Stuporman, Page 3

knew that before I even had breakfast I was going to get a spanking. Whatever was the purpose of this daily ritual, it was lost on me. The memory of yesterday's whipping never invaded my dreams to rouse me to get up and go to the bathroom. I became used to the idea that things outside my control would get me in trouble. A few times, I tried to change the sheets before Margaret came in but she always found them and went straight for the backyard to get a switch while I stood in my room waiting and crying.

  "Margaret, let me sleep with you. Please! I won't pee in your bed. I promise."

  "I know you won't pee in my bed, 'cause you sleeping in your bed."

  She kept walking down the hall and I was supposed to be walking with her but the distance between us was more from her words than the length or her legs. It wasn’t so much a distance between me and her but between me and my world-- between me and the idea that I was safe, cherished and not alone in my world.

  I didn't know what to do so I buried my despondency in the wonders of that old Victorian house. There were so many nooks and crannies, doorways and stairways where the imagination could nestle into mysteries and endless exploration. In a straight line from the front porch to the back porch lay the foyer and the living room--mysterious in its forbidden and forbidding formality. Next came the dining room where Margaret kept pretty things on a white mantle piece above my eyes.

  One had to walk around the dining table, past the white sideboard and the china closet to get to the kitchen, which was a room all itself. The kitchen was where Margaret sat at a big table and snapped fresh green beans into a huge kettle. It was where I discovered that I could eat ten Hungry Jack biscuits but not one lima bean and no one could convince me that there was not an unbridgeable gustatory chasm between hamburger and meatloaf.

  Upstairs I had a room to myself at the other end of the hall from my godparents' room. Almost all the furniture in Margaret's house was made of wood and painted white with gold carefully painted into little crevices and engraved curly cues. In my room, I had a show and tell record player and a big collection of Disney albums. The player consisted of a turntable set on top of a small red box with a screen. It was small but it was almost as tall as I was. I'd put an album on the turntable and a matching slideshow strip into a slot on top of the box, and then I'd watch Cinderella rush from the ballroom as the narrator warned that it was only minutes before the clock struck twelve. This was the late sixties, so this wasn't high tech digital--just vinyl and film. I worked the machine myself and had to read well enough to match the albums to the filmstrips and I had to have enough patience to place the arm of the player on the albums very carefully so as not to scratch them. This I did at four or five years old.

  As long as I stayed out of the living room, I was free to roam as I pleased. While I listened to Peter and the Wolf in my room, I also listened to Ray Charles when Margaret played him downstairs. In the grey of dusk I'd lay on my bed and imagine I was a woman waiting for a man whom she knew would never come. It was a delicious projection of the blue, sweet, dusky and private-- a bearable pain.

  Don't you know that I wait in the darkness of a lonely room

  Filled with sadness, filled with gloom.

  Hoping soon

  That you'll walk right through that door

  And love me like you tried before

  Freda Payne

  I discovered endless mysteries in the basement. This was where Margaret kept her antique sewing machine and seamstress dummy. She made clothes for her neighbors.

  "Go on and sing for Miss Mabel," Margaret coaxed me.

  I could only stare transfixed at the stately women who came to be measured for or to pick up capes and coats with intricate embroidery and hidden pockets.

  "Oh, she's shy, but her mama can really sing. Woo, that woman has a voice. Don't you want to sing for Miss Mabel? Sing that pretty song you learned from your Disney albums."

  She looked at me sweetly and expectantly. Miss Mabel looked kind, important and skeptical. I did not open my mouth.

  Margaret kept a television in the basement so she could watch The Edge of Night or Gun Smoke while she ironed clothes. I sat in awe watching White men in black clothes and slippery looking shoes running through the night to escape cars and bullets and women. Most of the basement was actually above ground in the back of the house. The door to the outside was always open and plenty light and air came through the windows so she sometimes combed my hair there. That was a job for Superman. I've always had thick, tightly curled hair. It curls so tightly that Pharaoh would have caught the children of Israel if Moses had been trying to part my hair. Hold still. Hold still, said the Inquisitor to the little girl on the rack. If the Emotions were singing on the radio while she combed my hair, I'd sing along with them. Show me. Show me. Show me. Show me ho-OOWW!

