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.