Peru

by Gordon Lish

  It just feels to me like someone did—but in all actuality, it is just probably a sensation which I have, the feeling that when we were doing it someone came down and saw what we did. It’s probably just from the fact of me knowing that there is a sense in which there was someone else there, but someone only in the sense of a dog, that is.

  However, I have to say that there was something just like us as human beings in him, the way Sir was looking at you and lying back and looking at you when he was letting himself be looked at by you—and you have to remember, don’t forget to remember, Sir was, this was, he was just a dog.

  You know something?

  It really is your place, isn’t it?

  Your location, I mean.

  Where the you of who you are is.

  Or were.

  It was built up a little bit with concrete on the ground all around it, which must have been for the reason of keeping rain out, snow out, plus mud and what have you.

  I believe in God.

  I do not think there is anyone who doesn’t believe in God. I believe that not believing in God is out of the question, that it cannot be done, that it’s all talk, that it’s got nothing to do with anything except the sentence that says it.

  I think I said that we ourselves did not have a dog, but I think that the Aaronsons did—Chester, if they had one, that this was his name, that his name was Chester, that this was the name which I would say that their dog had.

  I don’t know why they would have named their dog that, why people like the Lieblichs would have gone ahead and named their dog that, how they could have picked a name which was so terrible for a dog, a name like Sir and not a name like Chester. Because in every other respect, because in every other last respect, the Lieblichs did not do things except in the way that they were done by the very best of people. To me, the Lieblichs were just like the people who you saw when Miss Donnelly came to a picture and turned around the storybook for you to see it—to me, the Lieblichs were like the people in the storybooks in the pictures, the only big difference being that they were made up, that the people in the pictures were all made up, whereas the Lieblichs were not people who lived in towers and turrets and you had to go over a drawbridge to get to them.

  But you know what I used to sometimes see happening?

  In my mind, you know what I used to?

  The Lieblichs coming down out of towers and out of turrets and eating the castle they lived in as they came down out of them, reaching their hands out and digging out whole handfuls of it out of the walls and actually eating them, eating whole handfuls of walls and of floors and of stairways and so on, and then me grabbing into different things too, me eating their castle too, and it tasting to me just like All Sorts—like everything the castle is built of is candy.

  If I could understand her, then you can understand me.

  Listen, for instance, to these—“Tomorrow is another day,” “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” “Every dog has his day,” “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”

  There was a perfect understanding, the perfection of understanding between her and me, the nanny.

  Chopped like a little trench of various different cuts down into the top of his head, and then saw how hair stayed stuck in it.

  Also a place on his face.

  Used a hoe.

  Did the whole thing with a hoe.

  With a toy one.

  Saw how the hair stayed down in it like as if it was glued down in it, like it had been dented down into it and got caught in his head. Whereas the thing on the roof, it didn’t look like something which was actually happening to that part of anybody—to anybody’s head or skull as such. It was more a question of what was going on where their clothing was—tops and bottoms made out of what looked to me like white stuff, like big loose pajamas made out of some kind of funny heavy white stuff, like out of like sailcloth or out of what Florence sits here and calls duck.

  But this is not taking into account the fact of the little portable we had where we were packing Henry up—namely, the fact that it is a perfectly good television set but that it is just a black-and-white one and not color.

  That was June.

  This is August.

  So guess who comes home any day now.

  Go put like with like, it never quits—a place for everything, and everything put in its place.

  I acted like I didn’t really know he was dead until she came and told me, but I really knew he was, I really did. Even before I got out, even before I put down the handle of the hoe—it was just the handle of it by then because by then the business end of it was broken off of it—even before then, I knew that Steven Adinoff was all over and done with—I knew it even before I did or didn’t get my shoes and socks back on and went ahead home to my house and so forth. But when she came and told me, for her sake, it was for her sake that I acted like I was finding it out for the first time. I finally got down off of the toilet and went down the stairs and listened to her tell it to me like as if I was actually hearing something which I myself did not actually already know of.

  In all candor, I can tell you why I did—which is that I just automatically knew that this was her due as a mother, that she as a mother had the right to feel that the information which she was imparting to me was all hers for her to impart to me in and of itself.

  I think that my behavior was part and parcel of my idea of me always having to keep on presenting myself as presentable—I think that it was an outgrowth of the whole thing of this particular concept of myself as such.

  She actually said it.

  She said that she wanted to be the first one to tell me. She actually said to me something along the lines of this—like something like “Let me be the first one to tell you,” and then so on and so forth—namely, that I had killed her little boy etc., something more or less like that.

  However, I think you could say that I didn’t really go along with it as an absolute fact until there was some sign of it which was forthcoming from the Lieblichs.

