Hardly Children

by Laura Adamczyk

  Instead, the man was tall and slender, with a head of thick, wiry hair that might have been brown or black, his eyes no color I could name.

  Um, excuse me, Ronnie said. She used her adult voice with her nose up, hands folded in her lap.

  Moving only his head, the man looked down to regard us, his face the gray of a stone worn smooth by water.

  Girls, he said. As though he were about to address us. Girls … Or with merely a sense of recognition, as though we were a pack of gazelles and he a man viewing us through a lens, pointing a long, thin finger out: I see … girls. Just there. And he said, Girls, not Girl, which is how I know that I was not alone that day, probably never alone in that room, despite my wont to blot out Mary and Ronnie and even the man himself from any of these memories.

  What have you girls got there? the man asked, nodding down to the floor.

  I looked to see what was in my hand.

  Cars, Mary or I said, while Ronnie shot me or her or us a reproachful look.

  Excuse me, who are you? Ronnie asked. She had her sassy mouth on, but was still trying to be kind, as though the man were one of the rich neighbor kids who wouldn’t play with us.

  I’m the man of the house. He opened his arms, like Moses parting the Red Sea.

  Ronnie raised an eyebrow.

  I’m a friend of Mrs. Bullock’s, he said.

  Mrs. Bullock was our great-grandmother. And she did not have any friends. Even then we knew she didn’t have friends. We knew that sometimes the children from down the road brought her tomatoes from their garden and that sometimes on the mail lady’s day off, she would stop by with her kids and visit and make tea for all of them, while my grandmother would tell her about the three of us and my cousins and Bo and Hope and Marlena on Days of Our Lives, all in the same breath like those characters were real and were hers and were part of her life.

  Now, girls, you should be playing with dolls, not these cars. Where’d you get those?

  Great-Grandma, I said.

  Great-Grandma?

  Mrs. Bullock, I said.

  He nodded slowly, looking from Ronnie to me then beyond us to Mary or the carpet where she might have once been. Looking back to me, he said, Might I see one of those cars? He leaned down, opening his hand.

  In one memory, I never get any closer than this, than placing the tiny blue shell of a tin car in his palm. The man was nowhere close to my great-grandma’s age, yet his skin had the same watery translucence, skin that I knew would be soft and loose upon touching it. I placed the car in his palm. I placed the car tire-side down, as if it might drive up his wrist then forearm then shoulder and into his ear. His fingers closed around it.

  Woo-ee, the man whistled, holding it up. That’s a real beaut’. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a fine automobile. Such a fine, tasty-looking car.

  Tasty? Ronnie said.

  The man put the car in his mouth. He clamped his lips down and made his mouth big with chewing. He chewed and chewed and then swallowed, making it disappear.

  Ahh, the man said. Thank you, my dear. He smiled at me, showing his teeth then clicking his jaw.

  I couldn’t help but laugh.

  Ronnie shook her head at me. He didn’t really eat it, she said.

  I certainly did, he said, showing us his palms. A man’s gotta eat. Especially in these hard times. So, so hungry. He rubbed his stomach.

  I thought about the tin of saltines in the pantry downstairs. I thought about the way Grandma overfed us, but how we ate and ate. The desperate zeal from never having enough. Chicken fingers, macaroni and cheese, bananas, ice-cream bars, sliced peaches with sugar sprinkled on top. One thing after another. Then mints and gum and tea after it was all over, as though we were adult guests and not children, not little bodies with little mouths and stomachs to fill.

  Grandma has some snacks, I said.

  No. No, Ronnie said, turning to me. Mom had recently become miserly, overly careful with food, and Ronnie had followed suit, tinfoiling anything beyond a spoonful that she hadn’t finished.

  We don’t even know if he’s Grandma’s friend.

  He’s hungry, and Grandma barely eats anything.

  Just because you don’t see her eat doesn’t mean she doesn’t.

  I sighed.

  Girls, he said again, girls. This time a reproach, this time a preface, an open, hanging sigh. Girls, the man said, I’ve got an itch.

