Baby Is Three (2 page)

I met Ted Sturgeon in 1970. He was an unusual guy. He wasn’t all cosmic and airy-fairy in how he thought about things. He was actually sort of acerbic and funny and had a great kind of wry wit about stuff. But he could conceive idealism on a level that most other people couldn’t get to. He was a great cat. We put him through a really unbearable experience, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young did, when we hired him to write a screenplay for
Wooden Ships
, a proposed CSNY film based on one of our songs.

It was a nightmare for him, because each guy would get him alone and tell him how
he
wanted the script to be. And of course in each guy’s view,
he
was the hero. The other guys were sort of posed around the edges, like a Greek chorus. Mine was populated with young girls—and had all this sex in it. Stephen’s was populated by this lonely military hero out there. Neil took one look at the whole film idea and said, “No … No, man, I don’t think so, man …” It was hysterical. We were all such complete egotists by that time, and living so much in our own universes, and everything
was so contrary to the vision I just told you about …

It was a complete hopeless tar-baby of a project. And Ted tried to do it in all good faith. He kept trying to be positive about it. He would write and write and write and say, “What about this?” And we’d say, “Well, no, that’s too much of
them
and not enough of me.” It was a terrible thing, and I’m mostly responsible for having done it to him. He had a good sense of humor about it. I’m sure he must have laughed a lot privately

He was a
delightful
man, very very very bright, great sense of humor, witty, had a good skeptical and skewed take on things. I regret that I didn’t get to hang out with him more. I should have stayed friends with him and stayed close to him, but at a certain point there the drugs took over, and friendships got less important …

I
T WAS WELL
after bedtime and Bobby was asleep, dreaming of a place with black butterflies that stayed, and a dog with a wuffly nose and blunt, friendly rubber teeth. It was a dark place, and comfy with all the edges blurred and soft, and he could make them all jump if he wanted to.

But then there was a sharp scythe of light that swept everything away (except in the shaded smoothness of the blank wall beside the door: someone
always
lived there) and Mommy Gwen was coming into the room with a blaze of hallway behind her. She clicked the high-up switch, the one he couldn’t reach, and room light came cruelly. Mommy Gwen changed from a flat, black, light-rimmed set of cardboard triangles to a night-lit, daytime sort of Mommy Gwen.

Her hair was wide and her chin was narrow. Her shoulders were wide and her waist was narrow. Her hips were wide and her skirt was narrow, and under it all were her two hard silky sticks of legs. Her arms hung down from the wide tips of her shoulders, straight and elbowless when she walked. She never moved her arms when she walked. She never moved them at all unless she wanted to do something with them.

“You’re awake.” Her voice was hard, wide, flat, pointy too.

“I was asleep,” said Bobby.

“Don’t contradict. Get up.”

Bobby sat up and fisted his eyes. “Is Daddy—”

“Your father is not in the house. He went away. He won’t be back for a whole day—maybe two. So there’s no use in yelling for him.”

“Wasn’t going to yell for him, Mommy Gwen.”

“Very well, then. Get up.”

Wondering, Bobby got up. His flannel sleeper pulled at his shoulders and at the soles of his snug-covered feet. He felt tousled.

“Get your toys, Bobby.”

“What toys, Mommy Gwen?”

Her voice snapped like wet clothes on the line in a big wind. “Your toys—all of them!”

He went to the playbox and lifted the lid. He stopped, turned, stared at her. Her arms hung straight at her sides, as straight as her two level eyes under the straight shelf of brow. He bent to the playbox. Gollywick, Humptydoodle and the blocks came out; the starry-wormy piece of the old phonograph, the cracked sugar egg with the peephole girl in it, the cardboard kaleidoscope and the magic set with the seven silvery rings that made a trick he couldn’t do but Daddy could. He took them all out and put them on the floor.

“Here,” said Mommy Gwen. She moved one straight-line arm to point to her feet with one straight-line finger. He picked up the toys and brought them to her, one at a time, two at a time, until they were all there. “Neatly, neatly,” she muttered. She bent in the middle like a garage door and did brisk things with the toys, so that the scattered pile of them became a square stack. “Get the rest,” she said.

