Current or recent unpublished writings of the author
Run Over
I was run over—twice—in less than three seconds. I was only
three.
A big black woman in a big pink Oldsmobile was at the wheel. She
was my friend Pamela’s maid, and as she slid down the road to the Auchincloss’ Tudor at the other end of the block, I’m sure the thought, “My life is over,” plowed through her mind.
Moments earlier, I had been pinned beneath my brother Bill as we raced
head-first down our snow-covered driveway on Radio Flyers, cherry noses dripping from the speed and frozen air. The street’s solid ice meant there was no need to stop until we got to the curb of Hoffman’s yard on the far side of Guilford Lane. We tumbled off, mittens, caps, and legs flying in every direction. Dusting off the light powder and running our sleeves across our noses, we grabbed our sleds for yet another turn at the hill…
But, before attempting to cross the street, we perched on the curb and looked “left, right, left.” Just before I put one toe in the roadway, I saw and heard the oversized Olds approaching, chains knocking against wheel
wells and zinging on the packed snow. The sole of my rubber boot was no match for the surface as slick as a greased pig at a country fair. In a wink of an eye I went down, my waterproof snowsuit a frictionless capsule hurtling towards the overweight triceratops.
Flat on my back, I led with my legs. One of the front tires hit me with a
b-bump and set me spinning. My sub three-foot frame did a 360 before the chained back tire took the second hit. I’d spun on my axis a couple more times when Bill scooped me up, kicking and screaming, from the road’s surface. Bill fought and stumbled his way up the driveway with a flailing three-year-old in his arms. The Olds carried Alfreda, as stiff as a tree limb covered in ice, on down the road.
I was hysterical, inconsolable, and furious—not because I had just been
flattened twice by a two-ton Oldsmobile Holiday Ninety-Eight, pink on top, white on the bottom (same model as my Nanny’s), but because my outdoor play had been interrupted. The Oklahoma plains only got enough snow for sledding a couple times a year back in the fifties, and
I was not going to miss out, especially when there was absolutely nothing wrong with me. Of course, the adrenaline, anger, and numbing cold had not yet subsided sufficiently for me, or anyone else, to know if I was actually undamaged.
When I got inside, I was made to reverse the process that I’d only just
recently completed when I had come in to use the potty. Off came my
Grandmother’s knitted cap and mittens, off the boots, off a holly-red and white one-piece snowsuit. Next came wool trousers, stretch pants, long underwear, tights, a sweater, and three turtle-necks in Christmas colors: red, green and white. When I was finally stripped down to my birthday suit and panties with eyelet trim, I leapt up and declared, “See, I’m just fine! Can I go back outside now and play?”
My mother and dad looked at each other somewhere near the intersection of terror and disbelief. Dr. Stone, from down the street, was called in for a more professional appraisal (one of many visits to the accident-prone Street household—so many, I believe, he was on a retainer). He arrived, black bag and all, but alas, could find nothing to challenge his medical
training.
“Nope. Nothing. She’s perfectly fine. Perhaps a few bruises. Must have
been all the padding,” he said, as he looked at the pile of woolens and zipped his stethoscope back his bag.
When Dr. Stone turned to leave, the doorbell chimed, accompanied
by a timid knock of the brass lion’s head at the side door. It was Alfreda. She crept in, clutching her handbag, wide-eyes sinking into the back of a near ashen face. Dr. Stone excused himself and hurried out.
Looking down at her hot pink nail polish and past the tears that fell
from her chin, Alfreda blurted out, “Mr. and Mrs. Street, I am soooooo sorry. How is she, is she O.K.? That child jis’ come out of nowhere, I had no time to stop, I wasn’t even sure what’d happened, I didn’t even know what I’d done till I got in the door at Miz Auchincloss’.” Alfreda took a breath, “I was jis’ so scared. I was jis’ so stunned. Is she gonna be
O.K.?”
The tears kept rolling down Alfreda’s cheeks. Daddy had a handkerchief in
his coat pocket.
“Now don’t you worry, Alfreda,” he said rushing to erase her fears.
“She’s gonna be just fine. See, she’s already getting’ her snowsuit back on and is beggin’ us to let her go back outside to throw snowballs at her brothers.”
I looked up, hopeful.
“Now you just run along now. You did nothin’ wrong. It’s all gonna be
just fine.”
