When I Was Your Age, Volume Two

by When I Was Your Age, Volume 02 (retail) (epub)

  Did you follow professional sports or only make fun of them?

  I was a big Dodgers fan, not just because I lived in Los Angeles but because of their style of play. They used speed and brains instead of brawn. Maury Wills, my hero, was their leadoff hitter — small, fast, and an expert base-stealer. An infield hit, a steal, another steal, a sacrifice, and out of nothing they’d made a run. The Yankees, by contrast, were Goliath, with Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle bashing home runs. I loathed them. In football, the Los Angeles Rams had a player like Maury Wills, a short, squirmy running back named Dick Bass who slipped through tacklers’ hands like a fish. It was a joy to watch him slither out of their grasps. It was the revenge of the small, the triumph of Charlie Chaplin over the hulking policeman.

  One of the tragic side effects of CSD is loss of confidence regarding the opposite sex. How did your size affect your interaction with girls?

  Grammar-school boys pay little attention to girls, but I did, for the simple reason that there was always one girl in my class who was shorter than I was. For several years Sally Stewart filled this role. I wasn’t religious, but prayed she’d never move away. In junior high, when girls shot up like June cornstalks, the contrast between most of them and me became comical. I still remember hurrying out of a classroom, rounding a corner at a run, and smacking straight into an Amazon of a ninth-grader. She barely budged; the collision knocked me to the ground. I got up and tried to disappear, recalling the advice of Laurel to Hardy in one of their movies: “Act nonchalant.”

  I had no girlfriends during junior high. I went to a total of two or three school dances. Though I got good grades, I would have failed the test of sexual experience that kids used to give each other, awarding five points if you’d kissed (eight for kissing underwater, ten for French kissing), fifteen points if you’d — you get the idea. Strangely, not all short boys fell into my category. There were pint-sized tough boys, more muscled than I, who executed vicious tackles in football, smoked — despite tobacco’s reputation for stunting — and scored As on the sex tests. I listened to their accounts in awe. It was inspiring. Maybe the short could inherit a bit of the earth after all.

  What happened when you reached high school?

  Two things. Intelligence, creativity, life experience, political awareness — more and more, these outshadowed looks. And then, when it no longer mattered so much, I grew. Not a lot, but enough so that I no longer stood out so much. I realized that I wasn’t Job. Instead of being cursed, I’d actually been blessed with all the things that really mattered.

  What advice do you have for today’s vertically challenged?

  Stand tall! You’ll survive and prosper in the end. And you’ll be much more comfortable in cramped airplane seats.

  “Being short led naturally into being a writer for me. It was clear that I’d make my living with my brains, not my body. I wrote my first stories in grammar school — the adventures of two Chinese mice, the tale of an ice-age boy who thaws out in the present, a hilarious (so I thought) comedy titled The Colonels on the Corn. My father, Sid Fleischman, switched from writing adult books to children’s books at this time. From his works — read aloud chapter by chapter, as they were written — I absorbed the pleasure of plot, the joy of playing with words, the stranger-than-fiction quirks of history.

  Though my case of CSD lifted long ago, the experience casts a long shadow in my memory and has surfaced, in disguised form, in several of my books. Aaron in The Half-A-Moon Inn has a major physical problem to deal with, a different one than mine — he’s mute. Saturnalia concerns a holiday in which the world is turned upside-down, with little children commanding their parents. It’s a notion that appeals especially to the small and powerless. In A Fate Totally Worse Than Death, I took my gleeful revenge on the tall, wealthy, female aristocracy of my high school. Most recently, Weslandia stars a grammar-school misfit who develops his own alternate civilization in his backyard, exactly as my childhood friends and I invented our own games. Exactly as I still make up alternate worlds — short stories, novels, poems — today.”

