Hap and Hazard and the End of the World

by Diane DeSanders

  Mama spends the entire day stroking it, talking to it, begging. I sit in the corner in the shed, watching her try to put her own desire inside of that barely alive little thing, but finally its tiny mouth clamps shut. Finally it breathes once, twice, and then not at all.

  Hazzy out there in the pen is howling, and Mama’s face seems to fall apart. She yells at me to go back to the house, and she starts rushing around, cleaning up the toolshed, talking to herself, slamming things.

  I go next door to tell Nathan. We sit in his yard for a long time, not talking. I watch ants and other bugs scooting around this way and that, tiny things, but alive. Why could that puppy not stay alive?

  THE HOUSE IS QUIET NOW. Mama goes to her sewing room and cries and smokes and listens to Sam Spade. We take naps. Hazzy lies in the shade and won’t eat.

  Baby Trudy starts walking. May-May spoils her, sneaks her cookies after Mama says “No.”

  One night, I take the dog food out to Hazzy, but she doesn’t come out. I find her in the doghouse licking on some tiny babies, and I smell the newborn smell. I run in and tell Mama, “Hazzy’s had puppies again!” Mama comes running out with the flashlight, barely looks at them, says “Those are not puppies,” then runs back into the house and calls the vet. The vet comes out the next day and says the babies are rabbits. Hazzy’s found them, brought them one by one, five or six, hiding them in the doghouse, licking and trying to make them nurse, until now they’re all dead. So Mama has to take them away from her and bury them. Then Hazzy howls again.

  In a few days, the very same thing happens again. The dog finds some baby rabbits, brings them home, and tries to get them to nurse, until they all die.

  I HATE IT WHEN MAMA TALKS ABOUT GOD. Usually, it’s when she puts me to bed, after we say my prayers and we God-bless everybody. She has never talked about God when Daddy’s been around. It seems that Daddy is not included in something between Mama and God, but it seems that she wants me to be included.

  Since Daddy’s been gone, every night when I’m in bed, she comes with the Bible in her hand. I try to find things out.

  “But where is Daddy?”

  “Daddy’s in the hospital. Daddy’s sick.”

  “Is he going to die?”

  “No, no, he’s not going to die. He just needs to be there for a while, and then we hope he’ll be okay.”

  “Is it his feet?”

  “No, it’s not his feet.”

  I want to ask more things, but how can you ask all the things you want in a house so filled with disappointment? How can you believe any answers in such a house?

  I want to ask “Why did they take him away like that?” But we’re skipping over that and just going on to the next thing. Could anybody be taken away like that for being bad? I want to ask what she means by “sick,” but I know she’ll never tell me.

  She starts reading the Bible. She tries not to cry, but it just comes over her, especially when she starts saying how this life and this world is so terrible and so bad, but how we’re supposed to suffer, and sacrifice, just like Jesus had to suffer, so that everything can be better in the next life, when we go to beautiful Heaven with Jesus and with God.

  She reaches over to touch me, but then something holds her back. Maybe she sees me pull away. I don’t know why I pull away from her. I can see that her feelings are hurt.

  I hate Mama’s saying that this world is so terrible, as if God hates us. In Sunday school, they said that “God so loved the world.”

  I hate how Mama says we wish for the end of the world, how we look forward to earthquakes swallowing us up, thunder, lightning, people coming out of graves, people killing one another, killing themselves. Judgment Day! God and Jesus coming down to Earth to separate the sheep from the goats, raising up the sheep to be happy in Heaven, and the goats going down with the Devil to burn forever in black flaming Hell!

  “But what is so bad about the goats?”

  “Someday you’ll understand.”

  “But why can’t I understand now?” I don’t see why the sheep can’t just be with the goats. I don’t see why the goats have to be the bad ones all the time.

  Mama talks faster and louder when she says we hope for the end of the world to come soon. And as Mama gets to this part, about the whole world coming to an end, and everybody bad being punished, tortured, and burned in Hell forever, especially the goats, she stops crying.

