CHAPTER THREE

In which it becomes clear that something funny is going on

 

Before long Dirk was big enough to run away from me, which it frequently became necessary for him to do because I was not quick to learn that playing with him would only get me in trouble.  Nevertheless, we did play together every day, him being all I had in the world to play with, and naturally since I refused to speak to anyone who didn’t live in my house, I needed all the friends I could get.  So I pursued poor little Dirky’s companionship with a fervor that often as not left him bruised if not bleeding, and as he grew older and his natural intelligence took over he learned to start crying just before he was about to get hurt.  Which put me in the position of always being blamed for something that actually hadn’t happened, and being sent to my room to think about it; not having enough money in my piggy bank to hire my own lawyer, my Mama’s word was law:  you are bigger than him, therefore it’s your fault even if he started it.

Since he got so much satisfaction out of being a bad sport, it became our routine to never finish any game we started, because as soon as my greater size or intellectual development made it seem that I would probably come out on top, Dirk would throw the checkerboard across the room, or accuse me of cheating, or if the game was physical he would start crying, and here comes his Mama to tell me that I am bigger than him, and he’s standing behind her sticking his tongue out at me.  Then to even things out and make herself think she was being fair, my Mama always turned to him and said something about how it takes two to tango, so we both had to go to our room, not just me.  Since we had the same room, this signaled the escalation of hostilities which would begin as soon as my Mama was out of earshot, with whatever rudimentary name-calling is possible between such small children.

Now this was the late 1950s when wives and small children stayed home and husbands went to work and older children went to school.  The purpose of this whole setup was to get most of the family out of the house so the wife could try to clean the damn thing with these whiny little creatures following her around hanging on her dress begging for their Daddy and their sisters to come home and provide comic relief.  One time, my Mama was deep-cleaning the living room, and had taken all the covers off the air vents in the floor so she could stick the vacuum cleaner hose down there and suck the dust out of them.  All of a sudden she forgot there were open holes in the floor and her whole leg went down in one, and she screamed and flew out of that hole saying words I had never heard before, and from her, never heard again.  Because, you see, my Mama and my Daddy are nice goody two-shoes types of people and they never said bad words.  I was 17 years old before I ever heard my Daddy say a bad word, and that word was:  “crap.”

Anyhow, what happened next was really scary because my Mama came all apart on the outside and I could see her soul parts inside her, which hadn’t happened since my demon left me, and lo and behold there was her soldier boy jumping up and down inside her with a big old pee-pee sticking out of him the size of a tree.  My Mama went to the phone and I was hiding under the coffee table but Dirk was too little to know she might kill him for speaking so he said, Mama who you calling.  And she said, Your Daddy, go to your room, and so poor little Dirk started bawling and ran into his room, stepping on my foot as he went by me where I was hiding under the coffee table.  Then my Mama talked into the phone and said, Sam, what time are you going to lunch; I thought that was funny because my Daddy’s name was Irv, not Sam.

Anyway, after she hauled me out from under the coffee table and told me not to say a word and sent me to my room to pretend to take a nap, we had baloney sandwiches and all headed out the front door to go play in the park, which like always meant that me and Dirk would sit on the sand and throw dirt at each other because we were afraid of the other kids who wouldn’t get off the slide and the swings so we could play by ourselves, and my Mama and this one same guy who always showed up would sit on opposite ends of a park bench and both talk to themselves the whole time, staring straight ahead and not looking at each other.  On this particular day because my Mama’s whole self was hanging wide open, I could see her soul parts there and as usual her soldier boy was there inside her throbbing like a third lung, but this time I noticed something peculiar which is that her Mr. Right inside her was the same as that strange man who always sat on the opposite end of the park bench and talked into the air in front of him.

Overcome with curiosity, I snuck over around behind the park bench, and I had to move fast because my Mama normally never let me out of her sight because she knew I would certainly by snatched up by an eagle or have my soul eaten by some kind of evil spirit if she didn’t know my exact whereabouts at all times.  So anyway, I was tiptoeing up behind the park bench as fast as I could before my Mama could notice I was not in her sights, and I’d left Dirk behind a tree with his eyes closed counting to 100 or so, or however high extra smart 2½-year-olds can count, and sure enough if I didn’t trip over my own feet and smack my head on the back of the park bench, but not before I heard my Mama say something to the air in front of her face about, Why can’t you take the afternoon off.  I was thinking, take it off of what, when I tripped and here came the park bench and Smack!  I’m laying on the grass screaming.

