Not down by the storm sewer because Grandpa was watching the rain from the front window when he saw the little girl float by and he fought his way through the powerful moving river of water to save her at the last second like a newspaper hero. Not down by that ravine, because once a little boy was killed when the rushing water swept him in and he was crushed on those sharp blocks of quarried granite below. Not into a neighbor's house because of the four-year-old daughter of the preacher when Mother was little who was lured into a tornado cellar and murdered there by a teenage neighbor boy. He put his private thing in her down there in the cellar several times on days before the killing day. Not swimming, because of the polio epidemic. Not into a bar, even when you are a grown-up, because there are bad people in there drinking beer. Not into a friend's house, because if there is a fire, your friend's parents will save their own children and forget all about you and then you will burn to death. You will die.
Our back yard: parched and barren, but with one tree big enough to climb. Climbing that tree and fingering three tiny eggs in a nest. Later hearing the outraged screams of the mother bird. Mother scolding me because the mother would now abandon her eggs and the baby birds would never have life because of me. The reeling shock I felt constrict my throat. The taste of my hot tears for the little white orphaned eggs. Finding the deserted nest again the following winter, the eggs deteriorated by then to paper-thin fragments. My shame.
My doll, the one my young and tender-hearted parents purchased early because they feared I would not live the two weeks until Christmas. Mother placing the doll, boxed and wrapped in cellophane, next to me in my sick bed. Being too weak to play with that doll made for a child movie star, not for a little girl with home-made clothes living on the outskirts of an oil field. My dangerously high fever and Daddy putting me in the cold bath water in my nightgown, my throat feeling like it was slashed with barbed wire every time I swallowed my own saliva.
After I recovered, that doll was very real to me. I had others, but they were merely props I used for decorating my bed. I felt guilty about the other dolls because they knew that I did not love them, but still I could not bring myself to play with them. I left them carelessly on the floor, shoeless, hands reaching helplessly into the air. Mother complained about the clutter and demanded that I get rid of some of them. She handed me a clear plastic bag from the dry cleaners and I rapidly and ruthlessly bagged every single birthday and Christmas doll except for the one I loved. There was a trap door in the bottom of my closet to a storage space below the floorboards; a second trap door in the closet's ceiling led to the attic. I believed my closet contained secret entrances to Heaven and Hell. Mother helped me drop the big clear bag of unloved dolls down into the black hole under our house, and I felt a strange, wild exhiliration at being rid of them.
When night came, I could not rest. I thought I could hear the poor unwanted dolls weeping pathetically in the cold darkness that smelled like dirt. My heart hurt because I was such a bad mother, but eventually I cried myself to sleep. The next morning I asked Mother to come help me get the bag of dolls back, but she refused. As time passed I became afraid to go to sleep because I imagined the rejected dolls' heartbreak had gradually turned to hatred and they were plotting ways to come up through the trap door during the black of night to get their revenge on me.
*******
Daddy wanted to make something of himself so he left the oil field and took a job managing a large tenement-style apartment house; we moved into one of the vacant units. One dirty, windy afternoon a middle-aged couple invited some of us kids who were standing around watching them move in to come with them in their rusted red pick-up truck for a drive over to their old place while they loaded up more boxes. I didn't think Daddy would allow me to go with the other children, but much to my surprise, he said Okay. The wife was skinny and wrinkled, with dry faded brown hair and a red-and-white checked blouse. The man had a big western hat and a gut straining over his belt buckle. I guess they looked harmless to my father, and they sure liked kids.
All of us who went on this adventure were boys, except for me. We piled into the bed of the truck and the couple rode up front in the cab. As soon as we got on the main road I had to hold on to keep my balance. I could barely breathe because the wind resistance was so great it felt like a huge invisible smothering palm over my face. When we drove around the traffic circle I was pitched against the sharp-boned boys and I feared I would be thrown from the moving truck. The one-lane asphalt highway was just a little farther out, past the Dairy Queen and the roller rink. Maybe these people were going to kidnap us. But, no. They safely negotiated a sharp turn and headed on a few blocks to their old house, a stone one out on the highway. I had noticed this house before. It had a crescent moon window in its front door.
