Godmother Night

by Rachel Pollack

  “We didn’t make her. We just convinced her she’d make a much better impression dressed as herself.”

  Kate continued, “So she gave all that stuff to Louise.”

  Jimmy said politely, “Do you still have it?”

  Louise laughed. “Actually, I gave it to a commune of drag queens.”

  Looking up innocently, Kate said, “So can we go to your house and play dress-up?”

  Louise laughed again. “I guess I don’t have much choice, do I?”

  Back in her tiny apartment, Louise set them loose in her bedroom, telling them they could try on anything but her underwear as long as they didn’t tear anything. She also offered to help them if they wanted to play with her makeup, but Jimmy said, “Thank you, Louise. But we can do it ourselves.”

  For the next two hours Louise worked on articles for the medical journal she edited, trying to ignore the whispers and giggles coming from her bedroom. Only occasionally did she sneak a glance through the bedroom door. The bed was piled high with dresses, blouses, skirts, even her leather jacket and blazers. Shoes lay strewn about the floor. Kate and Jimmy seemed determined to try everything. One time Louise would find Kate dressed in a long gold crepe-de-chine dress, with several necklaces, while Jimmy had on her red leather miniskirt and sparkly high heels. The next time she peeked Jimmy would be wearing a fussy old grandma dress she’d forgotten she owned, and Kate would look like a miniature career woman in a tweed suit. Or they would both be wearing lace nightgowns, sitting before the mirror fussing with each other’s hair or putting on yet another layer of lipstick. When she came upon them kissing, sitting a little away from each other and leaning forward from the waist to touch lips, Louise decided she better stop looking. I’m getting old, she thought. I don’t even want to try to figure this out.

  After two hours, Louise gave them a ten-minute warning, and when the time was up, took a deep breath, then marched in like a summer camp athletic director to announce cleanup time. Kate was holding Jimmy’s chin in her hand and was brushing mascara onto his eyelashes. She began to protest but stopped when Jimmy got up and began to pick up skirts and dresses off the floor. “That’s okay,” Louise said. “I’ll put the clothes away, Jimmy. Thanks. You two get dressed and then we’ll see if we can discover your original faces somewhere under all that grease.”

  Kate squealed and grimaced as Louise wiped her face with makeup remover and then scrubbed her with soap and water. “Will you please sit still?” Louise said. “I do not want your mother to start asking me questions.” By contrast, Jimmy sat nearly motionless, his hands in his lap as he delicately offered his face to Louise’s washcloth. She marveled at the touch and feel of his skin, pure even for a child, and very clear, almost translucent. When she finished she found herself staring at him for a moment until she realized he was watching her. “Thank you,” he said as she stepped back.

  Out in the street, Jimmy announced he would go with them to Kate’s house before heading home. He and Kate held hands as they walked. Louise found herself looking nervously at people passing them, but no one seemed to pay any attention.

  To Louise, Kate said, “How come you don’t want Laurie to know we were playing dress-up?”

  “Oh,” Louise said, “you know your mom. She’s just a little stiff sometimes.” Just as in the café earlier, Kate looked at Jimmy and began to giggle at some private joke. Louise paid no attention. Poked by guilt, she said, “That’s not really fair. Laurie…Laurie worries a lot. That something might happen to you.”

  Kate laughed. “What’s going to happen to me from playing dress-up?”

  “Well, she worries that people—the government—might consider her a bad parent, a bad influence.”

  Kate laughed even louder. “Because we played dress-up?”

  Louise shook her head. “Never mind,” she said.

  Of course, it wasn’t Jimmy’s parents who’d died, but Jimmy himself. “I’m a reverse orphan,” he told Kate. Dead Jimmy, as Kate called him (to distinguish him from Black-haired Jimmy, a boy in her class), was Kate’s best friend. Jimmy was ten, always ten, though he’d died long enough ago that his parents had grown old enough to retire and spend a good part of their days looking at pictures of their lost son. They would talk of memories, but their memories were selective, for they forgot their distaste for him, his precociousness, his contempt for their anger and commands, his perverted insistence on sleeping in his mother’s old nightgowns.

