Meet Me in the In-Between

by Bella Pollen

  I pushed open the swing doors to the kitchen and stopped. Papagoya was jabbing at Lenor’s radial artery with his beak as she attempted to extract the gooey newspaper lining his cage. Momentarily distracted, he rotated his head in my direction. An electric-eyed monster, he blinked in disbelief at my Afro and then, fastening me with a look of outrage, launched.

  “For the love of God, duck!” yelled Lenor. But I remember only a blizzard of colour, then the Afro being wrenched from my head, and the sight of it, lifeless, in Papagoya’s beak, as he flew it straight out the open window. Considering that his wings were clipped—considering that we lived on the ninth floor, this was quite the political protest, and finally I understood: Lenor’s later departure time, meeting me in the hall, the wig on the hook—selfless protection, all of it.

  She grabbed my hand and we jammed ourselves into the elevator and hurtled down to the lobby. Out in the street, Lenor retrieved the Afro from the top of a fire hydrant but of Papagoya there was no sign. No parrot patty on the road, not even a single kaleidoscopic feather spiralling down on the currents of the evening’s heat haze.

  Later that evening, after a short but respectable period of mourning, my father hit the drinks trolley. As he tore the lid off a bottle of Smirnoff, there was a sharp rap at the window. Papagoya—edging his claws gingerly along the ledge and tapping his beak against the glass with all the impatient self-righteousness of an ex-pat deprived of his sundowner.

  Cold turkey was a painful but necessary process. If we excused the bird, it was on the grounds that alcohol turns the finest of men mean. The newly sober Papagoya still cuddled and snuggled, but we were never able to look at him in quite the same way again. Once you know, you know, right?

  Lenor forgave both Papagoya and us, her generosity of spirit never in question, but there was no more living under the rock of white naivety. Maybe this wasn’t the first time I’d witnessed intolerance, but it was the first time I really saw it, and it delivered a stunning jolt to my sensibilities. If a parrot could mimic human behaviour, then what was to stop a human from acting with animal aggression?

  After that things changed. Maybe I would never know what it was like to walk around in somebody else’s skin or hair, but I tried hard to look at the world through new eyes.

  My Afro, stained and shamed by its part in inciting racial hatred, I relegated to the dressing-up box. Maybe one day my grandchildren will rediscover Pam Grier. Sprinkled with talc, she’ll be just the thing for their searing reenactment of Phil Spector’s murder trial, but my own ambitions to be black were over.

  As for an identity, I kept on looking, and it took me the longest time to land on a career. Eventually, I peeled back all the skins I’d tried on in childhood, until there was only the soft, translucent one of writer. I still have the greatest trouble when it comes to polite conversation, but that’s OK, because writers live mute, locked into the mirrored chamber of narcissism, in a state of mind close to sociopathy. There is one question, however, that still makes my ears spontaneously bleed. When I hear it I don’t try to be funny or facetious anymore. I don’t tell people that I want to spray-paint Pluto or wrestle the ink from the silvery sac of the giant squid. When some nosy, insensitive small-talker asks me what I do, I take a deep breath and muster as much dignity as possible before replying.

  “I do my best.”

  HIERARCHY OF RULES

  Night hours pass slowly for the exhibitionist. It’s a bleak moment when the storybooks are shut and the spotlight of parental attention fades. To combat the loneliness, to ward off the bad dreams that often come, new entertainments must be improvised, with my faithful companion—a threadbare cat with marble eyes and knitted cardigan—positioned affectionately by my side to admire them.

  One such night, I was lying in bed, blowing the most glorious Bazooka bubbles ever seen, when my mother came back into the room to reclaim the brooch she’d left on our chest of drawers. My mother was hardly the crazed disciplinarian, but she was strict about sweets, or candy, as the other girls at school would say. This was not a healthy-eating issue. Back in the early 1970s, everyone was too busy scoring birth control to worry about counting out chia seeds or squeezing the légume for its juice. Marching for women’s rights was the number-one exercise of the day, and chain-smoking widely accepted as a top tip for breaking the ice at social occasions. America was a kingdom still under the lenient reign of fatty foods, and it was to be a good few decades before the Hyphen War unleashed its crusading heroes of trans-fat, gluten-free, and high-fiber upon our unsuspecting guts. When I was growing up, nobody cared what food contained so long as it tasted good. A blueberry donut was just the thing after a pizza supper, and both were best washed down with a bottle of Coke, a delicious beverage advertised by wholesome-looking kids who sang nice.

