she really, really hated to lose. She could feel that hatred in every part of her body, burning, swelling, and prickling inside her, as if she were a hot-air balloon about to burst or a torrent of lava hurtling down the side of a volcano. She couldn’t stop the surge of bile, thatlfelt as if it would drown her.
Standing behind her, Arthur leaned over her, smelling revoltingly of sweat, tobacco, and garlic. He popped a cheese ball into her wide-open howling mouth. Chesterfield still between his lips, he said, “Can that crap or I’ll give you something to cry about.” For Arthur believed that when feelings get too big to ignore, you either have a stiff drink, eat something rich and spicy, bang a girl, or best of all start an argument, preferably a political argument. Edith didn’t know any of these tricks and failed to see the cheese ball in the helpful light in which he offered it. She spit it out, spattering bits of cheese on her uncle and the checkerboard, and she yelled, “I hate you. I wish you were dead!” sounding more like her mother than Arthur wanted to notice.
As if summoned, Kitt cracked open her study door, stuck out her head, and pronounced in her most acid voice, “A deaf man couldn’t work with all this racket and carrying on. I can’t bear listening to it another minute. Go sit on the Crying Rock until you’re ready to be human.” She withdrew, with overtones of Schubert in the background, and slammed the door.
Edwin and Arthur both looked at Edith and, in unison, twinlike, they pointed to the door.
Just like Tweedledum and Tweedledee, she thought furiously as she exited, slamming the screen door behind her so hard it rebounded several times like a drum roll.
Whenever Edith cried for no good reason—and as far as she knew there were no good reasons—she was sent out to sit on the Crying Rock until she was prepared to act like a civilized, pleasant, and inobtrusive child. The Crying Rock was an ordinary piece of New England granite left behind by the Ice Age. It was more or less the size of her grandfather’s’s old sheepdog, Miss Hazel, when she was curled up to sleep with her nose tucked under her tail. The rough oblong boulder was covered with a delicate tracery of gray-green lichen and had a few scattered fingertips of soft deep-green moss sprinkled here and there. Recently Edith had also been expected to mind Marcus, when he was sent to the Rock to calm down. Arthur said that he and his brothers used to sit on it too, when they cried when they were boys growing up in this house, though it was hard for Edith to imagine them crying about anything. If anything, her grandparents had even less use for crying children than her parents did. Whingeing, Granny called it.
She felt like running away but, obediently, she sat down. At first her face was hot and red and her nose was running. She felt as if she might throw up and her heart was pounding so hard she could hear it. Her fists were hard, white-knuckled little balls. Her chest was tight and her breathing ragged.
After a while her snuffling faded and her breath evened out. Shutting out any more thoughts about checkers, she minutely examined the tussock of sword grass near her feet. She looked for the perfect flat-bladed stalk that she could hold lengthwise between her thumbs that would, if she blew in just the right spot, produce a piercing whistle. Uncle Edwin had shown her how to do this, and although she had tried again and again, she had yet to make a sound. Across the yard, through the screen door of the kitchen, she heard laughter, the tinkle of ice in the highball glasses, Uncle Edwin and Arthur tuning up their guitar and fiddle. Then they launched into a rousing chorus of “Los Cuatro Generales.” Arthur had learned that song when he’d gone to fight the Fascists in Spain a long time ago, when he was a teenager, before Edith was born. Edith knew how to make the drinks they were all having now, and had been having since Marcus went down for his nap. A jigger of Scotch on ice cubes made Scotch on the rocks; if you used Irish whiskey and lemon juice and sugar, that made a whiskey sour. Her favorite, which Kitt would usually let her sip, was the hot toddy—like a whiskey sour but with hot tea and more sugar. Kitt liked hot toddies when she needed to go to bed in the middle of the day with a headache or a cold or just because being pregnant again made her always tired.