  I liked to play in the big back yard. There were so many mysteries and wonders. Just the way the sun played through the leaves raised fascinating questions: What are shadows? If they are pictures, how can they move? I'd gaze at the black beetles I found under flat rocks and wonder why the rock did not crush them. I wondered why the dirt did not fall out of my bucket when I swung it upside down on my arm. I stood on my high back porch and surveyed my domain. The world and its mysteries were mine alone. From my porch, I could see across the alley, and I thought that if the houses weren't in the way I should be able to see on forever across the world.

  I shared this domain with my dog Lobo that my godmother found in the woods. He was a jet-black half wolf with one white spot on his chest. That dog loved me and half raised me. He almost killed my uncle Bobby for standing too close to me while we were playing ball. But Lobo let Margaret's little grandson Kevin play with me. He was a cute little golden brown boy with long silky, curly black hair, and we were like cousins.

  One day when I was about three, I was leaning over the wooden stretch gate that Margaret kept over the top of the back porch stairs so I wouldn't fall. I was leaning catty-corner, half over the gate and half over the iron railing of the steps. The porch must have been almost a story high in the back because it was only a few steps from the ground to the basement door below the porch. Kevin came and opened the gate to go down into the yard and I fell right over the railing, bounced off my wooden rocking horse and onto the cement ground. All I can remember is women scurrying around saying, "Don't let her fall asleep," Don't let her fall asleep. It was for moments like this that the Creator made little kids' heads so hard.

  The world below my front porch contained even more mysteries than my house or my backyard. And one strange mystery, more enigmatic than anything I had ever seen or heard: other children. I remember feeling a sense of alienation from the other children in my neighborhood as if I wasn't quite a part of their world but only observing it.

  "There's the ice cream truck, Rhonda," Margaret called me.

  Tinks and tinkles of frosty, bright music rang from the truck like all the snow and toys of Christmas coming down the street. Margaret would take me out to get a cup of vanilla ice cream, but she was more real to me than the other children who clamored around the truck.

  Being an only child, I played by myself a lot. I liked to be outside in the sultry summer evenings wondering at the stars and the music that floated unbidden through the air. All the other children were huge and seemed to know each other already. What's your name? Where you live? How old are you? Huge, nebulous questions from huge, nebulous people. Then a girl came up who was even taller than everyone else. She had deep chocolate skin with bright doll baby eyes, as sultry as the night and belonging to it-- belonging to this world where I happened to find myself.

  She looked at me briefly and exclaimed, "Oh, she's cute."

  Then she cross-examined me with the same huge, nebulous questions, uttered some oohs and ahhs of short-lived fascination, and then she skipped off. The other kids followed her so I continued playing alone as I always had, as ready to forget them as they were to forget me.

&n
bsp; Though I made no connection with those children and found no solace in the wall of defensiveness Margaret erected between us, I found comfort in the little children's prayer book she gave me when I was three or four years old. She would sit with me while I said my goodnight prayers. I remember one night I was lying in my bed very troubled about something. I asked the person my prayer books taught me about to be with me and somehow I knew that gentle spirit was there. There was no blinding flash of light, no voice booming from the clouds. But the presence was very real.

  Margaret went to a Church on the corner and would take me to meetings that the women held in the evenings. This Church also had a preschool in the basement and when I was old enough I started going. I still wasn't used to other children so when they let us play outside I mostly played with the wooden blocks and other toys. I did make one friend named Barbara. We would play together and made up a funny walk with giant steps. Now I had two friends, Aaron, the little boy next door and Barbara. But the other kids weren't a part of my world and I was not a part of theirs. Twice a crowd of kids followed me home.

  "Ooh, you did it. Now you gonna get it."

  "But I didn't mean to wet my pants. It just happened."

  Questions and verdicts, snickers and rolling, slit-eyed