“Losing the last day like that. Gee,” Laurie said, squeezing down between Toby and Shax, “it’s not bad being home.”
A month later, with satisfaction only secondary to Laurie’s, I took him back to school to pick up his books so he could try to catch up on his work. “Remember,” I told him in the car before we went into the school, “thank the teacher and the kids for the nice basket they sent you.”
“Yeah,” Laurie said. He had chosen ten in the morning as the ideal moment to present himself at school.
“And don’t forget to thank the teacher for her flowers.”
“Yeah.”
“And tell her I’ll help you at home with arithmetic.”
“Come on,” Laurie said.
We entered the classroom in triumph; Laurie threw open the door and stood for a moment in the doorway before advancing with a swagger Cyrano might have envied. “I’m back,” he said into the quiet of the spelling lesson.
“Thank you so much for the flowers,” I told the teacher. “Laurie appreciated them so much.”
Laurie sat on one of the front desks, holding his hand with the traction splint prominently displayed. All the third-grade girls gathered around him, and the boys sat on the floor and on nearby desks. “—And I guess there were five hundred people there,” he was saying, “they came tearing in from all over. And the street—you oughta seen the street—covered with blood—”
“I’ll go over his arithmetic with him,” I told the teacher.
“He was doing splendidly,” she said absently, her eyes on Laurie.
“—And my good shirt, they had to cut it off me, ten doctors, and there was so much blood on it they had to throw it away because it was all cut to pieces and bloody. And I went in an ambulance with the sireens and boy! did we travel. Boy!”
“And will he need to go over his reading?”
“Excuse me,” said Laurie’s teacher. Unwillingly, she moved closer to the spellbinder, her hand still reassuringly on my arm. “And my mother fainted,” he was saying, “and my father . . .”
Three
Sometimes, in my capacity as mother, I find myself sitting open-mouthed and terrified before my own children, little individual creatures moving solidly along in their own paths and yet in some mysterious manner vividly reminiscent of a past which my husband and I know we have never communicated to them; I remember the little shock of familiarity I felt when I first saw Jannie skip down the front walk, and the sense of lost years slipping past, unrealized, when Laurie came home chanting “O U T spells out, and out you go, down to the bottom of the deep blue sea with a dirty dishrag turned inside out,” although there was a heated family discussion about the second line of “Ibbitty, Bibbitty, Sibbitty, Sab,” because Laurie believed that it went “Ibbitty, bibbitty, conoso,” and I said it was “conothco,” and my husband said it was “Ibbitty, bibbitty, canarsie,” and it reminded me of the little idiocy which went “Laurie bumbaurie tiliaurie gosaurie,” although my husband said that that one ended “gotaurie.” Sally discovered in herself the ability to chant that most basic and most jeering of childhood tunes, the “da, da, da-da, da,” or “I know a secret,” melody; Laurie began collecting pictures of baseball players, which came enclosed in packages of bubble gum; in my day they used to be in packages of licorice. The candy cigarette turned up, and the chocolate apple; they no longer give away baseball bats with pairs of new shoes, but Buster Brown still grins with his dog from the soles. A whole section of forgotten past came back, for instance, one evening when Laurie remarked joyfully that a house near the school had a ghost in it and none of the kids from school would walk past it, although one intrepid adventurer named Oliver maintained that he had been inside and had of course seen the ghost, and “Boy,” Laurie said with reminiscent pleasure, “was he scared!”