  Sweets, though? Well, sweets were different. My mother claimed to have soft teeth and was fearful we’d inherited the same.

  In those days our family dentist operated out of a Lexington Avenue basement that my siblings and I would eventually dub the Cave of Torment. He was a thickset man with a gruff manner and such a profusion of hair on the backs of his hands that we imagined him commuting after work to the deepest recesses of Central Park, where moonstruck he would forage for berries, decomposing pigeons, and the occasional small child foolish enough to leave their bed after lights-out.

  During summer, when the pavements burned with heat and a shorter-sleeved model of the dentist’s coat was called for, it was apparent that this hair problem, which Susie, Marcus, and I had assumed to be localized to his hands, was in fact full-body hypertrichosis. Sprouting from his finger knuckles, it ran like black industrial cabling up his arms and across his shoulders, meeting, we could only presume, in a ruff down the centre of his back. It probably didn’t help that his name was Dr. Wolff. Planet of the Apes had recently been playing in cinemas, and we were smart enough to figure out that if the US government was overrun by monkeys, it was equally plausible that the annals of Manhattan dentistry might be dominated by werewolves.

  “Rinse, please,” Dr. Wolff would growl, indicating a flimsy cup of mouthwash with his amber nails. Instead of making an effort to disguise his hybrid form, he was more than willing to put his supernatural abilities to good use. Enhanced sight meant there was no necessity to burden our parents with costly X-rays. Anaesthetics, too, could be done away with as, according to werewolf mythology, cattle and children could be paralysed with a single, focused glare. Even tools were superfluous. The moment the slightest wobble was detected in one of our milk teeth, in went the paw. Seconds later, a poor bloodied canine would clatter into the porcelain bowl kept on hand for such occasions. The first time this happened to me, I merely blinked in astonishment, too stunned to scream.

  At the end of every session, impervious to our piteous tear-stained faces, Dr. Wolff would deliver a hoarse sermon on the perils of a sugary diet, before loping across the room to his supply cabinet and inviting Susie, Marcus, and me to choose a flavour from his assortment of lollipops, reserved for children who had been “especially brave and good.” Even at our tender ages, we recognised this as a trick. Obviously, we wanted the lollipop. We’d earned the lollipop, but accepting the lollipop in the face of the no-sugar diktat would surely result in more time spent in the dentist’s chair—or perhaps even being bitten and bringing the curse of lycanthropy upon ourselves. And then the concept of being rewarded for being “especially brave and good” made us doubly suspicious. Mum’s bedtime story of choice was Saki’s “The Story-Teller.” The heroine of this tale was ghastly little Bertha, a girl generously decorated with medals, whose reward for obeying rules and being horribly brave and good was to be devoured by, well, none other than a wolf.

  In the end, greed trounced caution. The lollipops were the old-fashioned kind—flat, bright coins wrapped in cellophane—and after a moment’s hesitation, during which Dr. Wolff idly picked at the hard, long bristles underneath his tongue, we’d snatch a handful of the things and m
ake a dash for the waiting room, where Mum would be patiently flicking through her copy of Life magazine. Dentistry was an occasion when the family candy rules were relaxed. My mother was a thoroughly fair person, happy to allow us lollipops after any kind of major ordeal, but in general, sweets were rationed. And at the top of the sweets embargo was bubblegum.

  Not only did bubblegum ruin your teeth, but the chewing of it was loutish and un-English and meant eating with your mouth open—a crime ranked on the Charter of Manners above slouching, the heinous putting of elbows on the table, and my own personal weakness, showing off in front of grown-ups.

  As English children, we already talked odd so it went without saying that fitting in was a matter of life and death. My mother was happy for us to embrace most things American—peanut butter with jelly, ice hockey, I Dream of Jeannie—but gum, spearmint, bubble, or any other kind, was forbidden.

