The End of the World as We Know It (15 page)

He used to concentrate so hard he'd curl his tongue between his teeth, and once in a football game, he got hit in the jaw and he came damn close to biting it off. He had to have stitches in his tongue. He was just very concentrated.

Mrs. Lackman had a son who was a youthful schizophrenic.
He was certifiable, as we say. Certified to do what I've never been sure. To go to the crazy house at Western State, I guess.

I'm not sure how old he was, but he was a lot older, maybe eighteen. One day when he was off his medication, he got stopped by the police with a briefcase full of, as it turned out, elaborate plans and explosives to blow up the university. After that, he was barred from ever going on the campus, and, in fact, he still can't go there today. He was a dark-haired boy with sparkling eyes, and he used to lurk in the doorways between the kindergarten and the first grade until his mother told him to go upstairs and mind his own business, presumably as long as his business didn't involve blowing up public buildings with significant numbers of people inside them.

When he was on his medication, he was gentle as a lamb. He would have let anybody go to the bathroom, even for number two. He would never have made a five-year-old sit in a baby's high chair.

It's a wonder we ever learned to read at all what with getting ready for the pageants. There was a really big pageant on Washington's Birthday, and then there was another really big pageant on May Day.

The Washington's Birthday pageant was more of a torture than May Day, because it was a play and everybody had a part to play and you had to memorize dialogue and you had to memorize it perfectly or you just knew it was going to be worse for you than even peeing on the floor would have been.

I never got to play George Washington. This one boy got all the good parts because he was already as big as a truck driver, strong and athletic and good-looking, and he had the biggest
head in the class, which was, for some reason, vital to all the lead parts, both male and female. He was every mother's dream son, he went on to be captain of the football team and homecoming king, and every kind of social reward that could be bestowed came his way from the age of five, and he was a nice guy besides, so nobody had to feel bad about it. It was just naturally going to be him who got to play the Father of Our Country.

My father was dragged into it one year. He had to stand up in front of all the parents of the other children, with many of whom he regularly sat down to cocktails, and recite a really mawkish speech that began, “I am the flag,” and concluded with the Pledge of Allegiance, where at least we all joined in.

It was the one time I was ever proud of my father. I forgot for a minute that he made my skin crawl. I forgot while he spoke how afraid he made me feel. The hard, metallic distaste went away, just for that brief time when he was being so bravely humiliated, and I saw him as others must have seen him, handsome and tall and straight as a flagpole.

People now tell me I look like him. I don't. I hope I don't.

There was the scene with the cherry tree, of course, and crossing the Delaware, and being sworn in as our first president, but the truly startling scene was the scene that depicted George Washington's birth.

Mrs. Lackman had written every word of the pageant herself. None of it came out of a book.

There was Mr. Washington outside the door, pacing and churning his hands together, frantic with worry, and there was Mrs. Washington in a big cardboard bed giving birth.

And then there was Mammy. It was Mammy who delivered
the play's classic line, its moment of ultimate drama. She picked up the little rubber doll that had been wrapped in swaddling clothes so you could just barely see its little rubber face, and she brought out the baby to show it off, and this is what she said, in a high voice like Butterfly McQueen: “Lawzy, Miz Washin'ton, you got a fiiiine baby boy. He look lak he a monf ole awready.”

Needless to say, there were no little black children holding up one finger or two at Mrs. Lackman's, no proud black faces beaming from the parents' section. God, when you think of it, it's a miracle we didn't all grow up to bomb public buildings or deal cocaine for a living.

May Day was another story. Of course, the boy who got to play Washington also got to be King of the May, probably two years running. Who got to be the Queen of the May escapes me. I'm sure she was lovely. And big-headed. I have noticed, in my brief encounters, that celebrities tend to have bigger heads than your average people, so maybe this was Mrs. Lackman's way of putting in an early bid for fame for her beloveds.

