by Rachel Simon
“Because it’s so beautiful outside,” I tell them.
“It’s boring,” the oldest one says.
Up ahead I see a lookout point. Fourteen times in the last two months I have passed by that point, wondering what it would be like to stop there, get out, and stand at the railing. The ground drops away there, and the valley stretches so far it seems like the whole world.
“What’re we doing?”
“I want to stop so we can look over the valley.”
“How come?”
“It’ll be fun. We’ll just stop for a minute.”
Even the baby is quiet as I pull onto the gravel and park.
The two older girls let themselves out. I unbuckle the baby and take her in my arms.
All four of us stand at the railing. We are in the elbow of a cliff that rises both behind us and to our left. To our right is the valley. The river snakes below us to the horizon. Along the banks of the water cluster the pink and yellow pastels of early spring. Patches of fields cut through the puffs of trees, and specks that must be houses dot the sides of roads.
The girls’ eyes open wide. “Wow,” the older ones say.
Standing here, the two voices come out rich and full, and return to us in an echo.
“Did you hear that?” they ask me.
“Hear what?”
“This.” And they shout again: “Wow!”
“Yes,” I say, as the echo begins. “I hear it.”
“Wow!” they yell out. “Wow! Wow!” Their voices come back to us like waves at the ocean, rolling over and over until you can’t tell the original from the sounds they’ve caused.
Then they look at me. “Mommy,” they say, and they pull at my jacket. “You shout something.”
“No, I’ll just listen,” I say.
“Please?” they say. “Please?”
“I don’t want to.”
“Come on.” And they give me no peace until I agree and open my mouth.
I am not planning what I’ll say. It just comes out like some part of me passing through to the outside, like when my voice is at rest in my sadder moods, and this is the shape it finds itself in.
“Mmmmm-en!” I shout. The older girls giggle, the baby claps her hands. And my voice ripples back across the valley.
At my side, the older girls join in with the fading trace of my voice. “Men!” they shout. “Mmmmm-en!” The baby joins in. “Aaaa!” They’re all going, their voices filling up the valley. And finally I join back in. “Men!” we shout together. “Mmmmm-en!”
Our voices layer into each other. I look at them and notice their huge grins and how this shouting together makes them jump up and down. Someday my girls will have their own histories with men. I wonder if this memory will make them smile then.
The Speed of Love
But did you try the brakes, my brother called out from the back seat and my mother screamed, Yes, of course, my foot is pressed to the floor, to the floor, and I looked over and there she was, pumping the pedal with nothing changing but us going faster, and we began to cry, all three of us, the car swooping over the hills, the wind slapping our hair around our faces, the houses we used to know flipping by — Just a short detour through our old home town, only take a few minutes, nostalgia, our mother had said, and when we asked what nostalgia meant she replied, You know how you remember your father being around, that he was fun and nice but that’s just because you forget how he really was: how he made you feel stupid, how he dictated what you should do; well I can tell you that kind of forgetting is the dictionary definition of nostalgia — and around this bend, up this slope, past the pool, the twisted tree, Naomi’s house, Linda’s, Deborah’s, down the incline and then my brother fought his tears and said, But we’re picking up speed, Mom, and she wailed, What can I do, what can I do — was she asking us or just crying out, I couldn’t tell which, but I wanted to help like I helped all the time, listening after Dad left, giving her advice I was barely old enough to know — and emergency brakes were something I didn’t know about yet, neither did my brother, and neither I guess did she — so I swallowed deep and said, Just follow the road, stay inside the lines, your steering is still working, right?, and she nodded, hands clenching the wheel, eyes sweeping the view and she said, Watch with me kids, I can’t do this alone so you’ve got to help me through this, and my brother said, Okay, Mom, but as the car bumped high in the air, over the hill, hitting down flying, I, the keeper of realities usually kept to myself, blurted out, I’ll watch with you, but I know this is the end, and she glanced over, frightened, and I knew she believed me, and oh, how I hated myself for saying it because I hadn’t meant to hurt her but then she faced the road again and sighed deep and laying calm onto her voice said, No, no, honey, as long as there’s a road I’ll keep on steering, you just strap yourself in now, strap yourself in and watch with me, we’re all going through this together, and I looked out the windshield and we were coming toward downtown, coming toward the busy streets with no-turn-on-red and stop for pedestrians and I knew she couldn’t make it and I knew she couldn’t make it but she reached over and said, I’ll get you home safe, trust me, and she took my hands and held on real hard and I thought, Right now she needs me more than I need my own self, so I didn’t pull my hands away and I couldn’t put on my seatbelt as we tore down the hill and we barreled into town.
