Senior Summer Reading Assignment
Assessment:
For your summer reading, you will be taking a reading test and creating a presentation with
a visual aid. Each of these assignments will be worth a test grade, for a total of two test
grades. BE PREPARED TO HAND IN YOUR VISUAL AID AND TAKE THE TEST ON
THE DAY YOU COME BACK FROM SUMMER VACATION!!
Accountability:
You will be signing for your packet so that teachers will be aware who received the
assignment and will be able to contact those who were absent, transferred, etc. This
means that there will be no acceptable excuses for not doing your summer reading. You
have over two months to complete this assignment, which is plenty of time to rest, relax,
and do your summer reading. Don’t put it off until the last minute, because you don’t want
to start off the year on the wrong foot, especially senior year when graduation is on the
line.
Part 1: Reading Test
The week you come back to school, you will be taking a test on every short story and poem
included in the packet. Skimming the packet or reading some summaries online will not be
sufficient to pass this test. You will need to read each story and poem carefully, and it is
a good idea to take notes in your packet so that you have something to study to review for
the test.
Part 2: Presentation with Visual Aid
For each of the three themes in the summer reading packet (it happened one summer,
culture and family, and decisions), you will need to create a visual aid that represents a
personal connection you made to each of the stories and poems in that theme’s collection
with both a picture and words. For example, while reading The Crucible, I was reminded of
a time when I accidentally told a friend’s secret. She was very mad at me, and our whole
group of friends started calling me a rat. My visual representation for this work might
look like this:
RAT!!!
SHAME 
Because you will need to create visual representations of your connections to nine short
stories and twelve poems, PowerPoint is really your best option. You could simply create a
slide for each theme that contains the pictures and connection words for each story and
poem contained in that theme’s collection. If you do not have computer access and cannot
make it to the library to use a computer (which, be honest, you all really could), then you
can make three poster boards, one for each theme, that does the same thing.
When you come back to school in September, you will have to present your PowerPoint or
poster board to the class, so make sure that you are comfortable sharing the connections
you choose. Because you are making personal connections to each story and poem, NO
TWO PRESENTATIONS SHOULD BE THE SAME!!! You should also be prepared to answer
some basic questions about the story during your presentations.
______________________________________________________________
IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS OR CONCERNS, PLEASE EMAIL
jbreese@fallriverschools.org
You can also check my website for a link to the
assignment and an example PowerPoint: http://www.fallriverschools.org/jbreese.cfm
Collection 1:
It Happened
One Summer
Where Are You Going, Where Have You
Been?
by Joyce Carol Oates
First published in Epoch, Fall 1966. Included in Prize Stories : O Henry Award Winners (1968),
and The Best American Short Stories (1967).
Copyright © by Joyce Carol Oates
for Bob Dylan
Her name was Connie. She was fifteen and she had a quick, nervous giggling habit of
craning her neck to glance into mirrors or checking other people's faces to make sure her
own was all right. Her mother, who noticed everything and knew everything and who
hadn't much reason any longer to look at her own face, always scolded Connie about it.
"Stop gawking at yourself. Who are you? You think you're so pretty?" she would say.
Connie would raise her eyebrows at these familiar old complaints and look right through
her mother, into a shadowy vision of herself as she was right at that moment: she knew
she was pretty and that was everything. Her mother had been pretty once too, if you
could believe those old snapshots in the album, but now her looks were gone and that
was why she was always after Connie.
"Why don't you keep your room clean like your sister? How've you got your hair fixed
—what the hell stinks? Hair spray? You don't see your sister using that junk."
Her sister June was twenty-four and still lived at home. She was a secretary in the
high school Connie attended, and if that wasn't bad enough—with her in the same
building—she was so plain and chunky and steady that Connie had to hear her praised all
the time by her mother and her mother's sisters. June did this, June did that, she saved
money and helped clean the house and cookedand Connie couldn't do a thing, her mind
was all filled with trashy daydreams. Their father was away at work most of the time and
when he came home he wanted supper and he read the newspaper at supper and after
supper he went to bed. He didn't bother talking much to them, but around his bent head
Connie's mother kept picking at her until Connie wished her mother was dead and she
herself was dead and it was all over. "She makes me want to throw up sometimes," she
complained to her friends. She had a high, breathless, amused voice that made
everything she said sound a little forced, whether it was sincere or not.
There was one good thing: June went places with girl friends of hers, girls who were
just as plain and steady as she, and so when Connie wanted to do that her mother had no
objections. The father of Connie's best girl friend drove the girls the three miles to town
and left them at a shopping plaza so they could walk through the stores or go to a movie,
and when he came to pick them up again at eleven he never bothered to ask what they
had done.
They must have been familiar sights, walking around the shopping plaza in their
shorts and flat ballerina slippers that always scuffed the sidewalk, with charm bracelets
jingling on their thin wrists; they would lean together to whisper and laugh secretly if
someone passed who amused or interested them. Connie had long dark blond hair that
drew anyone's eye to it, and she wore part of it pulled up on her head and puffed out and
the rest of it she let fall down her back. She wore a pull-over jersey blouse that looked one
way when she was at home and another way when she was away from home. Everything
about her had two sides to it, one for home and one for anywhere that was not home: her
walk, which could be childlike and bobbing, or languid enough to make anyone think she
was hearing music in her head; her mouth, which was pale and smirking most of the
time, but bright and pink on these evenings out; her laugh, which was cynical and
drawling at home—"Ha, ha, very funny,"—but highpitched and nervous anywhere else,
like the jingling of the charms on her bracelet.
Sometimes they did go shopping or to a movie, but sometimes they went across the
highway, ducking fast across the busy road, to a drive-in restaurant where older kids
hung out. The restaurant was shaped like a big bottle, though squatter than a real bottle,
and on its cap was a revolving figure of a grinning boy holding a hamburger aloft. One
night in midsummer they ran across, breathless with daring, and right away someone
leaned out a car window and invited them over, but it was just a boy from high school
they didn't like. It made them feel good to be able to ignore him. They went up through
the maze of parked and cruising cars to the bright-lit, fly-infested restaurant, their faces
pleased and expectant as if they were entering a sacred building that loomed up out of the
night to give them what haven and blessing they yearned for. They sat at the counter and
crossed their legs at the ankles, their thin shoulders rigid with excitement, and listened to
the music that made everything so good: the music was always in the background, like
music at a church service; it was something to depend upon.
A boy named Eddie came in to talk with them. He sat backwards on his stool, turning
himself jerkily around in semicircles and then stopping and turning back again, and after
a while he asked Connie if she would like something to eat. She said she would and so she
tapped her friend's arm on her way out—her friend pulled her face up into a brave, droll
look—and Connie said she would meet her at eleven, across the way. "I just hate to leave
her like that," Connie said earnestly, but the boy said that she wouldn't be alone for long.
So they went out to his car, and on the way Connie couldn't help but let her eyes wander
over the windshields and faces all around her, her face gleaming with a joy that had
nothing to do with Eddie or even this place; it might have been the music. She drew her
shoulders up and sucked in her breath with the pure pleasure of being alive, and just at
that moment she happened to glance at a face just a few feet from hers. It was a boy with
shaggy black hair, in a convertible jalopy painted gold. He stared at her and then his lips
widened into a grin. Connie slit her eyes at him and turned away, but she couldn't help
glancing back and there he was, still watching her. He wagged a finger and laughed and
said, "Gonna get you, baby," and Connie turned away again without Eddie noticing
anything.
She spent three hours with him, at the restaurant where they ate hamburgers and
drank Cokes in wax cups that were always sweating, and then down an alley a mile or so
away, and when he left her off at five to eleven only the movie house was still open at the
plaza. Her girl friend was there, talking with a boy. When Connie came up, the two girls
smiled at each other and Connie said, "How was the movie?" and the girl said, 'You
should know." They rode off with the girl's father, sleepy and pleased, and Connie
couldn't help but look back at the darkened shopping plaza with its big empty parking lot
and its signs that were faded and ghostly now, and over at the drive-in restaurant where
cars were still circling tirelessly. She couldn't hear the music at this distance.
Next morning June asked her how the movie was and Connie said, "So-so."
She and that girl and occasionally another girl went out several times a week, and the
rest of the time Connie spent around the house—it was summer vacation—getting in her
mother s way and thinking, dreaming about the boys she met. But all the boys fell back
and dissolved into a single face that was not even a face but an idea, a feeling, mixed up
with the urgent insistent pounding of the music and the humid night air of July. Connie's
mother kept dragging her back to the daylight by finding things for her to do or saying
suddenly, 'What's this about the Pettinger girl?"
And Connie would say nervously, "Oh, her. That dope." She always drew thick clear
lines between herself and such girls, and her mother was simple and kind enough to
believe it. Her mother was so simple, Connie thought, that it was maybe cruel to fool her
so much. Her mother went scuffling around the house in old bedroom slippers and
complained over the telephone to one sister about the other, then the other called up and
the two of them complained about the third one. If June's name was mentioned her
mother's tone was approving, and if Connie's name was mentioned it was disapproving.
This did not really mean she disliked Connie, and actually Connie thought that her
mother preferred her to June just because she was prettier, but the two of them kept up a
pretense of exasperation, a sense that they were tugging and struggling over something of
little value to either of them. Sometimes, over coffee, they were almost friends, but
something would come up—some vexation that was like a fly buzzing suddenly around
their heads—and their faces went hard with contempt.
One Sunday Connie got up at eleven—none of them bothered with church—and
washed her hair so that it could dry all day long in the sun. Her parents and sister were
going to a barbecue at an aunt's house and Connie said no, she wasn't interested, rolling
her eyes to let her mother know just what she thought of it. "Stay home alone then," her
mother said sharply. Connie sat out back in a lawn chair and watched them drive away,
her father quiet and bald, hunched around so that he could back the car out, her mother
with a look that was still angry and not at all softened through the windshield, and in the
back seat poor old June, all dressed up as if she didn't know what a barbecue was, with
all the running yelling kids and the flies. Connie sat with her eyes closed in the sun,
dreaming and dazed with the warmth about her as if this were a kind of love, the caresses
of love, and her mind slipped over onto thoughts of the boy she had been with the night
before and how nice he had been, how sweet it always was, not the way someone like
June would suppose but sweet, gentle, the way it was in movies and promised in songs;
and when she opened her eyes she hardly knew where she was, the back yard ran off into
weeds and a fence-like line of trees and behind it the sky was perfectly blue and still. The
asbestos ranch house that was now three years old startled her—it looked small. She
shook her head as if to get awake.
It was too hot. She went inside the house and turned on the radio to drown out the
quiet. She sat on the edge of her bed, barefoot, and listened for an hour and a half to a
program called XYZ Sunday Jamboree, record after record of hard, fast, shrieking songs
she sang along with, interspersed by exclamations from "Bobby King": "An' look here,
you girls at Napoleon's—Son and Charley want you to pay real close attention to this song
coming up!"
And Connie paid close attention herself, bathed in a glow of slow-pulsed joy that
seemed to rise mysteriously out of the music itself and lay languidly about the airless little
room, breathed in and breathed out with each gentle rise and fall of her chest.
After a while she heard a car coming up the drive. She sat up at once, startled, because
it couldn't be her father so soon. The gravel kept crunching all the way in from the road—
the driveway was long—and Connie ran to the window. It was a car she didn't know. It
was an open jalopy, painted a bright gold that caught the sunlight opaquely. Her heart
began to pound and her fingers snatched at her hair, checking it, and she whispered,
"Christ. Christ," wondering how bad she looked. The car came to a stop at the side door
and the horn sounded four short taps, as if this were a signal Connie knew.
She went into the kitchen and approached the door slowly, then hung out the screen
door, her bare toes curling down off the step. There were two boys in the car and now she
recognized the driver: he had shaggy, shabby black hair that looked crazy as a wig and he
was grinning at her.
"I ain't late, am I?" he said.
"Who the hell do you think you are?" Connie said.
"Toldja I'd be out, didn't I?"
"I don't even know who you are."
She spoke sullenly, careful to show no interest or pleasure, and he spoke in a fast,
bright monotone. Connie looked past him to the other boy, taking her time. He had fair
brown hair, with a lock that fell onto his forehead. His sideburns gave him a fierce,
embarrassed look, but so far he hadn't even bothered to glance at her. Both boys wore
sunglasses. The driver's glasses were metallic and mirrored everything in miniature.
"You wanta come for a ride?" he said.
Connie smirked and let her hair fall loose over one shoulder.
"Don'tcha like my car? New paint job," he said. "Hey."
"What?"
"You're cute."
She pretended to fidget, chasing flies away from the door.
"Don'tcha believe me, or what?" he said.
"Look, I don't even know who you are," Connie said in disgust.
"Hey, Ellie's got a radio, see. Mine broke down." He lifted his friend's arm and showed
her the little transistor radio the boy was holding, and now Connie began to hear the
music. It was the same program that was playing inside the house.
"Bobby King?" she said.
"I listen to him all the time. I think he's great."
"He's kind of great," Connie said reluctantly.
"Listen, that guy's great. He knows where the action is."
Connie blushed a little, because the glasses made it impossible for her to see just what
this boy was looking at. She couldn't decide if she liked him or if he was just a jerk, and so
she dawdled in the doorway and wouldn't come down or go back inside. She said,
"What's all that stuff painted on your car?"
"Can'tcha read it?" He opened the door very carefully, as if he were afraid it might fall
off. He slid out just as carefully, planting his feet firmly on the ground, the tiny metallic
world in his glasses slowing down like gelatine hardening, and in the midst of it Connie's
bright green blouse. "This here is my name, to begin with, he said. ARNOLD FRIEND
was written in tarlike black letters on the side, with a drawing of a round, grinning face
that reminded Connie of a pumpkin, except it wore sunglasses. "I wanta introduce
myself, I'm Arnold Friend and that's my real name and I'm gonna be your friend, honey,
and inside the car's Ellie Oscar, he's kinda shy." Ellie brought his transistor radio up to
his shoulder and balanced it there. "Now, these numbers are a secret code, honey,"
Arnold Friend explained. He read off the numbers 33, 19, 17 and raised his eyebrows at
her to see what she thought of that, but she didn't think much of it. The left rear fender
had been smashed and around it was written, on the gleaming gold background: DONE
BY CRAZY WOMAN DRIVER. Connie had to laugh at that. Arnold Friend was pleased at
her laughter and looked up at her. "Around the other side's a lot more —you wanta come
and see them?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Why should I?"
"Don'tcha wanta see what's on the car? Don'tcha wanta go for a ride?"
"I don't know."
"Why not?"
"I got things to do."
"Like what?"
"Things."
He laughed as if she had said something funny. He slapped his thighs. He was
standing in a strange way, leaning back against the car as if he were balancing himself.
He wasn't tall, only an inch or so taller than she would be if she came down to him.
Connie liked the way he was dressed, which was the way all of them dressed: tight faded
jeans stuffed into black, scuffed boots, a belt that pulled his waist in and showed how lean
he was, and a white pull-over shirt that was a little soiled and showed the hard small
muscles of his arms and shoulders. He looked as if he probably did hard work, lifting and
carrying things. Even his neck looked muscular. And his face was a familiar face,
somehow: the jaw and chin and cheeks slightly darkened because he hadn't shaved for a
day or two, and the nose long and hawklike, sniffing as if she were a treat he was going to
gobble up and it was all a joke.
"Connie, you ain't telling the truth. This is your day set aside for a ride with me and
you know it," he said, still laughing. The way he straightened and recovered from his fit of
laughing showed that it had been all fake.
"How do you know what my name is?" she said suspiciously.
"It's Connie."
"Maybe and maybe not."
"I know my Connie," he said, wagging his finger. Now she remembered him even
better, back at the restaurant, and her cheeks warmed at the thought of how she had
sucked in her breath just at the moment she passed him—how she must have looked to
him. And he had remembered her. "Ellie and I come out here especially for you," he said.
"Ellie can sit in back. How about it?"
"Where?"
"Where what?"
"Where're we going?"
He looked at her. He took off the sunglasses and she saw how pale the skin around his
eyes was, like holes that were not in shadow but instead in light. His eyes were like chips
of broken glass that catch the light in an amiable way. He smiled. It was as if the idea of
going for a ride somewhere, to someplace, was a new idea to him.
"Just for a ride, Connie sweetheart."
"I never said my name was Connie," she said.
"But I know what it is. I know your name and all about you, lots of things," Arnold
Friend said. He had not moved yet but stood still leaning back against the side of his
jalopy. "I took a special interest in you, such a pretty girl, and found out all about you—
like I know your parents and sister are gone somewheres and I know where and how long
they're going to be gone, and I know who you were with last night, and your best girl
friend's name is Betty. Right?"
He spoke in a simple lilting voice, exactly as if he were reciting the words to a song.
His smile assured her that everything was fine. In the car Ellie turned up the volume on
his radio and did not bother to look around at them.
"Ellie can sit in the back seat," Arnold Friend said. He indicated his friend with a
casual jerk of his chin, as if Ellie did not count and she should not bother with him.
"How'd you find out all that stuff?" Connie said.
"Listen: Betty Schultz and Tony Fitch and Jimmy Pettinger and Nancy Pettinger," he
said in a chant. "Raymond Stanley and Bob Hutter—"
"Do you know all those kids?"
"I know everybody."
"Look, you're kidding. You're not from around here."
"Sure."
"But—how come we never saw you before?"
"Sure you saw me before," he said. He looked down at his boots, as if he were a little
offended. "You just don't remember."
"I guess I'd remember you," Connie said.
"Yeah?" He looked up at this, beaming. He was pleased. He began to mark time with
the music from Ellie's radio, tapping his fists lightly together. Connie looked away from
his smile to the car, which was painted so bright it almost hurt her eyes to look at it. She
looked at that name, ARNOLD FRIEND. And up at the front fender was an expression
that was familiar—MAN THE FLYING SAUCERS. It was an expression kids had used the
year before but didn't use this year. She looked at it for a while as if the words meant
something to her that she did not yet know.
"What're you thinking about? Huh?" Arnold Friend demanded. "Not worried about
your hair blowing around in the car, are you?"
"No."
"Think I maybe can't drive good?"
"How do I know?"
"You're a hard girl to handle. How come?" he said. "Don't you know I'm your friend?
Didn't you see me put my sign in the air when you walked by?"
"What sign?"
"My sign." And he drew an X in the air, leaning out toward her. They were maybe ten
feet apart. After his hand fell back to his side the X was still in the air, almost visible.
Connie let the screen door close and stood perfectly still inside it, listening to the music
from her radio and the boy's blend together. She stared at Arnold Friend. He stood there
so stiffly relaxed, pretending to be relaxed, with one hand idly on the door handle as if he
were keeping himself up that way and had no intention of ever moving again. She
recognized most things about him, the tight jeans that showed his thighs and buttocks
and the greasy leather boots and the tight shirt, and even that slippery friendly smile of
his, that sleepy dreamy smile that all the boys used to get across ideas they didn't want to
put into words. She recognized all this and also the singsong way he talked, slightly
mocking, kidding, but serious and a little melancholy, and she recognized the way he
tapped one fist against the other in homage to the perpetual music behind him. But all
these things did not come together.
She said suddenly, "Hey, how old are you?"
His smiled faded. She could see then that he wasn't a kid, he was much older—thirty,
maybe more. At this knowledge her heart began to pound faster.
"That's a crazy thing to ask. Can'tcha see I'm your own age?"
"Like hell you are."
"Or maybe a couple years older. I'm eighteen."
"Eighteen?" she said doubtfully.
He grinned to reassure her and lines appeared at the corners of his mouth. His teeth
were big and white. He grinned so broadly his eyes became slits and she saw how thick
the lashes were, thick and black as if painted with a black tarlike material. Then, abruptly,
he seemed to become embarrassed and looked over his shoulder at Ellie. "Him, he's
crazy," he said. "Ain't he a riot? He's a nut, a real character." Ellie was still listening to the
music. His sunglasses told nothing about what he was thinking. He wore a bright orange
shirt unbuttoned halfway to show his chest, which was a pale, bluish chest and not
muscular like Arnold Friend's. His shirt collar was turned up all around and the very tips
of the collar pointed out past his chin as if they were protecting him. He was pressing the
transistor radio up against his ear and sat there in a kind of daze, right in the sun.
"He's kinda strange," Connie said.
