6. Parking Lot

My brother and I are in the Arden Hill Hospital parking lot, playing a game in the dark. The game is to run in a circle and touch the taillights of the five cars we have designated. It’s pretty intricate: you have to weave and zig zag and choose from many possible routes in order to reach all the taillights. We call this game “The Course.” As one person runs, the other one counts Mississippis to time them. We tried using the dashboard clock of my father’s Ford LTD for timing, but it only shows minutes, not seconds, so we kept ending up in a tie.

We’re here in the hospital parking because my grandmother, my father’s mother, is inside. She normally lives in New York City, in the Bronx near where my brother and I were born. Her apartment there smells like mothballs and bacon but it has the most comfortable couch I’ve ever sat on and a grandfather clock that makes a deep chime I love. She leaves the clock on all night, and if you sleep over the first night it wakes you up every time but by the second night you sleep right through. Whenever we visit, she gives me a big bundle of comics she saves from the newspapers she gets from “the other side,” Ireland, where she was born and lived until she was in her twenties. The comics aren’t really very funny, they’re mostly “Andy Capp”-like comics about husbands and wives and people sitting in bars talking in words you have to say out loud to yourself to understand, but I like that she saves them for me and I like reading them the way I like the chime her clock makes. They feel like they’re from another world, part of some other tradition I wish I knew more about.

My grandmother was visiting us when she got sick. It was about six weeks ago, on a Saturday. She said she was having chest pains and then she got all clammy and started moaning and my mother and father got her into the car and drove to the hospital. They came back alone; the doctors said she had to stay. My father seemed really sad as he was telling all this to us, but then he looked at me and his face lit up in a big smile. “You know what this reminds me of, tiger?”

I shook my head no.

“When we took you to the hospital that time. Never so scared in my life. You know the doctors told us if we’d been an hour later you might not have made it.”

I nodded. I knew the story.

My brother returns out of breath from his run. “55 seconds,” I say to him.

“Yes,” he says, raising his hands above his head.  “The new record!”

“Only until I get my next try.” I get set up in a three-point stance like one of the runners we saw watching the Olympics last summer. I wait for him to call “Go.”

The way it works these nights we come to the hospital is, my mother and father go in first and check on my grandmother. If  she’s seeming okay, aware of what’s going on around her, they’ll come out and get us and we’ll go in. There’s usually not much for us to do than say hello, let her clutch our hands. She has too many tubes in her to give us a hug. We sit in the big chairs in the room and tell about our days: teachers, sports, it doesn’t matter. It’s hard to tell how much she understands. My parents look so relieved when my brother and I talk, probably because they don’t have to.

My parents have only come out to get us once during the past week. My brother and I have to wait in the car, sometimes for over an hour. So we make up games. We’ve always been good at making up games to play together. When we were younger, the games mostly involved beating each other up. There was the game that we played with the nerf basketball in the hallway, where we had a plastic hoop set up on my brother’s door at the end of the hall but you had to run as fast as you could from the living room, right at the other person, and shoot at the first moment of contact. There was a problem in that game, in that we both usually knocked each other to the floor and nobody could actually see if the ball had gone in the basket, but we still enjoyed playing it.

“Fifty three,” my brother says as I collapse against the car after running my course. This time I cut through the little space between the red car and black one, instead of going around. That’s where I gained the extra seconds.

“You have the new record,” my brother says, disappointment in his voice.

“You should have just lied,” I tell him.

“What do you mean?”

“You should have just said that it took me 56 seconds. How would I have known? Then you’d still have the record.”

He looks at me confused, not sure if I’m kidding or not. “That would be no fun,” he finally says. “It isn’t any fun if you don’t at least try to play right.”

I nod. It’s a good answer. “Why don’t you go again. Maybe you’ll find a way to retake the record.”
My brother takes off. But before he even touches the first car there are flashing lights, a siren. The siren is really loud, like it’s right there next to me. The police car’s headlights are as bright as the siren is loud, and they easily pick up my brother, who freezes for a moment, and then flees for some weeds at the edge of the parking lot.

