I loved her even when, one day after class when we were all in the kitchen, there was a sudden change in the tone of conversation, and Edwina jerked her head in irritation and said the word “stupid.” I was busy working on a drawing and I didn’t hear the entire sentence, but I knew from the way my mother suddenly turned her head and reflexively picked an already chewed nail that she had been called stupid. There was only a moment of silence, and then they went on talking, my mother moving with stiff animation when she got up to get a plate of cookies for them to eat. Edwina sat with her head and face presented regally to the room, her oddly self-righteous expression that of a person who has successfully imposed her personality on someone else.
Like Edwina, my father could say it and it would be so. Sometimes he would come home when Edwina was still visiting and he would say, “Hey, it’s old Ed Barney!” and invite her to stay “for a few brews.” When that happened, we would all move into the living room, and my father would put on a record, and they would talk, each telling truths and agreeing with one another, organizing the world with their words and deciding what was right or wrong as the music ranted. “That’s right,” one would say to the other, as they all vigorously nodded their heads. “You’re absolutely right.”
Once though, Edwina did not agree with my father. He sat in his chair with his neck craning angrily forward, rubbing his fingertips together as though crushing something into powder. He used words I didn’t understand in a tone of voice that filled the room and pressed down on my neck, making me want to compress my bones and breath. My mother said, “Oh Al.” He ignored her, crushing her voice with his yells. Edwina sat stiff and bristling in her chair, her long hands deliberately loose on her wrists. She talked, and he interrupted her. He stamped over her words, but her face and body held the weight of his voice off her, and she occupied the little space around her with the same imperious face she’d made when she called my mother stupid. My father strained forward as though he would spring.
“I’m not going to stay and listen to this,” she said, and she stood, knocking over her glass of beer. As she walked to the closet to get her coat, my father did spring, and I was shocked to see Edwina break into a run, which she controlled almost immediately. My father followed her out the door yelling at her, his fists balled. I understood that he was telling her she was bad, evil, she had aligned herself with the terrible things in the world. I don’t remember if I felt anger or sadness or fear. I can only picture myself frozen and compressed, staring at my crayon drawing. I can’t remember what my mother did.
It was a long time before Edwina came to see us again. When she did, she and my father were friends again, but their faces held little reservations that prevented total agreement. He would look at her as though she were a naughty but lovable child, and she would look at him as though he were not as smart as she was but that she liked him anyway. There was no change between Edwina and my mother.
This and every other image from that time is faded, small and surrounded by a thick border of fuzzy, quavering blackness. The images aren’t connected; there are large spaces between them filled with the incoherent blackness. The emotions belonging to the images are even more unclear; they seem a slur of abnormal happiness, as if my childhood were characterized by the cartoons I watched on TV. This is probably because the adults around me, believing childhood to be a pretty thing, encouraged me to feel that way, talking to me in baby talk, singing about itsy-bitsy spiders and farmers in the dell, laying an oil slick of jollity over the feelings that have stayed lodged in my memory, becoming more and more grotesque as time goes on. But the feelings continue to lurk, dim but persistent, like a crippled servant, faithfully, almost imbecilicly trying to tell me something in the language of my childhood, my own most intimate language which has become an indecipherable code.
I remember the time a kid fell off our porch and cracked his skull. It was Halloween, and I wasn’t allowed to go out because my mother thought that, at five, I was too young. My mother dressed for the occasion in her red terry-cloth robe that reached the floor and made her look thick and imposing. The ordinary packaged candy looked special in a large crystal punch bowl. She handed it out with a gently officious air, enjoying herself as my father sat quietly in the shadows of the dim, radio-mumbling house. Most of the kids in our neighborhood were close to my age, and they stood bashful and ungainly in their monstrous wings and clown feet, incredulous and feeling slightly guilty that a stranger had put on a ceremonial dress to give them handfuls of candy. Sometimes a crowd of big kids would come and bellow “trick or treat” like a threat, or even thrust their masked faces into our living room to scream right at my mother, who screamed in return and hurriedly thrust the candy at them. It was during one of these screaming moments that we heard the real screams of a small child who had just fallen off the porch. There was a scramble of movement amid masked children in the dark, and then the boy was in our bright kitchen, sitting on a stool, bundled in a blanket, sucking his thumb. Probably his parents were there somewhere, but I don’t remember them. My mother was on the phone to the hospital, picking her nails while my father paced in and out of the room, coughing and wiping his mouth. He said something that made me think we could get into trouble because the boy fell off our porch.
I was frightened and fascinated by the boy. It terrified me to think that you could be standing on a porch, my porch, receiving official candy in a spirit of goodwill and then, with one wrong movement, be pitched into darkness, cracking your head in a way that could kill you. I stared at his eyes. They were a garish painted mask of red and blue, his sole costume. His lashes were long and beautiful, his eyes serene and wide, completely undisturbed by the large red gash in his head. I stared at the gash and at the brown hairs mashed around in the blood. I thought I was looking right into his brain. It seemed glowing and wonderfully mysterious. I felt very close to him. I wanted to put my hand in his head. We could get into trouble for this.
