Collected Fictions (5 page)

"I'll take him!" she called, and all the diners turned to gape, gaze, wait.

It would be a scene that everyone could enjoy, the theater that is implicit in every public setting.

You know what I mean. We are all of us identical in this too, in our preparations for pandemonium, in confidently readying ourselves for it to scatter the order that so astonishingly obtains. I for one am never impressed by the statistical increase in murder and assault, believing that whatever rules us and contains us and keeps us from obliterating everything in sight can never do so with our connivance for very long.

She came ahead, cutting a robust figure through the stilled tables, calling out to us as she came, "I'll take him! I'll take him!"

She would be the wife, I thought, and this is of course who she was.

I stood to make the introductions, and the other fellow, instructed by my courtesy, stood too.

"My name is," I began, all welcome. But her attention was well to the side of me.

"I don't care what your name is," she said, regarding first her husband and then the woman who was still seated. "I want to know what her name is."

The second woman wasted not an instant. She pushed back her chair and rose. "My name?" she said, her voice no less moderate than when she had said, "No one is safe." I recall thinking what a wonderfully controlled woman this is, the very thing of the legislative, of the state. I recall thinking what it would be like to enter her bed, to be in receipt of feeling expressed with such temperance. I imagined it would be a congenial experience, reminding myself that reserve nothing can dismantle is immensely more arousing than is the inner beast made manifest. Is it this that taxes my fondness for my wife?

"My dear," the second woman said, "I am the person your husband had been sleeping with until a few brief weeks ago."

WE HAVE A NEW SLED NOW
—not a plastic one, but a product made of a kind of pressed-wood material, a composite perhaps. Still, it is a Flexible Flyer, and that's the top of the line. We bought it in the next larger size.

I suppose we would have had to give up the old one, anyway. To be sure, my boy is growing.

I wonder what sort of disfigurement the custodian displays on his face. It was a ball-peen hammer and therefore the striking surface was round, a small knob at least a nose width at the most.

He still services the building according to some irregular schedule he has devised. But I have naturally returned to my usual habits, off and away at nine sharp, back at my door at six on the dot, except of course for Fridays and Wednesdays, when I fetch the laundry and the groceries home.

You may be wondering if I have taken to placing the larger sled in the hallway where the missing one was kept.

I have, as a matter of fact.

I understand from my wife that the fellow still complains when he comes to do the carpet. He wants that little oblong cleaned just like the rest—and insists he will not resituate a sled to do it.

My wife tells me the old fellow is very angry about our persisting failure to cooperate, that he is threatening to remove any and all obstructions that interfere with his work. My wife tells me the custodian says we are insane to continue to provoke him like this. My wife tells me that this is what the man says—if it proves your disposition to take on the face of it what tales are told by such a wife as I have.

GUILT

I FELT ADORED
. I felt adored by people and things. Not loved merely. Adored, even worshiped. I was an angel, born an angel. I recall knowing I did not have to do anything particularly angelic to be viewed in this light. I was blessed, or I felt blessed. I don't think this feeling came into being exactly. I don't think it grew as I grew. I think it was with me right from the start. It was what I stood on. It was the one thing I was sure of. It moved with me when I moved. It was acknowledged by everything that saw me coming. Animals knew it, the dogs in the neighborhood knew it, all the parents knew it, not just mine. The sidewalks knew it. If I picked up a stick and held it, I knew the stick was holding me back, would be willing to embrace me if it could. Everything held me back or wanted to. The sky wanted to reach down with its arms when I went out to play.

I had blue eyes and blond hair and I was very pretty. I was favored in these ways, it is true. But I was not vulnerable on account of it. I mean, the condition of adoration in which I understood myself to be held was in no respect dependant upon prettiness. This was not an opinion of mine, not anything susceptible to test, proof, refutation by argument or circumstance. To say this understanding was conditional would have asserted nothing more than the testimony that experience is conditional.

Of course.

Let's not be silly.

