Frances waited for Jimmy to finish with his cereal. Then she placed her banana skin in the wastebasket by the door, crouched over, and crept up behind his rocker. Gently, she took hold of the top of his chair and placed each of her bare feet over the rockers. She leaned back, causing her little brother to slide back in the chair and look up at her. “Gimme a ride, Jimmy.”
“Well, Jell-O, Franny. It’s about time.”
She moved about the room, then stopped to stand a bit in front of the television so he would pay attention to her.
“Is it going to be a TV day?” she challenged.
“No way, Ray!” Jimmy twisted around in his chair so that his head was soon hanging where his feet had been and his skinny feet were poked through the back rungs of the chair. His hands, still holding the cereal bowl, dangled close to the floor. Then he rocked himself just enough to set the bowl down.
“What are we going to do?” She was getting impatient.
“War games,” he said.
“What kind?”
“We’re going to take an important bridge.”
“Jimmy, there is only one bridge, and we already took it.”
“Not this one, we didn’t.”
“Where is it?”
Jimmy gave an upside-down smile, grunted; his face was red with little white patches where the veins stood out on his forehead.
“Is it over the river? Jimmy! Stop doing that! You’re all purple. Answer me, is it over the river?” She grabbed his arms, pulling him out of the chair onto the floor. He breathed heavily and giggled a bit as his face faded to a more agreeable shade. Frances plopped herself into the rocker and began rocking, giving his bony butt a light kick every time she rocked forward. “For the last time, is it over the river?”
“Don’t worry. I’ll show you,” he said, a smug expression on his face.
“So I suppose that means you are going to be the leader?”
“Yeah,” he said, grabbing her ankles and pretending to bite them.
“Jimmy, you were the leader yesterday.”
“No, I wasn’t. Scotty Tanner was.”
“Well, let’s both be leaders,” she said.
“We can’t both be. I’ll be the leader before the bridge, and you be the leader after the bridge.”
“We need more men,” she said, as she fantasized being the leader of a larger group.
“Nope. This is a secret maneuver. We can’t have everybody in the neighborhood knowing about it.”
“Oh, big deal.”
“Hey! You’re supposed to obey me now.”
“Okay, okay, so let’s go,” she surrendered, giving him one last kick from the rocker.
This last kick spurred Jimmy, and he blasted up from the floor in one swift movement. He stood in front of Frances, his legs spread with his little knees hyperextended in back. She knew immediately, by looking at him, that he was already playing. He was playing soldier.
He pulled his thumbs through the empty belt loops of his fatigue pants and pressed his other four knuckles into his hips. As he stared her down, Frances resisted. Her eyes started to laugh at him. She wanted to protest and call him silly. But the largest part of her wanted to be drawn into his fantasy, and this turned her expression to expectation. She waited.
Jimmy leaned her chair back. “All right then, we’re going to take an important bridge today. It’s over the river, like you thought, but it’s not a common bridge. I think, mostly, that people don’t know about it. So once we take it, it’ll be our bridge, and the territory on the other side’ll be our territory. Now, I’ll get the supplies, and you tell the home office.”
Frances went down the basement stairs to her mother’s sewing room. Her mother, the home officer, surveyed Frances from across her sewing table and then bowed to her sewing again.
“Frances, when are you going to change your clothes?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, I hope you’ll know soon.”
Her mother concentrated on changing the needle in her machine.
“Mom?”
“Mm, hmm?”
“Jimmy and I are going out to play.”
“Where is out?”
“Oh, you know.”
“I know that you are to stay away from the banks. Stay up on the trails. Before you go, take this up to Jimmy.” She handed Frances an old leather belt of their father’s, trimmed down with extra holes poked into it. “Tell him to wear it. I have had enough of droopy drawers and everybody in the neighborhood seeing where his legs begin.” Her mother, looked over her sewing glasses to make the point, then resumed her work.
