Winkie

by Clifford Chase

  “I love you, too,” Ruth would say then, pressing on her belly and making her squeak—and again it was almost too much, it seemed to Marie she couldn’t contain so much painful joy and she had to let out another short squeak.

  “Father-Mother God, loving me, guard me while I sleep, guide my little feet up to thee,” prayed Ruth and her sister, Helen, together, eyes shut, each in their cozy bed. Once Mama had pushed the black button that switched off the light, Marie was free to sit there in the dark near her beloved and, as the winter room grew cold, to watch colors streak past or swirl or march by in rows of dots all night long.

  In the morning Marie was exhausted and haggard, and when Ruth hugged her and said, “I love you,” again, the bear was startled by her own squeak.

  “Marie, Marie, Marie,” Ruth might sing, trying to distract herself from the morning chill, lifting the bear by the arms, swinging her around.

  And the bear would say to herself, “Who?”

  In the midst of such riddles Marie was evolving as quickly as a real little cub might grow in the wild. But to her it seemed like nothing was happening at all, since no one else could see the changes inside her, and nothing else about her ever changed.

  2.

  “All right for you,” Ruth’s sister replied, when Ruth had refused to do the dusting for her. Marie watched with some amazement as these magic words transformed Ruth’s expression from defiance to regret. Thus Ruth relented and Helen went off roller-skating.

  Gingerly Ruth lifted objects in the parlor and wiped the wood under them with her hand. She hadn’t been able to find a dust rag, and she was too timid to disturb her mother for it. The house was silent. It was Saturday but her father worked Saturdays. Her brother, John, was at his clarinet lesson. Her mother was in the kitchen reading Science and Health to relieve a headache, for headaches aren’t real. Sometimes Ruth shut her eyes and blew into the corners of the shelves. “There,” she kept whispering, with satisfaction.

  Marie had been annoyed with Ruth for capitulating to her sister, but now she watched from the piano with contentment. She enjoyed seeing things done incorrectly. It was her little protest against the world. At first Ruth had sighed with frustration not to have a rag, but soon she had become absorbed and the sunlit room grew hazy with floating particles.

  Then Marie saw Papa standing in the wide, arched doorway, as straight and silent as a sentry. He watched his daughter a moment before asking, in his sardonic way, “Ruth, what do you think you’re doing?”

  Startled, the girl hid her sooty fingers behind her back. “Dusting,” she answered.

  Marie knew the kinds of questions that would follow and wished she could scream, or even squeak, to interrupt them. Where is the dust cloth, why are you doing your sister’s chores, where is your sister … “Did you knock the card down from the windowsill?” Papa asked, and Ruth guiltily shrugged. “What if the iceman had come early today and didn’t see the card? Then your mother wouldn’t have any ice.”

  Papa bent to pick up the card and placed it safely in the window again. Marie tried willing it to fall. Ruth had begun to sniffle. Papa evenly told her to go find her sister but first to go wash her hands and then … Marie refused to listen further. The girl ran upstairs to wash and the bear was left alone with Papa. He of course thought he was completely alone. Marie watched him gaze out the parlor window looking worried and grave.

  Ruth put Marie in the red wagon and tugged her along. The bear read over and over the headline of the yellowed newspaper lining the slats of the wagon: “Scopes Guilty in ‘Monkey’ Trial.” She wondered what the monkey had done wrong. It was one of the first warmish days of the year and the sun was out. Ruth seemed slightly less dejected, maybe because Mama had asked her to buy some thread, so she felt useful again. They found Helen and her friend Eleanor near 107th Street, skating lazily on the fresh, smooth pavement. Helen wore her navy blue sailor dress with its striped white collar that Ruth coveted. Eleanor, too, wore navy.

  “Father says you’re to come home right now,” Ruth said.

  Marie knew Ruth could never question her father’s rules, but she didn’t have to relish them either.

  “Oh, applesauce,” said Helen.

  Marie thought that was a good answer, but Ruth looked shocked. “I’ll tell Father.”

  Helen ignored her. With exaggerated poise she said, “Good-bye, Eleanor, I have to go now,” and skated off toward home.