My husband and I looked at one another; in my case it was a house on the next block—the one next to the vacant lot—and the boy who said he had been inside was named Andy Young (how is it that I have not forgotten Andy Young in all these years?) and my husband remembered that there was a shack at the back of the school yard which had a ghost in it and that one Louie Fair had been inside. In all cases the punchline of the story was precisely, “Boy, was he scared!” My husband and I found ourselves repeating the same amused platitudes about boys who went into haunted houses that our parents had used to us, Laurie retorted that everyone knew this house was haunted and he bet we wouldn’t go inside, and there was a familiar split-second hesitation before my husband and I answered, in chorus, that certainly we would go inside, if it were not that the house belonged to someone else who would presumably resent our entering without permission. Laurie said Boy, he bet a ghost was sure a scarey thing to see, and his father offered to compose a document demonstrating that our house was haunted if Laurie would take copies of this document and distribute them, like handbills, around the neighborhood. Laurie agreed with delight, and the conversation closed, in traditional style, with the flat statement that Laurie was not to go into the haunted house under any circumstances since it was a) someone else’s property and b) if abandoned, probably dangerous, with broken glass and falling beams. Point c) was not mentioned, but I personally have always believed in ghosts; I taught Laurie later a small charm against evil spirits, disguising it as a nursery rhyme. The handbill* was duly composed and Laurie set out with it, although along the way he fell in with evil spirits against whom his charm was powerless and played two innings of softball; when his father asked him later about the handbill he said that Mrs. Wright, down the road, had read it and thought it was very clever and asked Laurie if he had written it himself. Mrs. Collins had not had time to read it right then but said she would send over a plate of cookies later. By the time school started again in the fall, gang warfare had taken over the fourth grade and the ghost was allowed to languish in his haunted house, untroubled again by Oliver, although I daresay that when someday Laurie’s son remarks that a friend of his has explored a haunted house, Oliver’s name will come, freely and with nostalgia, to Laurie’s mind.
The opening of school that fall found Sally, scorning the overalls which now read LAURIE JANNIE SALLY, preparing to enter upon nursery school. Jannie’s girls had all retired abruptly to a ranch in Texas, from which they very rarely wrote illegible letters to their mother, but Sally now had a house of her own, located approximately and damply in the middle of the river near our house; we all heard a great deal about this retreat of Sally’s, in which a number of small children Sally’s age lived in utter happiness upon lollipops and corn on the cob. Sally visited there, she explained, at night after the rest of us were asleep, and when she was particularly angry with any of us she shouted furiously, “You can’t come to my house!”
Sally had at this time entered with complete abandon into a form-fitting fairyland; I saw her sometimes as wandering perpetually in a misty odd world, where familiar shapes merged and changed as she passed and occasionally a brother or a sister or a parent, stepping from behind a tree, might briefly interrupt her journey; with the exception of Jannie, who slept in the same room and had no refuge from Sally’s bedroom stories, I spent more time with Sally than with anyone else, and began to find that a large part of my daily activity was accompanied by Sally’s tuneful and unceasing conversation; part song, part story, part uncomplimentary editorial comment. Around the house, my head deep in a pillowcase or the oven, my eyes focussed on that supernatural neatness which the housewife sees somehow shadowing her familiar furniture, it was largely possible to disregard, or not-quite-hear, Sally, but in the car I was entirely what I believe is called a captive audience. We traveled far afield that fall, Sally and I, up and down familiar and unfamiliar roads, going perhaps after pumpkins, or taking a side road because for a minute it looked unusually yellow to Sally, or just going the longest way around because it took us over a covered bridge crossing Sally’s river and people living nearby owned a baby goat. “
In my river,” Sally remarked once, chillingly, “we sleep in wet beds, and we hear our mothers calling us,”—giving me a sudden terrifying picture of my own face, leaning over the water, wavering, and my voice far away and echoing; “The water is probably extremely cold,” I told her, and shivered. “In the river,” Sally said, “no one ever comes except us.” We drove upon occasion, Sally and I, up and down Murphy’s Hill, which was every bit as steep going up as it was going down and led only to a kind of plateau neatly edged with trees; in the fall these trees presented an appearance sufficiently startling to make a trip up (and of course down) Murphy’s Hill a rewarding experience even beyond its roller coaster aspects; the vines on the trunks of these trees turned red early, and the trees stayed green late, and a row of straight, youthful green trees with bright red trunks was a sight I have never seen except at the top of Murphy’s Hill.
