Life Among the Savages (18 page)

“When he heard the crash,” Laurie said. “Gee, what a noise it must of made.”

“Keep your
head
down.”

“How many cops?”

“Officer Harrison, and Mr. Lanza, and two or three others I didn't know. I called the State police station and thanked them a few days ago. They were very happy to hear that you were so much better.”

“Doc said you fainted.”

“I did
not.
” I sat up indignantly.

“Did Daddy faint?”

“Certainly not.”

“Did Jannie faint?”

“I sent Jannie and Sally down to the Olsons',” I said. “They don't know very much about it.”

“I won't tell them,” Laurie said reassuringly. “What about my bike—is it all right?”

“Well,” I said, “no, it isn't. As a matter of fact, it's broken.”

“I
bet
it is,” said Laurie, with relish. “Boy, did that bike ever get smacked—I bet it's in a million pieces.”

“Keep your head down.”

“Hey, what about my clothes?” Laurie said, remembering. “I woke up in the hospital and I had on a nightgown; what about my clothes?”

“Since you're feeling so well,” I said, remembering, “I might as well point out that even though I was quite worried about you, I was positively ashamed when they undressed you at the hospital. I distinctly remember telling you to put on clean clothes that morning, and whatever may be said for your shirt, your underwear—”

“They undressed me at the hospital? Who?”

“The nurse. And when I saw that underwear—”

“The
nurse
?
She
undressed me?”

“Keep your head
down
.”

“Oh, brother,” said Laurie. He thought, while Toby, his head on the pillow, breathed heavily and happily, and Shax stirred, lifted his head, and curled up more comfortably. “Where are my clothes now?” Laurie asked finally.

“Your shoes are put neatly—
neatly
—under the chair in your room. That underwear has been sent to the laundry, and your socks and blue jeans, too.” I hesitated. “Your shirt was thrown out,” I said.

“Why?” Laurie demanded. “
Why
was my shirt thrown out?”

“It was torn,” I said.

“Torn? You mean it was covered with blood or something?”

“No,” I said. “It was torn. Cut.”

“Cut?”

“Keep your head down. They cut it off you at the hospital.”

“They did?” Laurie said, his eyes shining. “They had to
cut it
off?”

“Well, they
preferred
to.”

“Where is it?”

“I told you, it was thrown out. They gave me your clothes at the hospital and told me the shirt was thrown out.”

Laurie asked accusingly, “You didn't keep that shirt? All covered with blood and you didn't
keep
it?”

“Why should I keep it?”

“Which one was it? The green checked one?”

“That was the one you took off in the morning. You put on the new shirt with the baseball picture.”

“
That
one? My new one?”

“There are plenty of others,” I said, making a mental note about never going near those baseball shirts again. “How about you go to sleep now?”

“That good baseball shirt? And you went and threw it out?”

“You couldn't have worn it again.”

“Who wants to
wear
it?” said Laurie. “What else happened?”

“Well,” I said, “Brooklyn lost the pennant that same afternoon.”

“I heard the Series in the hospital,” Laurie said. “What a robbery.”

“Would you like to go to sleep now?”

“I bet Dad was nearly crazy,” Laurie said.

“Not at all,” I said, “he was—”

“Losing the last day like that. Gee,” Laurie said, squeezing down between Toby and Shax, “it's not bad being home.”

A month later, with satisfaction only secondary to Laurie's, I took him back to school to pick up his books so he could try to catch up on his work. “Remember,” I told him in the car before we went into the school, “thank the teacher and the kids for the nice basket they sent you.”

“Yeah,” Laurie said. He had chosen ten in the morning as the ideal moment to present himself at school.

“And don't forget to thank the teacher for her flowers.”

“Yeah.”

“And tell her I'll help you at home with arithmetic.”

“Come
on
,” Laurie said.

We entered the classroom in triumph; Laurie threw open the door and stood for a moment in the doorway before advancing with a swagger Cyrano might have envied. “I'm back,” he said into the quiet of the spelling lesson.

“Thank you so much for the flowers,” I told the teacher. “Laurie appreciated them
so
much.”

Laurie sat on one of the front desks, holding his hand with the traction splint prominently displayed. All the third-grade girls gathered around him, and the boys sat on the floor and on nearby desks. “—And I guess there were five hundred people there,” he was saying, “they came tearing in from all over. And the street—you oughta seen the street—
covered
with blood—”

“I'll go over his arithmetic with him,” I told the teacher.

“He was doing splendidly,” she said absently, her eyes on Laurie.

“—And my good shirt, they had to
cut
it off me, ten doctors, and there was so much blood on it they had to throw it away because it was all cut to pieces and bloody. And I went in an ambulance with the sireens and boy! did
we
travel. Boy!”

“And will he need to go over his reading?”

“Excuse me,” said Laurie's teacher. Unwillingly, she moved closer to the spellbinder, her hand still reassuringly on my arm. “And my mother fainted,” he was saying, “and my
father .
. .”