  The black market for candy was school. Every morning, shuddering down in the walnut box of our elevator, I’d snap open my Dick Dastardly lunch box and check for suitable currency.

  The stock value of fruit was low, but any snack bearing the Hostess logo, be it a Ding Dong, Sno Ball, or Twinkie, was a cinch to move. The day’s trading opened at milk break. At the bell, there’d be a rush to the playground. For the next fifteen minutes, it was all the mayhem of the New York Stock Exchange as seasoned traders cleaned up, rookies were shafted, and the rest got their hair pulled. Combine a cheating nature and plain greed with the lucky draw of being an auctioneer’s daughter, and it was no surprise that I nailed this vocation.

  On days I scored Bazooka, I would take it home and hide it under my pillow. After lights-out—No talking! No roughhousing!—I’d slide out the small, neat, rectangular brick, with its pleasing hospital corners, and peel it slowly, revelling in the waxy feel of the packaging, the seductive whiff of artificial fruit, and those heady first chews when the gum was soft and grainy with sugar. After the initial high had worn off, I’d lie dreamily on my back, one arm bent under my head, and send vast quivering planets up into the dark universe of my bedroom. “Bravo!” cried my threadbare Kitty Cat. And it was right then, as my mother returned for her brooch, that my bubble, quite literally, burst.

  A parent coming back into the bedroom after lights-out was my cue to manipulate whichever one it was into staying as long as possible. Tell me the story of me! Tell me about being born in England! About you and Dad landing in New York when I was a baby and being asked to sign a government waiver promising I wouldn’t start a revolution! This time, however, I turned my face to the wall, scraped the gluey dregs off my mouth, and, for reasons that still escape me, pressed the resulting mess into the crotch of my pajama bottoms.

  Viyella is an absorbent fabric, and the gum lost no time sinking into the crossroads of interlocking stitching, where it flattened and spread its tentacles like a malevolent, pink cuttlefish.

  I glanced at Kitty Cat. As a little girl I was wont to channel my naughty self through this stuffed toy, and it had got me out of trouble for a mixed bag of wrongdoings. But now that I’d hit double figures, my parents were finding “The cat did it!” less and less charming as a defence strategy. I toyed with removing my pajamas and dropping them out the window, figuring a single gust of wind could have floated the evidence to the river. But what if Susie woke and squealed? What if two cops knocked at the door—one holding out my waterlogged pajamas on a stick, the other directing my mother’s gaze to Nanny’s punctiliously sewn name tape on their waistband? The throwing out of perfectly good clothes before they’d been outgrown was another rule, one that came under the subheading of Waste—and that led unavoidably to the Poor Starving Children of Africa. Like most kids, Susie, Marky, and I were prepared to suspend disbelief for Father Christmas and Happy Ever After, so you’d think the poor starving children of Africa would slip by unchallenged, but there was no getting away from the absurd contradiction it posed—namely that eating everything on our plates left nothing for starving kids, whereas leaving a little something at least gave them a fighting chance. Still, even had the tossing of perfectly good pajamas not come under the by-laws of Waste, it would undoubtedly have been categorized as Littering, an offence, according to my mother, right up there with not voting and tax avoidance.

  I shut my eyes and tried to ignore the grotesque muck in my crotch, but remorse and disgust escalated until the idea of confession began to seem like a relief.

  I crept through the apartment, holding the pajama’s waistband stretched as far away from my tummy as the elastic would allow. I found my parents in the study, staring at the TV, on which a man with a roughly creased face and a sweating upper lip was addressing the nation.

  “Creep!” My father shook his fist at the screen.

  “Weasel!” my mother yelled.

  I waved my gummy pants under their noses, sighed and stamped my foot, but my parents couldn’t have been less interested. Nixon’s attempted cover-up trumped my own.

  For a child hard-wired to feel short-changed on the quantity and quality of attention, I’d long ago identified news as the enemy. The stuff was everywhere—flashing on the television, spilling out of the radio, and strewn over the kitchen table in a riddle of print. I don’t suppose my parents were more distracted than anybody else’s; nevertheless, every headline seemed specifically worded to shift focus away from me.

