Soon Ruth finished practicing and arrived downstairs to tell Cliff to put his drawing things away, because it was almost dinnertime. “And Winkie, too,” she added, which gave the abandoned bear a bitter thrill of self-righteousness. “I’ve told you not to leave your things lying around in the family room.”
“Ken had him last,” the boy complained, but soon enough he came in to retrieve the bear. “OK, let’s go,” he said with resignation, as if Winkie were his annoying little brother.
Still, as he was carried upstairs, the little bear thought maybe all was well again and he heaved an inward sigh to be once more in Cliff’s possession. He hardly noticed that one eye had clicked open as usual but the other, his right, was now frozen shut.
In the bedroom Cliff gave him the usual shake to make his eyes close and open but, seeing that this had no effect on the right eye, shook him several times more. Each time the bear wanted to cry out in pain.
“Winkie,” said the boy, “why aren’t your eyes working right?” He spoke with miniature exasperation, as if the bear were simply being uncooperative. Was he? As Cliff shook him even more forcefully, Winkie tried to will the hurting eye open again.
Abruptly the shaking stopped, and with his good eye Winkie saw the boy’s index finger coming toward him. It veered right and he felt it, moist and warm, on the problem eyeball. Then the finger pushed. The sensation was almost unbearable, but now the frozen orb gave way and grindingly rolled open.
In New Orleans, everything was going to be better.
There, before both his eyes now, was Cliff’s face, very close, very intent, gray eyes staring. “Hmt,” he muttered, just as one of his brothers would. He frowned, then Winkie saw the finger coming at him again. Once more it pressed right on his eyeball so that the bear wanted to scream. Slowly the orb squeaked closed again. There was no satisfying click, only a sound and a pain like sandpaper. Cliff pushed the eye open and shut a few more times, and for a moment it seemed to get a little easier … but then not.
Suddenly the boy hugged Winkie very tightly, and whatever pain the bear had felt today seemed altogether worth it. “You’ll be feeling better soon!” Cliff said, and it was like soothing balm spreading over his bad eye and all through him, so that despite his treatment earlier that afternoon, Winkie’s heart began slowly and almost painfully to unfold—
“Talking to your bear?” Ken sneered.
Winkie had heard him clumping up the stairs, but he had pretended not to notice, as if that could hinder him.
“No,” said Cliff, holding the bear suddenly at arm’s length.
“Oh, Winkie, oh, Winkie, how are you?” said Ken in a baby voice.
Swiftly Cliff put the bear up on the shelf, careless of leaving him with one eye open and one closed. Then he ran out and down the stairs to dinner.
Later that night as Cliff changed into his pajamas, he gazed up at the bear, seeming almost to relent, but then with a distracted air, as if he couldn’t remember what he’d meant to do just now, he simply climbed into bed. Downstairs the galloping theme to Bonanza began.
For the next few days Winkie watched and waited to be picked up and hugged tightly once more, but Cliff came and went, woke and slept, without even speaking to him. Yet the bear held out some hope, because even though Cliff was trying so hard to be a big boy, he continued shitting his pants.
4.
“They’re protesting in———now,” said Ruth one evening with disdain. From his perch up in the boys’ room Winkie couldn’t hear the place, couldn’t tell if it was near or far. He stared ahead with his one good eye.
“What do the niggers want?” asked Cliff.
“Nothing,” said Dave. “It’s all a buncha nothing.”
“They don’t know what they want,” added Ruth with finality.
Uneasily Winkie sniffed their dinner of corned beef and cabbage. Making fun of Negroes had become a family pastime in Louisiana. At breakfast Dave liked to read aloud newspaper accounts of how a Negro tried to steal something but then was caught, because he was stupid. Or maybe a group of Negroes was protesting something and the police chased them away or arrested them. Winkie doubted this was fair. The stories made him feel woozy, as though the shelf to which he’d been exiled were tilting little by little and he were about to fall.
As it happened, Paul’s own high school had just been integrated that year. By some irrefutable logic that Winkie couldn’t grasp, this meant that all the girls, white and colored, now went to the newer, nicer high school that had been built for the white teens, while Paul and all the other boys had to go to the run-down colored high school across town. Paul didn’t like the school, and Ruth and Dave held the Negroes responsible for this.
“Those jigs’ll just ruin that brand-new school,” said Dave. “You’d think the politicians would learn.”
“Ah wanna go to dat nice white school,” said Ken, which made Cliff laugh.
Winkie disliked any joke that made fun of people. He listened to forks clink on plates.
Ruth said, “We had integration back when I was in high school, too—because they’d started moving into Morgan Hill. They ruined my high school. You should just see it now.”
