Autumn Street (2 page)

It was true, I knew, that in the faraway part of the
countryside where the sky and hills met, the colors were unclear. I had seen it, sometimes, summers in Pennsylvania, had seen how the horizon blurred. I blended those colors carefully with clear water on my thick brush.

"Can you tell me why you paint the sky that way?" a woman asked me in a kind, quiet voice. She was visiting my school.

"What way?" Her question frightened me. I was afraid that I had done it wrong.

"Look how you've painted the sky all the way down to the hills," she pointed out, as if I had done it by chance, as if I had not known. "Now look how the other children have painted the sky."

I looked. The other skies were all blue strips across the top of their papers. I lifted my gold dog tag to my mouth and sucked.

"Yours isn't
wrong,
" she said, aware of my anguish. "But it's so different from theirs. Do you know why you do it that way?"

"Because that's the way sky is," I whispered to her. "Sky is all over, not just at the top." But my voice trailed and made it more a question than a conviction.

"Do you have other paintings that you can show me?" she asked.

I took the rolled paintings from my cubbyhole and gave them to her. I watched, terrified, embarrassed,
while she spread them out one by one on a table. There were all my skies, all my hills and mountains and fields. I loved those paintings more than anything else at school, more than the cherry-and-whipped-cream dessert that was sometimes served at lunch. But at the same time I had two thoughts that didn't fit together very well: that they were the most beautiful paintings in the world, and that they were, for reasons that I didn't understand, not good enough.

"May I keep some of these? Would you mind?" she asked.

I shook my head shyly. "You can have them all."

She took my paintings away, and I went back to my easel. But the feelings I had about the sky and hills were gone, at least for that day. In a corner of thè classroom I could see the visiting woman talk to the teachers; they were glancing at me as they talked. She was pointing to things in my paintings. She was saying something about "Elizabeth's perceptions." Elizabeth was me; but what were perceptions: kinds of mountains or trees? I didn't know, and was humiliated.

I watched as she rolled my perceptions neatly, secured them with rubber bands, and placed them in a briefcase. Her eyes found me, across the room, and she smiled and waved, as if we had a secret together. Then she went away.

"She is a Professor of Education," said our teacher proudly, when the woman was gone. I nodded solemnly, as if I understood.

Finally I picked up my brush again, looked around at the paintings that the other children were making, and tried to do it the way they did. I tried to make a firm, bright blue, bold strip of sky across the top of the paper. But I put too much water on my brush, perhaps on purpose, and the edges of the sky wept slowly down the center of the page.

At home that evening, when my parents told me that now my father, too, would be going away to the war, I asked them to tell me where that meant, and they answered the Pacific. Daddy showed me on a map where the Pacific was. And I could see, even looking at the flat map on the page of a book, that the Pacific must be the place where, even though there were no hills, no mountains, no trees, the sky would be everywhere—not just a thin and hateful strip, but a deep and endless blue that came all the way down, that touched the sea. In that sky the colors would blur, as if you were looking at them through a haze of tears.

"I
DON'T LIKE
it at Grandfather's," I said sulkily to Mama.

"Why not, Elizabeth?" She buttoned my pajamas and began to brush my hair.

"There are too many rooms. I get lost."

Mama smiled. "That will just take some getting used to. You know, this was my house when I was a little girl, even smaller than you. I used to like all the stairways, and the closets, and porches, and halls. Think of it as a place to explore."

"And Jess won't play with me anymore."

"Well, Jessica is making friends who are her own
age, Liz. You will, too. And you know, when I was little, I didn't have a sister. So I played by myself."

"I'm scared of that boy," I confessed.

Mama looked puzzled. "What boy?"

"In the kitchen. I was in the kitchen talking to Tatie—she lets me lick the bowl when she's making cookies. And there was a boy hiding in the pantry. Tatie made him come out and say hello, but then he ran back in the pantry again and hid, and I could see him looking at me through the crack in the door. Tatie said not to pay any attention to him because he was being rude and no-account."