Well that other fellow jumped up and ran away so fast, my Mama calling Sam, Sam, while she held my head in her lap and cried and told me not to say a word, and I was so surprised at her crying, because she had never cried for me being hurt before, that I stopped crying and looked inside her to see what was going on.  And I saw a rope around her heart stretching all the way out of her and down the block and around the corner and down the street where the other end of it was hooked onto that other Sam guy’s heart and the rope was damn near stretched to the busting point because he was getting out of there as fast as he could.

Then my Mama saw me looking inside of her and shut herself up tighter than a drum and gave me a smack on my own soul parts inside me for not minding my own business, and told me again not to say a word.  Then she stood me up and swatted the grass and leaves off my clothes and said where’s your brother, in this tense tone of voice that told me she figured he’d run off to the circus or something, and I pointed over to the tree where I left him.  Now he was obviously confused, because he still had his hands over his eyes and was giggling in such a way as to say, they can’t see me because I can’t see them, and I thought I should be so lucky, and tried to forget about all that had happened to me on that day.

But I was not to be so lucky.  After we went home and I was laid down to pretend to take another nap, here came these funny little sounds that sounded like pitter-pattering feet.  I knew it wasn’t Dirk because he was over there in his bed snoring, so I got out of my bed to investigate, it not being my Mama’s habit to tip-toe around in her own house; if anything, she usually stomped her feet on the floor a little too hard when she walked.  I snuck my bedroom door open as quiet as I could, and snooped through the whole house not finding anybody, not even my Mama, which made me nervous and I thought maybe she had run away from home and left me to take care of my little brother.  But then I went down the hall and saw her bedroom door was shut so I snuck up on it and listened real quiet, and as soon as my pounding heart quieted down a little, I thought I could hear little twittering sounds.  At first I thought it was my Mama crying, then I thought she was laughing, then I thought she was doing both at the same time.  Then this squeak, squeak sound starts up and by now I’m getting pretty curious because I’m starting to hear a low grumbling sound like a tractor moving dirt around.

That’s when I pushed my big red ear right up against the door so I could hear better, and damn it to hell if that door didn’t fly right open and bang into my Daddy’s dresser, and I fell on my head half in my Mama’s bedroom and half in the hall, and looked up with tears in my eyes, to see my Mama naked for the very first time since I was born, and was I surprised to find out that she had a chest full of hair!

But then as my eyes focused in on what they were looking at, it became apparent that this was not my Mama at all, it was some man who looked like that man in the park, but without the suit and tie, and he was hopping up and down on one foot trying to stick his feet in his pants, and my Mama was over in the corner shoving herself into her dress, and nobody was saying a word and I even forgot to cry, I was so scared.  And right I was to be scared, because after that man ran out of the house without saying good-bye, my Mama smacked me around the room snorting and spitting and I thought she was going to kill me for sure.  Then she just stopped all of a sudden, grabbed a blanket off her bed, and stomped off into the living room and turned the TV on real loud and slung herself onto the sofa where she howled and squeaked for some time, her head hid under the blanket, and shaking like a tree in a tornado.  I lay down on the floor in front of her and grabbed the edge of the blanket where it was dragging on the floor, and started rubbing on that soft shiny strip of material that goes on the front of the blanket.  For some reason this made all my thoughts and feelings go away, so I just lay there and watched a movie on TV while my Mama moaned under her blanket.

This is what they had playing on the TV that afternoon.  It was a movie about a girl who was made to go live with her mean old grandmother or aunt or something, and one day the mean old witch catches her pigging out on ice cream, and for those of you who don’t know, back then you didn’t go get ice cream out of the fridge in the middle of the day and pig out on it, because doing so would make your Mama yell at you for spoiling your supper.  So the old woman hauled the poor little girl over to the kitchen table and set that whole big box of ice cream down in front of her, and handed her a spoon bigger than her mouth, and said there you go, little demon child, you want ice cream, so eat your damn ice cream and eat every drop.  Well at first I thought that girl was lucky to have such a generous grandmother, but after awhile it became apparent that the girl would rather not eat the whole entire box of ice cream.  And it became obvious because of the creepy music they were playing in the background that this little girl was not having any fun.

Something about that movie scared me so bad I hid my head under my Mama’s blanket, and there under the blanket was my Mama staring at me with her eyes wide open.  She saw me rubbing that soft shiny cloth between my fingers and so she tried it herself, and pretty soon there we both were, rubbing and forgetting.  It’s so soff, she said, it’s so soff.  Then she looked at me right in my eyes and said over and over, Don’t say a word.  Don’t say a word.  Don’t say a word.  I promised myself to try and do as I’m told so my Mama will not cry and hit me and feel bad, and we both went to sleep there hiding our heads under that blanket, soffing away.