The soft tinkling sound of dinnerware continued, as if completing the irreversible process of destruction that Ruth had just described. Winkie’s bad eye began to throb. At the same time he noted that Paul had remained oddly silent during this conversation about his school. Suddenly the bear understood why the teenager always smelled like stale candy and cigarettes: He had been cutting class. Not even Cliff and Ken had realized this. Winkie stared half at darkness, half at the younger boys’ two bedspreads. It was strange knowing things that no one else knew. Sometimes Winkie was proud of it, and sometimes he wished he could just spit all those secrets out.
5.
Dots, thought the bear, staring into the dark of the boys’ room with his good eye. He called this boredom, instead of not-love or notjoy, because boredom could be endured, and boredom could be relieved. Today the president had been shot—he knew that much because Cliff and Ken had been sent home early from school. Things happen, Winkie reminded himself, with the satisfaction, if nothing else, of fear fulfilled. He looked at Ken’s map of the United States on the wall, shades of gray in the dark, and it looked to him like a huge misshapen crocodile, jagged and ravenous.
Cliff and Ken slept. What was meant to be and what wasn’t, what might have happened and what might not, what was chosen, what was half chosen, and what was not chosen at all, what was hoped for yet not, what could and couldn’t be changed, what was suffered and survived and what wasn’t, and what, by a hairs breadth, might not have to be suffered after all.
Cliff had forsworn Winkie but his resolve was not firm. Sometimes he carried the bear around the house anyway, seeming to have forgotten his brothers’ taunts, and sometimes Ken and Paul seemed to have forgotten, too—they saw him with Winkie under his arm but said nothing. Or they might even join in the Winkie play, saying things like “Winkie wants to watch TV” or “Winkie’s bored” or “Winkie needs a snack.” The bear hated Ken and Paul all the more for these whims, because he knew it could just as easily be “Winkie needs a spanking” or “Oops, Winkie fell down the stairs.” It was never “Winkie needs a hug.”
Whether Cliff might pick him up or even kiss him on any given day was a repeated question that nearly drove the bear mad. His problem eye was also unpredictable. Sometimes when Cliff jostled him, the right orb might fall open, shut, and open again, just as it should. More often than not, though, the eye remained stuck and hurting. Then Cliff would begin pushing and poking it with his finger, absently testing it again and again, like a loose baby tooth. “Poor Winkie,” the boy murmured, as the bear tried to choose between the pain like sandpaper and the unbidden joy of being held again. “Poor eye.”
6.
Soon Ruth’s father came for a short visit to see New Orleans and Ruth’s new home. In the glimpses Winkie caught of him, he appeared as tall
and thin as ever but now entirely gray and a little stooped, like a jackknife bent slightly closed. He made very little noise because, as Winkie had overheard Ruth say with admiration to Dave, her father spent most of his day down in the living room reading the Bible and Science and Health with the Key to Scriptures.
Up here, the vacuum cleaner roared and whined, changing pitch as Ruth slowly made her way down the stairs. “Darn it,” she said, under her breath. Apparently one of the boys had littered the beige carpet with the small, white circles of a hole punch before leaving for school. Winkie had overheard Ruth’s father point them out to her a little while ago. The observation was made in that deceptively wry and reserved way of his, so that even Winkie couldn’t tell if it was a joke or a hint, and in any case Ruth had gone to get the Eureka immediately.
Such uncertainties had made the whole house vibrate unpleasantly since her father’s arrival. Winkie knew that Ruth’s veneration for him was as irreducible as her very molecules, and there was no point in wishing otherwise, so with one eye open and one painfully closed the bear was given over to pondering with both wonder and sadness the unchanging bond between parent and child. At breakfast, lunch, and dinnertime Ruth’s eager storytelling voice echoed through the new house and up the stairs to Winkie. She told how she had solved a bookkeeping problem at the dentist’s office where she worked part-time or how she had given Helen sensible advice when she called, distraught, from college in Illinois. Upstairs, Winkie couldn’t hear her father’s quiet replies or the three boys’ murmurings, only Dave, who spoke less than usual and said things like, “That’s absolutely right.” Every once in a while the bear heard Ruth’s laughter, and he knew that her father must have exercised the dry sense of humor that Ruth so esteemed.
“Someone took my hole punch and dropped little holes up and down the stairs,” said Ruth in the foyer when Cliff got home from kindergarten, “so this morning I had to vacuum them all over again.”
The bear strained to hear more, as if he could detect Cliff trying not to attract further notice on his way up to his room. From long experience Winkie guessed Ruth wasn’t in a bad mood yet, but she was about to be.