Frances held the belt in her hand. But instead of moving away, back to Jimmy, she waited as though her mother might have something more to give her. She leaned against the sewing table.
“Frances, don’t jiggle the table. How can I sew a straight line?”
“Mom?”
“Hmm?” Her mother now had pins between her lips.
“Sister Margaret Therase said that God knows all our thoughts the very second that we think them.”
“Mm, hmm.” Her mother bent her head close to the sewing machine needle and pushed a black thread through the tiny hole.
“Sometimes I have bad thoughts. I don’t mean to think them, but, you know, they just come to me, and then, I suppose, He knows. I try to take it back…”
“Take what back?” her mother mumbled, with the pins still between her lips.
“The bad thoughts.” Frances moved up to her mother and plucked the three pins altogether out of her mouth. “Now, talk to me.”
“Well, Frances, if it’s important, why don’t you start from the beginning and try to make yourself a little more clear?”
Frances sighed, closed one eye, looked at her mother. “Sometimes I have bad thoughts.” She announced this sentence, each word stated loudly and with long pauses in between, as though her mother might be hard of hearing or slow-witted. “I don’t think them on purpose, and I wish that God would just forget about them so that I won’t be in trouble.”
“Well, just tell God you’re sorry. Go to Saturday confession.” Her mother smiled at Frances.
“Nooo,” Frances bleated. “Not those kinds of bad thoughts, not sinful or mean ones.”
“Are you talking about impure thoughts?”
“Ahh!”
“Well, honey, you’re not being very clear then. Can’t you give me an example?”
Frances cleared her throat. “Okay, we’ll be riding in the car. We’re passing underneath the stoplight, and just then the stoplight changes to yellow. Well, the first time that happened to us, I got the bad thought.”
“What bad thought?”
“Just that it is bad luck to be under the light when you can’t see it change to yellow, and if I ever do that again, something bad will happen.”
“Like what will happen, Frances? Would we be in a car accident then?”
Frances pictured in her mind what a car accident might be like. She looked up at the ceiling to see what else the bad thing might be.
“I don’t know, Mom. Bad is bad. I just get scared. I think the thought about something not going the right way, and then the next thing I think is, Oh, no, now God knows it, and he is going to make it a rule.”
“A rule?”
“Yes, a rule! A rule!” Frances pulled at the bottom of her red knit shirt with her hands and stretched it almost to the bottom of her shorts as she strained to be clear. “I make the rule up first, which isn’t so bad, but if God hears it, and you know he always does, he’s the one that can make the bad thing happen. Do you see?”
“No.”
Frances leaned her elbows on the sewing table and cradled her forehead in her hands. She thought about lying in her bed at night and how the hall light shone in through her door. She couldn’t sleep with the light shining in her eyes, but she was afraid to sleep in the dark, too. She remembered when she had first found the solution to the problem. She had gotten up and mo
ved the door to the position of being exactly half-open and half-closed. But as soon as she had done that, a new rule had entered her consciousness. Exactly in the middle, that was what the rule had been after that. From then on she had to remember to keep the door exactly in the middle when she went to bed, or somehow it would be bad luck.
Frances felt her mother touch her elbow, and she heard her say, “Tell me.”
She looked up, still holding her chin in her hand and said, “Like for instance, the bedroom door has to be halfopen. That’s not a bad one though, not as bad as the stoplight one anyway. I suppose the bigger the bad luck, the worse the bad thing that is going to happen. I think little ones hardly count, but I do them just the same to be safe.”
“Give me an example of a little one.”
“Eating M&M’s.”
“What about M&M’s, for heaven sakes?” her mother asked.
“I have to eat them in order. I lay them all out in rows by color. I eat the M&M’s from the longer rows until all the rows are the same length as the shortest row.” Frances was finding this a difficult process to explain. “In other words, until there is the same number of each color left. Then I eat one from the red row, one from yellow, one from the brown, never changing the order, until they’re all gone.”