“Halt!” an amplified voice calls, before the police car even skids to a stop. When the car does stop, a policeman jumps out, leaves his front door open, crouches behind it. I have a good view of all this from where I’m standing. The policeman has his gun drawn, and as he peeks around the car door he points it right at my brother.

“Walk toward the car,” the policeman screams. “Hands up, where I can see them. Walk slowly.”

My brother starts walking. He’s either shivering or crying, I can’t tell.

The cop grabs a flashlight with a long handle from the car and shines it at my brother. He gets up out of his crouch when he sees it’s just a kid approaching the car.

He jumps out from behind the car and starts yelling at my brother. “Who are you? What are you doing? Why are you here?” His tone is harsh, angry. My brother mumbles answers, but I can’t hear what he’s saying.

I want to yell out, run over, but I’m afraid if I do the cop will pull the gun out again. So I sit down on the front seat of my parents car and stay quiet.

I have a moment of panic when I see my brother getting into the police car. He can’t arrest my brother! But then they drive right over to where I am. The police car stops and the cop gets out.

He shines the  flashlight right in my eyes. “Do you know who this is?” he asks, in the same harsh voice he used with my brother.

“Yes,” I say. “His name is Jeffrey. He’s my brother.”

“Where are your parents?”

“Inside.”

“What are they doing inside?”

“They’re with my grandmother. She’s dying.”

It’s the first time any of us have said it, even my parents. But it’s what we all know.

The cop makes a disgusted noise. “If your grandmother is inside dying, then what are you doing out here running around in the parking lot?”

“No, we were only playing a game,” I say. “My parents leave us out here if my grandmother isn’t feeling well, and…”

“I don’t want to hear it.”

The cop lets my brother out of the car. He makes us both get in the back seat of my parent’s car and gives us a lecture on playing in hospital parking lots, how it’s disrespectful along with being dangerous. I want to argue, but I know he won’t listen, or even let me speak. I just want him to leave. Finally he pulls a clipboard from his car and writes something down.

“Now don’t move from this car until your parents come out,” the cop says, and drives away.

My brother and I sit in the dark. I can hear him sniffling, which I don’t blame him for. I’m guessing he feels just like I feel. Like everything is terrifying. Having a gun pointed at you. Policemen who hate you for no reason. Someone you love dying.

“You know what I’d do?” I ask, after a few minutes of silence. “Shoot him with his own gun. Take his gun away from him and shoot him with it right between the eyes.”

My brother makes a noise, halfway between a sniffle and snort.

“And then,” I continue, “I’d shoot him again. In the stomach this time. It bleeds a lot if you shoot someone in the stomach. I heard that in one of Dad’s shows.”

“Yeah,” my brother says, in a choked voice. “And then what I’d do is, I’d get his keys, and I’d run over him with his own car. Run over just his legs so it would hurt more.”

I smile in the dark. “Oh, yeah. That’s excellent. Run him over with his own car.”

5. Monica Sommerlad’s Hair Ribbon

I was in back of the Stanley’s house, snow-saucering down the steep hill with Philip Reich. These were two things I wasn’t supposed to be doing. I wasn’t supposed to play with Philip Reich because a few months before he and his brother Kevin had gotten in trouble for taking a younger girl from around the block named Josie to the cows field and making her take off her pants. Josie was eight, a year younger than Philip and me; Kevin was three years older than us. The story had gotten out, mostly because Philip told everyone about it, and word had filtered up to the parents. Since then most of us had been forbidden to spend time with Philip and Kevin.

Not hanging out with Kevin wasn’t such a big thing, since he was older and I didn’t spend much time with him to begin with, but Philip I’d been on and off friends with ever since we moved to the block. We weren’t best buddies, but he did live right across the street, and sometimes I’d see him out there on his front stoop by himself and it was just convenient to go over and see what he was doing, whether he wanted to throw a football back and forth. He had an amazing throwing arm for a kid, though he’d broken his leg in a car accident with his parents when he was six and he still walked with a little limp, so he wasn’t into Little League and or any other kind of organized sports.