"Hey, she says you're kinda strange! Kinda strange!" Arnold Friend cried. He pounded
on the car to get Ellie's attention. Ellie turned for the first time and Connie saw with
shock that he wasn't a kid either—he had a fair, hairless face, cheeks reddened slightly as
if the veins grew too close to the surface of his skin, the face of a forty-year-old baby.
Connie felt a wave of dizziness rise in her at this sight and she stared at him as if waiting
for something to change the shock of the moment, make it all right again. Ellie's lips kept
shaping words, mumbling along with the words blasting in his ear.
"Maybe you two better go away," Connie said faintly.
"What? How come?" Arnold Friend cried. "We come out here to take you for a ride.
It's Sunday." He had the voice of the man on the radio now. It was the same voice, Connie
thought. "Don'tcha know it's Sunday all day? And honey, no matter who you were with
last night, today you're with Arnold Friend and don't you forget it! Maybe you better step
out here," he said, and this last was in a different voice. It was a little flatter, as if the heat
was finally getting to him.
"No. I got things to do."
"Hey."
"You two better leave."
"We ain't leaving until you come with us."
"Like hell I am—"
"Connie, don't fool around with me. I mean—I mean, don't fool around," he said,
shaking his head. He laughed incredulously. He placed his sunglasses on top of his head,
carefully, as if he were indeed wearing a wig, and brought the stems down behind his
ears. Connie stared at him, another wave of dizziness and fear rising in her so that for a
moment he wasn't even in focus but was just a blur standing there against his gold car,
and she had the idea that he had driven up the driveway all right but had come from
nowhere before that and belonged nowhere and that everything about him and even
about the music that was so familiar to her was only half real.
"If my father comes and sees you—"
"He ain't coming. He's at a barbecue."
"How do you know that?"
"Aunt Tillie's. Right now they're uh—they're drinking. Sitting around," he said
vaguely, squinting as if he were staring all the way to town and over to Aunt Tillie's back
yard. Then the vision seemed to get clear and he nodded energetically. "Yeah. Sitting
around. There's your sister in a blue dress, huh? And high heels, the poor sad bitch—
nothing like you, sweetheart! And your mother's helping some fat woman with the corn,
they're cleaning the corn—husking the corn—"
"What fat woman?" Connie cried.
"How do I know what fat woman, I don't know every goddamn fat woman in the
world!" Arnold Friend laughed.
"Oh, that's Mrs. Hornsby . . . . Who invited her?" Connie said. She felt a little
lightheaded. Her breath was coming quickly.
"She's too fat. I don't like them fat. I like them the way you are, honey," he said,
smiling sleepily at her. They stared at each other for a while through the screen door. He
said softly, "Now, what you're going to do is this: you're going to come out that door. You
re going to sit up front with me and Ellie's going to sit in the back, the hell with Ellie,
right? This isn't Ellie's date. You're my date. I'm your lover, honey."
"What? You're crazy—"
"Yes, I'm your lover. You don't know what that is but you will," he said. "I know that
too. I know all about you. But look: it's real nice and you couldn't ask for nobody better
than me, or more polite. I always keep my word. I'll tell you how it is, I'm always nice at
first, the first time. I'll hold you so tight you won't think you have to try to get away or
pretend anything because you'll know you can't. And I'll come inside you where it's all
secret and you'll give in to me and you'll love me "
"Shut up! You're crazy!" Connie said. She backed away from the door. She put her
hands up against her ears as if she'd heard something terrible, something not meant for
her. "People don't talk like that, you're crazy," she muttered. Her heart was almost too big
now for her chest and its pumping made sweat break out all over her. She looked out to
see Arnold Friend pause and then take a step toward the porch, lurching. He almost fell.
But, like a clever drunken man, he managed to catch his balance. He wobbled in his high
boots and grabbed hold of one of the porch posts.
"Honey?" he said. "You still listening?"
"Get the hell out of here!"
"Be nice, honey. Listen."
"I'm going to call the police—"
He wobbled again and out of the side of his mouth came a fast spat curse, an aside not
meant for her to hear. But even this "Christ!" sounded forced. Then he began to smile
again. She watched this smile come, awkward as if he were smiling from inside a mask.
His whole face was a mask, she thought wildly, tanned down to his throat but then
running out as if he had plastered make-up on his face but had forgotten about his
throat.
"Honey—? Listen, here's how it is. I always tell the truth and I promise you this: I ain't
coming in that house after you."
"You better not! I'm going to call the police if you—if you don't—"
"Honey," he said, talking right through her voice, "honey, I m not coming in there but
you are coming out here. You know why?"
She was panting. The kitchen looked like a place she had never seen before, some
room she had run inside but that wasn't good enough, wasn't going to help her. The
kitchen window had never had a curtain, after three years, and there were dishes in the
sink for her to do—probably—and if you ran your hand across the table you'd probably
feel something sticky there.
"You listening, honey? Hey?" "—going to call the police—"
"Soon as you touch the phone I don't need to keep my promise and can come inside.
You won't want that."
She rushed forward and tried to lock the door. Her fingers were shaking. "But why
lock it," Arnold Friend said gently, talking right into her face. "It's just a screen door. It's
just nothing." One of his boots was at a strange angle, as if his foot wasn't in it. It pointed
out to the left, bent at the ankle. "I mean, anybody can break through a screen door and
glass and wood and iron or anything else if he needs to, anybody at all, and specially
Arnold Friend. If the place got lit up with a fire, honey, you'd come runnin' out into my
arms, right into my arms an' safe at home—like you knew I was your lover and'd stopped
fooling around. I don't mind a nice shy girl but I don't like no fooling around." Part of
those words were spoken with a slight rhythmic lilt, and Connie somehow recognized
them—the echo of a song from last year, about a girl rushing into her boy friend's arms
and coming home again—
Connie stood barefoot on the linoleum floor, staring at him. "What do you want?" she
whispered.
"I want you," he said.
"What?"
"Seen you that night and thought, that's the one, yes sir. I never needed to look
anymore."
"But my father's coming back. He's coming to get me. I had to wash my hair first—''
She spoke in a dry, rapid voice, hardly raising it for him to hear.
"No, your daddy is not coming and yes, you had to wash your hair and you washed it
for me. It's nice and shining and all for me. I thank you sweetheart," he said with a mock
bow, but again he almost lost his balance. He had to bend and adjust his boots. Evidently
his feet did not go all the way down; the boots must have been stuffed with something so
that he would seem taller. Connie stared out at him and behind him at Ellie in the car,
who seemed to be looking off toward Connie's right, into nothing. This Ellie said, pulling
the words out of the air one after another as if he were just discovering them, "You want
me to pull out the phone?"
"Shut your mouth and keep it shut," Arnold Friend said, his face red from bending
over or maybe from embarrassment because Connie had seen his boots. "This ain't none
of your business."
"What—what are you doing? What do you want?" Connie said. "If I call the police
they'll get you, they'll arrest you—"
"Promise was not to come in unless you touch that phone, and I'll keep that promise,"
he said. He resumed his erect position and tried to force his shoulders back. He sounded
like a hero in a movie, declaring something important. But he spoke too loudly and it was
as if he were speaking to someone behind Connie. "I ain't made plans for coming in that
house where I don't belong but just for you to come out to me, the way you should. Don't
you know who I am?"
"You're crazy," she whispered. She backed away from the door but did not want to go
into another part of the house, as if this would give him permission to come through the
door. "What do you . . . you're crazy, you. . . ."
"Huh? What're you saying, honey?"
Her eyes darted everywhere in the kitchen. She could not remember what it was, this
room.
"This is how it is, honey: you come out and we'll drive away, have a nice ride. But if
you don't come out we're gonna wait till your people come home and then they're all
going to get it."
"You want that telephone pulled out?" Ellie said. He held the radio away from his ear
and grimaced, as if without the radio the air was too much for him.
"I toldja shut up, Ellie," Arnold Friend said, "you're deaf, get a hearing aid, right? Fix
yourself up. This little girl's no trouble and's gonna be nice to me, so Ellie keep to
yourself, this ain't your date right? Don't hem in on me, don't hog, don't crush, don't bird
dog, don't trail me," he said in a rapid, meaningless voice, as if he were running through
all the expressions he'd learned but was no longer sure which of them was in style, then
rushing on to new ones, making them up with his eyes closed. "Don't crawl under my
fence, don't squeeze in my chipmonk hole, don't sniff my glue, suck my popsicle, keep
your own greasy fingers on yourself!" He shaded his eyes and peered in at Connie, who
was backed against the kitchen table. "Don't mind him, honey, he's just a creep. He's a
dope. Right? I'm the boy for you, and like I said, you come out here nice like a lady and
give me your hand, and nobody else gets hurt, I mean, your nice old bald-headed daddy
and your mummy and your sister in her high heels. Because listen: why bring them in
this?"
"Leave me alone," Connie whispered.
"Hey, you know that old woman down the road, the one with the chickens and stuff—
you know her?"
"She's dead!"
"Dead? What? You know her?" Arnold Friend said.
"She's dead—"
"Don't you like her?"
"She's dead—she's—she isn't here any more—"
But don't you like her, I mean, you got something against her? Some grudge or
something?" Then his voice dipped as if he were conscious of a rudeness. He touched the
sunglasses perched up on top of his head as if to make sure they were still there. "Now,
you be a good girl."
'What are you going to do?"
"Just two things, or maybe three," Arnold Friend said. "But I promise it won't last long
and you'll like me the way you get to like people you're close to. You will. It's all over for
you here, so come on out. You don't want your people in any trouble, do you?"
She turned and bumped against a chair or something, hurting her leg, but she ran into
the back room and picked up the telephone. Something roared in her ear, a tiny roaring,
and she was so sick with fear that she could do nothing but listen to it—the telephone was
clammy and very heavy and her fingers groped down to the dial but were too weak to
touch it. She began to scream into the phone, into the roaring. She cried out, she cried for
her mother, she felt her breath start jerking back and forth in her lungs as if it were
something Arnold Friend was stabbing her with again and again with no tenderness. A
noisy sorrowful wailing rose all about her and she was locked inside it the way she was
locked inside this house.
After a while she could hear again. She was sitting on the floor with her wet back
against the wall.
Arnold Friend was saying from the door, "That's a good girl. Put the phone back."
She kicked the phone away from her.
"No, honey. Pick it up. Put it back right."
She picked it up and put it back. The dial tone stopped.
"That's a good girl. Now, you come outside."
She was hollow with what had been fear but what was now just an emptiness. All that
screaming had blasted it out of her. She sat, one leg cramped under her, and deep inside
her brain was something like a pinpoint of light that kept going and would not let her
relax. She thought, I'm not going to see my mother again. She thought, I'm not going to
sleep in my bed again. Her bright green blouse was all wet.
Arnold Friend said, in a gentle-loud voice that was like a stage voice, "The place where
you came from ain't there any more, and where you had in mind to go is cancelled out.
This place you are now—inside your daddy's house—is nothing but a cardboard box I can
knock down any time. You know that and always did know it. You hear me?"
She thought, I have got to think. I have got to know what to do.
"We'll go out to a nice field, out in the country here where it smells so nice and it's
sunny," Arnold Friend said. "I'll have my arms tight around you so you won't need to try
to get away and I'll show you what love is like, what it does. The hell with this house! It
looks solid all right," he said. He ran a fingernail down the screen and the noise did not
make Connie shiver, as it would have the day before. "Now, put your hand on your heart,
honey. Feel that? That feels solid too but we know better. Be nice to me, be sweet like you
can because what else is there for a girl like you but to be sweet and pretty and give in?—
and get away before her people come back?"
She felt her pounding heart. Her hand seemed to enclose it. She thought for the first
time in her life that it was nothing that was hers, that belonged to her, but just a
pounding, living thing inside this body that wasn't really hers either.
"You don't want them to get hurt," Arnold Friend went on. "Now, get up, honey. Get
up all by yourself."
She stood.
"Now, turn this way. That's right. Come over here to me.— Ellie, put that away, didn't
I tell you? You dope. You miserable creepy dope," Arnold Friend said. His words were not
angry but only part of an incantation. The incantation was kindly. "Now come out
through the kitchen to me, honey, and let's see a smile, try it, you re a brave, sweet little
girl and now they're eating corn and hot dogs cooked to bursting over an outdoor fire,
and they don't know one thing about you and never did and honey, you're better than
them because not a one of them would have done this for you."
Connie felt the linoleum under her feet; it was cool. She brushed her hair back out of
her eyes. Arnold Friend let go of the post tentatively and opened his arms for her, his
elbows pointing in toward each other and his wrists limp, to show that this was an
embarrassed embrace and a little mocking, he didn't want to make her self-conscious.
She put out her hand against the screen. She watched herself push the door slowly
open as if she were back safe somewhere in the other doorway, watching this body and
this head of long hair moving out into the sunlight where Arnold Friend waited.
"My sweet little blue-eyed girl," he said in a half-sung sigh that had nothing to do with
her brown eyes but was taken up just the same by the vast sunlit reaches of the land
behind him and on all sides of him—so much land that Connie had never seen before and
did not recognize except to know that she was going to it.
Joyce Carol Oates - Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? : Text 6/28/10 1:03 PM
http://jco.usfca.edu/works/wgoing/text.html Page 2 of 10
A Good Man Is Hard To Find
By Flannery O’Connor
The grandmother didn't want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her
connections in east Tennes- see and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey's mind.
Bailey was the son she lived with, her only boy. He was sitting on the edge of his chair at the
table, bent over the orange sports section of the Journal. "Now look here, Bailey," she said, "see
here, read this," and she stood with one hand on her thin hip and the other rattling the newspaper
at his bald head. "Here this fellow that calls himself The Misfit is aloose from the Federal Pen
and headed toward Florida and you read here what it says he did to these people. Just you read it.
I wouldn't take my children in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it. I couldn't
answer to my conscience if I did."
Bailey didn't look up from his reading so she wheeled around then and faced the
children's mother, a young woman in slacks, whose face was as broad and innocent as a cabbage
and was tied around with a green head-kerchief that had two points on the top like rabbit's ears.
She was sitting on the sofa, feeding the baby his apricots out of a jar. "The children have been to
Florida before," the old lady said. "You all ought to take them somewhere else for a change so
they would see different parts of the world and be broad. They never have been to east
Tennessee."
The children's mother didn't seem to hear her but the eight-year-old boy, John Wesley, a
stocky child with glasses, said, "If you don't want to go to Florida, why dontcha stay at home?"
He and the little girl, June Star, were reading the funny papers on the floor.
"She wouldn't stay at home to be queen for a day," June Star said without raising her
yellow head.
"Yes and what would you do if this fellow, The Misfit, caught you?" the grandmother
asked.
"I'd smack his face," John Wesley said.
"She wouldn't stay at home for a million bucks," June Star said. "Afraid she'd miss
something. She has to go everywhere we go."
"All right, Miss," the grandmother said. "Just re- member that the next time you want me
to curl your hair."
June Star said her hair was naturally curly.
The next morning the grandmother was the first one in the car, ready to go. She had her
big black valise that looked like the head of a hippopotamus in one corner, and underneath it she
was hiding a basket with Pitty Sing, the cat, in it. She didn't intend for the cat to be left alone in
the house for three days because he would miss her too much and she was afraid he might brush
against one of her gas burners and accidentally asphyxiate himself. Her son, Bailey, didn't like to
arrive at a motel with a cat.
She sat in the middle of the back seat with John Wesley and June Star on either side of
her. Bailey and the children's mother and the baby sat in front and they left Atlanta at eight fortyfive with the mileage on the car at 55890. The grandmother wrote this down because she thought
it would be interesting to say how many miles they had been when they got back. It took them
twenty minutes to reach the outskirts of the city.
The old lady settled herself comfortably, removing her white cotton gloves and putting
them up with her purse on the shelf in front of the back window. The children's mother still had
on slacks and still had her head tied up in a green kerchief, but the grandmother had on a navy
blue straw sailor hat with a bunch of white violets on the brim and a navy blue dress with a small
white dot in the print. Her collars and cuffs were white organdy trimmed with lace and at her
neckline she had pinned a purple spray of cloth violets containing a sachet. In case of an
accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady.
She said she thought it was going to be a good day for driving, neither too hot nor too
cold, and she cautioned Bailey that the speed limit was fifty-five miles an hour and that the
patrolmen hid themselves behind billboards and small clumps of trees and sped out after you
before you had a chance to slow down. She pointed out interesting details of the scenery: Stone
Mountain; the blue granite that in some places came up to both sides of the highway; the brilliant
red clay banks slightly streaked with purple; and the various crops that made rows of green lacework on the ground. The trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them
sparkled. The children were reading comic magazines and their mother and gone back to sleep.
"Let's go through Georgia fast so we won't have to look at it much," John Wesley said.
"If I were a little boy," said the grandmother, "I wouldn't talk about my native state that
way. Tennessee has the mountains and Georgia has the hills."
"Tennessee is just a hillbilly dumping ground," John Wesley said, "and Georgia is a lousy
state too."
"You said it," June Star said.
"In my time," said the grandmother, folding her thin veined fingers, "children were more
respectful of their native states and their parents and everything else. People did right then. Oh
look at the cute little pickaninny!" she said and pointed to a Negro child standing in the door of a
shack. "Wouldn't that make a picture, now?" she asked and they all turned and looked at the little
Negro out of the back window. He waved
"He didn't have any britches on," June Star said.
"He probably didn't have any," the grandmother explained. "Little riggers in the country
don't have things like we do. If I could paint, I'd paint that picture," she said.
The children exchanged comic books.
The grandmother offered to hold the baby and the children's mother passed him over the
front seat to her. She set him on her knee and bounced him and told him about the things they
were passing. She rolled her eyes and screwed up her mouth and stuck her leathery thin face into
his smooth bland one. Occasionally he gave her a faraway smile. They passed a large cotton field
with five or fix graves fenced in the middle of it, like a small island. "Look at the graveyard!" the
grandmother said, pointing it out. "That was the old family burying ground. That belonged to the
plantation."
"Where's the plantation?" John Wesley asked.
"Gone With the Wind" said the grandmother. "Ha. Ha."
When the children finished all the comic books they had brought, they opened the lunch
and ate it. The grandmother ate a peanut butter sandwich and an olive and would not let the
children throw the box and the paper napkins out the window. When there was nothing else to do
they played a game by choosing a cloud and making the other two guess what shape it suggested.
John Wesley took one the shape of a cow and June Star guessed a cow and John Wesley said, no,
an automobile, and June Star said he didn't play fair, and they began to slap each other over the
grandmother.
The grandmother said she would tell them a story if they would keep quiet. When she
told a story, she rolled her eyes and waved her head and was very dramatic. She said once when
she was a maiden lady she had been courted by a Mr. Edgar Atkins Teagarden from Jasper,
Georgia. She said he was a very good-looking man and a gentleman and that he brought her a
watermelon every Saturday afternoon with his initials cut in it, E. A. T. Well, one Saturday, she
said, Mr. Teagarden brought the watermelon and there was nobody at home and he left it on the
front porch and returned in his buggy to Jasper, but she never got the watermelon, she said,
because a nigger boy ate it when he saw the initials, E. A. T. ! This story tickled John Wesley's
funny bone and he giggled and giggled but June Star didn't think it was any good. She said she
wouldn't marry a man that just brought her a watermelon on Saturday. The grandmother said she
would have done well to marry Mr. Teagarden because he was a gentle man and had bought
Coca-Cola stock when it first came out and that he had died only a few years ago, a very wealthy
man.
They stopped at The Tower for barbecued sand- wiches. The Tower was a part stucco and
part wood filling station and dance hall set in a clearing outside of Timothy. A fat man named
Red Sammy Butts ran it and there were signs stuck here and there on the building and for miles
up and down the highway saying, TRY RED SAMMY'S FAMOUS BARBECUE. NONE LIKE
FAMOUS RED SAMMY'S! RED SAM! THE FAT BOY WITH THE HAPPY LAUGH. A
VETERAN! RED SAMMY'S YOUR MAN!
Red Sammy was lying on the bare ground outside The Tower with his head under a truck
while a gray monkey about a foot high, chained to a small chinaberry tree, chattered nearby. The
monkey sprang back into the tree and got on the highest limb as soon as he saw the children
jump out of the car and run toward him.