Mama began to laugh. "That must be Tatie's little grandson. I haven't met him yet, but your grandmother told me that he comes sometimes to visit her. He must be just about your age, Liz. He would be someone you could play with."

"I don't want to play with someone rude and no-account."

"He was just being shy. And what about
you
, Elizabeth Jane Lorimer? If you didn't make an effort to be nice to him, it sounds as if
you
were being rude, too."

"And no-account?"

Mama laughed. "Yes, and no-account, too. Did you say hello to him?"

I shook my head.

"Did you ask him his name?"

I shook my head. "Tatie told me his name. Charles."

Mama patted my hair, put the brush away, and tucked me into bed. "I'm going to go to find Jess and bring her upstairs now. You remember, though, Liz, that you're six years old now. That's big enough to be polite to people. The next time Charles comes to visit Tatie, you try to make him feel welcome. It must be hard for him, visiting here where he doesn't know anyone except Tatie."

"And
she's
only the cook," I said smugly.

Mama frowned. "Elizabeth..."

"I know," I said. "That was rude and no-account."

***

"Mama?" I called before she closed the door "When you were a little girl, living here, did you have a pet?"

She thought. "Sometimes. I remember that I had..."

"A turtle?"

Mama laughed. "No. I never had a turtle. Why did you ask that?"

I snuggled into my pillow. "I don't know," I said sleepily. "I was just thinking about turtles."

***

Three children in the green, lush-lawned neighborhood where I lived, a stranger in my grandfather's house, had small, moist turtles that they kept in glass bowls from Wool worth's and fed, with their fingers, tiny pieces of limp lettuce. The turtles had American flags hand-painted on their backs, because it was war-time.

Pre-war turtles, I learned, had been decorated with scenic paintings: rainbows, sunsets, and carefully lettered messages from tourist spots. Yosemite. The Grand Canyon. There had been a turtle for every natural wonder of the United States, and all of them had found their way to this small Pennsylvania town, where they had been nurtured in glass bowls, extending their tiny prehistoric heads now and then if you watched long enough.

"They grow to be giant turtles," the doctor's daughter, Anne, told me, as we sat on her back porch and watched her little flag-festooned creature move sluggishly against the sides of his bowl. "They live to be a hundred years old, and by that time they're as big as—oh, as big as the kitchen table!"

I glanced through the screen door and measured her round kitchen table with my eyes, seeing it as a shell, imagining a huge, lizard-like head extending slowly, near the place where the toaster stood. I imagined a thin brown tongue darting from the head, aiming for the kitchen counter, seizing an entire head of lettuce.
I could almost hear the hideous primordial munch. I shuddered.

"Where will you keep him when he gets to be big?" I asked Anne. Her small turtle lurched suddenly from his inverted-dish island and submerged, darkening the colors of his painted American flag.

"He'll escape by then," she said, matter-of-factly. "He'll go out in the woods at the end of Autumn Street, because there's more to eat out there. That's where they all go. There are probably a hundred big turtles out there already. Tommy Price's turtle disappeared three years ago, and someone said they saw it in the woods, eating ferns. They could tell it was his because it said
Mammoth Caves
across its back."

Mammoth Caves.
The phrase sent exhilarated, apprehensive chills down my skinny back. A hundred monstrous prehistoric creatures lurking, munching ferns, in the woods at the end of my grandfather's street: and one of them, already grown to ominous proportions, with the words
Mammoth Caves
stretched, elongated, across his mossy, reptilian shell.

I was so terribly frightened of caves, of the whole concept of caves, of dark passages with convoluted turnings, farther and farther into unfathomable blackness, into places where there were no sounds but perhaps a dimly heard dripping, of rock-encrusted walls
that wept, and the sound of your own heart beating in a dark much darker, more frightening, than the dark of your worst nightmares. I shivered at the thought that in one place, one dark opening too vast for comprehension, one Mammoth Cave, there would be echoes, that if in the blackness you found the place to stand, on ground that had never been exposed to light or to the experience of human sound, you could call out, and your voice would return to you. From all the passages where you had been, from the place where you stood in the dark so heavy it smothered you, and from the places you had not yet felt your way along, your message would return: thundering from the unfelt walls, disguised and distorted by a higher pitch from a turning far ahead, or eerily in whispers from the tunnels behind. All at once, your own voice: your
voices,
coming at you, murmuring, indistinguishable, in harmonies or discord; and you would have to stand there all alone and listen to the answers that came at you from inside yourself.