  That’s the part I especially hate.

  The Light Falling Across It Just So

  Sometimes when Mama’s busy having bridge club at our house, like now, when it’s almost summer, because of our being the ones with air conditioning now, and Daddy won’t be dropping in, since he is still gone to who knows where and for such a long time, then I go back into their dressing room closets to see if Daddy’s things are still there. Sometimes I spend the whole afternoon just looking at my mama’s and my daddy’s things and smelling the powder and the cigarettes and the Shocking by Schiaparelli. Soundlessly, I open and close closets and drawers and look and look and then put everything back exactly so no one can ever tell I’ve been in there.

  I hang around to watch when the bridge club ladies’ day arrives, each one saying, “It’s so hot!” as she walks in the door and greets my mama with a pretend kiss. First there’s a dining-room sit-down lunch with tuna fish and iced tea. And then, after a silent smoking of cigarettes, and after they carry their chairs in to the already-set-up living room card table, and they talk babies and new houses and how it’s somebody’s own fault if she’s losing her husband, then they sit down and discuss maybe playing for just a little bit of money this time. They cross their high heels up under their chairs, the nylons wrinkling in clear skin-colored folds around their ankles, all except for Aunt Dorothy, who wears loafers and glasses and keeps score, and whose husband, they say, was changed forever by the war. And then they get down to business.

  Sometimes, I stay to see Aunt Celeste pick up the cards first, her red flashing fingernails shuffling and reshuffling them, her fingers dancers, the cards acrobats who’ve flown through the air a thousand times. They say she is real smart from some girls’ school up east, but I think she doesn’t like kids much, and that includes me. She always says to me, “What pretty pink cheeks,” and then she sort of glares before she smartly slaps down one card after another, around and around, four little stacks of cards, her lips moving sideways around her cigarette, the smoke drifting white chiffon across her face.

  The cards dealt, the ladies pick them up, raise their four little fans in front of their faces, and Aunt Polly says she isn’t good enough to play this hand, and she lays it down and then picks a gardenia out of an arrangement nearby and sticks it in her hair. Then Aunt Celeste asks Mama if she’s got any bourbon in the house, and says, “That’s okay, I’ll get it myself.” And she gets up while the others are rearranging their hands.

  Once, Aunt Polly made me paper dolls out of newspaper folded again and again while she was playing “dummy” in the game, and she whispered to me that “dummy” was her favorite part to play. The paper dolls were strung out, holding newsprint hands, except on the ends, where some were missing arms or legs—a long line of unbroken, attached-together dolls, hair and dresses alike, and she drew little faces on them, smiling all their lips in Crayola.

  In my room, I thumbtacked them up, circle-eyed grinning faces the same, newsprint headlines running across their bodies and their just-alike dresses and their sometimes missing arms and legs, and I thought about when my daddy came and sang me a bedtime song about a man who wanted a paper doll that he could call his own.

  The paper dolls I really like to play with are the dime-store cardboard ones my mama bought me, their tall glossy books filled with paper-doll dresses and suits and purses and jewels and things you cut out very carefully, and then you very carefully fold these little paper tabs over the shoulders and around the thin little waists and the tiny little wrists and ankles of the paper dolls. I can’t decide whether I like my Myrna Lo
y paper doll best or my Betty Hutton one, so I play with them both together, as if they’re friends. The thing about paper dolls is, that you can’t walk them around or have them doing things all that much, because the clothes and hats and shoes that are attached by just these little folded tabs will all fall away and the paper dolls will be running around in their underpants, like in those dreams where you hope no one will notice, so you have to place the little dresses and jackets and hats and purses and gloves and shoes on them, very carefully folding the tabs perfectly into place, and then when they look just like dream-girl Miss Americas, you prop them up against something, because they can’t stand on their own. Then you have to just look at them and look at them and concentrate on how pretty they are and on how lovely and perfect they are, and then you make up the game in your head and pretend that something is really happening. There are some girls who will play this with you in just the same way almost—it seems like—forever.

