When I Was Your Age, Volume One Read online

  I didn’t speak.

  He cleared his throat. “I hope you’ll wear that the day I come home.”

  I blinked. The truth was I hadn’t thought much about his coming home. Only about his leaving.

  “I’ll bring you a ring when I come back,” he said.

  I didn’t move. Just blinked again.

  “What kind of ring would you like?”

  I mumbled something.

  “What?” he asked.

  “A pearl,” I said hoarsely.

  “A pearl ring. Okay. On the day I come home, I’ll bring you a pearl ring. And a music box. How’s that? I’ll hide in the bushes, and when you ride up on your bike, home from school, I’ll jump out and surprise you. How’s that?”

  He cleared his throat again. I turned just a little to look at him. I saw he had tears in his eyes. I didn’t want him to feel sad too. That was almost worse than anything.

  I reluctantly rolled over onto my back. I looked at the ball he held. It was still a stupid ball, no doubt about that. But I mumbled something about it being pretty.

  “Will you play with this one?” he said.

  I touched it with my finger. I let out a quivering sigh, then nodded, accepting the complications of the moment. All-Ball would know that he could never be replaced. Ever. He was the one and only ball for me. But I could pretend to like this other one. Even play with it. For Dad’s sake.

  He handed me the white ball and I embraced it and smiled feebly.

  He smiled back. “Come eat some dinner with us now,” he said.

  I was ready. I wanted to leave my room. The light of day was nearly gone.

  “Come on.” He helped me off the bed, and, clutching pieces of All-Ball along with the new white ball, I joined the family.

  My dad left soon after that. We entered a new school. Ball-bouncing was replaced with friends, homework, and writing letters to Korea. Still — and this is weird, I’ll admit — I slept with a torn piece of All-Ball under my pillow for the next year, until after my dad came home.

  “I decided to share the story of All-Ball with young readers because I think it speaks to the hardest thing about being a child: the fact that most things in your life are out of your control. On the other hand, it also shows one of the best things about being a child: the fact that you can use your imagination to help ease your troubles.

  All the games I once played — from talking to All-Ball, to playing with my dolls, to pretending to be a cowboy or a soldier with my brothers — helped me become a writer. And one of the great joys of being a writer is that every day I can still use my imagination to help ease my troubles. The spirit of All-Ball now lives in my writing tools, instead of in a beloved rubber ball.”

  The kitten is a scrawny thing with burrs and bits of wood caught in its hair, where it still has hair, and pus coming out its eyes and nose. Its big baby head looks even bigger at the end of such a stick of a body. I found it in the woods at the end of my street where I play most days with my friends. This time I was alone. Lucky for you I was, I think to the kitten. Otherwise, David or Claude might have decided you’d be good practice for their slingshots. Those two can be mean, I think to myself. I don’t like playing with them really, but they live at the end of the street and sometimes you just play with the kids on your same street, even if they’re mean, sometimes even to you.

  The kitten makes a pitiful noise.

  “Don’t worry,” I tell it, stroking its scabby head until the mewing is replaced by a faint purr. “Everything will be okay. I’m going to take you home, and my mom will give you a bath and some medicine.”

  I tuck the kitten under my jacket and run out of the woods, across the street, down the sidewalk toward my house. I feel the warmth of the kitten through my shirt and start thinking of names.

  I’m only ten, so it will be five or six years before I work for Dr. Milk. My two oldest brothers worked for him part-time and summers when they were teenagers. Now my other brother, Paul, works there. Dr. Milk is the vet out on Ridge Road. He takes care of our dogs, and he will take care of my kitten.

  I never had a pet that was my very own. A couple of years ago, my father got a new beagle to replace the old one who had died, Patches was his name. He called the new one Bucky and said that Bucky could be mine. But saying a thing is so doesn’t mean it is.

  Bucky lives in a kennel out back, keeping his beagle smell, which my mother hates, far away from the house. I feed Bucky some days and play with him, but I am not allowed to bring him inside to sleep at the end of my bed or curl up next to me while I do my homework. Bucky is an outdoor dog; he is a hunting dog.

