The trouble started after my father left my mother and me so that he could shack up with his girlfriend and her son, puny little Peter Clegg, who was in my class at school. It was confusing, you know? My dad was a mailman and Peter’s mother was the postmaster’s secretary. That was how their little “romance” started. But at the time, I didn’t get any of that. I just assumed that he had left because he liked Peter better than he liked me. What I couldn’t figure out was why.
Dad left us high and dry. I was in Cub Scouts, okay? One week Mom was a housewife and our den mother, and the next week she was a grocery clerk down at the First National. That was when I had to start taking the bus over to this woman Irma’s house after school.
Irma Cake: she was a foster mother, but she babysat other kids, too. Us after-school kids had to play down in the basement so we wouldn’t wake the babies up from their naps or bother her while she was watching her stories on TV. Those babies all must have been heavy sleepers, I guess, because she’d have the volume up so loud that you could hear the television through the fucking floorboards. Time now for . . . The Edge of Night. We were only allowed upstairs at snack time, or if we had to use the toilet. And if you needed to tell Irma something while you were up there, you had to wait for a commercial.
Irma’s daughter, Tawny, was in charge downstairs. To this day, I fantasize about running into Tawny Cake on the street somewhere and making her pay for the things she did. One time when I was in prison, I woke up smiling from a dream where I’d just plunged a shiv into her heart.
Tawny was older than the rest of us—fourteen or fifteen, maybe. She was a big bruiser and unpredictable as hell. Nice to you one day and a bully the next. On my first day at Irma’s, Tawny gave me a handful of Hershey’s Kisses. On the second day, I called her Scrawny Tawny, thinking she’d think it was funny. Instead of laughing, she smacked me so hard across the mouth that I cut the inside of my lip on my bottom teeth. She wouldn’t let me go upstairs so Irma could look at it, so I just sat there cross-legged on the floor, swallowing back my tears and snot and blood. I never knew from day to day, sometimes from hour to hour, which Tawny I was dealing with.
My mother didn’t work on weekends. Sometimes we’d get in the car and go places on Saturday: Wequonnoc Park to look at the animals and swing on the swings, or down to Ocean Beach if it was summer. Once a month or so, we’d drive the forty-five minutes to my cousins’ house, the O’Days. Uncle Chick and my mom were brother and sister, and my cousin Donald and I were almost the same age. I liked Donald okay back then, but it bugged me that he was bigger than me, and ten months older, and that his father hadn’t left him. But anyway, whatever Mom and I did on Saturday, by Sunday afternoon I’d start worrying about the next day when I’d have to go back over to Irma’s. When I told my mother I didn’t want to go there anymore, she said I had to go. “These changes are hard for me, too, you know,” she said. “Do you think I want to be over at the First National all day, ringing up people’s groceries while they watch me like hawks, thinking that I’m out to cheat them? But this is the way things are now, Kent, and we both have to just accept it. And if you don’t like it, then call up your father and tell him because he’s the one who made this mess.” When I did call Dad, my classmate Peter Clegg was the one who answered. “Who is this?” he kept saying. “If you’re not going to say anything, then I’m hanging up.” And he did, three times in a row. The fourth time, the phone just kept ringing and ringing.
Mornings at school were okay, but once lunch was over, I’d start staring at the wall clock, dreading what was coming. And when the bus driver yanked the door open in front of Irma’s, I’d get off as slowly as I could. Irma would appear at the door, holding a baby or a toddler in her arms and calling to me to hurry on in. “How was school today, Kent?” she’d ask.
“Good.”
“Okay, down you go then. The girls and Tawny are waiting for you.”
The girls, Sandra and Nadine, were both in my grade, but they went to a different school. I didn’t like either of them. And I hated Tawny.