Alfreda looked as if she’d had her sentence commuted. It was too good to
be true. She’d hit the white and only granddaughter of Oklahoma City’s mayor and
here his son was tellin’ her to go on back to work and not to worry a bit.
“Praise the Lawd !” she said as she scurried to the
door.
I took advantage of this diversion of attention to slip on my hat and
slip out the back door. Soon I was rolling a snowman’s belly across the front yard. The sleds had been retired for the day.
***
But I wasn’t finished with “running over” accidents. Fortunately, the
next one involved only fingers.
As has been firmly established and previously stated, I was the spoiler
in a family of four brothers who were hoping for a fifth to fill out their Fab
Five roundballers. While they could have called in one of their cousins from the all-male trio on my Dad’s side, they were holding out for my
arrival.
The latter was somewhat delayed by four miscarriages and then a
morning-sick mother. Years after my birth, she shared with me a time when, during my gestation, she had been heaving over the bathroom toilet. My oldest brother Jack, of trunk-jettisoning fame, burst in. “Hurry up,” he said, “I’m going to be late for school!”
My father took the morning sickness as a good sign—it had been absent
during the first trimester of the four miscarriages—and he was sure this meant the pregnancy was going take this time. After my successful entry into the world, he hypothesized that Mother’s system had been changing over from boys to girls.
Needless to say, my brothers were sorely disappointed when the starched
diaper on the post in the front yard read, “It’s a Girl!” and box after box, and bow after bow, revealed another frilly dress—sixty-four in
all.
But I wasn’t spoiled. I was the spoiler.
All of this to say, there was a need for a lot of starch in our household, and someone to mix it and spray it on ten daily dress-shirts and a couple of dresses for me. My brothers wore starched and ironed Oxford shirts to school each day and a clean, pressed dress-shirt to dinner each night. Then there were Sundays and parties and the office for Daddy. And since I was vying for a spot in the Kathryn Lipes annual fashion show (not really, but in my mother’s eyes I was), my dresses needed to be picture-perfect, ready at all times.
Lula did not have time in her normal course of cleaning and cooking to
manage the mountain of wrinkled textiles. Mother had to find another girl.
Katherine, still a teenager and not related to the Lipes’ clan, rang the back
doorbell on Thursday mornings and stayed a full day in the utility room, warmed in the winter by the incessant tumbling of the dryer, and dripping sweat in the summer, despite air-conditioning. Steam seemed to rise from both her and the iron each time she replaced it on its heel.
I liked to watch from the wicker clothes basket—sometimes behind it,
sometimes in—and from below the level of the ironing board. Katherine would sprinkle water onto each sleeve and collar from a Seven-Up bottle fitted with a special stopper, much like a salt-shaker but with bigger holes. There were rhythm and blues in the shake-shake of the bottle, the hisssss of the iron, and the gentle humming of Katherine.
One day I tiptoed in and tried to see how close Katherine was to
finishing my polka-dot pinafore with the big red sash. I stood on my tippy toes and pulled myself higher with my fingers on the gingham ironing board cover. Next thing I knew there was a sizzle and two screams: one coming from me as the hot metal crossed over the index and tall fingers of my left hand, the other, almost simultaneous, from Katherine.
Katherine grabbed me by the waist with one arm and thrust my fingers
under the cold water of the tap that she’d opened with the other. I could hear Mother’s tennis shoes slapping the brick floor of the back hallway as she passed Lula’s bathroom, arriving almost as soon as the cool water on my fingers.
“What happened?” she cried. Katherine was crying too.
Though whimpering and wincing, I found myself wanting to underestimate
the damage and defend Katherine—she had not been able to see me below Tommy’s shirttail. I had put my fingers on the board without her knowing. Katherine was not at fault, although it was clear that she herself believed the contrary.
Fortunately, in the flurry to relieve my pain and prevent scaring which
might offend future courtiers who would indeed want to hold my hand, Mother had no time to affix blame or to conduct further inquiry. She popped and applied some cubes from a metal ice tray, slathered greasy cream all over my hand, and wrapped enough gauze around it to rival a boxing glove—all of which probably contributed to the scars that endure today. (The wrinkles and age spots of increasing years which now populate my digits make the scars almost indistinguishable, however. And as for the courtiers, they are a thing of the distant past.)
And Katherine? She reappeared thirty-five years later at Westminster
Presbyterian Church for Mother’s funeral. How Katherine knew she had died, I’ll never know. She sat in the row just beyond a bank of relatives and a smattering of very old friends. More recently, I discovered two addresses for a “Katherine Penny” within blocks of my mother’s last place of residence, which says so much more than one might imagine. I’ll try to find her on my next visit to the City.