  Boys usually won’t play this with you for a very long time, but once, Nathan and I played with the paper dolls for almost a whole afternoon, on the day when I decided to make pink mink capes and hats to match for both Myrna Loy and Betty Hutton, and also for another paper doll I had then that was a Loretta Young.

  It was well into the game on a hot summer bridge club day, with Aunt Celeste playing the hand in the living room and Nathan and I with the paper dolls all laid out under the dining room table, and Nathan saying he wanted to quit because this wasn’t real, until I thought of making the paper dolls mink capes and hats to match by cutting up cotton pads and coloring them with watercolors. He said okay, but only if we could go back there in the dressing room closet and look at the real ones first, so we carried all the stuff with us down the hallway past the bridge club ladies, as though we were going back to my room to play.

  They weren’t noticing us anyway, and when we got back into the dressing room, we could hear the laughing and talking between hands about who got what and how they’d played it. We could even smell their cigarette smoke when we got back into the closet and were opening my daddy’s drawers and looking through his key chains and cuff links and playing cards with naked women on them. He had a lot of stuff like that, and Nathan wanted to take some of it, but I stopped him by starting on my mama’s drawers with the stockings and slips and the powder puffs and little red Maybelline boxes with the little gummy brushes in them. We were whispering the whole time, surrounded by the smells, dusty, perfumy, and dark, like the inside of the closet before I pulled the cord for light and drew aside the dresses to show the glowing plastic-covered pink mink cape and its hat to match that we were going to copy for the paper dolls still in our hands. Then, even though I was afraid somebody might come, I untied the cord, which I had never done before, on top of the plastic bag and pulled it slowly down, the pink mink emerging, glowing pale at the top, with softly swaying, alive-like hairs moving in the light, and we stood silent just looking at it, and I could hear Nathan breathing right next to my ear, so I pulled down the plastic a little more. And then right in the middle of this, Nathan grabbed up that Loretta Young paper doll, saying he was going to torture her to death, and then he ran through the house, with me chasing him and the bridge-club ladies exclaiming and Mama getting up to stop us, and he ran out into the yard, paper-doll clothes flying out behind him on all sides and me running and shouting behind, and he threw her into the street right under a car, so she got that hot, sticky black tar all over her front side. Then he said, “Oh, she needs a bath,” and he threw her into the sprinkler, and then after that she had a wrecked-up face. And I was so mad, because he did seem to like her at first.

  So then while Nathan was climbing over the white-painted three-plank fence and running away, yelling something over his shoulder, and my mama and Aunt Polly were tumbling out and down the back porch steps to see what was happening out there, I was trying to wipe the watery grass clippings off my Loretta Young paper doll’s warping sad face. She would never look the same again. I started to cry, and then I yelled, “Nathan, I’m gonna get you!” and my mama said from out in the yard, “Well, we can always buy another one.” That was after she’d yelled at Nathan that next time he could play over here right or not at all. She was always telling him that, but even though I could see that he did try, it never lasted for very long.

  Aunt Polly came running all the way out to me in the yard and took that Loretta Young in her hand, smoothing and blotting and examining it, saying she’d bet it could be fixed up just fine. I, of course, said that I didn’t want another one, but that I wanted that one. And no matter how nice and sweet Aunt Polly was, I knew I didn’t want this one to have some new painted-on face, either.

  Aunt Dorothy watched us coming back from the window, and then inside, the ladies went on back to the bridge table, where from the kitchen I could hear Aunt Celeste saying, “Are we playing bridge, or what?” On the kitchen floor I could see the Loretta Young had no chance now of ever being any dream-girl Miss America. Her whole face looked blotched and distorted, the eyes puffed and faded, the mouth crooked, her paper-doll body blighted with stains. She looked as though she’d been forsaken in some backyard for years, neglected, unloved. I stretched out on the linoleum floor beside her. Then Aunt Polly, who was dummy in the game again, came in and looked at both me and that Loretta Young. And then she said that we should have a nice funeral for Loretta Young and bury her out in the yard like they had done their cat that summer when it died of worms. Except, of course, it would be different, she said.

