From the Kenyon Review, New Series, Spring 1992, Vol. XIV, No. 2
Virginia turned her car out of the Saferstein Tower parking lot and headed down Copley Hill. She decided to drive around town. Would she be able to find her old neighborhood? She’d been too ashamed to ask Grandma Evans for directions. She could hear her exclaiming: “You mean to tell me you forgot where you come from?”
Halfway down the hill she turned right onto Edgewood Avenue, skirting the southern perimeter of an appropriately woodsy municipal park. A carved signpost loomed into view, PERKINS WOODS, and in a flash she saw in her mind the corner where she used to stop on her way home from school before crossing the busy intersection, look both ways and don’t run, black letters on the white metal street sign that now was white on green: “Monroe St.” Here, Karen would say good-bye and turn into her white neighborhood. They walked together through most of second grade, up to this traffic light, until the day . . .
How does one forget a word? Virginia could hear it as clearly as God pronouncing the Ten Commandments to Moses, burning each letter into the stone tablets. And the moment surrounding the word was as precisely marked off in her head as a few feet worth of film on a reel—as if someone had snipped it out, though she could still feel the hole it left; it wasn’t neat, it wasn’t excised at all. She would always fit into that blue coat and leggings, snow crunching under the yellow boots and the sky far away, so still it seemed more a surface than a medium, an impenetrable scrim. How does one get rid of that sound, that sky?
She’d shown Karen her report card just because she was happy and wanted to share her very first straight A’s (in first grade everything had been charted Good-Satisfactory-Unsatisfactory). They were monitors for the week, which meant they got to stay after school to clean erasers and sponge the blackboard; then they walked home. Virginia couldn’t wait to show her daddy her grades so she could bask in the delicious balm of his praise. She asked to see Karen’s card because she never dreamed it could be bad; nothing could be bad on a day like this, the old snow crusty like meringue and new snow just beginning to sift down, Christmas less than a week off.
But when Karen pushed her in the chest so that she sprawled against a speckled mound of bulldozed snow and ice, when Karen flung Virginia’s starry report card to the ground and stomped it once, twice, with her boot as yellow as her hair swinging viciously, Virginia felt like a glass jar had lowered around her, closing her off from the world that she could still see, out of reach, on the other side of her fingertips. It was like the crickets they’d catch every summer and keep in mayonnaise jars; they thought because they’d lined the jar with grass and timothy and punctured air holes in the lid that the crickets didn’t mind. Now she knew how those crickets felt: pinned to the hard side of the snow mound, she could feel snow melting under her head as the word floated between her and the paling sky, clearly visible long after Karen had spat out her revenge and run off: Nigger!
Virginia turned left and slowly eased down Monroe, a plummeting street. This was a short quiet block, bound at either end by busy intersections; before she had entered school, she had not been allowed beyond this hundred-yard brick path except when holding the hand of Ernie Junior or crossing over into Perkins Woods to play on the swing sets or visit the scraggly ducks and threadbare beavers in the little zoo.
After Karen had left her shamefaced on that mound of snow, Virginia had avoided her on the way home; sometimes they’d dawdle along just a few yards apart. It was as if they had parted into different worlds. Now, from a distance of a decade and a half, it seemed nearly incredible to her that she had remained resolute. A few times Karen had tried to speak, to pretend nothing had happened, but Virginia had decided that even an apology wouldn’t do—although she wasn’t sure what she would have done had Karen apologized.
Right side, halfway down. Virginia remembered the number of seconds before she saw the house, a steep A-frame wedged between other A-frames, the handkerchief lawn and the square porch. It had been painted dark red like the brick road; there, up under the eaves, was the single window she had opened to throw that hard plastic baby doll out into the street. Denise Sanders and her brother June Bug had lived next door; June Bug had been to reform school, and the only other thing Virginia could remember was him launching homemade rockets by heating a tip of a wooden match that had been tightly wrapped in aluminum foil. On the other side lived senile Anna Everhart and her crazy middle-aged son Floyd . . .
Virginia crossed through the center of town over to the east side, turning away from the main thoroughfares into even shabbier neighborhoods. The lawns were scraggly and the cars rusted, the clapboard porches dingy with factory soot.
It began to rain, a thin drizzle from low gray clouds. Fourteen years! Somewhere, down these modest streets, under the now leafless maple boughs, the aunts and uncles and matriarchal cousins twice removed who had punctuated her childhood with their jibes and wry stories had had to give up on their dreams of a good life. Some had been close friends of the family as well, like Aunt Carrie, who used to babysit when Dad and Belle went to the cabarets at the Lodge—or where else did they go, so dressed up and laughing? What Lodge could it have been? Back then, the Lodge was the Lodge, whatever a lodge was. Children didn’t question further.