Once, for instance, I had dinner with Elizabeth Taylor. She had the biggest head I've ever seen on a human being, even though she was quite small. Tiny feet. She looked, from the rear, like a big licorice ice cream cone. She said the most charming thing: “Everybody tells me I have such beautiful lavender eyes. A woman came up to me in Dior and said she just wanted to have a close look at my lavender eyes. They're not really lavender. If you ask me, when I get up in the morning and go to the bathroom and look in the bathroom mirror, they're gray. Just plain old gray.”

I understand things haven't gone so well for her lately. If I
were as beautiful as she is, I would think life would be filled with sweetness and light. I would hope my life would be a veritable festival of continuous adoration.

Most of my childhood I don't remember. It comes to me in flashes, and some things hang around, like the time I threw up on the floor in second grade, in public school, but most of it has faded, what it felt like, what it looked like, who was who. My sister, on the other hand, remembers everything.

The first year at May Day I was an oriole, for the dance of the birds—there was a cardinal and a robin and a blue jay and so on—which meant my mother had to sew an elaborate costume out of crepe paper involving a bird's head and a beak and wings with many feathers, all black and orange, a cross between Batman and Nijinsky, things you wouldn't normally make out of crepe paper and which you had to buy out of your own pocket as your contribution to the pageant, like bringing the pint of cream, heavy whipping cream, on Butter Day.

I loved my bird costume. I wish I still had it. It would cheer me up when I'm blue. Besides, the Orioles have always been my second favorite baseball team, and when I lived in Baltimore, going to Johns Hopkins, they were the best of the best.

My first-grade year in the May Day pageant, I was the crown bearer. This costume I still have a picture of. I was dressed in a huge white beret, probably sewn by my mother as well, and a white shirt with a white lace jabot and white shorts and white socks and black high-top sneakers. This costume was a mortification, even though I look happy in the picture. It's what you do, in pictures.

There was a May Pole, with streamers in eight different colors,
all pinned to the ground, and eight different girls to pick them up and skip around the May Pole, twirling and untwirling the streamers, each wearing a dress that matched the color of her streamer, lavender and yellow and periwinkle blue and lime green and pink, all pale, the dresses all little coronation kind of things, all gauzy, all sewn by their mothers as well. In those days, mothers could do that kind of thing with their eyes closed.

And there were heralds and bumblebees and maids-in-waiting and pixies of all kinds, all in costumes sewn by their mothers, all the costumes identical every year. You could watch a decade of slides of the May Day pageant and every one of them would look the same.

There were masses of flowers everywhere, mostly lilacs and tulips. All the girls had little circlets of flowers in their hair. Like daisy chains. They had made them themselves the day before.

So there was a lot of cavorting and bird dancing and streamer twirling and bumblebee buzzing and heralding and bowing and scraping, all to a soundtrack of classical music played by Mrs. Lackman on her old record player on the porch, and then there was the coronation and then it was over. It took a lot of rehearsal. We had to rehearse inside when it was raining, but it was worth it. It always came off without a hitch. Even the schizophrenic son behaved on May Day.

The school shut its doors a long time ago and Mrs. Lackman is dead, but I wish I could see the May Day pageant just one more time before I die. I see myself in my splendid oriole costume, wings flapping, feathers fluttering in the breeze, or in a white lace jabot and high-tops, carrying a crown of flowers through billowing pastel streamers. But I could be wrong.

My memories are vague, as I said, and perhaps not accurate. Maybe “he look lak he a monf ole awready” was part of a Christmas pageant, which we probably also had one of. Maybe it was said about the Baby Jesus and not about George Washington. I don't know.

None of us who went to Mrs. Lackman's really remembers anything except the pageants, and the roles we played. We don't remember a thing about the actual school part. Except Butter Day, which was supposed to be vaguely educational.

I see my own childhood as though it happened to someone else, some person I don't recognize, just a series of brief moving pictures in which I am an insignificant figure.

Somewhere in the midst of all this pageantry came Butter Day, somewhere between Washington's Birthday and May Day. We didn't have to wear costumes, we didn't have to memorize anything, we just had to show up with a pint of cream.