Inside, The Tower was a long dark room with a counter at one end and tables at the other
and dancing space in the middle. They all sat down at a board table next to the nickelodeon and
Red Sam's wife, a tall burnt-brown woman with hair and eyes lighter than her skin, came and
took their order. The children's mother put a dime in the machine and played "The Tennessee
Waltz," and the grandmother said that tune always made her want to dance. She asked Bailey if
he would like to dance but he only glared at her. He didn't have a naturally sunny disposition like
she did and trips made him nervous. The grandmother's brown eyes were very bright. She
swayed her head from side to side and pretended she was dancing in her chair. June Star said
play something she could tap to so the children's mother put in another dime and played a fast
number and June Star stepped out onto the dance floor and did her tap routine.
"Ain't she cute?" Red Sam's wife said, leaning over the counter. "Would you like to come
be my little girl?"
"No I certainly wouldn't," June Star said. "I wouldn't live in a broken-down place like this
for a million bucks!" and she ran back to the table.
"Ain't she cute?" the woman repeated, stretching her mouth politely.
"Arn't you ashamed?" hissed the grandmother.
Red Sam came in and told his wife to quit lounging on the counter and hurry up with
these people's order. His khaki trousers reached just to his hip bones and his stomach hung over
them like a sack of meal swaying under his shirt. He came over and sat down at a table nearby
and let out a combination sigh and yodel. "You can't win," he said. "You can't win," and he
wiped his sweating red face off with a gray handkerchief. "These days you don't know who to
trust," he said. "Ain't that the truth?"
"People are certainly not nice like they used to be," said the grandmother.
"Two fellers come in here last week," Red Sammy said, "driving a Chrysler. It was a old
beat-up car but it was a good one and these boys looked all right to me. Said they worked at the
mill and you know I let them fellers charge the gas they bought? Now why did I do that?"
"Because you're a good man!" the grandmother said at once.
"Yes'm, I suppose so," Red Sam said as if he were struck with this answer.
His wife brought the orders, carrying the five plates all at once without a tray, two in each
hand and one balanced on her arm. "It isn't a soul in this green world of God's that you can trust,"
she said. "And I don't count nobody out of that, not nobody," she repeated, looking at Red
Sammy.
"Did you read about that criminal, The Misfit, that's escaped?" asked the grandmother.
"I wouldn't be a bit surprised if he didn't attack this place right here," said the woman. "If
he hears about it being here, I wouldn't be none surprised to see him. If he hears it's two cent in
the cash register, I wouldn't be a tall surprised if he . . ."
"That'll do," Red Sam said. "Go bring these people their Co'-Colas," and the woman went
off to get the rest of the order.
"A good man is hard to find," Red Sammy said. "Everything is getting terrible. I
remember the day you could go off and leave your screen door unlatched. Not no more."
He and the grandmother discussed better times. The old lady said that in her opinion
Europe was entirely to blame for the way things were now. She said the way Europe acted you
would think we were made of money and Red Sam said it was no use talking about it, she was
exactly right. The children ran outside into the white sunlight and looked at the monkey in the
lacy chinaberry tree. He was busy catching fleas on himself and biting each one carefully
between his teeth as if it were a delicacy.
They drove off again into the hot afternoon. The grandmother took cat naps and woke up
every few minutes with her own snoring. Outside of Toombsboro she woke up and recalled an
old plantation that she had visited in this neighborhood once when she was a young lady. She
said the house had six white columns across the front and that there was an avenue of oaks
leading up to it and two little wooden trellis arbors on either side in front where you sat down
with your suitor after a stroll in the garden. She recalled exactly which road to turn off to get to
it. She knew that Bailey would not be willing to lose any time looking at an old house, but the
more she talked about it, the more she wanted to see it once again and find out if the little twin
arbors were still standing. "There was a secret:-panel in this house," she said craftily, not telling
the truth but wishing that she were, "and the story went that all the family silver was hidden in it
when Sherman came through but it was never found . . ."
"Hey!" John Wesley said. "Let's go see it! We'll find it! We'll poke all the woodwork and
find it! Who lives there? Where do you turn off at? Hey Pop, can't we turn off there?"
"We never have seen a house with a secret panel!" June Star shrieked. "Let's go to the
house with the secret panel! Hey Pop, can't we go see the house with the secret panel!"
"It's not far from here, I know," the grandmother said. "It wouldn't take over twenty
minutes."
Bailey was looking straight ahead. His jaw was as rigid as a horseshoe. "No," he said.
The children began to yell and scream that they wanted to see the house with the secret
panel. John Wesley kicked the back of the front seat and June Star hung over her mother's
shoulder and whined desperately into her ear that they never had any fun even on their vacation,
that they could never do what THEY wanted to do. The baby began to scream and John Wesley
kicked the back of the seat so hard that his father could feel the blows in his kidney.
"All right!" he shouted and drew the car to a stop at the side of the road. "Will you all
shut up? Will you all just shut up for one second? If you don't shut up, we won't go anywhere."
"It would be very educational for them," the grandmother murmured.
"All right," Bailey said, "but get this: this is the only time we're going to stop for anything
like this. This is the one and only time."
"The dirt road that you have to turn down is about a mile back," the grandmother
directed. "I marked it when we passed."
"A dirt road," Bailey groaned.
After they had turned around and were headed toward the dirt road, the grandmother
recalled other points about the house, the beautiful glass over the front doorway and the candlelamp in the hall. John Wesley said that the secret panel was probably in the fireplace.
"You can't go inside this house," Bailey said. "You don't know who lives there."
"While you all talk to the people in front, I'll run around behind and get in a window,"
John Wesley suggested.
"We'll all stay in the car," his mother said.
They turned onto the dirt road and the car raced roughly along in a swirl of pink dust. The
grandmother recalled the times when there were no paved roads and thirty miles was a day's
journey. The dirt road was hilly and there were sudden washes in it and sharp curves on
dangerous embankments. All at once they would be on a hill, looking down over the blue tops of
trees for miles around, then the next minute, they would be in a red depression with the dustcoated trees looking down on them.
"This place had better turn up in a minute," Bailey said, "or I'm going to turn around."
The road looked as if no one had traveled on it in months.
"It's not much farther," the grandmother said and just as she said it, a horrible thought
came to her. The thought was so embarrassing that she turned red in the face and her eyes dilated
and her feet jumped up, upsetting her valise in the corner. The instant the valise moved, the
newspaper top she had over the basket under it rose with a snarl and Pitty Sing, the cat, sprang
onto Bailey's shoulder.
The children were thrown to the floor and their mother, clutching the baby, was thrown
out the door onto the ground; the old lady was thrown into the front seat. The car turned over
once and landed right-side-up in a gulch off the side of the road. Bailey remained in the driver's
seat with the cat gray-striped with a broad white face and an orange nose clinging to his neck like
a caterpillar.
As soon as the children saw they could move their arms and legs, they scrambled out of
the car, shouting, "We've had an ACCIDENT!" The grandmother was curled up under the
dashboard, hoping she was injured so that Bailey's wrath would not come down on her all at
once. The horrible thought she had had before the accident was that the house she had
remembered so vividly was not in Georgia but in Tennessee.
Bailey removed the cat from his neck with both hands and flung it out the window
against the side of a pine tree. Then he got out of the car and started looking for the children's
mother. She was sitting against the side of the red gutted ditch, holding the screaming baby, but
she only had a cut down her face and a broken shoulder. "We've had an ACCIDENT!" the
children screamed in a frenzy of delight.
"But nobody's killed," June Star said with disappointment as the grandmother limped out
of the car, her hat still pinned to her head but the broken front brim standing up at a jaunty angle
and the violet spray hanging off the side. They all sat down in the ditch, except the children, to
recover from the shock. They were all shaking.
"Maybe a car will come along," said the children's mother hoarsely.
"I believe I have injured an organ," said the grandmother, pressing her side, but no one
answered her. Bailey's teeth were clattering. He had on a yellow sport shirt with bright blue
parrots designed in it and his face was as yellow as the shirt. The grandmother decided that she
would not mention that the house was in Tennessee.
The road was about ten feet above and they could see only the tops of the trees on the
other side of it. Behind the ditch they were sitting in there were more woods, tall and dark and
deep. In a few minutes they saw a car some distance away on top of a hill, coming slowly as if
the occupants were watching them. The grandmother stood up and waved both arms dramatically
to attract their attention. The car continued to come on slowly, disappeared around a bend and
appeared again, moving even slower, on top of the hill they had gone over. It was a big black
battered hearselike automobile. There were three men in it.
It came to a stop just over them and for some minutes, the driver looked down with a
steady expressionless gaze to where they were sitting, and didn't speak. Then he turned his head
and muttered something to the other two and they got out. One was a fat boy in black trousers
and a red sweat shirt with a silver stallion embossed on the front of it. He moved around on the
right side of them and stood staring, his mouth partly open in a kind of loose grin. The other had
on khaki pants and a blue striped coat and a gray hat pulled down very low, hiding most of his
face. He came around slowly on the left side. Neither spoke.
The driver got out of the car and stood by the side of it, looking down at them. He was an
older man than the other two. His hair was just beginning to gray and he wore silver-rimmed
spectacles that gave him a scholarly look. He had a long creased face and didn't have on any shirt
or undershirt. He had on blue jeans that were too tight for him and was holding a black hat and a
gun. The two boys also had guns.
"We've had an ACCIDENT!" the children screamed.
The grandmother had the peculiar feeling that the bespectacled man was someone she
knew. His face was as familiar to her as if she had known him all her life but she could not recall
who he was. He moved away from the car and began to come down the embankment, placing his
feet carefully so that he wouldn't slip. He had on tan and white shoes and no socks, and his
ankles were red and thin. "Good afternoon," he said. "I see you all had you a little spill."
"We turned over twice!" said the grandmother.
"Once", he corrected. "We seen it happen. Try their car and see will it run, Hiram," he
said quietly to the boy with the gray hat.
"What you got that gun for?" John Wesley asked. "Whatcha gonna do with that gun?"
"Lady," the man said to the children's mother, "would you mind calling them children to
sit down by you? Children make me nervous. I want all you all to sit down right together there
where you're at."
"What are you telling US what to do for?" June Star asked.
Behind them the line of woods gaped like a dark open mouth. "Come here," said their
mother.
"Look here now," Bailey began suddenly, "we're in a predicament! We're in . . ."
The grandmother shrieked. She scrambled to her feet and stood staring. "You're The
Misfit!" she said. "I recognized you at once!"
"Yes'm," the man said, smiling slightly as if he were pleased in spite of himself to be
known, "but it would have been better for all of you, lady, if you hadn't of reckernized me."
Bailey turned his head sharply and said something to his mother that shocked even the
children. The old lady began to cry and The Misfit reddened.
"Lady," he said, "don't you get upset. Sometimes a man says things he don't mean. I don't
reckon he meant to talk to you thataway."
"You wouldn't shoot a lady, would you?" the grandmother said and removed a clean
handkerchief from her cuff and began to slap at her eyes with it.
The Misfit pointed the toe of his shoe into the ground and made a little hole and then
covered it up again. "I would hate to have to," he said.
"Listen," the grandmother almost screamed, "I know you're a good man. You don't look a
bit like you have common blood. I know you must come from nice people!"
"Yes mam," he said, "finest people in the world." When he smiled he showed a row of
strong white teeth. "God never made a finer woman than my mother and my daddy's heart was
pure gold," he said. The boy with the red sweat shirt had come around behind them and was
standing with his gun at his hip. The Misfit squatted down on the ground. "Watch them children,
Bobby Lee," he said. "You know they make me nervous." He looked at the six of them huddled
together in front of him and he seemed to be embarrassed as if he couldn't think of anything to
say. "Ain't a cloud in the sky," he remarked, looking up at it. "Don't see no sun but don't see no
cloud neither."
"Yes, it's a beautiful day," said the grandmother. "Listen," she said, "you shouldn't call
yourself The Misfit because I know you're a good man at heart. I can just look at you and tell."
"Hush!" Bailey yelled. "Hush! Everybody shut up and let me handle this!" He was
squatting in the position of a runner about to sprint forward but he didn't move.
"I pre-chate that, lady," The Misfit said and drew a little circle in the ground with the butt
of his gun.
"It'll take a half a hour to fix this here car," Hiram called, looking over the raised hood of
it.
"Well, first you and Bobby Lee get him and that little boy to step over yonder with you,"
The Misfit said, pointing to Bailey and John Wesley. "The boys want to ast you something," he
said to Bailey. "Would you mind stepping back in them woods there with them?"
"Listen," Bailey began, "we're in a terrible predicament! Nobody realizes what this is,"
and his voice cracked. His eyes were as blue and intense as the parrots in his shirt and he
remained perfectly still.
The grandmother reached up to adjust her hat brim as if she were going to the woods with
him but it came off in her hand. She stood staring at it and after a second she let it fall on the
ground. Hiram pulled Bailey up by the arm as if he were assisting an old man. John Wesley
caught hold of his father's hand and Bobby I,ee followed. They went off toward the woods and
just as they reached the dark edge, Bailey turned and supporting himself against a gray naked
pine trunk, he shouted, "I'll be back in a minute, Mamma, wait on me!"
"Come back this instant!" his mother shrilled but they all disappeared into the woods.
"Bailey Boy!" the grandmother called in a tragic voice but she found she was looking at
The Misfit squatting on the ground in front of her. "I just know you're a good man," she said
desperately. "You're not a bit common!"
"Nome, I ain't a good man," The Misfit said after a second ah if he had considered her
statement carefully, "but I ain't the worst in the world neither. My daddy said I was a different
breed of dog from my brothers and sisters. 'You know,' Daddy said, 'it's some that can live their
whole life out without asking about it and it's others has to know why it is, and this boy is one of
the latters. He's going to be into everything!"' He put on his black hat and looked up suddenly
and then away deep into the woods as if he were embarrassed again. "I'm sorry I don't have on a
shirt before you ladies," he said, hunching his shoulders slightly. "We buried our clothes that we
had on when we escaped and we're just making do until we can get better. We borrowed these
from some folks we met," he explained.
"That's perfectly all right," the grandmother said. "Maybe Bailey has an extra shirt in his
suitcase."
"I'll look and see terrectly," The Misfit said.
"Where are they taking him?" the children's mother screamed.
"Daddy was a card himself," The Misfit said. "You couldn't put anything over on him. He
never got in trouble with the Authorities though. Just had the knack of handling them."
"You could be honest too if you'd only try," said the grandmother. "Think how wonderful
it would be to settle down and live a comfortable life and not have to think about somebody
chasing you all the time."
The Misfit kept scratching in the ground with the butt of his gun as if he were thinking
about it. "Yestm, somebody is always after you," he murmured.
The grandmother noticed how thin his shoulder blades were just behind his hat because
she was standing up looking down on him. "Do you every pray?" she asked.
He shook his head. All she saw was the black hat wiggle between his shoulder blades.
"Nome," he said.
There was a pistol shot from the woods, followed closely by another. Then silence. The old
lady's head jerked around. She could hear the wind move through the tree tops like a long
satisfied insuck of breath. "Bailey Boy!" she called.
"I was a gospel singer for a while," The Misfit said. "I been most everything. Been in the
arm service both land and sea, at home and abroad, been twict married, been an undertaker, been
with the railroads, plowed Mother Earth, been in a tornado, seen a man burnt alive oncet," and he
looked up at the children's mother and the little girl who were sitting close together, their faces
white and their eyes glassy; "I even seen a woman flogged," he said.
"Pray, pray," the grandmother began, "pray, pray . . ."
I never was a bad boy that I remember of," The Misfit said in an almost dreamy voice,
"but somewheres along the line I done something wrong and got sent to the penitentiary. I was
buried alive," and he looked up and held her attention to him by a steady stare.
"That's when you should have started to pray," she said. "What did you do to get sent to
the penitentiary that first time?"
"Turn to the right, it was a wall," The Misfit said, looking up again at the cloudless sky.
"Turn to the left, it was a wall. Look up it was a ceiling, look down it was a floor. I forget what I
done, lady. I set there and set there, trying to remember what it was I done and I ain't recalled it
to this day. Oncet in a while, I would think it was coming to me, but it never come."
"Maybe they put you in by mistake," the old lady said vaguely.
"Nome," he said. "It wasn't no mistake. They had the papers on me."
"You must have stolen something," she said.
The Misfit sneered slightly. "Nobody had nothing I wanted," he said. "It was a headdoctor at the penitentiary said what I had done was kill my daddy but I known that for a lie. My
daddy died in nineteen ought nineteen of the epidemic flu and I never had a thing to do with it.
He was buried in the Mount Hopewell Baptist churchyard and you can go there and see for
yourself."
"If you would pray," the old lady said, "Jesus would help you."
"That's right," The Misfit said.
"Well then, why don't you pray?" she asked trembling with delight suddenly.
"I don't want no hep," he said. "I'm doing all right by myself."
Bobby Lee and Hiram came ambling back from the woods. Bobby Lee was dragging a
yellow shirt with bright blue parrots in it.
"Thow me that shirt, Bobby Lee," The Misfit said. The shirt came flying at him and
landed on his shoulder and he put it on. The grandmother couldn't name what the shirt reminded
her of. "No, lady," The Misfit said while he was buttoning it up, "I found out the crime don't
matter. You can do one thing or you can do another, kill a man or take a tire off his car, because
sooner or later you're going to forget what it was you done and just be punished for it."
The children's mother had begun to make heaving noises as if she couldn't get her breath.
"Lady," he asked, "would you and that little girl like to step off yonder with Bobby Lee and
Hiram and join your husband?"
"Yes, thank you," the mother said faintly. Her left arm dangled helplessly and she was
holding the baby, who had gone to sleep, in the other. "Hep that lady up, Hiram," The Misfit said
as she struggled to climb out of the ditch, "and Bobby Lee, you hold onto that little girl's hand."
"I don't want to hold hands with him," June Star said. "He reminds me of a pig."
The fat boy blushed and laughed and caught her by the arm and pulled her off into the
woods after Hiram and her mother.
Alone with The Misfit, the grandmother found that she had lost her voice. There was not
a cloud in the sky nor any sun. There was nothing around her but woods. She wanted to tell him
that he must pray. She opened and closed her mouth several times before anything came out.
Finally she found herself saying, "Jesus. Jesus," meaning, Jesus will help you, but the way she
was saying it, it sounded as if she might be cursing.
"Yes'm, The Misfit said as if he agreed. "Jesus shown everything off balance. It was the
same case with Him as with me except He hadn't committed any crime and they could prove I
had committed one because they had the papers on me. Of course," he said, "they never shown
me my papers. That's why I sign myself now. I said long ago, you get you a signature and sign
everything you do and keep a copy of it. Then you'll know what you done and you can hold up
the crime to the punishment and see do they match and in the end you'll have something to prove
you ain't been treated right. I call myself The Misfit," he said, "because I can't make what all I
done wrong fit what all I gone through in punishment."
There was a piercing scream from the woods, followed closely by a pistol report. "Does it
seem right to you, lady, that one is punished a heap and another ain't punished at all?"
"Jesus!" the old lady cried. "You've got good blood! I know you wouldn't shoot a lady! I
know you come from nice people! Pray! Jesus, you ought not to shoot a lady. I'll give you all the
money I've got!"
"Lady," The Misfit said, looking beyond her far into the woods, "there never was a body
that give the undertaker a tip."
There were two more pistol reports and the grandmother raised her head like a parched
old turkey hen crying for water and called, "Bailey Boy, Bailey Boy!" as if her heart would
break.
"Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead," The Misfit continued, "and He
shouldn't have done it. He shown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then it's
nothing for you to do but thow away everything and follow Him, and if He didn't, then it's
nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can by killing
somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but
meanness," he said and his voice had become almost a snarl.
"Maybe He didn't raise the dead," the old lady mumbled, not knowing what she was
saying and feeling so dizzy that she sank down in the ditch with her legs twisted under her.
"I wasn't there so I can't say He didn't," The Misfit said. "I wisht I had of been there," he
said, hitting the ground with his fist. "It ain't right I wasn't there because if I had of been there I
would of known. Listen lady," he said in a high voice, "if I had of been there I would of known
and I wouldn't be like I am now." His voice seemed about to crack and the grandmother's head
cleared for an instant. She saw the man's face twisted close to her own as if he were going to cry
and she murmured, "Why you're one of my babies. You're one of my own children !" She
reached out and touched him on the shoulder. The Misfit sprang back as if a snake had bitten him
and shot her three times through the chest. Then he put his gun down on the ground and took off
his glasses and began to clean them.
Hiram and Bobby Lee returned from the woods and stood over the ditch, looking down at
the grandmother who half sat and half lay in a puddle of blood with her legs crossed under her
like a child's and her face smiling up at the cloudless sky.
