There are no teams and no score. Any number can play, and it’s every man for himself.
Everyone plays scrub at school, too, bigger games, harder, with kids from all different grades, the big boys. In spring, everybody suddenly starts playing scrub every day. I like the game when it’s not with the bigger boys. The other day I got hit square on the nose by a fly ball, so now I flinch. I can’t throw far enough, but I can pitch a bit, and do okay at bat, so I get by.
Tiff Minton’s better than most of the boys. Tiff has older brothers, and all the boys treat her with respect. She has a face both tough and kind, large dark eyes, streaked-blond Prince Valiant–cut hair, which swings as she hurls a powerful ball all the way in to a boy named Larry, who grabs it perfectly at home base, the two of them absolutely heroic in my eyes. I think about Tiff as much as I think about the boys. Her eyes are quiet and observant. Her hands are cut up and rough like a boy’s. We are friendly to each other, but I don’t know what to say to her, any more than I know what to say to anyone.
When the bigger boys come out, that kid named Larry’s the main hero out there in a fast game, pitching, catching, scanning bases, yelling, signaling, snatching his flying gum wad from the air with his teeth mid-wind-up, the dusty wind whipping his hair and shirt around his scrawny body. Even some of the teachers come out to watch him. Grown-ups talk about him. My dad filmed him. One day, the teachers call Larry to come in off the field. Larry gets in trouble a lot.
Once he tried to show me how to pitch. He held my hand in his and stood close, sweaty-smelling and tall as a grown-up. He was nice to me. And his friends teased him about this, but he didn’t care. He just kept on being nice. I kept standing near him. But then he walked away with the other boys onto the field.
I watch for Larry at school. I think about Larry’s lanky grace in bed in the dark. Larry wouldn’t be scared of the dark like I am. I imagine him telling me the things he knows, being my friend, being on my side, but I only see him at school, often sitting outside the principal’s office, where he nods to me.
One day leaving school, I was walking behind Larry and a boy named Sam, who has blond hair that always looks dirty and bruises on his face, and I heard Larry say, “I told her! I told her! But she wouldn’t listen to me!”
I walked faster to catch up behind them. I heard Sam say, “Ah, they don’t care. All’s they care about is the rich kids,” his lip curling down. And then they both looked back at me, and I stopped, and the two of them walked away.
THERE’S A GIRL NAMED GEORGEANNA who plays well with the boys, and I watch her, wishing I could be as fearless, but I don’t know how to join in. She leads a pretend adventure game, and I follow along, asking, “Can I play? Can I play?” until she turns around and looks at me, her face blank, distant. One of her eyes is green and the other blue.
“What is wrong with you?” she says.
I go over to the sandbox, where two boys are digging holes and piling up sand. When I sit down, one of the boys looks at me and says in this sneery voice, “Are you rich?”
“Uh, no, I don’t know . . .” I don’t know what to say.
“Then how come your mom drives a Cadillac?” he says, looking like he knows something bad about me.
I go play on the swings. I can swing by myself. I can swing so high and so hard, I can feel the swing-chains pop at the top and the back legs come out of the ground.
Out in the center, there’s a heavy steel Maypole-shaped merry-go-round that spins and wobbles, that swings not just around and around but also loosely in and out toward the center post, the seat often banging hard into the center post while careening around, constantly in motion, a whirlpool of excitement, kids constantly dangling off. Mostly, the bigger kids play on it.
A couple of the older boys will position themselves around inside the rim, taking the job of keeping the wooden seat away from the center post with their feet. There are Maypole-type steel supports holding this circular seat to the top of the pole, that you can hold on to, but you have to be ready at all times either to jump away if your section of the seat happens to swing into this center post or quickly take over the keep-away position.