We would sit in Mrs. Lackman's kitchen, the only time we were ever allowed in there, even when she would bake us cookies, which she did once in a blue moon. In fact, the only rooms we ever saw were the two classrooms, since apparently nobody was ever allowed to use the bathroom, and the kitchen was all sort of warm and homey compared to the classrooms, one of which had a high chair in the middle of it. Just in case.

Her son was away in the far reaches of the house, being loony, no doubt, but loony on his own time. We were safe. We were glad Butter Day had arrived.

We would sit in the kindergarten chairs, which had been taken into the kitchen and placed in a perfect circle. Mrs. Lack-man would get out a group of Mason jars, blue-green glass with
lids and screw-on tops, and fill each one half full with heavy cream.

Then we would take the Mason jars and distribute them. The children who got to go first would hold the jar as though it were the Holy Grail, the white cream bluish inside the jar. Then, at Mrs. Lackman's signal, the first children would begin to shake the jars. After a time, Mrs. Lackman would give another signal and the jars would be passed to the right, and the next child would begin to shake the jar, and so on around and around the circle.

The cream would froth in the jar and then begin to thicken like whipped cream. And then the miracle occurred.

The cream would begin to turn into butter. Liquid would separate from the bulk of the cream, and the clotted part would begin to turn a greenish yellow inside the jar.

We would keep shaking, shaking now like mad, since the object of our efforts was so close at hand. Mrs. Lackman was in a state of high excitement, and her exhortation would keep our arms, now tired from exertion, flailing away.

The cream was now round globs inside the jar, and made a kind of wet thunk as it went up and down, up and down, hitting the top and bottom of the jar, the useless, thin, milky liquid sloshing around the yellow mass.

Finally it was time to stop. Mrs. Lackman would open the jars, and inside each one there would be a round ball of butter. Soft, fresh butter.

Mrs. Lackman would put the butter on a chilled plate and get out a box of Saltine crackers and hand two crackers to each child. She would then take a butter knife and, going around the
circle, spread a thin smear of butter on one of the two crackers, and each child, in a hysteria of excitement, would begin to eat the cracker in tiny, mouselike bites, except for the May King, who would put the whole thing in his enormous, athletic mouth and eat it in one bite.

When the first cracker was gone, Mrs. Lackman would move around the circle and, as though she were Lady Bountiful giving us far more than we deserved, spread an even thinner smear of butter on the second cracker.

We were pretty bored by that time, and our arms were tired, and some people were sweating from all the exertion of shaking the jar with great force, up and down, up and down. But we ate our crackers. The butter was delicious, unsalted, fresh, gleaming pale yellow. Two crackers of it was pretty much a surfeit, but with only one cracker, we would have felt a little cheated after all that effort.

Then Mrs. Lackman would smooth out each little glob of butter until it was a perfect soft ball and wrap it in wax paper and put it in her icebox and the true purpose of Butter Day was finally revealed. Mrs. Lackman wanted butter. Free butter. Free fresh butter. We had been given a minute taste of the delicacy Mrs. Lackman and her schizo son would enjoy for weeks.

Then we went back to learning to read and add, the first graders left totally to their own devices, the kindergartners harassed by her totally totalitarian method of learning and trying to go to the bathroom. Butter Day usually ended about when it was time for my red-headed neighbor to pee on the floor, although we'd gotten pretty used to it by then and it lacked the excitement it had originally held.

So that was Butter Day. Educational, fun, and, ultimately,
servitude to Mrs. Lackman's private appetites. I can picture her, sitting down with her psychopathic son, slathering free butter on large steaming baked potatoes and wallowing in a swelter of gastronomic sensuality.

We got through it all. Except for the lack of opportunity to go to the bathroom, it was actually kind of fun, and public school, which we all started in the second grade, seemed drab in comparison. The teachers there were kind and smart, and were infinitely indulgent with the one-finger, two-finger system of education, which I gather was pretty general in those days. I've talked to other people.

The only exciting part of public school was atomic bomb drills, when we would either get under our desks, which was fun, or be herded into the dark and rat-infested boiler room, which was not fun, but which gave us a better, more bitter taste of life in an atomic holocaust.