***
Mrs. Bowman worked for, and often alongside, my grandmother in
1959, the year my fingers sizzled and I spun under the 55’ Olds. They rolled out biscuits together, canned peaches, and made sure the silver shone on the buffet in the dining room for Christmas Eve dinners.
They looked a lot like one another too: tight gray curls, silver-framed glasses, and pasty skin. Mrs. Bowman had her own room and bath just beyond the kitchen at Grandmother and Granddaddy Street’s, but once a year she took a trip to visit her real family.
Katherine and Lula and Booker may have had real families, too,
but I never knew. Booker was a kindly, middle-aged man, smart and strong. Though he wore long pants, long-sleeved shirts, and boots, even as he cut and weeded the yard under an August sun, I knew he was strong because he would push wheel barrows loaded with dirt or manure for my mother’s flowerbeds, or a pile of bricks to build a new patio. That’s how I knew he was smart, too. He designed the patio and did all the calculations himself.
I think my mother respected Booker, or at least his skills, but she never called him “Mr. Jones.” She never called Lula, “Mrs. Dugger” or Katherine, “Miss Penny,” either. Lula was at least forty, but she was still a girl. I was puzzled by that.
Booker hauled in sand, smoothed and leveled it perfectly using a
funny instrument with a bubble that I’d never seen before, and laid out the used bricks that my mother had bought “because they had more character.” Booker couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t want new ones. (Lula had bought used wood to build a screened porch on her house to keep the bad people out because she couldn’t afford new.)
The patio was built in what had been a dirt courtyard between the honey-suckled fence of the basketball court and the stockade fence festooned
with roses from Mother’s inner garden. Booker laid the bricks in a circle around an elm tree in the middle of the courtyard, and he hung a single swing from one of the branches. I would no longer have to go out to the back-back yard to swing with Tweety Bird and my other imaginary friends. Instead, I could twist the swing round and round until there was just enough room for me to wedge myself in the triangle formed by the chains and the seat, and then I’d let her go, whirling myself silly in first one direction and then the other until the chains had no more spin in them.
The original brickless space had served only one function: my mother had asked Booker to dig deep holes and sink metal linings with a hinged lid into them to house our two garbage cans. He then built an additional screen and gate around the holes so no one would ever know that the Street family produced stinky garbage—except once a week when Booker would haul the cans down to the street. There, men who looked like him jumped off the back of a garbage truck, lifted the loads to their shoulders, and then ran after the truck that lumbered on down the street, barely slowing to allow them to empty the contents. Then the men would run back up the driveway and behind two gates to slip the cans back into their hideaways.
I once saw on the news that a garbage man was so tired, down in
a place called Mississippi, that he took a rest in the back of the truck—and
then the driver turned on the compactor. The truck just ate him up; he never made it out.
Because Booker only came once a week, unlike the gardeners of
our neighbors’ houses, and because my mother seldom allowed the use of chemicals (We all used to beg for weed killers), our yard never rose to the standards of those around us. Our parents taught us to look down our noses at people who actually sprayed their yards green—can you imagine? Fake grass! We never knew that the green film was actually herbicides and that’s why we could practice our putts on their lawns. The dandelions of our own acted like pins in a pinball machine, sending our Titleists off in random directions.
Booker did his best to dig out the massive weeds that thrived
alongside the fescue at 1503 Guildford Lane, but his efforts were never enough.
I got paid to butcher them as well, but only if I could extract the tap root.
Their increasing numbers as summer wore on testified to our failed attempts and my diminishing interest, despite needing the cash for my Christmas money.
Floors were another matter. While Mother would not allot more of
her household budget to fighting weeds, she would invest in her floors. The fact that they only needed serious attention twice a year probably contributed as well to their higher priority.
Every early spring and late summer, Mr. Preston arrived with his
cadre of strippers, waxers, and buffers, and the extra men it took to run them. They attacked the walnut peg floors of the living and dining rooms, the waxed brick of the kitchen, back hall, and garden room, and the linoleum of my bedroom where my Mary Jane’s would leave their signature black scuff marks. Mr. Preston always left my floor sparkling white.
