Most of my childhood I don’t remember. It comes to me in flashes, and some things hang around, like the time I threw up on the floor in second grade, in public school, but most of it has faded, what it felt like, what it looked like, who was who. My sister, on the other hand, remembers everything.
The first year at May Day I was an oriole, for the dance of the birds—there was a cardinal and a robin and a blue jay and so on—which meant my mother had to sew an elaborate costume out of crepe paper involving a bird’s head and a beak and wings with many feathers, all black and orange, a cross between Batman and Nijinsky, things you wouldn’t normally make out of crepe paper and which you had to buy out of your own pocket as your contribution to the pageant, like bringing the pint of cream, heavy whipping cream, on Butter Day.
I loved my bird costume. I wish I still had it. It would cheer me up when I’m blue. Besides, the Orioles have always been my second favorite baseball team, and when I lived in Baltimore, going to Johns Hopkins, they were the best of the best.
My first-grade year in the May Day pageant, I was the crown bearer. This costume I still have a picture of. I was dressed in a huge white beret, probably sewn by my mother as well, and a white shirt with a white lace jabot and white shorts and white socks and black high-top sneakers. This costume was a mortification, even though I look happy in the picture. It’s what you do, in pictures.
There was a May Pole, with streamers in eight different colors, all pinned to the ground, and eight different girls to pick them up and skip around the May Pole, twirling and untwirling the streamers, each wearing a dress that matched the color of her streamer, lavender and yellow and periwinkle blue and lime green and pink, all pale, the dresses all little coronation kind of things, all gauzy, all sewn by their mothers as well. In those days, mothers could do that kind of thing with their eyes closed.
And there were heralds and bumblebees and maids-in-waiting and pixies of all kinds, all in costumes sewn by their mothers, all the costumes identical every year. You could watch a decade of slides of the May Day pageant and every one of them would look the same.
There were masses of flowers everywhere, mostly lilacs and tulips. All the girls had little circlets of flowers in their hair. Like daisy chains. They had made them themselves the day before.
So there was a lot of cavorting and bird dancing and streamer twirling and bumblebee buzzing and heralding and bowing and scraping, all to a soundtrack of classical music played by Mrs. Lackman on her old record player on the porch, and then there was the coronation and then it was over. It took a lot of rehearsal. We had to rehearse inside when it was raining, but it was worth it. It always came off without a hitch. Even the schizophrenic son behaved on May Day.
The school shut its doors a long time ago and Mrs. Lackman is dead, but I wish I could see the May Day pageant just one more time before I die. I see myself in my splendid oriole costume, wings flapping, feathers fluttering in the breeze, or in a white lace jabot and high-tops, carrying a crown of flowers through billowing pastel streamers. But I could be wrong.
My memories are vague, as I said, and perhaps not accurate. Maybe “he look lak he a monf ole awready” was part of a Christmas pageant, which we probably also had one of. Maybe it was said about the Baby Jesus and not about George Washington. I don’t know.
None of us who went to Mrs. Lackman’s really remembers anything except the pageants, and the roles we played. We don’t remember a thing about the actual school part. Except Butter Day, which was supposed to be vaguely educational.
I see my own childhood as though it happened to someone else, some person I don’t recognize, just a series of brief moving pictures in which I am an insignificant figure.
Somewhere in the midst of all this pageantry came Butter Day, somewhere between Washington’s Birthday and May Day. We didn’t have to wear costumes, we didn’t have to memorize anything, we just had to show up with a pint of cream.
We would sit in Mrs. Lackman’s kitchen, the only time we were ever allowed in there, even when she would bake us cookies, which she did once in a blue moon. In fact, the only rooms we ever saw were the two classrooms, since apparently nobody was ever allowed to use the bathroom, and the kitchen was all sort of warm and homey compared to the classrooms, one of which had a high chair in the middle of it. Just in case.
