by Gordon Lish
I never wanted to be the one who I am.
But I think I knew that it wasn’t going to do me any good for me to go home and start eating what he said. I think I knew that even already by then it was already too late for me to be any different, even if my mother had any of the things which the colored man said, which I could tell from just looking at our kitchen she didn’t.
WE CALLED IT PROPERTY. We called where you lived your property. I mean the ground itself, plus everything on it. For instance, there was the Lieblichs’ property, which I think was probably the biggest property of all the different properties on the block, or which I anyhow know was bigger than our property was or than the Aaronsons’ property was, and which was, from certain other standpoints—the lawn it had, for instance, and the trellises and the hedges and the arbor and the flowers—the prettiest property, the really loveliest and prettiest of all of the different properties. In all truth, in all honesty, there were times when I thought it was so pretty that I just couldn’t stand it to look at it—there were times when I would look at it in comparison with our property, there were times when I would look at the Lieblichs’ property in comparison with our own property, and I would just stand there and start to feel like as if I had to do something, that it was so pretty that it made you feel like you had to go ahead and do something—even just walk around on it or lie down on it or reach out and see if you could find the best place to lie down on it and hug it, actually try to hug it—the grass, the grass, the lawn—or have a dream where you could reach out your arms around it and hug the whole house itself for a minute or just be inside of it for a while.
Our property was called property too, even though we were not actually the owners of it, even though we just were the people who were the renters of it, even though the nanny said that it was understood that we were just going to be allowed to have the use of it so long as it was all still okay with the landlord himself and so long as we did not break any of his rules or break the things he owned—or wear anything out too much or use too much hot water or get things too dirty for him to get clean again or pester him too much, or irk him about anything, about things like a new coat of paint for the ceiling of the kitchen or for anything, anything, more hot water.
She said that we were just temporary, that that was just how some people were, that they were just temporary people, and that you never knew why this was so, but that sometimes it was because people were the kind of people who just did not want to be tied down to anything, whereas other times it was because they were the kind of people who just could not afford to be permanent people anywhere, that they just did not have the kind of money you needed to really stick to things and for things to stick to you, for you to be able to build up things and get better and better at being built up in the world—and sometimes, sometimes when the nanny said all of these things, she made it sound like this was a good way to be, that it was the Christian way to be, but mainly when she said it she didn’t, and I was ashamed—and then it would twist around for a while, with me making believe for a while that I myself was better than all of the rest of them were just for this, just for this—just on account of being ashamed, I mean.
You know what the nanny once predicted?
She predicted that even if I owned someday, she said that it wouldn’t matter, that never in my life would I ever actually forget the fact that we were a family who rented.
In all truth, I thought it meant that he was the lord of the land—that that’s what the landlord was—that he was the lord of our property just the way there was a lord of the property in Miss Donnelly’s storybooks, and that the job of the ladies-in-waiting was to wait on him, to serve things to him, to bring him things on trays and to carry a cushion to him and to look pretty for him and to let him see you always standing there and waiting for him in gossamer.
Even when I was in the sandbox, even when my mind was just on being in the sandbox, even when this was the one thing which I was really supposed to be concentrating on, I still used to think to myself if whether I would look good enough if the landlord came over, or whether, if I got too dirty, if whether he would make us pack up and move out, make my mother and father have to pack up and move us all out because I myself had forgotten to keep myself clean enough and then the landlord had to come over by surprise and catch me at it, at that or at some other dirtiness I did not know I had done.
Sometimes my mother and father would call for me to come in and make myself presentable, that the landlord was coming over and that I had to be presentable—but you know what?
The most incredible thing.
He never came.
Or if he did, I for one wasn’t there for it when he did.
But I always felt I had to keep myself ready for me to be seen by the landlord. The day I killed Steven Adinoff, I think it was a day like this—I think it was a day when I had the idea that I had to keep myself ready for me to be seen by the landlord, or that my mother actually said something to me which made me specifically think so. But I cannot definitely say so with any absolute assurance.
It’s not important.
This isn’t important, either—but I just feel like stating it—namely, that there was a sense in which I always felt as if like we were getting warnings, that the landlord was always giving us different kinds of warnings, that he was always taking a look at something to see if it had reached the point where he had to go ahead and give us a warning about it, and then he did it, called my mother when there was not anybody else for him to call, and said to her instead to my father that this was a warning for us all.
The nanny used to say that she was at her wit’s end, that she was fresh out of patience, that she could take only so much, that she was just flesh and blood—that, believe it or not, there was a limit to everything.
I was always trying to make the grade with everybody.
I think the reason we didn’t have a dog was on account of the landlord in general, or on account of my father in particular—for the reason that he might trip over one—that my father on account of his shoe would—but this on my part is purest speculation, purest.
We just didn’t have a dog, and this is all that I can say I really know about it, this is all that I can say that I really know about it that we didn’t.