S
OMETIMES, IN MY capacity as mother, I find myself sitting open-mouthed and terrified before my own children, little individual creatures moving solidly along in their own paths and yet in some mysterious manner vividly reminiscent of a past which my husband and I know we have never communicated to them; I remember the little shock of familiarity I felt when I first saw Jannie skip down the front walk, and the sense of lost years slipping past, unrealized, when Laurie came home chanting “OUT spells out, and out you go, down to the bottom of the deep blue sea with a dirty dishrag turned inside
out
,” although there was a heated family discussion about the second line of “Ibbitty, Bibbitty, Sibbitty, Sab,” because Laurie believed that it went “Ibbitty, bibbitty, conoso,” and
I
said it was “conothco,” and my husband said it was “Ibbitty, bibbitty, canarsie,” and it reminded me of the little idiocy which went “Laurie bumbaurie tiliaurie gosaurie,” although my husband said that
that
one ended “gotaurie.” Sally discovered in herself the ability to chant that most basic and most jeering of childhood tunes, the “
da,
da, da
-da,
da,” or “
I
know a secret,” melody; Laurie began collecting pictures of baseball players, which came enclosed in packages of bubble gum; in my day they used to be in packages of licorice. The candy cigarette turned up, and the chocolate apple; they no longer give away baseball bats with pairs of new shoes, but Buster Brown still grins with his dog from the soles. A whole section of forgotten past came back, for instance, one evening when Laurie remarked joyfully that a house near the school had a ghost in it and none of the kids from school would walk past it, although one intrepid adventurer named Oliver maintained that he had been inside and had of course seen the ghost, and “Boy,” Laurie said with reminiscent pleasure, “was
he
scared!”

My husband and I looked at one another; in my case it was a house on the next block—the one next to the vacant lot—and the boy who said he had been inside was named Andy Young (how is it that I have not forgotten Andy Young in all these years?) and my husband remembered that there was a shack at the back of the school yard which had a ghost in it and that one Louie Fair had been inside. In all cases the punchline of the story was precisely, “Boy, was he scared!” My husband and I found ourselves repeating the same amused platitudes about boys who went into haunted houses that our parents had used to us, Laurie retorted that
every
one knew this house was haunted and he bet we wouldn't go inside, and there was a familiar split-second hesitation before my husband and I answered, in chorus, that
certainly
we would go inside, if it were not that the house belonged to someone else who would presumably resent our entering without permission. Laurie said Boy, he bet a ghost was sure a scarey thing to see, and his father offered to compose a document demonstrating that our house was haunted if Laurie would take copies of this document and distribute them, like handbills, around the neighborhood. Laurie agreed with delight, and the conversation closed, in traditional style, with the flat statement that Laurie was not to go into the haunted house under any circumstances since it was a) someone else's property and b) if abandoned, probably dangerous, with broken glass and falling beams. Point c) was not mentioned, but I personally have always believed in ghosts; I taught Laurie later a small charm against evil spirits, disguising it as a nursery rhyme. The handbill
¹
was duly composed and Laurie set out with it, although along the way he fell in with evil spirits against whom his charm was powerless and played two innings of softball; when his father asked him later about the handbill he said that Mrs. Wright, down the road, had read it and thought it was very clever and asked Laurie if he had written it himself. Mrs. Collins had not had time to read it right then but said she would send over a plate of cookies later. By the time school started again in the fall, gang warfare had taken over the fourth grade and the ghost was allowed to languish in his haunted house, untroubled again by Oliver, although I daresay that when someday Laurie's son remarks that a friend of his has explored a haunted house, Oliver's name will come, freely and with nostalgia, to Laurie's mind.

The opening of school that fall found Sally, scorning the overalls which now read
SALLY, preparing to enter upon nursery school. Jannie's girls had all retired abruptly to a ranch in Texas, from which they very rarely wrote illegible letters to their mother, but Sally now had a house of her own, located approximately and damply in the middle of the river near
our
house; we all heard a great deal about this retreat of Sally's, in which a number of small children Sally's age lived in utter happiness upon lollipops and corn on the cob. Sally visited there, she explained, at night after the rest of us were asleep, and when she was particularly angry with any of us she shouted furiously, “
You
can't come to
my
house!”

Sally had at this time entered with complete abandon into a form-fitting fairyland; I saw her sometimes as wandering perpetually in a misty odd world, where familiar shapes merged and changed as she passed and occasionally a brother or a sister or a parent, stepping from behind a tree, might briefly interrupt her journey; with the exception of Jannie, who slept in the same room and had no refuge from Sally's bedroom stories, I spent more time with Sally than with anyone else, and began to find that a large part of my daily activity was accompanied by Sally's tuneful and unceasing conversation; part song, part story, part uncomplimentary editorial comment. Around the house, my head deep in a pillowcase or the oven, my eyes focussed on that supernatural neatness which the housewife sees somehow shadowing her familiar furniture, it was largely possible to disregard, or not-quite-hear, Sally, but in the car I was entirely what I believe is called a captive audience. We traveled far afield that fall, Sally and I, up and down familiar and unfamiliar roads, going perhaps after pumpkins, or taking a side road because for a minute it looked unusually yellow to Sally, or just going the longest way around because it took us over a covered bridge crossing Sally's river and people living nearby owned a baby goat. “In my river.” Sally remarked once, chillingly, “we sleep in wet beds, and we hear our mothers calling us,”—giving me a sudden terrifying picture of my own face, leaning over the water, wavering, and my voice far away and echoing, “The water is probably
extremely
cold,” I told her, and shivered. “In the river,” Sally said, “no one ever comes except
us
.” We drove upon occasion, Sally and I, up and down Murphy's Hill, which was every bit as steep going up as it was going down and led only to a kind of plateau neatly edged with trees; in the fall these trees presented an appearance sufficiently startling to make a trip up (and of course down) Murphy's Hill a rewarding experience even beyond its roller coaster aspects; the vines on the trunks of these trees turned red early, and the trees stayed green late, and a row of straight, youthful green trees with bright red trunks was a sight I have never seen
except
at the top of Murphy's Hill.