Little Boy Blues Read online

  Struggling to manipulate my marionettes and keep them untangled, I learned patience. Defending my domain, I learned diplomacy, since I was not only unenvied but also widely misunderstood. “You play with puppets?” “They’re not puppets, they’re marionettes, and you don’t play with them. They’re not dolls. Puppets are something you wear on your hands. Marionettes are like actors made out of wood. They’re not a thing alike.”

  As my hands grew, I became more adept. By the time I was seven years old, I could manipulate my troupe well enough to put on shows at school myself. I did “Hansel and Gretel” and “Red Riding Hood,” and the minstrel performed on a toy piano I found that was just the right proportion for Bimbo to sit and play, although once he had played through a chorus or two, kicked over his piano bench (a big laugh) and then forgot to play, lifting his hand to scratch his head while the music went on without him (a bigger laugh when he did a little double take at the keyboard), there was nothing to do but go through the same gags twice, with diminishing results. My uncle paid a parishioner who had a basement woodshop to build a stage. The stage was made of plywood and the proscenium stood six feet tall. It was too heavy for me to move alone and too big to fit into our apartment, so it stayed at my aunt and uncle’s. When I was eight, they moved to Lexington, a much smaller town twenty miles away, where Uncle Tom had a new pastorate, and the stage and most of the marionettes moved with them. That was fine with me, since I was going, too, because my mother could not find anyone to watch me after school (my father was gone again). I finished the second grade in Lexington and spent the summer with my aunt and uncle. Mother was in summer school, upgrading her teacher’s certificate, and she came on the weekends.

  There wasn’t much to do or much of anyone to do it with out there in the country except play with the marionettes or consult the magician’s catalog that I had found advertised in the back pages of a comic book and written away for. I spent hours lying on my bed staring into that wish book with its black and yellow cover that offered—or so it seemed—every magic trick ever invented, from trick card decks to elaborate stage illusions. I never ordered much and what I did order—Chinese linking rings, a set of cups and balls—I never got much good at. It was the catalog that was magic. For hours after school, I lay on my bed and consulted it like an oracle, imagining myself pulling scarves from canisters or pouring milk into a paper funnel from which the milk would later vanish. I didn’t need to actually own the equipment with which to perform these tricks, although I did pine for the milk pitcher for several months—dry months giftwise, with no Christmas or birthday coming up. The catalog was enough.

  My aunt and uncle had a new television, a color floor console—their first television of any kind, mine too. It had been a parting gift from their former church. But other than Walt Disney and Saturday-morning cartoons, there wasn’t much for kids on the two channels we got. Captain Kangaroo came on every morning, but even when I was small, I thought watching Captain Kangaroo was like volunteering for a coma.

  The rest of the time, I watched what the grownups watched, and with a total lack of discrimination—old movies, cooking shows, ball games, westerns, quiz shows, even the test pattern (an Indian chief in full headdress inside a bull’s-eye) if I got up before the station began broadcasting in the morning. And so one Sunday afternoon, I stumbled on Jon Gnagy’s Learn to Draw, a series of fifteen-minute basic art instruction videos. Gnagy, an amiable, middle-aged man always in the same flannel shirt and sporting a Van Dyke beard—he certainly looked like what I suspected an artist looked like—taught you to draw a ball, a cube, a cone and a cylinder, and then demonstrated how to turn these shapes into a mountain range, a lighthouse or a water wheel. The best part was that you got to write off for Jon Gnagy’s Learn to Draw Outfit, which contained some basic—though to my mind very sophisticated—art supplies (charcoal, drawing pencils, a kneaded eraser), a ream of drawing paper and an instructional manual that reproduced the scripts from the television show. If you don’t count matchbook covers that bore ads from art correspondence schools asking you to copy a sketch of a German shepherd or Robert E. Lee, Jon Gnagy was my introduction to art.