  Instinctively, I scratched the back of my neck.

  I’m just itching.

  So, scratch yourself, Ronnie said.

  It’s no good, he shrugged. I itch all over. I scratch one place, and it starts an itch somewhere else. It never ends.

  That sucks, Ronnie said.

  Ronnie, I hissed, poking her side. We weren’t supposed to say suck.

  Ronnie? he asked, raising an eyebrow.

  Veronica, she corrected.

  Veronica, he said, and, looking in my direction, asked, And who might we be?

  Frannie, I said.

  Frances, Ronnie corrected.

  And Mary, I said to Mary beside me, who might have no longer been beside me.

  Ronnie and Frannie and Mary, he said rhythmically. It’s like a little song. I’m sorry, he said, putting a hand to his chest, Veronica and Frances and Mary.

  Ronnie smirked.

  Now, girls, he said. About that itch. He stretched out his right leg. It’s my ankle.

  You can scratch it, Ronnie told him.

  Can’t reach, he replied, and he made a show of stretching down and not being able to get there.

  You can so, she said. Just bend your leg.

  Can’t. Too stiff, these old bones. He wrinkled up his face, leaning back.

  I scooted forward.

  Frannie.

  I gave her a look, then turned back and scratched at the slice of pale skin between his sock and pant leg.

  Oh, oh, he said, closing his eyes. You’re an expert scratcher, Frannie. You’ve got it. But then he dropped his leg and put up the other. He opened his eyes: Now it’s my other ankle. He shook his foot at Ronnie.

  She rolled her eyes and moved forward, scratching at him as one might a stray dog.

  Oh oh oh! he said again. Just like your little sis.

  And Ronnie gave up a giggle too.

  We made a game of it. I itch here! he’d cry and point to his elbow and we’d scratch it. And I itch there! he’d cry and point to his shin and we’d scratch it. I itch here and here and here. We got so worked up, scratching and giggling and tickling, that the whole thing took on a life of its own and started to get away from us, started to bubble over with too much good feeling. But we must not have gotten to a particular itch to his liking, because he dropped his face into a well and said, Scratching around a thing is not the same as scratching a thing. I filled my cheeks and swallowed and felt the bottom of my stomach hollow out. I stood up from the couch, because he looked like a different man just then, a new, older man, and I saw Ronnie stiffen and heard her say, Frances, with her same tone of warning, like, Frannie, stay away from that stove, Frannie, keep your hands inside the car, Frannie, Frances, but nothing about Mary, who was not even there, who was not there and had never been there the whole time, Mary, who was climbing up onto the couch beside the old, deep man.

  * * *

  WHEN I DRINK, I drink too much. My nights get smudged, as water stains bleeding into newsprint. I can hold on to the headline, the lede, but the details—the walk home, all the in-betweens—lose shape somewhere in the middle of the night, and when I wake in the morning my head is a sponge, the rest of my body a mysterious bruise. It tells me something, and that’s usually: there’s more that you don’t know. Somewhere those nights have burned to ash and I no longer own them, if I ever did. It leaves me with a fear so familiar as to need no introduction, just as one can navigate even the most complicated rooms of her home in the dark.

  Mary has been going to therapists on and off since high school. Ronnie says that she doesn’t believe
in all that, doesn’t know what she’d talk about for an hour with a complete stranger every week. Divorce, I can hear Mary say, then a man older than her writing it down on a pad of yellow paper. Ah, yes, divorce, a puzzle piece, because I’ve seen those looks of recognition too. I’ll be fine and then the furniture in my house shifts. Nothing is where it was before. The bedside lamp and the spider plant start to hide from me. I’ll get dark and darker and then go to talk to one of those older men sitting in a beige armchair, and it’s like I am very precisely describing a dark gray pool of water. Divorce and the man nods and asks me about my week, but we never get to the long shadow I’m pulling behind it.

  I call Mary, then Ronnie.

