Too Close to the Falls (16 page)

The staccato blasts of the Bloods wafted into the open windows as they sped by on their bikes. I could hear the tat-a-tat-tat of the playing cards they had placed in their bike spokes with clothespins so their wheels would make gearchanging noises. I felt the rhythmical beating of the cards calling to me to run with the pack; yet I was chained to my scissors for
hours
on end, shackled to the Lennon Sisters paper pile. The Schmidt brothers bustled back and forth playing Dick Tracy with walkie-talkies made from two orange-juice cans connected with clothesline which
I
had carefully constructed.

I watched them through the leaded glass bars of my parents' living room window as I sat cutting out the Lennon Sisters dresses that were paper replicas of those worn on the
Lawrence Welk Show
, where the sisterly gaggle warbled weekly. Susie actually made us sing a medley of their songs. I was great at doing one task and could smoke with concentration; however, I never mastered doing two tasks simultaneously. As we sang “Kay-sa-rah-sa-rah, whatever will be will be,” and the Baker girls' favourite, “Whip-er-will whip-er-will you and I know, Tammy, Tammy, Tammy's in
love,” I cut mine all wrong and snipped off all the tabs that held the clothes on the cardboard figures. Judy and Sue Baker were disgusted with me for having wrecked three evening gowns. (As my mother said, “Haven't they ever heard of tape?”) Cutting out the pleated skirts with those jagged edges was a true exercise in patience. My fingers were tired and blistered by the time we finished snipping the entire wardrobe from the large paper sheets. I thought
then
maybe the fun would begin. I had a desire to be sane and if playing Lennon Sisters paper dolls was the ticket, I was willing to pay my admission.

Susie, the eldest of the sisters, placed each of us on the floor of my living room and we each had a home for our Lennon sister under the skirt of a wing chair. We had to keep our clothes in neat piles, with casuals in one pile and formals in another. The skirt of the chair kept knocking my apparel askew and the heating vent behind the chair kept blowing my wardrobe from one end of my wing-chair home to the other, creating a storm that rivalled the one in Kansas at Dorothy's house in
The Wizard of Oz
. However, Judy's and Susie's seemed perfectly organized. Susie had the eldest two Lennon sisters, Judy the middle sister, and I had the youngest. Susie held her doll in the middle of the floor and said we were all going out on “a convertible date.” Everyone got dressed. So we all had to find a paper dress and hat and fold our tabs back on our cardboard figures. Then Susie held out her doll and walked around the room. I guess that meant we were on a driving date, although there were never any men dolls. Then she said, “Oh, we're going to a debutante ball where I'm going to be on the throne committee so we have to all wear strapless gowns. . . . Oh, except for Cathy. Her Lennon sister is much too young for strapless. She will
have to wear capped sleeves.”
Great
. There was a lot of flurry and we all went back to our skirted wing chairs and changed paper dresses and emerged to admire Susie as her Lennon sister lay on the coffee table inert — apparently she was on her throne. Since she couldn't bend at the knees, I guess she had to be a reclining debutante queen, sort of like Cleopatra. Then it was time for the “splash party” after the dance, and now even
I
guessed that we had to scurry back to our chairs to change our Lennon sisters' clothes yet again and this time we had to don our bathing suits, wrap covers with matching hats, and gold wedge high heels.

On it went, day after gruesome day, until the day arrived when I heard the insistent whine as the Baker sisters leaned on the doorbell, and I ran out the back door and locked myself in the car and beeped the horn whenever my mother tried to talk to me. Finally she gave up. Believe it or not, the Baker sisters didn't get the hint. They simply stood stunned in the gravel driveway in their matching flowered sundresses with the thick straps. I heard my mother saying that I wasn't myself. Still they stood. Finally my mother had to tell them to go home. They seemed shocked by the news that they were not wanted.

The testing week was even more silly. I was now used to the waiting room at Dr. Small's office, and was not nearly as shocked as I'd been the first time. In fact, the term “nuts” never shocked me again. My only concern was not becoming one. I actually took to doing imitations of “parrot boy,” “Mr. Lint,” and “twisted French mother” on our way home from Buffalo, and my mother couldn't help but laugh.