  At my grandparents’ home there was a long closet that had two entrances. One was in the room my brother Stevie and I shared at the back end of the house; the other opened into my grandparents’ bedroom in the front. You could sneak all the way through the closet, under my pinafores and Stevie’s short pants without touching a thing. But at the other end it meant dodging around Grandma’s dozen flowered cotton housedresses that tended to wrap around your shoulders and hold you fast, or her muzzy, full-length fur coat that was like some large animal waiting to pounce. And it meant stepping over Grandpa’s ugly work boots that were larger than any shoes I had ever seen, with their leather strings turned black with wear.

  We played in that closet during our long Virginia sojourn, my brother and cousins and I. Some games were familiar ones that I knew from New York City like Hide-and-Seek, Sardines, and Tag. There was also a game we made up on the spot called Split, which had rules that changed whenever friends came to visit. Split was Hide-and-Seek in pairs, and the only thing unchangeable about it was that Michael and I, who were the oldest cousins, were not allowed to pair up together. We were too canny, too familiar with the hiding places, and too stubborn to be found.

  The long closet smelled of cedar and mothballs, and something else, a heavier, homier smell that I realized years afterward had been my grandfather’s sweat. My grandmother didn’t have any particular smell, except perhaps a sweet talc scent; it was not a strong recognizable smell at any rate. Only later, when she was all alone and had taken up sucking on lemons, did she have a signature odor. To this day I smell a lemon and I think of her. But not then, not in the long closet. Not in the time I am going to tell you about.

  We often visited Grandpa Dan and Grandma Fanny’s little two-story brick house under the whispering sycamores, staying for ten days in the summer. It was a wonderful place for a holiday, with the Hampton Roads, a part of Chesapeake Bay, just a short walk away. There were many children close to my age living up and down the block. On soft summer nights you could hear their mothers calling them home, the names like a southern anthem sung into the dusk. Across the street was a family with four girls: Mary Beth, Mary Louise, Mary Alice, and Alice. Several houses down were Frances, Willard A, and Bubba. I developed a southern accent, just to fit in, losing it as soon as we got home again.

  But the time this story begins was in the 1940s, during World War II. My father had joined the army as a Second Lieutenant and was being sent overseas. So we moved down from New York City to Hampton, Virginia, to the house where my mother had grown up. We would be spending the war years there, safe with Grandpa Dan and Grandma.

  It had not been an easy decision. My mother — a small and darkly beautiful woman, who was shy with strangers but forthright with friends — had to pack up all our belongings in the sunny apartment overlooking Central Park, and cart us down to Virginia on her own. Daddy was off in boot camp and not able to help settle us in. As the third child of six, Mommy had long ago carved out her own life away from her close-knit and confining southern family. Returning home was for her a kind of defeat. But the war meant sacrifices of a much greater sort for other people. She never let us know how much she longed to be back in the great brawling city she had adopted for her own.

  Daddy came to visit for a week and then shipped overseas. We went to see him off on a big boat from Newport News, and then settled in happily with our grandparents. Only Mommy seemed to miss Daddy horribly from the start; Stevie and I were too pleased to be surrounded by our extended family, all of whom indulged us more than our absent father ever had. In fact, Daddy seemed more present now that he was away, because he sent letters home every week that Mommy read aloud to us. She pretended the letters were for all of us, but I could read the greeting. It always said “Dear Isabelle.” It never mentioned Stevie or me.

  Daddy wrote how he was winning the war single-handedly. I mistook this story-telling ability for the truth.
It was ten years before I understood he hadn’t even been in the fighting. He was a foreign correspondent, a newspaperman in khaki. When he came back to Virginia with a shoulder wound because he had been in London during the German buzz bomb attacks, it was convincing evidence of what a great warrior he had been. He played it for all it was worth, wearing his uniform for days after returning home, and keeping his arm in its sling long past any medical necessity. In fact, he never got to shoot a gun.