He started to whimper and tremble and to suck violently on his thumb. My mother got off the phone and came to him. “Poor little one,” she said. “Soon everything will be all right.” She put her arm around him, and suddenly I wanted to do the same, to protect and heal the boy.
I ran out of the kitchen and got my stuffed animal, a little limp dog named “Greenie.” I thrust it at the boy and said, “Take Greenie.” He did. He held Greenie tightly with one arm, sucking his thumb, quiet again, his beautiful eyes looking at me with what seemed like curiosity. I stared into his deep red brain until my mother bundled him in her sweater and took him to the hospital.
I let him take my toy. I felt that Greenie had helped him in some way, and it made me feel good to think that I could help a person, especially a person whose brain I’d seen. When I got Greenie back the following week, I valued him all the more as a healer and personal emissary of my goodwill.
When it was over, my father held me on his lap. He held me as though he was frightened of what had happened to the boy and thought I must be frightened too. The house was dark, the radio was singing to us in the background. His hands encircled the ankle of one of my legs and the knee of the other, and I rested in his body as though it were infinite. He said, “The Daddy will never let anyone hurt his little girl.” He said it as though the sentence itself was grand, as though saying it turned him into a stone lion, immobile but internally watchful and fierce.
Once my father took me with him to watch a basketball game. These were the games he talked about when he walked around the house, rubbing his fingers together and saying “the Mighty Reds” or “Hey hey! What do you say? Get that ball the other way!” as though the words were inflatable cushions of safety and familiarity with which he could pad himself. The Reds were clearly one of the good forces in life, playing basketball against bastards and viciousness. Even my mother said their name in the way people talk about doing right; it wasn’t fun, but you had to admit it was important.
The game wasn’t fun either. The auditorium was h
ot and muggy, full of muffled senseless noise and strangers with invulnerable gum-chewing faces. Sweating men ran with meaningless urgency, straining to prevent each other from doing something that changed from moment to moment. Strangers sat on benches roaring at intervals. My father sat with his neck stretched forward, his face set in the expectant, placated look he had when the world was forming a pattern he approved of.
When it was over we walked home in the dark. “The old Reds won,” said my father. “Don’t you want to cheer?” I cheered into the damp night as I ran up the sidewalk. The houses and trees were remote and strange in the dark, the mailboxes lonely and disoriented on their corners. Cars swished by in mournful sweeps of light, and we walked in triumph.
At home there was cinnamon toast and hot chocolate and my mother in her special white Chinese robe with black dragons on it. We marched into the rec room, Daddy carrying me on his shoulders, my legs dangling down his chest. Fat old Walnut the cat thumped behind us, his tail low and steady. My father put Carmen on the record player, and I darted around the room, swirling in an invisible lavender skirt. Daddy and Mother kissed on the blue-flowered sofa. Mother’s legs were folded and tucked against her body like the wings of a plump bird, and I saw the jagged shred of toenail and the hard little callus on her pink incurved baby toe. Her husband’s hands covered her face as he kissed her. “Olé, olé!” shouted prancing me. Scornful Carmen, with an aquiline nose and a rose in her teeth, silently leered from the velvety dark of her album cover where she sat propped sideways against a tall blue lamp. She had been stabbed to death by the time Daddy swung me into his arms. “Up the magic mountain, one, two, three. Up the magic mountain, yessiree.” We left Walnut curled beside the heat vent. Mother followed behind, smiling at my head as it rested on Daddy’s shoulder, hitting light switches as we passed from room to hall to room to staircase. “She’s going to sleep with Mama and Daddy tonight because the Reds won and because she is such a good girl.”
My memory of that night is a swollen, rose-colored blur that shades every thought venturing near it. The pink bed was massive. The quilts and blankets were rumpled into low mountain ranges with frowning indentation eyes and brows that stretched and melted when Daddy pulled the blankets over me. Tiny curls of hair and granules were the worms and earth of the pink bed world. The smell of Daddy’s hair oil and Mama’s perfume penetrated me like a drug too strong for my system to metabolize.
I lay cuddled in the arms of my softly pajamaed father, waiting for Mama, who was lazily brushing her hair at the vanity table. The rest of the room with its furniture, curtains, glimmering bottles, and snakes of Mama’s jewelry was a dream of objects that claimed to be familiar but weren’t. Then the light went off, and Mama slid between the sheets, her fragrant body heat lilting from the open space between nightgown and skin, and there was no longer any world outside the bed. When my eyes adjusted to see the gray squares of window and the trees beyond, they were faraway as stars, and the lumbering furniture was ephemeral as the half-dreams that bother you when you’re trying to wake up.
Justine Shade had unusually attractive parents, something she came to hold against them for reasons unknown to her. Even when she was five, she says, she knew that they were socially beautiful, although that concept is foreign to five-year-olds. They weren’t exquisite or perfect, but they had a reassuring, bigboned blondness (her mother), an elegant, slouching, Cary Grantesque authority (dad) that people responded to as though a cerebral complacency-center was stimulated by the mere sight of them.