On a hunch she followed the numbered streets until she dead-ended at a row of two-story apartments on First Avenue. Farther down loomed the brick hulk of the First Avenue Factory, Goodyear Tire & Rubber. From here she could imagine the gaping assembly halls, tiny men in them working the flanges and tire molds, rubber bubbling in red-hot vats and hissing as it struck the cold iron. Around the corner she glimpsed a railroad bridge spanning a small gulch and beyond, the much larger facade of Plant One with its gloomy clock tower proclaiming the witching hour, five p.m., punch-out time weekdays for the administration, those lucky souls whose white shirts never had a chance to absorb the greasy soot spewing from the smokestacks she could see now, marking off the skyline into blank measures.
Her father used to take the family here on their Sunday evening drives, pointing out the various divisions and their tasks. He had a white-collar job, nothing special, but enough to keep him out of the pits. What had he been working at? Probably something with plastics, like later in Arizona. Too young to care about such details, Virginia never paid attention when he talked about it to Belle, preferring to gaze through the backseat window at the glittering slashes of light escaping from the coated windowpanes cracked open for air, and the gray-streaked smoke that billowed from grates and chimneys and hung at shoulder level like lost thunderclouds. What had he been in the reeking tiers of this man-made Purgatory, how had his efforts born fruit or withered along the smoking terraces of Babel, how was it that he couldn’t resist the compulsion to return to the scene of his daily humiliations on his day off, circling his place of labor like a dog following the scent of its mother back to the house from which he’d been sold?
Grandma Evans’s high voice penetrated Virginia’s thoughts. Your Aunt Carrie all alone in that house down on Furnace Street. Furnace Street must be around here somewhere. The street names were descriptive, matter-of-fact labels reflecting the landmarks these residents saw every day on their way to and from work—River Street ran along an underground stream, Pondview abutting it and Grandview just beyond; then Goodyear Boulevard and German Alley, Fulton Street, Detroit Avenue, Settlement Drive. The cross streets started at Plant One with First Avenue and ascended, away from the smell, toward respectability.
After wheeling around for another twenty minutes, Virginia pulled into a rutted lane and drove slowly past the little nut-brown clapboard house in the middle of the block, nearly hidden behind a row of hedges. She turned at the far corner and parked across the street under a sycamore tree. The porch was in acute need of repair, with cracked boards and an occasional slat missing from the trellis; the stone steps had sunk over the years. A gingerbread house, Virginia thought, charmed by the stone urns that had once been planted with petunias. Then she realized it couldn’t be more than one room deep, since the ferny foliage of the gorge began right behind it; how cramped and dark it must be inside! There was no movement behind the curtains. Get out and walk over, she ordered herself, but she turned on the radio instead, fiddling at the dial until a nameless symphonic piece filled the car.
Each time Aunt Carrie had shown up on their front porch to babysit her and Ernie Junior while her parents went out, she’d left this tiny house, locked the flimsy front door, and followed the railroad tracks to the bus stop. She had climbed out of this valley of smoke to arrive on their porch and smother her niece and nephew with hugs and her odors of cabbage and peaches, an old-fashioned purse jabbing their ribs.
Aunt Carrie was her father’s sister, and Virginia hadn’t seen her since they’d moved to Arizona when she was ten. She dreaded having to visit just because she was in town for the first time after so many years. Yes, it was the “proper thing to do” . . . but wasn’t a surprise visit a preposterous notion, almost an assault? There’d be enough time in the next couple of weeks to phone and announce herself. Virginia shivered; the cold had crept into the car and even seeped through her pea jacket. She’d better start back.
The next day Virginia dragged herself out of bed in the dull late Monday morning light. Why was she so tired? She’d had several unsettling dreams, but she couldn’t remember a single one. She forced herself to dig into her bowl of Grape-Nuts and yogurt, and by the time she entered Mrs. Woods’s classroom, less than an hour later, she felt strangely exultant. As she hefted the red trunk onto the table, the class cheered.
“I want each of you to find the puppet you had on Friday,” she began. “Don’t try to sneak off with a different one. Puppets don’t like to be abandoned; they have feelings, too.”
“Hey.” It was the boy with the mossy teeth. “Where’s Gina?”
“She had a hard weekend, so I let her sleep late. She’ll be up in time to hear your stories.”
“Stories?”
“Your puppets’ stories, I mean. I want each of you to spend ten minutes or so with your puppet. Find out where he or she was born, what their parents are like, what the most exciting thing that ever happened to them was.”
As the children scrambled for their puppets, Mrs. Woods came over with an encouraging smile and patted Virginia on the arm. “I guess you’re in control,” she whispered. “I’ll be in the lounge if you need me.”