The Secret Lives of My Toys
When I was seven years old, my parents insisted that I join the Brownies.
My older sister was a Brownie and through them had, for the first time in her life, found friends who liked her as much as she liked them. The change was remarkable; you can see it in the pictures: the little girl behind thick, vulture-eyed glsses, her face sagging like melted putty, suddenly, at the first Brownie barbecue, draws herself up and learns to smile. She poses with her arms thrown around her new friends. Her cheeks are red from laughter, her eyes wet from happiness. Even the frames of her glasses seem to sparkle in the afternoon sun.
My parents felt that I could benefit similarly from the Brownies. I did not agree.
My sister had always wanted friends but had been too shy to initiate anything. I wasn’t afraid to make friends — at least I thought so at the time. I was, I thought, just someone who preferred being alone, because by myself I could do whatever I wanted.
Every afternoon, all the neighborhood kids except me made an exodus to the woods down the street, where they did whatever it was that kids did together. During these afternoons, I would run from one yard to the next, sampling different swing sets. Eventually, I would match the seat of my pants to the seat of some worn swing, and then take off into the air, swinging so high that I would be enveloped by autumn leaves the color of candy corn, or winter branches stretching out to embrace me, or the soothing green fans of spring and summer.
While I swung, I made up long, rambling songs about the secret lives of my toys. In my songs, my dolls and stuffed animals came alive and danced through the neighborhood. My toys could go inside every basement and attic and tree; they knew no boundaries. They took me along. We liked all the same things. We never fought, and they listened to and appreciated everything I confided in them. Together we shared many secret adventures.
At night, my toys and I played alone in my room. We kept the door closed so that we wouldn’t have to include anyone else. I came out only to eat dinner. Television did not interest me. Other children did not interest me. And I knew, long before my parents forced me to join, that the Brownies would not interest me either.
The Brownies had vows, traditions, group activities, drab uniforms. Every Thursday, we were marched down the school hallway by our two troop leaders and assembled in the gymnasium. There we were indoctrinated with the customs and lore of the Brownies. On the day of the initiation pledge, I deliberately held up my left hand instead of my right, knowing that to do so would be considered blasphemous. One girl poked me, but I droned on woodenly with the pledge. At last a cry rose up from the suddenly attentive
troop leaders, and, just before I finished, a pair of stiff, older hands jerked down the offending arm and cranked up the proper one.
I begged my parents to let me leave the Brownies. “But look at your sister,” my mother said, “she’s being invited to parties now. Don’t you want to be invited to parties?” “No,” I mumbled, but I knew it was no good. They’d enlisted me and expected me to stay until my tour of duty was up.
In the meantime, I was dragged along on Brownie trips. Zoos, museums, historical sights — I passed through all in my paper-thin regulation Brownie uniform, standing away from the group, shaking my head yes or no if anyone spoke to me, yawning every few minutes.
There is only one trip that made any real impression. It sits as clearly in my mind as the photographs of my sister.
One day, in the fall of second grade, the Brownie troop leaders gathered us up after school and drove us in their two station wagons to a neighboring town. There we wound our way through a residential area, an older kind, like the one where I lived, the kind where every house is unique and well groomed, and all the hedges are meticulously clipped. I imagined running around these lawns in the late afternoons, trying out the swing sets I saw in the backyards.
