“C’mon“, her friend said, standing aside when she opened the front door, inviting her in. She hesitated, and once again she was urged to enter. “It’s all right“, Ellen said." You can come in. My mother’s not home, and my Dad won’t mind.”
It was a mid-summer day, the sun still high in the sky, its brightness suddenly, sternly counteracted by the dark interior her companion was urging her to enter. She hesitated again, stepped tentatively across the lintel. Ellen grabbed her hand, and pulled her inside, shutting the door. With the door shut her eyes adjusted slowly to identify objects in the dim interior. On one side of the room, a small lamp threw a diffused light; the only window in the room was covered by an opaque, light-resistant fabric. It was a small room, with few accoutrement's; a chesterfield across the long side of the room, and sitting where the lamp was, at a desk, a man hunched over something.
“My Dad”, whispered Ellen. Light hurts his eyes. His eyes? Light hurts them? Ellen had told her that her father was blind. That was part of the fascination, she had never seen a blind man before. The other area of fascination was the house itself. The only one on their long street of pinched-together two- and three-story houses that was set aside, solitary, and small, its roof parallel with that of other houses’ second stories. It stood directly next to the little grocery store over which the grocery people lived. It was a tiny house, a cramped little mouse of a house, shoe-horned into the street, as though it had gone for a ramble, forgotten where it belonged and just sidled into position, taking up little room. Looking out of place, but compelling in its different -ness.
Ellen, still holding her hand, drew her toward her father, who lifted his head. He had dark curly hair, a heavyset man, sitting on a wooden chair, a huge magnifying glass in his hand, studying something that lay on the desk. Perhaps it was only a small table. There were no drawers, papers were piled high at the back of it, and books, too, with, Ellen proudly said, large print. The man set the glass aside, asked who she was, where she lived. She nervously stuttered the information, and the man’s darkly severe face suddenly relaxed into what must have been a smile. Ellen loosed her hand, said wait a minute, I’ve got to go to the bathroom, and suddenly, quickly, she was gone.
It was rumoured at the school that the little house had no ‘conveniences’. No bathroom, no bathtub or toilet or washbasin. Everything outside, in a little building set aside for that purpose. Which was why Ellen was treated so specially at school, encouraged to come before classes, and to shower at school. And have breakfast there, as well. Even at lunch time when most other children went home for lunch, Ellen and a few others stayed behind, had their lunch at school. Lucky her.
In her own house, in the upstairs where they lived, there was a bathroom that was shared by all the people who lived in the house. Upstairs, besides the tiny kitchen, her parents’ bedroom that they shared with the baby, and her own bedroom, shared with her two brothers, there was another person, a man, who had the biggest room, the one with windows that looked down over the front yard. She wasn’t allowed in there.
The man who lives there is quiet. When he comes home from work, he goes into his room and never comes out. She rarely sees him. He did, once, ask her if she wanted a gift. He held a box of tissues. She knew what they were, just that her family didn’t buy them. To her, they represented a rare treasure, something of her own, disposable tissues. Which she would keep, never use, just look at, because the box they were in was covered with bright colours. Still, though she had told herself in that instant of the offer she would never use the contents of the box, she was hugely disappointed when the man handed it to her, to discover it was empty. Just an empty box.
An empty box. Even if it was coloured with reds and blues and yellows, it no longer held any attraction for her. The man handed it to her, beaming, and she thrust out her hand, accepting it. He continued to hold on to the box, and she looked at him, puzzled. Well? He said, what do you say? She remembered what to say.
It was that man, her family, and the family that lived downstairs who used the bathroom. The bathroom had wood on it, halfway up the walls, painted a yellow-green-brown colour she hated. Paint peeled from the ceiling at the corners of the walls, over where the bathtub stood. The sink leaked steadily, and since her bedroom was next to the bathroom, sometimes when she woke at night, she could hear it. Drip-drip.
She had been told that she was to use the bathroom as quickly as possible, then get out in case anyone else needed to use it. Sometimes the two boys, almost ready to leave elementary school for high school, brought some of their friends home with them. She wasn’t allowed to. She resented that they could. All of the boys just ignored her, and that was fine with her. Except once, when she hadn’t locked the bathroom door, one of the friends came in while she was sitting on the toilet. She hastily rose, and steadily facing the boy, wiped herself and tried to leave. He just stood there, staring at her. Then he unzipped his trousers and she saw something red, and she called out “I want to get out!”. He turned slowly, opened the door, and she ran.