One summer day when I was five, one hazy day defined by the din
of locusts and pavement so hot the tar bubbled and boiled, one day when Mother was distracted by Mr. Preston’s army of worker bees, I dared approach her with a request to take my exploration of the world beyond the gates, fences, and courtyards of my pre-school years. I caught her on her knees in the backyard flowerbed.
“Mother, may I ride my bike to the Country Club pool?” I
said.
She was busy dead-heading daisies and harvesting a bouquet for
the dining room table. Perspiration beaded up on her temple as she swatted an annoying black fly.
“All by yourself?”
I guess she still had some of her wits about her.
“Yes, but I’ve done it lots of time before with Bill. I’ll stop at every stop sign and look both ways before I cross. I’ll stick my arm straight out when I make the left turn onto Pennsylvania Avenue just like I learned at bicycle safety school. (How I ever passed, I’ll never know. It seemed like I’d hit every orange ball and cone that demarcated the lanes, and I’m sure I signaled left, when I meant right…twice.)
She had moved on to the azaleas that needed a little trimming
even though their white blossoms were long
gone.
“Well, I suppose that would be alright. Use the phone at the
check-in desk to call me when you get there, and remember, you can only charge one snack to our account.” (I had a bit of a bad reputation since I’d charged the beautiful little white cowboy boots to our account at age three at SINN’s Western Trail in Allenspark, Colorado.)
“Okay, I’ll call,” I said, throwing the words over my shoulder
as I grabbed my swim suit and towel on the way out.
I made it to the pool, about six or seven long blocks away,
without a mishap. (Thirty years later, I discovered that the blocks were not so long, or such a big deal after all; no wonder my mother had decided to let me go.) I called home then joined my friends for a game of Marco Polo.
Most of my friends’ mothers lay tanning and talking under
striped umbrellas, just steps from the water’s edge. I felt a certain pride that my mom was too busy to waste her time sitting and chatting by a pool. Didn’t occur to me that perhaps they were making sure their children were safe from drowning.
Later in the afternoon, Becky and Lindsay and Sally and I tried
to best one another with tricks on the waterslide. We went down on our bottoms and backs, and both backwards and frontwards on our tummies. But Lindsay was the first to go down backwards sitting up. I was just a little bit afraid so I went to get an orange and red popsicle instead. At half past three, I grabbed my bike and headed home.
I had just passed the tree-shaded house with the white columns
and red brick steps at the intersection of Elmhurst and Guilford when I heard it: the screech of rubber on hot pavement, a dull thump, glass shattering and scattering across the roadway—then silence just as loud and prolonged as the squealing brakes had been. I jumped off my Schwinn and spun around. The scene was frozen despite my thumping heartbeat that measured the passing seconds. No one moved in the car despite the missing windshield.
In the front yard of the colonial, rake in hand, stood the yardman, a pillar of salt except for his dark eyes jumping back and forth from car to pavement to car. I followed his pinball gaze to the curb. The only movement there was a red stream spilling over a dam of black tar from the pool that had formed above it. I raised my eyes a bit more, breath suspended, to see
the fractured body of a sixth-grader from Nichols Hills Elementary, my school, his crumpled bike ten feet away. It seemed there wasn’t an inch of his body that wasn’t leaking blood. I had passed him seconds before going the opposite way, wishing I was a bit older cuz he was so cute. Now, I could only recognize him by his ripped madras bermudas.
My breath returned, but I was too afraid to move; with so much
blood running down the road and splashed across the sidewalk, he had to be dead. Not one of us budged—not in the car, not in the yard, not me, not even a leaf on the maple.
The only sound was the chorusing locusts. Finally, the body shifted. Cochran raised his head then managed to get an elbow onto the pavement to push himself up. Next, straining, he got to one knee. It was then that I saw the yardman move. He took two steps towards the boy who had gotten to his feet, his right arm hanging limp.
“I’ll call,” the yardman yelled. He dropped his rake. “I’ll call
an ambulance. Jis’ don’t you move.”
But he did. Cochran drug his shoeless right foot behind him
halfway across the street, then lowered himself to his good knee. The yardman rushed to his side, hesitated, then reached his hand out to steady his bloodied sleeve.
Still no sound, no movement, from the woman in the car.
I turned and jumped on my bike, racing up the hill faster than
greased lightening. I burst through the back door. Mr. Preston looked startled, then alarmed. Panic leapt from my face.
“I just saw the worst thing of my entire life!” I yelled as, frantically, I searched for the warmth of Lula’s arms.