  Kate met Jimmy when she was seven, at a party she’d gone to with Mother Night. In the middle of all the dancing and loud laughter she’d seen a quiet figure in a green dirndl, sitting on the floor and drawing. She’d sat down and looked at the paper. It was covered with squiggly lines, except for the center, which displayed a snarling devil face, bright red with long yellow teeth. “What are you drawing?” she asked.

  “Mazes,” the child answered. “You want to try it?”

  “Okay.”

  The child gave her the pencil and pointed at a break in the lines at the upper left corner. “You have to go in here and go to the center and circle all around the Monster Man without falling into his den, and then you have to go out again without crossing the way you came in.”

  “Wow,” Kate said. “That’s really cool. Did you really make it yourself?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Kate set to work. Several times she thought she was making great progress only to hit a dead end. After a few minutes she said, “Are you a boy?”

  “Sure,” the boy said.

  Kate nodded. “I like your dress,” she said. “It’s real pretty.”

  “Thank you. I like your overalls.”

  “You do?” Kate looked down at the denim and flannel overalls Laurie had dressed her in that morning. Usually she liked these clothes. Now they looked dull. She tried to remember what pretty dresses she had at home. She looked up. “I’m Kate,” she said.

  “I know. You’re her goddaughter.” Kate’s eyes opened wide. Was she famous? Did all the dead people know her? The boy said, “I’m Jimmy.”

  Kate put out her hand. To her great surprise, Jimmy leaned forward and kissed her cheek. From then on they were friends, despite the fact that Kate never finished the maze, never even reached the center.

  Usually they met under the protective benevolence of Mother Night, who could stretch a few minutes at lunchtime into what seemed like hours. Sometimes Mother Night would take them somewhere, a party or a play, but at other times she would sit in a coffee shop, writing with a funny old pen in a shiny black notebook while the children wandered around town in search of adventure.

  The first time Mother Night sent them off on their own, Kate hesitated. “Is it safe?” she asked.

  Jimmy rolled his eyes. “Of course it’s safe. She doesn’t have to be with you to protect you.”

  Kate feared she would cry. “But I’m not even allowed to cross the street,” she said. She added, “Without a grown-up.”

  Godmother set down her book. She placed her hands on Kate’s shoulders. “My darling Kate,” she said. “I promise you. Wherever you go, my love and safety will go with you. No one will harm you, no stranger will touch you. Do you understand?”

  Kate whispered, “Yes.”

  Even so, when she stepped from the darkened coffee shop into the sunny afternoon, she stood nervously just outside the door. “Come on,” Jimmy said, and pulled on her hand. Suddenly Kate heard the growl of a motorcycle. She turned around to see, at the end of the block, Cara sitting on her parked motorcycle, body forward as she leaned on her handlebars. One hand moved in a half wave, half salute. Kate ran after Jimmy.

  Unlike most dead people Kate knew, Jimmy wore flesh almost all the time. It made it more fun, he said, if living people could see him. He got most of his clothes by stealing them from department stores, where he would fill his arms with dresses, then go to the boys’ fitting room to try them on. In the midst of all the confusion, and the outrage from mothers, no one ever seemed to notice that
he left with something extra, or maybe wearing something different than when he entered. Kate sometimes came along on these expeditions, but Jimmy never let her steal anything, or even stand too close. “I don’t want you getting caught,” he told her. “It doesn’t matter if they catch me. They can’t kill me or anything.”

  They were sitting on the end of a pier that day, a place where grown-ups came to exercise and to “make eyes at each other,” as Jimmy put it. It was summer and Kate was eating ice cream, something Laurie usually would not allow. Jimmy had bought it for her, with money he’d begged from a couple of middle-aged women, telling them that his family was so poor he had to wear his sister’s hand-me-downs. Confused, the women had looked from Jimmy to Kate, who’d nodded vigorously and said, “It’s true, it’s all true.” Not sure what to do, the women had given the children a couple of dollars and hurried away.

