I keep on doing all of this for quite a long time.
I wonder if any other children do this, or think these things. Maybe children all over the world are doing exactly the same thing at the same time, but it’s just that no one talks about it—too shameful.
I’m not sure exactly where that arrow goes. Does it dissolve upon arrival in such a place? Does it disappear when I stop seeing it? Or are all my arrows saved up somewhere? In Heaven? At the North Pole? Saved up until they amount to something up there? Do they know about me up there? Are they watching me from up there? Making lists?
They say Santa Claus knows if you’ve been bad or good, and keeps a list, so that means he must somehow be watching you all the time. “You’d better not pout, you’d better not cry! . . . He sees you when you’re sleeping . . .” But how? Does he watch you in the same way that God and Jesus watch you, from up in the sky, playing with moons and stars, sitting on clouds? From behind rocks and trees? From inside your own head?
In Sunday school, they say that God and Jesus hear your prayers. But how do you know if they’re hearing you or not? How do you know you’re not just making the whole thing up? How do you know you’re not talking to yourself, in bed, alone in the dark?
I banish this bad thought.
There’s no sound, no sign. I lie still, absorbing this. Then I go ahead and feel around on the interesting parts of my body for a while. Sometimes this part or that part is more tingly and interesting than the others. I think my mother would not like this if she knew. I figure God and Jesus and whoever else must not be paying that much attention right now anyway.
My navel is interesting lately. When I tickle it, especially deep inside, it makes other things tingle as well, each in a different way. Then I start in on tickling some of those other parts. This is not a completely new discovery, but lately it’s gotten a lot more interesting. I think about Nathan, who lives next door. I must ask Nathan if he’s noticed things like this. But Nathan’ll be the one to bring up this subject. He always does.
I think about something Daddy said. I turn over and stare at the window. The moon is up and beaming mistily through the blinds, as if the Blue Fairy were coming through to tell Pinocchio how to change from being a wooden puppet into being a real boy.
I always used to be trying to kiss my elbow to turn into a boy. Boys seem to have more fun, and they seem to know things.
The boys at school talk about Santa Claus in a sarcastic way. Most of the older boys already seem to have their own world, separate from and scornful of much of the grown-up world. And scornful of girls.
I go back and forth about all this. This is the second time I have put my doubts on hold.
The first time, we were in another house, a small, modern, carpeted, flat-roofed Stanhope Avenue house in town, as sleek inside as a new car. I wasn’t in kindergarten yet, the second baby wasn’t born yet, and I could never remember whether that first baby, tiny then, was a girl or a boy.
There was a vacant lot behind our house where older boys played ball, and I would hang around this boy named Billy, who had once stopped them from knocking down my snowman. I had dreams in which Billy was mixed up with Mighty Mouse. At the vacant lot, near Easter, I heard Billy say it was really your parents who hid the eggs.
Also, I’d heard Mama on the telephone saying, “Well, if it rains, we’ll just have to hide the eggs in the house.” But then when I asked about it, she looked surprised, and she said, “Yes, of course there’s a real Easter Rabbit.”
Daddy came in to say good night to me the night before Easter, and I asked him. He said the same things Mama said, but with his little teasing smile, and he started tickling me, saying he was going to count my ribs. Tickle tickle tickle tickle tickle!
“How many ribs do you think you’ve got?” he asked.
“A hundred and sixty-thirteen!” I screamed.
He started counting, “One, two, three, four,” and the more he counted ribs, the more ticklish I became, until I was giggling and squealing insanely, hoping this would go on forever, and afraid it might, and also closing my eyes to a feeling of something new.
Then Daddy stopped, all of a sudden jumped to his feet, grabbed his cane, and clump-CLUMPed out of the room as if something bad had happened. What?
The next morning was Easter. I always wake before they do, and I wasn’t supposed to leave my room yet, but I did.
I’d recently realized grown-ups don’t know what you’re doing if they’re not looking at you. Although you have to watch out for the sides of their eyes.