There’s a wide rut in the black dirt all the way around, so it’s hard to roll away if you jump or fall off, and you get kicked by all the feet going around. For most of the boys and a few of the girls, riding this thing is a test. It’s always in motion, and every rider affects its shifting orbit. You have to run and jump and hope that someone you have already signaled to will help you scramble onto the splintery wooden seat. You have to spy a space, a moment, an ally, and you have to be fast, or another kid will grab it. There are accidents and fights. Some kid is hurt on this thing almost every day.
If his tears fly fast from a stony face and he brushes it off, then everything’s okay. If that kid cries or whines in a babyish way, or blames somebody, or goes in to tell the teacher, he is branded weak and unworthy from that time on. The same with everything on the playground—if you want to be out there with any respect, you follow the code, unless it’s a matter of life or death. If there’s blood, or a broken bone, evidence of something serious and real, that has to be dealt with by the grown-ups, then that injured kid gets respect, and everyone’s his friend and writes on his cast.
Today, there was a compound fracture, complete with blood, screaming, and white bone sticking out—one of the towheaded kids. I was standing right there, watching Nathan grab onto a steel support in motion and then stand up on the seat, giving it a push, and I was trying to get up the nerve to do the same, but the thing was too full, swinging too fast in its unpredictable-monster orbit, bristling with arms and legs.
I saw the small blond kid about to get caught between the swinging seat and the steel post. I saw the blond kid stick out one skinny leg to try to stop it.
I saw the world crack open, POP!—the red blood and the white bone, like a snapped pencil, so fast—and the screaming, the screaming! Not like your normal screaming. I wanted to go back and see and hear it all again and again, because I could not believe what I thought I’d heard, thought I’d seen.
All the kids jumped off, stopping the thing’s motion. Older girls playing jump rope came to look, ran to get the teachers, many grown-ups came running out, and I was able to stand with Nathan in a group of the big boys. I saw the whole thing, and with the boys I talked about it, relived it, reviewed it, acted it out, and with the boys I laughed about it.
One of the teachers named it.
And then everyone, kids and grown-ups, went around speaking the words—compound fracture, compound fracture, compound fracture. The teachers explained in class how compound fracture means that the bone is not only just cracked in two but also first bent and then split and then sticking out through the skin for everyone to see. Scars that will be there for life.
Everyone in school had to say compound fracture as many times as they could. I said it to myself over and over. I sang it into a little song on the way home. And I thought about the boys and I laughed all over again.
I ran into the house to tell those words to my mother: compound fracture.
The Sewing Room
If I come home from school and I can’t find her in the yard or anywhere around the house, she’s probably in the sewing room.
I grab an apple off the table. I tiptoe down the hall. I call out. Is she back there, not answering? I hear radio sounds, then sewing machine sounds, then smell cigarette smoke. I can be alone with Mama in the sewing room.
But now Daddy’s voice is coming from back there; he’s mad about something. Then I hear her voice, low, as if to make him calm down.
“It’s as if everything is for him,” I hear him say.
I wait in the hall and listen. You have to watch out for when there’s something wrong with Daddy. He rarely goes into the sewing room, usually with a huff and a quick exit if I’m in there, as if he’s caught someone in the bathroom and just turns and leaves, as if he can’t stand for one second being in the
re where she’s so intent on something besides him, or as if he just has to get out right then from such a small, cramped space where there’s not enough room for two people, let alone three.
“Oh don’t be that way, Dick.”
“They don’t give a goddamn about me!”
Then Mama says he should not say goddamn, and that she doubts that . . . something . . . And then BANG!—a loud noise.
I know that sound. Daddy has thrown or broken something.
Stay away. Listen. Duck into the hall closet.
I swallow a mouthful of apple whole, and blocky bits hurt going down. But I like an apple in the hand, which makes me feel like the Girl.
I hear him clump-CLUMPing out through their bedroom, out of the house. I hear a whining sound he makes in his throat, then the slamming door. I hear him starting up his car, roaring away.
I come out. I open the door. I see her back stiffen. “Go outside and play!” she says.
