But increasingly now I was alone with my outings, wondering what it was like for Sils with her boyfriend Mike, what they did together, what were all the things I didn’t yet even know to ask, and, now that she had gone to a new advanced place I hadn’t, whether she liked me less.
In some ways my childhood consisted of a kind of wasting away, a wandering dreamily through woods and illegally in the concrete sewer pipes, crawling, or pleasantly alone in the house (everyone gone for an hour!) chewing the salt out of paper bits, or hiding under quilts in the afternoon to form a new place somehow, a new space that had never existed before in the bed, like a rehearsal for love. Perhaps in Horsehearts — a town named for an old French and Indian War battle, one full of slaughtered horses whose bodies bloodied the village pond and whose hearts were said to be buried on Miller Hill just south — the only things possible were deferment and make-believe. My childhood had no narrative; it was all just a combination of air and no air: waiting for life to happen, the body to get big, the mind to grow fearless. There were no stories, no ideas, not really, not yet. Just things unearthed from elsewhere and propped up later to help the mind get around. At the time, however, it was liquid, like a song — nothing much. It was just a space with some people in it.
But one can tell a story anyway.
One can get a running start, then begin, do it, and be done.
Things, I know, stiffen and shift in memory, become what they never were before. As when an army takes over a country. Or a summer yard goes scarlet with fall and its venous leaves. One summons the years of the past largely by witchcraft — a whore’s arts, collage and brew, eye of newt, heart of horse. Still, the house of my childhood is etched in my memory like the shape of the mind itself: a house-shaped mind — why not? It was this particular mind out of which I ventured — for any wild danger or sentimental stance or lunge at something faraway. But it housed every seedling act. I floated above it, but close, like a figure in a Chagall.
Before we had renovated our house, it had only one bathroom for the entire family and often I would rush to use it, finding the line three kids deep; there was a mirror in the hall and we used to clutch our groins and hop around, watching ourselves, hoping we wouldn’t explode. There were only two bedrooms for three children — the yellow room and the blue room. For a while my foster sister LaRoue, and my brother, Claude (in Horsehearts, pronounced clod), and I took turns sharing. Because LaRoue had first arrived at our house with another foster child who no longer lived with us — a slow, quiet girl named Nancy who had been beaten retarded by her mother — the two of them shared a room until Nancy went away, and then LaRoue was left with her own. I don’t think I ever actually knew why or where Nancy went; our house was always inhabited by people other than us, all camped out on the Hide-A-Beds. That’s why I’d sought Sils early, when I was nine, found her right there in my homeroom, alphabetized next to me, in the Cs, and attached myself to her.
One May someone just came and got Nancy and took her away. It seemed scary to me, that that could just happen. That someone could simply come and take you and go.
But LaRoue stayed and got her own room — the blue one with its deep white windowsills — and called my mother “Mom.” I was three years younger, though only one grade behind her, and I had the larger, yellow room with my brother Claude with whom I was close, being just a year older than he. Claude and I were “bunk-buddies,” a phrase I used laughingly, ironically, bittersweetly, later in life, with lovers, those nights of an affair I’d sleep with a man but sexlessly, feeling tired, the dumb dog of my body too exhausted for love, running all week in the meadows of it, now desiring merely to sleep, beat, next to someone else but close, like a brother, like Claude. “Bunk-buddies: we can be bunk-buddies.”
There was actually a bunk my brother and I slept in — sometimes he on top, sometimes I, to equalize things, I suppose. While the house was full of strict bedtimes and rules, all posted to the refrigerator with Bryson Paper Mill magnets, little pine trees with BPM stamped on them in gold, we were essentially unwatched children. We could find ways to do what we wanted, though we made a great deal of the moment at night when one of our parents (we were told, we assumed) would come in to check on us before they went to bed. We were never awake for this moment, but we knew of it, believed in it in a religious way, and sometimes, put to bed too early on a crickety summer evening, we’d prepare for it, like the Last Judgment. We turned it into a kind of body sculpture contest, posing in elaborate ways on our beds — standing on one foot, head hanging off one edge, arms lifted in the air and mouths and teeth and eyeballs arranged in astonished grimaces. “This will really surprise Mom,” we’d say, or “Dad’ll get a kick out of this,” and then we’d try to fall asleep that way. In the morning we’d awake sprawled in ordinary positions, never recalling whether we’d glimpsed a parent or not, or how we had finally fallen off to sleep in this more normal way.
Claude was my first pal, before Sils, and we were each other’s best friend, bunk-buddy, child spouse, until I was nine and he was eight, and we got separated — in a way, for the rest of our lives. We were too old; it was unseemly for a brother and sister to share a room. So the house got renovated, and each of the children got their own room — mine was downstairs, alone, off the first-floor hall. His was upstairs.
Soon afterward Claude befriended a new boy down the road, Billy Rickey. I stumbled around, then looked and found Sils, and that was that. Claude and I never really saw each other again, not in a true way. Passing each other in the corridor at school, seeing each other at dinner, then years later at holidays, weddings, and at funerals, we couldn’t figure out who the other one was anymore. It was as if one of us had grown flippers or feathers or a strange stripe up the side, our species suddenly unclear.
But he always remained, for me at least, my first love, my child bride, and in a busy family, speaking in tongues, it was important to be married, somehow, to someone. So I was, had been, for a while, to Claude.
It was LaRoue who was alone. As little children, Claude and I were all bodies and sleep and play — closer than even adults usually get — and we’d viewed our parents as stern, distant royalty and LaRoue as older, disturbed interloper, visitor, rent-a-girl, but Christianly tolerated. Our family read the Bible every night at the dinner table, my father proceeding chapter by chapter through the Gospels, The Acts, the letters from Paul to Timothy (I imagined Paul Zabrowski at school and his annoying friend Timothy Wilson), through First John, Second John, Third John, all the way to Revelation (“And to the angel of the church in Philadelphia …” Philadelphia? Aunt Mimi lived in Philadelphia!), all the long strange verses, as we watched our food grow cold. And so we learned forbearance.
(“We used to read the Bible at the dinner table, too,” said my husband when I first met him and we were trading tales. He was Jewish, Socialist, half Hungarian.
“Really?” I’d asked.
“Yeah,” he smiled. “Only we would read it in these really sarcastic voices.” I laughed in a loud, honking way. We needed to joke and play. We were nervous, unsure. “What’s also interesting,” he said, encouraged to the point of derangement, “is that although most people called him God, we called him — well, we called him ‘Fuckhead.’ ” Daniel slapped his hand across his heart. “One nation, under Fuckhead.”
I fell sideways, hysterical, then tried to straighten, relocate my napkin, when our grim waiter began to approach. “At any rate,” I said, stressing the oxymorons, “Bible reading and Peruvians on the Hide-A-Beds. That was my ‘Family Life.’ Be that as it may.