Until this day, the essence of sorrow and sadness like a Picasso painting still-lifed and forever living, is the forlorn and remembered sight of a discarded silk stocking brick-caught and hanging against the rain-windy side of the tenement building wall opposite our kitchen window from which I hung, suspended by one hand, screaming at my elder sister who had been left in charge of the three of us while my mother went out marketing.
What our interactions had been before is lost, but my mother came home just in time to pull me back inside the dark kitchen, saving me from a one-story drop into the air shaft below. I don’t remember the terror and fury, but I remember the whipping that both my sister and I got. More than that, I remember the sadness and the deprivation and the loneliness of that discarded, torn, and brick-caught silk stocking, broken and hanging against the wall in the tenement rain.
I was always very jealous of my two older sisters, because they were older and therefore more privileged, and because they had each other for a friend. They could talk to one another without censure or punishment, or so I thought.
As far as I was concerned, Phyllis and Helen led a magical and charmed existence down the hall in their room. It was tiny but complete, with privacy and a place to be away from the eternal parental eye which was my lot, having only the public parts of the house to play in. I was never alone, nor far from my mother’s watchful eye. The bathroom door was the only door in the house that I was ever allowed to close behind me, and even that would be opened with an inquiry if I tarried too long on the toilet.
The first time I ever slept anywhere else besides in my parents’ bedroom was a milestone in my journey to this house of myself. When I was four and five, my family went to the Connecticut shore for a week’s vacation during the summer. This was much grander than a day’s outing to Rockaway Beach or Coney Island, and much more exciting.
First of all, we got to sleep in a house that was not ours, and Daddy was with us during the day. Then there were strange new foods to sample, like blue soft-shelled crab, which my father ordered for his lunch and would sometimes persuade my mother to let me have a taste of. We children were not allowed such alien fare, but on Fridays we did have fried shrimp and little batter cakes with pieces of clam in them. They were good, and very different from my mother’s codfish-and-potato fishcakes which were our favorite Friday dinner back home.
A shimmering glare of silver coats every beach in my mind’s eye. Glistening childhood summers that sparkled like the thick glass spectacles I could not wear because of the dilating drops in my eyes.
The dilating drops were used by the Medical Center eye doctors to examine the progress of my eyes, and since the effects seem to have lasted for weeks, my memories of those early summers are of constantly squinting against the piercing agony of direct sunlight, while stumbling over objects that I could not see, since everything was dazzled by light.
The crabshells in the sand were distinguished from the clamshells, not by shape, but by the different feel of them beneath my brown toes. Delicate crabshells crumpled up like glasspaper around my heels, while the tough little clamshells crunched a hard and sturdy sound from under the balls of my fat little feet.
An old beached boat, abandoned on its side, lay in the sand above high tide down the beach a little from the hotel, and there my mother sat, day after day, in her light cotton dresses. Her ankles were properly crossed and her arms folded as she watched my two sisters and I play at the water’s edge. Her eyes would be very soft and peaceful as she gazed over the water, and I knew she was thinking of “home.”
Once my daddy picked me up and carried me into the water, as I squealed with delight and fear at being so high up. He dropped me into the ocean, holding onto my arms, and I remember, as he raised me up, screaming in outrage at the burning taste of saltwater in my nostrils that made me want to fight or cry.
The first year there I slept in a cot in my parents’ room, as usual, and I always went to bed before anyone else. Just as at home, the watery colors of twilight came in to terrify me, shining greenly through the buff-colored window-shades which were like closed eyes above my bed. I hated the twilight color and going to bed early, far from the comfortingly familiar voices of my parents, downstairs on the porch of this hotel which belonged to my father’s real-estate buddy who was giving us a good deal for the week.
Those yellow-green window-shade twilights were the color of loneliness for me, and that has never left me. Everything else about that first summer week in Connecticut is lost to me, except the two photographs which show me, as usual, discontent and squinting up against the sun.
The second year we were even poorer, or maybe my father’s real-estate friend had raised his prices. For whatever reason, the five of us shared one bedroom, and there was no space for an extra cot. The room had three windows in it, and two double beds that sagged ever so slightly in the middle of their white chenille-spread-covered expanses. My sisters and I shared one of these beds.