The light brown boy who had helped carry in the footlocker on the first day quickly reached out for a generic girl puppet. The first time he’d been too slow, or too shy, to snatch up one of the bandits or the few more terrifying animals. Virginia caught his attention and smiled: he was fine-boned, somewhat lanky, and his eyes were the color of warm toffee, fringed with dark curly lashes—a startling combination. I hope those looks don’t spoil him, she thought.
Renee picked up the Wicked Queen, gingerly. What a nice looking girl she was! Her scalp was neatly subdivided, the crop of pigtails sprouting with rubber bands at their roots and barrettes at the tips. When Virginia was that age, she had thought she was ugly, a poor imitation cheated by some “natural law” that had given white girls all the options for beauty.
Once they’d moved to Arizona and Belle had discovered that the extreme lack of humidity in the air meant Black hair wouldn’t “go back,” Virginia’s “wool” was pressed once a week and styled. She could still hear the angry sizzle of the curling iron as her mother took it from the stove and plunged it deep into the green jar of Dixie Peach. All that grease!
“Now you look elegant,” Belle would proclaim, untying the dishtowel around her daughter’s shoulders; but Virginia stared in the mirror and thought she looked like an oily poodle. Luckily this hair ritual took place only on Saturdays, in anticipation of church, so she had almost forty-eight hours before the next school day to try to soften the effect with the surreptitious application of a wet brush.
The seats in the auditorium were too small and close together for adults to fit comfortably. From the broad arc at the back of the room the rows descended like spokes toward the miniature orchestra pit, where a battered upright piano and a wooden lectern stood. From this lectern the P.T.A. chair-woman presided over the order of the day—field trips and suggestions for bake sales and other fund-raisers were discussed and countermotioned in utmost sincerity.
Before the board meeting started, Mrs. Woods had introduced Virginia to Mosstooth’s mother, a petite pale blonde woman in a navy skirt and white blouse closed primly at the neck with a cameo. (It should be an American flag pin, Virginia thought as she extended her hand, smiling.)
The woman crinkled her nose and said, “Puppets? John never mentioned it. Well, that should be a hit with the kids,” as if Virginia were offering them cotton candy or an extra recess.
“See?” Mrs. Woods whispered. “These are the concerned parents. Without them we couldn’t run this school. And they are excited about your presence here at Washington Elementary.”
There were murmurs, a scattering of applause when Virginia stood up and went to the lectern after being introduced as “an artist.” She was embarrassed, more for them than for herself. They didn’t know what to do with her. Did they expect a show? Okay, she’d give them one.
“Most of you know by now who I am. Your children come home and tell you what ‘the puppet lady’ did in class.” She avoided looking at John’s mother. “It sounds like a lot of fun, but you’re thinking: what can a puppet do that can’t be done better by a textbook and the teacher?”
“First of all, I’d like to remind you that puppets have been around for a long time. Puppets are universal. There are puppet shows in Japan as well as New York, in Turkey and Mozambique, in Spain and Indonesia. And ‘dolls’ are nothing more than puppets without a means of movement. Whenever a child pretends that Barbie is about to go on a date with Ken, a small puppet show is taking place. Extend this concept over the course of human history and it becomes logical that the first rock or piece of gnarled wood a caveman used to represent friends or enemies while telling a story was a kind of puppet. So puppets are nearly as old as human beings . . .”
After her lecture, the applause was polite and a bit uncertain, not the thunder she had secretly hoped for. Mrs. Woods was clapping heartily but when Virginia caught her eye, she beamed just a little too brightly. It occurred to Virginia that she shouldn’t have expected applause at all. This was a P.T.A. meeting, not a performance. And after all, who believed in puppets? Who took their fables seriously?
The order of business ran its course. Virginia’s thoughts drifted back to the first puppet show she had seen, more than a dozen years ago, in Phoenix. Belle had heard about the show at the Y.M.C.A. from another mother. Virginia didn’t want to go; she was nearly twelve, too old for “kid stuff,” and American Bandstand was on the tube, have a heart! But Belle needed Virginia to help with Claudia, who was too young to have playmates and was languishing from “lack of stimulus”; couldn’t Virginia learn not to be so selfish?
“Look there, Little Beet, look at the girl in the fluffy dress—isn’t she pretty? Like a picture. And the rosy curtains all brocade.”
Yecch. Virginia preferred the witch with the poisonous skin, warty and green like the Wicked Witch of the East. She was trying to train her two new cats, Jezebel and Hagatha, how to cast spells. “You are black cats,” the Wicked Witch screeched, “and only black cats can activate a spell!” But Hagatha and Jezebel, being the black cats that they were, were too busy fighting to stop and lend their spellbinding stare to the steaming cauldron. The witch was beside herself. “You’re impossible!” she yelled. “Tonight is Halloween, and some witch or warlock is bound to stop by to rent a few bad luck props!” The cats hissed, exposing cherry-red jaws—the children gasped, then laughed. The witch kicked both cats out the window but they popped up again at the sill, singing:
Trick or treat, trick or treat,
Black cats land upon their feet!
