Tales from a Free-Range Childhood

by Donald Davis

  Girls are smarter than boys are!

  Girls are smarter than boys are!

  Chapter 7

  THE LITTLE RAT

  From kindergarten days, I was interested in science. The world seemed to be filled with experiments waiting to be performed. Nothing was more fulfilling than learning about how things worked, what would break or not break, what might burn, whether something could be flushed if you needed to get rid of it. I loved the world as my laboratory.

  By the time I was no more than six years old, I already had three organized and named chemistry labs. One was called “the kitchen.” The others were called “the bathroom” and “out in the garage.” Nothing was more educational than experimental mixtures and combinations.

  It was shortly before Christmas the year I had turned seven. Mama and Joe and I were in town at Bill Cobb’s Firestone Store looking at toys and possible presents. Joe and I did not miss a thing. Our lists of wants were getting longer.

  All of a sudden, I saw something that I had no idea they actually made for children. It was a real, deliberate, and so-named Chemistry Set. The box was large and rectangular and had wonderful pictures on it of test tubes and burners and two children with smiling faces who were actually mixing chemicals. I was thrilled.

  I called to Mama. “Look at this!” I pointed eagerly. “This is exactly what I have been needing. A chemistry set. Oh, if I could have this for Christmas, I would not even ask or hope for anything else.” I thought that to be a very reasonable deal.

  My schoolteacher mother said nothing. She simply came over and read everything that it said on the Chemistry Set box. Then she smiled at me and said, “I’m sorry. But it says you have to be ten years old to have this. You are simply not old enough.” And that was it.

  So I had to be content with my old chemistry sets: kitchen, bathroom, and garage.

  Then, one wonderful day early in the following summer, I made a great discovery. Right there in our house, set up and waiting for me to use, was another chemistry set. I still do not know why I had never noticed it before. It had been there all the time. It was called “my mama’s makeup” and was all lined up on the glass top of what she called her “blond dresser,” complete with a little benchlike stool for me to sit on and a big, round safety mirror on the back of the dresser. (I called it a “safety mirror” because you could watch in it while you were experimenting and see in advance if anyone was coming up behind to catch you.)

  This was the whole picture: Mama loved to buy makeup and then save it because it was so expensive. There was a census of makeup on that dresser, some of which went back for a full generation.

  She would go to the store and buy a new box of bath powder. After she was back at home with the powder, the ritual would start. I would watch. She would open the new powder box, slit the paper that was protecting the powder, then take the powder puff and pat a little bit of the powder on the side of her face. I knew what was coming next. “Oh,” she would smile to herself, “that powder smells sooo good. It was so expensive. I am going to save it!” I knew right then that the new powder would get to be two hundred years old if I did not do something with it.

  Next to the powder boxes was a whole community of lotion bottles. They were different shapes, different sizes, different colors. Some of them had little pumps on the top so you could pump out a sample of the lotion. One or two even had little rubber bulbs that you could mash down, with good results. Every one of the lotions smelled different from every other one. And not a one of them tasted like they smelled.

  Beyond the lotions was a thicket of lipstick, each tube standing in the lipstick neighborhood like a little, stubby tree. When Mama would buy lipstick at the store, she would always choose two very similar colors so that one of them was sure to be “just right.” She would bring the new lipsticks home to try them out. After opening the two tubes, she would make a little mouth shape with the side of her thumb and the edge of her forefinger and draw little red/pink lips with the new lipstick. The verdict was always the same: “It wasn’t that color at the store.” I knew immediately that this particular lipstick would never be opened again unless I did it.

  On the right-hand side of the dresser lived the gathering of perfume bottles. There must have been a dozen of them, various heights and exotic names. Some of the perfume bottles were made of colored glass—some gold and one blue. Almost all of them had beautiful little caps that looked like small versions of crowns for miniature kings and queens. They were arranged in height order, like a little glass chess set.

  I loved this new chemistry set. It was complete. There was no need at all to take anything into the bedroom with you when you went to experiment. It was all there. You could take the top off of one of the bath-powder boxes and turn it over, and it was a perfectly usable little mixing bowl. Into this bowl you could put various powders, lotions, globs of lipstick, a little perfume, and mix it all up to see what you got. There were even two little sets of mixing devices. Mama called them “emery boards” and “orangewood sticks.”

  Right through the door beside the blond dresser was our one bathroom with its white toilet just inside. If you saw or even heard anyone coming, all you had to do was to step into the bathroom, scrape the mixture into the toilet, and flush. All was gone!

  My favorite time to play with the makeup chemistry set was when Mama went outside to hang out the laundry. It felt safer knowing that she was outside the house while I was in her room.

  We had a washing machine but no clothes dryer. The washer was a beloved Bendix with a front-loading door that had a big glass window in it. Joe and I loved it when Mama did a load of wash. We had no television, so we would watch anything.

  Once the load was in the Bendix, Mama would call us: “Come on in here, boys. It’s about ready to start. Bring your little chairs so you can sit and watch.”

  Joe and I would drag chairs in front of the washer. After a brief fight about which of us got to pour the Oxydol into the opening in the top and which of us got to pull the big knob to start the cycles, we would settle into our chairs and watch as we listened to the water pouring in.