It was a Friday afternoon, a few weeks before Christmas, and I’d been bored in the house after school, nothing on television, no homework to do (I liked doing homework; I was good at it; I kept this to myself) when I heard crunches and swooshes from next door. I went out onto the porch, even though it was freezing, and saw someone, alone, trudging up the hill behind Stanley’s house with one of the plastic saucers we all used for sledding. The hill behind Stanley’s house was steep and rocky; it had the biggest drop-off of any of the houses in that part of the neighborhood, almost straight down into the woods. That was the biggest problem with sledding there, it wasn’t cleared. You had to steer to avoid the trees. Around the middle of last winter, the Stanleys had asked my parents to stop letting me sled there, saying it was just too dangerous. Which we all knew, but it was still some kind of awesome ride.

I sat there watching for a few minutes, as the figure made his way to the top of the hill, and then with a running start went feet-first straight down that hill. He was going so fast, it looked like a blur.

“I’m going to go out for a little while,” I called to my mother, who was downstairs in the basement doing laundry.

“Not too long,” she called back. “Remember that we have to go to the Cub Scouts thing tonight, and I want you to have some dinner before then.”

“Okay,” I said. “I just need some air.”

I knew it was Philip Reich out there sledding. I’d recognized him from the porch. And I knew we weren’t supposed to go behind Stanley’s house. But it had just looked so amazing, seeing Philip fly down the hill like that, like a professional from the Olympics, like something out of a movie.

“Hey,” Philip said, when I showed up with my yellow saucer. Philip’s saucer was cooler than mine, red with white stripes.

“Hey,” I answered.

“It’s icy,” Philip said. “I totally wiped out last time.”

“I saw you. I was watching.”

Philip must have known we were all forbidden to play with him. He never said anything about it on the school bus, though, and he hadn’t even attempted to try to come over my house ever since the thing with Josie had gotten out. Maybe his parents had told him he was forbidden to play with us, too. He’d always had a little touch of that to him, of someone who just figured he was eventually going to be an outsider, and was just waiting for it to kick in.

“You want to give it a try?” Philip asked.

“Absolutely.”

My first time down was terrifying. The path was sheer ice, just like Philip said. I got maybe a third of the way down and abandoned, deliberately rolled off my sled.

“Told you,” Philip said, when I made it back to the top. “It took me, like, four tries before I made it all the way down. I’m cold. I’m going home.”

And he left. Like I said, it was almost as if he wanted to be left out.

I waited until he was out of sight. I wanted to give one last try before I went in. But I didn’t want Philip to see me bailing again.

This second time, I did resist the urge to leap off midway, although that urge was strong. I made it to the bottom, which was what I wanted. But then I kept on going, straight into a tree. I hit full-on and head-first, and then went sprawling through the air and landed on my face.

I may have been out for a few minutes. I was still face down in the snow when I started to come awake. It took me a few seconds to remember what had happened. I felt my head—there was a huge bump up there. My ears were ringing. Everything, the woods, the snow, my house with its lit-up windows, right next door, looked weird to me, like I was seeing it from a distance.

I shook my head. But I still couldn’t make my eyes focus right, and the ringing in my ears wouldn’t go away.

I was afraid. I sat back on the ground, held my head in my hands, waited for this to pass. But it didn’t pass. I started shivering and got up and walked home.

At home, I felt the same way. Like everything was underwater. Like I wasn’t in charge of my body. I started to get a really bad headache, like the one I’d had when I had rheumatic fever and they’d had to rush me to the hospital.

I didn’t let on to my mother. How could I? It was my own fault. I shouldn’t have been over there sledding. I shouldn’t have been playing with Philip Reich. I ate my dinner, hot dog and carrot sticks. I dressed up in my Cub Scouts uniform. In the car ride over to the Fire House, I kept checking my ears to see if there was anything wet coming from them. I’d read somewhere about people bleeding from the ears, after getting hit in the head.

“You’re so quiet,” my mother said in the car. “Are you nervous about the singing?”

