“Au revoir. Thank you very much for the chocolates.” My mother’s instructions surfaced at odd times.
I left my dripping sneakers on the brick floor, dropped my wet clothes into my lilac straw hamper, and took my very first voluntary shower. I dried off slowly, watching myself in the steamy mirror. When I didn’t come down for dinner, my mother found me, naked and quiet, deep in my covers.
“Let’s get the piano,” I said.
I started lessons with Mr. Canetti the next week. He served me wine-flavored cookies instead of chocolate. One day he bent forward to push my sleeves back over my aching wrists, and I saw my beautiful self take shape in his eyes. I loved him, too.
Take My Hand
I found comfort in the red, shy eyes of Mr. Klein and Mr. Canetti, and I found it in Franks Five and Dime. I didn’t think of it as stealing; I didn’t brag about it to other kids, not that I talked to them anyway, and I didn’t pray for forgiveness. It was just Taking. Every school day I took Necco wafers and a Heath bar from Frank’s. It was a long, dim box of a room; the candy racks were in front of the cash register, halfway down the left wall facing a heavy glass case, five shelves filled with Madame Alexander dolls and their hats and shoes and luggage sets. I walked in ten minutes before school started most days and cruised the shop, pausing in front of the doll case, looking for the little knot of businessmen and newspapers to stand behind. I was a terrible thief, slow and sticky and predictable. Without my round, trusting face and geeky glasses, I would never have gotten as far as I did. I put the Neccos, shifting in their glassy opaque tube, into my lunch bag and held the Heath bar in my coat pocket. It was easily unwrapped, one blind finger sliding under the smooth brown back flap. Once, my pocket lining was torn and I had to tuck it in the waistband of my panties and get it out during coatroom time. I smelled of anxious sweat and chocolate all day.
I got caught. Frank wrapped his huge hand around my wrist and squeezed until I dropped my lunch bag on the counter. He took out the candy, and I said, my mind blank with humiliation, that I had intended to pay for it.
“Sure you did. Every day you come in here. For this. Get outta here and don’t come back.”
Ellyn and Cindi Kramer stood in the doorway, listening openmouthed, and looked at me with real pleasure as I walked between them. It could have been worse; he could have telephoned my parents, who surely would have made me go to the psychiatrist I’d been ducking for the last year. I didn’t want to talk about what I did and why; I already knew I was crazy. As it was, I entered hell all by myself, like everyone else.
What I did at Mrs. Hill’s wasn’t stealing, either. Stealing was sneaking lipstick from Woolworth’s or blue silk panties from Bee’s Lingerie Shop. After Frank’s, after months of being called a thief by the whole bus, every single day, of being followed down the street by Ellyn and Cindi, catcalling until I reached the hedges that marked our property, I stayed out of candy stores, but I still stole. By the middle of seventh grade, I was casually lining up pens, fluorescent markers, and leather barrettes on one long table in study hall like it was the local flea market. But everything I took from Mrs. Hill I hid in my closet. Every time the doorbell rang I could see two big cops, hands on their guns, standing in my mother’s foyer and calling out my name.
Mrs. Hill was almost blind, she had something-retinitis; there was a hole in the center of her vision, as if someone had ripped the middle out of every page. If she turned her head way to the right or left, she could just about see my face. When I walked toward her as she sat in the big red vinyl recliner, she would turn her face far to the right; the closer I got, the more she would seem to yearn toward the kitchen. When I was almost upon her, she would smile away from me.
Every Saturday I tidied up Mrs. Hill’s house and made her lunch and dinner. She was my good deed, courtesy of Samuel C. Shales, minister at the Beech Street A.M.E. Zion Church, Where Everybody Is Somebody and Jesus Is Lord Over All. At eleven o’clock on September 16, through the window of my algebra class, I heard gospel music for the first time. Those sweet, meaty sounds led me to a white wood church on a corner my school bus never passed. Each time I had to walk by Reverend Shales’ office, and each time he looked up and kept talking on the phone. I stayed near the church bulletin board, my eyes down, my heart singing like Mahalia Jackson.