There was stuff to play with in the basement, but it was shabby: puzzles with missing pieces, books with all the pictures scribbled on, plastic cowboys and Indians that Irma’s dog had chewed before it got run over by a car. The only good thing down there was this can of Lincoln Logs. I’d make a beeline for them, then sit on the cold, damp cement floor and build stuff so I wouldn’t have to play dolls with the girls, or get in trouble with Tawny. But I’d be in the middle of making a fort or something when she’d yank me up off the floor and tell me I had to play some stupid game she’d invented. “Twirling” was one. No matter how dizzy you got, we had to keep spinning around in circles until she said we could stop. “Halt!” she’d yell. Then she’d laugh as we staggered like drunks, falling onto the floor or crashing into chairs or walls. If you stopped before she said you could, you had to go through the spanking machine. When Sandra and Nadine spanked you, it didn’t hurt, but as you passed under Tawny’s legs, she’d whack your butt hard enough to make it sting. After a while, Sandra stopped coming, so it was just Nadine and me. That was when Tawny started making us play “House.”
In “House,” Nadine was the wife and I had to be the husband. “Hug her,” Tawny would order me. “Now call her darling and kiss her.” If I cooperated, she’d peel back a roll of Life Savers and let me take two. If I refused, she’d pin me against the floor and tickle me until, unable to breathe, I’d give in. But one day when Tawny told us we had to play “House” again, I dug my heels in. “You do what I say, or else!” she threatened.
“Or else what?” Or else she’d tickle me again, I thought.
“You’ll see.” When I shook my head, she went upstairs and came back down with an electrical cord and threatened to whip me with it.
“Go ahead,” I said. “See if I care.” This was a bluff; I was petrified. She chased me around the basement until she had me cornered. Then she yanked down my pants and underpants and lashed my bare butt while Nadine stood there, wide-eyed. “Does that hurt?”
“No, it tickles.”
“Yeah? Then how about this?” Several blows later, she had me crying and begging her to stop.
The door at the top of the stairs banged open. “Tawny! What the hell’s going on down there?” Irma shouted.
Tawny answered before I could. “Nothing, Ma. Kent’s just being a little brat. He’s grabbing all the toys and won’t share them with Nadine.” I would have denied it if she wasn’t holding that cord in her fist, ready to whale me some more if I did.
“Then you and Nadine come up and have a snack,” Irma said. “And Kent, you can just stay down there by your lonesome for being so selfish.”
Halfway up the stairs, Tawny turned back and smirked. “I hope you know there’s rats down here. They have red eyes that glow in the dark, and that’s the only way you can see them. And when they bite you, you get diseases. This other boy we used to babysit got bit and he died.” At the top of the stairs, she hit the light switch and the basement went black.
Temporarily blinded, I felt my way to the railing, then crept up to the second step from the top. Blinking back tears, I hugged my knees and looked down, on guard against red-eyed rats.
After I got home that day, my mother wanted to know why I was being such a pouty face. I told her I didn’t know. “No? Well, why don’t you go take your bath while I start supper?”
While the bathtub was filling up, I undressed and touched my backside because it felt sore and hot. Then I stood up on the toilet and looked over my shoulder in the medicine cabinet mirror. When I saw the ugly red stripes, I started to cry. “Everything okay in there?” Mom called in to me.
“Yes! Don’t come in!”
“Well, my goodness, aren’t you getting modest.”
The next day, Tawny ignored me and played all afternoon with Nadine.
The day after that, she snuck upstairs and came down shaking a can of Reddi-wip. “Open your mouths,” she told us.
When we did, she filled them with whipped cream. Nadine only got one squirt, but I got three. I didn’t know why.
That night, when my mother tucked me in, I told her I didn’t need anyone to babysit me—that starting on Monday, I could just come home after school, do my homework, set the table, and not get into any trouble. She said maybe we could try that next year when I was in fifth grade, but for now I was too young. “I’d be at the store, watching the clock and worrying about whether or not you were okay. And anyway, if you didn’t go to Irma’s anymore, you’d never find out about the surprise you’re getting.”
“What surprise?” I wanted to know.
She said I had to wait and see on Monday. What I imagined was that my father was going to appear at Irma’s, take me home, and start living with us again. “Does it have anything to do with Daddy?”
“With Daddy? No, no. It’s something else.” She reminded me that I would see my father the next afternoon for our visit. While I was having my visit with him, she said, she was going to get me my surprise and bring it over to Irma’s. I begged her for a clue, but she said I’d just have to wait.
