Shadow Baby (2 page)

They might. But they will also think: Jackie Phillips wet her pants in kindergarten while everyone was doing jumping jacks. That’s the way it is.

Does everyone look at me and think, Clara Winter who loathes and despises snow and cold, who lives with her mother The Fearsome Tamar in North Sterns, whose eyes can
look green or gray or blue, depending, who has never met her father or her grandfather, who has represented Sterns Elementary at every state spelling bee since first grade, whose hair could be called auburn, who loves books about days gone by? Clara Winter who saw that Jackie had wet her pants in gym class and so stopped jumping jacks and ran out of line and tried but failed to wipe up the spill surreptitiously with a used tissue before anyone else would notice? Is that what they think?

They do, and they do not.

The eyes, they know. That I live with my mother Tamar in North Sterns, they know. The spelling, they know. The fact that I, as a kindergartner, got Jackie Phillips’s puddle all over my fingers from trying to wipe it up, they know. These are the things they know.

You see how much is left out.

Some may not even know about Tamar. Tamar is what I call my mother, but only when she’s not around. I tried it once in front of her.

“Good morning, Tamar,” I said. “Any Cheerios left?”

She gave me a look.

“Clara Winter, what the hell are you up to now? Is this another of your weird word things?”

I tried to look ingenuous, which is a word I believe to be a perfect word. Only certain words fit my personal category of perfection. What makes the word
ingenuous
perfect is the way the “g” slides into the “enuous.”

“What? What do you mean, Tamar?”

She couldn’t stop laughing. That was the last time I did that. To her face I call her Ma mostly, because that’s what pioneer girls called their mothers. That’s what Laura Ingalls
Wilder called her mother. I’m the only girl I know who calls her mother Ma.

Y
ou might wonder why a girl of eleven would be interested in an old man. You might think that a girl of eleven would have time only for her fellow sixth-graders. You might assume that the life of an old man who lived alone in a trailer in the Nine Mile Trailer Park in Sterns would hold no interest for an eleven-year-old child.

You would be wrong.

After the first night, when the old man lit lanterns in Nine Mile Woods, I saw him everywhere in Sterns. I saw him in Jewell’s Grocery buying noodles and a quart of milk when I was there buying a lime popsicle. I stood behind him in the checkout line and observed his movements. The old man gave Mr. Jewell forty-five cents—five pennies, one quarter, one dime, and one nickel—and Mr. Jewell gave him a Persian doughnut. The old man reached into his pocket and took out another penny, which he dropped into Mr. Jewell’s “Take a Penny, Leave a Penny” cup.

“Thank you, Mr. Kominsky,” Mr. Jewell said. “And what can I do for you, Miss Clara?”

I waited until the old man had walked out of Jewell’s and down the sidewalk toward Nine Mile Trailer Park.

“I would like to know Mr. Kominsky’s first name,” I said.

“Mr. Kominsky’s name is George,” Mr. Jewell said.

“Thank you.”

I left Jewell’s and walked across the street to Crystal’s Diner, where Tamar was waiting for me.

“There is an old man who lives in the Nine Mile Trailer Park who will soon become my friend,” I told her. “That is my prediction.”

Tamar sucked her straw full of milkshake, then suspended the straw above her mouth and let it drip in. That’s a habit of hers.

“Well, far be it from me to argue with a Clara Winter prediction,” Tamar said.

That’s Tamar. That’s a Tamar remark. Tamar’s mother died when she was eighteen years old. On Tamar’s seventeenth birthday, her mother gave her a black and red and orange lumberjacket that Tamar still wears despite the fact that the seams are ripping, the zipper keeps breaking, and moths have eaten holes in the wool.

When I first spoke to the old man, I told him that my last name was winter, which I always keep in small letters in my mind, so it doesn’t gain in importance. Winter is something that should be lowercase, in my opinion. Winter is to be feared. Winter is to be endured. That’s what I believe to be true.