Without his glasses, The Misfit's eyes were red-rimmed and pale and defenselesslooking. "Take her off and thow her where you thown the others," he said, picking up the cat that
was rubbing itself against his leg.
"She was a talker, wasn't she?" Bobby Lee said, sliding down the ditch with a yodel.
"She would of been a good woman," The Misfit said, "if it had been somebody there to
shoot her every minute of her life."
"Some fun!" Bobby Lee said.
"Shut up, Bobby Lee," The Misfit said. "It's no real pleasure in life."
(Taken from http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~surette/goodman.html 5/27/2011)
A&P
by John Updike
In walks these three girls in nothing but bathing suits. I'm in the third check-out slot, with
my back to the door, so I don't see them until they're over by the bread. The one that caught my
eye first was the one in the plaid green two-piece. She was a chunky kid, with a good tan and a
sweet broad soft-looking can with those two crescents of white just under it, where the sun never
seems to hit, at the top of the backs of her legs. I stood there with my hand on a box of HiHo
crackers trying to remember if I rang it up or not. I ring it up again and the customer starts giving
me hell. She's one of these cash-register-watchers, a witch about fifty with rouge on her
cheekbones and no eyebrows, and I knowit made her day to trip me up. She'd been watching
cash registers forty years and probably never seen a mistake before.
By the time I got her feathers smoothed and her goodies into a bag -- she gives me alittle
snort in passing, if she'd been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem -by the time I get her on her way the girls had circled around the bread and were coming back,
without a pushcart, back my way along the counters, in the aisle between the check-outs and the
Special bins. They didn't even have shoes on. There was this chunky one, with the two-piece -- it
was bright green and the seams on the bra were still sharp and her belly was still pretty pale so I
guessed she just got it (the suit) -- there was this one, with one of those chubby berry-faces, the
lips all bunched together under her nose, this one, and a tall one, with black hair that hadn't quite
frizzed right, and one of these sunburns right across under the eyes, and a chin that was too long
-- you know, the kind of girl other girls think is very "striking" and "attractive" but never quite
makes it, as they very well know, which is why they like her so much -- and then the third one,
that wasn't quite so tall. She was the queen. She kind of led them, the other two peeking around
and making their shoulders round. She didn't look around, not this queen, she just walked
straight on slowly, on these long white prima donna legs. She came down a little hard on her
heels, as if she didn't walk in her bare feet that much, putting down her heels and then letting the
weight move along to her toes as if she was testing the floor with every step, putting a little
deliberate extra action into it. You never know for sure how girls' minds work (do you really
think it's a mind in there or just a little buzz like a bee in a glassjar?) but you got the idea she had
talked the other two into coming in here with her, and now she was showing them how to do it,
walk slow and hold yourself straight.
She had on a kind of dirty-pink - - beige maybe, I don't know -- bathing suit with a little
nubble all over it and, what got me, the straps were down. They were off her shoulders looped
loose around the cool tops of her arms, and I guess as a result the suit had slipped a little on her,
so all around the top of the cloth there was this shining rim. If it hadn't been there you wouldn't
have known there could have been anything whiter than those shoulders. With the straps pushed
off, there was nothing between the top of the suit and the top of her head except just her, this
clean bare plane of the top of her chest down from the shoulder bones like a dented sheet of
metal tilted in the light. I mean, it was more than pretty.
She had sort of oaky hair that the sun and salt had bleached, done up in a bun that was
unravelling, and a kind of prim face. Walking into the A & P with your straps down, I suppose
it's the only kind of face you can have. She held her head so high her neck, coming up out of
those white shoulders, looked kind of stretched, but I didn't mind. The longer her neck was, the
more of her there was.
She must have felt in the corner of her eye me and over my shoulder Stokesie in the
second slot watching, but she didn't tip. Not this queen. She kept her eyes moving across the
racks, and stopped, and turned so slow it made my stomach rub the inside of my apron, and
buzzed to the other two, who kind of huddled against her for relief, and they all three of them
went up the cat-and-dog-food-breakfast-cereal-macaroni-ri ce-raisins-seasonings-spreadsspaghetti-soft drinks- rackers-and- cookies aisle. From the third slot I look straight up this aisle
to the meat counter, and I watched them all the way. The fat one with the tan sort of fumbled
with the cookies, but on second thought she put the packages back. The sheep pushing their carts
down the aisle -- the girls were walking against the usual traffic (not that we have one-way signs
or anything) -- were pretty hilarious. You could see them, when Queenie's white shoulders
dawned on them, kind of jerk, or hop, or hiccup, but their eyes snapped back to their own baskets
and on they pushed. I bet you could set off dynamite in an A & P and the people would by and
large keep reaching and checking oatmeal off their lists and muttering "Let me see, there was a
third thing, began with A, asparagus, no, ah, yes, applesauce!" or whatever it is they do mutter.
But there was no doubt, this jiggled them. A few house-slaves in pin curlers even looked around
after pushing their carts past to make sure what they had seen was correct.
You know, it's one thing to have a girl in a bathing suit down on the beach, where what
with the glare nobody can look at each other much anyway, and another thing in the cool of the
A & P, under the fluorescent lights, against all those stacked packages, with her feet paddling
along naked over our checkerboard green-and-cream rubber-tile floor.
"Oh Daddy," Stokesie said beside me. "I feel so faint."
"Darling," I said. "Hold me tight." Stokesie's married, with two babies chalked up on his
fuselage already, but as far as I can tell that's the only difference. He's twenty-two, and I was
nineteen this April.
"Is it done?" he asks, the responsible married man finding his voice. I forgot to say he
thinks he's going to be manager some sunny day, maybe in 1990 when it's called the Great
Alexandrov and Petrooshki Tea Company or something.
What he meant was, our town is five miles from a beach, with a big summer colony out
on the Point, but we're right in the middle of town, and the women generally put on a shirt or
shorts or something before they get out of the car into the street. And anyway these are usually
women with six children and varicose veins mapping their legs and nobody, including them,
could care less. As I say, we're right in the middle of town, and if you stand at our front doors
you can see two banks and the Congregational church and the newspaper store and three realestate offices and about twenty-seven old free-loaders tearing up Central Street because the
sewer broke again. It's not as if we're on the Cape; we're north of Boston and there's people in
this town haven't seen the ocean for twenty years.
The girls had reached the meat counter and were asking McMahon something. He
pointed, they pointed, and they shuffled out of sight behind a pyramid of Diet Delight peaches.
All that was left for us to see was old McMahon patting his mouth and looking after them sizing
up their joints. Poor kids, I began to feel sorry for them, they couldn't help it.
Now here comes the sad part of the story, at:least my family says it's sad but I don't think
it's sad myself. The store's pretty empty, it being Thursday afternoon, so there was nothing much
to do except lean on the register and wait for the girls to show up again. The whole store was like
a pinball machine and I didn't know which tunnel they'd come out of. After a while they come
around out of the far aisle, around the light bulbs, records at discount of the Caribbean Six or
Tony Martin Sings or some such gunk you wonder they waste the wax on, sixpacks of candy
bars, and plastic toys done up in cellophane that faIl apart when a kid looks at them anyway.
Around they come, Queenie still leading the way, and holding a little gray jar in her hand. Slots
Three through Seven are unmanned and I could see her wondering between Stokes and me, but
Stokesie with his usual luck draws an old party in baggy gray pants who stumbles up with four
giant cans of pineapple juice (what do these bums do with all that pineapple juice' I've often
asked myself) so the girls come to me. Queenie puts down the jar and I take it into my fingers icy
cold. Kingfish Fancy Herring Snacks in Pure Sour Cream: 49¢. Now her hands are empty, not a
ring or a bracelet, bare as God made them, and I wonder where the money's coming from. Still
with that prim look she lifts a folded dollar bill out of the hollow at the center of her nubbled
pink top. The jar went heavy in my hand. Really, I thought that was so cute.
Then everybody's luck begins to run out. Lengel comes in from haggling with a truck full
of cabbages on the lot and is about to scuttle into that door marked MANAGER behind which he
hides all day when the girls touch his eye. Lengel's pretty dreary, teaches Sunday school and the
rest, but he doesn't miss that much. He comes over and says, "Girls, this isn't the beach."
Queenie blushes, though maybe it's just a brush of sunburn I was noticing for the first
time, now that she was so close. "My mother asked me to pick up a jar of herring snacks." Her
voice kind of startled me, the way voices do when you see the people first, coming out so flat
and dumb yet kind of tony, too, the way it ticked over "pick up" and "snacks." All of a sudden I
slid right down her voice into her living room. Her father and the other men were standing
around in ice-cream coats and bow ties and the women were in sandals picking up herring snacks
on toothpicks off a big plate and they were all holding drinks the color of water with olives and
sprigs of mint in them. When my parents have somebody over they get lemonade and if it's a real
racy affair Schlitz in tall glasses with "They'll Do It Every Time" cartoons stencilled on.
"That's all right," Lengel said. "But this isn't the beach." His repeating this struck me as
funny, as if it hadjust occurred to him, and he had been thinking all these years the A & P was a
great big dune and he was the head lifeguard. He didn't like my smiling -- -as I say he doesn't
miss much -- but he concentrates on giving the girls that sad Sunday- school-superintendent
stare.
Queenie's blush is no sunburn now, and the plump one in plaid, that I liked better from
the back -- a really sweet can -- pipes up, "We weren't doing any shopping. We just came in for
the one thing."
"That makes no difference," Lengel tells her, and I could see from the way his eyes went
that he hadn't noticed she was wearing a two-piece before. "We want you decently dressed when
you come in here."
"We are decent," Queenie says suddenly, her lower lip pushing, getting sore now that she
remembers her place, a place from which the crowd that runs the A & P must look pretty
crummy. Fancy Herring Snacks flashed in her very blue eyes.
"Girls, I don't want to argue with you. After this come in here with your shoulders
covered. It's our policy." He turns his back. That's policy for you. Policy is what the kingpins
want. What the others want is juvenile delinquency.
All this while, the customers had been showing up with their carts but, you know, sheep,
seeing a scene, they had all bunched up on Stokesie, who shook open a paper bag as gently as
peeling a peach, not wanting to miss a word. I could feel in the silence everybody getting
nervous, most of all Lengel, who asks me, "Sammy, have you rung up this purchase?"
I thought and said "No" but it wasn't about that I was thinking. I go through the punches,
4, 9, GROC, TOT -- it's more complicated than you think, and after you do it often enough, it
begins to make a lttle song, that you hear words to, in my case "Hello (bing) there, you (gung)
hap-py pee-pul (splat)"-the splat being the drawer flying out. I uncrease the bill, tenderly as you
may imagine, it just having come from between the two smoothest scoops of vanilla I had ever
known were there, and pass a half and a penny into her narrow pink palm, and nestle the herrings
in a bag and twist its neck and hand it over, all the time thinking.
The girls, and who'd blame them, are in a hurry to get out, so I say "I quit" to Lengel
quick enough for them to hear, hoping they'll stop and watch me, their unsuspected hero. They
keep right on going, into the electric eye; the door flies open and they flicker across the lot to
their car, Queenie and Plaid and Big Tall Goony-Goony (not that as raw material she was so
bad), leaving me with Lengel and a kink in his eyebrow.
"Did you say something, Sammy?"
"I said I quit."
"I thought you did."
"You didn't have to embarrass them."
"It was they who were embarrassing us."
I started to say something that came out "Fiddle-de-doo." It's a saying of my grandmother's, and I know she would have been pleased.
"I don't think you know what you're saying," Lengel said.
"I know you don't," I said. "But I do." I pull the bow at the back of my apron and start
shrugging it off my shoulders. A couple customers that had been heading for my slot begin to
knock against each other, like scared pigs in a chute.
Lengel sighs and begins to look very patient and old and gray. He's been a friend of my
parents for years. "Sammy, you don't want to do this to your Mom and Dad," he tells me. It's
true, I don't. But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it. I
fold the apron, "Sammy" stitched in red on the pocket, and put it on the counter, and drop the
bow tie on top of it. The bow tie is theirs, if you've ever wondered. "You'll feel this for the rest of
your life," Lengel says, and I know that's true, too, but remembering how he made that pretty girl
blush makes me so scrunchy inside I punch the No Sale tab and the machine whirs "pee-pul" and
the drawer splats out. One advantage to this scene taking place in summer, I can follow this up
with a clean exit, there's no fumbling around getting your coat and galoshes, I just saunter into
the electric eye in my white shirt that my mother ironed the night before, and the door heaves
itself open, and outside the sunshine is skating around on the asphalt.
I look around for my girls, but they're gone, of course. There wasn't anybody but some
young married screaming with her children about some candy they didn't get by the door of a
powder-blue Falcon station wagon. Looking back in the big windows, over the bags of peat moss
and aluminum lawn furniture stacked on the pavement, I could see Lengel in my place in the
slot, checking the sheep through. His face was dark gray and his back stiff, as if he'd just had an
injection of iron, and my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me
hereafter.
(Text taken from http://www.tiger-town.com/whatnot/updike/ 5/27/2011)
“Sweet Summer”
By: Wayne Jarus
“The Summer I Was Sixteen”
By: Geraldine Connolly
The boats adrift in the harbour
As thoughts in a calm mind
A liquid sun beaming today and forever
We hoard happiness a smile at a time
The turquoise pool rose up to meet us,
its slide a silver afterthought down which
we plunged, screaming, into a mirage of
bubbles.
We did not exist beyond the gaze of a boy.
As thoughts in a calm mind
Finding respite in cool shade
A liquid sun beaming today and forever
Butterflies flutter in a golden haze
Finding respite in cool shade
In this pastel world of light and shadows
Butterflies flutter in a golden haze
And crickets sing in motionless meadows
Oh sweet summer stay and sleep
A liquid sun beaming today and forever
Lingering dreams and afternoons of heat
The boats adrift in the harbour.
(Taken from
http://poetry.about.com/library/weekly/bljar
ussummer.htm)
Shaking water off our limbs, we lifted
up from ladder rungs across the fern-cool
lip of rim. Afternoon. Oiled and sated,
we sunbathed, rose and paraded the
concrete,
danced to the low beat of "Duke of Earl".
Past cherry colas, hot-dogs, Dreamsicles,
we came to the counter where bees
staggered
into root beer cups and drowned. We
gobbled
cotton candy torches, sweet as furtive kisses,
shared on benches beneath summer
shadows.
Cherry. Elm. Sycamore. We spread our
chenille
blankets across grass, pressed radios to our
ears,
mouthing the old words, then loosened
thin bikini straps and rubbed baby oil with
iodine
across sunburned shoulders, tossing a glance
through the chain link at an improbable
world.
(Taken from
http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/gera
ldine_connolly/poems/11346)
“Summer of ‘69”
By: Brian Adams
I got my first real six-string
Bought it at the five-and-dime
Played it till my fingers bled
It was the summer of '69
Me and some guys from school
Had a band and we tried real hard
Jimmy quit and Joey got married
I shoulda known we'd never get far
Oh when I look back now
That summer seemed to last forever
And if I had the choice
Ya - I'd always wanna be there
Those were the best days of my life
Ain't no use in complainin'
When you got a job to do
Spent my evenin's down at the drive-in
And that's when I met you
Standin' on your mama's porch
You told me that you'd wait forever
Oh and when you held my hand
I knew that it was now or never
Those were the best days of my life
Back in the summer of '69
Man we were killin' time
We were young and restless
We needed to unwind
I guess nothin' can last forever - forever, no
And now the times are changin'
Look at everything that's come and gone
Sometimes when I play that old six-string
I think about ya wonder what went wrong
Standin' on your mama's porch
You told me it would last forever
Oh the way you held my hand
I knew that it was now or never
Those were the best days of my life
(Taken from
http://www.elyrics.net/read/b/bryan-adamslyrics/summer-of-_69-lyrics.html)
“Summer Colours”
By: Fenny Sterenborg
Long curls
lightest blond
like silver and gold
in the saffron sun
Summer dresses
cool white
show lots of skin
golden brown
Painted toenails
fierce red
in summer shoes
walk by
and catch eyes
green and blue
behind black shades
against the gleam
(Taken from
http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/fenn
y_sterenborg/poems/22030)
Collection 2: Culture
and Family
The Red Convertible
By: LOUISE ERDRICH
I was the first one to drive a convertible on my reservation. And of course it was red, a red Olds. I
owned that car along with my brother Henry Junior. We owned it together until his boots filled
with water on a windy night and he bought out my share. Now Henry owns the whole car, and his
younger brother Lyman (that's myself), Lyman walks everywhere he goes.
How did I earn enough money to buy my share in the first place? My one talent was I could always
make money. I had a touch for it, unusual in a Chippewa. From the first I was different that way, and
everyone recognized it. I was the only kid they let in the American Legion Hall to shine shoes, for
example, and one Christmas I sold spiritual bouquets for the mission door to door. The nuns let me
keep a percentage. Once I started, it seemed the more money I made the easier the money came.
Everyone encouraged it. When I was fifteen I got a job washing dishes at the Joliet Cafe, and that was
where my first big break happened.
It wasn't long before I was promoted to busing tables, and then the short-order cook quit and I was
hired to take her place. No sooner than you know it I was managing the Joliet. The rest is history. I
went on managing. I soon became part owner, and of course there was no stopping me then. It
wasn't long before the whole thing was mine.
After I'd owned the Joliet for one year, it blew over in the worst tornado ever seen around here.
The whole operation was smashed to bits. A total loss. The fryalator was up in a tree, the grill torn in
half like it was paper. I was only sixteen. I had it all in my mother's name, and I lost it quick, but before I lost it I had every one of my relatives, and their relatives, to dinner, and I also bought that red
Olds I mentioned, along with Henry.
The first time we saw it! I'll tell you when we first saw it. We had gotten a ride up to Winnipeg, and
both of us had money. Don't ask me why, because we never mentioned a car or anything, we just had
all our money. Mine was cash, a big bankroll from the Joliet's insurance. Henry had two checks— a
week's extra pay for being laid off, and his regular check from the Jewel Bearing Plant.
We were walking down Portage anyway, seeing the sights, when we saw it. There it was, parked,
large as life. Really as if it was alive. I thought of the word repose, because the car wasn't simply
stopped, parked, or whatever. That car re posed, calm and gleaming, a FOR SALE sign in its left front
window. Then, before we had thought it over at all, the car belonged to us and our pockets were
empty. We had just enough money for gas back home.
We went places in that car, me and Henry. We took off driving all one whole summer. We started
off toward the Little Knife River and Mandaree in Fort Berthold and then we found ourselves down
in Wakpala somehow, and then suddenly we were over in Montana on the Rocky Boy, and yet the
summer was not even half over. Some people hang on to details when they travel, but we didn't let
them bother us and just lived our everyday lives here to there.
I do remember this one place with willows. I remember I lay under those trees and it was
comfortable. So comfortable. The branches bent down all around me like a tent or a stable. And quiet,
it was quiet, even though there was a powwow close enough so I could see it going on. The air was
not too still, not too windy either. When the dust rises up and hangs in the air around the dancers like
that, I feel good. Henry was asleep with his arms thrown wide. Later on, he woke up and we started
driving again. We were somewhere in Montana, or maybe on the Blood Reserve—it could have
been anywhere. Anyway it was where we met the girl.
All her hair was in buns around her ears, that's the first thing I noticed about her. She was posed
alongside the road with her arm out, so we stopped. That girl was short, so short her lumber shirt
looked comical on her, like a nightgown. She had jeans on and fancy moccasins and she carried a little
suitcase.
"Hop on in," says Henry. So she climbs in between us.
"We'll take you home," I says. "Where do you live?"
"Chicken," she says.
"Where the hell's that?" I ask her.
"Alaska."
"Okay," says Henry, and we drive.
We got up there and never wanted to leave. The sun doesn't truly set there in summer, and the
night is more a soft dusk. You might doze off, sometimes, but before you know it you're up again, like
an animal in nature. You never feel like you have to sleep hard or put away the world. And things
would grow up there. One day just dirt or moss, the next day flowers and long grass. The girl's name
was Susy. Her family really took to us. They fed us and put us up. We had our own tent to live in by
their house, and the kids would be in and out of there all day and night. They couldn't get over me
and Henry being brothers, we looked so different. We told them we knew we had the same mother,
anyway.
One night Susy came in to visit us. We sat around in the tent talking of this and that. The season
was changing. It was getting darker by that time, and the cold was even getting just a little mean. I
told her it was time for us to go. She stood up on a chair.