We crunched to a stop on the gravel driveway. I felt a little better then and silently berated myself for having thought this nice couple was going to do something bad to us. The man unlocked the kitchen door and the woman waited while we kids got out of the truck and then she held the screen door open for us, smiling, as we went into her house.
Eight years of life had not prepared me for what I beheld in the kitchen. Empty amber beer bottles sprang up from every surface like tin soldiers. There were bottles covering the kitchen table, bottles in the sink and lining the counter top, bottles on top of the stove and on top of the refrigerator. There were bottles in squashed cardboard boxes and brown paper grocery bags. Bottle tops, all the same kind -- silver with red letters -- littered the floor and tiddly-winked between the regiments of emptied bottles. The sight of all these bottles, this indisputable evidence of beer-drinking, made my stomach drop as if the cables of the elevator I rode in had snapped and I'd plummeted down a few floors. I felt blood rise to my face and heard ringing somewhere in the dark behind my eyes. I heard my own voice telling me inside my head, this is a place you're not supposed to go.
The wife offered us Cokes from the ice box, the small ones in green glass bottles, and told us we could go sit in the living room and watch television. I alone followed her in there. The others, the boys, didn't seem to think there was anything wrong with being there in that house full of beer bottles; some of them went out in the back yard to play, chasing each other through the house, dodging half-packed moving boxes. Blue cigarette smoke drifted into the living room where I sat. Motes shimmered in strips of light let in by Venetian blinds. I wanted to go home, but I could hear the grown-ups scooting back chairs at the kitchen table and the man laughing when some of the beer bottles clanked and crashed to the floor. I couldn't pay attention to the t.v. or drink my little Coke because tears were rising in my throat and my breath was shallow.
After a while the man brought the boys, in a group, into the living room. He picked up one of many yellow National Geographic from a pile on the floor, and, grinning, displayed a picture. The boys giggled and jockeyed for good positions as more pages were turned. They pointed and said things I couldn't make out. When they'd all finished looking, one of the boys absently handed the journal to me and turned his attention to another magazine the husband was showing. I let the pages flip by me one by one from the back of the magazine to the front. I wondered which article they'd all been looking at. Then I figured it out. There were photographs of beautiful chocolate-colored women, their breasts bare, wearing strings of colored beads and silver wire around their necks and wrists. Some of them were big-bellied with babies. They stood under lush green trees with huge serrated leaves speaking with an old white woman, a missionary, perhaps. I shut the magazine in shame, not because of the pictures of lovely African women, but because of how the husband's face had looked when he showed those pictures to the boys.
Then I sat on the scratchy, lumpy couch and stared straight ahead at the t.v. I thought about how much I loved my parents and how, if I got back home safely, I would try so hard to be good. My heart ached for my own home like I had left it behind forever across an ocean. I could hear the strange grown-ups laughing and clinking bottles in the kitchen as the air grew dense with cigarette smoke strata. My own voice inside my brain kept telling me over and over again, this is a place you're not supposed to go.
Eventually the grown-ups finished their beers and loaded their cardboard boxes into the truck and then they were ready to take us home. Maybe the wife even asked me what was the matter and hadn't I had a good time.
When we arrived back at the apartments I leaped out of the back of the truck and ran all the way to my own back door, slowing down and trying to seem less breathless and panicky as I swung open the screen door. Mother was busy in the kitchen. It was only late afternoon by then, but I asked to take my bath early. I ran the water hotter than usual and washed myself all over with Lava soap.
The shock of finding one long, colorless hair growing on the most secret part of my body. Thinking, this is where it all begins. Things will never be the same again. From now on, everything has to be private. Seeing and hearing a curtain fall behind my eyes somewhere, a lead-colored one, as I sat for a long time in the bathtub and the water went tepid, then cool, then cold. Going completely underwater like when I was baptized, holding my breath a long time, trying to float motionless, like fish who sleep in shallow water.
Not eating much supper that night. Being afraid to look my parents in the eyes, afraid they could tell from my dilated pupils and flushed cheeks that I had been somewhere bad. Feeling a little better when, in my own bed at last, Mother turned off my bedroom light and then no one could see that I was ashamed. Snuggling down, praying for some kind of forgiveness -- from Little Lord Jesus? from Mother and Daddy? I tried a good long time there in the dark to go to sleep.
