Well, the Little Dirty Girl was dirty; she was the dirtiest eight-year-old I’ve ever seen. Her black hair was a long tangle. Her shoes were down-at-heel, the laces broken, her white (or rather grey) socks belling limply out over her ankles. Her nose was running. Her pink dress, so ancient that it showed her knees, was limp and wrinkled and the knees themselves had been recently skinned. She look as if she had slid halfway down Volunteer Park’s steepest dirtiest hill on her panties and then rolled end-over-end the rest of the way. Besides all this, there were snot-and-tear-marks on her face (which was reddened and sallow and looked as if she’d been crying) and she looked – well, what can I say? Neglected. Not poor, though someone had dressed her rather eccentrically, not physically unhealthy or underfed, but messy, left alone, ignored, kicked out, bedraggled, like a cat caught in a thunderstorm.
She looked (as I said) tear-stained, and yet came up to my shopping cart with perfect composure and kept me calm company for a minute or so. Then she pointed to a box of Milky Way candy bars on a shelf above my head, saying ‘I like those,’ in a deep, gravelly voice that suggested a bad cold.
I ignored the hint. No, that’s wrong, it wasn’t a hint; it was merely a social, adult remark, self-contained and perfectly emotionless, as if she had long ago given up expecting that telling anyone she wanted something would result in getting it. Since my illness I have developed a fascination with the sheer, elastic wealth of children’s bodies, the exhaustless, energetic health they don’t know they have and which I so acutely and utterly miss, but I wasn’t for an instant tempted to feel this way about the Little Dirty Girl. She had been through too much. She had Resources. If she showed no fear of me, it wasn’t because she trusted me but because she trusted nothing. She had no expectations and no hopes. Nonetheless she attached herself to me and my shopping cart and accompanied me down two more aisles, and there seemed to be hope in that. So I made the opening, social, adult remark:
‘What’s your name?’
‘A. R.’ Those are the initials on my handbag. I looked at her sharply but she stared levelly back, unembarrassed, self-contained, unexpressive.
‘I don’t believe that,’ I said finally.
‘I could tell you lots of things you wouldn’t believe,’ said the Little Dirty Girl.
She followed me up to the cashier and as I was putting out my small packages one by one by one, I saw her lay out on the counter a Milky Way bar and a nickel, the latter fetched from somewhere in that short-skirted, cap-sleeved dress. The cashier, a middle-aged woman, looked at me and I back at her, I laid out two dimes next to the nickel. She really did want it! As I was going into the logistics of How Many Short Trips from the Cart to the Car and How Many Long Ones from the Car to the Kitchen, the Little Dirty Girl spoke: ‘I can carry that.’ (Gravelly and solemn.)
She added hoarsely, ‘I bet I live near you.’
‘Well, I bet you don’t,’ I said.
She didn’t answer, but followed me to the parking lot, one proprietary hand on the cart, and when I unlocked my car door, she darted past me and started carrying packages from the cart to the front seat. I can’t move fast enough to escape these children. She sat there calmly as I got in. Then she said, wiping her nose on the back of her hand:
‘I’ll help you take your stuff out when you get home.’
Now I know that sort of needy offer and I don’t like it. Here was a Little Dirty Girl offering to help me, and smelling in close quarters as if she hadn’t changed her underwear for days: demandingness, neediness, more annoyance. Then she said in her flat, crow’s voice: ‘I’ll do it and go away. I won’t bother you.’
Well, what can you do? My heart misgave me. I started the car and we drove the five minutes to my house in silence, whereupon she grabbed all the packages at once (to be useful) and some slipped back on the car seat; I think this embarrassed her. But she got my things up the stairs to the porch in only two trips and put them on the unpainted porch rocker, from where I could pick them up one by one, and there we stood.
Why speechless? Was it honesty? I wanted to thank her, to act decent, to make that sallow face smile. I wanted to tell her to go away, that I wouldn’t let her in, that I’d lock the door. But all I could think of to say was, ‘What’s your name really?’ and the wild thing said stubbornly, ‘A. R.’ and when I said, ‘No, really,’ she cried ‘A. R.!’ and facing me with her eyes screwed up, shouted something unintelligible, passionate and resentful, and was off up the street. I saw her small figure turning down one of the cross-streets that meets mine at the top of the hill. Seattle is grey and against the massed storm clouds to the north her pink dress stood out vividly. She was going to get rained on. Of course.