  He is my father’s dog, really.

  When I am older, I will go hunting with my father the way my brothers have done. I try not to think about this. I want to go, because I want my father to like me. But I don’t want to kill animals.

  One time when my father and three brothers went hunting, one of my brothers killed a deer. Most times they kill rabbits or pheasants if they get lucky. Most times they don’t get lucky. But this time one of my brothers, I don’t remember which one, killed a deer.

  The deer was hung by its feet from a tree just outside the kitchen. I could see it hanging there when I sat at my place at the table. My father urged me to eat my venison and talked about the slippers he was going to have made from the hide. I couldn’t eat. The thought of the venison made me want to throw up.

  I could see the deer’s eyes, even from the kitchen table. There was life in them, still. Only the deer and I knew that there was life the bullet had missed. It was in the eyes.

  I pushed the venison away.

  My father said, “That’s a waste of good meat.”

  My brothers teased me. One of them called me a sissy.

  My mother said, “You don’t have to eat it,” and took the slab of gray meat off my plate.

  My mother reaches into my jacket and removes the kitten by the scruff of its neck. She tells me to go down to the cellar and take off all my clothes and put them in a pile next to the washing machine.

  “This animal is filled with disease,” she says. “We can’t let it touch anything in the house.”

  “We’ll take it to Dr. Milk,” I say. “He’ll make it better.”

  “We’ll see,” she says, pushing me toward the cellar stairs, the kitten dangling from one of her hands.

  I can feel tears welling up. “But that kitten is mine,” I say. “I found it and it’s going to be my pet.”

  She doesn’t say anything. Looking up from the cellar stairs, I see her shaking her head at the kitten. Its eyes are clamped shut. I can see the pus oozing out of them.

  “You are a sorry sight,” she tells the kitten in the same soothing voice she uses with me when I’m sick. “A sorry sad sight.”

  I feel in the pit of my stomach what the future of that kitten is. The feeling spreads through me like a sudden fever. Down in the cellar taking off my clothes, I cry so hard my body shakes.

  When I return upstairs, my mother wraps me in my bathrobe and holds me until I can speak.

  “Where’s the kitten?” I ask.

  “Out on the back porch in a box. Your brother will be home soon.”

  Paul will be going to college in the fall. Right now he’s a senior in high school. I can’t decide if I’m going to miss him or not. He’s the brother I know best because he’s been around the longest. The others left home when I was even younger.

  Paul is the brother who taught me to ride my bicycle and the one who spent an entire Saturday with me and not his friends building a real igloo out of snow and ice. He’s the brother who tells me how to be a man.

  He is also the brother who plays tricks on me and sometimes the tricks are cruel. When I get angry, he says I don’t have a sense of humor. He twists my arm behind my back sometimes until I say I’ll do what he wants me to do. He makes promises he doesn’t keep.

  Paul is seventeen. He shaves every day and kisses girls right in front of me like it was noth
ing. He works at Dr. Milk’s part-time and summers.

  I am sitting on the back porch waiting for Paul to come home and talking to the box next to me.

  “Don’t worry, Smoky,” I tell the kitten inside. “I won’t let anything bad happen to you, I don’t care how sick you are. My big brother will take you to Dr. Milk’s and give you shots and medicine and stuff and you’ll get better, you’ll see. My big brother can fix anything.”

  The kitten is awfully quiet. I wish it would make even a pitiful noise.

  We sit in silence. I daydream that I am seventeen. I am big and strong like my brother and I can make Smoky better. I see myself driving to Dr. Milk’s out on Ridge Road, carrying the kitten in its box into the back room (which I have never seen, really, only heard my brothers tell stories about), giving it some medicine, reassuring it . . .

  “Everything will be okay, Smoky, everything will be okay.”

  In the kitchen behind me I hear my brother and mother talking in low voices.