  Eating her ice cream, Kate said, “But they could put you in prison. Or a home.” She shuddered.

  Jimmy shrugged. “So what? I’d just leave. I’d go unseen on them. Pop!”

  Every now and then Jimmy would go unseen on the street, sometimes right in the middle of a conversation. Usually he did this as a joke on Kate, who would go right on talking, so absorbed she wouldn’t notice the sudden gauntness, the glimpse of bone through the skin, all the signs that meant only she could see him. The first time this happened, she wondered for several minutes why people kept staring at her, or whispering to each other, until one woman leaned over and said to her, “Are you talking to your imaginary friend, dear? Does it have a name?”

  When Kate was eleven years old, her friendship with Dead Jimmy ended because of a streetmarket.

  There were always streetmarkets in the city where Kate and Laurie lived, most of them illegal. People sometimes would set up carts, or simply lay down blankets on the sidewalk. They sold old clothes and new books, cheap copies of expensive wristwatches, wallets made from eels and snakes, earmuffs and sunglasses, healing oils and incense, earrings and magic charms, silk scarves and auto parts, fortunes and protection against evil. Most of what they sold they’d stolen, and of course they paid no taxes, so that the police sometimes closed them down, at least for a little while. But people liked the markets, at least the ones that sold new (if stolen) items from clean carts. People complained more about the ones selling filthy clothes and broken junk on the sidewalk. But since these people could scoop everything up in their blankets and move on, there wasn’t much the police could do.

  The market that sprang up the spring of Kate’s eleventh year, however, was different. For one thing it sold only old stuff—torn clothes, broken glass, high school yearbooks from twenty or thirty years ago, bent rings, jewelry with missing stones—things that no one really wanted. The sellers made up for this lack of appeal by extremely aggressive selling. They would grab people or shout in their faces. When people tried to turn away they would jump in front of them or else follow them, ridiculing the way they walked. Several people complained of cuts or bruises, even a broken arm. To make all of this much worse, the market did not operate in the seedy downtown area, but right on the main shopping avenue of one of the city’s wealthiest districts. The local shops complained of losing tens of thousands of dollars a day, as people either avoided the area altogether or couldn’t get through the street sellers to enter the stores.

  For weeks the hellmarket, as the newspapers called it, dominated the local news. People told their stories or showed their bruises on television, newspapers demanded action, late-night comedians told jokes. The police promised to clear them out, while implying that their helplessness wasn’t really their fault. In fact, no one seemed to understand just why the police couldn’t do anything. Store owners would call them as soon as the market began, then wait anxiously by their windows, listening for the sirens. And yet whenever the police arrived, the market was gone. The police cordoned off whole streets, letting nobody in or out. Somehow they only ever caught innocent shoppers who berated the police with still more tales of abuse. A few times they managed to confiscate oily sheets full of rusty tools or old torn photos. As soon as they left, however, the hellmarket returned, with even greater heaps of ancient trash.

  No one seemed to know where they came from. They looked to be all colors. Their ages ranged from as young as six or seven (one woman on the news told of a little girl who bit her ankle when she refused to buy a broken yo-yo), to people who looked almost too old to walk, let alone run from the police. Victims reported various languages, suggesting immigrants. Others heard only English. While many of the sellers looked as ragged as their merchandise, others appeared well fed and were dressed in clothes that could have come from suburban department stores except that they all looked helplessly out of fashion. Even the “rich” sellers, however, attacked their customers as ferociously as their shabbiest brothers and sisters.

  Kate found out about the market from the television. Laurie always put the news on while making dinner for her and Kate. Laurie didn’t care about the news actually; she just believed she should expose her daughter to current events. One night Kate heard shouts from the television, and when she went to look she saw groups of people shoving one another and screaming. The camera jerked around a lot, as if people were pulling the cameraman back and forth.

  Glancing in from the kitchen, Laurie didn’t like the way Kate sat so close to the television, staring with such concentration at the screen. She turned down the spaghetti sauce and walked over to the TV. “Honey,” she said, reaching for the controls, “why don’t you put on something else? This is all just noise.”