  Earlier Helen had hinted that Ruth herself might join in the skating today when the dusting was finished. Therefore Ruth informed Eleanor, “I can’t come skating now, because I have to go buy some darning thread for my mother, on 103rd Street.”

  Eleanor only shrugged and began skating in tight circles.

  Ruth pulled the wagon down the hill alone. Here and there a bush bloomed bright yellow, but most were a tangle of sticks. Marie felt sad for Ruth. She also knew she herself was Ruth’s second choice as a companion and so she, too, felt lonely and useless. She watched the cracked sidewalk slope downward.

  Ruth said to Marie, “When I was little, I was running down this hill one day, and I didn’t know you were supposed to lean back when you run downhill, so I leaned forward. Boom! I fell right down and skinned both knees.”

  Marie looked with trepidation down the steep sidewalk.

  “There was a paddy wagon sitting right there at the foot of the hill. I sat there rubbing my knee, and I didn’t think I could get up. Then a policeman leaned his head out the window of the paddy wagon and said, ‘Little girl, are you all right? I can give you a ride home.’

  “‘No, I’m fine!’ I cried. And I got right up and ran back up the hill. I could just imagine what Mama would think if she saw a paddy wagon drive up to the house!”

  Marie had noticed how Ruth often pretended to be fine when she wasn’t. It was like a game she played with the world, so that true and untrue changed places. Marie liked all kinds of pretend, but this kind made her feel queasy, and worse, like even the queasy feeling wasn’t true either. It made her feel like everything was her fault. Because if you could make anything true, if only you wanted to, then everything really was your fault.

  Soon a massive white building came into view, with four heavy columns above a row of wide, white steps.

  “That’s the Church of Christ, Scientist,” said Ruth. “Founded by Mary Baker Eddy. But you can’t go in there, Marie. It’s not for toys. It’s for worship.”

  Marie wanted to know why toys couldn’t go to church. She tried to imagine what went on inside. Father-Mother God, loving me … Was that what they all prayed in church, too? That ball of words at the beginning—Father, Mother, God—always confounded Marie. Who was Ruth praying to—Papa, Mama, God, or all three?

  Just around the corner was the five-and-dime. The fat, cheerful proprietor made much of Marie, sitting her up on the counter and complimenting her black velvet skirt and ruffled white blouse, which Mama had sewn. Usually Marie didn’t think about it, but suddenly she was abashed by the girly dress and her brown, furry legs sticking out of it. “She’s a pretty little thing,” the man was saying to Ruth. “Quite the lady.” Torn between delight and doubt, Marie wanted to wiggle out of these clothes and whoever it was that she must appear to be.

  From one of dozens of little gray drawers with brass handles the shopkeeper extracted a glossy, neat spool of brown thread. “Here we are,” he said, turning back to Ruth—

  “No!” he suddenly barked, toward the front of the store. “No coloreds!”

  Ruth turned to look, but of course Marie couldn’t. She only heard the door bang shut, then footsteps on the sidewalk. Ruth seemed agitated.

  “I don’t want ’em in here,” the man explained, not quite in his nice voice again. “Except for you,” he added, to Marie.

  Now Ruth chuckled. “She’s not colored, she’s a bear!”

  Marie wondered who the coloreds were and what they looked like. She’d heard Mama and Papa speak of them before. Papa had said colored people c
ontinued going places where they weren’t wanted. If so, Marie thought now, she wanted to meet them.

  Out on the sidewalk she perceived no one who might fit their description, just regular people. The young bear began to brood. The shopkeeper’s outburst was her first exposure to a wider world of hurt and hindrance beyond the family. Already that world was invisible again as Ruth rounded the corner and they made their way once more among trees and houses. Suddenly the frustration of not being able to speak, to ask, or to participate drove Marie nearly mad. Ruth marched ahead, humming and daydreaming, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Birds chirped. The sun shone even more brightly than before.