  I say, Remember that man at Great-Grandma Bullock’s?

  And Mary says, What man?

  And Ronnie says, There was never a man up there. That upstairs was creepy, though, she agrees. All those dead bugs. I hear her shiver over the phone. But never a man, she says.

  I remember the kitchen, Mary says. You guys would yell at me until I started crying. She is matter-of-fact, not angry, but not happy either. In her story, we are the doers of many wrongs, and they’re the only things she can remember.

  When I think of my great-grandmother’s house, I see the things farthest away from me first: the bright rectangle of sunlight coming through the back screen door, her tin of saltines in the hallway pantry, the blue and green living room with the shades pulled down. I see the front screened-in porch, my sisters and me on the tile floor, Grandma on the porch swing, all of us bathed in creamy yellow light. I see the stairs on the other side of the hallway door going up. I see the stairs going up to the second floor and Mary on the couch. Mary on the couch and the man with his hand in her hair and her thumb in her mouth. I see Ronnie’s bare slender arms moving out ahead of her, she saying, Mary. Frannie, go. Go downstairs. I see a dark circle in the light brown carpeting and me in the living room downstairs and Mary on the couch with her head in Grandma’s lap crying, with Grandma looking sad and saying, It’s a hard time for you girls. And I’ve wet myself. I remember I’m eight years old and on the floor and I’ve pissed my pants fully, all the way through, no hiding it, but Grandma hasn’t noticed yet and I’m not saying anything because I’m too old to piss my pants and it is this knowledge—too old—that gets me crying along with Mary, not thinking about my dad sleeping in a different house or my mom and my sisters and me in that big house all by ourselves eating cream of mushroom soup and toast for dinner, and I look to see if Ronnie is crying with us, to see if she’s seen that I’ve pissed myself, to see if I should be feeling what I’m feeling, but she’s not there and her cars aren’t on the floor and I don’t know where she might have gone to. And then the music is changing again on the TV that is turned up too loud and Grandma is saying, Well, shoot, I’ve seen this one before.

  After that summer it wouldn’t be a year before Dad would leave the state and stop sending the child support checks, and Mom would move us into an apartment complex behind the grocery store, where I would pine for my old bedroom, while Mary would come to say that she couldn’t remember the old house, couldn’t remember our father in it. Ronnie took to reading books with dark images on the covers—teenage girls in oversized sweaters staring out windows, a look of overblown anxiety on their faces. I’d pick them up when she finished but would stop reading before anything bad could happen.

  Mom did her best to keep things good. We’d go to the movies on discount nights, she sneaking in greasy brown bags of popcorn and cans of soda. But once, during a showing of Labyrinth, the manager found her in the dark and asked that the four of us leave. That night at home we’d hear her crying in the bathroom, door shut, Ronnie and Mary and me on the other side. For dinner we ate beans and rice or noodles that looked like hay. Breakfast was oatmeal made with powdered milk, the four of us growing lean and hard, then thin and thinner, our bodies receding to bone, breath quieting to whispers, as though God were trying to erase us.

  TOO MUCH A CHILD

  THE OLD MAN WOULDN’T STOP talking about the children. The same old man at the bus stop every morning and usually something about the weather and the kinds of jackets people wore because of it (his was large and khaki, many pockets), but now this heavy, heavy talk.

  It reminds me of when I was a child, he said, almost wistfully.

  Oh? said the woman beside me. She was short and sour-looking, her hair wavy-dry and going gray, but when the man spoke, her face softened. Bespectacled and bearded, the man talked to everyone there waiting, and instead of each of us standing inside her separate loneliness, he pulled us together as a community.

  Kids was always disappearing then, he said. You could lock your door, but it didn’t matter. They’d drag them out. There wasn’t much you could do. They’d just take them if they wanted them.

  The woman was listening in close, stitching her brows together—a charged, attentive pity shaping her face. I took out my book. It was large and heavy with gold script on the cover. The story was based on a B horror movie in which a small town is terrorized by a scaled, human-shaped beast I was pretty sure didn’t actually exist.