  Grandpa Dan was a handsome, smiling man who always had time for his grandchildren — Michael and Linda one town over, and Stevie and me right there in his house. He owned a clothing store downtown, working long hours. But whenever he was at home, he enjoyed showing us how to use the tools in the garage, telling us stories, fixing the tree house in the yard. Grandma, with her white braids piled up on her head like a crown, was several years older than Grandpa Dan, but hated anyone knowing it. So we were never sure when she had actually been born. It made birthday celebrations odd to say the least. She was a bit more distant than Grandpa Dan, and she never told stories, but she walked the long block every evening. Anyone who wanted to walk with her or to work with her in the kitchen would get her full attention, but otherwise she was not exactly attentive.

  After two tries at going around the block with her — she was the fastest walker I had ever known — I took the kitchen route. My favorite chore was chopping the apples for applesauce in Grandma’s big wooden bowl. The chopper had a wooden handle and a dark, curved knife, like a scimitar I thought, like ones I’d read about in stories from Arabian Nights. Chop, chop, chop. I was Ali Baba and Sinbad and Sheherazade, sitting on the kitchen table and bending over the bowl. Chop, chop, chop. Friday night my cousins and Aunt Cecily and Uncle Eddie came for Sabbath dinner. Chop, chop, chop. We got to sit in the dining room at the big mahogany table with the grownups. Chop, chop, chop. And afterward we played outside in the limpid summer nights, the fireflies winking on and off. It stayed light in the summertime till past nine.

  During the warm days, the neighbors’ children and I played Chase-the-Dog, teasing a long-suffering mutt called Wowser. Wowser would take our pokes and whistles for a long time; he really had a lovely disposition. But finally he would have enough, rising heavily onto stubby legs to chase after us, whuffling like the Jabberwock out of Wonderland. At that we would all scatter, running and screaming with terror and delight. The older kids could climb a low projecting branch of one of the sycamores to get away from Wowser. But I was too short to get up without help. Mary Louise had to lean down and haul me up before Wowser got there. No one was ever bitten, though Wowser certainly had ample time and opportunity.

  The one time I ever remember Mommy, Grandpa Dan, and Grandma acting together was the day Stevie got his first haircut. Mommy and Grandma protested because he had the sweetest head of golden curls imaginable. But he was already almost three years old and Grandpa Dan insisted. “This is no boy!” he said.

  Grandpa sat Stevie on a silver-colored washtub that was upended on the lawn and, kneeling down next to it, proceeded to sheer off Stevie’s curls. Mommy started crying, and Grandma wept as if her heart were broken, but the little golden curls floated down like angel wings to lie nestled in the green grass.

  Stevie’s lower lip began to tremble, not because the haircut hurt, but because Mommy and Grandma were making such a fuss.

  “There!” Grandpa Dan remarked. “A proper boy.” He picked Stevie up and carried him around on his shoulders for several minutes, calling out, “A proper boy! A proper boy!” Stevie loved that part and began giggling.

  I gathered up the curls, as many as I could that had not been blown away by the breeze. My mother kept one in her wallet for years.

  And then one morning everything changed.

  I woke up early because I heard a funny sound in my bedroom. It had intruded itself into my dream: a kind of sighing, like the wind through the sycamores. And it repeated and repeated, with a peculiar insistence — an awful sound.

  I thought at first Stevie was having a nightmare, but he was fast asleep in the bed across from mine, his snores coming in little pop-pop-pops.

  The room was filled with that lovely, scary early morning half-light you get in the South; shadows of the tall pines seemed to creep around and about the wainscoting on the walls. The sound came again, and I realized it was coming from the long closet.

  I began to tremble.

  Now I was not normally a frightened child. My daring in games, in running last from the dog, in following the older children wherever they led, was already a legend all the way up to Kicoughtan Road. “Dare Janie,” the local children would tell one another. “See what she’s gonna do.” But this sound made me shiver. There was something almost inhuman about it.