“No, I’m okay,” I said.

The Cub Scouts thing was the holiday gathering for all the local troops at the Mombasha Fire House in town. Each troop had to sing a Christmas carol and at the end we all got treat bags with some scout-oriented gifts, like kits for cars you could make out of balsa wood. As I walked in, I saw the den mothers had really outdone themselves decorating the firehouse this year. There were Santa faces taped on the walls, and all the tables had green and red tablecloths, with fake snow arranged in little snow drifts. Christmas carols played from the stereo system, loud and buzzy, and there was a big, tinselly Christmas tree in the corner, blinking white and blue lights.

Walking felt like walking uphill. It was all I could do to get over to my troop, 246. My head was throbbing. Under my Cub Scout hat, it was like I could feel the bump getting bigger and bigger. I smiled hello to everyone and found a chair and closed my eyes.

“Are you okay?” my den mother asked, when she noticed me sitting there by myself not speaking to anyone.

I was usually a pretty talkative kid.

I could barely hear her. I nodded my head yes as enthusiastically as I could, so she wouldn’t think anything was wrong.

I couldn’t remember ever being so scared in my life, not even during the time I was at the hospital.

The entertainment began. Troop 186 sang “Holly Jolly Christmas.” Troop 210 sang “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” Then one of the girl’s troops came up to sing. The holiday gathering was mixed, for both the Cub Scouts and the Brownies. It was the only time of year we did that.

They started singing “Silent Night.” I noticed one of the Brownies was a girl from my class, Monica Sommerlad. I’d never paid any attention to her. She wasn’t a smart girl, wasn’t one of the dummies. She was just one of the people I saw every day.

Tonight, she had a green ribbon in her blonde hair. I couldn’t take my eyes off that ribbon. It seemed like the most beautiful thing in the world to me. Monica seemed like the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. Not in a boyfriend/girlfriend way, it wasn’t like that. She was just…beautiful, in a way that made me want to cry and laugh at the same time.

I looked around the room. I loved this, all these decorations, these songs. Having my troop mates, my friends, all around me. I noticed Philip Reich, sitting at the end of the table, and I thought: what was going on with him, it would pass. We would be allowed to play with him again. He’d be okay in time.

Our time to sing came. My mouth wasn’t working any better than my legs, and my hearing was still going in and out and my head was still aching but when I came to these lines I sang them loud, looking for Monica in the crowd, finding her, and finding myself once again overwhelmed by the sight of that green ribbon in her hair:

Later on, we’ll conspire
As we sit, by the fire
To face unafraid, the world we made
Walking in the winter wonderland…

I sang these lines again later, over and over to myself as I was falling asleep. I could see it: sitting by the fire, talking, planning, unafraid. Not me and Monica, necessarily, but maybe me and my Mom and Dad, or me and a friend. Or maybe me and Monica.

It made me feel so good, thinking of that image. And I told myself, if I woke up the next morning, that was the way it was going to be, forever.

4. Flea Market

The Maybrook Flea Market was held on the second Sunday every month at the Maybrook Drive-In. Anyone who wanted to could just come in and rent a drive-in space and sell stuff from the backs of their cars. There were some dealers selling antiques or new clothes, but it was mostly people clearing out their attics or garages and putting out as much of it as would fit into their cars. It was the next step to the junkyard, and people knew it, and priced their things accordingly.

We went almost every time they had the Flea Market, and never didn’t buy something. Often, we’d end up with our own car nearly full. My father and I would go through all the books: my father bought mysteries, and I science fiction. We had different shopping styles. I could spend an hour going through a few boxes, looking at each title, trying to decide which two or three I wanted to spend my dime each on. My father would quickly scan the titles, establish the box held mostly mysteries, and make an offer on the whole thing. If someone resisted, or seemed unwilling to bargain, he’d just walk away. I would have been too worried about missing out on a treasure, like the Theodore Sturgeon I needed to complete my collection, to ever do anything like that.

