Two Girls Fat and Thin (10 page)

When I was nine I read
“The Little Match Girl,” the fairy tale about a starving child who freezes to death outside the home of a middleclass family as they eat Christmas dinner. I read with growing horror as it became clear that no elf or genie was going to appear to take her to a magic land or grant her wishes. She used the last of her pathetic matches to warm her fingers and finally lay down in the snow to die. For days I was obsessed with fantasies in which I appeared in the story, a wealthy child philanthropist, to sweep the match girl away to my opulent home. Then I switched to a fantasy in which the match girl appeared huddled in our backyard one snowy night, and I took her in and fed her bowls of Cream of Wheat. We gave her clothes and money, and in the end adopted her. She slept in my bed with me, her bony back pressed against my front, my arm wrapped around her waist.

“Mama, if we found a girl in the yard who was starving and cold, we’d take her in, wouldn’t we?”

“Of course we would.”

“We’d feed her and let her spend the night?”

“Yes, but there aren’t any starving people in our yard. Why do you ask?”

“Well, in case there was.”

“People don’t starve nowadays, honey. Everyone has enough to eat.”

“Even poor people?”

“Yes, even poor people.”

Still, I clutched the fantasies to me for days and kept them within reach when, months later, the idea of the dying girl would pierce me.

It was during the summer
of that year when we moved to Chiffon, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. We moved because my father had spent the happiest summer of his boyhood there with an aunt before his parents sent for him in Tennessee. We drove to Chiffon during a noisy downpour of rain. I sat between my parents in the front seat, comforted by the moist car-warmth of fresh sweat and damp vinyl. A friendly little snake of scent (apple cores, old potato chip bags) crawled out of the plastic Disposan bag that dangled from the knob of the glove compartment. The windshield wipers rubbed the water back and forth on the glass, and Michigan appeared to us through rivulets and teardrops as we slowly toiled towards Chiffon.

My father hunched over the wheel, squinting and talking about how wonderful life in Michigan would be. My mother sat cross-legged in her see-through raincoat and yellow paisley head scarf. For months I had been imagining this place of big beautiful snow and houses with front porches, where trees dappled the streets with their shadows in the summer and grocery clerks were your friends.

When we arrived at Chiffon, I was surprised to see rows of houses more squat and symmetrical than those in our neighborhood near Cincinnati. They each had a small square of concrete for a porch and short starved trees in their yards. My disappointment rose up like a silent creature staring at me from beneath the filmy green surface of a pool. But I put a sheet of optimism and determination to like the neighborhood over my feelings, and the creature sank. The square sod yards were very green, the tree bark was slick and black in the rain, and, before our house, there was a crabapple tree flowering in a dazzling pink burst, scattering its bright petals in the grass.

Exultant, my daddy took me in one arm and his umbrella in the other and carried me over the Lysol-smelling threshold. I ran across the thin maize carpet yelling “We’re here, we’re here!” my voice echoing from one square beige room to the next.

The next few weeks were a paradise of trips to the grocery and take-out dinners eaten in the basement rec room before the TV. We couldn’t get into a normal routine; there was so much to do. My father scanned the local newspapers for coupons and announcements of bargains, cut them out and saved them until he was ready to hit three or four stores at once.

“Well,” he’d say, walking into the kitchen, “are you ready to loot Farmer Jack’s and A&P and Kroger’s for all the ice cream and Kleenex and chicken pot pie we can carry?”

Or my mother and I would take a walk after dinner, through blocks of identical houses, with identical shrubs planted in each yard, to a stretch of dirt road that led to a little cluster of stores, one of them a drugstore with an enormous fluorescent-lit candy counter. We’d buy Almond Joys, Mallomars, Mellomints, and licorice ropes and walk back in the dark as the street lamps winked on. Kids standing on the sidewalk in groups would stop talking and turn to watch us, their expressions dimmed by the evening.

When we got back to the house, my father would be sitting in the dark in the living room with a flashlight at his feet. We’d come in and he’d flick it on, shining it in our faces, momentarily blinding us. “Were they friendly at Baker Drugs?” he’d ask.