The testing took place in a room off what Dr. Small referred to
as his “consulting room.” (Strange name since he never consulted with me.) This room had separate stations in it where you moved from one activity to another while he held a stopwatch like the TV show
Beat the Clock
. In the centre of the room there was a little table and two chairs with decals of Humpty Dumpty falling off the wall while looking terrified in mid-air. Dr. Small was lucky he was so puny so he could fit into the little chair without much of a squeeze. Sitting at the diminutive table opposite me, he said, with what I thought was a speech impediment involving the letter R, but my mother assured me was a New York accent, “Well, Catherine, now here I have a number of cards with pictures of Blacky the dog. Blacky lives in a family just like you. He has a mother and father. I'd like to show you some pictures of Blacky doing different things and you can tell me a story about Blacky and what
you
think he is doing and why.”

I nodded, feeling my shoulders lighten with sudden relief. All I had to do was tell a story about Blacky and I was out of this laughing academy and declared sane. One thing I knew about myself — I was a good storyteller. Everyone listened as I spun yarns at the post office. Even adults stood transfixed by what Dolores referred to as my “tall tales.” I had a routine at the post office of ripping open an innocuous advertisement from Sears and Roebuck and pretending that I'd received mail from Howdy Doody and Roy Rogers, and my speciality was the invitation I got from Walt Disney who ran the Mickey Mouse Club requesting that I replace Annette, the most popular Mouseketeer. I also did song-and-dance numbers. One of my most popular was bobbing up and down on imaginary Trigger as I imitated Roy Rogers singing “Happy Trails,” and for an encore I sang one of his earlier
songs from his radio days, one of my favourite bright red 78s entitled “Don't Fence Me In.”

The first card Dr. Small placed before me had a dog, presumably Blacky, drinking milk from his mother's body. That was really disgusting, so naturally I chose to ignore it and said that Blacky had seen a scary movie and was hiding under his mother and closing his eyes until the film was over.

“Oh,” Dr. Small said noncommittally. “Could you tell me more about that.”

“Sure,” I went on. “Blacky had just been to see the movie
Old Yeller
and was really upset when the dog had to be shot, so Blacky hid under his mother.” Dr. Small looked sceptical so I added, “You know that would be a scary movie for a dog to watch.”

Dr. Small wasn't giving up on this one. He said quietly, “Some people actually think that Blacky is drinking milk from his mother in this picture.”

“God, I wouldn't want to meet them,” I answered in a tone I was sure would reassure him that I had seen nothing like that to cast doubts on my sanity.

“Let's try another picture.”

I looked at a picture of Blacky baring his teeth and chewing on a collar that had the word
Mamma
on it in big bold letters. I was getting the dawning realization that these were trick cards. The idea was if you saw Blacky doing these sick things then you were insane. In order to look as though I was travelling with a full deck, I'd have to put a different spin on Blacky's activities. “Well, Blacky is really a good dog. He is carrying his mother's collar for her because she got a crook in her neck in her doghouse, which is too low. Blacky is offering to carry it for her.”

“Why is he snarling and growling?” Dr. Small snarled.

“Oh, he isn't. He just doesn't want to get it all wet so he is keeping his lips open. Who wants a drooled-on collar?”

On it went. In each picture Blacky was doing something more vile than in the last. I really started to sweat when Blacky made a giant bowel movement in front of his mother's house and in another when he licked himself “down there.” (In my family we used what my mother called “medical terms” to refer to bodily functions if we mentioned them at all.) I made sure that Dr. Small didn't have any idea that I had those “insane” thoughts and I kept the whole thing on the up and up. I said Blacky had dropped a Dairy Queen chocolate-dipped soft-ice-cream cone right in front of his dad's door and he was burying it so his dad wouldn't know he's been careless and wasted his ten-cent cone. Unfortunately he'd spilled some ice cream on himself (I cleverly didn't mention where) and in order to be a tidy dog he'd been embarrassed but had to lick it off.