I was only six when I knew that about caves and about echoes and knew that I could never go into the woods at the end of Grandfather's street, because in those woods I would have to face the monstrous turtle that prowled, dragging
Mammoth Caves
with him through the ferns and trees, trampling the fragile wildflowers, waiting, probably for me.

"They eat meat, too," said Anne, who was older than I, and who saw nothing in my silence beyond childish interest and admiration. She went into the kitchen, beyond the round table that still, for me, loomed like a scaly-limbed, slow-moving reptile, and took a small bit of hamburger from the refrigerator.

"Probably," she said primly, feeding her small flagged pet from her fingers, "the big ones would eat people."

I fled: fled running down the shaded sidewalk to the safety of my grandfather's house, to the kitchen where Tatie always welcomed me. The brown bulk of her was nothing like the sluggish brown creatures I feared, and I put my arms around her waist, buried my head against her apron, so that she stroked my hair, rubbed my back gently until I was no longer afraid, and then said, "There. Nobody gonna get you. You go wash your face, find Jess, and tell your Mama that dinner be ready soon."

Upstairs, in the big house, Jess was helping our mother fold and put away the intricately embroidered baby clothes, all freshly washed and ironed. Mama was waiting for a baby to be born.

And babies were part of the war, too. Standing in the dim shadows of the wide front hall, outside the parlor, I had heard an elderly, distinguished caller say that during a war baby boys were born. It was nature's
way, said the visitor, of creating new males in a world where men were being killed. Stunned, I had heard Grandfather agree.

None of the adults in the parlor that evening had shouted "Unfair!" the way I had shouted it inside myself, silently, standing hidden in the shadows. Who needed babies? It wasn't fair that men, and fathers especially, should go off to places where the war was, to
die
and be gone forever in that blurred and uncertain horizon, so that the people left at home, the mothers and the grandfathers and the little girls, mostly the little girls, ended up with nothing but a baby. And a baby would cry and need to be held and protected. What kind of nature was that, whose way was to take away a father, the one who had always done the holding, the protecting, and replace him with something even smaller and more helpless than oneself?

Nothing was fair, nothing at all.

But no one minded, except me. Mama and Jess smiled, when I found them, showed me the tiny gowns and blankets with their delicate borders of flowers and lace, and told me they would be down for dinner in a minute. I wandered along the upstairs hall, kicking the carpet, into a bathroom to wash my face and hands, and stood on a stool to see myself in the mirror. There were no tear stains on my face, only smudges of healthy Pennsylvania dirt. I had learned to keep my tears inside, most of the time. But my eyes were very large, and very blue; I looked at them for a long time, looking solemnly back at me, and wondered if, when you stood in a place where you were lost and consumed by darkness, it would be safer to keep your eyes open or closed. I blinked, and went down the long staircase to my place at the carefully set table where the silver napkin rings were engraved with initials. Everything was in order there, and brightly lit; the prisms of the crystal chandelier reflected the silver and the light with such intensity that there were not even shadows in the corners. For a moment I felt very safe.

"J
ESS
?"

"What?"

It was always easier, for some reason, to talk to Jessica in the dark. She became maternal in darkness, her voice from the bed beside mine very often gentle and kind, urging me to go to sleep, reassuring me when I woke frightened from a nightmare.

"I don't want Mama to have a baby. Or else I want it to be a girl."

She sighed, the embroidered sheets rustling in the summer night as she turned.

"Don't be silly, Elizabeth. She's already going to
have a baby, and you can't do anything about that. And she wants it to be a boy. Everybody wants it to be a boy. We already
have
two girls."