During these first weeks I saw very little of the other kids in the neighborhood because I almost never went out alone. They would sail by on bicycles, watching but keeping their distance whenever they saw us. Or I would hear them calling each other in a ritual singsong voice that scorned door bells and intermediary parents. The neighbors on either side of us (the old, grinning, big-nosed Sissels and the faded Catholic Kopeikins) had introduced themselves, but the Sissels had no children and the Kopeikins had only two squeamish myopic girls who wore matching flounce dresses, watched soap operas, and were given Saltines to eat when they were especially good.

One day when we’d been there almost a month, I was sitting in
the front yard in a lawn chair reading
Tarzan and the City of Gold
when two boys pulled up on bikes and looked at me.

“Hey kid,” they said. “Where’re you from?”

“Cincinnati, Ohio.”

“Ohio’s a queer state.”

“What does ‘queer’ mean?”

“God!” They looked at each other in disbelief. “You don’t know what ‘queer’ means?”

I shook my head. Their voices were sarcastic, with a hard quality that didn’t allow for softness at all.

“It means retarded. Ohio’s a retard state.”

I felt my parents’ house behind me, and it felt vulnerable and weak. “Then what’s Michigan if Ohio’s a retard state?”

“Michigan’s a cool state. What’s your name, kid?”

“Dotty Footie.”

“God!” They looked at each other and rolled their eyes. “See you around, kid.” They got on their bikes and pedaled away.

I folded the lawn chair and went into the house. My mother was sitting on the hard new orange couch, reading a magazine, so I asked her what “queer” meant.

“It means odd, or unusual. Why?”

“Some boys came up while I was reading and said Ohio was a queer state.”

“That just means they don’t know much about Ohio.”

I didn’t go out and read again. But when I went with my parents for bargains or sight-seeing, I looked at the kids in the street more closely. I noticed that the boys and girls played separately, the boys standing in groups or walking with baseball equipment, the girls sitting on the concrete stoops with Barbie dolls, their blue plastic Barbie homes and accessories laid out in a format. I told myself that I was just the kind of person who liked to stay inside a lot.

“Territory is very important,” said my father. Somebody had thrown a paper cup on the edge of our yard, and he’d brought it in and put it on the kitchen table. “That’s why people have yards and fences and decorations and flowers in their yards. To establish a territory and mark it. Whatever bastard threw this on our yard has violated our territory, and if I see him do it again, I’ll kill him.”

Before the summer ended there was a serialized TV special on Anne Frank. We all sat in the basement and watched it in the dark, eating plates of cookies my mother made when
The Wizard of Oz
or something special was on. The Anne Frank show was a live play on a bare set of rooms with actors and actresses who had lines on their faces and pieces of hair hanging on their foreheads. It was preceded and followed by a man sitting in a chair talking about Nazis. They showed concentration camp footage at the end, as they were rolling the credits.

I loved the Anne Frank show. It made me feel something for other people, an awful connection with dead strangers more intimate than any relationship I had with my living peers. It made me feel vindicated and angry and self-righteous. The television presentation padded it enough so that it induced a mild feeling of sorrow and sensitivity instead of actual pain. After all, the actress who played Anne Frank had said in the end, “I believe people are basically good,” and the announcer had talked about the triumph of the human spirit, even though there were all those corpses.

In September I had to go
to school. The trip to school was a gray sleepwalk through bathroom and breakfast, then through a neighborhood that was by now as familiar as a bad taste, surrounded by groups of other children who swung their lunch boxes and ferociously snapped their gum. In memory I see it from an aerial view; the square green lawns, the rooftops with the same chunk of space between them, the maze of sidewalks, the little human clusters progressing through the maze like disease moving through the body in a science diagram. The sight of myself—the lone toiling dot among the lunch box-swinging clusters—instantly recalls the fear and isolation that I took to be a normal state when among people other than my mother and father.

The school was a low concrete building surrounded by asphalt that had seesaws, swing sets and other iron instruments of play welded on to it. The halls were wide and monstrously echoed the shouts of children. We were assembled in the “Multi-Purpose Room,” given speeches, and told where to go. There were roughly thirty children assigned to big, full-skirted Miss Durrell, who had brown eyes and a burst of pimples arrayed across her forehead.