I was still put to bed earlier than my sisters, who were allowed to stay up and listen to “I Love a Mystery” on the old upright cabinet radio that sat in the living room downstairs near the porch window. Its soft tones would drift out across the porch to the cretonne-covered rocking chairs lined up in a row in the soft-salty back-street shore-resort night.
I didn’t mind the twilights so much that year. We had a back room and it got darker earlier, so it was always night by the time I went to bed. Unterrified by the twilight green, I had no trouble at all falling asleep.
My mother supervised the brushing of my teeth, and the saying of my prayers, and then after assuring herself that all was in order, she kissed me goodnight, and turned out the dim, unshaded bulb.
The door closed. I lay awake, rigid with excitement, waiting for “I Love a Mystery” to be over, and for my sisters to come and get into bed beside me. I made bargains with god to keep me awake. I bit my lips and pinched the soft fleshy parts of my palms with my fingernails, all to keep myself from falling asleep.
After an eternity of about thirty minutes, during which I reviewed the entire contents of my day, including what I should and shouldn’t have done that I didn’t or did do, I heard my sisters’ footsteps in the hallway. The door to our room opened and they stepped into the darkness.
“Hey, Audre. You still wake?” That was Helen, four years older than me and the closest to me in age.
I was torn with indecision. What should I do? If I didn’t answer, she might tickle my toes, and if I did answer, what should I say?
“Say, you wake?”
“No,” I whispered in a squeaky little voice I thought consistent with a sleeping state.
“Sure enough, see, she still wake.” I heard Helen’s disgusted whisper to Phyllis, followed by the sharp intake of her breath as she sucked her teeth. “Look, her eyes wide open still.”
The bed creaked on one side of me. “What you still doin’ up, staring like a ninny? On the way in, you know, I told the boogieman come bite your head off, and he comin’ just now to get you good.”
I felt the bed sag under the weight of both of their bodies, one on either side of me. My mother had decreed that I should sleep in the middle, to keep me from falling out of bed, as well as to separate my two sisters. I was so enchanted with the idea of sharing a bed with them that I couldn’t have cared less. Helen reached over and gave me a little preliminary pinch.
“Ouch!” I rubbed my tender upper arm, now sore from her strong little piano-trained fingers. “Oh, I’m goin’ to tell Mommy how you pinching me and you goin’ to get a whipping sure enough.” And then, triumphantly, I played my hole card. “And too besides, I’m goin’ to tell her what among-you doing in bed every night!”
“Go ahead, ninny, run your mouth. You goin’ to run it once too often ’til it drop off your face and then just see how it’s goin’ to gobble up you toes!” Helen sucked her teeth again, but moved her hand away.
“Oh, just go to sleep now, Audre.” That was Phyllis, my eldest sister, who was always the peacemaker, the placid, reasonable, removed one. But I knew perfectly well what I had pinched my palms to stay awake for, and I was waiting, barely able to contain myself.
For that summer, in that hot back room of a resort slum, I had finally found out what my sisters did at home at night in that little room they shared at the end of the hall, that enticing little room which I was never allowed to enter except by an invitation that never came.
They told each other stories. They told each other stories in endless installments, making up the episodes as they went along, from fantasies engendered by the radio adventure shows to which we were all addicted in those days.
There was “Buck Rogers,” and “I Love a Mystery,” “Jack Armstrong, All-American Boy,” “The Green Hornet,” and “Quiet Please.” There was “The FBI in Peace and War,” “Mr. District Attorney,” “The Lone Ranger,” and my all-time favorite, “The Shadow,” whose power to cloud men’s minds so they could not see him was something I did not stop lusting for until quite recently.
I thought that the very idea of telling stories and not getting whipped for telling untrue was the most marvelous thing I could think of, and every night that week I begged to be allowed to listen, not realizing that they couldn’t stop me. Phyllis didn’t mind so long as I kept my mouth shut, but by bedtime Helen had had enough of a pesky little sister and my endless stream of questions. And her stories were always far and away the best, filled with tough little girls who masqueraded in boys’ clothing and always foiled the criminals, managing to save the day. Phyllis’s hero was a sweet strong boy of few words named George Vaginius.