Cliff came into his room carrying drawing supplies, which meant he was about to make a present for someone, probably his grampa, as a surprise. Winkie breathed in the quiet. It would be a little while before Ken got home to bother them, and maybe Cliff would even take him down from the shelf for a minute. At his desk the boy placed his hand flat on the white paper and drew around it with a ballpoint pen, embellishing this with crayons until it became a turkey. Winkie smelled a fart and knew the boy had to go to the bathroom, but still Cliff kept working until he had finished the inscription, a large and small T, which presumably meant Thanksgiving or turkey. He stood up then and his face took on that perplexed, annoyed yet blank expression that he always got when he had just had an accident, as if he hoped he were wrong. He went out and soon Winkie heard the toilet flush—always a reassuring sound—but when Cliff returned, he shut the door and pulled down his navy corduroys and also his underpants, whose whiteness indeed was marred by a medium-size brown stain. As usual the boy threw them in the yellow wicker clothes hamper and hastily dropped the lid shut. Then he took a fresh pair of underpants from the drawer and put them on, along with his corduroys. After tucking in his shirt, he took his drawing and raced downstairs, apparently in search of Grampa.
Before long Ruth came trudging up the steps and rolled the laundry basket into the boys’ room. Winkie braced himself. As she opened the yellow hamper she, too, displayed for just a moment that same perplexed, annoyed yet blank expression. But immediately it crumpled to outrage, the dark tops of her cat-eye glasses like angry cartoon eyebrows. She took the offending pair of underpants to the banister yelling, “Cliff! Come up here—right now!”
Winkie heard her go into the bathroom then, muttering with despair, “I just don’t know what to do with him. I just don’t know what to do!”
Washing sounds, and Cliff stepping lightly on the stairs, ascending slowly and reluctantly, almost tiptoeing.
“Come in here,” Ruth said.
Winkie heard the slightest creak and rustle of the boy moving toward her. He heard Grampa’s step as well, coming up the stairs, then pausing near the top.
“Look at this!” Ruth said. The swishing of water again. “Look where I have to wash them. They’re too dirty for the sink.”
The dripping sound of cloth being wrung out, then the shrill roar of the toilet flushing. The tank began to fill and the washing sounds resumed.
“See what I have to do?” said Ruth. She was almost crying. “See?”
And it was as if Winkie himself could see it, too: the brown-stained underpants and Ruth’s hands in the toilet.
It was as clear as if it had been projected onto the back of the bear’s one closed eye, which indeed had begun to throb. Then he saw the small boy standing there, his mother kneeling at the bowl, and nearby, her tall, thin father, paused at the top of the stairs. The three of them appeared to him as if in a diagram, each as stark and immutable as a circle, a square, and a triangle: the three of them, father, daughter, and daughter’s son, three beings; that is, three facts. They seemed almost frozen there before his mind’s eye, but he knew that was only the illusion of slowed time at the moment of disaster.
Intentions were one thing, but facts, Winkie knew, were quite another. Facts were incontrovertible, as was tragedy, and so in the sawdust of his mind he tried to cushion time and slow it down before anything more could happen.
Winkie thought he heard Grampa then lift his foot to the last carpeted step, and immediately, like a ricocheting eight ball, Cliff came running into his room from the bathroom, crying, and flung himself not onto his bed but on the floor between the wall and the bed, where even Winkie couldn’t see him. In the reflection of the tilted Etch A Sketch, the bear glimpsed Grampa proceed quietly, even stealthily, down the hallway to the room he’d been given and carefully shut the door. In a moment the washing noises resumed at the toilet as if they were a continuation of normalcy, and after one last flush, Winkie heard Ruth go quickly, even stealthily, downstairs, presumably to the laundry room.
Also plain as day, the bear could foresee the agitated yet purposeful expression she would wear as she pretended to herself that her father had not witnessed what had just happened. Turning the washing machine dial to the left and pursing her lips, she would will the business of the day to proceed.
Even now Winkie wished Cliff might come and hug him tightly, like in the old days, but no one was to be consoled, and the boy’s suppressed, irregular whimpering sounded almost like old, tan cloth sadly ripping.
7.
Staring, staring, listening, listening: How much longer could he stand to be alone? If only Cliff loved him like before, with the old fervor, Winkie could be happy being a toy forever. But the blankness and the waiting seemed to go on and on, and he never knew when it would stop. It might never stop. Or surely there would come a time when it would never stop, and even if this wasn’t that time, it may as well be, because forever-alone was coming anyway.
Ratfinks were little plastic trolls that Cliff bought from gum machines. The bear watched Ken and Cliff build a large house for them on the floor next to their beds, using nearly all of the red plastic bricks and small white windows and doors. Winkie wanted to play, too, but Cliff only played with ratfinks now. Ken and Paul didn’t seem to think they were the least bit babyish, and indeed here was Ken playing with them himself. Ratfinks were too hard and small to hug. They were ugly and felt nothing. Now they were Cliff’s favorite toys.
Ken and Cliff even made furniture for them out of the little bricks—couches, beds, kitchen counters. Usually the two brothers fought, but today they were playing well together. They left off the roof so they could see inside and move the ratfinks around.
Ken rigged the back stairway to fall at the slightest touch. “This’ll fix ’em,” he said, holding a white ratfink and ma
king him wiggle and speak. “Uh oh, here come the nigger ratfinks.”
Winkie Page 9