Sally habitually rode standing on her head in the back seat, and gave every sign of regarding me as perhaps an additional fixture to the car, a sort of extension of the steering wheel; her conversation included me casually, and my comments became a sort of counterpoint to which she attended when it was necessary, perhaps, to find a rhyme, or perfect a rhythm; we found ourselves one day on a back road, turning a corner suddenly into a herd of cows.
“Do you know who I am?” Sally was singing, on her head in the back seat, “DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?”
The cows were wandering vaguely—very much, I suppose, in the manner of cows unsupervised and not in the least pleased about it; they crowded the road and moved in all directions at once. “I’m a rat and you’re a fish,” Sally sang, “and now you know who I am.”
“Do turn yourself rightside up,” I said. “The road is covered with cows and I can’t see out the back window.”
There was nothing to do, of course, but stop the car and wait until some avenue opened itself through the cows. I am earnestly afraid of all large animals; I closed the car windows tight and cringed in my seat, entirely convinced that a cow was going to try to climb onto, or into, the car. “Look at all the cows,” I said to Sally with a sort of wild gaiety; I did not, after all, want to communicate to a small child my fears, which might possibly be unfounded; “I guess you never saw this many cows before.”
“These are not cows,” Sally said. “These are giants.”
“See how they stop and look at us,” I remarked airily, moving over into the center of the front seat. “I suppose they wonder what we are.” I grinned back convulsively at a bovine face next to the window. “Nice cow,” I said.
“Lots and lots and lots of giants, and when I see giants I know their mothers are coming to eat me.”
This corresponded so nearly to my own apprehensions that, wildly disregarding the probable suicidal result of frightening a herd of cows into a stampede, I slammed my hand down onto the horn and my foot onto the gas pedal. The cows backed away and turned, lumbering against one another, and finally determined unanimously on one direction, which was down the road ahead of us; running, so that with Sally calling encouragement from a rear window and me leaning on the horn, we found ourselves in the odd position of chasing a herd of cows swiftly down a country road. “Run, giants, run,” Sally shouted out the window. I made a broad screaming turn onto a side road and pulled up, panting and listening to the thunder of hooves as the cows made off into the distance. “Golly,” I said.
“Giants are very nice sometimes,” Sally remarked, turning herself upside down, “and sometimes giants are not very nice and sometimes giants are very nice and sometimes giants are—”
It was the day of Sally’s fingers, I think, when we went to get the apples. There was a farm not far away where they sold an honest frost-bitten apple and had a speckled hen in a cage, and Sally and I made it, that fall, one of our regular stopping-off places; Sally was always given an apple to eat, and I always admired the speckled hen, and we came home with the car full of apples and their rich scent; on this day Sally had amused herself by counting the fingers on her left hand, which came out six, and the fingers in her glove, which came out five, and she was deeply involved in the problem of accommodating her fingers into the glove, which had unreasonably fit perfectly until now; the road was narrow and winding, and I was humming to myself and watching the way the sun came through the colored trees. We moved without any recognition of danger onto a scene of fire; I realized as we came around a corner that there had been a vague sense of activity and noise ahead, but as I slowed down the wild approach of the fire engine sounded behind me and I had no choice but to pull my car quickly over into the ditch as the engine rushed by. So there we sat, Sally and I, in the car, unable to turn and go back the way we had come, surely unable to go forward, and—I, at least—most unwilling to stay where we were. “Is it a giant?” Sally asked uncertainly, coming over into the front seat to look out, “is it a giant, or what?”
“It’s a fire,” I said. “That farmhouse is burning.”
“Why?” Sally asked.
I thought fleetingly that perhaps this would be a good time to warn Sally against playing with matches, but my moment had passed; “It looks like a giant to me,” she said. “Are we going to stay here?”
“Until the road ahead is clear,” I said. “We’ve got to wait till those other cars get out of the way, because we can’t turn around.”