Reverend Shales was shorter than I’d thought, and his glasses shimmered in the dusty light.
“Miss? You’re visiting our church again?”
I said yes. He asked my name, my parents’ names, my address, and my school, and however embarrassed I was to be caught lurking in his church hall, he was not sorry to have me there. His eyes shone like black pearls. I seemed like a girl who could offer a little companionship, he said. I could run to the corner store and bring back the right change, couldn’t I? I wasn’t above a little light cleaning, was I? He invited me to come and listen to the choir whenever I liked, and at the same time take the opportunity, the special opportunity to serve, to offer Christian charity to a very sweet, very lovely elderly lady a few doors down. He led me out the church door and pointed down the street to the small white house with the patchy lawn and the listing porch.
“I’ll phone Miz Hill to say you’re on your way. You are on your way now, young lady.” And he put his big hand on the small of my back and pushed. He said Go, and I went.
Crinkly, lifeless grey curls floated up and across Mrs. Hill’s grey-brown scalp, winging out over her ears. What must have been round, brown eyes had become opaque beige slits, like two additional spots of smooth skin in her dark puckered face. She had seven housedresses, and her doctor daughter came home twice a year from the great, safe distance of California and replaced them all. Mrs. Hill did not rotate them as Dr. Hill intended; she wore the pink one all week, and when it was stiff with sweat and moisturizer and medicated cream for her eczema, she threw it in the hamper for me to wash. On Saturdays she wore the purple housedress, and I didn’t blame her a bit. It was the least practical of them; instead of a cotton-poly mix, it was soft velour, and the pull on the end of the zipper was a purple and yellow sunflower, as though van Gogh had gotten loose in the Sears catalog. In her purple sunflower robe, Mrs. Hill told my fortune.
“Long life here,” she said, one thick, twisted finger digging into the middle of my palm. “Love affairs here. Did you bring Mrs. Hill some pork rinds?”
Dr. Hill had sent a note that Mrs. Hill had all sorts of things wrong with her heart and that salt and fat were out of the question. Mrs. Hill and I had a deaclass="underline" one palm reading for a bag of Salty Jims Pork Rinds. Mrs. Hill told me that Salty Jim was really Jim Buckton, who played trumpet with Duke Ellington in the fifties and had gone to high school with Mrs. Hill. Out of respect and school loyalty, we usually ate Salty Jim’s, but when the Red Owl Supermarket carried Li’l Pig Bar-B-Que Pork Rinds, we had to give old Jim the heave-ho and stock up on orange-speckled, amber clouds of pork fat.
“Open up that bag and set it right here. Let’s have that hand.” I popped open two cans of grape soda.
Mrs. Hill bent over my palm, and I could smell the greasy fruit smell of her hair pomade and the piercing eucalyptus of Vicks VapoRub, which she used prophylactically.
“The love affairs startin’ early.” She jabbed my palm and then held my own hand up to me, showing me the point at which the love line joined the life line.
“Really?” I said. I didn’t think of Mr. Klein or Mr. Canetti as love affairs. I knew that they had loved me and I had loved them back, but there wasn’t any sex, and you couldn’t have an affair without sex. When I was in fifth grade I had had a little sex with Seth Stern, but it wasn’t what I thought a love affair should be. We were playing James Bond, and he pulled down my underpants and stuck his hand between my legs. He was only in sixth grade, but he was shaving already, and I found the red nicks on his throat and chin mysterious, alluring tribal scars. He stuck one long finger inside me and rocked me roughly on his hand until we heard our parents gathering coats in the front hall. He pushed me back onto the bed and yanked up my panties while running his thumb along the inside of my thigh. My parents called for me, and we went downstairs, all my attention on my bruised, wet center and on Seth, who insisted on shaking my fathers hand as we said good-bye. The tension and excitement and shame I felt were terrible and vivid. This was life. Out of remorse, or indifference, he wouldn’t answer my phone calls, and my parents had just about dropped the Sterns anyway, so I kept my virginity quite a while longer. I dreamt of his hands.