  “No,” Kate said, with such vehemence that Laurie jerked back her hand. “I want to see.”

  Laurie crossed her arms and stood watching her daughter. She’d never seen Kate so intense before. Suddenly Kate said, “I have to go there.”

  Laurie shook her head. “Forget it. People are getting hurt there. It’s a madhouse.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Obviously. But I care. It’s my job. Don’t even think about going there.” Laurie braced herself as she reached out and turned off the TV.

  Kate must have seen enough because she didn’t object. Instead, she just said, “Mom, you don’t understand. I’ve got to go there.”

  “Kate, this is ridiculous. You’re not going anywhere near there.”

  “But I can help.”

  “Help?” Laurie laughed, a short sharp sound. “I don’t think so, sweetheart.” Kate looked down. Gingerly, Laurie touched her cheek. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I didn’t mean that. I think—I think it’s nice that you want to do something. But you know I can’t let you do that.”

  “It’s okay,” Kate said. She shifted her gaze to the empty air.

  Laurie stroked her shoulder. “Why don’t you help me make the salad?”

  Kate knew that her godmother would take her downtown if she asked. For once, however, Kate wanted to do this on her own, at least until she knew for sure. That night, she put a couple of subway tokens in her knapsack along with her allowance and some money from the secret bag she kept under her bed. She also tucked in a special handkerchief, delicate and pink, with lace trim and an embroidered flower. Jimmy had given it to her. To show how much he loved her, he’d said. In the morning she got up early and dressed herself in ragged jeans, sneakers, and an old sweatshirt before Laurie could come in and suggest more respectable clothes. “We’re going on a field trip,” Kate told her mother when Laurie objected. “To the park.”

  Through the morning, Kate did her best to ignore the stares and snickers from the fashionable girls in her class. During recess she went and sat by herself in the corner of the playground and drew pictures of motorcycles and labyrinths in the back of her composition book. She didn’t even look up when Alice and Martine, two girls who always wore dresses, strolled past her, whispering “Lezzie” just loud enough for Kate to hear.

  Finally, lunchtime came. The moment the bell rang Kate rushed from class and ran for t
he subway. The ride downtown took twenty minutes. The whole way, Kate bounced excitedly in her seat. Going somewhere on her own, really, without even Mother Night. But as she got closer to the streetmarket area, and could hear the noises of people shouting, her confidence began to dwindle. What if someone hit her? What if the police arrested her? She couldn’t just go unseen. What if it took longer than she thought and she couldn’t get back to school on time? And what if Laurie found out? Silently she repeated to herself Louise’s phone number and the phone number of the bookstore, placing them fresh in her mind just in case. The bookstore would be best, if she could speak to Mark, but suppose her Mom answered? She wondered if she could disguise her voice.

  The market, when she came to it, appeared both quieter and more chaotic than it looked on television. The sellers covered most of the sidewalk space in front of the stores for three whole blocks, but most of them just stood by their sheets full of junk or else sat on the ground. At the same time, there were pockets of wildness, shop owners screaming at the sellers to go away, market people grabbing some poor woman who’d tried to step past someone to go into a drugstore for a prescription. Kate saw a woman crying and pleading with the market people to leave her pen store alone, to go find some other neighborhood to destroy. Her husband had had a stroke, she said, he didn’t even leave the house anymore, if this kept up it would kill him, couldn’t they see that, why couldn’t they just go away? The marketers, a man who looked old enough to be the store owner’s father and a girl who looked about Kate’s age, only laughed and offered to sell the woman an ancient pen stained with leaked ink and grime. The store owner stood crying for a moment, then ran inside her shop and slammed the door.

  Kate stood at the head of the street, breathing deeply until a woman came up to her and warned her she better leave, things were quiet now, but they could blow up at any moment. Kate told her it was okay, she just had to go meet her mommy in the toy store at the end of the block. The woman looked doubtfully down the street, then offered to walk with her. “No, thank you,” Kate said, and walked quickly away, slowing down only when she was sure the woman wasn’t following her.