It was Arthur and her uncle who made her cry, but it was Kitt who banished her to the Crying Rock. Her father and uncle got mad, like she got mad and Marcus got mad. They yelled and sometimes they hit. Their faces got red and scary. But when her mother got mad, her fury felt cold and terrifying, like a blizzard. It seemed as if she wanted to make Edith disappear. Forever. Kitt sometimes screamed that she wished she herself had never been born. And Kitt hit herself, slapped her own face, even harder than she hit Edith.
The grownups’ voices grew louder and brighter, singing and laughing, but Edith paid them no more and perhaps less attention than she paid to the trilling of late-afternoon birdsong in the treetops. She was wondering where, if they were to show up today and ask her for help, she could build a snug little home for the Borrowers. She had been reading the book about the tiny family that lived under the grandfather clock and furnished their home with items they borrowed from the humans to her mother at bedtime. The Borrowers seemed to like to be on the inside of houses. But perhaps she could persuade them to try a cozy woodland burrow like Mole’s home in Wind in the Willows. Or maybe like Rabbit’s hole in Winnie-the-Pooh—where tubby Winnie got stuck for days after having too much honey for his tea. Winnie-the-Poohwas one of Kitt’s favorite books, and as soon as Edith was old enough to be read to, her mother had read it to her so often that Edith had learned it all by heart by the time she was four and a half, before she really knew how to read. Kitt and Arthur had been surprised and pleased when she “read” them the story about falling into the Heffalump trap. They never suspected she had memorized the whole story. Now, of course, she really could read, although she’d only just finished first grade. In school she had pretended that, like most of the other children, she was just learning how. After she’d polished off the boring Dick and Jane and Spot story, she’d usually sneak one of her own books out of her bookbag during “quiet reading.” She was afraid she would get in trouble if her teacher saw that she was reading the wrong book.
The big stump of an old ash tree by the barn would be perfect for the Borrowers. Its thick roots had lots of crevices and nooks. If she furnished it nicely with things she stole from the house . . . and she began to review the contents of the kitchen in her mind. Matchboxes would make nice beds, with Kleenex for covers. Tin cans for tables. Maybe caps from whiskey bottles for chairs.
Her musings about the Borrowers were interrupted when she heard Uncle Edwin start to play the guitar chords for “What Shall We Do with the Drunken Sailor?” That meant Arthur had gone to get Marcus up from his nap. “Drunken Sailor” was Marcus’s dancing song. Really it was more of a lurching and swaying song, since not-yet-three-year-old Marcus was none too steady on his feet, even when they were both on the ground, and he didn’t know how to hop, skip, or twirl as Edith could. Edith’s dancing song was “Shebeg Shemore”—an Irish song that Arthur said was about two fairy armies having a battle, though he didn’t know any words for it. And Edwin said if there were words, they’d be in Gaelic and anyway he thought the song was really about butterflies. When Arthur played her song on his fiddle, she put on her pink tutu and the ballet slippers that Kitt bought her last spring after they went to a matinee of the New York City Ballet. She twirled on her toes with her arms gracefully held over her head, pretending that she was the tiny ballerina inside her Russian grandmother’s precious porcelain egg. Baba had brought the fragile handpainted egg all the way from her childhood home in Saint Petersburg. (Whenever that city was mentioned, Arthur said it was properly called Leningrad.)
Although she’d finished crying, Edith didn’t feel a bit like dancing. Sliding off the rock onto the grass, she laced her fingers together so that her pointers made a steeple. Softly she intoned, “Here is the church and here is the steeple.” The disappointingly unmusical blade of grass was still between the church doors of her thumbs. She softened her breath and held her thumbs close to her lips so that her gentle blowing warmed and tickled the people inside. She was lying on the grass by the Crying Rock on her stomach now, propped up on her elbows and not minding that her blue-checked dress got pulled up and that her bottom under her underpants felt pink and pebbled from sitting on the granite for such a long time. She whispered to the little people inside the church of her palms and heard them singing softly a let-us-out song with a tune like “Danny Boy” that Kitt had made up for her when she taught her the finger play. Kitt could make up a poem without trying