  Dr. Milk is not there when my brother pulls the car into the parking lot. It is after hours. My brother has a key. I am impressed by this.

  “Come on,” Paul says in his take-charge voice, “get that box now. Bring it on in here.”

  He flicks on the light in the waiting room. “You’re coming in back with me,” he commands. “I’ll need your help.”

  “What are you going to do?” I ask. I am holding the box tight against my chest. I feel Smoky moving around inside.

  “What do you think?” he says. “You heard your mother. That kitten is sick, bad sick.”

  “She’s your mother, too.”

  “Well, she happens to be right,” Paul tells me. “With an animal that far gone, you don’t have a choice. It’s got to be put to sleep.”

  I think the tears I jam back into my body are going to kill me. I think if I don’t let them out they will kill me. But I won’t let them out. I won’t let Paul see.

  “You do have a choice” is all I say. I hug the box for dear life and move to the door. Paul moves faster.

  “Come on now,” he says, gently taking hold of my arm, “be a man.”

  “I’m not a man,” I tell him. “I don’t want to be.”

  “You’ve got to do what’s right. That kitten is half dead as it is.”

  “Then it’s half alive, too.”

  He shakes his head. “You always have to one-up me, don’t you?” he says.

  I don’t know what he means, but I do know that no matter what I say he is going to do what he wants to do.

  A few minutes later, we are in the back room. The box is empty. Smoky is inside a big old pretzel can with a hose attached, clawing at the can’s sides as my brother pumps in the gas. He is telling me it is good for me to watch this, it will toughen me up, help me be more of a man. Then he starts to lecture me about different methods of putting animals out of their misery, but all I can hear is the scratching. And then the silence.

  At the supper table that night, I don’t speak. I don’t look at my brother’s face or my father’s or my mother’s. I look at the tree branch outside the kitchen window where the deer once hung. My brother is saying something about taking me to the driving range tomorrow. He will teach me to hit a golf ball.

  I won’t go with him. I don’t want him teaching me anything anymore.

  In the fall he will go off to college. I will be eleven. I will be alone with my parents, alone without my brothers.

  I get up from the table and no one stops me.

  In the living room which is dark I sit for a long time thinking. I think about my kitten. I think about the pretzel can. I think about what it will be like not having any brothers around. I feel alone and small and frightened. And then all of a sudden I don’t feel any of those things. All of a sudden it’s as if Paul has already left and I am on my own and I know some things so clearly that I will never have to ask an older brother to help me figure them out.

  I will never work for Dr. Milk.

  I will not go hunting with my father.

  I will decide for myself what kind of boy I am, what kind of man I will become.

  “When I was asked to write a story based on my childhood, I wasn’t sure how or where to begin. I was surprised that my thoughts kept coming back to a long-forgotten episode involving a kitten I found one summer when I was ten. Slowly, the events and feelings came into sharper focus — and while I can’t swear that every moment of this story really happened, I know that every feeling is true. And in time, I came to understand that the reason for writing this story had less to do with the kitten and more to do with my brothers and myself.

  As I was the youngest, my three brothers were very important in my thinking about who I was and who I would be when I grew up. All my brothers were interested in the arts and at one time or another planned on arts-related careers. As it turned out, I was the only one who actually realized that particular dream.

  But my entire family was instrumental in my becoming a writer. We were a word-loving family. Our house was full of books and games; no dinner conversation was complete without jokes and wordplay. My mother recognized my talent as a writer early on and encouraged me to consider it as a profession. It took me a long time to follow her advice, but when I did, it was like coming home. Writing has always been a natural part of who I am.”

  My daughter Mary doesn’t like for me to tell this story. “It’s too sad,” she says. “It was a sad time,” I say. “I’m very happy now.” “But I want my mommy to be happy when she’s little,” she says. “It has a happy ending,” I say. “It tells why I never ran away from home.”

  “Guess what?” That’s all my nine-year-old sister Lizzie had to say to get me excited.