Her son was away in the far reaches of the house, being loony, no doubt, but loony on his own time. We were safe. We were glad Butter Day had arrived.
We would sit in the kindergarten chairs, which had been taken into the kitchen and placed in a perfect circle. Mrs. Lack-man would get out a group of Mason jars, blue-green glass with lids and screw-on tops, and fill each one half full with heavy cream.
Then we would take the Mason jars and distribute them. The children who got to go first would hold the jar as though it were the Holy Grail, the white cream bluish inside the jar. Then, at Mrs. Lackman’s signal, the first children would begin to shake the jars. After a time, Mrs. Lackman would give another signal and the jars would be passed to the right, and the next child would begin to shake the jar, and so on around and around the circle.
The cream would froth in the jar and then begin to thicken like whipped cream. And then the miracle occurred.
The cream would begin to turn into butter. Liquid would separate from the bulk of the cream, and the clotted part would begin to turn a greenish yellow inside the jar.
We would keep shaking, shaking now like mad, since the object of our efforts was so close at hand. Mrs. Lackman was in a state of high excitement, and her exhortation would keep our arms, now tired from exertion, flailing away.
The cream was now round globs inside the jar, and made a kind of wet thunk as it went up and down, up and down, hitting the top and bottom of the jar, the useless, thin, milky liquid sloshing around the yellow mass.
Finally it was time to stop. Mrs. Lackman would open the jars, and inside each one there would be a round ball of butter. Soft, fresh butter.
Mrs. Lackman would put the butter on a chilled plate and get out a box of Saltine crackers and hand two crackers to each child. She would then take a butter knife and, going around the circle, spread a thin smear of butter on one of the two crackers, and each child, in a hysteria of excitement, would begin to eat the cracker in tiny, mouselike bites, except for the May King, who would put the whole thing in his enormous, athletic mouth and eat it in one bite.
When the first cracker was gone, Mrs. Lackman would move around the circle and, as though she were Lady Bountiful giving us far more than we deserved, spread an even thinner smear of butter on the second cracker.
We were pretty bored by that time, and our arms were tired, and some people were sweating from all the exertion of shaking the jar with great force, up and down, up and down. But we ate our crackers. The butter was delicious, unsalted, fresh, gleaming pale yellow. Two crackers of it was pretty much a surfeit, but with only one cracker, we would have felt a little cheated after all that effort.
Then Mrs. Lackman would smooth out each little glob of butter until it was a perfect soft ball and wrap it in wax paper and put it in her icebox and the true purpose of Butter Day was finally revealed. Mrs. Lackman wanted butter. Free butter. Free fresh butter. We had been given a minute taste of the delicacy Mrs. Lackman and her schizo son would enjoy for weeks.
Then we went back to learning to read and add, the first graders left totally to their own devices, the kindergartners harassed by her totally totalitarian method of learning and trying to go to the bathroom. Butter Day usually ended about when it was time for my red-headed neighbor to pee on the floor, although we’d gotten pretty used to it by then and it lacked the excitement it had originally held.
So that was Butter Day. Educational, fun, and, ultimately, servitude to Mrs. Lackman’s private appetites. I can picture her, sitting down with her psychopathic son, slathering free butter on large steaming baked potatoes and wallowing in a swelter of gastronomic sensuality.
We
got through it all. Except for the lack of opportunity to go to the bathroom, it was actually kind of fun, and public school, which we all started in the second grade, seemed drab in comparison. The teachers there were kind and smart, and were infinitely indulgent with the one-finger, two-finger system of education, which I gather was pretty general in those days. I’ve talked to other people.
The only exciting part of public school was atomic bomb drills, when we would either get under our desks, which was fun, or be herded into the dark and rat-infested boiler room, which was not fun, but which gave us a better, more bitter taste of life in an atomic holocaust.