Mama likes to work in here, removed from the rest of us, bending her head to something she’s making. There’s always something like curtains or a dress she’s making. Sometimes she knits. In the years just after the War, she was still knitting Argyll socks, washing them, pinning them to patterns, taking great care. In every house, there’s always a sewing room.
I come in sweaty and plop down in the low chair next to her quilted satin-covered chest and the shelves full of patterns and buttons and hooks and thread and tape measures and seam bindings and pincushions and zippers and boxes of bobbin.
I take another bite of apple and chew it this time. She does not look over.
“Mama?” I say. Has she been crying?
“Yes, here I am,” she says. “You found me.”
Here she is, her high forehead smooth and shining onto the fabric, her small face and intent dark eyes lit from below by the tiny bulb shining onto the tiny needle zipping dangerously in and out with the other tiny needle from below, and the little “foot” that she expertly raises and lowers with one hand reaching around to a back side lever on the machine. The stitching and the machine humming continue and then pause, continue and then pause to her own coded rhythms, as if she’s playing on some musical instrument. Her one hand on the fabric stitching place, expertly holding while inching forward, her other hand on the wheel, her one foot on the pedal, her other foot cocked beneath her, she’s riding that machine into a place of her own, where none of us knows how to go. And I can be alone with her in the small room. She seems almost happy, thinking her own thoughts in here.
It’s different from talking to her anywhere else. Her focus is on a piece of cloth already cut and pinned to her perfect plan. She might give other sorts of answers than the ones I get at the dinner table, for example. And once in a while, there’s a bull’s-eye kind of moment in which she tells me something, and looks at me as if she really wants to tell me what is real, but this is quickly covered by one or the other of us. So I keep on trying to find things out.
And I get a different voice, a lower, plainer voice—more like the just us voice from earliest times that seemed to be the real voice of my mother.
If Daddy might be around the house, might be bursting in at any moment, then it will be somehow in her voice that we both are being aware of that.
“Mama, is something wrong with Daddy?” I say, and then I’m sorry I asked, from the way her eyes look.
“Do you think that’s any of your business?” she says.
I don’t know what to say. I wait.
“What are you doing?”
“What does it look like I’m doing?”
Sometimes I have to sit there for a while. Sometimes when we are alone together, and Daddy or the babies are not there to ruin everything, and I’m being just Mama’s good child, and she is exactly busy enough with making something the way she always likes to be making something, then I can ask one small thing at a time, and Mama might let me in a bit, might talk in the voice I remember, the voice I look for.
I have to sit quietly, letting a long time pass, as if I had nothing to do and wasn’t thinking about a thing in the world, because if she thinks I am already thinking about a question, she won’t answer it. Mama keeps her answers close.
A lipsticked cigarette smokes itself away in there, smoke rising loosely tubular, swaying cobralike above the ashtray between us, smoke shifting with every gesture of air, every move of hers or mine, floating this way, that way—smoke trapped at the top of the small windowless space in sultry cirrus drifts.
Her mouth pursed with pins, she talks out of one side, her voice low, curling in, ear cocked to the radio—an ad, “Call for Philip Mor-ris!” and then an ad for Sam Spade, on later tonight. Mama likes Sam Spade. Something pleasant crosses her face.
After I’ve waited the right amount of time, as if I have no reason and do not really care, I can ask a question.
She stops, knocks off the long ash, takes a long drag.
“Mama?”
“Yes,” she says, and then: “Hand me that tape measure.”
I do it. She measures one side of the piece she is working on. She looks pleased, puts her head down to her task.
“Mama?”
“Yes, what is it?”
“Will I go visit Aunt Lee again next summer?” I say it as though I have nothing at all in mind. Actually, I don’t, but just want to get her talking.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she says. “We’ll have to decide that when the time comes.”
I hear May-May in another part of the house, going out the back door with the babies. Almost time to start making dinner.
“Mama?” I say again.