  Then the show would start. As the drum of the washer started to turn, we would point and call out, “There goes my pajamas. There goes my checked shirt. There goes your socks with the elephants on them. There they go!”

  Our favorite part of the wash was the spin cycle. As soon as the spin cycle started, Joe and I would jump up from our chairs and hang on the top of the washing machine. It would vibrate and dance, shaking both of us as we hummed out loud to enhance the noise of it all. This was as good as a ride at the fair.

  When the wash was finished, Mama would come with her dishpan to get the wet laundry. The dishpan went on the floor as the door was opened and the clothes came out. I would watch her pull the wet clothes out and estimate the time it would take her to finish hanging out this particular load. I was pretty good at it.

  On one certain day, she finished the wash and pulled out about a twenty-minute load to hang out. Joe was playing somewhere else on his own, so it was a perfect time to head to the makeup chemistry laboratory. There was, in fact, an experiment I wanted to repeat to see if it turned out the way it had before. One of the very fragrant bath powders was a pale ecru color. The Jergens Lotion (which smelled like cherries and almonds but did not taste like either of them) was white. I did not understand why, if you mixed very pale powder with white lotion, then stirred them up, the resulting glob was a darker brown color than the powder had been to begin with. I had to figure this out.

  I headed to the bedroom and set up shop. Soon, I had a big and thick glob adhering to an emery board, stirring round and round. It was as dark in color as ever. All of a sudden, I realized something was wrong. The glob that I had created was so thick and hard that I was not sure it would successfully flush when it needed to disappear into the toilet. It needed to be thinned out.

  After looking up and down the makeup reagent table, I made a decision: add s
ome perfume. A good dose of perfume should thin it out very well. There were the perfumes, standing in line like volunteers in the army. It was my choice.

  At the very end of the perfume family, there was a very small bottle. It had never been opened because there was a story that went with this particular bottle. My aunt Pat, Uncle Lee’s wife, who lived in Richmond, Virginia, had gone to London, England, earlier that year to see the coronation of Queen Elizabeth. When she came back, we looked at her pictures with delight. We also were each the recipient of a present she had brought to us from a big store in London she called “Harrods.”

  My brother’s present was a little pair of folding scissors that even had a zipper case in which they lived and traveled. I was so jealous of this present. He could put the little scissors safely into his pocket, and everywhere he went he was ready and prepared to cut stuff.

  She brought me a stupid-looking little pair of English sunglasses. They were black and pointy on the corners and had little jewels embedded in the plastic of the frames. They made me look like Elton John as a little boy. I never did wear them where anyone could possibly see me.

  My daddy had gotten a little spade-shaped short necktie she said you called an “ascot.” He didn’t wear it either—said it would make him talk funny if he did.

  Mama’s present topped them all. It was a tiny box, beautifully wrapped. When she opened it, out came the little bottle of perfume. Mama read the label and gasped, “Chanel No. 5! Oh, how wonderful! I am going to save it!” I knew right then that the little bottle of perfume would never be opened unless I did it.

  The Chanel No. 5 bottle was gold see-through glass. You could see the perfume inside. It did have a little crown for a top. I thought it very beautiful.

  I picked up the bottle and easily unscrewed the lid. My bet was that Mama had opened it and sniffed it a lot, even though she had never put one single drop on her body. This was going to be great. After shaking a good little bit of the Chanel No. 5 onto the glob I had made, I stirred it around some more. Just as I had hoped, the added perfume smoothed out the mixture until there would be no trouble flushing it when the time came. And it all smelled great!

  I had just put the little perfume bottle back in its home place when something caught my eye. Even though the glass of the bottle was gold in color, it was very transparent, and you really could easily see through it. Now that about half of the perfume was gone, there was a clearly visible line right at the middle of the bottle. It seemed to underline the words, “Chanel No. 5,” which made it even more visible. Anyone, especially Mama, who looked in this direction would instantly see that someone had poured out half of the little bottle.

  How to fix it? Fill it back to the top with water and make it again be full, or simply empty the rest and get rid of the telltale line in the middle? An easy choice. I picked the little bottle back up, unscrewed the lid, and dumped the rest into my mixture. It made it smoother than ever, and now the bottle drew no visual attention at all.

  While all that was happening, my attention had relaxed, and somehow Mama had slipped back into the house unnoticed. She smelled it from the kitchen. When my mama came charging into the bedroom, she was not walking. She was on a flat-out trot. With one look at what I was doing, she grabbed me by the arm. To this day, that arm is slightly longer than the other, as she yanked me into the air, trying to ignore all simple laws of gravity. She spun me around and popped me down onto the little bench, now facing her. Her eyes were red and bulging. The powder-box lid fell from my hand, and everything spilled as it hit the floor.

  I knew what was coming next, for I had been in this position before. I could hear the words before they came out of her mouth. “Mister,” she would start out. “Mister, you march outside”—why did you have to “march” instead of walk whenever your mother was mad at you?—“go up to my switch bush, and get your own switch. And it better be a good one!”