My father also liked to buy electronics: old TV sets, radios, record players. “We could use an extra record player in the basement,” he’d say, or “This TV, we could take when we go camping.” Sometimes these electronics worked, but mostly they didn’t. It didn’t matter: my father never spent more than a dollar or two for them. Buying a working television for a dollar was something he couldn’t pass up, even if he had to go through a lot of broken ones to get there.

My mother liked antiques. Not real antiques: we couldn’t afford real antiques. Old-looking things: a rusty watering spout handle one time, some metal lattice work another. A beat-up bureau someone had painted dark-green even inside the drawers. Whatever my mother bought, there were always paint chips to be cleaned up from the backseat that afternoon.

My brother bought stuffed animals. I think this made my father a little uncomfortable, but it wasn’t like my brother went home and played with the stuffed animals or slept with them in his bed or anything. I think he just wanted something to collect, the same way the rest of us had.

 It was just a matter of time before my mother and father got the idea that we should try selling at Maybrook. I think it was my father who first said it aloud. “Next time, let’s load up the car and sell some of our own stuff.”

We had two weeks to get ready. We cleared out a space in the garage for a pile of all the stuff we wanted to get rid of. I got some of my old games, or ones that were missing pieces. My father put in some of the electronics he’d bought for a dollar. “Someone could get these to work,” he said. “All you need is a soldering iron.” My mother collected up all her pre-pregnancy clothes that she didn’t fit into anymore, some old suitcases, a few “make your own crafts” Christmas gifts my father had given her that she’d never opened. My mother really wasn’t all that interested in making crafts. My brother sold mostly books, which killed my father and me—we would never part with our books—but most of the books he wanted to sell were babyish ones that had been passed down to him from me.

We got there early, arranged our stuff on a blanket and in the trunk of the car just like we’d seen everyone else do. It was a different experience having to stand in one place, having to really look at the people walking around. They were a lot scarier, rougher, kind of hillybilly-ish—nothing like the people around our block. I hadn’t really noticed this before.

They looked hard at our stuff. We had no lack of people looking. But no one was interested in buying. “That TV work?” someone asked my father.

“Not at the moment,” he answered. The guy drifted away before my father could explain about the soldering iron.

We made a few sales: a few pieces of my mother’s clothing, a couple of my brother’s books. But nothing like the big bucks we’d been expecting. After three hours we were bored and disappointed, hot from the sun. “Maybe we should just go home,” my father said.

“Let’s take a quick look around first,” my mother said. “Just pack up the car and lock it.”

“I’m not sure we even have to lock it,” my father said.

It was one of our best days at Maybrook. I didn’t find the Theodore Sturgeon I was looking for, but I found another one I’d never even heard of before. My brother found a rabbit stuffed animal—rabbits were his favorite stuffed animal, which again was a little strange, since he had no interest in real rabbits—and my father came back with a portable eight-track player, white with black sides, that he swore the guy he’d bought it from had tested out for him.

My mother, though, she got the best thing. She found an old sewing machine, one with old-style pedals on the bottom. She eventually put it out in the backyard, made it the centerpiece of a small garden. A couple of years of rain and snow pretty much destroyed it, but for that couple of years, it looked great.

“I have no idea how we’re going to fit that in the car,” my father said when my mother made him drive around to pick up the sewing machine. But he was smiling.

Nobody wanted our junk. But we still wanted theirs.

3. Hospital

I was in the hospital for two months during first grade, October and November. I had rheumatic fever, but of course my parents didn’t know that as they were driving me to emergency room. They took me because I was complaining of the worst headache I’d ever had in my life. I think I must have been running a high fever as well, because my image of it seems steamy, peeling at the edges. Me, in the back seat, crying, twisting my body around because I thought there would be some position I could find that would stop the pain. My mother, in the back seat with me, with a wet cloth she kept trying to hold to my head but that I kept wriggling away from. My father, up front, staring ahead as he drove and, I think, crying himself. When we got to the hospital I remember not wanting to get out of the car, because in their rush to get me out of the house my parents hadn’t let me change out of my pajamas, and I felt embarrassed.