She looks at me sharply. Her eyes scare me.
“Don’t you see me sitting right here? Why do you keep on calling me?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, please stop calling me! I’m right here!”
“Mama, even if there is a Santa Claus, those Santas in the department stores aren’t the real Santa, are they? Because Granny says Santa can be in different places at once like that, but I don’t think so.” I say all that as fast as I can. I still just want to see if she will tell me the truth.
She looks at me. “And why don’t you think so?” she says.
“Because how could he be in all those places at once? And besides, the Santa we saw at Sanger’s had brown eyes, and he was not fat enough to be Santa. And then the Santa we saw at Dreyfus’s was fat and had freckles and blue eyes. Yes he did! I saw them! And besides, Nathan says so.”
“Says what?”
“Says the department store Santas are not the real Santa!”
“Oh, he does, does he.”
“Yes. And I think that must be right.”
Silence. She flattens a seam with the side of her thumb. Her face is the face of someone who knows things. But her mouth looks sour.
“I thought we settled this.”
“But, Mama, tell me! It’s not really real, is it?”
“Of course there’s a real Santa Claus, and if Santa could hear you talking like that, you wouldn’t be very happy with what you’d get for Christmas this year, young lady.” She’s looking at me the whole time now. Her eyes seem to exert a force upon me.
“But that man at Sanger’s wasn’t really Santa Claus, was he? And there was a different Santa at Titche’s when we went there!”
She looks back at the seam. “Well, no. Okay, the department store Santas are not the real Santa. The real Santa’s just too busy at the North Pole this time of year, so those people are some of Santa’s helpers, dressed up to talk to all the children about what they want.”
“But I thought Santa’s helpers were elves.”
“Well, Santa has all kinds of helpers.” She seems pleased with this answer.
“But Mama, have you really ever seen the real Santa?”
She looks at me again. I seem to see something scary standing behind her. Why does she want to keep pretending like this?
“Well, no, because he comes in
the middle of the night, when no one sees him. But we know what he looks like.”
“But how do we know?”
“We know, that’s all. Because some people who have seen him told us about it. Why can’t you just believe it?”
I don’t know why. But why won’t she tell?
Sometimes it’ll be in her voice that it’s not just her and me, but that someone else is listening in, even when Daddy’s not around and no one’s nearby that I can see. Someone is going to be hurt by me. Is it Santa watching? Is it God? Because I don’t want Mama to start talking about God.
She bends her head closer to the piece of cloth and her mouth holds more tightly to the pins she has there. I sit quietly and watch how she has a way of putting her forehead to the task that looks like something’s pushing her head down, but from the inside. Decisions have already been made.
There is always a kind of knowing about her, and in the sewing room the complex bisque of Mama and her knowing is thick, perfumed and ancient. She is a good woman, my mother, dutiful, strong, always busy. She makes me want to be good.
She does what she is supposed to do. She says what she is supposed to say. She never tells what she is not supposed to tell. Without doubt or discussion, she lives the part she has agreed to live. There’s determination in it, and loyalty.
Her face is clear, with a blandness to it, a smoothness of forehead, of mildly smiling lips, an absence of expression grounded in some act of will. But the eyes are intelligent. Decisions have been made. I am not to question. I am not to interfere with the space of goodness and light around her. She seems to own goodness.
In the sewing room, there is no room for anything but the kind of goodness that Mama owns.
I get up and go outside. I climb the fence and go to Nathan’s clubhouse, a rough box the dimensions of the old garage doors and scrap wood that make it up, but he’s not there. I stick my apple core on a nail at the door.
Mrs. Calder’s in their yard, hanging things on the line. She says Nathan’s at Cub Scouts. Fritzi, their old, crazy, always penned-up fox terrier, charges at me. Bark! Bark! Bark! Bark! Bark! Bark! Bark! Bark! Bark! Bark! Bark! Bark!
Hap and Hazard and the End of the World Page 10