I sneaked out from where the baby was asleep, then tiptoed across to their room, where they were both breathing deeply and covered with bedclothes, Mama’s face just peeking out, sideways on the bed. Is she looking at me? Am I real yet? I tiptoed closer. Her eyes were closed, her mouth open. A moving and gleaming beneath the lids made me think it might be a trick. How can she not know I’m standing right here? Would she be mad?
I touched her hair, ready to jump back. I reached out one finger and touched her eyelid. She did not move, but lay there on the bed at my chin level, breathing the same, even when I gently lifted her eyelid to see if the eye was awake inside there. I was ready for Mama to get up now, to come out, to make the world start up.
But the eye of my mother was not seeing me. The eye was rolled over and looking like something that could scare you, looking whitely inward at dreams. Her breathing changed; she rolled over. I jumped back.
I tiptoed into the living room.
Looking out the plate-glass sliding back doors, I saw it had rained, so I figured if the eggs were hidden in the house, that would mean it had been the two of them who had done the egg hiding, and not the Easter Rabbit.
That would mean it had been the two of them coloring eggs in the night and then cleaning up the mess and hiding it all away.
That would mean that the two of them, up late, sneaking around behind chairs and under tables, had placed the eggs in the obvious places around the house, a blue egg here, a gold egg there, the two of them together, maybe laughing and joking, having a little fun just for the two of them. Would they have crawled around together? Fallen down giggling about the game? Would they have hugged and kissed each other there on the floor like people I could imagine, like people in the movies? This seemed so much more exciting than any Easter Rabbit.
I’d hardly ever seen such a thing. They don’t want me to see them having fun together, as if something bad might slip out if too much fun is allowed. You have to watch, because if one of them starts having fun, the other will put a stop to it.
Sometimes in the car on the way out to dinner on Thursday night, the maid’s day off, with me in back with the babies, a low sun glowing orange across the walking-running striped rows of black-dirt cotton fields out Preston Road, throwing orange-and-blue shapes into the chrome on the car window, rosy gold onto Daddy’s freckled elbow in front, Mama might start to sing, as though we were all going to join in with “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” or “Three Blind Mice.” She acts jokey, her singing coming out like talking, as if just this once showing us how to have some fun.
Then Daddy would laugh in this way where his teeth stayed covered but his mouth went up at the corners, as though a silly mistake had occurred, his head pulling back with chin down, an unfunny laugh, not joining in. Then he’d step on the gas. Especially if she started in on “The Sheik of Araby,” laughing and teasing, Daddy becoming angry red about this song for some reason. But then she might think she could jolly him into something from when they were younger, and would keep on singing: “The Sheeeeeeeeeiiik of Aa-raa-beeeeeeeee, betweenthesheetswithdirtysockswithoutashirt, Oh heeeeeee made loooove to meeeeeeee, betweenthesheetswithdirtysockswithoutashirt”—you say that part really fast—and so on like that.
I would not see what was so funny about this, or what was so bad about it, either, but would just watch the two of them.
I’d think of running between the sheets hung out on the line, hiding from Dadd
y, who’d come home from work in a rare good mood one day in spring when his feet weren’t too bad, clump-CLUMP, clump-CLUMP, clump-CLUMP, chasing me across the backyard, me running, a sharp thrill in a breathless chest, between the clothesline sheets, Daddy clump-CLUMP, bursting through the great white flapping, grabbing me!
Me! Caught! Swept up! Perched, lurching and bobbing, on the giant lame-gaited shoulders! Clump-CLUMP, clump-CLUMP, the fear of his feet, of him falling—always the fear of him falling—carried helpless, gasping, squirming, yet grasping onto him, bouncing across the yard toward the house—throw you in the oven and cook you for dinner tonight!—shrieking in terror and joy that he might be going to do a thing so extreme with me.
Who knows what these moody giants might do? They killed and ate the black lamb Aunt Lee had sent home with me one summer for a pet, and Daddy thought that was really funny. Easy to imagine them stuffing me kicking and screaming into the flaming oven like the witch in “Hansel and Gretel.”
