water, some big ones up from the deep, bullying one another with their fat bodies, glassy eyes, dumb gulping mouths, a thrashing battle for food, for place.

  GranDad laughs, saying, “It’s good for them to compete.”

  Margie and Debbie, the cousins, are nearly the same age as my sister Annie, all three born toward the end of the war.

  Margie, the elder cousin, a stocky, intelligent, wild-haired almost five-year-old dynamo of aggression in a pinafore and crooked wire-rimmed glasses she’s worn since babyhood, teases, pokes, and provokes everyone, and no one stops her. Aunt Celeste does not believe in spanking, and Uncle Ted seems to think it’s funny for her to disrupt and taunt everyone. You can see him whispering to her and pointing with a grin.

  Uncle Ted strides across the lawn and speaks to Gran-Dad, who then announces that we are going to make our Easter egg hunt into a race, a contest for who can find the most eggs. Then Uncle Ted starts whispering again to Margie, who looks around, eager black eyes enormous behind the skewed glasses.

  Debbie, the younger cousin, thin, shy, pale, doesn’t say much, doesn’t eat much, but hugs her basket and sucks her thumb, as if hoping just to be invisible and left alone. Annie sits with her but gets forced into the game.

  I’m too old to be part of the race, and don’t want to be part of it, either, which just shows once again how there is something wrong with me, because I, too, just want to watch and be left alone. I take my basket to the other side of the yard, where I can view the whole scene. I look across at Oliver, who stands with the grown-ups, being oh so above it all.

  Now poor Annie has Daddy huddling with her, telling her she has to win with the most eggs, and exactly how she’s going to do this. He doesn’t seem to see how wrinkled Annie’s forehead has become, how worried her small face.

  Trudy’s only a year old, too young for the race. She sits on the grass, happily crushing eggs in her pudgy hands, then trying to eat the colored shells. GranDad takes a picture of this.

  Uncle Ted and Daddy and GranDad are excited about having an Easter egg race, all three joking around together, which you don’t often see. Each scolds open violence, yet each father eagerly whispers tactics to his own. Annie looks as if the weight of the whole house has just been strapped upon her four-year-old shoulders.

  And so the race begins. On your mark, get set, GO!

  I walk around them and watch, pick up a few eggs for myself, and I’m so glad I don’t have to compete.

  The boy and the girl with Nana’s friends are also not part of the race. They start out to be, but then step back, shy and quiet, both staying on the sidelines, picking up what eggs they can easily see. The girl watches us curiously. The boy clumps around, hunting eggs in his brown suit and a special shoe that’s built up to make his legs and feet come out even. Did he have polio? I wonder. Because once in a while there’s someone who’s had polio.

  The sisters-in-law, Mama and Aunt Celeste, as well as the invited friends, Granny and Papaw, other uncles and aunts, in their dresses and high heels and hats and gloves, have come out to stand on the terrace, holding their gin and tonics, their Bloody Marys, laughing and pointing at the amusing antics of the pastel-clad cousins chasing each other around the yard in a contest as vicious as that in any chicken yard.

  All the cousins pile their baskets high with what would be enough eggs for a large orphanage, cracked eggs tipping out onto the lawn. Finders keepers, losers weepers! Margie and I are grabbing them up from each other. The baskets are too heavy with too many, too much. Baby Trudy picks up an egg and digs tiny fingers into the yolk, squishing it onto her dress, putting shells to her mouth before I come running over, speaking in imitation grown-up tones. All her eggs must be thrown away, but no one cares, there are so many.

  I see Uncle Ted whispering to Margie again, and Annie looks so alone out there, so I go over and stand here and there around the yard, trying to point out eggs to her, but Margie watches me and snatches each one up before Annie can get to it.

  We shout out, “No fair! No fair!” But it seems there are no rules in this game. Daddy tells me to stay out of it because I am older, but now I want to join in so we can beat Margie.

  “Come on, Annie!” I’m yelling, but Margie bumps into Annie, causing egg
s to spill, which Margie snatches up.

  Margie is as fast as a little animal, and Annie, a year younger, is not having fun. She is crying and ready to stop, but Daddy and I keep yelling, “Don’t give up, Annie!” We try to help her out until the baskets appear to be about the same.

  Then Margie steals eggs from Debbie, who is still sucking her thumb and sitting behind a hedge. Annie cries out angrily and drops her eggs. Trudy crawls over, picks up an egg and squeezes with interest, watching the powdery yolk run between her fingers. The cheating is ignored.

  The grown-ups look away, chatter away, seem not to want to make trouble or even to see any trouble, and Uncle Ted seems to think the whole thing is a hilarious joke he’s going to enjoy for months to come. Aunt Celeste has her back turned and seems not to want to notice or care.

  We try to get the distracted grown-ups to do a final egg count, but they’ve all lost interest now, looking away from us brats, embarrassed, starting to drift inside. Everyone just looks away from unpleasant behavior. No one’s declared the winner, and there’s no prize.

  “I win! I win! I win!” shouts Margie, who obviously does have the most eggs now. She runs up close to me, sticking her face out, tempting me, inviting me to smack her.

  And oh, how much I do want to smack her, how my whole arm aches to smack her good and hard! But I know the only way to defeat Margie would be all-out hair-pulling, ear-biting, face-punching, rolling-over-and-over-on-the-grass violence, and I have to act nice with all these grown-ups around. I always have to be the one to act oh so nice, nice, nice, all the time, even when other people have not been forced and trained to act nice. So I would get the blame, because I’m the eldest, and those are Mama’s rules.

  Besides, if you cross Margie, she bites, and she bites hard, and no one stops her.