I turned to unlock my front door and a chunky, slow, old cat, a black-and-white tom called Williamson who lives two houses down, came stiffly out from behind an azalea bush, looked slit-eyed (bored) about him, noticed me (his pupils dilated with instant interest) and bounded across the parking strip to my feet. Williamson is a banker-cat, not really portly or dignified but simply too lazy and unwieldy to bother about anything much. Either something scares him and he huffs under the nearest car or he scrounges. Like all kitties he bumbled around my ankles, making steam-engine noises. I never feed him. I don’t pet him or talk to him. I even try not to look at him. I shoved him aside with one foot and opened the front door; Williamson backed off, raised his fat, jowled face and began the old cry: Mrawr! Mrawr! I booted him ungently off the porch before he could trot into my house with me, and as he slowly prepared to attack the steps (he never quite makes it) locked myself in. And the Little Dirty Girl’s last words came suddenly clear:
I’ll be back.
Another cat. There are too many in this story but I can’t help it. The Little Dirty Girl was trying to coax the neighbor’s superbly elegant half-Siamese out from under my car a few days later, an animal tiger-marked on paws and tail and as haughty-and-mysterious-looking as all cats are supposed to be, though it’s really only the long Siamese body and small head. Ma’amselle (her name) still occasionally leaps on to my dining room windowsill and stares in (the people who lived here before me used to feed her). I was coming back from a walk, the Little Dirty Girl was on her knees, and Ma’amselle was under the car; when the Little Dirty Girl saw me she stood up, and Ma’amselle flashed Egyptianly through the laurel hedge and was gone. Someone had washed the Little Dirty Girl’s pink dress (though a few days back, I’m afraid) and made a half-hearted attempt to braid her hair: there were barrettes and elastic somewhere in the tangle. Her cold seemed better. When it rains in August our summer can change very suddenly to early fall, and this was a chilly day; the Little Dirty Girl had nothing but her mud-puddle-marked dress between her thin skin and the Seattle air. Her cold seemed better, though, and her cheeks were pink with stooping. She said, in the voice of a little girl this time and not a raven, ‘She had blue eyes.’
‘She’s Siamese,’ I said. ‘What’s your name?’
‘A. R.’
‘Now look, I don’t–’
‘It’s A. R.!’ She was getting loud and stolid again. She stood there with her skinny, scabbed knees showing from under her dress and shivered in the unconscious way kids do who are used to it; I’ve seen children do it on the Lower East Side in New York because they had no winter coat (in January). I said, ‘You come in.’ She followed me up the steps – warily, I think – but when we got inside her expression changed, it changed utterly; she clasped her hands and said with radiant joy, ‘Oh, they’re beautiful!’
These were my astronomical photographs. I gave her my book of microphotographs (cells, crystals, hailstones) and went into the kitchen to put up water for tea; when I got back she’d dropped the book on my old brown-leather couch and was walking about with her hands clasped in front of her and that same look of radiant joy on her face. I live in an ordinary, shabby frame house that has four rooms and a finished attic; the only unusual thing about it is the number of books and pictures crammed in every wh
ich way among the (mostly second-hand) furniture. There are Woolworth frames for the pictures and cement-block bookcases for the books; nonetheless the Little Dirty Girl was as awed as if she’d found Aladdin’s Cave.
She said, ‘It’s so…sophisticated!’