My parents used to say the doctors told them that if they hadn’t gotten me to the emergency room right then, if it had been just a half hour more, I might have had permanent brain damage or even died. But don’t people always say things like that, if you survive an emergency room visit?

I’m sure there were nurses who went out of their way to spend time with me. I was an outgoing six-year, and even if the illness had taken a lot of that energy out of me, I was still six years old and alone in the hospital. I’m sure my doctor, Dr. Van Zandt, a short, abrupt man who wore a cap with fishing lures attached to it in the office when he met with patients, must have realized how strange and intimidating it was to a six-year-old to be so sick and tried to make me laugh, gave me a tongue depressor or two to keep as souvenirs. I’m sure my father, when he visited on nights and weekends, must have brought books and toys, because buying things was his usual response to any stressful situation. I’m sure when I finally came home, my parents must have made me a treat dinner and let me do anything I wanted for a few weeks, so grateful were they to have me home and back to my usual self. And I’m sure I must have felt an enormous dread the first day in December I went back to school after missing so much, having to face Mrs. Miller who, in even the one month I’d spent with her, I’d come to know as a mean and demanding teacher.

I don’t remember any of this. What I do remember is the Dennis the Menace comic books in the children’s room. I wasn’t really reading yet, just a few words here and there, but I must have gotten someone to read them to me so many times that I could infer the words from the pictures. Probably my mother. She told me she visited every day, although again I have no memory of that either.

Maybe they made such an impression because I’d never seen comic books before. But I remember spending hours with them, not caring how many times I’d read them before, losing myself in whatever scheme Dennis was trying to pull this time, what Mr. Wilson was saying about how badly the Mitchells were raising their child. The simple explanations of complex things that Dennis gave Joey, which even at six I realized were the wrong explanations, the tree house where Dennis spent his time. I have no memory of doctors, nurses, blood tests, heart monitors, hospital food, plastic sheets, but these things are still clear to me. 

The idea to make the scrapbooks came from one of the comic books itself. The story had something to do with Dennis going to visit a sick friend in the hospital, and at the end there was a “Hey, kids” type of page where the Dennis the Menace writer, Hank Ketchum, suggested that a good way to help out sick kids was to cut Dennis the Menace comics out of the daily paper, glue them on pieces of paper, string the pages together into a book, and then donate the book to your local hospital. 

It probably wouldn’t have made much of an impression if I hadn’t known there was a huge pile of newspapers in one of the hospital storage rooms, waiting to get thrown away. I’d noticed it one day when they were wheeling me down there for one test or another. 

I asked a nurse if I could go down and look at them. Who was going to say no to a six year old with rheumatic fever? And sure enough, our local paper, the Times Herald, carried the big one-panel Dennis the Menaces every weekday. 

Construction paper, scissors, glue, string appeared: again, probably my mother. Every morning I went down to the storage room, collected up another 10 or 15 pages with comics on them and brought them up to the children’s room. There, I cut out the Dennis the Menace panels and pasted them onto the paper and punched holes and strung the pages together with twine. 

I got very good at it. I could cut on an exact line, and use just enough glue so the paper didn’t bubble up. I learned to tie a knot in the string, and learned the letters so I could write “Dennis the Menace” on the title page.

I’m sure the nurses loved the first book I made. I’m sure they patted my head and said how thoughtful it was to try to make some sick child happy and behind my back commented on how poignant it was for me to be making these books to make sick children happy when I was a sick child myself. I’m sure by the fifth or sixth book they were a less enthusiastic, and by the tenth were starting to consider the scrapbooks eyesores that were taking up valuable shelf space in the children’s room. I definitely made at least ten of them. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was closer to twenty, because I know I worked on them every day.

Again, I have no memory of the reaction to the scrapbooks. I remember creating them. I remember leaving them in the children’s room. And I remember for years afterward, whenever we passed the hospital on the way to our always anxious visits to Van Zandt’s office for my checkups, I’d think of them, and wonder if they were still there, cheering up some other sick kid. I liked to believe they were.