in which you were loved, but perhaps not well enough. About houses that smelled of wet wool and old socks and hastily applied industrial cleaner, where parents sometimes stumbled on your name or slapped you without meaning to or looked at you as if you were everything they’d ever wanted going down the drain—and then closed a door and forgot you completely, crying, Oh, where is it? Oh, what happened? Oh, oh, oh—in misery and happiness and anger and laughter and pain.
I made two extra sandwiches for the Moran kids, but just as I brought them outside, two of the girls showed up, Judy, who was about eleven, and baby June, whose drooping diaper was so wet it seemed to leave a kind of damp slug’s trail on the grass.
I sent Judy back to their house for a new one and changed the baby right there on the lawn, Tony and Petey standing over me, eating their sandwiches and offering casual bits of guidance (“There’s a piece of grass on her tush”), like construction workers on coffee break. I tossed the wet diaper into my mother’s empty laundry basket at the side of the house and let the boys walk the Scotties to the corner, Judy and the baby coming along, too, where I told them all I really had to get to work. They turned back readily enough, but a few minutes later Tony and Petey came zooming by on their banana bikes, slowing beside us and circling around us and then zooming up again. They were waiting there when we emerged from the Richardsons’ driveway after dropping off the dogs and followed us most of the way to the Clarkes’ as well, until they were distracted by a red convertible with a wide and startlingly white interior that passed by on an intersecting road.
Standing straight up on their pedals, they headed off to see if they could chase it down and find out if it belonged to a movie star.
“We’ll let you know,” Petey shouted back over his shoulder, his voice deep and serious, full of comic-book urgency. It was clear that there were two of us now whom he wanted to impress.
“He likes you,” I said to Daisy, and she smirked and shrugged and said the requisite “Eeww,” and then, when I said it again, the pro forma “Does not.”
I stopped and bent down and took hold of her skinny leg. I lifted her foot, and she leaned against me, hopping on the other to keep her balance. I pretended to inspect her shoe. I could see how the white socks were still peppered with grains of sand. There was a shiny scar on her knee and a series of black-and-blue marks down her freckled calf. A girl with brothers.
“Your shoes are getting pinker,” I said, dropping one leg and picking up the other one.
“You must be in love.”
The Clarkes’ house was vaguely Victorian, with a nice big front porch and a back patio that looked out on a wide sloping lawn and a little pond surrounded by cattails and dragonflies.
Mr. and Mrs. Clarke were friends of my parents who shared the same city background and middle-class income, the house itself being an inheritance from a bachelor uncle of Mr. Clarke’s who had done well in the garment industry. In my childhood I had been enchanted by the house, not only because of its pond and porch, the diamond-shaped panes in its bay windows, or its turret and widow’s watch, but also because I believed for many years that it actually had been given to Mr. Clarke by a fairy—by his fairy uncle, as I’d heard him say, or, his uncle the fairy. In the wonderland that was my solitary childhood, such a bequest—a wave of a cattail wand, a flash of sunlight on a beveled pane of glass, a flutter of dragonfly wings—seemed both credible and marvelous. Had I not learned the truth of the matter in my freshman year at the academy (it was, I’m afraid, more of a slow, disappointed dawning than a flash of illuminating light), I might, on this pretty June morning now full of bee sound and birdsong and the scent of mown grass, have told Daisy the same.
The Clarkes spent every summer in an
I made two extra sandwiches for the Moran kids, but just as I brought them outside, two of the girls showed up, Judy, who was about eleven, and baby June, whose drooping diaper was so wet it seemed to leave a kind of damp slug’s trail on the grass.
I sent Judy back to their house for a new one and changed the baby right there on the lawn, Tony and Petey standing over me, eating their sandwiches and offering casual bits of guidance (“There’s a piece of grass on her tush”), like construction workers on coffee break. I tossed the wet diaper into my mother’s empty laundry basket at the side of the house and let the boys walk the Scotties to the corner, Judy and the baby coming along, too, where I told them all I really had to get to work. They turned back readily enough, but a few minutes later Tony and Petey came zooming by on their banana bikes, slowing beside us and circling around us and then zooming up again. They were waiting there when we emerged from the Richardsons’ driveway after dropping off the dogs and followed us most of the way to the Clarkes’ as well, until they were distracted by a red convertible with a wide and startlingly white interior that passed by on an intersecting road.
Standing straight up on their pedals, they headed off to see if they could chase it down and find out if it belonged to a movie star.
“We’ll let you know,” Petey shouted back over his shoulder, his voice deep and serious, full of comic-book urgency. It was clear that there were two of us now whom he wanted to impress.
“He likes you,” I said to Daisy, and she smirked and shrugged and said the requisite “Eeww,” and then, when I said it again, the pro forma “Does not.”
I stopped and bent down and took hold of her skinny leg. I lifted her foot, and she leaned against me, hopping on the other to keep her balance. I pretended to inspect her shoe. I could see how the white socks were still peppered with grains of sand. There was a shiny scar on her knee and a series of black-and-blue marks down her freckled calf. A girl with brothers.
“Your shoes are getting pinker,” I said, dropping one leg and picking up the other one.
“You must be in love.”
The Clarkes’ house was vaguely Victorian, with a nice big front porch and a back patio that looked out on a wide sloping lawn and a little pond surrounded by cattails and dragonflies.
Mr. and Mrs. Clarke were friends of my parents who shared the same city background and middle-class income, the house itself being an inheritance from a bachelor uncle of Mr. Clarke’s who had done well in the garment industry. In my childhood I had been enchanted by the house, not only because of its pond and porch, the diamond-shaped panes in its bay windows, or its turret and widow’s watch, but also because I believed for many years that it actually had been given to Mr. Clarke by a fairy—by his fairy uncle, as I’d heard him say, or, his uncle the fairy. In the wonderland that was my solitary childhood, such a bequest—a wave of a cattail wand, a flash of sunlight on a beveled pane of glass, a flutter of dragonfly wings—seemed both credible and marvelous. Had I not learned the truth of the matter in my freshman year at the academy (it was, I’m afraid, more of a slow, disappointed dawning than a flash of illuminating light), I might, on this pretty June morning now full of bee sound and birdsong and the scent of mown grass, have told Daisy the same.
The Clarkes spent every summer in an
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