“Hush, Claudia, they’re only puppets! Look, there’s another cat slipping into the kitchen, a pretty yellow one, with blue eyes!”
“ARRGH!” the witch screamed. “A yellow cat! Yellow cats bring good luck! Scat! I’ll be ruined if anyone discovers that my black cats have been in the same house as a yellow one.”
YELLOW CAT: I like you.
WICKED WITCH (beside herself, running in circles): If he leaves right away, the good luck may not have a chance to spread.
Why was Belle shaking her head? Look, the witch was casting a spell on the yellow cat!
Greedy Czar and bloody cassock,
Change this cat into a hassock!
Two other witches entered; they were fat with dark blue skin and bright red lipstick. Payne and Crustacia were feeling wonderfully wicked, and they were looking for two very bad black cats—wasn’t it dreadful how slipshod the market had gotten lately? Some suppliers would even try to pawn off brown cats for spells. Now, brown cats may be mean, but they’re not as rock bottom hateful as black cats!
“Outrageous,” Belle whispered. “How could anyone suggest I take my children to this . . . this . . .”
“It’s just a puppet show, Mom.”
“Just? Young lady, don’t you see what they’re doing?”
“But black cats are part of Halloween!”
“You’re hopeless! Don’t you understand anything?”
How the children squealed! Claudia tried to get down; she wanted to stroke the cats. Virginia thrust the squirming bundle into Belle’s arms. She was such a know-it-all, she thought; let her handle her own child.
WICKED WITCH: Jezebel and Hagatha will demonstrate their spell-casting stare on the hate potion.
CRUSTACIA: Excellent! That’s one of the most difficult spells.
WICKED WITCH:
Eye of toad and tail of rat,
Pinch of sulfur, gangster’s hat;
A lock of gray hair from a nag,
Evilness is just our bag!
JEZEBEL and HAGATHA:
Arithmetic problems, four school books,
All the teachers’ dirty looks,
A robber’s loot, a fisher’s bait,
All together, hate hate hate!
WICKED WITCH: All right cats, STARE! (The yellow cat slips through the window and stares.) BLACK CATS:
Mix our hate stares
Through and through . . .
YELLOW CAT:
Love is stronger
Than both of you!
WICKED WITCH: (ladling up a bit of brew): MMMmmmm, that’s good! And oh, how I love everybody! (She dances around the kitchen, kisses CRUSTACIA.)
CRUSTACIA: Yecch! Look! A yellow cat!
Jezebel and Hagatha climb onto the edge of the cauldron to drink and fall into the pot. They emerge as handsome yellow cats with turquoise eyes.
PAYNE: Three yellow cats! Aaaaagh—good luck! Let’s get out of here! (Both witches stomp off.)
WICKED WITCH: Oh, I’ve never been so happy before in my life. How did it happen? We made a hate potion.
YELLOW CAT: While you were staring at the cauldron and wishing hate, I was staring at it and wishing love. Everyone knows love is stronger than hate. I changed your hate potion into a love potion.
WICKED WITCH: I should be angry, but I just feel too wonderful to care! I think I’ll just change my whole business into a good magic shop. From now on I’ll only train good yellow cats.
JEZEBEL and HAGATHA (hugging each other): Oh, goody!
Once the world was bleak and dark
Till the flame of love did spark;
Hatefulness is such a drag,
From now on loving you’s our bag!
The harsh sunlight outside was blinding, but Belle didn’t stop to put on her shades. She sped across the parking lot like a tornado, swerving between the rows until she had reached the car and opened all the doors to let the hot air out. Then she stood clutching the baby to her chest as if an army of Huns were just over the next mesa. Virginia lost a thong in her haste and instinctively tried to hop, but the ball of her foot accidentally touched the searing asphalt and she yowled.
Belle didn’t move a limb; when her eyes focused on Virginia, though, the hard expression on her face softened. Virginia retrieved her thong and made towards her mother, exaggerating her limp as she threaded a path between the fiery automobiles.
“Poor baby,” Belle said when Virginia reached her, rubbing her daughter’s cheek with her thumb. “I’m sorry you had to see such trash.” Virginia slid into the passenger’s seat and reached over for Claudia; Belle slammed the car door and started the ignition. In Virginia’s head another door swung quietly open: a girl in blue leggings lay spread-eagled in the snow, while the white girl stood above her in yellow boots. Nigger! She tried to stop the memory from coming, but it was too late. Sometimes something happens, and you’re changed forever.