Curiosity, that was her problem. Well, not a problem, exactly. It was what propelled her. She just wanted to know. Didn’t everyone? She wasn’t supposed to go into peoples’ houses. Her parents were fairly strict about that. Her parents sometimes had their friends over, and they would sit in the kitchen, and talk, talk, talk. This was their house. Though it wasn’t a house, actually. Oh it was a house all right, but it wasn’t
their house. Someone else owned it, the people who lived downstairs. It was their house, and her parents paid rent to live there. She had asked her father once why
they didn’t own the house. He’d looked long at her, then just shrugged. “Some day, when you’re a little older, we’ll talk about it”, he’d said.
He was always talking about ‘some day‘. Just like when she asked him if she could do something he would always answer “maybe”. Or “we’ll see”. She knew that meant she could just forget it. She might be only six, but she knew that there were some things she could keep to herself, and then no one would have the opportunity to say to her “maybe”. She’d just go ahead and do whatever it was. If she wanted to.
Sometimes she wanted to. She’d been to the houses of a few of her school friends. She was allowed to go to the house of a girl who lived across and up the street from where they did. Because her parents were friends with the other girl’s parents. Because she was Jewish, she guessed. Since she was, too. She liked the girl - Annette was her name - and would have liked to spend more time with her. Annette was the youngest in her family of six girls. She was the oldest in her family of four; two girls, two boys. Babies, actually. She was a lot older than the other three.
Her mother kept her younger sister and brothers at home with her. Because she was six she was allowed to go out on the street. Play with her friends, if anyone was around, and that wasn’t too often. Or, most likely, play by herself. On the small lawn in front of the house. Out back, although there was nothing there but a lot of old junk. Sometimes she’d go up to the schoolyard, because it was just up the street a bit. She was allowed to walk there by herself. She was sometimes sent out by her mother to go to the little store at the corner, to get something her mother needed. She had the money and a note to give to the store people.
When she was in the schoolyard she could play on the swings or the teeter-totter. She swings were best. She could really pump hard, once she learned how, and swing herself high. Sometimes she was scared, and stopped pumping when she was going high, really high, and got suddenly afraid, anxious to let the swing wind down. And then she’d just sit there, twisting from side to side on the swing, letting it go that way instead of up.
If other kids were around sometimes they’d talk, sometimes they wouldn’t. Depended. She could recognize some of them, some other kids who went to the school. Mostly they were older kids. And if there were a lot of them she knew enough now that she had to give up her swing, and let them have the swings. Sometimes they got really excited, and didn’t sit on the swings themselves but tried really hard to shove them so much that they’d go high all by themselves and get caught on the upper rung of the swings. And then the swing wouldn’t come down. It would just hang there. Until someone, maybe the school janitor, got it down. She didn’t like it when they did things like that. But she didn’t say anything to them or to anyone else.
She knew what might happen, so she didn’t want anyone to think she was looking, or that she cared what they did. Some of those kids did funny things, like climb up on the roof of the school. She didn’t watch them, just peered kind of sideways, to see what they were doing. If anyone saw her looking straight up at them they’d tell her they’d beat her head in when they came down. Didn’t want that to happen. Usually, she just went home. It was better that way, so she wouldn’t get hurt, and wouldn’t feel bad.
She’d gone, once to the home of one friend, a girl even smaller than her, though she was the same age. Michiko told her to come up the stairs quietly, not to make any noise. So no one downstairs, where other people lived in that house, would know they were there. It was all right, she said, “don’t worry, you’re with me, I live here and no one can tell you to go away”. Well she
was a little worried. Mostly because she knew she wasn’t supposed to be there. Didn’t want to get caught, either. But Michiko had told her she had something really special to show her.
And her parents weren’t home. They both worked and her older brothers were still at school. They wouldn’t care, anyway, she said. She crept along an upper hallway, holding on to the brown-painted banister, and Michiko opened a door at the end of the hallway, said this was the ‘living room’. She pointed to where the family's beds were, but there were no beds. Michiko laughed, said they were all rolled up. She scrambled about inside a closet and brought out a few dust-topped boxes. Opened one, and tenderly brought out a doll. The most beautiful doll she’d ever seen, with beautiful, long black hair, wearing a long gown with sparkles in its bright fabric. Out came another doll, and another. They were special, they really were. And she’d love to have one of them herself. She said that to Michiko, and Michiko said she would, too. These did not belong to her, they were the family’s. They were for special occasions, like maybe once a year. To remember where they came from, and they had a family ceremony with them. Something like Christmas, Michiko said brightly, when there’s Santa and lights on a Christmas tree, that’s what it was like for them.
She emptied the second box, and arranged all the dolls carefully. It was a marriage, she said. An emperor and his empress, with all their servants. Each servant, she said, did something different. The emperor and empress didn’t do anything, they just sat there. The girls sat, eyes glued to the bright, exotic figures; familiar to one, fascinating to the other. Then the little dark-haired girl, picked up the dolls in the order in which she had extracted them, carefully re-wrapped them in what she said was ‘rice paper’, nestled them back in their boxes, and settled the boxes back into the corner of the cupboard from which they had been removed.