Not that Henry has ever had one, either.
But this is because we live in an apartment, because we live in the city in an apartment, not in some house in the suburbs not in New York City.
Besides, he isn’t interested, anyway.
If he wanted one, if Henry said he wanted one, believe you me, he would have one, no one would deny him.
It isn’t as if we have to worry about a lawn or anything, about a dog coming along and going ahead and going on it and wrecking it. I mean, it isn’t like this is the Lieblichs’, is it? Isn’t nothing like the Lieblichs’?
We didn’t have a lawn.
We didn’t have anything even like a lawn—we didn’t have anything like the way it was next door at the Lieblichs’, or even like the way it was at probably anybody else’s—our property was more or less a totally but totally different setup—more of a thing which didn’t have grass as such but which was just made up of the ground itself, plus with different sections or different shapes of concrete on it, sometimes even colored concrete, sometimes red-colored or brown-colored concrete for the effect, I think, of adding decoration—shapes of concrete, or of cement, which were specifically for the shape of the area they were there for, like for around the back door or for around the cellar door or for around the door of the garage—so that, in the case of the garage, for instance, a car could drive up into it or drive back out of it and have a nice smooth time of it, even though we personally didn’t actually ever have a car in it, in the garage that went with the house which we rented before my family had to move away somewhere to another house in Woodmere.
We had a washtub out there in it—and a clothes wringer to roll things through and squeeze the water out of the
m, to get a lot of the water mashed out of the soppy wash when you picked each of the things up out of the washtub to get them ready for the clothesline.
This is another thing the landlord had the concrete for, this is another thing—to hold the clothesline poles up straight and run the clothesline between them—places where there were shapes of concrete or of cement in the ground with holes running down in them so that you could stick the poles down in them and the holes would hold the poles up. Not that there was always a purpose, I don’t think, to all of the different places where there was concrete in the yard of our house. I have the feeling actually that there were some of them which were exclusively decorative, that there were some concrete places which were strictly for the decorative looks of them, especially the places which were colored places, or were painted.
I’ll tell you what I didn’t like.
I didn’t like the fact that from the Lieblichs’ property, that if you stood on the Lieblichs’ property, that all you had to do was look and you could see our clothesline, whereas it didn’t work vice versa, whereas the same thing didn’t work for you vice versa, whereas you couldn’t see anything which they would not have liked for us to if you were standing on our property and looking over at theirs from it. What I mean is this—what you saw when you looked from ours to theirs, it was great, it definitely but definitely looked just great—you couldn’t imagine how it could ever look any greater than that even if you tried, even if you sat right down and really tried.
I don’t know why we had concrete in our yard. The Lieblichs didn’t have to have any concrete in their yard. They just had a lawn in both the front of it and the back. If the Lieblichs had a cesspool, then you would never have known it—if they had to have one, then you certainly couldn’t have told it just by spotting a place where there was a kind of cover made up out of concrete over it and then you lifted it off and there was a steel lid underneath it and then under that, if you got that off, if you got the steel lid off, there was the opening of the cesspool itself, and then there was the cesspool if you looked down into it.
I didn’t know that we had one—I didn’t, I didn’t!—not until the day actually dawned when I did, and then, after that, you know what I used to think to myself?
A pool of cess.
I know it didn’t mean anything, but I couldn’t help myself, that’s what I used to think when I thought about it—that on our property there was a pool of cess and that the cess came from us, that the cess was coming from us, coming from something we did, coming from something which went on in our house.
In all honesty and sincerity, now that I look back on it, I think I have to say it makes me glad we never had one.
A dog.
I didn’t like the one which they had.
I don’t think you can like a dog whose name is a name like their dog had—whose name was Sir.
Sir.
It is really hard for me to imagine why anybody would name the dog they had Sir, why even rich people would.
So many things belonged to them. I used to think that the colored man belonged to them, that the colored man was theirs the same way the sandbox was. Of course, there is a sense in which he was. But now that I say this, then I suppose I have to also say that there is a sense in which even I was—plus also my mother and father—that there is a sense in w7hich we all belonged to the Lieblichs, and not just to Mr. and Mrs. Lieblich themselves but also to Andy Lieblich and to Iris Lieblich and Sir.
This is probably why, I’ll bet this is probably why it always felt so funny to me whenever the question of our property came up. For instance, suppose the nanny said that it was too late for Andy to come over to my property and that tomorrow was another day—or suppose the nanny asked me when was the next time going to be that the Blue Coal truck was coming over to my property so that Andy Lieblich could come out and see it—suppose the nanny said either one of these two things—because I will tell you something, I will tell you something, things like this, any of these things, they made me feel like somebody was catching me at something, like as if somebody was going to catch me at something, that I was doing something terrible and I wasn’t going to get away with it, that any minute they were going to come get me and catch me at it.
