Little Boy Blues (5 page)

“They’re not—no, I don’t.”

For a moment she just stared at me blankly, a tiny torso gripped in one hand, a tiny hairbrush gripped in the other. “Mama said you had a lot.”

I paused, trying to think of an answer, and then I saw her rise and I knew what was coming next. She would go and get her mother from the beauty parlor in the front of the house and bring down upon my head the whole adult apparatus of questions and answers to “sort this whole thing out,” as my teacher at the new school was fond of saying when no one stepped up to confess. And so I panicked. I said the first thing that came into my mind, just to keep talking, to keep her in the room with me. “I’m just saying—I don’t know who told her that, but they were wrong. They’re not dolls. They’re marionettes,” and as soon as I said it, I felt tired, sick of this explanation, and sick of doing anything
so strange that I had to be constantly explaining myself to people.

“They’re what?”

I was surprised to discover that she was interested, or at least interested enough to listen to my explanation and not go and get her mother. So I just kept talking, saying more than I’d intended just to hold her there, sitting across from me. Finally she got bored and thrust Ken back into my hands.

“He needs his jacket on,” she said irritably. I didn’t mind. I was out of danger. I didn’t even care that she made me keep playing Barbie until my aunt called me home for supper an hour later.

“Sugar, go help your aunt. Melita, I told you to call me when you wanted help.”

Aunt Melita was almost to the picnic table carrying a tray with a pitcher of tea and four glasses filled with ice.

“It wasn’t any trouble,” she said.

Uncle Tom drove up a few minutes later with the watermelon. We were waiting for him to come back from the kitchen with a knife when my mother said, “Daddy used to love watermelon. Mama would send one up to the icehouse in the morning and in the afternoon she’d get one of the colored boys to go get it, and then they’d call Daddy at the store and tell him. The only way you could get Daddy home from that drugstore in the middle of the day was to tell him you had a watermelon.”

“Papa did love watermelon,” my aunt said. I thought it was odd that my mother called her father Daddy and Aunt Melita always called him Papa, like they had two different fathers.

We were almost through with the watermelon—Mother cautioning me every other bite about swallowing the seeds—when she said, “I know I’m not even going to want to think about eating
supper after this. We should’ve thought of this earlier.” She put her fork down—I wondered why grown-ups liked to eat watermelon with a fork—and went on: “I just don’t know why some people eat so much.” Even I knew she was talking about my uncle, who had a potbelly that hung over his pants.

“Well, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with watermelon,” my aunt said.

“You know as well as I do the Bible warns us against gluttony,” Mother said, reaching for her tea.

“Can I have some more?” I asked.

“Yes, you can,” my uncle said enthusiastically. “Not going to hurt a skinny little boy like you.”

“Tom just thought he was doing something nice we could all enjoy,” my aunt said.

“Oh, Melita, I’m not criticizing Tom. He can eat whatever he wants to eat. I was just making an observation. Honey, you’re way too sensitive. You can’t be like that. You’ll have people worrying about every little thing they say around you. If I can’t make a simple comment without you getting upset, then we can’t talk about anything.” She frowned and rattled the ice in her glass. “Other sisters talk. I don’t see why we can’t.” She turned to me. “Did you know that when President Kennedy was a boy, his father would gather the family around at suppertime, and quiz them about current events?” I knew what current events were from
My Weekly Reader
. I wondered if President Kennedy ever sat around in his wet bathing suit.

“Oh lookee,” Mother said. “There’s a kitty cat.”

“My kitty cat.”

“Your kitty cat. Since when did you get a kitty?”

“That’s Milk Whiskers.”

“Milk Whiskers. That’s a funny name for a cat.” At home we had a parakeet named Pretty Boy. Pretty Boy had originally been named Orville, after Orville Wright, until we went away for two weeks to visit my cousins in Ohio and my mother had sent the parakeet to stay with her friend Ethel. When we came back, Ethel had renamed the parakeet Pretty Boy. I had complained, because Orville had been my idea and I thought it was funny, but my mother told me it was too late to change back because it would just confuse the bird.

“He’s big, isn’t he?” Mother said. “Where did he come from?”

“He just showed up one day, and we kept him, and I named him Milk Whiskers.”

She shook her head. “And where is Mr. Whiskers going to live when you come back home? You know we can’t have a cat.”

“Milk Whiskers. He’s going to stay here. He’s our cat.” Mother watched the cat bat at a june bug in the grass. “I don’t know why, but I just never had any use for cats.”

Once, when I was four and Mother and Daddy were still living together more often than they lived apart, the luxury of two incomes emboldened her to hire a cook who also watched me during the day. All I remember from that interlude was the sugar and butter sandwiches the cook prepared for me, my inability to fall asleep when she made me take a nap every afternoon and the intense suspense of waiting late every afternoon with my head on the armrest of the sofa closest to the front door, where I could stare at the parking lot in front of the apartments, waiting for a sight of the big green Plymouth to turn in, which was my signal to bolt through the screen door—it was the one time all day when I
got away with slamming that door—and dashing up the sidewalk to hurl myself into my mother’s arms.

Catherine, the cook, didn’t last long. After her abrupt departure, my mother interrogated me.

“Have you been telling stories?”

“No’m.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes’m,” I said, sounding entirely too tentative. To my everlasting confusion, my mother employed an overlapping lexicon devoted to the subject of lying. There were fibs, white lies, stories and outright lies. Fibs and white lies were minor sins, lies were the worst, and stories could be either. To further confuse the issue, the accused, usually me, could be conflated with his sin: “You’re a lie.” Even candor fell under the heading of lying in my mother’s eyes. When I told a lady in my uncle’s church, “Ooh, Miss Agnes, you sure are fat,” a fact often spoken of in our household, I was accused of making up stories.

