Frenise returned that understanding. “Just like us,” she would say, and at first I wondered who she meant by us: blacks? cooks? women? Frenise did the chickens. Near the chicken coop there was a shed where the grain was kept in a barrel. It had a lid, but the lid was usually ajar so the grain would not go moldy. Rats could climb into this barrel, but we didn’t discover this until one day a rat had eaten so much it was too fat to climb out. That day Frenise screeched when she leaned over to take a scoop of it. I heard her and ran to the shed.
“Shet,” she said, “there’s a fat black old rat in there. Bidge can’t do nothing — too swole up.” She made a kissing sound and I heard the purr of Phoebe’s Angora cat, a fluffy white creature with a bell on its collar so he wouldn’t eat the robins.
“Just like us,” said Frenise. “Faa.” She gathered the cat in her arms and stroking it to settle it she turned and poured this length of white fur into the grain barrel. She clapped the lid on and shook her head. There was a thump, the tinkle of a bell, a skidding like grain being sluiced in a bucket, and then only the bell.
Then, Frenise (who played a dime lottery every week she called “The Bug” and said “shet” more times than anyone I have ever known) lifted the lid off the barrel and took out the gasping cat. Its white fur was splashed with blood and one ear was slightly torn. She dropped it and stamped her slippered foot and then reached in again; and when I saw what was attached to that undamaged tail — all those bites on rag and bone, making it look like a chewed radish — I heard Frenise say, “Just like us” and knew she was including me. She saw in me the spitting image of her black self. It is an early picture: me and Frenise and the bitten rat. We carried it to a flowerbed and buried it together.
That night I was chased in a dream. I escaped, I lost my tail, and a bigger blacker Frenise hovered over me and yapped, “You look better that way, Maudie.”
People often asked me why it was that my first exhibition of photographs was composed mainly of black portraits, Negroes (as they used to be known) in every human attitude. I used to say, “Because they’re so pretty” (this was reported in hayseed language, “Because they’re a whole lot purtier than white folks”). It was partly true.
My family was kind. Frenise toughened me with her profanity (“shet,” “bidge,” and “faa”), they courted me with their sorrow; so they competed with her and made me their madonna. I was not suited to the role, but the weak never choose, and the madonna is made in childhood. They were generous and uncritical, protective, anxious to please me and prompt with their attention. I understood their adoring eyes to mean that I was blessed in some extraordinary way, singled out for their encouragement and praise, and did not guess, not for the longest time, that they did this purely because they thought I was ugly as a monkey.
They magnified my homeliness, so they exaggerated their pity. Children adore being pitied; I mistook it for love, I snuggled up to it and purred and thought they were kissing me when in fact they were trying to lick my wounds. “Her real love,” Mama said, “is her camera.” Their protective attitude isolated me, and this state of affairs made me look upon my brother and sister as my only friends. I came to depend on them in a way that is known best to people passionately in love. They aroused in me all the instincts of a mistress — jealousy, possessiveness, spite, greed. Pity is uncertain; it has none of love’s terrible demand, it asks nothing, it gives nothing, it casts a feeble light on one’s defects. I suppose I recognized that uncertainty; it wore me down, it didn’t feed me, it made me tricky, a plotting adult at the age of eleven. I came to fear the thought of separation our growing-up would bring — we’d be forced apart, I’d be alone. My father was kindest. I had his face: he took the blame.
Papa loved music — he said it oiled the springs in his mind (which was why he had a season ticket to the opera, though he called it “the uproar”). One April — a Boston Apriclass="underline" sunflecks on wet streets — he took Orlando and me to a children’s concert at Symphony Hall, and he left us there in the balcony while he ducked out to do some shopping. Out of pure high spirits we ran to the exit when he was gone and after a few heavy doors which I held open for little Orlando we found ourselves on a fire escape, clinging to the rail and looking down — not far, two or three floors. I was in a long dress and Orlando in his sailor suit. We laughed and listened to the rumble of street noise booming in the alley. I cannot remember why we did it, or what we expected to see. Large drops of rain tumbled through sunlight and glittered whole on Orlando’s hair.
There was a scrape of feet on the walls, a man walking down the alley. He heard us laughing and looked up, and stared and smiled. Then, I could not have put his thoughts into words, but somehow I knew that if there had only been one of us he would have passed on. He lingered below us. Instinct told him we were brother and sister, not a single image but a double creature, a pair fleetingly but profoundly glimpsed: a dream of love, charming and indivisible. I read his thoughts and saw he was blessing us with his envious approval. We had made his day, he had changed our lives. I took Orlando’s hand, drew him to me and kissed his cheek. The stranger was delighted; he watched us until the music knocking on the fire-door called us in. Afterward, I knew he would root for us in his dreams, and dream continually, and as long as he dreamed of us I would love Orlando. If I could assign a date for the beginning of my loving Orlando it would be that afternoon in April, when I saw consent in that stranger’s eyes.
I never wanted a pony. Orlando did. I asked for it so that he would want me, and when I got it he did, I could have had anything; I wanted Orlando. And that was how I learned the difference between love and pity. Pity was easy, but love seemed a kind of confusion that made the lover both cannibal and missionary, touched with every emotion except doubt. I loved him, I knew I would be blind without him. He had grace; he was blameless because he was beautiful; he was my missing half, whom I did not in the least resemble. It is not odd that I associate love with childhood. Lovers are always children, because love is ignorant risk-taking — a stifling illusion of the unattainable, most passionate at its most impossible and nonexistent otherwise. I never once remembered what he was, I knew only what I wanted him to be, because together, in Orlando and me, I saw perfection: body and soul.
It was another summer — easy for me to prettify with fragrant detail after so long, but memory willfully erases grandeur and sorts what is left: the leather smell of the rumble seat, the cushion stitches, the cloud of dust we raised. Orlando sat between Phoebe and me as we jounced down Great Gammon Road, off to Hyannis and Papa’s sailboat. Orlando’s face was shining with pleasure. He was happy; I wanted to be happy. He was handsome; I coveted that. Having him I could have everything, and it was as if the bargain had been sealed. I was sure of it when he put one arm around me tenderly — his other he threw around Phoebe — his trust resting lightly on my shoulder. It was a certainty. He could not refuse me, nor would I share him.
I remembered nothing of the sail itself, and my photograph of the afternoon showed Orlando and Phoebe in wet clinging bathing suits. Perhaps they swam, perhaps I crouched under my sun hat: some photographs say very little.
That night I could not sleep. I was fourteen and had my own room — pictures everywhere, curling edges, stuck to the walls, several albums already filled. The child’s bedroom is a forcing-house of longings, and there were mine, scattered around and on view, an early intimation of the artist’s magpie mind evident in the clutter, my refusal to discard the mountain of trifles my hobby had produced for me. I lay in bed and thought of Orlando and drew inspiration from my pictures: I knew what I had to do.