When Justine thought of her childhood with them, she thought of the shoeboxes of color photos stored in a living room closet in their Deere Parke, Michigan, home. As an adult, Justine used these photographs as a set of icons, talismans against her fear that there had been something unusually nasty about her childhood. She would take the photographs out of their shoeboxes and vinyl albums and arrange them in bouquets that spanned the floor before her as she hunched near the radiator, holding her white-socked feet for warmth as she brooded over these proofs of family happiness and genetic beauty. There they were, eager, rosy, smiling young parents, kneeling to hold their tiny daughter upright between them as she stood on her unsteady legs like a worried poodle, her face quizzical, solemn, and concentrated. At age four, she was caught in a wild charge across the living room in her white gown, her cheeks pink, her eyes glittering with a flashbulb-induced diamond pupil. She smiled on a swing set. She squatted shyly in a sandbox, squeezing the ruffles of her red swimsuit; she stood with her slender legs in bathing beauty position, one hand on her hip, her face demurely composed as an uncouth neighborhood child holding a garden hose gaped. At nine she dolorously examined the contents of an Easter basket; beyond a piece of cockeyed floor, tilted by her mother’s weird camera angle, her pajamaed father sat on the edge of a couch, holding a green coffee cup with both hands and looking bitterly into space, his glasses on the end of his nose. She stood in the doorway, a princess in gauze and yellow spangles, a delicate rhinestone tiara, and cheap sandals spray-painted gold, holding her Halloween bag and smiling as her mother captured her creation on film.
She could find nothing to link the charming world represented by her little photographs with the squalid, sweaty-pantyhose situation that became her adolescence—even though the pictures taken of her adolescence recorded a smiling, vulgarly pretty, confident young girl surrounded by friends wearing white lipstick and flowered miniskirts, her handsome, bemused parents in the background. Justine hated to look at these pictures, which, in her eyes, had the queasy, urgent, side-tilted quality of a dream that is rapidly becoming a nightmare. Her earliest memories though, weren’t as clear, and she was thus completely seduced by the bright old photos.
When she was five, they lived in Lancelot, Illinois, in a large apartment with two floors. Her father, having just graduated from medical school, was in residence at the hospital there. She pictures him returning home in his white coat, exuding safety, duty, and cheer. He is sitting slouched before the coffee table with little Justine tugging at his pant leg, a tuna sandwich on the plate before him. He is talking about important things. He sounds angry, but the anger is sleek and shaped to look like something else; it makes Justine feel afraid and reassured at once. Her mother replies as though she knows exactly what he means and has known all along. Her voice isn’t angry. It’s strong and almost proud, yet it has a curiously unstable quality as though the strength can’t sustain itself but needs to plant itself in some other form of energy to thrive. It makes Justine feel uneasy and confident at once. Their voices weave in and out of each other; they construct their conversation like a bridge of concrete high above Justine’s head. She watches solemnly.
They got up at five for breakfast because Dr. Shade had to be at the hospital at six. There was less talk then; Daddy was grumpy, not triumphant. He would say, “Lorraine, these eggs are mucusy,” or “How do you expect me to drink this?” The anger pulled against its sleek shape, and Justine held her breath. Her mother was subdued and obedient, but the strength in her voice was vibrant, as though rooted in her husband’s peevish demands. As to a corporal in the army, obedience to a respected superior was not degrading, rather it ennobled, it scornfully subsumed feelings that didn’t serve it, it gave a hard, elegant shape to every movement and object that embodied it. Mother’s grace and efficiency as she moved to pour the juice, the beautiful, fragile flowers in the vase, the stirring classical music coming from the radio were all performing a duty, augmenting and uplifting the campaign to get Dr. Shade out the door in the morning. Yet all this beauty and order could be disturbed by mucusy eggs. Her daddy could still get out the door, but it would be that much harder to do the important things. It was a puzzle.
When Daddy marched out in his white coat, Justine and Mama went into the living room to do their exercises. It built discipline, said Mama in a voice of conviction that had its roots in something Justine didn’t know about. Mama would change from her robe into her leotard, and Justine would stay i
n her pajamas. Mama would put on the exercise record of surging yet sedate music supporting a man’s voice which said, “Up ladies! Down ladies! Very good ladies!” Justine loved the record. The man’s voice had a mysterious foreign accent, and on the cover were pictures of a beautiful serious woman wearing a gray leotard, who was swinging her legs or touching her toes or kneeling and putting her head to her knee, just like the foreigner said. Justine and her mama would face each other as the music began, they would move up and down and back and forth together. Mama’s chest would get red and blotchy where Justine could see it exposed by the plunge-necked leotard, but her chin and face remained upright and intent as she rose and sank or knelt and swung. “We must learn to push ourselves, Justine,” she said.
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