"You never seen my hair," Susy said.
That was true. She was standing on a chair, but still, when she unclipped her buns the hair reached
all the way to the ground. Our eyes opened. You couldn't tell how much hair she had when it was
rolled up so neatly. Then my brother Henry did something funny. He went up to the chair and
said, "Jump on my shoulders." So she did that, and her hair reached down past his waist, and he
started twirling, this way and that, so her hair was flung out from side to side.
"I always wondered what it was like to have long pretty hair," Henry says. Well we laughed. It was
a funny sight, the way he did it. The next morning we got up and took leave of those people.
On to greener pastures, as they say. It was down through Spokane and across Idaho then Montana
and very soon we were racing the weather right along under the Canadian border through Columbus,
Des Lacs, and then we were in Bot-tineau County and soon home. We'd made most of the trip, that
summer, without putting up the car hood at all. We got home just in time, it turned out, for the army
to remember Henry had signed up to join it.
I don't wonder that the army was so glad to get my brother that they turned him into a Marine. He
was built like a brick outhouse anyway. We liked to tease him that they really wanted him for his
Indian nose. He had a nose big and sharp as a hatchet, like the nose on Red Tomahawk, the Indian
who killed Sitting Bull, whose profile is on signs all along the North Dakota highways. Henry went off
to training camp, came home once during Christmas, then the next thing you know we got an
overseas letter from him. It was 1970, and he said he was stationed up in the northern hill country.
Whereabouts I did not know. He wasn’t such a hot letter writer, and only got off two before the
enemy caught him. I could never keep it straight, which direction those good Vietnam soldiers
were from.
I wrote him back several times, even though I didn't know if those letters would get through. I kept
him informed all about the car. Most of the time I had it up on blocks in .the yard or half taken apart,
because that long trip did a hard job on it under the hood.
I always had good luck with numbers, and never worried about the draft myself. I never even had to
think about what my number was. But Henry was never lucky in the same way as me. It was at least
three years before Henry came home. By then I guess the whole war was solved in the government's
mind, but for him it would keep on going. In those years I'd put his car into almost perfect shape. I
always thought of it as his car while he was gone, even though when he left he said, "Now it's yours,"
and threw me his key.
"Thanks for the extra key," I'd said. "I'll put it up in your drawer just in case I need it." He laughed.
When he came home, though, Henry was very different, and I'll say this: the change was no good.
You could hardly expect him to change for the better, I know. But he was quiet, so quiet, and never
comfortable sitting still anywhere but always up and moving around. I thought back to times we'd
sat still for whole afternoons, never moving a muscle, just shifting our weight along the ground, talking
to whoever sat with us, watching things. He'd always had a joke, then, too, and now you couldn't get
him to laugh, or when he did it was more the sound of a man choking, a sound that stopped up the
throats of other people around him. They got to leaving him alone most of the time, and I didn’t blame
them. It was a fact: Henry was jumpy and mean.
I'd bought a color TV set for my mom and the rest of us while Henry was away. Money still came
very easy. I was sorry I'd ever bought it though, because of Henry. I was also sorry I'd bought color,
because with black-and-white the pictures seem older and farther away. But what are you going to do?
He sat in front of it, watching it, and that was the only time he was completely still. But it was the
kind of stillness that you see in a rabbit when it freezes and before it will bolt. He was not easy. He sat
in his chair gripping the armrests with all his might, as if the chair itself was moving at a high speed
and if he let go at all he would rocket forward and maybe crash right through the set.
Once I was in the room watching TV with Henry and I heard his teeth click at something. I
looked over, and he'd bitten through his lip. Blood was going down his chin. I tell you right then I
wanted to smash that tube to pieces. I went over to it but Henry must have known what I was up to.
He rushed from his chair and shoved me out of the way, against the wall. I told myself he didn't know
what he was doing.
My mom came in, turned the set off real quiet, and told us she had made something for supper. So
we went and sat down. There was still blood going down Henry's chin, but he didn't notice it and no
one said anything even though every time he took a bite of his bread his blood fell onto it until he was
eating his own blood mixed in with the food.
While Henry was not around we talked about what was going to happen to him. There were no
Indian doctors on the reservation, and my mom couldn't come around to trusting the old man, Moses
Pillager, because he courted her long ago and was jealous of her husbands. He might take revenge
through her son. We were afraid that if we brought Henry to a regular hospital they would keep him.
“They don’t fix them in those places,” Mom said; “They just give them drugs.”
"We wouldn't get him there in the first place," I agreed, "so let's just forget about it."
Then I thought about the car.
Henry had not even looked at the car since he'd gotten home, though like I said, it was in tip-top
condition and ready to drive. I thought the car might bring the old Henry back somehow. So I bided
my time and waited for my chance to interest him in the vehicle.
One night Henry was off somewhere. I took myself a hammer. I went out to that car and I did a
number on its underside. Whacked it up. Bent the tail pipe double. Ripped the muffler loose. By the
time I was done with the car it looked worse than any typical Indian car that has been driven all its life
on reservation roads, which they always say are like government promises—full of holes. It just about
hurt me, I'll tell you that! I threw dirt in the carburetor and I ripped all the electric tape off the seats.
I made it look just as beat up as I could. Then I sat back and waited for Henry to find it.
Still, it took him over a month. That was all right, because it was just getting warm enough; not
melting, but warm enough to work outside.
"Lyman," he says, walking in one day, "that red car looks like shit."
"Well it's old," I says. "You got to expect that."
"No way!" says Henry. "That car's a classic! But you went and ran the piss right put of it, Lyman,
and you know it don't deserve that. I kept that car in A-one shape. You don't remember. You're too
young. But when I left, that car was running like a watch. Now I don't even know if I can get it to
start again, let alone get it anywhere near its old condition."
"Well you try," I said, like I was getting mad, "but I say it's a piece of junk."
Then I walked out before he could realize I knew he'd strung together more than six words at
once.
After that I thought he'd freeze himself to death working on that car. He was out there all day, and
at night he rigged up a little lamp, ran a cord out the window, and had himself some light to see by
while he worked. He was better than he had been before, but that's still not saying much. It was easier
for him to do the things the rest of us did. He ate more slowly and didn't jump up and down during
the meal to get this or that or look out the window. I put my hand in the back of the TV set, I admit,
and fiddled around with it good, so that it was almost impossible now to get a clear picture. He
didn't look at it very often anyway. He was always out with that car or going off to get parts for it. By
the time it was really melting outside, he had it fixed.
I had been feeling down in the dumps about Henry around this time. We had always been
together before. Henry and Lyman. But he was such a loner now that I didn't know how to take it.
So I jumped at the chance one day when Henry seemed friendly. It's not that he smiled or anything.
He just said, "Let's take that old shitbox for a spin." Just the way he said it made me think he could
be coming around.
We went out to the car. It was spring. The sun was shining very bright. My only sister, Bonita, who
was just eleven years old, came out and made us stand together for a picture.
Henry leaned his elbow on the red car's windshield, and he took his other arm and put it over
my shoulder, very carefully, as though it was heavy for him to lift and he didn't want to bring
the weight down all at once. "Smile," Bonita said, and he did.
That picture. I never look at it anymore. A few months ago, I don't know why, I got his picture out
and tacked it on the wall. I felt good about Henry at the time, close to him. I felt good having his
picture on the wall, until one night when I was looking at television. I was a little drunk and stoned. I
looked up at the wall and Henry was staring at me. I don't know what it was, but his smile had
changed, or maybe it was gone. All I know is I couldn't stay in the same room with that picture. I was
shaking. I got up, closed the door, and went into the kitchen. A little later my friend Ray came over
and we both went back into that room. We put the picture in a brown bag, folded the bag over and
over tightly, then put it way back in a closet.
I still see that picture now, as if it tugs at me, whenever I pass that closet door. The picture is very
clear in my mind. It was so sunny that day Henry had to squint against the glare. Or maybe the
camera Bonita held flashed like a mirror, blinding him, before she snapped the picture. My face is
right out in the sun, big and round. But he might have drawn back, because the shadows on his
face are deep as holes. There are two shadows curved like little hooks around the ends of his smile,
as if to frame it and try to keep it there— that one, first smile that looked like it might have hurt his
face. He has his field jacket on and the worn-in clothes he'd come back in and kept wearing ever
since. After Bonita took the picture, she went into the house and we got into the car. There was a full
cooler in the trunk. We started off, east, toward Pembina and the Red River because Henry said
he wanted to see the high water.
The trip over there was beautiful. When everything starts changing, drying up, clearing off, you
feel like your whole life is starting. Henry felt it, too. The top was down and the car hummed like a
top. He'd really put it back in shape, even the tape on the seats was very carefully put down and glued
back in layers. It's not that he smiled again or even joked, but his face looked to me as if it was clear,
more peaceful. It looked as though he wasn't thinking of anything in particular except the bare fields
and windbreaks and houses we were passing.
The river was high and full of winter trash when we got there. The sun was still out, but it was
colder by the river. There-were still little clumps of dirty snow here and there on the banks. The water
hadn't gone over the banks yet, but it would, you could tell. It was just at its limit, hard swollen,
glossy like an old gray scar. We made ourselves a fire, and we sat down and watched the current go. As
I watched it I felt something squeezing inside me and tightening and trying to let go all at the same
time. I knew I was not just feeling it myself; I knew I was feeling what Henry was going through at
that moment. Except that I couldn't stand it, the closing and opening. I jumped to my feet. I took
Henry by the shoulders, and I started shaking him. "Wake up," I says, "wake up, wake up, wake
up!" I didn't know what had come over me. I sat down beside him again.
His face was totally white and hard. Then it broke, like stones break all of a sudden when water
boils up inside them.
"I know it," he says. "I know it. I can't help it. It's no use."
We start talking. He said he knew what I'd done with the car. It was obvious it had been whacked
out of shape and not just neglected. He said he wanted to give the car to me for
good now, it was no use. He said he'd fixed it just to give it back and I should take it.
"No way," I says, "I don't want it."
"That's okay," he says, "you take it."
"I don't want it, though," I says back to him, and then to emphasize, just to emphasize, you
understand, I touch his shoulder. He slaps my hand off.
"Take that car," he says.
"No," I say. "Make me," I say, and then he grabs my jacket and rips the arm loose. That jacket
is a class act, suede with tags and zippers. I push Henry backwards, off the log. He jumps up
and bowls me over. We go down in a clinch and come up swinging hard, for all we're worth,
with our fists. He socks my jaw so hard I feel like it swings loose. Then. I'm at his rib cage and.
land a good one under his chin so his head snaps back. He's dazzled. He looks at me and I look
at him and then his eyes are full of tears and blood and at first I think he's crying. But no,
he's laughing. "Ha! Ha!" he says. "Ha! Ha! Take good care of it."
"Okay," I says. "Okay, no problem; Ha! Ha!"
I can't help it, and I start laughing, too. My face feels fat and strange, and after a while I get
a beer from the cooler in the trunk, and when I hand it to Henry he takes his shirt and wipes my
germs off. "Hoof-and-mouth disease," he says. For some reason this cracks me up, and so we're
really laughing for a while, and then we drink all the rest of the beers one by one and throw
them in the river and see how far, how fast, the current takes them before they fill up and sink.
"You want to go on back?" I ask after a while. "Maybe we could snag a couple nice Kashpaw
girls."
He says nothing. But I can tell his mood is turning again.
"They're all crazy, the girls up here, every damn one of them."
"You're crazy too," I say, to jolly him up. "Crazy Lamartine boys!"
He looks as though he will take this wrong at first. His face twists, then clears, and he jumps up on his feet.
"That's right!" he says. "Crazier 'n hell. Crazy Indians!"
I think it's the old Henry again. He throws off his jacket and starts springing his legs up from the
knees like a fancy dancer. He's down doing something between a grass dance and a bunny hop, no
kind of dance I ever saw before, but neither has anyone else on all this green growing earth. He's
wild. He wants to pitch whoopee! He's up and at me and all over. All this time I'm laughing so hard,
so hard my belly is getting tied up in a knot.
"Got to cool me off!" he shouts all of a sudden. Then he runs over to the river and jumps in.
There's boards and other things in the current. It's so high. No sound comes from the river after the
splash he makes, so I run right over. I look around. It's getting dark. I see he's halfway across the
water already, and I know he didn't swim there but the current took him. It's far. I hear his voice,
though, very clearly across it.
"My boots are filling," he says.
He says this in a normal voice, like he just noticed and he doesn't know what to think of it. Then
he's gone. A branch comes by. Another branch. And I go in.
By the time I get out of the river, off the snag I pulled myself onto, the sun is down. I walk back to
the car, turn on the high beams, and drive it up the bank. I put it in first gear and then I take my foot
off the clutch. I get out, close the door, and watch it plow softly into the water. The headlights reach in
as they go down, searching, still lighted even after the water swirls over the back end. I wait. The
wires short out. It is all finally dark. And then there is only the water, the sound of it going and
running and going and running and running.
(Taken from www.mindquestacademy.org/.../The%20Red%20Convertible2.doc)
Two Kinds
By: Amy Tan
My mother believed you could be anything you wanted to be in America. You could open a
restaurant. You could work for the government and get good retirement. You could buy a house
with almost no money down. You could become rich. You could become instantly famous.
"Of course, you can be a prodigy, too," my mother told me when I was nine. "You can be best
anything. What does Auntie Lindo know? Her daughter, she is only best tricky."
America was where all my mother's hopes lay. She had come to San Francisco in 1949 after
losing everything in China: her mother and father, her home, her first husband, and two
daughters, twin baby girls. But she never looked back with regret. Things could get better in so
many ways.
We didn't immediately pick the right kind of prodigy. At first my mother thought I could be a
Chinese Shirley Temple. We'd watch Shirley's old movies on TV as though they were training
films. My mother would poke my arm and say, "Ni kan.You watch." And I would see Shirley
tapping her feet, or singing a sailor song, or pursing her lips into a very round O while saying
"Oh, my goodness."
“Ni kan," my mother said, as Shirley's eyes flooded with tears. "You already know how. Don't
need talent for crying!"
Soon after my mother got this idea about Shirley Temple, she took me to the beauty training
school in the Mission District and put me in the hands of a student who could barely hold the
scissors without shaking. Instead of getting big fat curls, I emerged with an uneven mass of
crinkly black fuzz. My mother dragged me off to the bathroom and tried to wet down my hair.
"You look like a Negro Chinese," she lamented, as if I had done this on purpose.
The instructor of the beauty training school had to lop off these soggy clumps to make my hair
even again. "Peter Pan is very popular these days" the instructor assured my mother. I now had
bad hair the length of a boy's, with curly bangs that hung at a slant two inches above my
eyebrows. I liked the haircut, and it made me actually look forward to my future fame.
In fact, in the beginning I was just as excited as my mother, maybe even more so. I pictured this
prodigy part of me as many different images, and I tried each one on for size. I was a dainty
ballerina girl standing by the curtain, waiting to hear the music that would send me floating on
my tiptoes. I was like the Christ child lifted out of the straw manger, crying with holy indignity. I
was Cinderella stepping from her pumpkin carriage with sparkly cartoon music filling the air.
In all of my imaginings I was filled with a sense that I would soon become perfect: My mother
and father would adore me. I would be beyond reproach. I would never feel the need to sulk, or
to clamor for anything. But sometimes the prodigy in me became impatient. "If you don't hurry
up and get me out of here, I'm disappearing for good," it warned. " And then you'll always be
nothing."
Every night after dinner my mother and I would sit at the Formica topped kitchen table. She
would present new tests, taking her examples from stories of amazing children that she read in
Ripley's Believe It or Not or Good Housekeeping, Reader's digest, or any of a dozen other
magazines she kept in a pile in our bathroom. My mother got these magazines from people
whose houses she cleaned. And since she cleaned many houses each week, we had a great
assortment. She would look through them all, searching for stories about remarkable children.
The first night she brought out a story about a three-year-old boy who knew the capitals of all the
states and even the most of the European countries. A teacher was quoted as saying that the little
boy could also pronounce the names of the foreign cities correctly. "What's the capital of
Finland?” my mother asked me, looking at the story.
All I knew was the capital of California, because Sacramento was the name of the street we lived
on in Chinatown. "Nairobi!" I guessed, saying the most foreign word I could think of. She
checked to see if that might be one way to pronounce Helsinki before showing me the answer.
The tests got harder - multiplying numbers in my head, finding the queen of hearts in a deck of
cards, trying to stand on my head without using my hands, predicting the daily temperatures in
Los Angeles, New York, and London. One night I had to look at a page from the Bible for three
minutes and then report everything I could remember. "Now Jehoshaphat had riches and honor in
abundance and...that's all I remember, Ma," I said.
And after seeing, once again, my mother's disappointed face, something inside me began to die. I
hated the tests, the raised hopes and failed expectations. Before going to bed that night I looked
in the mirror above the bathroom sink, and I saw only my face staring back - and understood that
it would always be this ordinary face - I began to cry. Such a sad, ugly girl! I made high - pitched
noises like a crazed animal, trying to scratch out the face in the mirror.
And then I saw what seemed to be the prodigy side of me - a face I had never seen before. I
looked at my reflection, blinking so that I could see more clearly. The girl staring back at me was
angry, powerful. She and I were the same. I had new thoughts, willful thoughts - or. rather,
thoughts filled with lots of won'ts. I won't let her change me, I promised myself. I won't be what
I'm not.
So now when my mother presented her tests, I performed listlessly, my head propped on one
arm. I pretended to be bored. And I was. I got so bored that I started counting the bellows of the
foghorns out on the bay while my mother drilled me in other areas. The sound was comforting
and reminded me of the cow jumping over the moon. And the next day I played a game with
myself, seeing if my mother would give up on me before eight bellows. After a while I usually
counted only one bellow, maybe two at most. At last she was beginning to give up hope.
Two or three months went by without any mention of my being a prodigy. And then one day my
mother was watching the Ed Sullivan Show on TV. The TV was old and the sound kept shorting
out. Every time my mother got halfway up from the sofa to adjust the set, the sound would come
back on and Sullivan would be talking. As soon as she sat down, Sullivan would go silent again.
She got up - the TV broke into loud piano music. She sat down - silence. Up and down, back and
forth, quiet and loud. It was like a stiff, embraceless dance between her and the TV set. Finally,
she stood by the set with her hand on the sound dial.
She seemed entranced by the music, a frenzied little piano piece with a mesmerizing quality,
which alternated between quick, playful passages and teasing, lilting ones.
"Ni kan," my mother said, calling me over with hurried hand gestures. "Look here."
I could see why my mother was fascinated by the music. It was being pounded out by a little
Chinese girl, about nine years old, with a Peter Pan haircut. The girl had the sauciness of a
Shirley Temple. She was proudly modest, like a proper Chinese Child. And she also did a fancy
sweep of a curtsy, so that the fluffy skirt of her white dress cascaded to the floor like petals of a
large carnation.
In spite of these warning signs, I wasn't worried. Our family had no piano and we couldn't afford
to buy one, let alone reams of sheet music and piano lessons. So I could be generous in my
comments when my mother badmouthed the little girl on TV.
"Play note right, but doesn't sound good!" my mother complained "No singing sound."
"What are you picking on her for?" I said carelessly. " She's pretty good. Maybe she's not the
best, but she's trying hard." I knew almost immediately that I would be sorry I had said that.
"Just like you," she said. "Not the best. Because you not trying." She gave a little huff as she let
go of the sound dial and sat down on the sofa.
The little Chinese girl sat down also, to play an encore of "Anitra's Tanz," by Grieg. I remember
the song, because later on I had to learn how to play it.
Three days after watching the Ed Sullivan Show my mother told me what my schedule would be
for piano lessons and piano practice. She had talked to Mr. Chong, who lived on the first floor of
our apartment building. Mr.Chong was a retired piano teacher, and my mother had traded
housecleaning services for weekly lessons and a piano for me to practice on every day, two hours
a day, from four until six.
When my mother told me this, I felt as though I had been sent to hell. I whined, and then kicked
my foot a little when I couldn't stand it anymore.
"Why don't you like me the way I am?" I cried. "I'm not a genius! I can't play the piano. And
even if I could, I wouldn't go on TV if you paid me a million dollars!"
My mother slapped me. "Who ask you to be genius?" she shouted. "Only ask you be your best.
For you sake. You think I want you to be genius? Hnnh! What for!Who ask you!"
