Autumn Street Read online

  Mama began to laugh. "That must be Tatie's little grandson. I haven't met him yet, but your grandmother told me that he comes sometimes to visit her. He must be just about your age, Liz. He would be someone you could play with."

  "I don't want to play with someone rude and no-account."

  "He was just being shy. And what about you, Elizabeth Jane Lorimer? If you didn't make an effort to be nice to him, it sounds as if you were being rude, too."

  "And no-account?"

  Mama laughed. "Yes, and no-account, too. Did you say hello to him?"

  I shook my head.

  "Did you ask him his name?"

  I shook my head. "Tatie told me his name. Charles."

  Mama patted my hair, put the brush away, and tucked me into bed. "I'm going to go to find Jess and bring her upstairs now. You remember, though, Liz, that you're six years old now. That's big enough to be polite to people. The next time Charles comes to visit Tatie, you try to make him feel welcome. It must be hard for him, visiting here where he doesn't know anyone except Tatie."

  "And she's only the cook," I said smugly.

  Mama frowned. "Elizabeth..."

  "I know," I said. "That was rude and no-account."

  ***

  "Mama?" I called before she closed the door "When you were a little girl, living here, did you have a pet?"

  She thought. "Sometimes. I remember that I had..."

  "A turtle?"

  Mama laughed. "No. I never had a turtle. Why did you ask that?"

  I snuggled into my pillow. "I don't know," I said sleepily. "I was just thinking about turtles."

  ***

  Three children in the green, lush-lawned neighborhood where I lived, a stranger in my grandfather's house, had small, moist turtles that they kept in glass bowls from Wool worth's and fed, with their fingers, tiny pieces of limp lettuce. The turtles had American flags hand-painted on their backs, because it was war-time.

  Pre-war turtles, I learned, had been decorated with scenic paintings: rainbows, sunsets, and carefully lettered messages from tourist spots. Yosemite. The Grand Canyon. There had been a turtle for every natural wonder of the United States, and all of them had found their way to this small Pennsylvania town, where they had been nurtured in glass bowls, extending their tiny prehistoric heads now and then if you watched long enough.

  "They grow to be giant turtles," the doctor's daughter, Anne, told me, as we sat on her back porch and watched her little flag-festooned creature move sluggishly against the sides of his bowl. "They live to be a hundred years old, and by that time they're as big as—oh, as big as the kitchen table!"

  I glanced through the screen door and measured her round kitchen table with my eyes, seeing it as a shell, imagining a huge, lizard-like head extending slowly, near the place where the toaster stood. I imagined a thin brown tongue darting from the head, aiming for the kitchen counter, seizing an entire head of lettuce. I could almost hear the hideous primordial munch. I shuddered.

  "Where will you keep him when he gets to be big?" I asked Anne. Her small turtle lurched suddenly from his inverted-dish island and submerged, darkening the colors of his painted American flag.

  "He'll escape by then," she said, matter-of-factly. "He'll go out in the woods at the end of Autumn Street, because there's more to eat out there. That's where they all go. There are probably a hundred big turtles out there already. Tommy Price's turtle disappeared three years ago, and someone said they saw it in the woods, eating ferns. They could tell it was his because it said Mammoth Caves across its back."

  Mammoth Caves. The phrase sent exhilarated, apprehensive chills down my skinny back. A hundred monstrous prehistoric creatures lurking, munching ferns, in the woods at the end of my grandfather's street: and one of them, already grown to ominous proportions, with the words Mammoth Caves stretched, elongated, across his mossy, reptilian shell.

  I was so terribly frightened of caves, of the whole concept of caves, of dark passages with convoluted turnings, farther and farther into unfathomable blackness, into places where there were no sounds but perhaps a dimly heard dripping, of rock-encrusted walls that wept, and the sound of your own heart beating in a dark much darker, more frightening, than the dark of your worst nightmares. I shivered at the thought that in one place, one dark opening too vast for comprehension, one Mammoth Cave, there would be echoes, that if in the blackness you found the place to stand, on ground that had never been exposed to light or to the experience of human sound, you could call out, and your voice would return to you. From all the passages where you had been, from the place where you stood in the dark so heavy it smothered you, and from the places you had not yet felt your way along, your message would return: thundering from the unfelt walls, disguised and distorted by a higher pitch from a turning far ahead, or eerily in whispers from the tunnels behind. All at once, your own voice: your voices, coming at you, murmuring, indistinguishable, in harmonies or discord; and you would have to stand there all alone and listen to the answers that came at you from inside yourself.