“Frances, look at me. Those rules you are worried about are just superstitions, like walking under ladders and breaking mirrors. Lord knows why you have to make up your own. Maybe we all do at one time or other.”
Frances looked at her mother, and her mother looked back kindly through her sewing glasses. Frances looked down again at Jimmy’s belt and felt the sadness of being misunderstood. “Mom?”
“What, dear?” she said as she leaned toward the sewing machine and pushed the blue fabric under the needle.
“I had a bad superstition this morning, and I just can’t help feeling that God is going to take me up on it.”
“But God is good,” her mother said. “Don’t worry about that.”
Frances heard Jimmy rattling the basement stair railing, sending her signals that he was waiting for her to join him. Their mother heard him too. She raised her head from her work and shouted above to the first floor. “Jimmy! There is no point in sneaking around. I know about your little expedition to the river, and all I can say—and I’ve told Frances, too—is that you are to stay on the upper trails.”
Jimmy made high, whining noises like the sounds of radio frequency and shouted back down the basement, “I can’t read you—am experiencing interference.”
“Well, you better read me, fella,” she called back.
They heard Jimmy shout, “AWOL!”
“When you go up there, tell your brother no more shouting.”
Frances didn’t answer her. Still leaning on the table, she spent a lot of time sticking each of the pins that she still held into her mother’s pincushion.
Her mother glanced up. “You’re such a moody bird, Frances.” Frances rolled her eyes and walked away from the sewing table with a sort of underhanded wave. It was a wave to half-say good-bye and to half-say get lost. She stomped up the stairs to let her mother know that she was leaving and to let her brother know that she was coming.
Jimmy was sitting on the top step. His legs on the second step were jiggling up and down in his little army boots. Jimmy’s body commotion had caused several of the supply items to fall from his lap. Frances said, “Jeez, Jimmy,” as she alternately climbed the last few steps and picked up the fallen objects. She picked up one of her high-top tennis shoes. Jimmy had painted it completely black with a Magic Marker so the pair would match his army boots. There was also a little tin compass, which always said North unless someone shook it—then it said Northwest. The last thing was a long, narrow strip of paper that had a representation of the Mississippi River running down it. Jimmy had cut this out of a larger map of the United States in their family atlas. Frances wished that he would throw it away. It was hardly an aid to their minute explorations of the river.
While Frances put her shoes on, Jimmy stood in the back hallway, listing aloud the supplies as he stuck them in his baggy pockets. “Peanut butter and grahams, compass, map, twine, penlight, jackknife, a banana for me, and here is a banana for you.”
Frances stood up, took the banana that Jimmy was handing her, and stuck it in the elastic of her shorts. “Here, Mom wants you to wear this,” she said, while threading Jimmy’s new belt through his belt loops.
“Nice.” He hummed a note of pleasure, stuck his banana through his belt and patted it as though it was a pistol. “Ready, Eddy?” Jimmy asked Frances.
“You bet, pet.” Frances stretched her brown arms over his little shoulders and walked him backward out of the back screen door.
On the stoop they both leaned down to pick up their walking sticks. Jimmy had smoothed them out by rubbing them against the concrete driveway. That was in the spring, and now the two sticks had become a part of their routine. Frances was fond of her stick; she liked its sanded softness. She thought, as she gripped the stick and walked with Jimmy out of the backyard, that the stick made being outside easier. It was not a superstition. Her stick was useful. She could test the depth of puddles before walking through them, turn night crawlers over on the sidewalk without getting the slime on her fingers. She could knock crab apples out of the trees, and she could knock any wise guy in the neighborhood if need be.
Jimmy cherished his stick as an object of fantasy. Frances couldn’t keep up with its many identities: a sword, a staff, a laser gun. When Jimmy wanted to pretend sword fighting with her, she would resist, saying, “I don’t want to break my stick.”