"So ungrateful," I heard her mutter in Chinese, "If she had as much talent as she has temper,
she'd be famous now."
Mr. Chong, whom I secretly nicknamed Old Chong, was very strange, always tapping his fingers
to the silent music of an invisible orchestra. He looked ancient in my eyes. He had lost most of
the hair on the top of his head, and he wore thick glasses and had eyes that always looked tired.
But he must have been younger that I thought, since he lived with his mother and was not yet
married.
I met Old Lady Chong once, and that was enough. She had a peculiar smell, like a baby that had
done something in its pants, and her fingers felt like a dead person's, like an old peach I once
found in the back of the refrigerator: its skin just slid off the flesh when I picked it up.
I soon found out why Old Chong had retired from teaching piano. He was deaf. "Like
Beethoven!" he shouted to me: “We're both listening only in our head!" And he would start to
conduct his frantic silent sonatas.
Our lessons went like this. He would open the book and point to different things, explaining,
their purpose: "Key! Treble! Bass! No sharps or flats! So this is C major! Listen now and play
after me!"
And then he would play the C scale a few times, a simple cord, and then, as if inspired by an old
unreachable itch, he would gradually add more notes and running trills and a pounding bass until
the music was really something quite grand.
I would play after him, the simple scale, the simple chord, and then just play some nonsense that
sounded like a cat running up and down on top of garbage cans. Old Chong would smile and
applaud and say Very good! But now you must learn to keep time!"
So that's how I discovered that Old Chong's eyes were too slow to keep up with the wrong notes
I was playing. He went through the motions in half time. To help me keep rhythm, he stood
behind me and pushed down on my right shoulder for every beat. He balanced pennies on top of
my wrists so that I would keep them still as I slowly played scales and arpeggios. He had me
curve my hand around an apple and keep that shape when playing chords. He marched stiffly to
show me how to make each finger dance up and down, staccato, like an obedient little soldier.
He taught me all these things, and that was how I also learned I could be lazy and get away with
mistakes, lots of mistakes. If I hit the wrong notes because I hadn't practiced enough, I never
corrected myself, I just kept playing in rhythm. And Old Chong kept conducting his own private
reverie.
So maybe I never really gave myself a fair chance. I did pick up the basics pretty quickly, and I
might have become a good pianist at the young age. But I was so determined not to try, not to be
anybody different, and I learned to play only the most ear-splitting preludes, the most discordant
hymns.
Over the next year I practiced like this, dutifully in my own way. And then one day I heard my
mother and her friend Lindo Jong both after church, and I was leaning against a brick wall,
wearing a dress with stiff white petticoats. Auntie Lindo’s daughter, Waverly, who was my age,
was standing farther down the wall, about five feet away. We had grown up together and shared
all the closeness of two sisters, squabbling over crayons and dolls. In other words, for the most
part, we hated each other. I thought she was snotty. Waverly Jong had gained a certain amount of
fame as "Chinatown's Littlest Chinese Chess Champion."
"She bring home too many trophy." Auntie Lindo lamented that Sunday. "All day she play chess.
All day I have no time do nothing but dust off her winnings." She threw a scolding look at
Waverly, who pretended not to see her.
"You lucky you don't have this problem," Auntie Lindo said with a sigh to my mother.
And my mother squared her shoulders and bragged: "Our problem worser than yours. If we ask
Jing-mei wash dish, she hear nothing but music. It's like you can't stop this natural talent." And
right then I was determined to put a stop to her foolish pride.
A few weeks later Old Chong and my mother conspired to have me play in a talent show that
was to be held in the church hall. But then my parents had saved up enough to buy me a
secondhand piano, a black Wurlitzer spinet with a scarred bench. It was the showpiece of our
living room.
For the talent show I was to play a piece called "Pleading Child," from Schumann's Scenes From
Childhood. It was a simple, moody piece that sounded more difficult than it was. I was supposed
to memorize the whole thing. But I dawdled over it, playing a few bars and then cheating,
looking up to see what notes followed. I never really listened to what I was playing. I
daydreamed about being somewhere else, about being someone else.
The part I liked to practice best was the fancy curtsy: right foot out, touch the rose on the carpet
with a pointed foot, sweep to the side, bend left leg, look up, and smile.
My parents invited all the couples from their social club to witness my debut. Auntie Lindo and
Uncle Tin were there. Waverly and her two older brothers had also come. The first two rows
were filled with children either younger or older than I was. The littlest ones got to go first. They
recited simple nursery rhymes, squawked out tunes on miniature violins, and twirled hula hoops
in pink ballet tutus, and when they bowed or curtsied, the audience would sigh in unison,
"Awww, and then clap enthusiastically.
When my turn came, I was very confident. I remember my childish excitement. It was as if I
knew, without a doubt, that the prodigy side of me really did exist. I had no fear whatsoever, no
nervousness. I remember thinking, This is it! This is it! I looked out over the audience, at my
mother's blank face, my father's yawn, Auntie Lindo's stiff-lipped smile, Waverly's sulky
expression. I had on a white dress, layered with sheets of lace, and a pink bow in my Peter Pan
haircut. As I sat down, I envisioned people jumping to their feet and Ed Sullivan rushing up to
introduce me to everyone on TV.
And I started to play. Everything was so beautiful. I was so caught up in how lovely I looked that
I wasn't worried about how I would sound. So I was surprised when I hit the first wrong note.
And then I hit another and another. A chill started at the top of my head and began to trickle
down. Yet I couldn't stop playing, as though my hands were bewitched. I kept thinking my
fingers would adjust themselves back, like a train switching to the right track. I played this
strange jumble through to the end, the sour notes staying with me all the way.
When I stood up, I discovered my legs were shaking. Maybe I had just been nervous, and the
audience, like Old Chong had seen me go through the right motions and had not heard anything
wrong at all. I swept my right foot out, went down on my knee, looked up, and smiled. The room
was quiet, except fot Old Chong, who was beaming and shouting "Bravo! Bravo! Well done!"
By then I saw my mother's face, her stricken face. The audience clapped weakly, and I walked
back to my chair, with my whole face quivering as I tried not to cry, I heard a little boy whisper
loudly to his mother. "That was awful," and mother whispered "Well, she certainly tried."
And now I realized how many people were in the audience - the whole world, it seemed. I was
aware of eyes burning into my back. I felt the shame of my mother and father as they sat stiffly
through the rest of the show.
We could have escaped during intermission. Pride and some strange sense of honor must have
anchored my parents to their chairs. And so we watched it all. The eighteen-year-old boy with a
fake moustache who did a magic show and juggled flaming hoops while riding a unicycle. The
breasted girl with white make up who sang an aria from Madame Butterfly and got an honorable
mention. And the eleven-year-old boy who was first prize playing a tricky violin song that
sounded like a busy bee.
After the show the Hsus, the Jongs, and the St. Clairs, from the Joy Luck Club, came up to my
mother and father.
"Lots of talented kids," Auntie Lindo said vaguely, smiling broadly. "That was somethin' else,"
my father said, and I wondered if he was referring to me in a humorous way, or whether he even
remembered what I had done.
Waverly looked at me and shrugged her shoulders. "You aren't a genius like me," she said
matter-of-factly. And if I hadn't felt so bad, I would have pulled her braids and punched her
stomach.
But my mother's expression was what devastated me: a quiet, blank look that said she had lost
everything. I felt the same way, and everybody seemed now to be coming up, like gawkers at the
scene of an accident to see what parts were actually missing.
When we got on the bus to go home, my father was humming the busy-bee tune and my mother
kept silent. I kept thinking she wanted to wait until we got home before shouting at me. But
when my father unlocked the door to our apartment, my mother walked in and went straight to
the back, into the bedroom. No accusations, No blame. And in a way, I felt disappointed. I had
been waiting for her to start shouting, so that I could shout back and cry and blame her for all my
misery.
I had assumed that my talent-show fiasco meant that I would never have to play the piano again.
But two days later, after school, my mother came out of the kitchen and saw me watching TV.
"Four clock," she reminded me, as if it were any other day. I was stunned, as though she were
asking me to go through the talent-show torture again. I planted myself more squarely in front of
the TV.
"Turn off TV," she called from the kitchen five minutes later. I didn't budge. And then I decided,
I didn't have to do what mother said anymore. I wasn't her slave. This wasn't China. I had
listened to her before, and look what happened she was the stupid one.
She came out of the kitchen and stood in the arched entryway of the living room. "Four clock,"
she said once again, louder.
"I'm not going to play anymore," I said nonchalantly. "Why should I? I'm not a genius."
She stood in front of the TV. I saw that her chest was heaving up and down in an angry way.
"No!" I said, and I now felt stronger, as if my true self had finally emerged. So this was what had
been inside me all along.
"No! I won't!" I screamed. She snapped off the TV, yanked me by the arm and pulled me off the
floor. She was frighteningly strong, half pulling, half carrying me towards the piano as I kicked
the throw rugs under my feet. She lifted me up onto the hard bench. I was sobbing by now,
looking at her bitterly. Her chest was heaving even more and her mouth was open, smiling
crazily as if she were pleased that I was crying.
"You want me to be something that I'm not!" I sobbed. " I'll never be the kind of daughter you
want me to be!"
"Only two kinds of daughters," she shouted in Chinese. "Those who are obedient and those who
follow their own mind! Only one kind of daughter can live in this house. Obedient daughter!"
"Then I wish I weren't your daughter, I wish you weren't my mother," I shouted. As I said these
things I got scared. It felt like worms and toads and slimy things crawling out of my chest, but it
also felt good, that this awful side of me had surfaced, at last.
"Too late to change this," my mother said shrilly.
And I could sense her anger rising to its breaking point. I wanted see it spill over. And that's
when I remembered the babies she had lost in China, the ones we never talked about. "Then I
wish I'd never been born!" I shouted. " I wish I were dead! Like them."
It was as if I had said magic words. Alakazam!-her face went blank, her mouth closed, her arms
went slack, and she backed out of the room, stunned, as if she were blowing away like a small
brown leaf, thin, brittle, lifeless.
It was not the only disappointment my mother felt in me. In the years that followed, I failed her
many times, each time asserting my will, my right to fall short of expectations. I didn't get
straight A’s. I didn't become class president. I didn't get into Stanford. I dropped out of college.
Unlike my mother, I did not believe I could be anything I wanted to be, I could only be me.
And for all those years we never talked about the disaster at the recital or my terrible declarations
afterward at the piano bench. Neither of us talked about it again, as if it were a betrayal that was
now unspeakable. So I never found a way to ask her why she had hoped for something so large
that failure was inevitable.
And even worse, I never asked her about what frightened me the most: Why had she given up
hope? For after our struggle at the piano, she never mentioned my playing again. The lessons
stopped. The lid to the piano was closed shutting out the dust, my misery, and her dreams.
So she surprised me. A few years ago she offered to give me the piano, for my thirtieth birthday.
I had not played in all those years. I saw the offer as a sign of forgiveness, a tremendous burden
removed. "Are you sure?" I asked shyly. "I mean, won't you and Dad miss it?" "No, this your
piano," she said firmly. "Always your piano. You only one can play."
"Well, I probably can't play anymore," I said. "It's been years." "You pick up fast," my mother
said, as if she knew this was certain. "You have natural talent. You could be a genius if you want
to." "No, I couldn't." "You just not trying," my mother said. And she was neither angry nor sad.
She said it as if announcing a fact that could never be disproved. "Take it," she said.
But I didn't at first. It was enough that she had offered it to me. And after that, everytime I saw it
in my parents' living room, standing in front of the bay window, it made me feel proud, as if it
were a shiny trophy that I had won back.
Last week I sent a tuner over to my parent's apartment and had the piano reconditioned, for
purely sentimental reasons. My mother had died a few months before and I had been getting
things in order for my father a little bit at a time. I put the jewelry in special silk pouches. The
sweaters I put in mothproof boxes. I found some old Chinese silk dresses, the kind with little slits
up the sides. I rubbed the old silk against my skin, and then wrapped them in tissue and decided
to take them home with me.
After I had the piano tuned, I opened the lid and touched the keys. It sounded even richer that I
remembered. Really, it was a very good piano. Inside the bench were the same exercise notes
with handwritten scales, the same secondhand music books with their covers held together with
yellow tape.
I opened up the Schumann book to the dark little piece I had played at the recital. It was on the
left-hand page, "Pleading Child." It looked more difficult than I remembered. I played a few
bars, surprised at how easily the notes came back to me.
And for the first time, or so it seemed, I noticed the piece on the right-hand side, It was called
"Perfectly Contented." I tried to play this one as well. It had a lighter melody but with the same
flowing rhythm and turned out to be quite easy. "Pleading Child" was shorter but slower;
"Perfectly Contented" was longer but faster. And after I had played them both a few times, I
realized they were two halves of the same song.
(Taken from http://www.angelfire.com/ma/MyGuardianangels/index9.html)
Not For Sale
By: Judith Ortiz Cofer
El Arabe was what the Puerto Rican women called him. He sold them beautiful things
from his exotic homeland in the afternoons, at that hour when the day’s work is done and there is
a little time before the evening duties. He did not carry anything men would buy. His
merchandise, mostly linens, was impractical but exquisite. The bed covers were gorgeously
woven into oriental tales that he narrated to his customers in his halting Spanish. My mother
bought the Scheherazade1. It was expensive, but she desired it for my bed, since it was the year
when I was being denied everything by my father: no dating like other sixteen-year-olds (I was a
decent Puerto Rican senorita, not a wild, American teenager); no driver’s license (the streets of
Paterson, New Jersey, were too dangerous for an inexperienced driver – he would take me where
I needed to go); no end –of-the-school-year weekend trip with my junior class to Seaside Heights
(even though three teachers would be chaperoning us). No, no, no with a short Spanish “o.”
Final: no lingering vowels in my father’s pronouncements.
She knew that I could be brought out of my surliness, my seething anger at my father’s
constant vigilance, by a visit from the storytelling salesman. ON the days when I heard the
heavy footfall on the staircase announcing his coming, I would emerge from my room, where I
kept company only with my English-language books no one else in the house could read. Since I
was not allowed to linger at the drugstore with my high school classmates not to go out socially –
unless my father could be persuaded to let me after interrogations and arguments I had come to
dread – I had turned to reading in seclusion. Books kept me from going mad. The allowed me to
imagine my circumstances as romantic: some days I was an Indian princess living in a zenana, a
house of women, keeping myself pure, being trained for a brilliant future. Other days I was a
prisoner: Papillon, preparing myself for my great flight to freedom. When El Arable came to our
door, bearing his immense stack of bed linens on his shoulder, I ran to let him in. Mother brought
him a glass of cold water as he settled into a rocking char. I sat on the linoleum floor Indianstyle while he spread his merchandise in front of us. Sometimes he brought jewelry too. He
carried the rings and bracelets in a little red velvet bag he pulled out of his coat pocket. The day
he showed us the Scheherazade bedspread, he emptied the glittering contents of the velvet bag on
my lap, then he took my hand and fitted a gold ring with an immense green stone on my finger. It
was ornate and covered my finger up to the knuckle, scratching the tender skin in between
fingers. Feeling nervous, I laughed and tried to take it off. But he shook his head no. He said that
he wanted me to keep the ring on while he told me some of the stories woven on the bedspread.
It was a magic ring, he said, that would help me understand. My mother gave me a little frown
from the doorway behind El Arabe, meaning Be polite but give it back soon. El Arable settled
back to tell his stories. Every so often he would unfold another corner of the bedspread to
illustrate a scene.
1
Scheherazade is the storyteller from 1001 Arabian Nights, the story that Aladdin is taken from.
On a gold background with green threads running through it, glossy like the patina on the
dome at city hall, the weavers had put the seated figure of the storytelling woman among the
characters she had created. She seemed to be invisible to them. In each panel she sat slightly
behind the action in the posture of wisdom, which the salesman demonstrated: mouth parted and
arms extended toward her audience, like a Buddha or a sacred dancer. While Sinbad wields his
sword at a pirate, Scheherazade sits calmly in between them. She can be found on the street
corner, where Aladdin trades his new lamps for old. But he does not see her.
El Arabe spoke deliberately, but his Spanish was still difficult to understand. It was as if
his toungue had trouble with certain of our sound combinations. But he was patient. When he
saw that one of us had lost the thread of the story, he would begin again, sometimes at the
beginning.
This usually drove my mother out of the room, but I understood that these tales were one
continuous story to him. If broken, the pattern would be ruined. They had to be told all the way
through. I looked at him closely as he spoke. He appeared to be about my father’s age, but it
was hard to tell, because a thick beard covered most of his face. His eyes revealed his fatigue.
He was stooped from carrying his bundles from building to building, I assumed. No one seemed
to know where he lived or whether he had a family. But on the day of Scheherazade stories he
told me about his son. The subject seemed to arise naturally out of the last tale. The king who
beheaded his brides was captivated by the storytelling woman and spared her life. I felt uneasy
with this ending, though I had read it before, not trusting the gluttonous King Shahryar to keep
his word. And what would happened to Scheherazade when she ran out of stories? It was
always the same with these fairy tales: the plot was fascinating, but the ending was unsatisfactory
to me. “Happily ever after” was a loose knot tied on a valuable package.
El Arabe took the first payment on the bedspread from my mother who had, I knew,
gotten dollar bills out of her underwear drawer where she kept her “secret” little stash of money
in the foot of a nylon stocking. She probably thought that neither my father no I would have any
reason to look there. But in that hear of my seclusion, nothing was safe from my curiosity: if I
could not go out and explore the world, I would learn what I could from within the four walls.
Sometimes I was Anne Frank, and what little there was to discover from my keepers belonged by
rights to me.
She counted out ten dollars slowly into his hand. He opened his little notebook with
frayed pages. He wrote with a pencil: the full amount at the top, her name, the date, and “10.00”
with a flourish. She winced a little as she followed his numbers. It would take her a long time to
pay it off. She asked me if I really wanted it – three times. But she knew what it meant to me.
My mother left with the bedspread, explaining that she wanted to see how it would look
on my bed. El Arabe seemed reluctant to leave. He lit a slender, aromatic cigarette he took out
of a gold case with a little diamond in the middle. Then he repeated the story of Scheherazade’s
winning over of her husband. Though I was by now weary of the repetition, I listened politely.
It was then that he said that he had a son, a handsome young man who wanted very much to
come to America to take over the business. There was much money to be made. I nodded, not
really understanding why he was telling me all this.
But I fell under the spell of his words as he described a heroic vision of a handsome man
who rode thoroughbreds over a golden desert. Without my being aware of it, the afternoon
passed quickly. It caught me entirely by surprise when I heard the key turning in the front door
lock. I was really chagrined at being found out of my room by my father.
He walked in, smelling strongly of sweat and coffee from the factory where he was the
watchman. I never understood why sacks of unprocessed coffee beans had to be watched, but
that’s all I knew about his job. He walked in, looking annoyed and suspicious. He did not like
any interruption of his routines: he wanted to find my mother and me in our places when he came
home. If she had a friend drop by, Mother had to make sure the visit ended before he arrived. I
had stopped inviting my friends over after a while, since his silent hostility made them
uncomfortable. Long ago, when I was a little girl, he had spent hours every evening playing with
me and reading to me in Spanish. Now, since those activities no longer appealed to me, since I
wanted to spend time with other people, he showed no interest in me, except to say no to my
requests for permission to go out.
Mother tried to mediate between us by reminding me often of my father’s early affection.
She explained that teenage girls in Puerto Rico did not go without chaperones as I wanted to do.
They stayed home and helped their mothers and obeyed their fathers. Didn’t he give me
everything I needed?
I had felt furious at her absurd statements. They did not apply to me, or to the present
reality of my life in Paterson, New Jersey. I would work myself into a shouting frenzy. I would
scream out my protests that we were not living in some backward country where women were
slaves.
“Look,” I would point out of the window of our fifth-story apartment in a building at the
core of the city. “Do you see palm trees, any sand or blue water? All I see is concrete. We are in
the United States. I am an American citizen. I speak English better than Spanish and I am as old
as you were when you got married!” The arguments would end with her in tears and the heavy
blanket of silence falling over both of us. It was not use talking to him either. He had her to
comfort him for the unfairness of the twelve-hour days in a factory and for being too tired to do
anything else but read La Prensa in the evenings. I felt like an exile in the foreign country of my
parents’ house.