The days were defined by the tasks we had to accomplish such as making numbers jump over and under lines on the blackboard, reading about people on the Prairie, memorizing the imports and exports of Nicaragua, or why people in Turkey no longer had to wear fezzes. A map hung over the blackboard at all times to remind us that other countries were delineated by particular shapes and distinguished by different colors. At intervals we were made to go out on the asphalt where, for the most part, boys would run up and down screaming and fighting and girls would huddle by the door talking in low voices. The most formidable group was made up of big girls in short skirts that cut tight across their thighs and clung to their buttocks, who had hair that was teased and knotted until it stood straight up on their heads. I was afraid of them and I walked out to the edges of the playground and daydreamed until it was time to go in and memorize something else.

At the end of the day I would go home, strip off my dress and leave it on the floor of my room, put on pants, and go sit in the basement rec room watching
Wagon Train, The Twilight Zone
, and
Hullabaloo
until dinner was called.

During the first week I made friends with Eileen Iris, who sat next to me. She was a small, sedate child with long wavy brown hair who wore a pale pink sweater with white sequin leaves on it, which seemed the essence of femininity to me. Soon we were exchanging “friendship bracelets” made of fake shells, walking together on the outer reaches of the playground, collecting pretty pebbles, and eating the tiny strawberries to be found in the fitful undergrowth. She introduced me to tiny Darla Rice, a brown-skinned girl one grade younger than us whose short dark hair was set in a fashionable adult style. Her mother took the three of us to the wonderful Ice Capades in Detroit, to watch skaters in ballerina attire or grinning papier-mâché heads glide and leap to solemn recorded music as they were raked by mystic blue and white spotlights.

My friendship with Darla and Eileen did not, however, ease my feeling of isolation as I sat in class or walked home alone from school. It was like an aberrant pocket of comfort that could not emit enough warmth to extend into the coldness surrounding it.

I was still afraid to venture out of the house into my neighborhood,
although I didn’t think of it as fear. It felt more like a natural aversion; the very air outside our door seemed unbreathable, the voices of the neighborhood children, hard and bounding as rubber balls, cut into my sphere and left no space for me. Where were the friendly Michiganders my father had spoken about so confidently? I watched him and waited for an answer, which came in the form of a speech. “They’ve ruined everything that Michigan ever was,” he said. “They ripped down the old buildings and paved over the old roads and put crap up all over everything. It’s terrifying.”

He spoke in the dark of evening after dinner, from his vinyl reclining chair. My mother sat on the edge of the couch, examining her nails.

“It’s all part of the general trend,” he continued. “I thought Michigan would’ve escaped it, but I was wrong. We’re being destroyed, like the Romans.” He was answered by the tiny click of my mother’s thin nails being peeled into her cupped palm.

He said these things again on many other nights as he paced through the house like a soldier, rubbing invisible granules and making bitter comparisons between our neighborhood and the Michigan of his happy summer, sometimes punctuating his words by rushing out into the yard to seize a piece of litter or a crumpled beer can which he would bring in and hurl onto the kitchen table. His words seemed to hover over the house in a useless attempt to shield it.

Then it was October, and we found out about Devil’s Night. There had been a Devil’s Night in Ohio, too; the night before Halloween, teenagers could go around ringing people’s doorbells and throwing toilet paper over trees, and nobody would mind. In Chiffon, it wasn’t just one night. It started a whole week before Halloween, and it wasn’t just ringing doorbells and throwing paper. Gangs of kids would wander around, rubbing layers of soap onto people’s windows and walls, setting fires on front stoops and splattering the houses of unpopular people with eggs.

Our house was “egged” the first night, and my father screamed with rage. “These are the people who pick on old people, who terrorize the small and the defenseless!” The next night he turned off all the lights and, with me at his side, waited in the living room for the next pranksters. We hid behind an armchair together with a
flashlight, some crackers and peanut butter—our “rations,” just like in the army. I was proud to be part of my father’s battle against juvenile delinquents. The first pranksters were a gang of doorbell ringers whose faces registered shock as my father burst out upon them with his machete, who scattered and fled in all directions as he chased them down the block shouting, “Come back and fight, bastards!”