  Of course, they took men and women too, not just children, the man said. Old ones and young ones—they did not discriminate! At this he laughed, his eyes going small beneath his glasses.

  We had, of course, read about that era when we were in school. The kidnappings and all that went along with them always seemed to have happened elsewhere and deep in the past—it wasn’t a history we included ourselves in—but now the old man was pulling this history out, unfolding it, showing us it was not so long ago. History had caught up to us. It had, in fact, become a present-tense kind of situation, and it was this: There was a group of men killing children at night. Going into homes and taking them from their beds. Taking them off the streets. We the people thought we knew who the men were during the day, but because of some technicality we could not arrest them then. They had to be caught in the act. But at night it was dark and they wore hats casting shadows over their faces, and some people thought that the children deserved it. They were not considered the brightest kids in school and were known to steal candy and cigarettes from the corner store, which had always been a rite of passage for people in the area, and even I had once palmed a long, flat apple candy before unwrapping it down the street and letting it form to the roof of my mouth. Stealing from this store was talked about in a weren’t-we-crazy-kids-back-then sort of way, but when these kids did it, these kids-these-days kids, people likened it to a greater problem with children in general, and they said these children huffed paint too and that some of them had once found a few stray cats and had used them for some dark purpose that had to do with the music they listened to, music whose lyrics we could not understand.

  Can’t believe this is happening again, the man said. He shook his head. His voice had a certain cadence, a quality that made us like whatever he was saying, even if it was tragic.

  What to do, these children? he said. What can one do? No one is safe.

  You’re absolutely right, the woman said. It is so shameful. I’m ashamed to live in this world. She shook her head the way the old man had done.

  I had a way of angling from tragedy. I listened but let my face go flat. I wanted people to make a joke of it then put it away, to make it feel less like a scar they were showing me. The most recent kidnapping had been over a week ago, and I hoped it would be the last. But even as I thought it, I knew it wasn’t true, knew it wouldn’t be the last time, and the real bother wasn’t that it wasn’t going to be the last time but that the situation wasn’t going to change by some old man at the bus stop, as jolly and beloved as he was, talking and sighing and shaking his head, so why not let’s not talk about it anymore?

  Little Miss, he said, seeming to only then notice me. How old are you?

  I’m an adult, I said, and looked down the street. There was a great cube of a clock jutting from the building on the corner—multi-faced so that you could
read it from any direction. It always kept perfect time.

  It began to rain as my bus pulled up. It took me from the central square and passed through several neighborhoods, each more depressed than the next: gray two-flats with bricks busted out like bad teeth, storefronts behind black bars, trash—heavy and wet—clotting the sewer grates with its pulpy mash, and, on one bent sidewalk, a diapered baby sitting flat on its bottom. The change from straight and square downtown to gray ruin happened so plainly as to serve as a time-lapse example of such collapse, a linear progression charted on an x/y axis: bad, worse, worst.

  The bus rattled fast ahead through the rain, the windows shaking as the wheels dipped into each pothole. From behind me came the sound of a marble or ball bearing dropping from some height then rolling along the floor.

  Falling apart? the woman in front of me turned to ask. Her lips shaped a wry smile.

  Yes, Dear Stranger, I answered in my head. The world is about to run off the rails. We’re all going to get knocked out of orbit, a pool ball chipped off the table. It’s not just a feeling I have, Dear Stranger, rather an assurance, a surety, everything so goddamn out of whack that it’s no longer a matter of if but when.

  * * *

  THE BUS TOOK ME to a neighborhood that looked excerpted from elsewhere—an ivied campus where it was eternally autumn, the air sharp and clean, leaves frozen in their most vibrant shade of decay. That this neighborhood was surrounded by the other, grayer neighborhoods served to some as an indicator of all the good that could happen in the world. A rose blooming in the desert! For others, it was tasteless bragging, an opulent oasis to which access was highly regulated. I tried not to take sides.