Copyright 2013, Sue Nell Street Phillips
Run Over
I was run over—twice—in less than three seconds. I was only
three.
A big black woman in a big pink Oldsmobile was at the wheel. She
was my friend Pamela’s maid, and as she slid down the road to the Auchincloss’ Tudor at the other end of the block, I’m sure the thought, “My life is over,” plowed through her mind.
Moments earlier, I had been pinned beneath my brother Bill as we raced
head-first down our snow-covered driveway on Radio Flyers, cherry noses dripping from the speed and frozen air. The street’s solid ice meant there was no need to stop until we got to the curb of Hoffman’s yard on the far side of Guilford Lane. We tumbled off, mittens, caps, and legs flying in every direction. Dusting off the light powder and running our sleeves across our noses, we grabbed our sleds for yet another turn at the hill…
But, before attempting to cross the street, we perched on the curb and looked “left, right, left.” Just before I put one toe in the roadway, I saw and heard the oversized Olds approaching, chains knocking against wheel
wells and zinging on the packed snow. The sole of my rubber boot was no match for the surface as slick as a greased pig at a country fair. In a wink of an eye I went down, my waterproof snowsuit a frictionless capsule hurtling towards the overweight triceratops.
Flat on my back, I led with my legs. One of the front tires hit me with a
b-bump and set me spinning. My sub three-foot frame did a 360 before the chained back tire took the second hit. I’d spun on my axis a couple more times when Bill scooped me up, kicking and screaming, from the road’s surface. Bill fought and stumbled his way up the driveway with a flailing three-year-old in his arms. The Olds carried Alfreda, as stiff as a tree limb covered in ice, on down the road.
I was hysterical, inconsolable, and furious—not because I had just been
flattened twice by a two-ton Oldsmobile Holiday Ninety-Eight, pink on top, white on the bottom (same model as my Nanny’s), but because my outdoor play had been interrupted. The Oklahoma plains only got enough snow for sledding a couple times a year back in the fifties, and
I was not going to miss out, especially when there was absolutely nothing wrong with me. Of course, the adrenaline, anger, and numbing cold had not yet subsided sufficiently for me, or anyone else, to know if I was actually undamaged.
When I got inside, I was made to reverse the process that I’d only just
recently completed when I had come in to use the potty. Off came my
Grandmother’s knitted cap and mittens, off the boots, off a holly-red and white one-piece snowsuit. Next came wool trousers, stretch pants, long underwear, tights, a sweater, and three turtle-necks in Christmas colors: red, green and white. When I was finally stripped down to my birthday suit and panties with eyelet trim, I leapt up and declared, “See, I’m just fine! Can I go back outside now and play?”
My mother and dad looked at each other somewhere near the intersection of terror and disbelief. Dr. Stone, from down the street, was called in for a more professional appraisal (one of many visits to the accident-prone Street household—so many, I believe, he was on a retainer). He arrived, black bag and all, but alas, could find nothing to challenge his medical
training.
“Nope. Nothing. She’s perfectly fine. Perhaps a few bruises. Must have
been all the padding,” he said, as he looked at the pile of woolens and zipped his stethoscope back his bag.
When Dr. Stone turned to leave, the doorbell chimed, accompanied
by a timid knock of the brass lion’s head at the side door. It was Alfreda. She crept in, clutching her handbag, wide-eyes sinking into the back of a near ashen face. Dr. Stone excused himself and hurried out.
Looking down at her hot pink nail polish and past the tears that fell
from her chin, Alfreda blurted out, “Mr. and Mrs. Street, I am soooooo sorry. How is she, is she O.K.? That child jis’ come out of nowhere, I had no time to stop, I wasn’t even sure what’d happened, I didn’t even know what I’d done till I got in the door at Miz Auchincloss’.” Alfreda took a breath, “I was jis’ so scared. I was jis’ so stunned. Is she gonna be
O.K.?”
The tears kept rolling down Alfreda’s cheeks. Daddy had a handkerchief in
his coat pocket.
“Now don’t you worry, Alfreda,” he said rushing to erase her fears.
“She’s gonna be just fine. See, she’s already getting’ her snowsuit back on and is beggin’ us to let her go back outside to throw snowballs at her brothers.”
I looked up, hopeful.
“Now you just run along now. You did nothin’ wrong. It’s all gonna be
just fine.”
Alfreda looked as if she’d had her sentence commuted. It was too good to
be true. She’d hit the white and only granddaughter of Oklahoma City’s mayor and
here his son was tellin’ her to go on back to work and not to worry a bit.