“Please, Phyllis?” I wheedled. There was a long moment of quiet, with Helen sucking her teeth ominously, then Phyllis, whispering, “All right. Who’ turn it is tonight?”
“I’m not saying a word ’til she asleep!” That was Helen, determined.
“Please Phyllis, please let me listen?”
“No! No such thing!” Helen was adamant. “I know you too well in the dark to have to shine a light on you!”
“Please, Phyllis, I promise I be quiet.” I could feel Helen swelling up beside me like a bullfrog, but I persisted, not realizing or caring that my appeal to Phyllis’s authority as the elder sister only infuriated Helen even more.
Phyllis was not only softhearted, but very practical, with the pragmatic approach of an eleven-year-old West Indian woman.
“Now you promise you never goin’ to tell?”
I felt like I was being inducted into the most secret of societies.
“Cross my heart.” Catholic girls never hoped to die.
Helen was obviously not convinced. I stifled a squeak as she nipped me again with her fingers, this time on the thigh.
“I’m getting tired of all this, you know. So if you ever so much as breathe a word about my stories, Sandman’s comin’ after you the very same minute to pluck out you eyes like a mackerel for soup.” And Helen smacked her lips suggestively, giving way with a parting shot.
I could just see those little white rubbery eyeballs swimming about in the bottom of the Friday night fish stew, and I shuddered.
“I promise, Helen, cross my heart. I don’t say a word to nobody, and I’ll be so quiet, you’ll see.” I put both of my hands up across my mouth in the darkness, jittering with anticipation.
It was Helen’s turn to begin.
“Where were we, now? Oh yes, so me and Buck had just fetched back the sky-horse when Doc…”
I could not resist. Down came my hands.
“No, no, Helen, not yet. Don’t you remember? Doc hadn’t gotten there yet, because…” I didn’t want to miss a single thing.
Helen’s little brown fingers shot across the bedclothes and gave me such a nip on the buttocks that I screeched in pain. Her voice was high and indignant and full of helpless fury.
“You see that? You see that? What I tell you, Phyllis?” She was almost wailing in fury. “I knew it! She can’t keep that miserable tongue in she mouth one minute. Sure enough, I told you so, didn’t I? Didn’t I? And now too besides she want to steal me story!”
“Sh-h-h-h! The two-a-you! Mommy’s comin’ back here just now, and among-you two goin’ to make us all catch hell!”
But Helen wasn’t going to play any more. I felt her flop over on her side with her disgruntled back towards me, and then I could feel our bed shaking with her angry sobs of rage, muffled in the sweaty pillow.
I could have kicked myself. “I truly sorry, Helen,” I ventured. And I really was, because I realized that my big mouth had done me out of a night’s installment, and probably of all the installments for the rest of the week. I also knew that Mother would never let me out of her sight the next day long enough for me to catch up to my sisters, as they ran off down the beach to complete their tale in secret.
“Honest, I didn’t mean to, Helen.” I tried one last time, reaching over to touch her. But Helen jerked her body sharply backward and her butt caught me in the stomach. I heard her still outraged warning hissed through clenched teeth.
“And don’t you dare pat me!” I had been on the receiving end of her fingers often enough to know when to leave well enough alone.
So I turned over on my stomach, said goodnight to Phyllis, and finally went to sleep, too.
The next morning, I woke up before either Phyllis or Helen. I lay in the middle of the bed, being careful not to touch either one of them. Staring up at the ceiling, I listened to my father snoring, in the next bed, and to the sound of my mother’s wedding ring hitting the headboard in her sleep, as she flung her arm across her eyes against the morning light. I relished the quiet, the new smells of strange bedclothes and sea-salty air, and the frank beams of yellow sunlight pouring through the high windows like a promise of endless day.
Right then and there, before anybody else woke up, I decided to make up a story of my own.