Mrs. Lackman may have been a fascist dictator, and she may have abused the child labor laws, but we did learn to read. We learned to add and subtract. And we learned to sit for hours at a time at long tables with other attractive, well-mannered boys and girls and not make one single peep, except for the occasional, very occasional moments when Mrs. Lackman would stick her head in the door and ask how we were doing.
And, given a couple of pints of heavy cream—heavy whipping cream—and, of course, a Mason jar with a really tight-fitting lid and one of those rubber rings that goes inside it, I could still make a pound or two of butter, even if I were in the desert, even if I were in the frozen, barren tundra, even all by myself without one single hope of salvation, even without so much as a single Saltine cracker. You just shake the jar.
He Was So Fat
When we were little children, if my brother and sister and I wanted something really badly and all other entreaties had failed, there was one that always did the trick. We’d work ourselves up to an anguished howl and say, “But Mama, I need it. I need it for school.” You had to sound really frustrated and kind of heartbroken, but it worked whether the desired item was a box of pencils or a new pair of roller skates. Needing something for school was unassailable, even though we never had any money.
I wanted this certain new pair of sneakers or a new plaid flannel shirt, something, anything that hadn’t already been worn half to death by my brother, and even sometimes people before him; I wanted some new and wholly mine thing in the worst kind of way, but we had no money, and so I had to resort to the need-it-for-school argument, and that broke my mother down and she agreed. “Oh, all right,” she said. She sent me to Mr. Swink’s dry goods store in town, where I was told to charge it. “Put it on the never never,” as my aunt used to say.
All the store owners knew us. There weren’t any credit cards. You just signed for it. Years before, my mother used to stop in Mr. McCoy’s grocery store after school and charge money so she could go to the movies. She had an amazing amount of gall, my mother. And she always got away with it.
McCoy’s sold McCormick spices and they had, in the window, a thermometer advertising the company. The different temperatures were marked by different spices, so one hundred degrees was chili pepper and so on down through whatever spices they could think of that corresponded in some metaphorical way to various temperatures. One cold day my grandmother ran into a friend of hers who said, “Yesterday it was lemon, but today it’s all the way down to ginger!”
So I wanted these new sneakers or whatever it was, some trivial thing, and my mother finally relented because I needed it for school and all, and I decided, one Saturday afternoon in September, to walk to town and get them. It was two miles, and you walked down the creek, which was almost violently sexy—you could take your clothes off and nobody would see you or if somebody did see you maybe Something Big would happen; you saw old beer bottles and crumpled packs of cigarettes and used rubbers, and every single thing was invested with a kind of erotic promise. You could get rubbers out of machines in gas stations for a quarter, in the foul-smelling bathrooms, and I knew what they were because my brother’s friends had told me.
Then you left the willowed water and walked up a hill and across a big long field by the two-lane road, past a pond that was frighteningly rumored to have no bottom at all, ever, so if you fell in, you would never be found, not if they dredged the pond forever. Then you walked over the crest of a hill and you could see it, the town, spread out before you like Oz, and you walked down through the university campus and then you were on the actual sidewalks.
Town was an exciting place compared to where we lived, largely because there were other people there. It was great, living in the country, it was a bucolic extravaganza, and it provided an almost endless number of ways to play, what with mud-clod wars and the endlessly cool waterfall in the creek and black-snakes in the bedrooms and everything.
My brother and sister both had bicycles, but I never had one, even though, as one of my mother’s friends recently remarked, every child in America had a bicycle. My mother said I could ride my brother’s bike when he wasn’t using it, but when do you use a bicycle except after school and on the weekends? At night? Alone at night? So I was often left to my own devices while they were off careening down gravel roads and hurtling into creeks where they sustained any number of life-threatening injuries involving trips to the emergency room.