“Praise the Lawd !” she said as she scurried to the
door.
I took advantage of this diversion of attention to slip on my hat and
slip out the back door. Soon I was rolling a snowman’s belly across the front yard. The sleds had been retired for the day.
***
But I wasn’t finished with “running over” accidents. Fortunately, the
next one involved only fingers.
As has been firmly established and previously stated, I was the spoiler
in a family of four brothers who were hoping for a fifth to fill out their Fab
Five roundballers. While they could have called in one of their cousins from the all-male trio on my Dad’s side, they were holding out for my
arrival.
The latter was somewhat delayed by four miscarriages and then a
morning-sick mother. Years after my birth, she shared with me a time when, during my gestation, she had been heaving over the bathroom toilet. My oldest brother Jack, of trunk-jettisoning fame, burst in. “Hurry up,” he said, “I’m going to be late for school!”
My father took the morning sickness as a good sign—it had been absent
during the first trimester of the four miscarriages—and he was sure this meant the pregnancy was going take this time. After my successful entry into the world, he hypothesized that Mother’s system had been changing over from boys to girls.
Needless to say, my brothers were sorely disappointed when the starched
diaper on the post in the front yard read, “It’s a Girl!” and box after box, and bow after bow, revealed another frilly dress—sixty-four in
all.
But I wasn’t spoiled. I was the spoiler.
All of this to say, there was a need for a lot of starch in our household, and someone to mix it and spray it on ten daily dress-shirts and a couple of dresses for me. My brothers wore starched and ironed Oxford shirts to school each day and a clean, pressed dress-shirt to dinner each night. Then there were Sundays and parties and the office for Daddy. And since I was vying for a spot in the Kathryn Lipes annual fashion show (not really, but in my mother’s eyes I was), my dresses needed to be picture-perfect, ready at all times.
Lula did not have time in her normal course of cleaning and cooking to
manage the mountain of wrinkled textiles. Mother had to find another girl.
Katherine, still a teenager and not related to the Lipes’ clan, rang the back
doorbell on Thursday mornings and stayed a full day in the utility room, warmed in the winter by the incessant tumbling of the dryer, and dripping sweat in the summer, despite air-conditioning. Steam seemed to rise from both her and the iron each time she replaced it on its heel.
I liked to watch from the wicker clothes basket—sometimes behind it,
sometimes in—and from below the level of the ironing board. Katherine would sprinkle water onto each sleeve and collar from a Seven-Up bottle fitted with a special stopper, much like a salt-shaker but with bigger holes. There were rhythm and blues in the shake-shake of the bottle, the hisssss of the iron, and the gentle humming of Katherine.
One day I tiptoed in and tried to see how close Katherine was to
finishing my polka-dot pinafore with the big red sash. I stood on my tippy toes and pulled myself higher with my fingers on the gingham ironing board cover. Next thing I knew there was a sizzle and two screams: one coming from me as the hot metal crossed over the index and tall fingers of my left hand, the other, almost simultaneous, from Katherine.
Katherine grabbed me by the waist with one arm and thrust my fingers
under the cold water of the tap that she’d opened with the other. I could hear Mother’s tennis shoes slapping the brick floor of the back hallway as she passed Lula’s bathroom, arriving almost as soon as the cool water on my fingers.
“What happened?” she cried. Katherine was crying too.
Though whimpering and wincing, I found myself wanting to underestimate
the damage and defend Katherine—she had not been able to see me below Tommy’s shirttail. I had put my fingers on the board without her knowing. Katherine was not at fault, although it was clear that she herself believed the contrary.
Fortunately, in the flurry to relieve my pain and prevent scaring which
might offend future courtiers who would indeed want to hold my hand, Mother had no time to affix blame or to conduct further inquiry. She popped and applied some cubes from a metal ice tray, slathered greasy cream all over my hand, and wrapped enough gauze around it to rival a boxing glove—all of which probably contributed to the scars that endure today. (The wrinkles and age spots of increasing years which now populate my digits make the scars almost indistinguishable, however. And as for the courtiers, they are a thing of the distant past.)
And Katherine? She reappeared thirty-five years later at Westminster
Presbyterian Church for Mother’s funeral. How Katherine knew she had died, I’ll never know. She sat in the row just beyond a bank of relatives and a smattering of very old friends. More recently, I discovered two addresses for a “Katherine Penny” within blocks of my mother’s last place of residence, which says so much more than one might imagine. I’ll try to find her on my next visit to the City.
