How strange the world is! How full of marvels! On her way home Asthma passes Professor Brunelleschi, who is on his way to the cemetery where his wife is buried. Asthma’s own room overlooks it, so she is well aware of his clockwork consistency.
Asthma likes the cemetery. For one thing, it is practically an extension of her own house. The backyard gives way to lilac bushes, boulders, and brambles, and the next thing you know, you are standing on the cemetery path in the company of songbirds, squirrels, skippers, and painted ladies. Coffins blanketed in sod.
She is careful not to disturb Professor Brunelleschi while he is speaking to his dead wife. Asthma fondly remembers Noni Brunelleschi, who had been golden as if glazed and who had smelled of her husband’s Turkish tobacco. Noni, so soft and round — except for her piano playing, which was fortissimo! and angular.
“Bellezza ed onestate,” he murmurs. “I am no longer witty. I no longer laugh.”
Asthma likes the dead. They are unobtrusive. One can dream beside them without disruption. Asthma has provided Noni with companions: dead birds, moles, mice, beetles. Sometimes, sitting among the dead in a silence animated only by the breezes and the birds, a neighbor’s voice, a curse, will sail directly overhead like a sharply beaked paper plane and Asthma will hear little Pea Pod receive a slap, followed by a howl, and then Goldie yelling, and the air around Faculty Circle will churn with trouble; trouble will grease the walls of Pea Pod’s house. All the mothers are screamers. They cannot help themselves. But when she is happy, Goldie sits down at the piano, just as Noni used to do, except Goldie doesn’t play Baconfelder or Bartók or Mussorgsky. She plays Irving Berlin and Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hammerstein. Once when Pea Pod refused to stop howling, Goldie played “There Is Nothin’ Like a Dame” so loudly she declenched a thunderclap: the entire sky flew into a rage and it rained buckets of black cats (Blackie’s words) for two whole days.
Asthma’s own mother is belleza and when Goldie plays “Luck Be a Lady” and Blackie sings, she sings con espirito. But Asthma distrusts these performances and has come to absolutely loathe the piano. Because of this loathing, Asthma had managed to break Noni’s heart. “You have the fingers,” Noni had insisted. “You have the spirit and the talent. You have the ear.” But Asthma said if she ever played anything it would be the kettledrum. She could see herself tearing into that drum like nobody’s business. “Kettledrum!” Noni had gasped, throwing her hands into the air. “Kettledrum! And why not the triangle? Spoons? Tacky crystal glassware? Why not dig wells and operate an elevator!” (Asthma did not tell her that the best time she ever had at the movies was when Harpo Marx tore that piano apart.)
When Asthma gets home, Blackie is relaxing in the tub. Her hair is turbaned, her rosy flesh buoyant and bestilled. Blackie and her Rod are going to Goldie’s for cocktails and Asthma is expected to play with Pea Pod, but play at what? Asthma and Pea Pod have had a painful history ever since the time Asthma bullied Pea Pod and was bitten on the arm. For this Pea Pod had received a searing punishment. Goldie had thrown her over a shoulder, torn off her panties, and ascended the staircase swatting Pea Pod ragefully before tossing her like a sack of cornmeal into her room — as Asthma and Blackie stood in the front hall transfixed.
The following morning a freak ice storm had split a majestic cherry tree in two — a tree that had been the pride of Faculty Circle, planted smack in its middle. Asthma shudders recalling this, recalling her own terrific guilt, her wish that Pea Pod had done her greater damage — broken her arm or ruptured a vein. She has feared Pea Pod ever since. She imagines her in her room alone, drinking black milk, eating black food, and picking at a scab. “I’m not playing with Pea Pod,” she says decisively. “I’m tired and hungry and I’m going to eat a peanut-butter-marshmallow sandwich.”
“Sure, baby. .,” Blackie yawns and closes her eyes. Asthma sees her mother’s pecan-colored pubic hair fizzing in the perfumed bath salts.
He is unlike other people. And the girl, too, unlike other people. Sometimes when he is crouching alone in the lilacs waiting for the moment to quicken, for the world to start over, it does. Suspended in the shadows, he sees her windows come to life and when this happens it is as if the first stars have caught fire and he is vividly alive, he embodies expectation, flush with longing for a look at the One Child, the One Girclass="underline" Asthma. Whose parents, Blackie and her Rod, have just left the house and in cocktail attire walk to Goldie’s front door and ring. In a moment they vanish as into a black hole. They will drink and drink. Propelled into a very great distance, time will stand still.
Asthma carries her supper to her room and considers her holdings: 110 animals (he has counted them) made of plastic, glass, wood — and one ivory elephant. They are provided with a restaurant that serves blue-plate specials, an amusement park constructed of shoe boxes, a castle with a moat, a movie theater (Italian. Made of printed cardboard and a gift from Noni). A mirror pond. An opera house, the Eiffel Tower, the Tower of Pisa (made of plaster), a locomotive.
The first time he saw Asthma she was in a tree. He had already seen Blackie, a hot machine made of rivets and spinning gears, like a pressure cooker and a robot combined. She was much like his own mother, always heating up and letting off steam. Asthma was better off in the tree than in the house.
Asthma’s father, a history professor, collects stamped postcards from Jamaica going back to the 1850s. His prizes include the King of Wings Penitentiary featuring a pink Cunard Line stamp, and the Jehovah God Bible School with three Jamaica Boy Scout stamps: pink, blue, and green.
Stub has never taken food from Asthma’s house.
It is unclear if he crouches among the lilacs to watch over Asthma or simply to watch her. If he could, he would join in her play. It is possible that he wishes to be her, wading deep into the fullness of the game. Upstairs framed in light, Asthma leans over her realm, moving things around. She is Ptah, brooding over the Egg of the World; she is Trimurti, her arms wheeling from within the lotus flower; she is Marduk, constructing a reed mat on the face of the waters, scattering dust, inventing gods and men — except that she plays with little glass horses, a plastic camel. He thinks Vanderloon would also appreciate this play of hers.
He burns as he watches her from below, the flickering, the firefly child, now you see her, now you don’t — careening like the smallest particle of matter, as restless as a thing can be, as a puppy, an angel dancing on a pin, as a dust mote swimming in the ocean of the eye: rabbit, fairy, human child: Asthma! Sprite, little daemon, his own talisman burning from his neck, burning within the iris of his eye.