“Hello,” I said. “I’m Clara winter. I was wondering if I could do my oral history project with you.”

No answer. He stood there behind his screen door, looking at me.

“It’s for my sixth-grade project.”

No answer.

“I’m eleven.”

Why did I say that? Why did I tell him I was eleven?

“I saw you lighting lanterns. You like lanterns.”

Babbling! But when I mentioned the lanterns, he let me in. Interview an elderly person, they said, find out all about their
lives. It’s called an oral history. The minute they assigned the oral history project I knew that I would interview the old man. I wanted to listen while he told me about lanterns. I wanted him to be my friend. I wanted my prediction to come true.

“I’ll do Georg Kominsky,” I said. “He lives in the Nine Mile Trailer Park.”

I had already found his name in the telephone book.
Georg
, not George. He wasn’t on the approved list. They had a list of Sterns residents who had been oral historied in the past.

“He’s an immigrant,” I said. “He’s old.”

Was he? I didn’t know, but they love old immigrants. The old man was also a plus because Tamar, my mother, goes to choir practice every Wednesday night at the Twin Churches, exactly opposite Nine Mile Trailer Park.

“I’ve never been in a trailer before,” I said when the old man let me in.

I took the liberty of walking around. It was a very narrow place. I had the feeling that if the old man, who was tall, laid down on his back crosswise, he might not fit without having to crumple up a little. Each end of the trailer was curved.

“Sir, is this what being on a boat’s like?” I asked the old man.

Already I was getting used to him not talking. I liked the sound of my voice in his trailer. There was something echoey about it.

“I’ve always wondered what life on a boat was like,” I said. “The smallness of it.”

I walked straight to the end of the trailer, past the tiny kitchen with the miniature refrigerator and the miniature sink, past the little room with the sliding curtain-door that
had a bed built onto a wall platform and drawers built into the opposite wall, into the tiny bathroom at the end that had a miniature shower, an ivory toilet, and a dark-green sink.

“I like your dark-green sink. It’s unique. It’s a one-of-a-kind sink, just like your house is a one-of-a-kind house.”

“It’s not a house,” the old man said. “It’s a trailer.”

“Why do you think they’re called trailers?”

That’s when I first learned the trick of how to get the old man to talk. Just keep talking and once in a while throw a question in. He wouldn’t answer and he wouldn’t answer, and then he would answer.

“Do you want something to drink?” I said. “I can make you something to drink. I brought a selection of various beverages for you. Tea, instant coffee with instant creamer, and hot chocolate.”

I had little bags of everything.

“I could make you some hot chocolate,” I said. “It would be my pleasure. Miniature marshmallows already mixed in.”

It was the end of March in the Adirondacks that night. We sat at his kitchen table and he stirred his coffee. Around and around he stirred. This is the kind of thing I think about, now that the old man is gone. I submerged all the miniature marsh mallows in my hot chocolate until they disappeared. They dissolved. They were no more. You could say I killed them.

“Let me ask you a question,” I said. “Say you’re on death row. How would you rather die: electric chair or lethal injection?”

That used to be one of my favorite questions. I used to ask it of everyone I met. The old man stirred his coffee.

“If you had to choose, that is,” I said.

“Did they tell you to ask that question for the oral history?”

“Yes.”

He kept on stirring.

“Actually, no,” I said.

There was something about the old man. Even though it was my habit then to tell untruths, around the old man I couldn’t.

“This would be for my own personal information,” I said.

“Well then,” he said. “Let me think about it.”

I had hoped for an immediate answer. But immediate answers were not forthcoming from the old man. That was one of his traits.

T
he Adirondack Ski Club created the ski trail from Utica to Old Forge, fifty miles of cross-country skiing. The night I first observed the old man, they had just finished the portion that wound its way through Nine Mile Woods and up through Sterns. Would you find me skiing on that trail? Would you find me out on a winter night, a scarf wrapped around my face, poling my way through the snow?