  I had never been much good with a coloring book. I envied girls their ability to stay so easily inside the lines (I never knew a boy who knew how to color). This was different. I was still copying, carefully aping each phase in the step-by-step instruction manual: the blocking with shapes, the gradual refinement of shape to physical object (box to house, cylinder to pine tree), and then the final details (shingles on the roof, shadows down one side of the tree). But that copying allowed for a certain latitude. Even an eight-year-old understood that it wasn’t about making an exact replica; it was more about the picture as a whole, something that could be approximated, something you could play a variation on, mess with. The best part was being ready with my supplies when the show came on, and then, propped on my elbows in front of the television, following along when Gnagy made three swift strokes with the side of a charcoal stick to put shadows on a mountain range, or feathered in shadows under the eaves on an old mill. I envied his assured strokes and spent hours practicing those easygoing slashes on the paper. Most of my efforts looked nothing like the examples on television or in the instructions, but I persevered until my fingers shone black with charcoal and chalk.

  I never took what I learned from those lessons and applied it to pictures of my own creation. I was happy just to be able to recreate what Gnagy drew, since to me, copying something well was as good as anything you might come up with on your own. I wasn’t after art, I had no intention of expressing myself—what did I have to express? I was after craft, everything that went into knowing what to include and how much you could leave out and still have a good picture. Mastering those techniques was like learning secret handshakes or becoming part of a guild. It gave me a handle on wrangling the world around me, and it was the most fun I ever had with anything on television.

  Mostly, though, I just remember how quiet it was out there in the country. We lived in a brick ranch house in a broad lot as treeless as the churchyard next door. There were dark woods at the back of the property, but I never explored very far. My aunt and uncle’s backyard in Winston-Salem had been surrounded by a privet hedge. There was an old apple tree that still produced a crop every year, and a swing in the tree for me. The yard sloped away from the house, and at the bottom of the yard my aunt always put in a small garden. Beyond that was the alley, lined with clinkers from the coal furnace that crunched under the tires of the garbage truck when it rumbled by. Everything there was measured, bounded, safe. There were no deep woods.

  The house in Winston-Salem faced a busy street, but in Lexington, we lived beside an even busier highway. On Saturday and Sunday the road in front of the house and the church was clogged with cars pulling outboard motor boats on their way to and from High Rock Lake ten miles farther south. Then it was even more lonesome, watching all those people passing, on their way somewhere else. Monday through Friday we had the place to ourselves.

  I had the back string free and was working to untangle the two crossed strings that controlled Red Riding Hood’s hands when I became aware that my mother was talking to me. Or maybe it was the sun and not her voice that got my attention. I had been sitting in her shadow where she lay on the folding chair in the yard behind my aunt and uncle’s house and, in the time it had taken me to free just one string from the clotted mess that hung midway between the marionette and the control sticks, the sun had moved and stolen my shade.

  “—a box of oranges and a doll, that’s what I got for Christmas every year. That’s all Blanche got, too. The richest girl in town, and we got the same thing for Christmas. We would run as fast as we could, whoever got through Christmas first, to each other’s houses to show off our dolls.”

  I went back to concentrating on following the string from the left hand to see if I could find what was mangling it in the other knotted strings. I had heard the doll-and-oranges story several
times, enough to know where it was going. Mother sat up to smear more cocoa butter on her legs. The smell filled the windless afternoon. We were waiting for Uncle Tom to come back from the store with the watermelon. Mother was reading a biography of Franklin Roosevelt for her U.S. history class in summer school, and I hoped she would tell me more about how Roosevelt got polio after he left his wet bathing trunks on too long after swimming, but instead she began to talk about the Depression, and how no one who hadn’t lived through it could understand it, and how they had made do with nothing.

  “Stephanie has three Barbies,” I announced suddenly, before my mother could get around to the trove of toys gathering dust in my closet.

  “Who is Stephanie, honey?” my mother asked in a tone that blended—I never figured out how she did it—indifference and irritability.