  When my father was interested in something, he had a habit of taking off his glasses and pinching the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. Likewise, my mother would catch a strand of her hair and twiddle its ends. That night, as I took in my father’s nose pinch and my mother’s hair twiddle, I had an epiphany. News was not the enemy. Rather, it might become my salvation.

  The pajama pants went into the wash the following morning. The bubblegum melted in the heat of the machine and became an integral part of the garment, like a shiny gusset on a new swimsuit. I was fine with that. I’d moved on. By then sibling rivalry was a childhood habit as second nature to the three of us as breathing. Let Susie win a tricolour rosette for French spelling. Let Marcus draw a cute picture of a hamster with a Brussels sprout head. From now on these pedestrian achievements would be eclipsed. My bulletins would be hard-hitting. They would sway opinion. Here finally was a career path that could be rewarding and meaningful. News happened every day. All I had to do to get a jump on the others was wait for the opportune moment to report it.

  “Guess what,” I said to my mother after school. “On the way home, I passed a lady on the street pushing triplets!”

  “How lovely, darling,” she said, swiftly returning to the headline Landmark Roe v. Wade Decision in her New York Times. I was put out. Whatever Roe v. Wade may have been, surely my story appealed to a broader female readership?

  I tried again a few weeks later.

  “Guess what,” I said to my father. “A yellow cab ran into the balloon cart on Lexington, and all the balloons floated way up to the—”

  “Not now, Froggins.” Dad held up his hand. Walter Cronkite was on the news. “NASA launches the Explorer 49 into lunar orbit.”

  Scooped again, I thought sourly. The business of reporting was not as simple as I’d imagined. What did I have to do to get that nose pinch and hair fiddle? I collected everything I knew about Watergate. Facts were not enough. A story needed a hero or a villain. It needed excitement and danger, and if these could be rooted in perjury, corruption, and criminality, so much the better.

  It was the year my sister turned twelve. In preparation for teenagedom she was granted a number of privileges related to the themes of independence and enhanced responsibility. Independence translated into a hike in pocket money and permission to walk unsupervised to certain preordained locations. The corner shop had been allowed at age eight, the local library at eleven, and now Central Park was added to the Map of Free Movement. This was no minor upgrade. The park was a jungle. An ungovernable snarl of caves, lanes, and tunnels. It was, or so I briefed Kitty Cat, a gift of ice s
licks, mossy lakes, and prehistoric trees, the spreading canopies of which happened to be the kingdom of the Oolie Oolies, sturdy troll-like creatures whose feckless monarch, queen of the Oolie Oolies, wore a magnificent headdress sewn from discarded Good Humor wrappers. Central Park was a blast, the place in the world I most liked to explore. But Susie’s new privilege came with an unacceptable line of small print: Look after your younger sister and never let her out of your sight.

  One day, after we’d been in the park barely an hour, my sister announced it was time to go home. I was far from ready to leave, so I kicked her. She argued her authority with the patience of a high-court judge. I kicked her again.

  “Find your own way home,” she said, storming off.

  I watched her go, considering whether to treat her to a neck punch or a dead arm on her return. To my surprise, she didn’t return. Five minutes passed. Ten. My lip began to wobble. Central Park was where the bogeyman lived. It was the hunting ground of opportunist werewolf-dentists with X-ray eyes and yellow tongues. It was where little unattended girls were hauled through tunnels by their white ankle socklets and expertly fish-filleted.

  “I’ll tell on you,” I sniffed. But even as I said it, I wondered: Would the telling be quite enough?

  My mother had instilled in the three of us a special set of rules pertaining to the subject of Lost. These rules were sacred and had to be memorised along with our home telephone number and zip code. I stopped sniveling as an idea formed in my head. If I couldn’t simply relate it, I’d have to become the news instead.

  Rule number one of Lost was: Stay where you are! This I understood. It had something to do with ebb and flow, with mathematical probability. Once you went searching for missing persons, gaps widened, crowds multiplied. Without this rule, children didn’t just get lost, they got lost forever.

  And suddenly that didn’t seem like such a bad thing. I felt the anarchic thrill of freedom. Performing a happy heel click, I skipped off, fetching up, in due course, on the far west side of the park where I contemplated rule number two.