“For your own good,” they would say, laughing hysterically at their own private joke! The oven is on, the kitchen, the heat! Easy to imagine the two of them with forks and carving knives, devouring the flesh off my bones the way wolves and witches and giants in stories are always eating children up.
But then Mama would not join in with any Daddy-chasing-me games. She would watch with a nervous face, would talk in a down-turning voice with little tucks in it, making us stop that playing, as if something might be wrong with it, as if she couldn’t trust what might happen if Daddy or anyone else started having too much fun. Then Daddy would turn and stomp away, hurrying into the back of the house with his stiff-legged, one-foot-heavy limp, not coming back until dinner-time, and then acting as if nothing had happened.
But it’s also true that Daddy couldn’t get up and down from the floor easily because of his feet, so I might have to imagine just her hiding the eggs by herself while he read the paper in bed. Or would they have argued about the proper colors, how to do this and that, yelling until somebody slammed a door?
Looking out the plate-glass windows at the wet grass in the backyard, the vacant lot behind, all of a sudden, incredibly, I saw him! The Easter Rabbit!
Yes, it’s true! The actual, real-life Easter Rabbit!
Mama and Daddy had not started up the day yet, no grown-ups anywhere in sight, and yet there he was, walking along the wet sidewalk on the street behind the vacant lot behind our house. I was seeing him with my very own eyes, the Easter Rabbit, no doubt at all about it. It was definitely him.
As tall as a man, with white fur, as solidly there as rocks and trees, he was ho-de-o-do striding down the street in long loping steps, top-hatted head bobbing, as if the big world that I wonder so much about were nothing but a lot of hilariously happy silliness where people black and white are whistling while they work, saying okeydokey, winking at you, pulling nickels out of one another’s ears, and where a person can go around skipping and singing Zippity-doo-dah all the day, and nobody thinking a thing about it.
Then he disappeared behind another house.
I didn’t even look for the eggs. Maybe he hasn’t been here yet, I thought. I turned around, heart pounding, and ran right back to bed, the way I was supposed to do, easing my door closed, jumping under the covers, squeezing my eyes tight.
So the boys on the block were wrong, and Mama and Daddy were right, I thought. So it is the kind of world in which you can have Easter Rabbits and Santa Claus, and Jesus, and angels, and maybe witches, devils, ghosts, monsters, werewolves, and vampires, as well—and not another kind of world, in which you cannot have any of those things.
So that means you have to be good.
At Granny’s House
Granny’s house stands in giant-Elm-tree shade on a corner of Beverly Drive, ivy all over, with a slate roof and wood trim painted gray-blue. Daddy calls it “Tudorish” as the rainy morning clears and we drive up next to Gran-Dad’s Cadillac with its LONE STAR dealer plates parked out front, and Mama says, “Dick, please.”
We already had a quiet little Christmas morning with sticky ribbon candy at our house, and now we’re having it again. It’s a Christmas Day party at Granny’s house.
Granny, for whom the wild old days of party-town, new-oil-money Dallas, Texas, was just yesterday—for in the 1940s, the ’30s and the ’20s could still be seen in the people, their clothes, their habits and stories, their music still in the air—from that time when bootleggers in Model B Ford sedans cruised the wide Highland Park alleyways on Saturday nights, high school boys jumping out with deliveries here and there, while oil men, developers, and their lawyers played high-stakes poker, with only silver dollars allowed all night long, and Dallas was small enough that you could still feel you knew everybody in town.
Granny loves nothing more than a party in her big house, loves dressing up in all her jewels, loves making everybody laugh and have fun. Sometimes she brings out costumes, or makes her dinner guests put on red wigs before they can get a plate.
Granny often seems like she’s just waiting for the next party to start. I’ve walked in the side door when Mama would drop me off on a slow afternoon, only to find her alone, furiously smoking, drinking, and playing solitaire at a card table on the side porch, one-two-three-four-five-six-SEVEN, one-two-three-four-five-SIX. She’d look up as if wishing for someone to please drop by, then she’d go to the bar, and then she’d insist on teaching me how to play solitaire, showing me how to win, and if I didn’t win, showing me how to cheat once, twice, three times, counting how many times I’d have to cheat in order to “win” the game.