I WISH I COULD THINK
of a way to get speech into this without disrupting things. But I don't think I can. If presences could talk, I could do it. Presences are what counts in what I'm getting onto paper now that I am forty-seven. The people don't count. Not even Alan Silver counts. Besides, I cannot remember one thing Alan Silver ever said. Or what anybody else did.

Here's what I remember.

I remember blessedness until I was seven. I was safe.

Then we moved to a different neighborhood, another town. The war was on, and I think my father was making money off it. He had more money, however he got it. This was a certainty, no speculation. In the old neighborhood, we were renters. There was some vague shame in this, being renters. I knew about it. The boys I played with must have said so, or their nannies must have. I supposed they were trying to interfere with the magic that encircled me. I supposed they envied me. Envy had been explained to me. I don't know who did it. I suppose my mother did. I suppose she taught me, told me to expect envy, to be ready for it, not to be surprised by it, to fortify myself, stay vigilant.

I admit it, it didn't work. There was shame attached to renting even if it was envy that inspired them to let me know that's what we were, that's what we had been, renters in a neighborhood where everyone else owned.

Moving did not defeat this, though. What I mean is, between the time I knew we were going to move and the time we moved, I didn't fight back. I didn't tell the nannies we were going to own. I don't know why I didn't. I think I must have thought moving was more shameful than renting was, even if you were going to own.

Perhaps I thought we have to go someplace else to own, that we can't own here.

I don't know.

It wasn't that terrible.

That's how safe I was, how adored I felt myself to be, even by the nannies. Especially by the nannies.

I'm telling everything.

The nannies adored me because I didn't have one. This was a bonus. It was reverence on top of what I already had from them. The shame of renting was the same. It supplemented the universal blessedness. It was shame and it was intended that I be shamed by the knowledge, but it also abetted the well-being I was supposed to have. The nannies and the boys they took care of understood that my interests were secured, perhaps heightened, to the extent that humiliation was heaped upon me.

I understood this.

I understood it was queerly superior to be less well-off.

I understood it was a good thing for me to be a child like this, but not a good thing for the grown-ups whose fault this was. The shame was really theirs. I shared in it only insofar as I could profit from it, be esteemed as more angelic because of it.

BUT THEN WE MOVED
.

The old neighborhood was old in relation to houses. The new neighborhood was new in the same way.

Houses were still going up.

You have to imagine this—a plot of land, everything dug up, mud mostly, three finished houses, five finished houses, seven finished, but everything still looking unfinished.

It stayed this way for years. Even after the war was over, it still looked like this, unfinished.

They all had money from the war. This was what people said. People said it was war profits that got us these new houses. The maids said it.

There were no nannies in this neighborhood.

The maids were black and they didn't like the people they worked for. When it was only children around, the maids talked so that the children would hear them. In the afternoons, before they started getting the suppers ready, the maids stood out on the street near enough to where the children were playing. Profiteering was a word you heard because it came up a lot—
them
.

There was mud all over everything every season of the year. In the old neighborhood, everything was finished and had a gabled roof or long dark beams crossing darkly over creamy stucco, turrets on the corners sometimes. And there was grass.

I'm telling you about the profiteering part only to show you how charmed I was. Let's see if you understand.

Listen. Let's say I was seven and a half, eight, not yet nine. But I knew. I knew war profits was much worse than renting. I knew the maids hoped to put a malignancy abroad, hurt the children who heard it, make sure we heard them saying
them
.

I heard it. It didn't harm what held me higher than the rest.

Alan Silver did that. It was Alan Silver that brought me down to the level of everybody but him.

HERE'S WHAT HAPPENED
.

Alan Silver moved in. He moved in when there were seven houses and four more still going up. He was twelve. Maybe I was nine by then. So that's the boys from two houses. The other five houses had boys in them too. There were girls, of course. All the houses had girls, but I can't remember any of them. Except for Alan Silver's sister. Oh, there's only one reason I remember her. Or one memory Alan Silver's sister's in.

The girls didn't count.

I can't tell you how much the boys did.

I was the youngest. Then came Alan Silver. The rest were older. But I don't know how old. There were five of them, and they were rough. Maybe they weren't rough, but I thought they were. This opinion derived directly from their policy respecting the mud. I mean, they played in it, or they picked it up and packed it and threw it at people. If they threw it at me, I sat down until it dried off. If they threw it at one another, they kept on playing.