The girls had tiptoed back downstairs, gone outside to play again, chatting between them what it would be like to have such dolls as their very own, to play with, whenever they wanted to. Michiko confided in her that she had been naughty, she wasn’t
ever supposed to take those boxes out of the cupboard on her own.
Two houses away, at the corner intersection, there was a house where just one family lived. The grandmother was always there, looking after all the children that lived there. Their mother was there, too sometimes. She was allowed inside there, her parents knew them. They ate spaghetti, a lot of it, with meatballs, and it always smelled so good. At Christmas time, they had a big tree set up with lots of lights, the first one she’d ever seen. Those kids never called her a dirty Jew. The grandmother was very old, and very fat. She always smiled at her. She smiled back. She didn’t have a grandmother herself, and she never questioned why. She found it fascinating, to see the grandmother always sitting in the big warm kitchen, knitting. Not a very nice colour, always the same colour, kind of green, she was told was pronounced “khaki” but when she said it she blushed. Green hats, green scarves, and more and more and more of them, until there was boxes full of them, and they were sent off somewhere.
There was another home she had entered, last year. The home of a wan, blonde little girl, Hilda, with whom she sometimes played after school in the schoolyard. Hilda since moved. But last year when they had been friends, Hilda had invited her to come to her home, just up the street, cross to the next and go down a few houses, and there it was, Hilda said brightly. She’d never gone off her street before, though she had wandered thrillingly far up the street, never diverged off it. On their way there was a Salvation Army band playing just off the corner, and a few people stopped to look at them. She and Hilda stopped to listen. She didn’t know what to think of the uniforms. Hilda said they were a religion. They didn’t look like that to her, she whispered back. When the band stopped playing and someone began talking about the love of the Saviour, the girls walked on.
Hilda lived not in a house but an apartment building, and that was one of the reasons she’d agreed to go along. She had never actually been inside an apartment building before, though she’d seen them from the street. They had entered a door, with stairs directly beyond it, and Hilda beckoned her forward, and up the stairs. She expected when they had clambered up the flight, to find a door that would bring them to Hilda’s home, but they climbed two more flights before Hilda found a door, halfway across a long corridor, and opened the door to her home. She had a secret, a surprise, something really special she wanted to show her. A comic book, a pretend toy stove, a special dress, new, not borrowed, a jewel, shining with a special light of its own, she thought.
Hilda scrubbed about in a little cupboard in the kitchen with its scratched linoleum floor, tired-looking table and chairs, no light but that from a bulb hanging centre of the ceiling. She gave a little cry of triumph and removed a tin with a peculiar lid she’d had to pry open. “Look!” she said, “look at this”. She did, she looked, saw a half-empty tin with something she couldn’t identify in it. But she did see blue-gray bits of something floating on top of whatever it was. “Smell it!” Hilda ordered. And she did, but still had no idea what it was. “Honey!” Hilda said triumphantly. She poked her middle finger into the tin, alongside the interior, just above the glutinous mass, and stuck the residue she had rescued from the sides into her mouth. And offered the tin to her to do the same. She said, instead, she’d better get back, before her mother went calling for her, or she’d be in trouble.
At the moment, she felt troubled, an odd feeling in the pit of her stomach. Fear, although she herself did not quite know how to name it. The man beckoned her closer “Come here, child, I can’t see you properly.” She made no move to bring herself closer to Ellen’s father, wished Ellen would return, wondered what was taking her so long…
The man rose before she could react, reached for her shoulders, turned her around and pulled her back toward where he had been seated. He held her stiffly, hard. She wanted to struggle, to pull herself away. She just surrendered to the pressure he exerted on her shoulders, and she whimpered, said please to let her go, it hurt. She began to sniffle, and he removed his grip from her shoulders, placed one of his hands across her mouth, brought her head to a rest on his chest, her body nestled between his legs. The other hand made its way around her face, lingering at her hair, pulling it slightly as though to test its springiness. Then it travelled down her body, slowly, as though the man intended to remember every inch of her.
Her fear had succumbed to terror. The pain of his hand over her mouth, pulling her steadily toward his chest was little compared to the frozen terror of the unknown. Would he kill her? She would never see her parents again, her brothers and her sister. She would never again take a train with her mother to visit her aunt and her three cousins. Why did he hate her? She had never done anything to him.
A distracting sound, of a door slamming at the back of the house, and finally Ellen entered. A split second before her entry she was released, shoved gently away. She stood free, trembling, snivelling. Ellen bridged the gap between them, grasped her hand, and led her back out into the sunshine. She shook herself loose from her friend, and ran, ran, ran home.