Although I stayed on my toes, the test never seemed to end. I was sure God didn't test this much before he opened heaven's gate. Nor did Joan of Arc have to fight so much for her sanity. If her inquisitors had been this relentlessly devious, it was no wonder she finally said, “Just burn me at the stake.”

The next week Dr. Small had set up a little dollhouse on one table and a farm and barnyard on another. He took the mother doll into the dollhouse and put her in front of the oven and asked what she was cooking. I drew a blank. Finally I said that she was drying mittens. We were very near to dropping the thin veneer of politeness we had precariously maintained throughout the Blacky caper. He asked if we were going to eat the mittens and I couldn't resist
saying that I didn't want to pull the wool over his eyes but people who lived outside of New York City didn't eat mitten stroganoff. They ate in restaurants.

He seemed a little taken aback by the mention of him as a New Yorker and he moved on to the toy barn. In front of a pig stall was a little girl doll in blond pigtails that stuck out at a ninety-degree angle (speaking of insane), wearing a red gingham dress. He asked what she would do with the pigs. Would she feed them, he asked leadingly. I knew better than to wallow with the swine on this one, knowing what a sane person would do. I said I'd kill all the pigs before they ate any more food, cut them up, and sell pork chops in a stand by the side of the road. I'd make sure I was out selling them during rush hour. I added that part just to let him know that I wasn't so stupid I'd stand out on a country road all day with no traffic. After all, I'd been selling newspapers outside for years.

On it went. I think I acted as “sane as the next person,” as Roy said when I regaled him with my responses to the Blacky dog cards, dollhouse, and farm set. Finally, after my mother had several more visits with Dr. Small (my father and I were working so we couldn't go), I was declared sane!

It wasn't that I exactly admired Dr. Small. In fact, I thought he was appropriately named. Yet the
job
appealed to me. However, I'd get a nurse and larger furniture instead of that Munchkin stuff. I liked the idea of being the deity who decided if you were sane or not. It sure beat being on the other side of the desk trying to look sane for the Dr. Smalls of this world. I found it far more comforting to switch chairs. If I couldn't beat Father Flanagan or Mother Superior, at least I could find a role that was safe from them.

I was to return to school the following Monday after five weeks away. I knew that people had been counting my marbles and it was a little nerve-racking going back after so long. Anthony had his stitches out but was still wearing a filthy bandage just for effect. Roy, realizing that I was edgy, said the most important time would be the first five minutes of my return. He said I had to act as though I'd had a purpose in what I had done, and my mission had been accomplished. I had to confront Anthony right away to show him and the rest of the class that I wasn't buying into the sane/insane red herring. “You gots to profile by Anthony the second you're back and let him know right off the bat that you're back for good. Let him know he ain't won this round. Take
nothing
from him.” Roy swaggered up to me in the stockroom and stared at me in what my mother would have called an “insolent” way. He walked too close and I had to move back. “Make him move out of
your
way. He needs to know the compass only the beginnin' and you ain't buyin'
none
of this insanity jive.” Roy said a battle of the wits is no different from a battle in the ring. You have to maintain dominance and never let up. He told me to refer to my time off as my “spring furlough.”

So I strolled into school the following Monday wearing all new clothes that my mother was only too happy to buy, tossed my lunch box on the rack above my coat hook with gay abandon. It barely cleared Clyde Ayers' head and everyone turned to look at me as they took off their yellow rain slickers. I said I couldn't believe that I was back in this dump. I said I'd had a great time burning the midnight oil watching
Gunsmoke
and
Have Gun Will Travel
and going to bed whenever I pleased. I paraded into the classroom and felt all the eyes burning into my back. Anthony
was standing in line at the pencil sharpener. I got my pencil and strode purposefully over to the pencil-sharpening lineup. I cut right in front of Anthony and said, “I'm next.” There was a silence. I waited with my back to him. Sister Immaculata stopped correcting papers at her desk. The room went dead quiet and Anthony waited behind me while I sharpened my pencil to a fine point. It was over.