The sky, when we got out of the cars, was layered like gelatin pudding, in pink, purple, and blue. The first star was out. The streetlights popped on. The lawns around us were so well trimmed that they looked like drawings.
We were led by our troop leaders across a quiet street to a small house and ushered through the back door into the kitchen. There, in the bright light, we met the owner, Mr. Edgerton, the tallest and thinnest man I had ever seen. Mr. Edgerton was so tall, his neck curled over like the top of a lowercase letter f. He smiled as if we were presents someone had given him for Christmas and thanked us again and again for coming. As he passed around a plate of cookies he said he’d made just for us, I slipped into the living room to see if anyone else was home. It didn’t seem likely; aside from the kitchen, the house was as dark as the space between my dreams.
Then Mr. Edgerton led us downstairs into his basement.
There, by the light of a single bulb, we saw an enormous table, so large it almost filled the whole room. On top of the table was a miniature, handcrafted town. There were houses, each lit from the inside, streets, cars, a glittering river, a park, a trolley, grass, trees, flowers. There were also little people, each no bigger than my middle finger, positioned throughout the whole scene. Some rode the cars and trolley, some ate dinner or watched television in their houses, some just stood in midstep along the streets. All were thin. All wore the same blank expression on their faces, as though they had fallen asleep with their eyes open.
The Brownies circled the table. From what I knew of the world, Mr. Edgerton had every detail right, from the letters on the marquee of the movie house to the pails in the sandboxes. There were also things I barely knew, like an orchestra in the outdoor theater, scullers on the river, a funeral at the cemetery. I wanted to touch everything to make sure it was real, and I wanted to be tiny, like the little people, so I could live in this town, too.
Then our troop leaders directed our attention back to Mr. Edgerton. “Isn’t this something,” they said. “And he did this all by himself.”
Our host grinned so hard I thought his face would crack open.
“And look,” they added, as he lowered his head with modesty, “he doesn’t even have five fingers, like the rest of us. Just look at his hands.”
Mr. Edgerton held up his hands, and, though they were the size of normal hands, each hand had only two fingers. The fingers were twice the size of any fingers I’d seen, and they resembled a thumb and a pinky pointing in opposite directions, as if they were on a clock that read quarter to three. The palm in the middle was small, little more than a hinge to hold the thumb and pinky together. He wiggled his fingers at us. I looked down at my own hands. I tried to imagine making this whole world with only four fingers, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t even imagine holding on to swings.
When I looked back at him, Mr. Edgerton had picked up one of the little people and was fondling it between the two fingers of his right hand. He gazed down at it, still with his smile, and then beyond his hand to the little town. As he took it all in, the look on his face reminded me more than anything ever had and ever would of the look on my sister’s face in the barbecue pictures.
It was a moment before I realized that I had covered my mouth with my hand. Had my face ever looked like that when I played with my toys? I started to think so, but I couldn’t be sure.
The troop leaders announced that it was time to go, and one by one, the Brownies followed them up the stairs. As I, the last girl to leave, got halfway up the stairs, I looked down at Mr. Edgerton.
There he was, still beaming at his town on the table, the town that now seemed, from my position alone on the stairs, terribly small.
Mr. Edgerton glanced up and saw me watching him. We stood and stared at each other, and, even in the dim light, I could see crimson roll into his face. Finally, he lowered his head. “I’m sorry,” he said, gently placing the little person back on the table, “I didn’t realize you’d all gone up already.”
I watched him make his way around the table. Then, just as he reached out for the bannister, I spun around, leaving him behind, and scrambled up the stairs.
The other girls laughed when I burst through the doorway into the kitchen. I ignored them and bolted my way around their starched brown uniforms to the back of the room.
The air was crisp and the sky completely dark when the troop leaders dropped me off at my house. I opened the front door. My parents were sitting beside each other on the sofa, watching television. They were holding hands in a lazy, casual way, as though it was something they did all the time. Maybe it was.