You would not.

I had a feeling that the old man knew the power of winter. How did I know that? Because when I told him why I spell my last name with a lowercase w, he nodded. He did not question. I used to love that about the old man.

The first night I ever met the old man, sitting at his kitchen table, I read a book report aloud. You might think that seems like a strange thing to do. You might think, Tamar is right, Clara Winter is indeed an odd child. But still, there we sat, me reading, him listening.

They like us to read a book and do a book report on it once every two weeks. “Now that you’re in sixth grade,” they say. “Time to develop your critical faculties.” Etcetera. I scoff at this. Their definition of a book and my definition of a book do not coincide. “Fifty-page minimum,” they say.

What kind of book is only fifty pages long? A comic book?

It hurts me to see a book report. It’s painful to me. Book reports are to books what (a) brown sugar and water boiled together until thick is to true maple syrup from Adirondack sugar maples, (b) lukewarm reconstituted nonfat powdered milk is to whipped cream, and (c) a drawing of a roller coaster is to a roller-coaster ride. Give me a
real
assignment, I say.

I like to read books one after another.
Immerse
—another perfect word—myself in a book and then
immerse
myself in the next book, and just keep going until there aren’t any more books left to swim in. That’s why I hate it when authors die. I cannot stand it. There will be no more books forthcoming from that person. Their future books died with them. In the past I have found a series of books and loved it so much that all I wanted to do was read and read and read those books for the rest of my life. Then I would find out that the author was dead. Had in fact been dead for many a year. This has happened to me several times.

You can see how much it would hurt me to write a book report every two weeks. I could do such a thing only to a book I hated. And why would I read a book I hated? Self-torture?

My only option is to make them up.

Besides, there’re not too many unread-by-Clara-winter books left in the school library. It’s a strange feeling, to walk down a row of books with your head bent so you can read
the titles, and recognize most of them.
Amelia Earhart: American Aviator. Alexander Graham Bell: Inventor of the Telephone. George Washington Carver: American Botanist
. I like biographies. I like the early childhoods of famous people. Sometimes they’re what you’d expect them to be, sometimes they’re not.

I like reading between the lines of famous early childhoods.

My favorites are pioneers. Winter explorers. The kinds of pioneers who bore the burden of snow and ice, who faced the cold head-on. Winter is to be feared. But who thinks about that now? Everyone thinks we’ve conquered winter. Houses with heat, cars with heat, stores and schools with heat. They forget what it used to be like. They can’t begin to imagine what it was like for the pioneers, with one small fire in an unchinked cabin, or how cold it must have been in the Indians’ winter camps.

Imagine it.

We are close to death every winter day. What if the furnace went out and the electricity went out and the phone line went out and the blizzard raged so hard that the road was a pure whiteness, and you slowly burned up everything wood in the house, and then twisted newspaper into tight rolls and burned them like fast-burning logs, and then started in on your summer clothes and the sheets and towels and mattress stuffing and anything else that could possibly burn, and finally, even, tore all your books apart and burnt the pages, all the time jumping up and down to stay warm, dancing even, with all your winter clothes on? It wouldn’t matter. You would die. No one thinks about things like that. They all feel so safe.

Not me.

“Would you like to read my fake book report?” I said. “I have it here in my backpack. It was completed just this afternoon.”

The old man stirred his coffee with the handle of his spoon. He did not use the
bowl
of the spoon, as I have seen it referred to in books but never, not once, in real life.

“It concerns winter,” I said.

“You read it to me,” he said.

The Winter Without End
, by Lathrop E. Douglas. New York: Crabtree Publishers, Inc., 1958. You need to make up a title that sounds possible and an author that doesn’t sound impossible. I always put down a year from long ago, just in case they check. They’d never check, but still. You could always say, “Oh, you couldn’t find it? That’s because it’s out of print.” They’d be impressed that you knew what out of print meant.

“Ready?” I said.

“Ready.”