  It’s just that there was a way in which things weren’t this or that until I saw the Lieblichs do something in a way which said to me it was. Their house, for instance, my idea was that it was what a house was and that what we had, on the other hand, was something different from that, not a house in the sense of the idea of something which people actually lived in as such but of just something which people could go inside of when they came in from somewhere else. Oh, the way it was wood, their place, that and that it was painted white and up over the front door there was a dark green archway that went up and over it in front of the house, plus dark green shutters for every last window, for even the special little ones which the Lieblichs’ house had in certain special places of it—and I don’t want to leave out the fact that they had little screens for those little windows and also little storm windows for those little windows, and I think there were some of them up under the roof which were actually round windows or, even better, oval.

  But if we ourselves were friends, then why was it that his parents didn’t want to be friends with my parents? Isn’t it the normal thing for the parents to be friends when this is what the children are? But Andy Lieblich’s father, for instance, I don’t think I ever heard Andy Lieblich’s father lean out of the car and ask my own father if he wanted to come along when Mrs. Lieblich backed the Buick out and then drove Mr. Lieblich to get the train at the railroad station and my own father, mine, with his shoe, had to walk.

  We probably weren’t really friends.

  We probably weren’t even friends.

  He never once ever came over to my house when I asked him to, and he never once asked for me ever to come over to theirs. But he always said that it was because of the nanny, whereas look—the nanny didn’t stop Iris Lieblich, did she?

  The thing is to stick to the sandbox.

  It is all of it only the sandbox.

  My God, my God, I keep thinking of all of the things which I haven’t even begun to really
think about yet—where the good sand was, for instance—just to begin with, the whole thing of where the good sand was, for instance, of how I always knew where the good sand was, for instance, and of how I always turned my back to him and then dug down for it—still feeling, me even still feeling—oh, it’s amazing, it’s amazing—that I can sometimes still feel it under my fingernails, the feeling I can still sometimes feel myself get under there of the grains of sand pushing up against them from up under there, of granules of it still jammed under them, still stuck in there up under them, and of them pushing up my fingernails.

  God love him, he is coming home almost any day now.

  I PERSONALLY DON’T SEE THE POINT of Color. What you can see in color you can see in black-and-white. You know what I say? I say that they are going to have to come up with a much better reason than just of color itself if they are ever going to get me to go ahead and lay out that kind of money for just a television.

  Not that Florence and I could not afford color for ourselves if in and of itself we wanted to. Believe you me, if you can manage the tariff for summer camp every summer for the past six summers, then you can certainly handle what they get for the average television with color on it, the price is that measly by comparison with what they hit you up for just for one summer of sending your son to summer camp, let alone compared to what it costs you from month to month for you to pay the maintenance on a Manhattan apartment, on even a, you know, dirt-cheap one, and this one is far from a dirt-cheap one, I can tell you, I can tell you—because you do not get a dirt-cheap one off upper Fifth Avenue even if the building itself is not entirely what certain people would have the gall to tell you they do not regard as one of the best ones.

  I thought the reason which she wanted Sir along for was because she was scared of going down into a cellar from when she had gone down into ours with me the other time. In all honesty and sincerity, I did not even guess even slightly to the contrary. Who could even have dreamed otherwise? Plus which, how is a six-year-old actually supposed to be ready for them to have a thing which comes out of them like that when he never had a dog of his own?

  I am going to tell you something.

  Sir’s thing—I think of it, and then guess what I think of the next instant.

  I think of it, and then the next thing which I find myself in my mind thinking of is of his lip. Or guess whose foot.

  There wasn’t any, there wasn’t a floor as such down there—it was just the way it was in our yard, it was just packed-down dirt the way it was in our yard—except for right around the furnace itself, where there was like this special section of concrete around it instead of just the packed-down dirt around it all by itself. Or cement.

  In the sense that you got down into our cellar from going down into it from the outside of the house itself, then it seems to me that you cannot, in this particular sense, say that there was ever actually any of the Lieblichs who were ever really inside of my house. Not that it is any different now, not that this is any different from how it is right here for me now in this very building, for instance—namely, the fact that being neighbors, the fact that you live next door to somebody else, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to end up socializing with each other or even theoretically acknowledging each other when you just happen to run into each other in some other context, even just downstairs on the street in front of the building on the sidewalk.

  It was a big thing for me, being the boy who lived next door to them—and it still is, it still is. When all is said and done, there is no question but that you have to see things in proportion and do your best to take the bitter with the sweet. Thanks to the Lieblichs, I was lucky enough to be given the opportunity to be exposed to things which have gone on to continue to stand me in good stead ever since. But like they say, youth is wasted on youth. It’s a crime what we all of us take for granted. Make no mistake of it, poverty can be a blessing—not that we were anywhere close to being actually poor people as such. We probably just weren’t as well off as they were—that’s probably all we were. I mean, how can children in and of themselves have any real basis for comprehending these things? Who knows but that it just could have been that God just happened to give me parents who just weren’t as extravagant or as spendthrift as other parents were—maybe mine, maybe my particular parents, just weren’t the kind of people who showed off the way most people did.

