were garages back there, a black asphalt back alley and back
doors and places to hang clothes on a line and a million places
to hide, garbage cans, garages half open, telephone poles,
strange dark dirty places, basements. Two blocks behind us in
the back there was a convent, a huge walled-in place all verdant
with great trees that hid everything: and so our neighborhood
turned gothic and spooky and we talked of children captured
and hidden inside: and witches. Outside there were maybe
twenty of us, all different ages but all children, boys and girls,
and we played day after day and night after night, well past
dark: hide-and-seek, Red Rover Red Rover, statue, jump rope,
hopscotch, giant steps, witch. One summer we took turns
holding our breath to thirty and then someone squeezed in our
stomachs and we passed out or got real dizzy. This was the
thing to do and we did it a million times. There were alleys
near one or two of the houses suddenly breaking into the brick
row and linking the back ways with the front street and we
ran through them: we ran all over, hiding, seeking, making up
new games. We divided into teams. We played giant steps. We
played Simon Says. Then the boys would play sports without
us, and everything would change. We would taunt them into
playing with us again, going back to the idyllic, all together,
running, screaming, laughing. The girls had dolls for when the
boys wouldn’t let us play and we washed their hair and set it
outside together on the steps. We played poker and canasta
and fish and old maid and gin rummy and strip poker. When
babies, we played in a sandbox, until it got too small and we
got too big. When bigger, we roller-skated. One girl got so big
she went out on a date: and we all sat on the steps across the
street and watched her come out in a funny white dress with a
red flower pinned on it and a funny-looking boy was with her.
We were listless that night, not knowing whether to play hide-
and-seek or statue. We told nasty stories about the girl in the
9
white dress with the date and wouldn’t play with her sister
who was like us, not a teenager. Something was wrong. Statue
wasn’t fun and hide-and-seek got boring too. I watched my
house right across the street while the others watched the girl
on the date. Intermittently we played statue, bored. Someone
had to swing someone else around and then suddenly let them
go and however they landed was how they had to stay, like a
statue, and everyone had to guess what they were— like a
ballet dancer or the Statue of Liberty. Whoever guessed what
the statue was got to be turned around and be the new statue.
Sometimes just two people played and everybody else would
sit around and watch for any little movement and heckle and
guess what the person was being a statue of. We were mostly
girls by now, playing statue late at night. I watched my house
across the street because the doctor had come, the man in the
dark suit with the black bag and the dour expression and the
unpleasant voice who never spoke except to say something bad
and I had been sent outside, I had not wanted to leave the
house, I had been ordered to, all the lights were out in the
house, it was so dark, and it was late for them to let me out
but they had ordered me to go out and play, and have a good
time they said, and my mother was in the bedroom with the
door closed, and lying down I was sure, not able to move,
something called heart failure, something like not being able to
breathe, something that bordered on death, it had happened
before, I was a veteran, I sat on the steps watching the house
while the girl in the white dress stood being laughed at with
her date and I had thoughts about death that I already knew I
would remember all my life and someday write down: death is
someone I know, someone who is dressed exactly like the
doctor and carries the same black bag and comes at night and
is coming tonight to get mother, and then I saw him come,
pretending to be the doctor, and I thought well this is it she
will die tonight I know but the others don’t because they go on
dates or play statue and I’m more mature and so they don’t
know these things that I know because I live in a house where
death comes all the time, suddenly in the night, suddenly in the
day, suddenly in the middle of sleeping, suddenly in the middle
of a meal, there is death: mother is sick, we’ve called the doctor,
I know death is on the way.
10
The streetlights lit up the street. The brick was red, even- at
night. The girl on the date had a white dress with a red corsage.
We sat across the street, near our favorite telephone pole for
hide-and-seek, and played statue on and off. I always had a
home out there, on the steps, behind the cars, near the telephone pole.
*
Inside the woman was dying. Outside we played witch.
The boys chased the girls over the whole block from front
to back. They tried to catch a girl. When they caught her they
put her in a wooden cage they had built or found and they
raised the cage up high on a telephone pole, miles and miles
above the ground, with rope, and they left her hanging there.
She was the witch. Then they let her down when they wanted
to. After she begged and screamed enough and they wanted to
play again or do something else.
You were supposed to want them to want to catch you.
They would all run after one girl and catch her and put her in
the cage and raise it up with the rope high, high on the telephone pole out in the back where the adults didn’t see. Then they would hold the cage in place, the girl inside it screaming,
four or five of them holding her weight up there in the wooden
cage, or they would tie the rope to something and stand and
watch.
When they picked you it meant you were popular and fast
and hard to catch.
*
When we played witch all the girls screamed and ran as fast as
they could. They ran from all the boys and ran so fast and so
far that eventually you would run into some boy somewhere
but all the boys had decided who they were going to catch so
the boy you would run into accidentally would just pass you
by and not try to catch you and capture you and put you in
the cage.
*
Everyone wanted to be caught and was terrified to be caught.
The cage was wooden and had pieces missing and broken. The