They walked a short distance along the back fences of the neighboring yards and turned from the alley onto the sidewalk. They headed for the river, which was five straight blocks away. The sun was warm and persistent with promises to shine over everything by noon. Frances stood flatfooted for a moment, pulling up the heat of the sidewalk through her tennis shoes.
Outside, Jimmy forgot himself completely. Frances forgot herself occasionally. She was aware of certain precautions, like not looking into the sun too long.
“Crack, Jimmy, don’t step on the crack!”
“Crack smack.”
“You’ll break somebody’s back!”
“Not mine.”
“Somebody’s. Just play the game. Play it for me.”
“Okay, crack shmack, crack smack,” and he jumped on every crack he could see.
“Jimmy!” She grabbed him around the waist tightly with her chin between his shoulder blades. He giggled, then stopped. Frances breathed warm breaths through the shirt on his back. He made low growling sounds like a captured lion.
Frances held Jimmy in a grip that said, You can’t get away. She might have held him forever, but he slumped down, making himself deadweight in her arms. He hummed a teasing little tune between his teeth. And while Frances became nervous about his tune, he slumped down just far enough to dangle his hands close to the inside of her knees. Then, when he had gained his position, he tickled her relentlessly there. They both fell to the grass boulevard next to the sidewalk and laughed until they ached. When they rolled away from each other onto their backs, she found banana smashed on the front of her shorts and shirt.
Frances scraped the mash disgustedly off of her clothes and wiped it onto the grass with her fingers. She saw that Jimmy’s banana had also exploded at the top, and she caught him by the arm, as he rolled toward her, to save him from the mess.
“Watch out for the banana.”
“Eyugh!” Jimmy feigned repulsion, and then, making his eyes wicked, he took the banana in his hands like a cake decorator and squeezed it onto her bare leg.
“God! You’re such a goon. Why do I ever think we can be friends?”
Flat on her back, Frances draped her arm across her brow and looked at the sky. The sun was indeed getting higher, and she moved her arm over her eyes to block its glare. The weight of her arm against her eyelids brough
t the white lights back again, and she remembered the morning’s early omen. “Let’s go to the Connor wading pool instead,” she said, without looking at him.
“No, I’m going to the bridge.”
The day wasn’t going her way, though she wasn’t sure what her way would be. She was just feeling hot and listless.
“I don’t want to go.” She yanked the grass by her sides and looked at the sky again. Jimmy stood up to leave. There was no argument. She turned on her side a little to watch him, and as he walked away, he turned his black, bristly head ever so slightly and spoke the word that controlled her.
“Chicken.”
She lay there with her face in the grass, saw a small black ant crawling with quivering effort up one of the narrow blades. After waiting for what she perceived as a stubborn enough amount of time, she stood up and followed him.
On the sidewalk ahead she could barely make out the figure of Jimmy with his stick by his side. She wasn’t worried about catching up with him eventually. At least she knew she would along the river bank somewhere. She began to smell the river in the warm air as she walked forward. Her gradual anticipation of its sun-glinted surface took the place, step by step, of her former negative disposition. She forgot temporarily about the cracks in the sidewalk.
The river was the biggest thing Frances knew about. It frustrated her that Jimmy didn’t understand how big it was. To him, it was a skinny thing cut out of the atlas, and she believed that he didn’t think it had much to do with the rest of the country now that he had cut it out of there and kept it folded up in his pocket. They had argued about its size, but Jimmy still insisted that Lake Minnetonka was much bigger.
Once they crossed University Avenue, it was only a block to the river. As she waited there for traffic to pass, she studied a billboard posted on a building across the street. It was a picture of three men with various kinds of headgear and uniforms. The caption in the lower right-hand corner simply said, “Join the Army.” She thought of Jimmy, whom she had lost sight of a few blocks back. Now she wasn’t so sure she would catch up with him before he took off on his mission. What if she lost him? She pulled her stick up under her arm and broke into a run. She ran between cars to the other side of the street. Her legs were strong, and the spring in her calves excited the rest of her body.
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