He looked into the playbox and took out the old wood-framed slate and the mixed-up box of crayons; the English annual story book and an old candle, and that was all for the playbox. In the closet were some little boxing-gloves and a tennis racket with broken strings, and an old ukulele with no strings at all. And that was all for the closet. He brought them to her, and she stacked them with the others.

“Those things, too,” she said, and at last bent her elbow to point around. From the dresser came the two squirrels and a monkey that Daddy had made from pipe cleaners, a small square of plate-glass he had found on Henry Street; a clockwork top that sounded like a church talking, and the broken clock Jerry had left on the porch last week. Bobby brought them all to Mommy Gwen, every one. “Are you going to put me in another room?”

“No indeed.” Mommy Gwen took up the neat stack of toys. It was tall in her arms. The top fell off and thunked on the floor, bounced, chased around in a tilted circle. “Get it,” said Mommy Gwen.

Bobby picked it up and reached it toward her. She stooped until he could put it on the stack, snug between the tennis racket and the box of crayons. Mommy Gwen didn’t say thank you, but went away through the door, leaving Bobby standing, staring after her. He heard her hard feet go down the hall, heard the bump as she pressed open the guest-room door with her knee. There was a rattle and click as she set his toys down on the spare bed, the one without a spread, the one with dusty blue ticking on the mattress. Then she came back again.

“Why aren’t you in bed?” She clapped her hands. They sounded dry, like sticks breaking. Startled, he popped back into bed and drew the covers up to his chin. There used to be someone who had a warm cheek and a soft word for him when he did that, but that was a long time ago. He lay with eyes round in the light, looking at Mommy Gwen.

“You’ve been bad,” she said. “You broke a window in the shed and you tracked mud into my kitchen and you’ve been noisy and rude. So you’ll stay right here in this room without your toys until I say you can come out. Do you understand me?”

“Yes,” he said. He said quickly, because he remembered in time, “Yes ma’am.”

She struck the switch swiftly, without warning, so that the darkness dazzled him, made him blink. But right away it was the room again, with the scythe of light and the shaded something hiding in the top corner of the wall by the door. There was always something shifting about there.

She went away then, thumping the door closed, leaving the darkness and taking away the light, all but a rug-fuzzed yellow streak under the door. Bobby looked away from that, and for a moment, for just a moment, he was inside his shadow-pictures where the rubber-fanged dog and the fleshy black butterflies stayed. Sometimes
they stayed … but mostly they were gone as soon as he moved. Or maybe they changed into something else. Anyway, he liked it there, where they all lived, and he wished he could be with them, in the shadow country.

Just before he fell asleep, he saw them moving and shifting in the blank wall by the door. He smiled at them and went to sleep.

When he awoke, it was early. He couldn’t smell the coffee from downstairs yet, even. There was a ruddy-yellow sunswatch on the blank wall, a crooked square, just waiting for him. He jumped out of bed and ran to it. He washed his hands in it, squatted down on the floor with his arms out. “Now!” he said.

He locked his thumbs together and slowly flapped his hands. And there on the wall was a black butterfly, flapping its wings right along with him. “Hello, butterfly,” said Bobby.

He made it jump. He made it turn and settle to the bottom of the light patch, and fold its wings up and up until they were together. Suddenly he whipped one hand away, peeled back the sleeve of his sleeper, and presto! There was a long-necked duck. “Quack-ack!” said Bobby, and the duck obligingly opened its bill, threw up its head to quack. Bobby made it curl up its bill until it was an eagle. He didn’t know what kind of noise an eagle made, so he said, “Eagle-eagle-eagle-eagle-eagle,” and that sounded fine. He laughed.

When he laughed Mommy Gwen slammed the door open and stood there in a straight-lined white bathrobe and straight flat slippers. “What are you playing with?”

Bobby held up his empty hands.

“I was just—”

She took two steps into the room. “Get up,” she said. Her lips were pale. Bobby got up, wondering why she was so angry. “I heard you laugh,” she said in a hissy kind of a whisper. She looked him up and down, looked at the door around him. “What were you playing with?”

“A eagle,” said Bobby.

“A what? Tell me the truth!”

Bobby waved his empty hands vaguely and looked away from her. She had such an angry face.