  “What?”

  “You’ll never guess,” Lizzie said. And I wouldn’t. Lizzie was too smart for me. She’d skipped second grade, the one I was stumbling through. Everyone praised Lizzie. Momma depended on her to help with our two baby sisters. Complete strangers would stop Momma to say how pretty Lizzie was. “Such darling freckles,” they’d say. Lizzie would frown. She didn’t think freckles were darling, but I did. I wanted to be just like Lizzie. Smart, dependable, pretty. Even our brother Sonny thought she was terrific, and Sonny was twelve years old.

  “What?” I asked again. “What? What? Tell me.”

  “We’re going to see a moving picture show. The mothers are going to take us into Shanghai to see The Wizard of Oz.” Lizzie knew all about The Wizard of Oz. She’d read the book.

  We lived in China when I was seven, and I’d never seen a movie. Well, actually, I had seen part of one, but I got scared and began crying so loud that Momma had to take me out before it was half over.

  “You mustn’t yell this time,” Lizzie warned. “You’ll ruin it for everyone.”

  “Okay,” I promised, already thrilled and scared.

  “If it gets too scary for you, you can close your eyes, and I’ll punch you when it’s okay to watch again, all right?”

  I nodded solemnly and promised myself that no matter what happened I would not cry. I knew Lizzie thought I was a crybaby. I was born on Halloween, so she and Sonny often called me “Spook Baby.” They could count on me to burst into tears every time they did. If I called Lizzie “Lizard,” she’d ignore me or just look at me and laugh.

  As excited as I was about going to see The Wizard of Oz, I was frightened by the trip into the city. True, there were no bombs falling, no enemy soldiers standing about with guns and bayonets as there were in other Chinese cities where we’d lived. But Shanghai beyond the safe walls of the American School was crowded with desperate people.

  Outside the school gate, the mothers herded our little group of American children into rickshas to go to the theater. While they did so, Chinese children no bigger than I was crowded around us. These children wore rags for clothes. I could see that their faces and bodies were covered with sores, as they pushed their dirty hands at my face, begging for coins.

  I wished for my D
addy. I was never as frightened when our tall, funny father was with us. But all the fathers were far away. Ours was back home with our Chinese friends in Hwaian, near the worst of the fighting. I knew I was supposed to be happy that God needed Daddy there working with Pastor Lee to help people who were hungry and hurt by the war. But I wasn’t happy; I was jealous of those people. I wanted Daddy to be with us.

  Once the movie began, though, I was swallowed up in its magic. The real world of war and homesickness and fear seemed to disappear. Even I was changed. I was no longer an ordinary-looking seven-year-old crybaby. In my soul, I knew that I looked exactly like Judy Garland.

  True, I missed a lot of the cyclone, most of the flying monkeys, and only got a few deliciously scary glimpses of the Wicked Witch of the West. But Lizzie kept her promise. She poked me when it was safe to watch again, so I didn’t miss too much of the movie, and I only cried after Dorothy was safely home in Kansas.

  The management was selling phonograph albums of the music in the theater lobby. Patty Jean White’s mother bought one. I longed to have one for my own, but the White’s dormitory room was right near ours. Surely Patty Jean would let the rest of us listen. Besides, we’d lost our record player when the soldiers looted our house in Hwaian.

  For the next several days, the seven of us who had seen the movie gathered in the Whites’ room and listened to the record. I loved those songs, especially “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” I longed to go over the rainbow. It sounded more like heaven than the place we sang hymns about every day and twice on Sundays. Besides, when I sang that song, I knew I sounded just like Judy Garland.

  “Let’s play Oz,” Lizzie said one day while we were listening.

  We looked at her in astonishment. “There’s no room,” someone said.

  “Not indoors, silly. Outdoors in the quadrangle.” We got excited. The Shanghai American School buildings surrounded a rectangle of huge green lawn. The quadrangle would make a wonderful Land of Oz.

  “I’ll be Dorothy,” I offered.