  For instance, they went to the Woodmere Academy—Andy Lieblich and Iris Lieblich went to the Woodmere Academy and I myself went, as you know, to P.S. #7—except where were you going to get a better teacher than Miss Donnelly was as a teacher at even twice the price?

  But I’ll tell you something which still bothers me and which even to this day still gives me the wackiest feeling of things always being just a little bit always off, of things forever looking to you like they are just a certain amount out of line, of things never really coming together the way they are meant to come together and match up exactly right. Namely, it was when Miss Donnelly read us the story of the Three Little Pigs and anybody could tell that the moral of the story was that bricks were the best thing for you to have your house made out of, but it was our house which was and not the Lieblichs’ which was—whereas theirs was just made out of wood like the house of one of the, you know, the foolish pigs.

  On the other hand, not to think I do not realize that it was just a children’s story in a children’s storybook, and that no one can come along and just pick up and go from it, go from the question of total make-believe to the question of real houses for real people. Still and all, I told you the truth when I told you how it made me feel back then—and I’ll tell you something else, which is that the way you felt when you were six is the way you still feel now. Getting older doesn’t get you any farther away from the feeling—it just gets you farther away from telling the truth about it to anybody, plus probably even to you yourself.

  I would not have traded anything for Miss Donnelly, you could not have gotten me to trade anything for Miss Donnelly, you couldn’t have paid me to take anything for Miss Donnelly, not even for love or money.

  The smell of the hankie she kept pinned to her bodice, the look of the finger she pressed down on the page, the sound of Miss Donnelly saying, “See the lady-in-waiting, everybody? See the lady in gossamer, everybody? Say lady-in-waiting, everybody. Everybody say gossamer.”

  She said it was her bodice.

  She talked about it like this. She put her hand on it and she called it this. She said the place where she pinned the hankie she had on, it was called her bodice.

  She said, “Boys and girls, can you say bodice?”

  She wore things with pleats over it, things with pleats and tucks and darts and ruffles over it—things like lace and smocking and rick-rack over it—and she had clean flat long straight bony ghostly chalky fingers that did not taper and that had no nail polish on them and that looked to you like light was coming right through them and like they themselves could go ahead and go right through things.

  It felt like as if I was going to kiss her whenever she came close to me, like as if I was swooning and wasn’t going to be able to stop myself, like I was just plummeting in toward her in her general direction and was going to have to fall over on her and collapse on her and have to kiss her whether I liked it or not, that it wasn’t up to me anymore, that I was just woozy and was just a thing and was just overpowered by it. You know what it felt to me like whenever I was up close to Miss Donnelly and smelled the lilac smell which was always coming off of her? It felt to me just like it did with the colored man and just like it did with Andy Lieblich—it felt to me like I had to show them that I adored them, that everything depended on it, that I might die if I didn’t, be lost if I didn’t, be left alone, get loose, drift away, scatter, vanish, clatter off in some different direction, somewhere where they weren’t.

  She said that she just sprinkled a dab of it on it in the morning, that she just dashed a dab of it on her hankie in the morning, that she
just spattered a drop of it on it, just moistened a fresh hankie with a little spattering of it—of lilac cologne or of lilac toilet water, depending on what she still had any left of from what the boys and girls of last year’s first grade had had the dearness and had had the kindness to get their mothers and fathers to go get for her as a fragrance for last Christmas.

  I sat way up in the front and looked up at her.

  I heard every word which Miss Donnelly said.

  Miss Donnelly always had a different word.

  Muslin.

  Russet.

  Homespun.

  Gossamer.

  You know what? I used to think that if you could just get inside of the Lieblichs’ house so that you could actually be there inside of it when Mr. Lieblich and Mrs. Lieblich were in there talking to each other, that what you would hear them saying to each other would be all made up out of words like this—muslin, russet, homespun, gossamer. Not of just Reg, just Phil.

  Which reminds me to tell you what Steven Adinoff talked like—because Steven Adinoff had a harelip and Steven Adinoff nyalked nyike nyis.

  I DON’T KNOW WHERE HE WENT TO SCHOOL. All I know is that it wasn’t at P.S. #7. Maybe it was the Woodmere Academy, maybe he went to the Woodmere Academy, but I would definitely but definitely doubt it, I would definitely have my doubts about it. His mother was not any help on this, either—she did not shed any light on this, either—on where Steven Adinoff lived and on which school he went to—except that maybe he did not live in Woodmere at all, or go to school in Woodmere, either—it could have been any one of the other towns I named, he could have lived in and gone to school in any one of them, plus even in one which I did not even know about even—because I only remember Lynbrook and Lawrence and Cedarhurst and Hewlett and Inwood and Valley Stream.