  I was only six when I knew that about caves and about echoes and knew that I could never go into the woods at the end of Grandfather's street, because in those woods I would have to face the monstrous turtle that prowled, dragging Mammoth Caves with him through the ferns and trees, trampling the fragile wildflowers, waiting, probably for me.

  "They eat meat, too," said Anne, who was older than I, and who saw nothing in my silence beyond childish interest and admiration. She went into the kitchen, beyond the round table that still, for me, loomed like a scaly-limbed, slow-moving reptile, and took a small bit of hamburger from the refrigerator.

  "Probably," she said primly, feeding her small flagged pet from her fingers, "the big ones would eat people."

  I fled: fled running down the shaded sidewalk to the safety of my grandfather's house, to the kitchen where Tatie always welcomed me. The brown bulk of her was nothing like the sluggish brown creatures I feared, and I put my arms around her waist, buried my head against her apron, so that she stroked my hair, rubbed my back gently until I was no longer afraid, and then said, "There. Nobody gonna get you. You go wash your face, find Jess, and tell your Mama that dinner be ready soon."

  Upstairs, in the big house, Jess was helping our mother fold and put away the intricately embroidered baby clothes, all freshly washed and ironed. Mama was waiting for a baby to be born.

  And babies were part of the war, too. Standing in the dim shadows of the wide front hall, outside the parlor, I had heard an elderly, distinguished caller say that during a war baby boys were born. It was nature's way, said the visitor, of creating new males in a world where men were being killed. Stunned, I had heard Grandfather agree.

  None of the adults in the parlor that evening had shouted "Unfair!" the way I had shouted it inside myself, silently, standing hidden in the shadows. Who needed babies? It wasn't fair that men, and fathers especially, should go off to places where the war was, to die and be gone forever in that blurred and uncertain horizon, so that the people left at home, the mothers and the grandfathers and the little girls, mostly the little girls, ended up with nothing but a baby. And a baby would cry and need to be held and protected. What kind of nature was that, whose way was to take away a father, the one who had always done the holding, the protecting, and replace him with something even smaller and more helpless than oneself?

  Nothing was fair, nothing at all.

  But no one minded, except me. Mama and Jess smiled, when I found them, showed me the tiny gowns and blankets with their delicate borders of flowers and lace, and told me they would be down for dinner in a minute. I wandered along the upstairs hall, kicking the carpet, into a bathroom to wash my face and hands, and stood on a stool to see myself in the mirror. There were no tear stains on my face, only smudges of healthy Pennsylvania dirt. I had learned to keep my tears inside, most of the time. But my eyes were very large, and very blue; I looked at them for a long time, looking solemnly back at me, and wondered i
f, when you stood in a place where you were lost and consumed by darkness, it would be safer to keep your eyes open or closed. I blinked, and went down the long staircase to my place at the carefully set table where the silver napkin rings were engraved with initials. Everything was in order there, and brightly lit; the prisms of the crystal chandelier reflected the silver and the light with such intensity that there were not even shadows in the corners. For a moment I felt very safe.

  4

  "JESS?"

  "What?"

  It was always easier, for some reason, to talk to Jessica in the dark. She became maternal in darkness, her voice from the bed beside mine very often gentle and kind, urging me to go to sleep, reassuring me when I woke frightened from a nightmare.

  "I don't want Mama to have a baby. Or else I want it to be a girl."

  She sighed, the embroidered sheets rustling in the summer night as she turned.

  "Don't be silly, Elizabeth. She's already going to have a baby, and you can't do anything about that. And she wants it to be a boy. Everybody wants it to be a boy. We already have two girls."

  "If she had a girl, we could name it Felicia," I suggested. I knew that would entice Jess. She named all her dolls Felicia. She wanted her own name to be Felicia, instead of Jessica Kathryn.