“That’s not what Catherine said.”

I was stumped. I liked Catherine, except when she made me take a nap (especially after the nap that earned me a whipping from my mother, who was furious when she found I’d eaten two rows of chenille buttons off the bedspread one especially sleepless afternoon: I had been a rabbit and the bedspread was a cabbage patch). “I didn’t tell a lie.”

“So why did you say that I didn’t like her cooking?” Then I remembered. It was a week or so before. Catherine had tried to get me to eat congealed salad, and I put up a fight that ended with my saying that my mother didn’t like Catherine’s cooking either.

“She said she quit because she didn’t want to work for anyone
who didn’t like what she did. She said you said I didn’t like her cooking.”

“I heard you tell Daddy.”

“Honey, I never did any such thing.”

“You said she put too much salt in the butter beans.”

“Oh well, that. That’s not the same thing.”

“You said she was no Tina.”

“Honey, Tina was a treasure. Mama used to say she’d never seen a better cook. That doesn’t mean I didn’t think Catherine could cook, too.”

“Can’t you tell her that?”

“Oh, it’s too late for that. Nigras today are just sensitive as they can be about every little thing. Catherine was one of those touchy ones. You’ve run her off for good.”

“I didn’t mean it.”

“I just hope we’ve learned a lesson from this. You have to be very careful what you say to people. You don’t want to hurt people’s feelings, do you?”

“No’m.”

“You know how you’ve been working on talking too loud? Well, now I want you to work on being quiet and being very careful about what you say to people. Don’t always say everything you know. Have I ever told you how quiet my daddy was? He was very reserved at all times. I wish you could have known him.”

“Yes’m.” I relaxed a little, knowing now that I wasn’t going to get a spanking.

“So can you stay home and do the cooking and be with me?”

“No, honey, I wish I could, but Mommy has to teach school. You can stay with Tom and Melita.”

“But I want to stay with you.”

“I know you do, and I do too, but I just can’t make it happen.” She gave me a funny look. “Is that what this was all about?”

By the time I turned ten, I had lost interest in putting on shows with my marionettes, preferring to work with them alone on plots that I improvised as I went along. Ultimately boredom, not necessity, became the mother of my invention, leading to odd scenarios starring the cowgirl, the wolf and the minstrel boy. There was no intent in these inventions, and hardly any volition. I felt, rather, as though I were peering down, like some sort of minor god, and merely observing the marionettes in their off-hours, when they talked among themselves.

It was around this time that my mother mounted her campaign to make me more of a regular boy. (At church I overheard another woman say something to Mother about her special son. “Oh, no,” she replied, “he’s just a regular boy.”) She signed me up for the Cub Scouts. She bought me a baseball glove and paid to have a basketball hoop installed in the yard behind our apartment. “You know your father went to college on a football scholarship, don’t you?” she often reminded me. Marionettes were not part of the regular-boy package, although as soon as they began to gather dust, I got the lecture about not being a quitter. In time, I discovered that the immediate subject of these lectures was not the issue. Don’t give up the piano, don’t abandon your old friends, when are you going to give me a puppet show—it didn’t matter what the subject was. What mattered was that my mother hated change, especially in me. But that took years to figure out. When I was ten, I merely suspected that she thought of me as a sort of apprentice failure following in my father’s footsteps. That
bothered me not because I agreed with her but because I did not want to be the latest person in her life to let her down. So that fall, when my new class held a talent show, I brought the minstrel boy out of semi-retirement and had him play the toy piano. Two girls lip-synching “Hit the Road, Jack” won the contest, and I never picked up a marionette again.

Two things stuck with me about the day I witnessed the performance of “Jack and the Beanstalk.” First, when I was escorted backstage, I was surprised by how big the marionettes were (each of them came up to my chest) and how dirty. Their clothes were dingy and worn, the paint on their faces chipped and scored. One of the giant’s hands was missing a thumb, the stump just raw wood. Seen up close, everything looked old and scuffed, even the people who ran the show. Shows like this must have been the last gasp of small-time live entertainment: vaudeville, medicine shows, minstrelsy. As their usual bookings dried up, some of the milder acts turned to the school circuit. And by the time I got out of elementary school in the early sixties, even those gigs had died off—the puppet shows and magic acts and the science guy with the shiny ball that could make a girl’s hair stand on end. There’s been nothing like it since: the small-time but inimitable traveling troupe.

I was shocked when I saw the beanstalk for what it was, a tattered thing made of nothing more than crudely knotted strips of cloth from an old bedsheet that had been dyed green. This was the object that, when seen from the audience, had seemed to levitate magically from the well into which Jack’s mother had furiously thrown the magic beans. For the four or five seconds that it
took to rise in the half-light of morning on the small stage, I had believed it completely. It took nothing more than this to fool me. And in the same instant that I understood the deception, I also understood, even without being able to articulate the thought, that I liked being fooled (this was, after all, the first time I had ever fallen in love with anything). And realizing that, I understood something else: I wanted to fool other people in the same way. (I was affected with a similar feeling the first time I saw a magic show a year later, but there I realized immediately that no real magic was going on. The whole transaction between magician and audience was like that between a pitcher and batter: it was about skill and deception, and both parties were in on it together.) These tattered things, strung up and marched through a story whose ending was known to everyone in the audience before they took their seats, were capable of summoning not just a willing but a craven, abject suspension of disbelief. In the six or seven seconds that it took to rise out of sight, it really had been a magical beanstalk ascending to heaven. And that curtained proscenium—it didn’t matter that it was stained, faded, patched and repatched—was like a door I could walk through, and once I had crossed the threshold, I never wanted to leave.

  The Family Business