Page 53 - WTP VOl. X #4

summer, and the grass is cold and wet on my feet. The cat appears, and I follow him. We walk beneath the willow tree, passing under its long branches with the slender silvery leaves. We walk the edge of the hill that leads down into the woods. There is a creek further down and then a dump back over the other side. We stay on the periphery of the lawn, smell-
ing wet earth and the flowering bushes, everything moist and giving off breath in the sun. Tommy rubs my legs, purring and purring, and the sun warms
my back like those puffy, blue hydrangea blooms. I want to open and be consumed by the sky, the air, the purring cat, the long day filled with nothing to worry about. We go to the side of the yard where the roses climb the trellis off the wide porch. Then past the bushes to the steps. On the other side, a huge
bay window. From the porch, I can look into my own room, see the four-poster bed with the quilt turned back and the indentation of my body left and gone from there. There’s the washstand with the white pitcher, the little old school desk, the bureau with the three drawers and my penny collection inside. I am the one who is awake in this green world, and I feel, although I don’t name it then, joy—a brightness and freedom about what the day might hold.
~
In our sunken living room, we keep a terrarium with plastic palm trees in it for turtles, but they have a habit of climbing out, losing themselves slowly under chairs and along the hardwood floors, trailing dust bunnies and bits of cat hair. There aren’t many hiding places in this house, and it’s clear the turtles can’t really escape. One day, I stand near the terrarium
and watch my mother. She climbs on a step stool and reaches up to the top shelf of the hall closet. She pulls out a box and opens it. It’s a gun. She shows it to me and tells me that it’s Daddy’s and that she is putting the bullets for it someplace else in the house, and I don’t need to know where they are.
“If anything bad ever happens when we are fighting,” she says, “take your sister and run to the neighbor’s.”
~
It’s close to bedtime, early evening. I’m wearing baby doll pajamas, a sleeveless top with a ruffle on the bottoms. I wear them with my underwear. Sud- denly, Daddy is looming in my doorway, screaming
at me to get in my bed. I don’t want to because it’s still light outside. Crying, I push past him out of my room, running out of the house because I know my mother is outside sitting on the next-door neighbor’s porch. His heavy footsteps follow me out the front
door and he stands on our porch. He’s only wearing his bathrobe which has fallen open to his nakedness underneath which I don’t like, and he’s still yelling at me. My mother comes right over from the neighbor’s, walks me back inside, and puts me in my bed. I listen to make sure she doesn’t leave again.
~
My doll Lisa lives under the bed in the long box she came in, with blankets and a little pillow I made
for her. Still, there is a lot of dark space under there where something else might live. I worked out a
deal with whatever it is under there. I go to bed and turn toward the wall with the windows. This way the thing can escape through the cracked door into the night-lighted hall without me seeing it. If I face the door, then it can’t get out and it hides in the wide inky darkness holding me. Sometimes I have night- mares and yell for my mother. Sometimes she comes and sometimes it’s Daddy in his boxers. I don’t like it when Daddy comes because it scares me more.
~
In the daytime, sometimes I am the scary thing. I wait for Missy, pressed up against the right side of her doorway. When she opens it all the way and comes out, I holler, “Boo” and she screams. You’d think she’d know to look by now, but I guess when you are four, you don’t always remember. Once I took her Raggedy Ann. “Annie, Annie,” she was gasping with big wet tears rolling down her face. I felt bad then and I gave it back, but first I gave it an extra tug on the striped leg, so she’d know who was bigger. Maybe I am trying to teach my sister how it feels to know there is some- thing waiting outside your room.
~
The second-grade school project is to make a map of
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