***
Mrs. Bowman worked for, and often alongside, my grandmother in
1959, the year my fingers sizzled and I spun under the 55’ Olds. They rolled out biscuits together, canned peaches, and made sure the silver shone on the buffet in the dining room for Christmas Eve dinners.
They looked a lot like one another too: tight gray curls, silver-framed glasses, and pasty skin. Mrs. Bowman had her own room and bath just beyond the kitchen at Grandmother and Granddaddy Street’s, but once a year she took a trip to visit her real family.
Katherine and Lula and Booker may have had real families, too,
but I never knew. Booker was a kindly, middle-aged man, smart and strong. Though he wore long pants, long-sleeved shirts, and boots, even as he cut and weeded the yard under an August sun, I knew he was strong because he would push wheel barrows loaded with dirt or manure for my mother’s flowerbeds, or a pile of bricks to build a new patio. That’s how I knew he was smart, too. He designed the patio and did all the calculations himself.
I think my mother respected Booker, or at least his skills, but she never called him “Mr. Jones.” She never called Lula, “Mrs. Dugger” or Katherine, “Miss Penny,” either. Lula was at least forty, but she was still a girl. I was puzzled by that.
Booker hauled in sand, smoothed and leveled it perfectly using a
funny instrument with a bubble that I’d never seen before, and laid out the used bricks that my mother had bought “because they had more character.” Booker couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t want new ones. (Lula had bought used wood to build a screened porch on her house to keep the bad people out because she couldn’t afford new.)
The patio was built in what had been a dirt courtyard between the honey-suckled fence of the basketball court and the stockade fence festooned
with roses from Mother’s inner garden. Booker laid the bricks in a circle around an elm tree in the middle of the courtyard, and he hung a single swing from one of the branches. I would no longer have to go out to the back-back yard to swing with Tweety Bird and my other imaginary friends. Instead, I could twist the swing round and round until there was just enough room for me to wedge myself in the triangle formed by the chains and the seat, and then I’d let her go, whirling myself silly in first one direction and then the other until the chains had no more spin in them.
The original brickless space had served only one function: my mother had asked Booker to dig deep holes and sink metal linings with a hinged lid into them to house our two garbage cans. He then built an additional screen and gate around the holes so no one would ever know that the Street family produced stinky garbage—except once a week when Booker would haul the cans down to the street. There, men who looked like him jumped off the back of a garbage truck, lifted the loads to their shoulders, and then ran after the truck that lumbered on down the street, barely slowing to allow them to empty the contents. Then the men would run back up the driveway and behind two gates to slip the cans back into their hideaways.
I once saw on the news that a garbage man was so tired, down in
a place called Mississippi, that he took a rest in the back of the truck—and
then the driver turned on the compactor. The truck just ate him up; he never made it out.
Because Booker only came once a week, unlike the gardeners of
our neighbors’ houses, and because my mother seldom allowed the use of chemicals (We all used to beg for weed killers), our yard never rose to the standards of those around us. Our parents taught us to look down our noses at people who actually sprayed their yards green—can you imagine? Fake grass! We never knew that the green film was actually herbicides and that’s why we could practice our putts on their lawns. The dandelions of our own acted like pins in a pinball machine, sending our Titleists off in random directions.
Booker did his best to dig out the massive weeds that thrived
alongside the fescue at 1503 Guildford Lane, but his efforts were never enough.
I got paid to butcher them as well, but only if I could extract the tap root.
Their increasing numbers as summer wore on testified to our failed attempts and my diminishing interest, despite needing the cash for my Christmas money.
Floors were another matter. While Mother would not allot more of
her household budget to fighting weeds, she would invest in her floors. The fact that they only needed serious attention twice a year probably contributed as well to their higher priority.
Every early spring and late summer, Mr. Preston arrived with his
cadre of strippers, waxers, and buffers, and the extra men it took to run them. They attacked the walnut peg floors of the living and dining rooms, the waxed brick of the kitchen, back hall, and garden room, and the linoleum of my bedroom where my Mary Jane’s would leave their signature black scuff marks. Mr. Preston always left my floor sparkling white.