  Ruth took a different way home and they passed through a small park. There, by the greening lawn, as the girl stopped to inspect a daffodil, Marie saw a young cripple in a wooden chair with four wheels like a pram, a dark blanket on her knees, and beside her a nurse and an old man, apparently the invalid’s father. Marie couldn’t tell for sure if the cripple was a boy or a girl, so slumped was he or she in the chair with wheels. As the father and the nurse chatted, Marie could see the eyes of the invalid widen and flutter. As if she wished her eyes were mouths, Marie said to herself. As if those two eye-mouths could speak. The father and the nurse began to chuckle over something, the invalid began to drool, and Marie felt a tug on the wagon.

  Shortly they were toiling up the same hill and Ruth began telling stories again. “When Grandpa was only a little baby,” she said, “he was riding in the back of a covered wagon with his parents through Kansas—and there was an Indian attack! Grandpa’s father was killed by an arrow.” Marie was still facing backward and continued watching the crooked sidewalk and the trees and houses receding and receding down the hill. “He was only a baby,” Ruth said, “and he was lucky to survive. Of course his mother couldn’t take care of her children on her own. Grandpa’s sisters went to relatives’ and Grandpa was raised by friends of the family, the Severances.” Ruth sighed. “Those were pioneer times.”

  Marie felt the small rubber wheels bump over an especially big crack in the sidewalk. Again Ruth seemed quite satisfied with her story, as if she’d just given the right answer on a quiz, but it made Marie feel even more lonely and blank. They turned onto their own block, and the bear glanced up wearily at the familiar trees above her head, the intertwining of twigs. Just a few houses down was their own, with its humbly blunted roof peak. Pioneer times. Marie, too, was riding in a wagon and trying to survive. In the lull and momentum of the wheels, she understood that as much as she was trapped in a lifeless body, she was also caught in a time and place. So was Ruth, so was her family. And they were all simply trying to survive. But did they have to like it?

  A black automobile ticked by in its black canvas bonnet. Cries of hopscotch rose from down the block.

  3.

  “Yes, yes, Marie is going to the symphony too!” John sang, making Ruth and Helen laugh even more.

  “No, we can’t!” Ruth cried, but her tone was devilish, thrilling Marie.

  The boy continued dancing the bear around the girls’ room, singing the Charleston. Marie was transfixed by the black-andwhite checks of John’s sweater vest, which unlike the twirling room remained fixed before her eyes. She felt the forces of swoop and swirl. Ruth never played with her this way. Ruth was as careful with her things as her careful parents could ever hope her to be, though as everything wheeled by, Marie glimpsed even her dancing a little, too. Soon Mama could be heard calling from below, but the fun continued just a little longer, for with a jazzy flourish John placed the bear in Ruth’s arms and they all clumped down the stairs together giggling. “Marie! Marie!” John cheered.

  They came to a halt in the foyer, where Mama stood waiting in her best shawl. With tired, deep-set eyes she glared at Marie, sighing loudly, but Ruth only hugged the bear tighter. Marie had never been so grateful. Now Mama glared at John, who straightened his bow tie.

  Caught in a time and place

  “Ruth wanted to bring her bear,” he said, shrugging.

  Helen tittered.

  Marie wasn’t surprised by this betrayal, but her eyes ached at the thought of missing the concert after all. She wasn’t even sure what a concert was. Mama seemed just about to speak—and Ruth’s hold on the bear was already beginning to loosen—when Papa called from the front yard, with some irritation, that they were going to miss their train. By this fluke Marie remained in Ruth’s grasp, and the family bustled down the hill to the station. As they waited for the train, the bear hoped they had entered a new era in which Ruth flouted the rules and Marie got to go new places. Beneath a billow of soot the chugging machine arrived, roiling Marie’s heavy skirt. Inside, well-dressed strangers sat in maroon velvet seats, waiting only to arrive.

  As if she could do otherwise, the bear tried to keep very still under Ruth’s arm, in order to avoid Mama’s notice. But as soon as Papa had found them places and the children had sat down facing their parents, Mama’s disapproval resumed. “Really, Ruth, to a concert,” she said, shaking her head.

  Ruth, who hated to be reprimanded, immediately began to cry. “You didn’t say I couldn’t,” she protested.