She stepped, reached, put a hard hand around his wrist. She lifted his arm so high he went on tiptoes, and with her other hand she felt his body, this side, that side. “You’re hiding something. What is it? Where is it? What were you playing with?”

“Nothing. Reely, reely truly nothing,” gasped Bobby as she shook and patted. She wasn’t spanking. She never spanked. She did other things.

“You’re being punished,” she said in her shrill angry whisper. “Stupid, stupid, stupid … too stupid to know you’re being punished.” She set him down with a thump and went to the door. “Don’t let me hear you laugh again. You’ve been bad, and you’re not being kept in this room to enjoy yourself. Now you stay here and think about how bad you are breaking windows. Tracking mud. Lying.”

She went out and closed the door with a steadiness that was like slamming, but quiet. Bobby looked at the door and wondered for a moment about that broken window. He’d been terribly sorry; it was just that the golf ball bounced so hard. Daddy had told him he should be more careful, and he had watched sorrowfully while Daddy put in a new pane. Then Daddy had given him a little piece of putty to play with and asked him never to do it again and he’d promised not to. And the whole time Mommy Gwen hadn’t said a thing to him about it. She’d just looked at him every once in a while with her eyes and her mouth straight and thin, and she’d waited. She’d waited until Daddy went away.

He went back to his sunbeam and forgot all about Mommy Gwen.

After he’d made another butterfly and a dog’s head and an alligator on the wall, the sunbeam got so thin that he couldn’t make anything more, except, for a while, little black finger shadows that ran up and down the strip of light like ants on a matchstick. Soon there was no sunbeam at all, so he sat on the edge of his bed and watched the vague flickering of the something that lived in the end wall. It was a
different
kind of something. It wasn’t a good something and it
wasn’t bad. It just lived there, and the difference between it and the other things, the butterflies and dogs and swans and eagles who lived there, was that the something didn’t need his hands to make it be alive. The something—stayed. Some day he was going to make a butterfly or a dog or a horse that would stay after he moved his hands away. Meanwhile, the only one who stayed, the only one who lived all the time in the shadow country, was this something that flickered up there where the two walls met the ceiling. “I’m going right in there and play with you,” Bobby told it. “You’ll see.”

There was a red wagon with three wheels in the yard, and a gnarly tree to be climbed. Jerry came and called for a while, but Mommy Gwen sent him away.
“He’s been bad.”
So Jerry went away.

Bad bad bad. Funny how the things he did didn’t used to be bad before Daddy married Mommy Gwen.

Mommy Gwen didn’t want Bobby. That was all right—Bobby didn’t want Mommy Gwen either. Daddy sometimes said to grownup people that Bobby was much better off with someone to care for him. Bobby could remember ’way back when he used to say that with his arm around Mommy Gwen’s shoulders and his voice ringing. He could remember when Daddy said it quietly from the other side of the room, with a voice like an angry “I’m sorry.” And now, Daddy hadn’t said it at all for a long time.

Bobby sat on the edge of his bed and hummed to himself, thinking these thoughts, and he hummed to himself and didn’t think of anything at all. He found a ladybug crawling up the dresser and caught it the careful way, circling it with his thumb and forefinger so that it crawled up on his hand by itself. Sometimes when you pinched them up they got busted. He stood on the windowsill and hunted until he found the little hole in the screen that the ladybug must have used to come in. He let the bug walk on the screen and guided it to the hole. It flew away, happy.

The room was flooded with warm dull light reflected from the sparkly black shed roof, and he couldn’t make any shadow country people at all, so he made them in his head until he felt sleepy. He lay down then and hummed softly to himself until he fell asleep. And
through the long afternoon the thing in the wall flickered and shifted and lived.

At dusk Mommy Gwen came back. Bobby may have heard her on the stairs; anyway, when the door opened on the dim room he was sitting up in bed, thumbing his eyes.

The ceiling blazed. “What have you been doing?”

“Was asleep, I guess. Is it night time?”

“Very nearly. I suppose you’re hungry.” She had a covered dish.

“Mmm.”

“What kind of an answer is that?” she snapped.

“Yes ma’am I’m hungry Mommy Gwen,” he said rapidly.

“That’s a little better. Here.” She thrust the dish at him. He took it, removed the top plate and put it under the bowl. Oatmeal. He looked at it, at her.