  “Stephanie Garner? She lives—”

  “Oh, the Garners, yes.” The Garners lived two doors down the road from my aunt and uncle, who were now ten miles out in the country south of Lexington. Stephanie’s mother ran a beauty shop in one room of their house, and I was allowed to play with her because she lived nearby and her parents went to Uncle Tom’s church.

  “She has a Ken, too.”

  “Kenny?”

  “Ken. Barbie and Ken. Ken is Barbie’s boyfriend. He has a car and he comes to see her in her dreamhouse.” I had spent Wednesday afternoon after school at Stephanie’s, because my aunt had her ladies’ church circle meeting and my uncle had to make hospital visits. It had rained, and we stayed inside for two hours. She had just gotten a new Barbie, and she dressed and undressed one doll after another, pulling tiny outfits from the pink suitcase that turned into a closet and a chest of drawers with a little mirror when you opened it up. While I waited for the wardrobe changes, I drove Ken around in his sports car until it was time for him to visit. Then Ken and Barbie had to have coffee together, and then it was time for Barbie to comb her hair. I had never had a playdate with a girl before, and by the time Ken had come over for coffee the third time, I thought I was going to go out of my mind with boredom.

  “Maybe they could fight,” I suggested at one point, but Stephanie acted like she hadn’t heard me and just went on fitting a tiny pair of pink plastic shoes on Barbie’s pointy toes. Then, when she told me it was time for Ken to drive over again, I said Ken had a flat tire and we were fixing it.

  “I thought you liked dolls,” Stephanie said. “Mama said.”

  “They’re all right. I think you ought to be able to bend their arms and legs.”

  “She can bend over and turn her head. Mama said you had some dolls.”

  “They’re not—no, I don’t.”

  For a moment she just stared at me blankly, a tiny torso gripped in one hand, a tiny hairbrush gripped in the other. “Mama said you had a lot.”

  I paused, trying to think of an answer, and then I saw her rise and I knew what was coming next. She would go and get her mother from the beauty parlor in the front of the house and bring down upon my head the whole adult apparatus of questions and answers to “sort this whole thing out,” as my teacher at the new school was fond of saying when no one stepped up to confess. And so I panicked. I said the first thing that came into my mind, just to keep talking, to keep her in the room with me. “I’m just saying—I don’t know who told her that, but they were wrong. They’re not dolls. They’re marionettes,” and as soon as I said it, I felt tired, sick of this explanation, and sick of doing anything so strange that I had to be constantly explaining myself to people.

  “They’re what?”

  I was surprised to discover that she was interested, or at least interested enough to listen to my explanation and not go and get her mother. So I just kept talking, saying more than I’d intended just to hold her there, sitting across from me. Finally she got bored and thrust Ken back into my hands.

  “He needs his jacket on,” she said irritably. I didn’t mind. I was out of danger. I didn’t even care that she made me keep playing Barbie until my aunt called me home for supper an hour later.

  “Sugar, go help your aunt. Melita, I told you to call me when you wanted help.”

  Aunt Melita was almost to the picnic table carrying a tray with a pitcher of tea and four glasses filled with ice.

  “It wasn’t any trouble,” she said.

  Uncle Tom drove up a few minutes later with the watermelon. We were waiting for him to come back from the kitchen with a knife when my mother said, “Daddy used to love watermelon. Mama would send one up to the icehouse in the morning and in the afternoon she’d get one of the colored boys to go get it, and then they’d call Daddy at the store and tell him. The only way you could get Daddy home from that drugstore in the middle of the day was to tell him you had a watermelon.”

  “Papa did love watermelon,” my aunt said. I thought it was odd that my mother called her father Daddy and Aunt Melita always called him Papa, like they had two different fathers.

  We were almost through with the watermelon—Mother cautioning me every other bite about swallowing the seeds—when she said, “I know I’m not even going to want to think about eating supper after this. We should’ve thought of this earlier.” She put her fork down—I wondered why grownups liked to eat watermelon with a fork—and went on: “I just don’t know why some people eat so much.” Even I knew she was talking about my uncle, who had a potbelly that hung over his pants.