“Did you have fun?” my mother said when I closed the door.
“It was fine,” I replied. I sat at the foot of the stairs and unlaced my shoes. My parents were both watching me, their eyebrows arched, as if poised for disappointment. On the television in front of them, a family of attractive people muttered and giggled. My father patted the sofa. “You might like this,” he said. I looked at his hand, and at the hollow in the cushion beneath it, while upstairs my toys rustled in the darkness of my room, distressed I hadn’t gone to see them as soon as I’d come home.
Sheets
Alvina would walk through the wall, if she could. Step halfway in — one arm, one leg. Just far enough to reach that whimpering child in the row house next door. She’d pluck the girl from her bed — Alvina knows where the bedroom is. She wouldn’t be caught. Day and night, she hears the girl’s mother twaddling on the phone in another room, cracking her gum in front of the television. Never knows what the child’s doing.
Alvina would rescue the girl. Ronnie, that’s her name. She’d carry her back here, cuddle her in these brown arms, press her to this worn face, to the skin with its ripples like soft desert sand. She could have a bed ready in a minute, a second. That one, over there. The one her husband used to sleep in before his cough got the better of him.
Behind the house, cars whistle past on the expressway. Cats scurry by the chain link fence between the tiny yards. She hears them now, matted fur strumming the dull steel like a toneless harp. Once she took in a tabby she found dizzy and tangled after a fight. The pads of its feet were as shredded as old ballet slippers, and one of its eyes was missing. She dribbled iodine on its wounds, fed it milk through an eyedropper. In a month it slipped through a hole in the screen. She hears it sometimes, at night. It screams as if it’s in a tunnel so dark, its single eye cannot find the exit.
Ronnie plays in the dirt out back, summer and winter. Her toys are plastic milk jugs, strips of curtain lining, egg cartons. She keeps a dirt collection. With a fork she digs out little pieces from all over the project, up and down the strip backing onto the highway, then stores the dirt in the foam pouches of the cartons. “What’cha doing?” Alvina asked her once,
leaning over the chain link fence.
“I’m a dirt scientist,” Ronnie said. “I’m getting dirt from everybody’s backyard.”
Alvina asked to see. Ronnie held up her egg carton. Each sample was labeled in a child’s scrawl. “All the times of the year. From my house to the end of the street.” She said it with pride.
“What’cha looking for in it?”
“Color. Smell. Different stuff. See, this one’s red, this one’s got Coke cans, this one had worms in it — only they ain’t there no more.”
“You dig up mud?”
“Yeah. I like when it’s hard and old and got cracks like an earthquake. See, this one’s cracked. But you wouldn’t know about it now. In this box, it looks just like all the other ones.”
Days, Alvina goes to the library. She can read, but she does not want to; it is more interesting to watch the people. Lovers amble past looking at each other, their bodies breathing silent ballads together. Young women shuffle through the stacks, clasping ringed fingers over their swelling waistlines. Mothers kneel onto the dusty granite, buttoning the jackets of their small children.
Alvina sits at the same table every day, the one farthest from the vagrants, who pack themselves onto sofas in the sun room. Alvina does not want to be confused with them. She bathes every morning before leaving the house, irons her dresses, combs her white hair.
She does not watch soap operas. She has no television.
She sweeps the apartment every morning, every evening. She polishes the thief bars on her windows once a week.
At night, boys with radios the size of houses pass by, one after another. Big boys, testing out the fusing of their bones, the hardening of their muscles. Dark as starless nights. The same boys who only last year stood beside the highway and threw stones at the cars of white people. Now, they bribe girls with their radios. “Hey, what’s up. Let’s dance in the street.” Even in winter. Boys and girls leap about on the frozen street in front of the project, breaking up only for the occasional rattletrap. They jump high, they roll around; hot and flushed, they look the way she felt when she was their age.