Well, there’s no withstanding that. Even if you think: what do kids know? She followed me into the kitchen where I gave her a glass of milk and a peach (she sipped and nibbled). She thought the few straggling rose bushes she could see in the back garden were wonderful. She loved my old brown refrigerator; she said, ‘It’s so big! And such a color!’ Then she said anxiously, ‘Can I see the upstairs?’ and got excited over the attic eaves which were also ‘so big’ (wallboard and dirty pink paint) to the point that she had to run and stand under one side and then run across the attic and stand under the other. She liked the ‘view’ from the bedroom (the neighbor’s laurel hedge and a glimpse of someone else’s roof) but my study (books, a desk, a glimpse of the water) moved her so deeply and painfully that she only stood still in the center of the room, struggling with emotion, her hands again clasped in front of her. Finally she burst out, ‘It’s so…swanky!’ Here my kettle screamed and when I got back she had gotten bold enough to touch the electric typewriter (she jumped when it turned itself on) and then walked about slowly, touching the books with the tips of her fingers. She was brave and pushed the tabs on the desk lamp (though not hard enough to turn it on) and boldly picked up my little mailing scale. As she did so, I saw that there were buttons missing from the back of her dress; I said, ‘A. R., come here.’
She dropped the scale with a crash. ‘I didn’t mean it!’ Sulky again.
‘It’s not that; it’s your buttons,’ I said, and hauled her to the study closet where I keep a Band-Aid box full of extras; two were a reasonable match: little, flat-topped, pearlized pink things you can hardly find anymore. I sewed them on to her, not that it helped much, and the tangles of her hair kept falling back and catching. What a forest of lost barrettes and snarls of old rubber bands! I lifted it all a little grimly, remembering the pain of combing out. She sat flatly, all adoration gone:
‘You can’t comb my hair against my will; you’re too weak.’
‘I wasn’t going to,’ I said.
‘That’s what you say,’ the L.D.G. pointed out.
‘If I try, you can stop me,’ I said. After a moment she turned around, flopped down on my typing chair, and bent her head. So I fetched my old hairbrush (which I haven’t used for years) and did what I could with the upper layers, managing even to smooth out some of the lower ones, though there were places near her neck nearly as matted and tangled as felt; I finally had to cut some pieces out with my nail scissors.
L.D.G. didn’t shriek (as I used to, insisting my cries were far more artistic than those of the opera singers on the radio on Sundays) but finally asked for the comb herself and winced silently until she was decently braided, with rubber bands on the ends. We put the rescued barrettes in her shirt pocket. Without that cloud of hair her sallow face and pitch-ball eyes looked bigger, and oddly enough, younger; she was no more a wandering Fury with the voice of a Northwest-coast raven but a reasonably human (though draggly) little girl.
I said, ‘You look nice.’
She got up, went into the bathroom, and looked at herself in the mirror. Then she said calmly, ‘No, I don’t. I look conventional.’
‘Conventional?’ said I. She came out of the bathroom, flipping back her new braids.
‘Yes, I must go.’
And as I was wondering at her tact (for anything after this would have been an anti-climax):
‘But I shall return.’
‘That’s fine,’ I said, ‘but I want to have grown-up manners with you, A. R. Don’t ever come before ten in the morning or if my car isn’t here or if you can hear my typewriter going. In fact, I think you had better call me on the telephone first, the way other people do.’
She shook her head sweetly. She was at the front door before I could follow her, peering out. It was raining again. I saw that she was about to step out into it and cried ‘Wait, A. R.!’ hurrying as fast as I could down the cellar steps to the garage, from where I could get easily to my car. I got from the back seat the green plastic poncho I always keep there and she didn’t protest when I dumped it over her and put the hood over her head, though the poncho was much too big and even dragged on the ground in the front and back. She said only, ‘Oh, it’s swanky. Is it from the Army?’ So I had the satisfaction of seeing her move up the hill as a small, green tent instead of a wet, pink draggle. Though with her tea-party manners she hadn’t really eaten anything; the milk and peach were untouched. Was it wariness? Or did she just not like milk and peaches? Remembering our first encounter, I wrote on the pad by the telephone, which is my shopping list:
Milky Way Bars
And then:
I doz.