One summer day when I was five, one hazy day defined by the din
of locusts and pavement so hot the tar bubbled and boiled, one day when Mother was distracted by Mr. Preston’s army of worker bees, I dared approach her with a request to take my exploration of the world beyond the gates, fences, and courtyards of my pre-school years. I caught her on her knees in the backyard flowerbed.
“Mother, may I ride my bike to the Country Club pool?” I
said.
She was busy dead-heading daisies and harvesting a bouquet for
the dining room table. Perspiration beaded up on her temple as she swatted an annoying black fly.
“All by yourself?”
I guess she still had some of her wits about her.
“Yes, but I’ve done it lots of time before with Bill. I’ll stop at every stop sign and look both ways before I cross. I’ll stick my arm straight out when I make the left turn onto Pennsylvania Avenue just like I learned at bicycle safety school. (How I ever passed, I’ll never know. It seemed like I’d hit every orange ball and cone that demarcated the lanes, and I’m sure I signaled left, when I meant right…twice.)
She had moved on to the azaleas that needed a little trimming
even though their white blossoms were long
gone.
“Well, I suppose that would be alright. Use the phone at the
check-in desk to call me when you get there, and remember, you can only charge one snack to our account.” (I had a bit of a bad reputation since I’d charged the beautiful little white cowboy boots to our account at age three at SINN’s Western Trail in Allenspark, Colorado.)
“Okay, I’ll call,” I said, throwing the words over my shoulder
as I grabbed my swim suit and towel on the way out.
I made it to the pool, about six or seven long blocks away,
without a mishap. (Thirty years later, I discovered that the blocks were not so long, or such a big deal after all; no wonder my mother had decided to let me go.) I called home then joined my friends for a game of Marco Polo.
Most of my friends’ mothers lay tanning and talking under
striped umbrellas, just steps from the water’s edge. I felt a certain pride that my mom was too busy to waste her time sitting and chatting by a pool. Didn’t occur to me that perhaps they were making sure their children were safe from drowning.
Later in the afternoon, Becky and Lindsay and Sally and I tried
to best one another with tricks on the waterslide. We went down on our bottoms and backs, and both backwards and frontwards on our tummies. But Lindsay was the first to go down backwards sitting up. I was just a little bit afraid so I went to get an orange and red popsicle instead. At half past three, I grabbed my bike and headed home.
I had just passed the tree-shaded house with the white columns
and red brick steps at the intersection of Elmhurst and Guilford when I heard it: the screech of rubber on hot pavement, a dull thump, glass shattering and scattering across the roadway—then silence just as loud and prolonged as the squealing brakes had been. I jumped off my Schwinn and spun around. The scene was frozen despite my thumping heartbeat that measured the passing seconds. No one moved in the car despite the missing windshield.
In the front yard of the colonial, rake in hand, stood the yardman, a pillar of salt except for his dark eyes jumping back and forth from car to pavement to car. I followed his pinball gaze to the curb. The only movement there was a red stream spilling over a dam of black tar from the pool that had formed above it. I raised my eyes a bit more, breath suspended, to see
the fractured body of a sixth-grader from Nichols Hills Elementary, my school, his crumpled bike ten feet away. It seemed there wasn’t an inch of his body that wasn’t leaking blood. I had passed him seconds before going the opposite way, wishing I was a bit older cuz he was so cute. Now, I could only recognize him by his ripped madras bermudas.
My breath returned, but I was too afraid to move; with so much
blood running down the road and splashed across the sidewalk, he had to be dead. Not one of us budged—not in the car, not in the yard, not me, not even a leaf on the maple.
The only sound was the chorusing locusts. Finally, the body shifted. Cochran raised his head then managed to get an elbow onto the pavement to push himself up. Next, straining, he got to one knee. It was then that I saw the yardman move. He took two steps towards the boy who had gotten to his feet, his right arm hanging limp.
“I’ll call,” the yardman yelled. He dropped his rake. “I’ll call
an ambulance. Jis’ don’t you move.”
But he did. Cochran drug his shoeless right foot behind him
halfway across the street, then lowered himself to his good knee. The yardman rushed to his side, hesitated, then reached his hand out to steady his bloodied sleeve.
Still no sound, no movement, from the woman in the car.
I turned and jumped on my bike, racing up the hill faster than
greased lightening. I burst through the back door. Mr. Preston looked startled, then alarmed. Panic leapt from my face.
“I just saw the worst thing of my entire life!” I yelled as, frantically, I searched for the warmth of Lula’s arms.
Copyright 2013, Sue Nell Street Phillips