  “I shouldn’t have to.”

  “But—”

  “And I shouldn’t have to tell you not to talk back to your mother,” Papa added.

  Marie flinched to see Papa join in, too. He and Mama sat upright wearing identical expressions of weary reproach.

  “I’m sorry,” the girl whined, tears of shame wetting the top of Marie’s head, whose own eyes now burned with shiny outrage.

  “Ruth, you are too old for this sort of thing,” said Mama. Ruth had turned nine the month before, but Marie didn’t see what that had to do with anything. “You cannot possibly be so upset about that bear.”

  Still crying, Ruth hugged Marie closer, and she let out a squeak. John and Helen snickered.

  “Ruth, if you keep this up, then you and I will get off at the next stop and take the train home,” said Mama. “Your father and John and Helen will go, and I will have to miss the concert, too.”

  Ruth paused, evidently at the thought of her mother making such a sacrifice.

  “All right then,” said Mama.

  Ruth was silent as the train rattled along.

  The orchestra warming up and the crowd’s murmuring together made an enlarging chaos, and then there was applause and a hush. From Ruth’s lap Marie could see only the backs of the next row of folding chairs, the well-dressed concertgoers, hat after hat, and above them the mild sky. The violin struck a single note, and the orchestra joined in, first with one note, then a chord that grew and changed. More applause, another silence—what was happening? Marie could hear distant birds, a lifting breeze—then at last the piece began.

  Five soft strokes like heartbeats. The notes that followed were quiet yet sure, just a few instruments, and seemed to be preparing the way. Marie had heard the family’s gramophone as well as Mama’s piano and John’s clarinet, but these noises tickled her ears in new ways. Soon came a sad melody that somehow hid determination in softness, like Ruth marching up the hill pulling her wagon. A storm of possibilities followed, hundreds of trees seemed to shudder in wind, then a calm. What else could there be?—

  Marie was almost ripped in two by the sudden, forceful stroke of a single violin—ringing, smoky, gorgeous, and alone. It was like a spotlight on a dark world. “Here I am!” it seemed to say, and it didn’t care what the consequences were.

  She might have expected it to snatch up the softly determined melody as its own, but instead the others kept their tune and the violin danced in and around it. When at last it did join in, it was only to complete the last few phrases, as if it could hardly be bothered with finishing a sentence that was already known, even a beautiful one. Marie lost the world at hand. Gravity let go. She seemed to be walking freely and happily through empty space. And not just walking but dancing, and not just dancing but dancing on a high wire, while the taut line quivered
itself like a violin string beneath her stubby feet, which were light and sure of themselves, as if they always had been. The violin trilled and continued to trill, and all at once Marie saw the hats and chairs and Ruth herself wheel past as she tumbled out of the girl’s lap, the trunk of her body a-spin. For that moment before landing she was a creature in motion, untouched, her own being, apart from Ruth, a planet twirling in its own galaxy.

  With a short squeak the bear rolled twice in the grass before Mama whispered irritated shushes and Ruth whisked her up into her lap again. The violin had stopped trilling by now and the orchestra had taken over. Marie lay there dazed, her eyes fallen shut. So far in her life she’d been carried and towed and occasionally shaken—today she’d even been danced—but none of it was anything like this whirl in slow motion through empty space. She was convinced she’d somehow done it on her own—tossed herself out of Ruth’s lap and onto the grass by the strength of her own swoon.

  With an almost stabbing determination the violin rose up again. Every phrase was different now: furious, sad, petulant, defiant, pleading. Marie had felt these things many times, and she’d seen Ruth get in trouble for them, yet here they all were, one after the other, all part of the same music to which even Mama and Papa submitted willingly. The orchestra halted, and for many minutes the violin wailed its beautiful tantrum. It was the scratchy woodiness beneath the sweetness that thrilled the young bear most. She could hear it clearly, the very real, mundane substance of the instrument itself, and she could have wept, if her glass eyes had let her, to be witnessing its brave struggle to be more than it was—more than wood, strings, varnish, matter.