  She was quiet for a moment, thinking. "Felicia June," she said dreamily. "Because it's going to be born in June," she added, explaining, but I knew her explanation was a lie. The June was for June Allyson. Jess had June Allyson pictures, cut carefully from movie magazines, hidden in her bureau drawer, under the rolled white socks. Jess wasn't allowed to have movie magazines, but the hired girl, Lillian Chestnut, who did the laundry, had hundreds. Lillian Chestnut's own room, above the garage, was filled with movie magazines. Jess and I had once sneaked there on Lillian's day off, had examined all of her belongings, and Jess had stolen the pictures.

  "Can't," said Jess suddenly, from her bed, shaking off the fantasy of Felicia June. "It's going to be a boy. All the baby blankets are blue. It's going to be named Gordon James, Junior, for Daddy."

  I buried my face in my pillow. I heard my own muffled voice say, "Then Daddy will die."

  "What? Take the pillow out of your mouth."

  "Daddy will die if it's a boy," I said distinctly.

  "What on earth are you talking about? That's preposterous." Preposterous was one of Jessica's favorite words.

  I told her the secret I had known for several weeks. "It's nature's way. Nature makes boy babies be born when there's a war, and then the men get killed."

  "Preposterous," she said again, but her voice was uncertain. "Who told you that?"

  "I heard Judge Crandall tell Grandfather," I whimpered. "And Grandfather said 'Yes.'" I burst into tears. "Hold my hand, Jess."

  She reached across the gap between our beds, in the darkness, and our hands found each other. Hers felt warm and firm and comforting. But after a second she let mine go, sat up, and said, "Elizabeth! Why is your hand sticky?"

  "I was licking it." I had been. I had wiped my nose on it, too, but I didn't want to tell her that. "I was wondering what I taste like."

  She turned on the light angrily, got out of bed, and went into the bathroom. I could hear her washing her hands. I could hear that she was using soap.

  "You're disgusting," she said, when she came back. She arranged her nightgown tidily around her legs, pulled the sheet up, and turned off the light again.

  I sighed.

  "Jess, I could be the boy."

  "What?" She was still angry at me, about the hand.

  "I really want to be a boy. If I could be the boy, then the baby could be a girl."

  "You can't do that. You can't change what you are."

  "I could. I could wear boys' clothes, and I could cut my hair off. Everyone could call me Gordon."

  Jessica took a very long deep breath. "Elizabeth, I want to go to sleep. You can't be a boy."

  "Why not?"

  "Because right now you are six, and when you are six you can wear boys' clothes and look like a boy. But when you are older you are going to get breasts."

  I knew that. I had forgotten about it. I didn't like the idea very much.

  I reached up under my nightgown with my sticky hand and rubbed my chest. Nothing but ribs. Reassuring. I felt with interest my heartbeat for a while: a soft thu-dump feeling, regular and hypnotic and something no one else knew about but me.

  "Good night, Jess," I whispered, but she was already asleep, breathing softly. I realized then, for the first time, that her dreams would always be different from mine.

  ***

  Tap.

  Tap.

  There were the sounds, in unison, or almost, of the tightly tied shoes, the old ladies' shoes, striking the floor of the back porch as the three great-aunts rocked in their wicker chairs. The whisper of their summer dresses of voile. The murmurs.

  There were the sounds of the doves, settling ¡at evening: muted, sad, sleepy calls from one spruce to another.

  And the cheerful thwirp of the tree frogs.

  Jessica and I moved barefoot through the damp grass at the end of the long yard. I could see her through the twilight, the pale pink of her neatly sashed dress flattened to white as color sank away with the sunset; she stood by the far rosebushes, fastidiously tidying the leaves with her little stick the way we had been shown.

  "Nineteen," she called across the yard in her high, clear voice.

  How like Jessica to count. We were removing beetles from the leaves of the roses, nudging them with our sticks into cans of kerosene. Jess was orderly, precise. Her hair was combed, her hands were clean, and her beetles, I knew, were probably laid out in businesslike rows at the bottom of the can she carried.