My father walked into the living room and immediately focused his eyes on the immense
ring on my finger. Without greeting the salesman, without acknowledging my mother who had
just returned to the room, he kept pointing at my hand. El Arabe stood up and bowed his head to
my father in a strange formal way. Then he said something very odd – something like I greet
you as a kinsman, the ring is a gift to you daughter from my son. What followed was utter
confusion. My father kept asking what? What? What? I struggled to my feet trying to remove
the ring from my finger, but it seemed to be stuck. My mother waved me into the kitchen where
we worked soap around the swollen finger. In silence we listened to the shouting match in the
living room. Both men seemed to be talking at once.
From what I could make out, El Arabe was proposing to my father that I be sold to him –
for a fair price – to be his son’s bride. This was necessary, since his son could not immigrate
quickly unless he married an American citizen. The old salesman was willing to bargain with
my father over what I was worth in this transaction. I heard figures, a listing of merchandise, a
certain number of cattle and horses his son could sell in their country for cash if that was what
my father preferred.
My father seemed to be choking. He could not break through the expert haggler’s
multilingual stream of offers and descriptions of family wealth. My mother pulled the ring off
my finger, scraping away some of the skin along with it. I tried not to cry out, but something in
my broke when I heard my father’s anguished scream of Not for sale! Not for sale! Persisting
until the salesman fell silent. My mother rushed the ring out to the living room while I tried to
regain my self-control. But my father’s hoarse voice repeating the one phrase echoed in my ears;
even after there was the sound of a door being shut and the dull, heavy footsteps of a burdened
man descending the stairs, I heard the pained protest.
Then my father came into the kitchen, where I was stnding at the sink, washing the blook
off my fingers. The ring had cut me deeply. He stood in silence and, unmoving in the doorway,
looked at me as if he had not seen me in a long time or just then for the first time. Then he asked
me in a soft voice if I was all right. I nodded, hiding my hand behind my back.
In the months that followed, my mother paid on her account at the door. El Arabe did not
come into our apartment again. My father leaned the word “yes” in English and practiced saying
it occasionally, though “no” remained NO in both languages and easier to say for a nonnative
speaker.
On my bed Scheherazade kept telling her stories, which I came to understand would
never end – as I had once feared – since it was in my voice that she spoke to me, placing my
dreams among hers, weaving them in.
(Taken from http://www.jstor.org/pss/4336755)
“Cold as Heaven”
By: Judith Ortiz Cofer
Before there is a breeze again
Before the cooling days of Lent, she may be
gone.
My grandmother asks me to tell her
Again about the snow.
We sit on her white bed
In this white room, while outside
The Caribbean sun winds up the world
Like an old alarm clock. I tell her
About the enveloping blizzard I lived
through
That made everything and everyone the
same;
How we lost ourselves in drifts so tall
We fell through our own footprints;
How wrapped like mummies in layers of
wool
That almost immobilized us, we could only
Take hesitant steps like toddlers
Toward food, warmth, shelter.
I talk winter real for her,
As she would once conjure for me to dream
At sweltering siesta time,
Cool stone castles in lands far north.
Her eyes wander to the window,
To the teeming scene of children
Pouring out of a yellow bus, then to the
bottle
Dripping minutes through a tube
Into her veins. When her eyes return to me,
I can see she’s waiting to hear more
About the purifying nature of ice,
How snow makes way for a body,
How you can make yourself an angel
By just lying down and waving your arms
As you do when you say
Good-bye.
(Taken from
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmM
ID/16982)
“Praise the Tortilla, Praise the Menudo,
Praise the Chorizo”
By: Ray Gonzalez
I praise the tortilla in honor of El Panzon,
Who hit me in school every day and made
me see
How the bruises on my arms looked like
The brown clouds on my mother’s tortillas.
I praise the tortilla because I know
They can fly into our hands like
Eager flesh of the one we love,
Those soft yearnings we delight in biting
As we tear the tortilla and wipe the plate
clean.
I praise the menudo as visionary food that it
is,
The tripas y posole tight flashes of color
We see as the red caldo smears across our
notebooks
Like a vision we have not had in years,
Our lives going down like the empty bowl
Of menudo exploding in our stomachs
With the chili piquin of our poetic dreams
I praise the chorizo and smear it
Across my face and hands,
The dayglow brown of it painting me
With the desire to find out
What happened to la familia,
Why the chorizo sizzled in the pan
And covered the house with a smell
Of childhood we will never have again,
The chorizo burrito hot in our hands,
As we ran out to play and show the vatos
It’s time to cut the chorizo,
Tell it like it is before la manteca runs down
Our chins and drips away.
(Taken from
http://www.chss.montclair.edu/~lorenzj/unis
inos/gonzalez-praisetortilla.pdf)
“Family Ties”
By: Jimmy Santiago Baca
Mountain barbecue.
They arrive, young cousins singly,
Oulder aunts and uncles in twos and threes,
Like trees. I play with a new generation
Of children, my hands in streambed silt
Of their lives, a scuba diver’s hands, dusting
Surface sand for buried treasure.
Freshly shaved and powdered faces
Of uncles and aunts surround taco
and tamale tables. Mounted elk head on
wall,
brass rearing horse cowboy clock
on fireplace mantle. Sons and daughters
converse round beer and whiskey table.
Tempers ignite on land grant issues.
Children scurry round my legs.
Old bow-legged men toss horseshoes on
lawn,
Other farmhands from Mexico sit on a
bench,
Broken lives repaired for this occasion.
I feel no love or family tie here. I rise
To go hiking, to find abandoned rock cabins
In mountains. We come to a grass clearing,
My wife rolls her jeans up past ankles,
Wades ice cold stream, and I barefooted,
Carry a son in each arm and follow.
We cannot afford a place like this.
At the party again, I eat bean and chile
Burrito, and after my third glass of rum,
We climb in the car and my wife drives
Us home. My sons sleep in the back,
Dream of the open clearing,
They are chasing each other with cattails
In the sunlit pasture, giggling,
As I stare out the window
At no trespassing signs white flashing past.
(Taken from
http://books.google.com/books?id=x8A3X
WOORoEC&printsec=frontcover&dq=jimm
y+santiago+baca&hl=en&ei=_tPwTdLCE6
Xw0gH_6bWhBA&sa=X&oi=book_result
&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CEAQ6AEw
AQ#v=onepage&q&f=false)
“For a Daughter Who Leaves”
By: Janice Mirikitani
More than gems in my comb box shaped by the
God of the Sea, I prize you, my daughter…
-Lady Otomo, 8th Century Japan
A woman weaves
Her daugher’s wedding
Slippers that will carry
Her steps into a new life.
The mother weeps alone
Into her jeweled sewing box
Slips red thread
Around its spool,
The same she used to stitch
Her daughter’s first silk jacket
Embroidered with turtles
That would bring luck, long life.
She remembers all the steps
Taken by her daughter’s
Unbound quick feet:
Dancing on the stones
Of the yard among yellow
Butterflies and white breasted sparrows.
And she grew, legs strong
Body long, mind
Independent.
Now she captures all eyes
With her hair combed smooth
And her hips gently
Swaying like bamboo.
The woman
Spins her thread
From the spool of her heart,
Knotted to her daughter’s
Departing
Wedding slippers.
(Taken from http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/for-a-daughter-who-leaves/)
Collection 3:
Decisions
Love in L. A.
By: Dagoberto Gilb
Jake slouched in a clot of near motionless traffic, in the peculiar gray of concrete, smog,
and early morning beneath the overpass of the Hollywood Freeway on Alvarado Street. He didn't
really mind because he knew how much worse it could be trying to make a left onto the onramp.
He certainly didn't do that every day of his life, and he'd assure anyone who'd ask that he never
would either. A steady occupation had its advantages and he couldn't deny thinking about that
too. He needed an FM radio in something better than this '58 Buick he drove. It would have
crushed velvet interior with electric controls for the L. A. summer, a nice warm heater and
defroster for the winter drives at the beach, a cruise control for those longer trips, mellow
speakers front and rear of course, windows that hum closed, snuffing out that nasty exterior noise
of freeways. The fact was that he'd probably have to change his whole style. Exotic colognes,
plush, dark nightclubs, mai tais and daiquiris, necklaced ladies in satin gowns, misty and sexy
like in a tequila ad. Jake could imagine lots of possibilities when he let himself, but
none that ended up with him pressed onto a stalled freeway.
Jake was thinking about this freedom of his so much that when he glimpsed its green
light he just went ahead and stared bye-bye to the steadily employed. When he turned his head
the same direction his windshield faced, it was maybe one second too late. He pounced the brake
pedal and steered the front wheels away from the tiny brake lights but the smack was
unavoidable. Just one second sooner and it would only have been close. One second more and
he'd be crawling up the Toyota's trunk. As it was, it seemed like only a harmless smack, much
less solid than the one against his back bumper.
Jake considered driving past the Toyota but was afraid the traffic ahead would make it
too difficult. As he pulled up against the curb a few car lengths ahead, it occurred to him that the
traffic might have helped him get away too. He slammed the car door twice to make sure it was
closed fully and to give himself another second more, then toured front and rear of his Buick for
damage on or near the bumpers. Not an impressionable scratch even in the chrome. He perked
up. Though the car's beauty was secondary to its ability to start and move, the body and paint
were clean except for a few minor dings. This stood out as of his few clearcut accomplishments
over the years.
Before he spoke to the driver of the Toyota, whose looks he could see might present him
with an added complication, he signaled to the driver of the car that hit him, still in his car and
stopped behind the Toyota, and waved his hands and shook his head to let the man know there
was no problem as far as he was concerned. The driver waved back and started his engine. "It
didn't even scratch my paint," Jake told her in that way of his. "So how you doin'? Any damage
to the car? I'm kinda hoping so, just so it takes a little more time and we can talk some. Or else
you can give me your phone number now and I won't have to lay my regular b. s. on you to get it
later."
He took her smile as a good sign and relaxed. He inhaled her scent like it was clean air
and straightened out his less than new but not unhip clothes.
"You've got Florida plates. You look like you must be Cuban."
"My parents are from Venezuela."
"My name's Jake." He held out his hand.
"Mariana."
They shook hands like she'd never done it before in her life.
"I really am sorry about hitting you like that." He sounded genuine. He fondled the wide
dimple near the cracked taillight. "It's amazing how easy it is to put a dent in these new cars.
They're so soft they might replace waterbeds soon." Jake was confused about how to proceed
with this. So much seemed so unlikely, but there was always possibility. "So maybe we should
go out to breakfast somewhere and talk it over."
"I don't eat breakfast."
"Some coffee then."
"Thanks, but I really can't."
"You're not married, are you? Not that that would matter that much to me. I'm an openminded kind a guy."
She was smiling. "I have to get to work."
"That sounds boring."
"I better get your driver's license," she said.
Jake nodded, disappointed. "One little problem," he said. "I didn't bring it. I just forgot it
this morning. I'm a musician," he exaggerated greatly, "and, well, I dunno, I left my wallet in the
pants I was wearing last night. If you have some paper and a pen I'll give you my address and all
that."
He followed her to the glove compartment side of her car.
"What if we don't report it to the insurance companies? I'll just get it fixed for you."
"I don't think my dad would let me do that."
"Your dad? It's not your car?"
"He bought it for me. And I live at home."
"Right." She was slipping away from him. He went back around to the back of her new
Toyota and looked over the damage again. There was the trunk lid, the bumper, a rear panel, a
taillight.
"You do have insurance?" she asked, suspicious, as she came around the back of the car.
"Oh yeah," he lied.
"I guess you better write the name of that down too."
He made up a last name and address and wrote down the name of an insurance company
an old girlfriend once belonged to. He considered giving a real phone number but went against
that idea and made one up.
"I act too," he lied to enhance the effect more. "Been in a couple of movies."
She smiled like a fan.
"So how about your phone number?" He was rebounding maturely. She gave it to him.
"Mariana, you are beautiful," he said in his most sincere voice.
"Call me," she said timidly.
Jake beamed. "We'll see you, Mariana," he said holding out his hand. Her
hand felt so warm and soft he felt like he'd been kissed.
Back in his car he took a moment or two to feel both proud and sad about
his performance. Then he watched the rear view mirror as Mariana pulled up
behind him. She was writing down the license plate numbers on his Buick,
ones that he'd taken off a junk because the ones that belonged to his had
expired so long ago. He turned the ignition key and revved the big engine and
clicked into drive. His sense of freedom swelled as he drove into the now moving
street traffic, though he couldn't stop the thought about that FM stereo
radio and crushed velvet interior and the new car smell that would even make
it better.
(Taken from http://share.ehs.uen.org/system/files/love%20in%20LA.pdf)
The Glass of Milk
Manuel Rojas
translated by William F. Colford
The sailor, who was leaning against the starboard rail, seemed to be waiting for
someone. In his left hand he held a bundle wrapped in a piece of white paper that
showed grease spots in several places; with the other hand he puffed on his pipe.
A thin young man came out from behind some freight crs, stopped a moment, looked
toward the sea, and then continued walking along the edge of the dock with his hands
in his pockets, unconcerned or lost in thought.
When he drew opposite the ship the sailor shouted to him in English:
"I say! Look here!"
The young man raised his head, and without stopping answered in the same language:
"Hello! What?"
"Are you hungry?"
There was a short silence, during which the youth seemed to be thinking; he even
took one step shorter than the others, as if he were going to stop. But finally, smiling
sadly at the seaman, he said, "No. I am not hungry. Thank you, sailor."
"Very well."
The sailor took his pipe from his mouth, spat, put the pipe between his lips again, and
looked away. The youth, ashamed that his appearance should arouse feelings of
charity, seemed to quicken his pace, as if he were afraid he might think better of his
negative answer.
A moment later an impressive tramp with blue eyes and a big, blond beard, who was
dressed out-landishly in ragged clothes and huge, broken shoes, walked in front of the
sailor. The latter, without calling him over first, shouted at him:
"Are you hungry?"
The question had not even been completed when the loafer, looking with gleaming
eyes at the package the sailor held in his hands, answered quickly:
"Yes, sir; I am very much hungry."
The sailor smiled. The package flew through the air and landed in the eager hands of
the hungry man, who did not even thank him. Opening the bundle, which was still
slightly warm, he sat down on the ground and rubbed his hands in glee as he saw its
contents. A dockside derelict may not know English, but he would never forgive
himself for not knowing enough to ask anyone who speaks that language for something
to eat.
The young man who had gone by a few minutes before witnessed the scene from
where he was standing a short distance away. He was hungry He had not eaten for
exactly three days, three long days. And more from timidity and shame than because
of his pride, he shrank from standing in front of steamer gangplanks at mealtime
waiting for the sailors’ generosity in order to get some package containing leftover
food or scraps of meat. He could never do that; he would never be able to do it. And
when, as in the recent incident, someone offered him his leftovers, he would decline
them heroically, but with regret, because refusing made him even hungrier.
For six days he had been wandering through the alleys and along the docks of that
port. He had been left there by an English steamer from Punta Arenas, the port where
he had jumped ship, abandoning his job as a cabin boy. He had spent a month in
Punta Arenas helping an Austrian crab fisherman in his work. On the first northbound
ship he had stowed away.
They found him the first day out, and sent him below to work as a stoker in the boiler
room. At the first large port the steamer touched they set him ashore, and there he
stayed like a package without a name and address, not knowing anyone, without a
penny in his pocket, and without knowing how to work at any trade.
While the steamer was still in port he could eat, but afterwards. . . . The huge city
rising beyond the alleyways lined with bars and cheap lodging houses did not attract
him; it seemed like slave quarters, without light or air, and without the open
grandeur of the sea: behind those high, straight walls people lived and died, stunned
by the sordid struggle.
He was possessed by the terrible obsession of the sea, which twists the calmest, most
orderly lives as a mighty arm bends a slender rod. Although quite young, he had
already made several voyages along the coasts of South America in different ships,
working at various jobs and tasks, all of which had practically no application on land.
After the ship left he kept on walking around, trusting to luck to find something just
to keep him going until he could get back to his familiar way of life; but he found
nothing. There was little activity at the port, and the few ships where there was work
didn’t sign him on.
The place was full of professional vagabonds wandering around, unemployed sailors
like himself who had jumped ship or were fugitives from the law; loafers resigned to
idleness, who kept alive somehow or other by begging or stealing, counting the days
like the beads of some grimy rosary, waiting for something extraordinary to happen,
or not waiting for anything—men of the strangest and most exotic races and
nationalities, even types in whose existence one does not believe until he has seen a
living example.
The next day, convinced that he could not last much longer, he decided to try any
means to get food. While walking along he came upon a ship that had come in the
night before and was loading wheat. A line of men kept walking back and forth across
a gangplank carrying heavy sacks on their shoulders from the freight cars up to the
hatches of the ship’s hold, where the stevedores took over. He stood there watching
for a while until he got up courage to speak to the foreman and ask for a job. He was
taken on, and quickly joined the long line of loaders.
During the early part of the day he worked well, but later he began to feel weak. As
he walked along with the load on his shoulders he felt dizzy, and would sway on the
gangplank when he looked down between the side of the ship and the wall of the dock
into the frightening chasm where the water, flecked with oil and covered with debris,
gurgled softly.
At lunchtime there was a short rest; and while some of the men went to eat in the
cheap taverns nearby and others ate what they had brought, he stretched out on the
ground, pretending not to be hungry.
He finished the day’s work completely exhausted, covered with sweat, and down to
his last ounce of strength. While the longshoremen were drifting away he sat down on
some large sacks, waiting for the foreman. When the last worker had left, he went up
to him; embarrassed and hesitant - though he did not tell him what the trouble was he asked if they could pay him right away, or if he could possibly have an advance on
what he had earned.
The foreman answered that it was customary to pay when the job was over, and that
it was still necessary to work the following day in order to finish loading the ship.
Another whole day! Moreover, they weren’t advancing a cent!
"But," the foreman told him, "if you need it I could lend you about forty cents . . .
that’s all I have."
The young man thanked him for the offer with a sorrowful smile, and went away.
Suddenly he was seized by a sharp sense of desperation. He was hungry, hungry,
hungry! He was so hungry that it doubled him up, just as a blow with a thick, heavy
whip might have done. He saw everything through a blue haze, and staggered like a
drunken man when he walked. Nevertheless, he would not have been able to moan or
cry out, for his suffering was neither acute nor oppressive; it wasn’t a pain, but a dull
ache, an exhausted feeling; it seemed to him that he was being crushed by a great
weight.
Suddenly he felt a kind of burning sensation in the pit of his stomach, and he stopped
walking. He kept bending down, down, slowly doubling up like an iron bar being bent
by force; he thought he was going to fall. At that moment, as if a window had been
opened before him, he saw his home and the countryside around it, his mother's face,
and the faces of his brothers and sisters: everything he loved and cherished appeared
and disappeared before his eyes, shut with sheer fatigue....
Then, little by little, the giddiness went away; and as his burning stomach gradually
cooled, he slowly straightened up. Finally he stood erect, breathing heavily. One
more hour and he would fall senseless to the ground.
He quickened his step, as if he were fleeing from a new attack of dizziness, and while
walking along he determined to go in and eat anywhere, without paying, ready to be
shamed, beaten, jailed, anything. The important thing was to eat, eat, eat. A
hundred times his mind kept repeating that word—eat, eat, eat—until the term lost all
meaning and left him with a feeling of burning emptiness in his head. He had no
intention of running away: he would say to the proprietor, "Senor, I was hungry,
hungry, hungry. . . and I have no money to pay. Do what you wish."
He reached the first city blocks, and in one of them found a dairy It was a bright,
clean little shop, full of small, marble-topped tables. Behind the counter stood a
blond lady with a spotless white apron.
He chose that store. The street had little traffic. He could have eaten in one of the
cheap taverns near the dock, but they were always full of people drinking and
gambling.
In the dairy there was only one patron. He was a little old man with glasses, with his
nose buried in the pages of a newspaper. He seemed motionless, reading there, as if
he were glued to the chair. On his table was a half-empty glass of milk.
The young man walked up and down on the sidewalk, waiting for him to get out, little
by little he was beginning to feel that burning sensation in his stomach again. He
waited five, ten, as much as fifteen minutes. Tired, he stood to one side of the door;
from there he looked harshly at the old man.
What the devil could he be reading so intently! He finally came to imagine that the
man was an acquaintance who knew his intentions and had set out to frustrate them.
He felt like going in and saying something rude to make him leave—an insult, or a
sentence that would make him understand that a person had no right to sit there
reading for such a small purchase.