One hot summer day I was in my grandmother’s dining room and she had these gauzy curtains, her summer curtains, just fine light gauze, as fine and pretty as a bride’s veil. They were blowing gently in the breeze and they were just irresistible, so I took out some matches and set them on fire. I just simply thought on a sweltering August day that it would be a fine thing to do. I actually did it twice, in both my grandmothers’ houses, at different times. Then I crawled under the dining room table to watch the flames creep up the walls. I sat there watching my grandmothers’ fluid curtains burn and waiting to be punished. It was both gut-wrenchingly magical and masochistic at the same time. Curtains like that are probably totally flame-retardant now.
So there was an almost endless number of hilarious things to do. But the almost endless part was very important, and there were many, many things that town had that we didn’t have. Store windows. Ammonia Cokes. Movies. Rednecks with their sinewy forearms and hollowed-out chests lounging around by the Rockbridge National Bank, which was run by Mr. Rader, who knew everything about everybody, rednecks in their overalls spitting tobacco on Main Street. New clothes nobody else had worn. An alleyway you felt a little creepy walking through.
It was a nice day. Virginia in the fall is exactly the right temperature, the kind of temperature you imagine dreams would be in, if dreams had thermometers. It has both the nostalgia of summer’s end, like a stove slowly cooling after you’ve turned it off, and the anticipation of almost everything else, the color, the cold, the clear hazeless air, the earth with a thin crust of sparkling frost, and, in the distance, the mountains a deep, true indigo.
It was a nice day and I was walking to town, where there were people and you could get lost in the crowd, although there wasn’t really a crowd, and it would have been hard to get lost, since there were only six stoplights and most of the people knew who I was anyway. But I was walking to town and the new sneakers or the new shirt would somehow magically make my life more, well, more acceptable. I would be the envy of all. I would be good-looking and strong and dark and intense instead of just superficially clever. So, in a way, now that I think of it, I really did need this thing for school.
In the middle of the big field, I saw a group of boys I knew from school. They were in my grade and they were smoking cigarettes, just walking along with a vague air of bored menace. And then they saw me, and they started my way. There was nowhere to go, the road was far off, and I knew them from school, and I never imagined that I was myself in any kind of trouble.
The leader of the gang was George Hazelwood. He was surrounded by five other boys—well, they weren’t exactly boys; I mean, some of them shaved already, having failed various grades in their tortured academic careers, failed more than one. They all had hair like Elvis. Bad Elvis hair, lank and dirty and greasy. The oldest one, Henry MacLaine, was probably fifteen. Henry MacLaine was really, really stupid. He was fifteen and he was only in the eighth grade.
You have to be pretty stupid for that.
George Hazelwood was the leader of the gang because he was so fat. He was rotund. Rednecks tend to be either fat or really, really skinny. George was the kind of white trash fat you get from eating too many sandwiches made out of Merita bread and peel-off baloney and biscuits fried in lard and everything else boiled in fatback, which is a kind of glutinous form of salt.
We were all, my sister and brother and I, preternaturally skinny, because we never ate any kind of snack food that came out of a bag and we never ate between meals and we never had Cokes, unless we went to visit the Learys, where they had potato chips and Fritos and dip, something we weren’t even allowed to say, much less to eat except when we were there (or at the Fords’, who also had dip). The Learys always kept a case of Cokes on the back porch from the bottling plant on Route 60. When you took a Coke, you put a nickel in the little hole in the crate, and when all the Cokes were gone, the nickels paid for a new case.
The whole conglomeration of boys, fat and skinny, surrounded me, giving me the kind of grunts that pass for hello in that set, and they asked what y’all doing and I said I was walking to town, and then they all pulled in a little closer.
“You ain’t sorry?” Henry MacLaine asked me.
“Sorry for what?”
“Sorry for that thing you said to George last Saturday in town, right in front of the Rockbridge National Bank.”
“I never saw George last Saturday. I don’t even think I was in town.”
“Yes you was. Wasn’t he George?”
“Yep. He was definitely in town.”
It kind of took me aback that George Hazelwood could use the word definitely in a sentence.
“And you said some things. You said something to George in front of the Rockbridge National Bank. Right smack in front of the bank.”