When my father picked me up on Saturday afternoon, Peter Clegg was in the car with him. On the way to the movie we were going to, Peter and I had to sit together in the backseat, but neither of us said anything to the other. The movie was A Night to Remember, about the sinking of the Titanic. I got to sit next to Dad and Peter Clegg sat next to me so we could share the bucket of popcorn. But when the people in the movie started drowning, baby Peter got scared and we had to switch seats. “It’s okay, buddy,” Dad assured Peter. “It’s not real. It’s just a movie.” He put his arm around him.
“It is so real,” I leaned over and whispered. “The Titanic was a real ship, and all those people really died.” When Dad got mad at me for making Peter cry, I upended our tub of popcorn and said it was an accident.
My surprise was a little brown gerbil in a cage. The rule was that I couldn’t take him home; I could only play with him when I was at Irma’s. Mom’s plan worked for a while; I stopped complaining about having to go over there. Now, besides the Lincoln Logs, I had my gerbil to play with. I named him Funny because he made me laugh. And that first week, Funny brought me luck. Tawny was gone. She’d gotten sick over the weekend, Irma said, and had to go to the hospital and have her appendix taken out. So it was just me and Nadine downstairs by ourselves. “Can I hold Funny now?” she kept asking me.
“No!” I kept saying. “He’s mine.” So she had to keep sitting there, watching Funny crawl up and down my arm and eat pellets from my hand.
Then, for no reason, Nadine told me her parents were divorced.
“So?” I said. “What do I care?”
She shrugged. Then she told me my parents were getting a divorce, too.
“No, they’re not!” I insisted.
“Yes, they are. Irma told my mother.”
“Well, she’s wrong then. My father is just on vacation.”
“Oh,” Nadine said. “You know what? I have a boyfriend.”
“Who cares? Stop bothering me.”
“You want to know who it is?” I told her I didn’t. “It’s you,” she said.
“It is not.”
She wanted to know why I didn’t want to be her boyfriend. “Because I hate girls, and because you’re ugly and have yellow teeth.”
She didn’t say anything for the next several minutes. Then what she said was, “I hope Tawny dies while she’s in the hospital. Don’t you?”
We looked at each other for several seconds. Then I nodded. “Here,” I said, handing her my gerbil. “You can hold him for one minute, starting now. One thousand one, one thousand two . . .” When I got to one thousand sixty, I put my hand out and demanded that she give him back. She did.
Tawny was still in the hospital the next day. The day after that, she was back home, but she had to lie down on the couch upstairs. But by Thursday, she was back in the basement. She told Nadine and me that while she was in the hospital, a nurse had walked her down to the nursery and let her look at the new babies, and it had given her an idea. “Today when you play ‘House,’ you two are going to make a baby. Do you know how?” Nadine and I looked at each other, wide-eyed, and shook our heads. “Okay, first of all, you both have to take off all your clothes.” Ever the obedient one, Nadine began to undress, but I just stood there, shaking my head. “Okay, suit yourself,” Tawny said. She walked over to Funny’s cage and took him out. His head was poking out from the hole between her thumb and index finger.
“Put him back!” I said. “You can’t touch him! He’s mine!”
“He’s mine!” she mimicked. She scooped a Lincoln Log off the floor and started tapping it against the top of his head. “Are you going to take your clothes off or not?” she said.
“No!” The tapping got harder and harder.
“Stop crying!” she said. “You’re the man, not the lady.”
With my fists, I rubbed away my tears. Then I yanked off my sneakers, pulled my polo shirt over my head, and pulled down my pants.
“That’s better. Now walk over to your wife and kiss her.” I approached Nadine and gave her a peck on the cheek. “On the lips, idiot!” When I just stood there, not doing it, the tapping started again. I kissed Nadine on the lips like she wanted me to. “Did I tell you to stop? Do it again, and while you’re still kissing her, reach down and touch her cunny.”
“Her what?” I asked.
“Boy, you really are stupid, aren’t you?” She tossed the Lincoln Log onto the floor, walked over to Nadine, and cupped her hand around the little knob between her legs. I did what she said. Her next order was for Nadine. “Now you touch his thing. Keep doing it until I tell you to stop.”