  I knew it couldn’t possibly be a ghost or a monster. I didn’t actually believe in such things, though I loved reading about them. And besides, it was morning, not midnight. But it was a sound that had such desperation, such loneliness, such sorrow in it, as if the house itself were weeping, that I knew — without really understanding why — that shivering was the only reasonable response to it.

  I don’t know how long I lay in bed, hoping that Stevie would wake up so we could listen to the sound together. Then I could play big sister and calm his fears and mine at the same time. But he didn’t wake. He just slept on and on, with that quiet little pop-pop-pop snore.

  “I dare you . . .,” I whispered to myself. And then I got up. Slowly I walked over to the long closet, my bare feet dragging along the splintery wooden floor. When I reached the closet — ten long steps from my bed — I put my ear against the door.

  The sound was louder there — a moaning, a groaning so powerful it seemed to shake the wood.

  Trembling so hard I thought I might actually faint, I eased the closet door open and went in.

  Cedar and mothballs and that heavier, mustier smell enveloped me. Silently I walked under Stevie’s clothes and mine, pulled along by a curiosity that was greater than fear. I came to the long winter coat that marked the beginning of my grandparents’ things. Grandma’s fox stole that I so loved to stroke brushed my face. This time it brought me not the slightest bit of pleasure. Grandpa’s heavy serge suits, two of them that he wore only on the High Holy Days when he went to synagogue, stopped me for a moment. I pushed them aside and stepped carefully over his work boots.

  The awful sound was coming in waves now. I pushed past my grandmother’s soft, silky crepe Sabbath dress. Then I got tangled for a moment in one of her cotton housedresses.

  It was pitch dark in the long closet because my grandparents’ door was closed, but I knew where I was by the feel of every dress and suit. Dragged along by that heavy rope of sound, by the rise and fall of it, I pushed open the door.

  And blinked in the sudden light. The sound was coming from the window. I turned to see my grandmother sitting in the rocking chair, staring out at the dawn. Her white braids hung down her back. She was wearing a flowered housedress. The awful moaning cry was coming from her. I didn’t know what it meant.

  Grandpa was still lying on his side of the big double bed, where the nubbly white chenille spread hung neatly over the end. I walked to the foot of the bed and waited for him to tell Grandma to stop crying.

  He didn’t move.

  I went over to wake him, touching his shoulder. He was cold and stiff.

  It didn’t occur to me to scream. Or to speak. I had energy for only one thing.

  I turned and ran.

  I ran faster than I had ever run from Wowser. Faster than in any of the games of Hide-and-Seek, Sardines, Tag, or Split. I ran out of the bedroom door, into the hall, and back to my own room where I jumped into the bed with Stevie. I wrapped myself around him, big spoon around little spoon, and listened to his little pop-pop-pop snores till Mommy came in and told us both that Grandpa Dan was gone.

  “Gone?” Stevie asked. “Gone where? Can we go with him?”

  Stevie didn’t understand what she m
eant. But I knew. I had known it the minute I touched him.

  Gone. Not like Daddy who was gone overseas. Not gone like us from New York.

  Gone. Like in dead. No more stories. No more tree house. No more cut curls.

  Gone. Like in forever.

  Grandma cried in her bedroom for nearly a month. Mommy brought her meals up there, sat with her, tried to reason her back to herself. Aunt Cecily came over and tried the same. But Grandma had to cry that sorrow out, I guess. There was so much in her, I couldn’t imagine it all.

  Stevie would sometimes go and sit on her lap and they would rock together for a long time in silence, staring out of the window till he got bored and left.

  But I couldn’t bring myself to cross the threshold of the bedroom. I would stand in the hall and call out, “Grandma, please. Please, Grandma.” Until one day she saw me standing there, and stood up, smiling.

  “I think we need to make some applesauce,” she said.

  I followed her like a little shadow down the back stairs. That day I chopped apples in the wooden bowl till my hand was sore. But I wouldn’t stop, afraid — I think — that only my chopping kept her in the kitchen, kept her out of the crying room.