She came back. She never did telephone in advance. It was all right, though; she had the happy faculty of somehow turning up when I wasn’t working and wasn’t busy and was thinking of her. But how often is an invalid busy or working? We went on walks or stayed home and on these occasions the business about the Milky Ways turned out to be a brilliant guess, for never have I met a child with such a passion for junk food. A. R.’s formal, disciplined politeness in front of milk or fruit was like a cat’s in front of the mass-produced stuff; faced with jam, honey, or marmalade, the very ends of her braids crisped and she attacked like a cat flinging itself on a fish; I finally had to hide my own supplies in self-defense. Then on relatively good days it was ice cream or Sara Lee cake, and on bad ones Twinkies or Mallomars, Hostess cupcakes, Three Musketeers bars, marshmallow cream, maraschino chocolates, Turkish taffy, saltwater taffy, or – somewhat less horribly – Doritos, reconstituted potato chips, corn chips, pretzels (fat or thin), barbecued corn chips, or onion-flavored corn chips, anything like that. She refused nuts and hated peanut butter. She also talked continuously while eating, largely in polysyllables, which made me nervous as I perpetually expected her to choke, but she never did. She got no fatter. To get her out of the house and so away from food, I took her to an old-fashioned five-and-ten nearby and bought her shoelaces. Then I took her down to watch the local ship-canal bridge open up (to let a sailboat through) and we cheered. I took her to a department store (just to look; ‘I know consumerism is against your principles,’ she said with priggish and mystifying accuracy) and bought her a pin shaped like a ladybug. She refused to go to the zoo (‘An animal jail!’) but allowed as the rose gardens (‘A plant hotel’) were both pleasant and educational. A ride on the zoo merry-go-round excited her to the point of screaming and running around dizzily in circles for half an hour afterwards, which embarrassed me – but then no one paid the slightest attention; I suppose shrieky little girls had happened there before, though the feminine youth of Seattle, in its Mary Jane shoes and pink pocketbooks, rather pointedly ignored her. The waterfall in the downtown park, on the contrary, sobered her up; this is a park built right on top of a crossing over one of the city’s highways and is usually full of office-workers; a walkway leads not only up to but actually behind the waterfall. A. R. wandered among the beds of bright flowers and passed, stooping, behind the water, trying to stick her hand in the falls; she came out saying:
‘It looks like an old man’s beard’ (pointing to one of the ragged Skid Row men who was sleeping on the grass in the rare, Northern sunlight). Then she said, ‘No, it looks like a lady’s dress without any seams.’
Once, feeling we had become friends enough for it, I ran her a bath and put her clothes through the basement washer-dryer; her splashings and yellings in the bathroom were terrific and afterwards she flashed nude about the house, hanging out of windows, embellishing her strange, raucous shouts with violent jerkings and boundings-about that I think were meant for dancing. She even ran out the back door naked and had circled the house before I – voiceless with calling, ‘A. R., come back here!’ – had presence
of mind enough to lock both the front and back doors after she had dashed in and before she could get out again to make the entire tour de Seattle in her jaybird suit. Then I had to get her back into that tired pink dress, which (when I ironed it) had finally given up completely, despite the dryer, and sagged into two sizes too big for her.
Unless A. R. was youthifying.
I got her into her too-large pink dress, her baggy underwear, her too-large shoes, her new pink socks (which I had bought for her) and said:
‘A. R., where do you live?’
Crisp and shining, the Little Clean Girl replied, ‘My dear, you always ask me that.’ ‘And you never answer,’ said I.
‘O yes I do,’ said the Little Clean Girl. ‘I live up the hill and under the hill and over the hill and behind the hill.’
‘That’s no answer,’ said I.
‘Wupf merble,’ said she (through a Mars Bar) and then, more intelligibly, ‘If you knew, you wouldn’t want me.’
‘I would so!’ I said.
L.D.G. – now L.C.G. – regarded me thought fully. She scratched her ear, getting, I noticed, chocolate in her hair. (She was a fast worker.) She said, ‘You want to know. You think you ought to know. You think you have a right. When I leave you’ll wait until I’m out of sight and then you’ll follow me in the car. You’ll sneak by the curb way behind me so I won’t notice you. You’ll wait until I climb the steps of a house – like that big yellow house with the fuchsias in the yard where you think I live and you’ll watch me go in. And then you’ll ring the bell and when the lady comes to the door you’ll say, “Your little daughter and I have become friends,” but the lady will say, “I haven’t got any little daughter,” and then you’ll know I fooled you. And you’ll get scared. So don’t try.’
The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories Page 129