  “Well, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with watermelon,” my aunt said.

  “You know as well as I do the Bible warns us against gluttony,” Mother said, reaching for her tea.

  “Can I have some more?” I asked.

  “Yes, you can,” my uncle said enthusiastically. “Not going to hurt a skinny little boy like you.”

  “Tom just thought he was doing something nice we could all enjoy,” my aunt said.

  “Oh, Melita, I’m not criticizing Tom. He can eat whatever he wants to eat. I was just making an observation. Honey, you’re way too sensitive. You can’t be like that. You’ll have people worrying about every little thing they say around you. If I can’t make a simple comment without you getting upset, then we can’t talk about anything.” She frowned and rattled the ice in her glass. “Other sisters talk. I don’t see why we can’t.” She turned to me. “Did you know that when President Kennedy was a boy, his father would gather the family around at suppertime, and quiz them about current events?” I knew what current events were from My Weekly Reader. I wondered if President Kennedy ever sat around in his wet bathing suit.

  “Oh lookee,” Mother said. “There’s a kitty cat.”

  “My kitty cat.”

  “Your kitty cat. Since when did you get a kitty?”

  “That’s Milk Whiskers.”

  “Milk Whiskers. That’s a funny name for a cat.” At home we had a parakeet named Pretty Boy. Pretty Boy had originally been named Orville, after Orville Wright, until we went away for two weeks to visit my cousins in Ohio and my mother had sent the parakeet to stay with her friend Ethel. When we came back, Ethel had renamed the parakeet Pretty Boy. I had complained, because Orville had been my idea and I thought it was funny, but my mother told me it was too late to change back because it would just confuse the bird.

  “He’s big, isn’t he?” Mother said. “Where did he come from?”

  “He just showed up one day, and we kept him, and I named him Milk Whiskers.”

  She shook her head. “And where is Mr. Whiskers going to live when you come back home? You know we can’t have a cat.”

  “Milk Whiskers. He’s going to stay here. He’s our cat.” Mother watched the cat bat at a june bug in the grass. “I don’t know why, but I just never had any use for cats.”

  Once, when I was four and Mother and Daddy were still living together more often than they lived apart, the luxury of two incomes emboldened her to hire a cook who also watched me during the day. All I remember from that interlude was the sugar and butter sandwiches the cook prepared for me, my inab
ility to fall asleep when she made me take a nap every afternoon and the intense suspense of waiting late every afternoon with my head on the armrest of the sofa closest to the front door, where I could stare at the parking lot in front of the apartments, waiting for a sight of the big green Plymouth to turn in, which was my signal to bolt through the screen door—it was the one time all day when I got away with slamming that door—and dashing up the sidewalk to hurl myself into my mother’s arms.

  Catherine, the cook, didn’t last long. After her abrupt departure, my mother interrogated me.

  “Have you been telling stories?”

  “No’m.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes’m,” I said, sounding entirely too tentative. To my everlasting confusion, my mother employed an overlapping lexicon devoted to the subject of lying. There were fibs, white lies, stories and outright lies. Fibs and white lies were minor sins, lies were the worst, and stories could be either. To further confuse the issue, the accused, usually me, could be conflated with his sin: “You’re a lie.” Even candor fell under the heading of lying in my mother’s eyes. When I told a lady in my uncle’s church, “Ooh, Miss Agnes, you sure are fat,” a fact often spoken of in our household, I was accused of making up stories.

  “That’s not what Catherine said.”

  I was stumped. I liked Catherine, except when she made me take a nap (especially after the nap that earned me a whipping from my mother, who was furious when she found I’d eaten two rows of chenille buttons off the bedspread one especially sleepless afternoon: I had been a rabbit and the bedspread was a cabbage patch). “I didn’t tell a lie.”