“Then I will have another apple,” Sally said. She returned to the back seat, found an apple, and stood herself up on her head. “I am going to sing an apple song,” she said.
We had to stay there for over an hour; it was quite a fire. Had the farmer whose home was burning been of a philosophical turn—which I am fairly sure he was not—and believed that he was due for at least one fire during his lifetime and was having it now, he might have taken great consolation in the way this one came off; his livestock, I learned from brief bulletins from the firemen, was safe, his children securely at school, his wife and farmhands unharmed, his insurance invulnerable, and as we arrived they had been carrying out his television set. The sound country policy of letting the burning house go and trying to save the buildings nearby was being put into practice; the fire hose stretched nicely to Sally’s river, and although the house and barn, which were close to one another and both hopelessly lost, flamed ominously, the firemen were successfully soaking down the other outbuildings and the one or two neighboring houses. There was not even a wind.
“I’m a sweetie,” Sally sang, “I’m a honey, I’m a poppa-corn, I’m a potato chip, all my days for you.”
My principal feeling, beyond the primitive terror of the fire itself, was of embarrassment. I was deeply concerned lest these people assume that we, my daughter and I, had come curiously to watch their fire. I wanted very much to catch hold of one of the firemen and explain that we were here entirely by accident, like the fire itself; we had been passing by, I would tell him, on our way home from buying apples, and had been caught by chance on this road; we did not ordinarily race fire engines to fires, I would go on, but in this case, what with the narrow road . . .
“Aren’t they through yet?” Sally demanded over my shoulder.
“Almost,” I said. “The fire engine is getting ready to leave.”
“We shouldn’t of stayed this long,” Sally said.
I pulled out of the ditch, and waved cheerily to the farmer’s wife as we went by. We reached home to find the rest of our family waiting restlessly for dinner.
“We got apples,” I said to my husband, “and we saw—”
“Giants.” Sally swung wildly on her father’s arm, “Giants.” She nodded.
“Giants?” my husband asked me, staring.
“There was a big giant party and they were cooking marshmallows,” Sally said. She caught Jannie in a long ominous look. “Giant marshmallows.” Her voice dropped to a compelling whisper. “And the giants were all stamping around and the mother giant sat there and watched them, and the mothe
r giant said ‘Wait till those other cars get out of the way and then we can go home.’ And I had ninety-seven apples. And we came over the river and the mother giant went in and got drowned dead.” There was a short, respectful silence.
Finally Laurie inquired of his father, “Who was Aristides the Just?”
“Friend of your mother’s,” my husband said absently. “Apple pie?” he said hopefully to me.
“I got to do a report,” Laurie said.
“Y’know something?” Jannie asked me. She glanced around at her younger sister and then went on in a low voice, “I don’t believe it when Sally tells about giants. Do you?”
“Certainly not,” I said. “She’s just making it up.” And recognized clearly that there was no ring of conviction whatever in my voice. “My goodness,” I said heartily, “who’s afraid of giants?”
During that fall the conflict of individual cultures in our family became explicit, and uncontrollable. My husband and I, a little frayed after a number of years spent—it seems—almost entirely in the society of small children, had managed to build up little sets of foibles which we were reluctant to sacrifice. Laurie had developed opinions which could only be called decided. Sally had not so far seen any reason for doubting that anything could be achieved if you just made enough noise about it. Jannie, who had never in her life doubted anything she said herself although no parental pronouncements sounded to her entirely impartial or, no matter how emphatic, reasonable, entered first grade that fall and came into contact with the public school system.
Now, I have nothing against the public school system as it is presently organized, once you allow the humor of its basic assumption about how it is possible to teach things to children, and my experiences with Laurie have convinced me that the schools are well enough, and my children are well enough, and it is only any chance combination of these two which is apt to become explosive. Laurie succeeded in fighting his way to the fourth grade without showing any noticeable signs of contact with education, but Jannie brought up against the school an impact which must have been felt in the very bedrock of learning, and which certainly put a crack in the family hearthstone.