I wonder if Andy Lieblich really knew one way or the other—that we were renters, I wonder if he ever knew it—and if he did, if he did, then if he just acted like as if he didn’t just to save my feelings, just to spare my feelings—or if the idea was actually to make me feel worse.
Like someone saying that you look presentable when they know that you know you don’t look presentable—and when they know that you know that they are just saying this because they have to.
Doesn’t this always make you feel worse?
But maybe it could really make you feel better.
Doesn’t it all depend?
But depend on what, on what?
I could never make up my mind if they thought I should be ashamed of things for not owning things—or if I should be, because of it, be proud of myself.
It doesn’t pay to keep thinking about a thing like this.
I tell you, there were times when I thought to myself that just Andy Lieblich by himself could make us have to move out of our house and move away even if the landlord had not made up his mind for him to make us do it yet.
But when we did have to move away, it wasn’t on account of either one of them. It was not because of the landlord or because of Andy Lieblich.
What it was because of was Steven Adinoff. Not that he himself made us, of course.
It was just a question of my parents deciding to go somewhere where our family could start over again with a clean slate, with the slate wiped clean again, with nothing against us and no, you know, no hard feelings.
Whereas you know what?
Why would I want a clean slate?
Name me anything better than when I am talking about—namely, killing Steven Adinoff—even as to what it cost me—namely, my place in the sandbox.
But this is all getting us way off on a tangent, after we moved and all that. I will just say this for it, and then let it go at this—when we moved, the best car was a DeSoto, and the family which owned it, it lived all the way up at the other end of the block.
PLACE IS WHAT WE CALLED YOUR PRIVATES back then when I was six. Place was what Iris Lieblich called it when she got her underpants down off herself far enough and showed you where she did it when she did her siss. Or yours, yours was your place too—a boy’s place was a place too—and it even went for his—for Sir’s—his place once came into it too—because Iris Lieblich said that if it didn’t, that if Sir’s didn’t, then she wasn’t going to show me hers.
In all frankness and candor, I did not care that much about me seeing hers. So what, hers? Big deal, hers!
What I really cared about was Iris Lieblich seeing mine—or actually was me seeing Iris Lieblich see it.
Here’s what she said. “You can look at my place if I can look at yours.” This is what she said.
She never knew I would have liked it just as much if she just looked at mine.
She said, “You want to go over to your cellar and look?”
I always said yes whenever she asked. But it really wasn’t all that many times—I am making it sound like it was a million different times—when, if the truth be known, it was just twice, and the second one was with Sir along.
I don’t know what the name of their maid was. Actually, she hardly ever came up in anything. The only times I ever really got a halfway good look at her were through the screen door or through the storm door there inside of the Lieblichs’ garage when the maid was inside at the door that you went through to go from the Lieblichs’ garage on into the inside of their house—when she was waiting, when that’s where the Lieblichs’ maid was there waiting there to get the things back from the colored man because the colored man was all through with them or where she was waiting to watch him pick them up from where she had left the
m on the doorstep for him—the rags and the whisk broom and the chamois cloth and the scrub brush and the can of Old Dutch Cleanser—and sometimes the cans he needed for Simonizing. This was when I saw the maid—because the maid was watching him, too.
Believe you me, I tried to always watch the colored man every chance I got—unless, of course, it was a time when a chance at the sandbox had come up or was going to come up and I had to get ready for it, had to get my thoughts ready again for me to play in the sandbox and be the best at it.
He went in there for him to pick the things up or for him to go put them away—and stayed in there for him to change from shirt to shirt.
He never told me his name.
Was it because I was a child?
Nothing’s changed. I am still the boy I have been telling you about—namely, the boy who was always outdoing all of the rest of them, boys first and grown-ups second.
I don’t remember how I did it anywhere else except in the sandbox, but I am sure that I must have also done it when I was there in Miss Donnelly’s class, which was the class for the first-graders at the school where I went, which was named P.S. #7.
She was so tall and so white and had such nice dark hair.
Everything about her was everything I loved—it was all so nice—the way Miss Donnelly always smelled, for one thing, and was always saying gossamer, for another—like this, like when she would be reading to us from one of the storybooks and would say to us, “See, boys and girls?”
Not russet, not muslin, not homespun.
She would say to us, “See, boys and girls?”
She would say to us, “Gossamer—say gossamer. Can you all of you say gossamer, boys and girls?”
We all of us said it. I say I was the best at saying it. I was always the best at sitting there saying gossamer for Miss Donnelly when I was in the first grade.
She would say to us, “Not russet, not muslin, not homespun.” She would turn the storybook around, press her finger to the picture, and show us the picture, and say to us, “Say gossamer. Say lady-in-waiting. Can you say gossamer and say lady-in-waiting, boys and girls?”