Sometimes, at night in bed, I would reach under my pajamas and touch my pee-pee to make it hard. I liked doing it; it felt nice. But this didn’t. When Nadine made it hard, Tawny pointed at it and laughed. She told Nadine to lie on her back on the floor. Then she ordered me to lie down on top of her and move around. “Move around how?” I asked her.
“Like a milk shake in a milk shake maker. Then the baby will start growing inside of her.” I was confused. Were we playing making a baby, or were we really going to make one? I wasn’t about to disobey her, though. As long as I did what she said, she wouldn’t hurt Funny.
The next day at school, on my way back from the drinking fountain, I found Peter Clegg’s lunch bag in the coatroom, threw it on the floor, and stomped it flat. At afternoon recess, I tripped him during a game of tag. He stumbled, hit the ground, and ripped his pants at the knees. He told the teacher on duty that I’d done it on purpose. “No, I didn’t! It was an accident!” I kept insisting until the teacher believed me.
When the bus dropped me off at Irma’s that afternoon, her car wasn’t in the driveway. The front door was unlocked but no one was around. “Hello?” I kept saying. “Hello?” When I went down to the basement, I was relieved to see that Funny was still alive and well. I grabbed a handful of pellets, took him out of his cage, and stroked his back as he ate. When he pooped on my hand, I walked over to the chair where Tawny always sat and smeared it on the seat.
Where was everyone? I liked nobody else being there, but a little bit didn’t like it either because I kept thinking about those red-eyed rats. I was building Funny a Lincoln Log house when the basement door banged open. Nadine was the first one to come into view, then Tawny.
“Where’s Irma?” I asked. Tawny said one of the foster babies had a doctor’s appointment and she’d taken the other baby, too. “Oh,” I said. “Where have you two been?”
“Up in Tawny’s room,” Nadine said. “Do you like my braids? Tawny braided them.” I hadn’t until then noticed them. I’d been looking, instead, at the red splotch on her neck.
When I glanced over at Tawny, I saw that she was waiting for my answer. “Yeah,” I said. “They’re nice.”
Later, when we were getting ready to play “House,” I saw two
more red splotches on Nadine—one on her stomach, and one on the inside of her leg. “Are you getting the measles?” I asked her.
Tawny grabbed onto my shoulder and squeezed. “Haven’t you ever heard that curiosity killed the gerbil?” she said. This time when I had to get on top of Nadine and move like a milk shake, I closed my eyes. That made it easier. It even felt a little bit good.
On the bus the next morning, Susan Gibson sat on the seat in front of mine. She was wearing her Girl Scout uniform. I heard her telling Debbie Casey that she’d sold nineteen dollars’ worth of Girl Scout cookies, and when she handed in her money at the meeting that afternoon, she was hoping she’d get the pin for being the top seller.
We had an assembly that day, and in the middle of some lady talking about the Indian tribes that used to live in Connecticut, I asked my teacher, Miss Faborsky, if I could go to the boys’ room. She asked me if I could wait until the assembly was over. I shook my head. So she let me.
I didn’t really have to go. Instead of heading to the boys’ room, I returned to our classroom. The lights were off and the coast was clear. I sat down on Susan’s seat, reached around in her desk, and found an envelope. Inside was a sheet where she’d written down her cookie order, plus a ten-dollar bill, a five, and four ones. I put everything back in the envelope, then walked over to where Peter Clegg sat, and stuck it inside his desk. Later, when Susan reported that her cookie money was missing, Miss Faborsky made us all stand up, tilt our desks forward so that everything inside fell out onto the floor, and then go stand in a line against the chalkboard. As she walked up and down the rows, examining our piles, she stopped at Peter Clegg’s desk and picked up the envelope. “What’s this?” she asked Peter. He said he didn’t know. She returned the money to Susan and told Peter to go down to the office. After he left the room in tears, Miss Faborsky gave the rest of us a speech about honesty. Whenever her eyes met mine, I nodded. I felt more glad than guilty. Peter hadn’t stolen Susan’s money, but he had stolen my father.