  There was one bush in the backyard that Daddy was not ever supposed to trim. It was Mama’s switch bush. It was a kind of privet hedge that had long stems of flexible new growth she thought made the perfect device for punishment. The entire ordeal was that you had to go to the bush and select a long, thin branch. Then you had to carry it back to where she was waiting. She would take the switch and swish it around to see if it met her specifications. (If you tried to get one that was thin or weak enough that it would not hurt, she would surely send you back on a second trip to get another one.) Then she would strip off the leaves. She would make you hold up your britches legs (that was as much so that you couldn’t run as that you now had bare legs), and she would, as she said, “stripe your legs” with the switch. The process was worse than the pain.

  On this particular day, however, that exact request did not come. No, I seemed to have overdone things this time. Mama looked straight at me and talked to me with her pointed finger. “You sit right here and do not move while I go get the switch!”

  I was terrified. I knew that she must be going to get a special switch that she had been feeding and training since before I was born. It might just be a whole tree. I could be going to die.

  Once Mama left the room, I felt much calmer. Now, it was time to figure out what really needed to be done before she got back. I thought deeply about what was happening. I was about to die over a pitiful little bottle of never-used perfume. It was not fair. I simply was not willing to do that. That is when the idea came.

  Sometime earlier, my cousin Andy had been spending the day with me when he got out of sorts, got a bad case of the pouts, and ran away. Mama searched everywhere for him. She went all over the inside of the house, then all over the yard, then through the garden and chicken lot and cow pasture, then all over the barn, then through all the bushes and trees that might hide him. He was nowhere to be found.

  Over an hour later, she finally found him hiding in the garage behind the Mehaffeys’ house, across the road and a few hundred yards below our house. When she finally found him, she was so exasperated that she sat down and cried, right there beside the well in the Mehaffeys’ backyard.

  Remembering this day, I now knew what to do. I was going to run away. Then Mama would have to put down the switch and look for me. When Daddy came home, she would have to explain to him why he did not have a little boy any longer. Then she would cry! It would be wonderful.

  It was such a good overall plan that my brain went on to get one good idea too many. Suddenly, I realized that if I actually ran away, I would not get to watch her cry. And what good would it do to make her cry if I did not get to watch? I wanted to watch.

  The plan made itself. I opened the back door of the kitchen, so it would look like someone had just gone out that way. Then I crawled into a little, low closet that was beside the stove in the kitchen. It was the place where the milk bucket lived, the place where kindling wood for the stove was kept. There was also a mop and broom in there. Once the door was pulled shut, I could look out through a wide crack and see everything in the kitchen. I was going to get to watch Mama cry.

  Suddenly, the side door opened, and there she was. The switch she had brought looked like it was as alive as a snake. It was big, too. I hoped that she would not drop it on the floor because I knew it was capable of searching me out and killing me all on its own without any help from Mama.

  All of a sudden, she saw that I was not seated where she had left me. She looked from the bedroom door all around the kitchen. “Where are you?” was Mama’s question. “Where are you?”

  I decided not to answer. She needed to find out on her own.

  My mother walked over to the open door and looked out. “Did you go out of this house when I told you not to move?” Her voice was loud.

  I still did not answer. Go out and see, I thought to myself.

  She did. I could hear her calling for me as she walked all around the house. I was not there! Once back around to the door, she came back inside. She did not look good. Her eyes were already red, and I could hear her sound like she wa
s struggling to breathe. It is working, I thought.

  Mama picked up the receiver of the black kitchen-wall telephone and called a number. It was the number for Daddy at the bank. He came on the line. “Come home!” she was pleading. “He has run away, and I cannot to save my life find him. I have looked everywhere. Come home no matter what you are doing. . . . Yes . . . yes”—she seemed to be answering questions I could not hear—“yes . . . Well, maybe I did get too mad!” She hung up the phone.

  Mama sat down at a chair at the kitchen table and put her head down on her folded arms. She was almost heaving as she breathed. This was getting better and better all the time.

  In no time, Daddy’s car came in the driveway. I heard the car door open and then slam. He was on the way inside.

  The next few moments were like a scene from an opera. The door opened and my daddy stood there, tall and erect. Mama looked up at the sound of the opening door. She saw him. She seemed to lift into the air without any means of support whatever and with a high-pitched humming sound—“Uuuuuuuhhhhh!”— she flew through the air to meet him. She draped around his neck, sobbing. It was beautiful!

  Daddy was not impressed. He looked down at her wet face and suggested, “Dry up! Let’s go and look for him.”

  Mama wiped her eyes and face and joined Daddy at the door. They both went outside. I could hear them circling much farther around the house than the trip Mama had made on her own. They were searching beyond the garden, behind the chicken house, below the barn—everywhere I might have hidden if I had actually gone outside. Finally, they gave up and came back to the house.

  When the two of them entered the door, Daddy was in the lead. He looked back at Mama over his shoulder and offered, “I am calling the police. This is a case for the police.”

  All of a sudden, I realized that I had not counted on this turn of events. I had not planned on the police being called. I was pretty certain that the police were probably not going to cry. It seemed to me like it was time to come out.