Finally the patron finished his reading—or at least interrupted it. In one swallow he
drank down the rest of the milk in the glass, got up slowly, paid his bill, walked over
to the door, and went out. He was a little man, bent with age, who looked like a
carpenter or a painter. As soon as he was in the street he adjusted his glasses, stuck
his nose in the newspaper again, and walked off slowly, stopping every ten steps to
read more carefully.
The young man waited until he was out of sight, and then went in. For a moment he
stood at the door, trying to decide where to sit down; finally he picked out a table
and went toward it. Halfway there he decided against it, stepped back, bumped into
a chair, and then sat down at a corner table.
The lady came over, wiped the table top with a cloth, and with a gentle voice in
which there was a trace of a Castilian accent, asked him "What will you have?"
Without looking at her he answered, "A glass of milk."
"Large?"
"Yes, large."
"Just milk?"
"Is there any sponge cake?"
"No, just vanilla wafers."
"All right, vanilla wafers."
When the lady turned away he rubbed his hands on his knees in cheerful anticipation,
like someone who feels cold and is about to have a hot drink.
The lady returned and placed before him a big glass of milk and a plateful of vanilla
cookies; then she went back to her place behind the counter.
His first impulse was to drink down the milk in one gulp and then eat the cookies, but
immediately he thought better of it; he sensed that the woman’s eyes were fixed
upon him, watching him curiously. He did not dare to look at her it seemed to him
that if he did so she would become aware of his frame of mind and his shameful
intentions, and he would have to get up and leave without tasting what he had
ordered.
Slowly he picked up a vanilla wafer, dipped it in the milk, and took a bite; he drank a
sip of milk and felt the burning sensation, which had returned to his stomach,
diminish and disappear. But at once the reality of his desperate situation rose before
him, and something hot and clutching rose from his heart to his throat. He realized
that he was going to sob, to sob loudly; and although he knew the lady was looking at
him he could not choke back or undo that fiery knot which was growing tighter and
tighter. He fought it off and as he did so he went on eating rapidly, fearfully, afraid
that weeping might keep him from eating.
When he finished the milk and cookies his eyes clouded over; something warm rolled
down his nose and fell into the glass. A terrible sobbing shook him from head to foot.
He rested his head on his hands, and for a long time he wept: he wept with sorrow,
with rage, with a longing to weep as though he had never wept before.
He was bent over, weeping, when he felt that a hand was stroking his tired head and
a woman’s voice with a soft Castilian accent was saying: "Cry, my son; cry...."
A new wave of weeping flooded his eyes with tears, and he cried as forcefully as he
had at first, but now not with bitterness but with joy, as he felt a great coolness flood
through him, putting out that hot something that had clutched his throat. While he
wept it seemed to him that his life and his feelings were being cleansed like a glass
beneath a stream of water, and were regaining the brightness and firm texture of
other days. When the spell of weeping passed and he was calm again, he wiped his
eyes and face with his handkerchief. He raised his head and looked at the lady, but
she was no longer looking at him: she was looking out into the street at some faraway point, and her face was sad.
In front of him on the table was a fresh glass of milk and another plate heaped high
with wafers. He ate slowly, without thinking about anything, as if nothing had
happened, as if he were in his own house and his mother were that lady behind the
counter. When he finished, it had already grown dark and the store was lighted by an
electric bulb. He sat there awhile, thinking about what he would say to the woman
when he went out, but nothing appropriate occurred to him.
Finally he rose and said simply, "Thank you very much, senora: good-bye."
"Good-bye, my son," she said.
He went out. The wind from the sea cooled his face, still warm from weeping. He
walked aimlessly for a while, and then went down a street that led to the docks. It
was a lovely evening, and huge stars were beginning to shine in the summer sky.
He thought of the blond lady who had treated him so generously, forming plans to
repay her and make it up to her in some worthy way when he had money; but these
thoughts of gratitude vanished with the warmth of his face until not one was left, and
the recent events faded away and became lost in the recesses of his past life.
Suddenly he was surprised to find himself singing something in a soft voice. He
straightened up joyfully, and strode along with vigor and determination. He reached
the shore and walked up and down buoyantly, feeling himself reborn, as if his
scattered inner forces had been reassembled and consolidated. Then the fatigue from
his work began to rise in his legs with a slow tingling sensation, and he sat down on a
pile of sacks.
He looked at the sea. The lights from the dock and from the ships shone over the
water in a red-gold band, shimmering softly. He stretched out on his back, looking up
at the sky for a long while. He did not feel like thinking, or singing, or speaking he
felt alive, and that was all.
And he dropped off to sleep, with his face turned toward the sea ….
(Taken from http://neptune.esc.k12.in.us/socratic/resources/TheGlassofMilk.html)
Games at Twilight
Anita Desai
It was still too hot to play outdoors. They had had their tea, they had been washed and had
their hair brushed, and after the long day of confinement in the house that was not cool but at
least a protection from the sun, the children strained to get out. Their faces were red and bloated
with the effort, but their mother would not open the door, everything was still curtained and
shuttered in a way that stifled the children, made them feel that their lungs were stuffed with
cotton wool and their noses with dust and if they didn’t burst out into the light and see the sun
and feel the air, they would choke.
“Please, ma, please,” they begged. “We’ll play in the veranda and porch—we won’t go a
step out of the porch.”
“You will, I know you will, and then——”
“No—we won’t, we won’t,” they wailed so horrendously that she actually let down the
bolt of the front door so that they burst out like seeds from a crackling, overripe pod into the
veranda, with such wild, maniacal yells that she retreated to her bath and the shower of talcum
powder and the fresh sari that were to help her face the summer evening.
They faced the afternoon. It was too hot. Too bright. The white walls of the veranda
glared stridently in the sun. The bougainvillea hung about it, purple and magenta, in livid
balloons. The garden outside was like a tray made of beaten brass, flattened out on the red gravel
and the stony soil in all shades of metal—aluminum, tin, copper, and brass. No life stirred at this
arid time of day—the birds still drooped, like dead fruit, in the papery tents of the trees; some
squirrels lay limp on the wet earth under the garden tap. The outdoor dog lay stretched as if dead
on the veranda mat, his paws and ears and tail all reaching out like dying travelers in search of
water. He rolled his eyes at the children—two white marbles rolling in the purple sockets,
begging for sympathy—and attempted to lift his tail in a wag but could not. It only twitched and
lay still.
Then, perhaps roused by the shrieks of the children, a band of parrots suddenly fell out of
the eucalyptus tree, tumbled frantically in the still, sizzling air, then sorted themselves out into
battle formation and streaked away across the white sky.
The children, too, felt released. They too began tumbling, shoving, pushing against each
other, frantic to start. Start what? Start their business. The business of the children’s day which
is—play.
“Let’s play hide-and-seek.”
“Who’ll be It?”
“You be It.”
“Why should I? You be——”
“You’re the eldest——”
“That doesn’t mean——”
The shoves became harder. Some kicked out. The motherly Mira intervened. She pulled
the boys roughly apart. There was a tearing sound of cloth, but it was lost in the heavy panting
and angry grumbling, and no one paid attention to the small sleeve hanging loosely off a
shoulder.
“Make a circle, make a circle!” she shouted, firmly pulling and pushing till a kind of
vague circle was formed. “Now clap!” she roared, and, clapping, they all chanted in melancholy
unison: “Dip, dip, dip—my blue ship——” and every now and then one or the other saw he was
safe by the way his hands fell at the crucial moment—palm on palm, or back of hand on palm—
and dropped out of the circle with a yell and a jump of relief and jubilation.
Raghu was It. He started to protest, to cry “You cheated—Mira cheated—Anu cheated—
—” but it was too late, the others had all already streaked away. There was no one to hear when
he called out, “Only in the veranda—the porch—Ma said—Ma said to stay in the porch!” No
one had stopped to listen, all he saw were their brown legs flashing through the dusty shrubs,
scrambling up brick walls, leaping over compost heaps and hedges, and then the porch stood
empty in the purple shade of the bougainvillea, and the garden was as empty as before; even the
limp squirrels had whisked away, leaving everything gleaming, brassy, and bare.
Only small Manu suddenly reappeared, as if he had dropped out of an invisible cloud or
from a bird’s claws, and stood for a moment in the center of the yellow lawn, chewing his finger
and near to tears as he heard Raghu shouting, with his head pressed against the veranda wall,
“Eighty-three, eighty-five, eighty-nine, ninety . . .” and then made off in a panic, half of him
wanting to fly north, the other half counseling south. Raghu turned just in time to see the flash of
his white shorts and the uncertain skittering of his red sandals, and charged after him with such a
bloodcurdling yell that Manu stumbled over the hosepipe, fell into its rubber coils, and lay there
weeping, “I won’t be It—you have to find them all—all—All!”
“I know I have to, idiot,” Raghu said, superciliously kicking him with his toe. “You’re
dead,” he said with satisfaction, licking the beads of perspiration off his upper lip, and then
stalked off in search of worthier prey, whistling spiritedly so that the hiders should hear and
tremble.
Ravi heard the whistling and picked his nose in a panic, trying to find comfort by
burrowing the finger deep—deep into that soft tunnel. He felt himself too exposed, sitting on an
upturned flowerpot behind the garage. Where could he burrow? He could run around the garage
if he heard Raghu come—around and around and around—but he hadn’t much faith in his short
legs when matched against Raghu’s long, hefty, hairy footballer legs. Ravi had a frightening
glimpse of them as Raghu combed the hedge of crotons and hibiscus, trampling delicate ferns
underfoot as he did so. Ravi looked about him desperately, swallowing a small ball of snot in his
fear.
The garage was locked with a great heavy lock to which the driver had the key in his
room, hanging from a nail on the wall under his workshirt. Ravi had peeped in and seen him still
sprawling on his string cot in his vest and striped underpants, the hair on his chest and the hair in
his nose shaking with the vibrations of his phlegm-obstructed snores. Ravi had wished he were
tall enough, big enough to reach the key on the nail, but it was impossible, beyond his reach for
years to come. He had sidled away and sat dejectedly on the flowerpot. That at least was cut to
his own size.
But next to the garage was another shed with a big green door. Also locked. No one even
knew who had the key to the lock. That shed wasn’t opened more than once a year, when Ma
turned out all the old broken bits of furniture and rolls of matting and leaking buckets, and the
white anthills were broken and swept away and Flit sprayed into the spider webs and rat holes so
that the whole operation was like the looting of a poor, ruined, and conquered city. The green
leaves of the door sagged. They were nearly off their rusty hinges. The hinges were large and
made a small gap between the door and the walls—only just large enough for rats, dogs, and,
possibly, Ravi to slip through.
Ravi had never cared to enter such a dark and depressing mortuary of defunct household
goods seething with such unspeakable and alarming animal life but, as Raghu’s whistling grew
angrier and sharper and his crashing and storming in the hedge wilder, Ravi suddenly slipped off
the flowerpot and through the crack and was gone. He chuckled aloud with astonishment at his
own temerity so that Raghu came out of the hedge, stood silent with his hands on his hips,
listening, and finally shouted, “I heard you! I’m coming! Got you——” and came charging
round the garage only to find the upturned flowerpot, the yellow dust, the crawling of white ants
in a mud hill against the closed shed door—nothing. Snarling, he bent to pick up a stick and went
off, whacking it against the garage and shed walls as if to beat out his prey.
Ravi shook, then shivered with delight, with self-congratulation. Also with fear. It was
dark, spooky in the shed. It had a muffled smell, as of graves. Ravi had once got locked into the
linen cupboard and sat there weeping for half an hour before he was rescued. But at least that had
been a familiar place, and even smelled pleasantly of starch, laundry, and, reassuringly, of his
mother. But the shed smelled of rats, anthills, dust, and spider webs. Also of less definable, less
recognizable horrors. And it was dark. Except for the white-hot cracks along the door, there was
no light. The roof was very low. Although Ravi was small, he felt as if he could reach up and
touch it with his fingertips. But he didn’t stretch. He hunched himself into a ball so as not to
bump into anything, touch or feel anything. What might there not be to touch him and feel him as
he stood there, trying to see in the dark? Something cold, or slimy—like a snake. Snakes! He
leapt up as Raghu whacked the wall with his stick—then, quickly realizing what it was, felt
almost relieved to hear Raghu, hear his stick. It made him feel protected.
But Raghu soon moved away. There wasn’t a sound once his footsteps had gone around
the garage and disappeared. Ravi stood frozen inside the shed. Then he shivered all over.
Something had tickled the back of his neck. It took him a while to pick up the courage to lift his
hand and explore. It was an insect—perhaps a spider—exploring him. He squashed it and
wondered how many more creatures were watching him, waiting to reach out and touch him, the
stranger.
There was nothing now. After standing in that position—his hand still on his neck,
feeling the wet splodge of the squashed spider gradually dry—for minutes, hours, his legs began
to tremble with the effort, the inaction. By now he could see enough in the dark to make out the
large solid shapes of old wardrobes, broken buckets, and bedsteads piled on top of each other
around him. He recognized an old bathtub—patches of enamel glimmered at him, and at last he
lowered himself onto its edge.
He contemplated slipping out of the shed and into the fray. He wondered if it would not
be better to be captured by Raghu and be returned to the milling crowd as long as he could be in
the sun, the light, the free spaces of the garden, and the familiarity of his brothers, sisters, and
cousins. It would be evening soon. Their games would become legitimate. The parents would sit
out on the lawn on cane basket chairs and watch them as they tore around the garden or gathered
in knots to share a loot of mulberries or black, teeth-splitting jamun from the garden trees. The
gardener would fix the hosepipe to the water tap, and water would fall lavishly through the air to
the ground, soaking the dry yellow grass and the red gravel and arousing the sweet, the
intoxicating scent of water on dry earth—that loveliest scent in the world. Ravi sniffed for a
whiff of it. He half-rose from the bathtub, then heard the despairing scream of one of the girls as
Raghu bore down upon her. There was the sound of a crash, and of rolling about in the bushes,
the shrubs, then screams and accusing sobs of “I touched the den——” “You did not——” “I
did——” “You liar, you did not” and then a fading away and silence again.
Ravi sat back on the harsh edge of the tub, deciding to hold out a bit longer. What fun if
they were all found and caught—he alone left unconquered! He had never known that sensation.
Nothing more wonderful had ever happened to him than being taken out by an uncle and bought
a whole slab of chocolate all to himself, or being flung into the soda man’s pony cart and driven
up to the gate by the friendly driver with the red beard and pointed ears. To defeat Raghu—that
hirsute, hoarse-voiced football champion—and to be the winner in a circle of older, bigger,
luckier children—that would be thrilling beyond imagination. He hugged his knees together and
smiled to himself almost shyly at the thought of so much victory, such laurels.
There he sat smiling, knocking his heels against the bathtub, now and then getting up and
going to the door to put his ear to the broad crack and listening for sounds of the game, the
pursuer and the pursued, and then returning to his seat with the dogged determination of the true
winner, a breaker of records, a champion.
It grew darker in the shed as the light at the door grew softer, fuzzier, turned to a kind of
crumbling yellow pollen that turned to yellow fur, blue fur, gray fur. Evening. Twilight. The
sound of water gushing, falling. The scent of earth receiving water, slaking its thirst in great
gulps and releasing that green scent of freshness, coolness. Through the crack Ravi saw the long
purple shadows of the shed and the garage lying still across the yard. Beyond that, the white
walls of the house. The bougainvillea had lost its lividity, hung in dark bundles that quaked and
twittered and seethed with masses of homing sparrows. The lawn was shut off from his view.
Could he hear the children’s voices? It seemed to him that he could. It seemed to him that he
could hear them chanting, singing, laughing. But what about the game? What had happened?
Could it be over? How could it when he was still not found?
It then occurred to him that he could have slipped out long ago, dashed across the yard to
the veranda, and touched the “den.” It was necessary to do that to win. He had forgotten. He had
only remembered the part of hiding and trying to elude the seeker. He had done that so
successfully, his success had occupied him so wholly, that he had quite forgotten that success
had to be clinched by that final dash to victory and the ringing cry of “Den!”
With a whimper he burst through the crack, fell on his knees, got up, and stumbled on
stiff, benumbed legs across the shadowy yard, crying heartily by the time he reached the veranda
so that when he flung himself at the white pillar and bawled, “Den! Den! Den!” his voice broke
with rage and pity at the disgrace of it all, and he felt himself flooded with tears and misery.
Out on the lawn, the children stopped chanting. They all turned to stare at him in
amazement. Their faces were pale and triangular in the dusk. The trees and bushes around them
stood inky and sepulchral, spilling long shadows across them. They stared, wondering at his
reappearance, his passion, his wild animal howling. Their mother rose from her basket chair and
came toward him, worried, annoyed, saying, “Stop it, stop it, Ravi. Don’t be a baby. Have you
hurt yourself?” Seeing him attended to, the children went back to clasping their hands and
chanting, “The grass is green, the rose is red. . . .”
But Ravi would not let them. He tore himself out of his mother’s grasp and pounded
across the lawn into their midst, charging at them with his head lowered so that they scattered in
surprise. “I won, I won, I won,” he bawled, shaking his head so that the big tears flew. “Raghu
didn’t find me. I won, I won——”
It took them a minute to grasp what he was saying, even who he was. They had quite
forgotten him. Raghu had found all the others long ago. There had been a fight about who was to
be It next. It had been so fierce that their mother had emerged from her bath and made them
change to another game. Then they had played another and another. Broken mulberries from the
tree and eaten them. Helped the driver wash the car when their father returned from work.
Helped the gardener water the beds till he roared at them and swore he would complain to their
parents. The parents had come out, taken up their positions on the cane chairs. They had begun to
play again, sing and chant. All this time no one had remembered Ravi. Having disappeared from
the scene, he had disappeared from their minds. Clean.
“Don’t be a fool,” Raghu said roughly, pushing him aside, and even Mira said, “Stop
howling, Ravi. If you want to play, you can stand at the end of the line,” and she put him there
very firmly.
The game proceeded. Two pairs of arms reached up and met in an arc. The children
trooped under it again and again in a lugubrious circle, ducking their heads and intoning
“The grass is green,
The rose is red;
Remember me
When I am dead, dead, dead, dead . . .”
And the arc of thin arms trembled in the twilight, and the heads were bowed so sadly, and
their feet tramped to that melancholy refrain so mournfully, so helplessly, that Ravi could not
bear it. He would not follow them, he would not be included in this funereal game. He had
wanted victory and triumph—not a funeral. But he had been forgotten, left out, and he would not
join them now. The ignominy of being forgotten—how could he face it? He felt his heart go
heavy and ache inside him unbearably. He lay down full length on the damp grass, crushing his
face into it, no longer crying, silenced by a terrible sense of his insignificance.
(Taken from
http://www.nexuslearning.net/books/Elements_of_lit_Course6/20th%20Century/Collection%201
4/GamesatTwilight.htm)
“The Road Not Taken”
By: Robert Frost
“Brown Penny”
By: William Butler Yeats
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
I WHISPERED, 'I am too young,'
And then, 'I am old enough';
Wherefore I threw a penny
To find out if I might love.
'Go and love, go and love, young man,
If the lady be young and fair.'
Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,
I am looped in the loops of her hair.
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
(Taken from
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmM
ID/15717)
O love is the crooked thing,
There is nobody wise enough
To find out all that is in it,
For he would be thinking of love
Till the stars had run away
And the shadows eaten the moon.
Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,
One cannot begin it too soon.
(Taken from
http://www.csun.edu/~hceng029/yeats/yeats
poems/BrownPenny)
”Hanging Fire”
By Audre Lorde
I am fourteen
and my skin has betrayed me
the boy I cannot live without
still sucks his thumb
in secret
how come my knees are
always so ashy
what if I die
before morning
and momma's in the bedroom
with the door closed.
I have to learn how to dance
in time for the next party
my room is too small for me
suppose I die before graduation
they will sing sad melodies
but finally
tell the truth about me
There is nothing I want to do
and too much
that has to be done
and momma's in the bedroom
with the door closed.
Nobody even stops to think
about my side of it
I should have been on Math Team
my marks were better than his
why do I have to be
the one
wearing braces
I have nothing to wear tomorrow
will I live long enough
to grow up
and momma's in the bedroom
with the door closed.
(Taken from
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/171
288)
“We Wear the Mask”
By: Paul Laurence Dunbar
WE wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.
Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.
We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!
(Taken from
http://www.potw.org/archive/potw8.html)