calling on your sympathy
We’re stuck inside
on such a lovely day
Please let us out
so we can, as we’re meant to be,
Be free to roam
the world and free to play.
Then, louder, Edith proclaimed, “Open the door and out come the people!” She opened the thumbdoors. Rushing out of the little church came eight or nine Wood Elves, magical folk who sometimes let her see them. Today the minute figures scurried around, and they began loading two little boats, about the size and shape of walnut shells, that sat in a sparkling stream she suddenly spotted in the glade beneath her face.
All the tiny elves, no taller than Edith’s fingernails, were dressed in old-fashioned clothes of velvety brown and gossamer green. A father elf and his little girl were taking leave of the others; the girl was helped by her father into the first of the boats. He gave her a paddle the size of a chicken’s pin feather. The second boat was tethered to the first and the father now finished securing the sacks and boxes with which it was filled. Perhaps those contained their food and gear for the journey. The little girl jumped out of the boat again and ran up the bank to hug a round, comfortable-looking Granny elf, who wiped away tears with a cobweb hanky. They were so small that Edith had to have her nose right in the grass to see them.
So Marcus’s wailing startled Edith, and at once the Wood Elves and their gear vanished without a trace. Kitt was looming over her, tall and barefoot. Her pregnant belly stretched her turquoise Mexican skirt so it looked like a pumpkin was underneath it. Sobbing and flailing, Marcus hung askew from his mother’s pincer-like grip on his right shoulder. Twin reflections of the sinking sun shone in her round spectacles.
Kitt was in the state of mind she referred to, when in good spirits, as “high dudgeon.” She addressed Edith. “Since it appears that you plan to spend the rest of your life posed on this rock like the girl on the White Rock soda bottle,”—here she gave the dangling Marcus a shake in the rock’s direction—“kindly be so good as to take this horrid changeling before I am forced to beat him to a pulp.”
It was so unfair. Edith was lying on the grass: how could she look like the White Rock girl? And she hated hearing “beat him to a pulp,” which was one of Kitt’s favorite phrases. It conjured up mental images that made her stomach flop over in her belly. Instead of thinking about it, she imagined she was wrapped in an invisible shield like the one in the television ad for Colgate toothpaste. It was a clear barrier that stopped germs and decay from rotting your teeth. In the advertisement, various objects thrown at the people behind the shield bounced back without hurting them.
Kitt knew she sounded as if she were performing an opera, but there was no help for it. After his nap, Marcus had cried because she put the wrong (from his viewpoint) pants on him. This had driven Kitt, who had passionate views on her children’s dress, to fury. So now he wasn’t wearing pants at all, just his damp naptime diaper. He still wet the bed, despite the deafening alarm they’d put under his sheet that rand that woke everyone up in the house when he peed at night. To make matters worse, this afternoon he had squirmed out of Kitt’s grip and bolted for the stairs, which, as he full well knew, he was not allowed to climb without supervision. To keep him from falling, she’d grabbed him by his clambering bare foot and yanked him down the stairs. She’d heard his hard little skull thwonk twice on the steps. Why didn’t he listen to her?
Edith knew that a “high dudgeon,” when her mother spoke theatrically, with odd words no one else used, was usually followed by a meltdown. Kitt would scream and curse and wail that she wished she were dead, wished she had never been born, never gotten married, had never had children. This tirade would be punctuated by her walloping anyone nearby, but mostly herself. Now she swung Marcus, no lightweight, down to Edith with his arms and legs churning, his face snotty.
Edith sat up and smoothed her checkered dress over her stone-dimpled legs. She knew not to look at Kitt when she was mad, so she lowered her eyelids halfway, clenched her teeth together, and hunched her shoulders slightly toward her ears, as she reached up for her little brother and took him under his arms.
She didn’t really feel like seeing his slobbery cryface, so she put him on her lap on his still-diapered bottom. She held him with his back against her chest and curled herself over him like an oyster shell over a pearl. No, she thought, Marcus is more like a slimy oyster than like a pearl.Softly she started to sing the lullabies she’d heard Kitt sing to her all her life at bedtime—Brahms’s Lullaby, “All the Pretty Little Horses,”“Good Night, Irene,” and a pretty Russian one about a little birch tree sleeping in a meadow.
“Na polye beryozhaya stoyala . . .”
"наполеберйожаястояла
наполеберёжаязасыпала. . ."
Marcus’s breath got softer, less ragged. Without needing to look, Edith could feel that Kitt and her stormy rage had gone back inside.
Sometimes at night in bed, if she glazed over her eyes and made the ordinary world get thin like a photograph, and then breathed softly to create a dizzy feeling beneath her breastbone, she was able to float effortlessly off her bed and fly all around her room and in and out the windows. She liked to fly this way when everyone, all the people, birds, and animals, was asleep. She’d never tried to fly outside, unless she counted the time the tornado took her, and had never tried to with Marcus in her arms, but just now she really wanted to. So she pressed her nose and lips softly but firmly into the tender, tangy-with-baby-sweat back of Marcus’s neck. He had stopped sobbing and was merely snuffling. She began to hum softly so that the sound made an ever-so-slight buzz in her nose and in his neck. She could feel her bones and her brother’s bones begin to resonate together. The tune she hummed was a song she had heard on a Mahalia Jackson record of Kitt's:
When I die
Hallelujah bye and bye
I’ll fly away.
Edith didn’t think that dying was required for flying away. You just half-closed and unfocused your eyes and hummed. Soon shapes began to dissolve in the air, and she and Marcus still looked the same but they were as weightless and translucent as the puffballs on dandelion stalks that she liked to blow away after she made a wish. She and Marcus lifted into the air light as bubbles. They floated gently up from the Crying Rock, up above the big ash tree where her swing was, and soon they were high up among the spinning stars of the young summer evening.
“Star bright, star light, first star I see tonight, I wish I may, I wish I might have the wish I wish tonight,” she said under her breath. Edith was tempted to make a wish to be turned into a fairy, so that she could fly whenever she wanted to, and so she could go live in fairyland, which was located, she believed, near Neverland, beyond the sea, first star to the right and straight on till morning. But just before she flew out over the sea toward Neverland, she started to feel scared. She started to worry that Kitt and Arthur would be terribly sad— heartbroken—if she didn’t come back. The picture in her mind of their sad faces was too painful to bear. So instead of asking to be a fairy, she wished for a pony again and wheeled away from the sparkling stars in the now black sky. Holding Marcus securely in her arms, she swept them down through the cool evening air, following a lonely raven looking for its nighttime roost, toward the farmhouse. The gray cedar-shingled roof looked the same as always, but it was somehow as perfectly transparent as a soap bubble or an invisible shield, and she was able to look right down into the kitchen. Kitt was stretched out on the old brown couch by the pantry, lying with her head on Uncle Edwin’s lap, her clasped hands holding her drink on her bosom. She looked only a little bit sad. She might not have realized yet that her children had flown away. Arthur was playing his fiddle and singing “Kevin Barry gave his young life in the cause of liberty” in his clear baritone voice. His Chesterfield cigarette was propped at the edge of the table, a long ash on its end. The table’s enamel edge had many scorch marks