The diet doctor stopped her pills suddenly. It was crazy, but it was only later that she knew that, after her father had kicked her out, into the city, where she wanted to live anyway. You’ll see, she intoned to Lois as she threw her stuff together, “that these dead shall not have died in vain,” the Gettysburg Address coming to mind, her father having recited it so often from the hardcover book he loved. Everything fit into two cardboard boxes; Jane didn’t take her yearbook with her name in gold letters on its white cover. She didn’t take her tennis racket.
Chapter 2
Grace thought her dolls came alive at night, after midnight, and talked with each other only when she’d fallen asleep. Most likely she’d been told the story of The Nutcracker Suite, but Grace, like most children, took stories to heart. She waited up nights, a captive to the secret lives of her dolls, and feared they might say terrible things about her. Against her young will Grace would fall asleep, though sometimes she’d make it past midnight, or what she thought was midnight. To stay awake she danced on her bed, wondering if they were watching. The dolls never spoke, at least she never heard them, and Grace reasoned that they knew she was awake and could wait longer. In a way she never gave up the notion that her dolls came alive. Later, when she stopped playing with them, she forgot it.
Play was Grace’s job, the way doing the housework her mother Ruth’s. Ruth did her work defensively, keeping Grace out of the kitchen, telling her humorously to go play as if she were saying go away. Grace found play a lonely job, and she hated her dolls, especially Kitty, the grown-up-looking blond, with breasts much bigger, proportionately, than Grace’s, an anomaly not missed by Grace, who found it impossible to mother her. She would hit her dolls for no reason at all, then try to make it up to them. Grace liked animals much better, and any animal, even a stuffed one, was preferable to a doll.
Ruth liked animals better than people. They’re loyal, she told Grace, but you can expect more from your family because you’re related by blood. Even so, Ruth distrusted her relations. And being related by blood doesn’t mean much to a child, but because she was related to them, they were there, rather than other people, at a bungalow colony in her sixth summer. Running out of the cottage naked, Grace liked to wake her relatives early, knocking on their doors and calling out that it was time to get up. They thought of her as uninhibited. With abandon Grace ran into the ocean, carrying an inner tube, and floated as far away from her blood as she could, until her mother called her out of the water and angrily slapped her across the face. You could’ve drowned made no sense to her; it had no relation to her. Six years later she became afraid of the waves when an especially big one knocked her down and dragged her under. She couldn’t catch her breath and she wondered how she had ever not been afraid.
Relatives told Ruth what a bright little girl she had, how cute she was. Ruth accepted their praise with reservations, keeping to herself the thought that these people were after all only family. Grace’s true test would come in the world. Fascinated by an older cousin who had, as Ruth put it already developed, as if Grace were a photograph still in the camera, Grace resented having to play with a younger cousin only because they were the same age. Ruth told her husband, Grace doesn’t know how to play.
The sand, the ocean, the bugs, the snakes. The people with newly red flesh advertising their bodies in bathing suits that exposed the red and the white, the lines demarcating the private parts. Grace even thought of herself as an explorer, a Columbus coming upon a new world. She took long walks with her older brother, Richard, who had been mandated by Ruth to look after her. Each time they set off they went farther and farther, miles and miles away. Grace thought, not exactly clear what a mile was, but farther than she had ever been from her mother. A sense of danger accompanied her like a best friend. Once upon a time there appeared a stream, so wide that it had a bridge across it, and standing on it was a boy Richard’s age. He was holding a burlap sack that had kittens in it, he told them, and then he hurled the bag over the bridge. Grace and Richard stood by, dumb, and watched the bag disappear under the water, bit by bit. Finally it was all gone. Richard told her that farmers were like that, that they had a different attitude toward animals, because they raised them to eat or to kill. “Then I’ll never be a farmer,” she said belligerently, “if they kill kittens.” Richard laughed at the idea. Grace announced that she would never live in the country, “if that’s the way people are.” And she never did, though her reasons were different when she got older. She said the country made her nervous. In her memory the boy who drowned the kittens became like a picture in a family photo album, still and frozen. But the scene was too horrible to have been real, and Grace often thought it was a dream.
Grace missed her room at home. Small as it was, it was hers and she grew to love it as if it were human. After school she’d kiss its floor, with passion, pursing her lips, opening her mouth slightly, the way movie stars did. In this room she invoked her fantasies, directing herself to choose the best one, going over it and over it, it always giving her pleasure. She directed her friend Celia too. They had a special game and Grace was tyrannical about being the girl, letting Celia be her only once in a while. Celia the man would come upon Grace the girl, unaware, innocent and grab her from behind. The girl would pretend to fight and then abandon herself to the man. They enacted this scene over and over again, Celia fighting Grace more and more about getting the chance to be the girl. They lived in the same apartment building, with older brothers the same age, and mothers who didn’t like each other. Ruth thought Celia’s mother had too many airs. “Like mother, like daughter,” Grace’s mother intoned.
For one of Ruth’s birthdays Grace bought her a cheap pin, a cluster of fake seed pearls around a blue enamel center, which she’d found, all by herself, at a street fair several blocks from home. Returning, she had to pass the gypsies on the corner. They had appeared on the block suddenly, different and strange, and when they beckoned to Grace, waving their arms covered in shiny red and blue material, she hesitated, stuck to her spot on the sidewalk. They waved and smiled, their white teeth bright against their dark skin. Grace stared and ran, not knowing why they wanted her, or what they would do with her. Ruth was given her present. She said it was ugly and that she’d never wear it. She opened the top drawer of her mahogany dresser, put the pin with other junk jewelry and shut the drawer with finality. As she shut it she told Grace that it was important to tell the truth. The gypsies wore much uglier jewelry. Weeks later Grace dreamt that her mother was killed by a runaway train. Ruth had been tied to the tracks and no one could save her. That made sense because Ruth always refused help. If you do things by yourself, you won’t owe anyone anything, she’d tell Grace. Grace woke screaming and asked to sleep with her mother, who told her she was being silly. And added, You’re not a baby anymore.
There was something calm about Celia, as if she had a big secret that she wouldn’t tell anyone, most of all Grace. Grace always wanted to find out what she knew. When Celia refused to play their special game anymore, saying they were too old — they were now ten — they set up a make-believe office, reviving Celia’s father’s dead business files and ledgers. Their business was an imaginary army of women. The names of their female soldiers were alphabetized and placed on cards in a small metal box. From Celia’s room they sent their soldiers on maneuvers and they punished and rewarded them as they had done their dolls. But added to their older responsibilities — discipline and feeding — was administration, end they took to it as if called to it. Grace was stricter, more punitive than Celia, who wanted to give the girls longer leaves and more dances. Grace no longer danced on her bed when listening to the radio, and, wearing real baby clothes that Ruth bought because they were more economical than doll’s clothes, Tiny Tears and Kitty sat on a shelf in the farthest part of Grace’s closet, as if that shelf were her childhood.