They never threw it at Alan Silver that I ever saw. But I never saw Alan Silver play outside. I don't know where he played. Maybe he played inside. Maybe he went to another neighborhood. I never played with Alan Silver. I never talked to Alan Silver. I never looked at him up close.

But I saw him. Everybody saw him. Everybody talked about him. Not the boys or the maids but the parents. The parents said he was an angel. He looked like an angel. He had blond hair and blue eyes and was pretty the way they said I used to be but that he still was, even though he was twelve.

It was when I came across this belief that I felt changed. I hadn't been noticing what was happening. I had been outgrowing my prettiness and I hadn't noticed. Isn't this amazing? To stop being the most beautiful?

For the first time ever, I felt unsafe. For the first time ever, I felt they could get me, it could all come in at me and get me, penetrate, kill me, find me in my bed, choke me, put poison into me, and my parents wouldn't try to stop it, would sooner have Alan Silver instead.

I'll tell you how I handled this. I stopped going outside so much. I stayed away from where I might get mud thrown on me—and if it happened that I did, then I didn't wait around for it to dry first but right away went home to wash it off. This meant making worse tracks inside the house. So it didn't handle anything any better, because the maid yelled or my mother yelled or they both yelled—and when they did it, I could see them yearning for Alan Silver in my place.

I could see desire.

The way I used to feel the sky would put down its arms for me if only it had them, I could see a heart red in the sky just above the roofs—a red, red heart.

It was desire. It was the desire of a neighborhood. It was everything, all earthliness, God too, deciding it desired Alan Silver instead.

THE FIRST THING
I heard was the siren. I was in the back of my house, staying clean. Maybe the maid heard the siren first. Maybe she ran to the front door first, or maybe I did. But what I remember is the both of us at the door looking out.

The fire engine is up the block. By the time we are there looking out, the firemen aren't in it. Then there is screaming. But the maid and I stand in the door.

The screaming's from over there, from over on this side, and from this side comes Alan Silver's mother and Alan Silver's sister, and they are the ones screaming, and I never heard screaming like this before, all this screaming all the way from over on this side to all the way up the block, and Alan Silver's mother is pulling at her hair, or maybe she is pulling at the sister's hair as they go running—up there to where the fire engine is parked. Then everybody is running out of all the finished houses. They are all screaming and going to where the fire engine is, but keeping a little behind Alan Silver's mother and behind Alan Silver's sister even if they started out from a closer house.

I don't know what thing amazes me more—people pulling at their hair, or the fire engine on the block, or seeing the whole neighborhood outside all at once.

The whole neighborhood is out there where the fire engine is and where the firemen are coming out of an unfinished house, the very last one at the end of the block. Then they go back and then they come out and then they go back and then they come out, and it's then I notice the maid's not standing with me where I am standing anymore.

My house is empty except for me.

You know where they all went? They all went up there where I knew something terrible was.

I WENT IN
.

I went back to the room where I'd been. I think it was the kitchen or the breakfast room. I went back to eating my milk and cookies again.

In the whole neighborhood, I was the only one who didn't go up there. But wasn't I too young to see a thing like that?

I knew it had to be a thing like that.

Days later, they started talking about it—the parents, the maids, but not any of the kids.

I could tell in the doorway—or I could tell when I was eating the milk and cookies I went back for.

He lived in a coma for a while.

But I knew he would be dead.

They said the five boys were playing with him when he fell. They said he fell from where the top floor was going in. They said he fell down through the shaft where the chimney was set to go in—to the concrete they had already poured down in the basement for the basement down below.

I remember thinking, "What was Alan Silver doing playing with those boys?" I remember thinking, "Was he always playing with those boys when I was staying clean?"

"Someone pushed him," I thought.

I thought, "Which boy did?"

I wanted to tell everyone I didn't.

I am forty-seven years old.

I still want to say it wasn't me, it wasn't me, that I am innocent, innocent—I swear, I am.