I risked an invitation, “You guys want to come over and play on the bluff behind the apartments tomorrow? The alders are neat and we can climb around and stuff.” How bold I felt to invite, to assume, friendship with two guys I’d just met.
“I’m spendin’ the night at Macek’s here, so yeah, why not? If Macek isn’t afraid someone will rob him.” We laughed and Macek slugged Taylor in the shoulder.
I left my new-found pals to finish their fight alone and ran all the way home. I had found some friends, but the apartment looked shabby and worn out. Did I imagine faces glaring at me from every window? The three little girls I had seen earlier were still on the swings and I observed that two were black and one brown. I hadn’t noticed before.
A guilty relief filled me when I found a little white girl with a jack-o-lantern grin perched on the steps. She was dirty and lean, a deserted runt on the front porch. I smiled when she said hello and tried not to let her know that I was staring at her forehead. It was impossible not to stare: a lump stuck out of her forehead just above her eyes. The strangest nodule of skin and tissue that I had ever seen jutted from her head like a misplaced navel. A giant mole? No, more like a belly button, one that stuck out instead of in. She had an “outie” right in the middle of her forehead.
I climbed the steps refusing to look back, though I wanted to stare and even touch the weird magnetic oddness of it. Never in my life had I seen such an astonishing curiosity on anyone’s face. I announced it when I walked in the door. “Did you see that little girl with the belly button on her head?”
“Samuel!” Mom was stretched on the couch with a stack of official papers on her chest, looking tired and lonely.
“Well, Mom, she does.”
“I’m aware of that, but don’t you think it’s cruel to make fun of her?” Then her tone changed. “I can’t believe her mother can’t have that thing removed.”
“They live upstairs,” offered Mary, dancing to the radio as she set the tiny table for three. “Her mom’s a drunk, and worse, I bet.”
“Where on earth did you hear such a thing?”
“Mom, you can hear everything in this place. The way that woman talks, you better stuff cotton in Humpy’s ears when he goes to bed.”
“His name is Sam, and that will be just enough of that. I expect you to treat that little girl nicely. She has enough to put up with without you two giving her a bad time. Get in there and put supper on the table.”
Supper was still strange with just three of us, but no one mentioned it. Instead we looked beyond the room for topics. “Mom, why do all these Negroes live here?” I asked around a mouthful of chicken. Back in Ninilchik I’d never seen but two black people before and now they were all around me. I didn’t say so, but they scared me a little.
“They’re just people,” asserted Mom.
“One of them talked to me today,” Mary said.
“That’s nice,” Mom answered tersely. “You just stay away from them.”
“But I was down at the laundry room,” Mary continued, “and this lady came in and got her sheets out of the dryer. She just asked me where I was from and stuff like that.”
“I didn’t say they weren’t friendly. I just said stay away. They have their life and we have ours. Now get after those dishes.” Mom left us with no chance for questions and went off to her bath.
I went to bed filled with images of that little girl with the belly button on her forehead. Maybe her mom was a witch who practiced black magic on helpless children. Maybe she wasn’t a little girl at all but a bat, or a unicorn changed by some trick of magic. After all, it was nighttime when I saw her.
The way Mom talked about our neighbors managed to make this place even more mysterious. The smells of cooking food and sounds of music coming from the other apartments were as foreign as any I could imagine. From the mold, the mildew, and the accented voices of the hallways, to the unfamiliar spicy food odors and pounding, pounding music that leaked through open windows, I was surrounded by this strange and sinister place that I must call home. I was glad it was summer so the night wasn’t dark.
Chapter 5
Mom always made us get up before she went to work, so I had time to write a letter before I went to the bluff to meet my new friends. I lay on the bed with the remains of my Big Chief writing tablet and wrote “Dear Becky.”
“I’m fine,” I wrote. “Hope you are too.” I chewed on my pencil. Then I went to the kitchen and poured a glass of milk. This was my first letter to a girl, and I was at a loss for words. What could I say that really mattered? I didn’t want to say too much and be mushy, or not say anything and have her stop being my girlfriend.
I was losing my mental picture of Becky, and I wondered what it was that I liked about her. In my top drawer was the scented, flowered note card with Becky’s address. I dug it out and laid it on the bed to let the fading perfume work on me.
I took a half hour to say that we had moved into an apartment and that summer was boring here just like at home. I couldn’t tell her the secrets, the mysteries that abounded in this foreign place. I was too proud to say much about how I missed climbing the alders on the bluff and building forts with my friends back home. Instead I told her to write and say hi to people and gave up. The letter went in an envelope and into the drawer with Dad’s cribbage board. Maybe I could mail it in a few days. But suddenly I didn’t want to.
Becky and Harry Munson, all the kids that had been a part of me, were receding on the tide of my life, and I feared that soon they would be too far away to reach.
I ran all the way to the bluff. There were birds out, and I spooked a squirrel that chattered and screamed against my right to be there. Below me at the base of the steep hill train cars moved back and forth, squealing their brakes and clanging as they met. I could just see pieces and colors through the branches and leaves, but the scene seemed dirtier and more confusing than the train sets I’d seen in people’s basements or in Western movies.
I wandered along the bicycle trail with its humps and rolls and wished I had a bike, one with a banana seat and high handlebars.
I heard a clatter and turned to watch a bike approaching. It was a bike like I had just been thinking about, and I knew by the sound that the owner had clipped a playing card to the frame so that it hit the spokes, imitating an engine, a dream of power. The rider was slim and dark haired. He was sleek like the bike and they moved together, lightly touching the tops of the bumps and swerving around rocks and bushes. Twice the bike left the ground but the kid turned it and landed square on the trail. He stopped. Maybe because I was in the trail, but he stopped and smiled.
“How ya doin’?” I said in my boldest fashion.
“Hi.”
“Nice bike.”
“Thanks, I just got it. You got one?” His question, I realized in a moment of wondrous clarity, was an attempt at friendship, a probing for familiarity.
“No.”
“I wanted a skateboard,” he said, leaning on the handlebars, “but Gram said they’re too dangerous. Sheesh!”
“My mom said the same thing,” I lied. “Most fun things are that way.”
“You want to try it?” He pushed the bike to me, and I saw his hands and arms were slim and delicate like a girl’s. I nearly threw him off the bike and yanked it from him. Did I want to try