My brother watches the water level in the giant hole next door, waiting for the hole to dry up so he can use it for a bunker. He would like to roof it over, with sticks and old planks, but he knows this isn’t possible because the hole is too big and also he wouldn’t be allowed. Instead he plans to dig a tunnel down there, into the side of the hole, and to get up and down to it by a rope ladder. He has no rope ladder, but he says he’ll make one, if he can get some rope.
He and the other boys run around in the mud; large extra feet of clay stick to the soles of their boots, leaving tracks like monsters. They crouch behind the trees in the old orchard, sniping at one another, shouting:
“You’re dead!”
“I am not!”
“You’re dead!”
At other times they crowd into my brother’s room, lying on their stomachs on his bed or on the floor, reading his huge piles of comic books. I sometimes do this too, wallowing among the pages of colored paper, surrounded by the fuggy scent of boys. Boys don’t smell the same as girls. They have a pungent, leathery, underneath smell, like old rope, like damp dogs. We keep the door closed because my mother doesn’t approve of comics. The reading of comics is done in reverential silence, with now and then a few monosyllables of trade.
Comic books are what my brother is collecting now. He’s always collected something. Once it was milk bottle tops, from dozens of dairies; he carried sheafs of them around in his pockets, held together with rubber bands, and stood them up against walls and threw other milk bottle tops at them to win more. Then it was pop bottle tops, then cigarette cards, then sightings of license plates from different provinces and states. There is no way of winning comic books. Instead you trade them, one good one for three or four of lesser value.
At school we make Easter eggs out of construction paper, pink and purple and blue, and stick them onto the windows. After that it’s tulips, and soon there are real tulips. It seems to be a rule that the paper things always appear before the real ones.
Grace produces a long skipping rope, and she and Carol teach me how to turn it. As we turn, we chant, in monotonous minor-key voices:
Grace puts one hand on her head, the other on her hip, and wiggles her bum. She does this with perfect decorum; she’s wearing her pleated skirt with the straps over the shoulders. I know Salome is supposed to be more like the movie stars in our paper doll books. I think of gauzy skirts, high heels with stars on the toes, hats covered with fruit and feathers, lifted eyebrows, pencil-thin; gaiety and excess. But Grace in her pleats and woolen straps can wipe out all that.
Our other game is ball. We play it against the side wall of Carol’s house. We throw our rubber balls up against the wall and catch them as they come down, clapping and twirling in time to the chant: Ordinary, moving, laughing, talking, one hand, the other hand, one foot, the other foot, clap front, clap back, back and front, front and back, tweedle, twydle, curtsy, salute, and roundabout. For roundabout you throw the ball and twirl all the way around before catching it. This is the hardest thing, harder even than the left hand.
The sun lasts longer and longer and goes down golden-red. The willow trees drop yellow catkins over the bridge; the maple keys fall twirling to the sidewalks and we split the sticky seed part and pinch the keys onto our noses. The air is warm, humid, like invisible mist. We wear cotton dresses to school, and cardigans, which we take off walking home. The old trees in the orchard are in flower, white and pink; we climb up into them, breathing in their hand lotion smells, or we sit in the grass making chains of dandelions. We unbraid Grace’s hair, which falls down her back in coarse brown ripples, and wind the chains around her head like a crown. “You’re a princess,” says Carol, stroking the hair. I take a picture of Grace and stick it into my photo album. There she sits, smiling primly, festooned with blossoms. The field across from Carol’s house is sprouting new houses, and in the evenings groups of children, boys and girls alike, clamber about inside them, in the fresh wood smell of shavings, walking through walls that don’t yet exist, climbing ladders where there will soon be stairs. This is forbidden. Carol won’t climb to the higher floors because she’s afraid. Grace won’t climb either, but not because of fear: she doesn’t want anybody, any boy, to see her underpants. No girl can wear slacks to school, but Grace never wears them at any time. So the two of them stay on the ground floor while I climb, up and along the beams with no ceiling covering them, up again to the attic. I sit on the top floor where there is no floor, among the rafters in this house of air, basking in the red-gold sunset, looking down. I don’t think about falling. I am not yet afraid of heights.
One day someone appears in the schoolyard with a bag of marbles, and the next day everyone has them. The boys desert the boys’ playground and throng into the common playground in front of the BOYS and GIRLS doors; they need to come to this side of the playground, because marbles have to be played on a smooth surface and the boys’ yard is all cinders.
For marbles you’re either the person setting up the target or the person shooting. To shoot you kneel down, sight, and roll your marble at the target marble like a bowling ball. If you hit it you keep it, and your own marble too. If you miss, you lose your marble. If you’re setting up, you sit on the cement with your legs spread open and put a marble on a crack in front of you. It can be an ordinary marble, but these don’t get many shooters, unless you offer two for one. Usually the targets are more valuable: cat’s eyes, clear glass with a bloom of colored petals in the center, red or yellow or green or blue; puries, flawless like colored water or sapphires or rubies; waterbabies, with undersea filaments of color suspended in them; metal bowlies; aggies, like marbles only bigger. These exotics are passed from winner to winner. It’s cheating to buy them; they have to be won.
Those with target marbles call out the names of their wares: purie, purie, bowlie, bowlie, the two-syllable words drawn out into a singsong, the voice descending, the way you call dogs, or children when they’re lost. These cries are mournful, although they aren’t meant to be. I sit that way myself, the cold marbles rolling in between my legs, gath ering in my outspread skirt, calling out cat’s eye, cat’s eye, in a regretful tone, feeling nothing but avarice and a pleasurable terror. The cat’s eyes are my favorites. If I win a new one I wait until I’m by myself, then take it out and examine it, turning it over and over in the light. The cat’s eyes really are like eyes, but not the eyes of cats. They’re the eyes of something that isn’t known but exists anyway; like the green eye of the radio; like the eyes of aliens from a distant planet. My favorite one is blue. I put it into my red plastic purse to keep it safe. I risk my other cat’s eyes to be shot at, but not this one. I don’t collect many marbles because I’m not a very good shot. My brother is deadly. He takes five common marbles to school with him in a blue Crown Royal Whisky bag and comes back with the bag and his pockets bulging. He keeps his winnings in screw-top Crown preserving jars, donated by my mother, which he lines up on his desk. He never talks about his skill though. He just lines up the jars. One Saturday afternoon he puts all his best marbles—his puries, his waterbabies and cat’s eyes, his gems and wonders—into a single jar. He takes it down into the ravine somewhere, in under the wooden bridge, and buries it. Then he makes an elaborate treasure map of where it’s buried, puts it in another jar, and buries that one too. He tells me he’s done these things but he doesn’t say why, or where the jars are buried.