I’d walk into the living room on any afternoon and find the maroon velvet sofa bolster pillows propped up, costumed, bewigged, rubber-masked, with jewelry and cigarette holders tied onto their stuffed gloves and sleeves, ready and waiting for the next party.
Granny says Oliver was mixing drinks at the bar at my age, and everybody thought that was so cute, but now he’s not her sweet little boy anymore and won’t do it. I asked if I could mix drinks too, but Mama says, “No!” I asked Oliver if it was true, but he got up and left the room without a word.
Oliver’s Mama’s brother, which makes him my uncle, but he’s only seven years older. I always think that he’s like the older brother I’ve been looking for, and that we’ll be friends.
Now that it’s Christmas Day and everybody has to be nice, I look for him as Granny greets us excitedly at the front door, Papaw behind her with his Ho-ho-ho-ho Santa-Claus laugh, lots of cheek kissing, offering drinks, as we walk into the big dark house full of old maroon Sarouks and Kashans, carved chairs, Chinese lamps, and, upstairs, satin comforts and floating secrets with bedroom doors closed. Granny’s house is full of people and fun, and full of strange things that don’t match, not like Nana’s house, which is silent, light, and full of perfection.
Daddy leaves his cane at the door and clumps around. Mama talks to Aunt Meg. I wipe off Papaw’s kisses, which are too wet. There’s a light on in the black-tiled bathroom under the stairs, where we used to hide. Maybe Oliver’s hiding in there. He’s done it before.
“I have a surprise for you!” Granny’s saying, walking away toward the kitchen, teasing over her shoulder, winking, flashing black eyes at me as I run after her into the bar, where she talks to Cleveland, who’s dressed up for serving drinks. His yellowish oak brown face with its sad dark-ringed eyes splits wide in the gold-toothed grin he always gives me when he’s out trimming bushes in overalls and a straw hat. His wife is no-nonsense Nona, Granny’s lifelong maid, small, round, plum-dark, and always in a bad mood.
In the kitchen, another party’s going on. Granny jokes with Nona. Nona’s sister Johnnie gulps her drink and tries to hide the glass as we walk in. Johnnie looks completely different from Nona, straight hair, small nervous eyes, skin as light as Granny’s. They say “Merry Christmas” and ask what Santa Claus brought me. Granny always says she has more black friends than white.
“What’s the surprise? What’s
the surprise?” I follow Granny around, and she keeps winking and teasing. “You’ll find out!” She says.
I see Daddy heading for the bar as if there’s something he just can’t stand. Clump-CLUMP, clump-CLUMP, he hurries in his pounding lurch. I look around for what might be wrong now.
In the living room are people with cigarettes and drinks, Granny’s friends I know from snapshots taken in New York, in New Orleans, horse races at Ruidoso, and they’re talking about the new Cipango Club, where there’s a phone jack in every red leather booth, and you might see John Wayne and Ward Bond and other movie stars dance with the girls on tables crazy drunk.
Nana calls me over to give her a big kiss, saying maybe Santa Claus came here, too, while GranDad holds his new camera ready and pops his black eyes like a man in the movies. Mama and Aunt Meg and Uncle R.E. and Aunt Annie and Uncle Eddie sit and stand together on the back porch with cousins who are all babies. All they ever want to do is watch babies, play with babies, and talk about babies, babies, lots of babies fussing and drooling all over the place. Oliver still has not appeared.
“Well, we bought all this ribbon candy and it wound up being a huge mess from the wet weather,” I hear Mama say, clearly admitting that that ribbon candy was not brought by Santa.
Granny takes me around and shows me off to her friends for the men to wink and whistle the way men did back then, and pinch my cheeks and pull nickels out of my ears, and say, “Jeffee, you are too young to be a grandmother,” and the women to say, “What a pretty child,” and “What pink cheeks!” and “What grade are you in?” All her friends laugh at Granny’s jokes. “She’s such a cute woman,” her friends all say.
Hap and Hazard and the End of the World Page 7