  I had dropped mine twice, killing more grass than bugs. Retrieved, my can was slippery and smeared; there was kerosene on my hands and feet, dying beetles lurching back to munch the bushes again, and those in my can were still alive, crawling up the sides to the top. I tried to poke them back down with my stick, and they adhered to the stick, so I scraped them off against the trunk of a maple tree, hoping my great-aunts couldn't see me through the twilight and that the gardener would not find them there in the morning.

  They were Japanese beetles, I had been told. I had not been told why the Japanese, who were part of the war in the Pacific, who were out there looking for my father, had loosed insects in my great-aunts' yard. But I scraped at them dutifully with my stick, unproductively, and they dropped off the leaves, not into my can but onto the lawn, so that they could scramble over to the next rosebush for dessert, and every time I scraped one off, the leaf would turn to reveal three more nibbling on the underside.

  "Twenty-two," called Jess with satisfaction. "I'm quitting soon. It's too dark."

  The can slid through my hands once again, fell to the ground, and it was empty when I picked it up. So I had sealed my father's fate. There was no hope for him at all if I couldn't even fight the Japanese in the backyard of 203 Autumn Street.

  "Put the cans in the gardening shed, girls," called Great-aunt Caroline, rising, her white dress now gray in the dusk, against the railing of the porch. "Then wash your hands and I'll give you some lemonade before you go home."

  "I got forty-seven," I lied, feeling another Oriental saber enter my father's side with the lie. I put my empty can into the shed, concealed behind some screwdrivers and paintbrushes, and wiped my smeared hands on my skirt.

  "Dummy," said Jess with scorn, carefully placing her can and stick on the workbench, in the center, where they could be seen. "You can't even count to forty-seven."

  "I can too. One, two, three, four, five..."

  But she was gone, flitting across the wide lawn in her clean dress, her curls smooth, her fingernails trimmed, her high laugh reaching to the porch where the great-aunts waited to clasp her against soft bosoms scented with lilac cologne and to touch her with their wrinkled, gentle, veined hands.

  I caught a firefly as I walked toward the
porch, caught it on the first try, after its brief glimmer beside the honeysuckle. I felt it move, raw it flicker in my grimy fist, held my hand to my face and smelled the acrid firefly smell mingled with the thick sweet scent of kerosene. It was mine: I had captured it and made it mine. I would take it, secret in my closed hand, home to Grandfather's house and release it in my room so that its sporadic beacon would soar in the darkness above my dreams.

  But when I opened my fingers tentatively to see its light once more, I found it dead. Grief-stricken, I rubbed the broken body—the fragile, lacerated wings—from my sticky hand with the hem of my dress. In the shadows that moved now from the bushes like furry creatures reaching dark paws across the lawn, more fireflies moved and glowed. Frightened by my own failures, I ran from them to the sanctuary of the house.

  5

  GRANDMOTHER didn't like me.

  She didn't like Jessica, either. She didn't call us Jess and Liz, the way everyone else did. She called us by our full names, snapping out the syllables like the short, even stitches that she put at the edges of her embroidery. Jessica Kathryn. Elizabeth Jane. She said the names as if she were reading them from the label of a bottle filled with bad-tasting medicine.

  One dose of Elizabeth Jane before bedtime, I imagined she was thinking as I went to her each evening for her dry-lipped kiss on my cheek. Snap. And the cap was back on the bottle.

  "Good night, Elizabeth Jane. Remember to say your prayers."

  Then one dose of Jessica Kathryn, which she seemed to find slightly less bitter, perhaps because Jess' cheek was always clean, as mine was not.

  Upstairs, undressing together in our big bedroom with the flower-sprigged wallpaper, I asked Jess, "Do you say your prayers?"

  She was naked, reaching into the closet for her pink nightgown that hung on a hook beside my blue one. She looked at me in surprise. "Of course I do. I say 'God bless Mama and Daddy and Grandfather and Grandmother and Liz.' When the baby is born I'll say the baby, too."

  She stood there for a moment, looking at me, puzzled. Finally she pulled her nightgown over her head. "Don't you?" she asked, as her face emerged.