  So then, even though I knew I wouldn’t really be able to get my daddy to dig a hole for putting it in the ground, I let my Aunt Polly go on and find a shoe box while I laid out all the Loretta Young clothes that wouldn’t work anyway for the Myrna Loy or the Betty Hutton—the skirts and sweaters and scarves and gloves and shoes and hats, all on the bed in little arrangements as they would have been worn in the Loretta Young dream-girl Miss America life, as it would have been if all this had never happened. Aunt Polly wanted to repaint the face for the funeral, like with the smiling Crayola lips, but I said no. Then even though I knew I was going to hide that boxed Loretta Young in my room in the bottom of my closet all covered up with shoes, so I could keep going in there and looking at her for years to come, I folded the tissue paper with Aunt Polly and then laid it and all the clothes into the box one by one alongside of the Loretta Young after we had put her in her favorite outfit. Then I laid in the cotton pads for the pink mink coat and hat to match, and Aunt Polly and I looked in the box at what we had done, and Aunt Polly said, “We are gathered together to say good-bye to a dear friend.” And she carefully placed two pieces of honeysuckle on either side of the Loretta Young. Then she looked at me. I said, “She was the most beautiful and the nicest of them all.” Then I arranged four pearl buttons I had stolen from Granny’s dresser drawer in the four corners of the shoe box.

  Then Aunt Polly said, “But bad things happened to this Loretta Young that weren’t her own fault.” Then she tossed up some M&Ms from the bridge club game so that they fell and bounced in the box like little confetti. Then I brought out my mama’s bottle of Shocking by Schiaparelli, and we put sprinkles of it all over ourselves and each other and that Loretta Young. Then I said “Amen.” Then we closed up the box without speaking or looking at each other, and Aunt Polly went back into the living room and back to the game while I carried that boxed Loretta Young back into my room. But before I hid it deep in the back of my closet, where no one would find it, I took a last look at the poor wrecked face with the light falling across it just so, and I very carefully drew new red-pencil smiling lips turning just a little bit up at the end. And then I dropped in, crushing them, some soft sweet white petals, just the same way Aunt Polly told me she once had driven a man crazy by eating her gardenia corsage petal by petal by petal by petal. . . . Amen.

  Summer

  When summer comes it is Nathan and me all the time, all the time, back and forth between our houses. We play together side by
side sometimes all day every day until dark, not just in the yards but in the woods and in the creek beds and in the fields and in the huge silvered ghosts of abandoned chicken houses that stand in tall grass and broken glass behind another neighbor’s “woods,” and seem to glow from within, where we hide and giggle when they call, as the late-day sun beams through slow-swirling, drifting galaxies of dust motes forever resifting the echoes of every egg cracking and every pecking-order feud ever sounded in that space.

  Here’s Nathan and me playing in Mr. Moore’s peach orchard in spite of having been told and really believing that Mr. Moore will come out with his hunting rifle and fire on little kids like us if he catches us stealing his peaches or even climbing through the fence. We never actually see Mr. Moore, but we believe we’ve seen him. I can picture the old man’s face, angry eyes, overalls, a rifle in one hand, though I never actually lay eyes on Mr. Moore.

  But the fear is in us as our legs go over the slats and as we run, ducking down, making our wobbly beeline for the corner near the far edge, where we figure Mr. Moore can’t see us stretched out under low branches on the cool dirt, and the fear is in us as we draw our dirty pictures in the dirt, as the fear is in us as we pick and dust and bite into the furry fresh peaches, and as the juice runs down our chins and elbows and makes Mr. Moore’s dirt stick to our arms and legs, we are full of fear.

  But even the fear of grown-ups and their million rules can’t stop us from wanting to do the kinds of things that the punishments of grown-ups, who have their own problems, can not touch. Something in us has a life of its own day in and day out, and trying not to think about it is thinking about it, if you know what I mean.