ON THE EVENING of the day my father died, I was in my bedroom on the second floor swinging a red leather dog leash around my head, trying to graze the overhead light with the brass clip. This was a forbidden pastime for me, and I had a jagged red scar on my shoulder to prove it, but there I was, moth to the flame, at it again. This was how my brother found me when he threw the door open.
“Get out!”
Will just stood there, all quiet and serious, like someone had drained the kid out of him.
“Okay, what?” I said, dropping my weapon.
“Daddy’s dead.”
“Oh, is that all,” I fake-laughed.
We stood there, eyeballing each other. Then he spun around and started walking back down the hall. I followed him, silently, to the stairs, and down to the landing, where we paused to listen. There was a murmur of deep voices, but none that I knew. I could just see into the living room below, but all I caught was the back end of Obadiah, our basset hound, his tail clamped hard between his quivering hind legs.
I followed Will down the rest of the stairs, my hand dragging squeakily on the waxed banister, my nightgown catching under my bare feet. Our mother was perched on a chair near the empty fireplace. She didn’t see us, even though we were practically in front of her. Her face was composed, but it was very red. I knew that look; it was her version of crying. On either side of her stood two tall policemen in dark blue uniforms. Obadiah was sitting at our mother’s feet, staring up at her, registering far more readable emotion in his soupy eyes and drooping expression than his mistress. Will and I just stood there, facing them.
Something about everyone’s body language told us to keep our distance. No one said anything to us. No one explained why there were a couple of DC cops standing with their hats in their hands in the room we used for company and for Christmas. The only reason we were down there was because my brother had overheard my mother get the phone call.
When Will didn’t turn and pinch me and say See? in a bratty way that would have validated my stubborn mistrust, I began to think our father might really be dead after all.
I don’t remember how I got back upstairs, or into bed, but that night I dreamt I was standing next to a boxing ring. Brutus and Popeye were the contestants, and Brutus was really letting Popeye have it—fists were flying, hooks and jabs and uppercuts and below-the-belt punches and everything else they did in fights in the cartoons. Finally a right hook sent Popeye to the floor in a crumpled heap. Clearly, there wasn’t any spinach around. The referee counted it out, and Brutus was declared the winner. Popeye struggled to his feet and staggered over to where I was standing by the ropes. On the way, he morphed into my father. Swaying before me, he said, “I’m all right, Wendy, really I am,” over and over. His eyes were two crosses, and that’s how I knew, on my six-year-old terms, he was dead.
In the morning the policemen were gone, and our mother was nowhere to be found. With minimal conversation, Henrietta got us up, and my brother and I went to school as if nothing was wrong. I was dying for some kind of recognition. Something momentous had happened to me and, unbelievably, nobody wanted to notice.
By third period I couldn’t stand it any longer. I raised my hand. Miss Clark ignored me. I waved and wiggled and flapped my arm until she had no choice but to acknowledge me.
“Yes?” she said, looking at me like I was a scary thing in the road she had to go around. The children twittered around me in the hopes of a comeuppance.
I stood up. “My father died last night,” I announced.
My classmates sniggered and looked at me like I was telling the mother of all attention-getting fibs.
Miss Clark called for silence and then, with excruciating kindness, said, “We know, dear. Now, please sit down.”
That shut everyone up. Not only was the homeroom teacher wigged out, but also “death” was an abstract notion. Especially the death of a father. In fairy tales the mother was the one who always got killed: Bambi’s mother, Cinderella’s and Snow White’s. (The Lion King was eons away.)
On the playground later, a boy I had a crush on asked me how it had happened. I had no idea, but, acutely aware of my nascent celebrity, I told him my father was brutally murdered by a man with a black beard.
I don’t remember anything after that, even though I am able to recall all of Anne Francis’s outfits in Honey West and the exact pattern of moles on the back of Ward Tattenall’s head from when I sat behind him in third grade. Will and I were not allowed to go to the funeral, and nobody talked about what had happened. It was like the daddy slate had been wiped clean. We had hardly known him when he was alive, he was such a remote parent, but you’d think in death he’d at least be talked about.
Up until my inadvertent catapult to fame, I had been a quiet, well-behaved, myopic kid with unruly red hair and good grades. I got pushed around on the playground, and my brother regularly made me eat Milk-Bones to keep me in line. If I refused, he punched me in the stomach. Well, sayonara to all that. Nobody was going to ignore me again. I became the precocious loud-mouthed showman that teachers shrink from in bad visions. D+ was my call letter, inattention my consort.
Consequently, I got to know the principal, Mrs. Johansen, a whole lot better. The blue upholstered chair in front of her desk became as familiar to my butt as the toilet I shared at home with my brother.
“What are you in for this time?” she would remark, shoving a mountain of folders off the chair so I could sit down.
“I dunno,” I’d say and shrug, knowing full well it was for something like eating handfuls of mud at recess and charging morons twenty-five cents to watch me do it. Or pooping in my underwear on purpose. Or hoarding all the red and blue squeaky pens in art class and then scribbling all over Louise Close’s rainbow masterpiece. After an amount of time Mrs. Johansen knew my teachers would deem sufficiently punishing, during which I sat contentedly munching on Euphrates crackers, of which she was inordinately fond, I would be escorted back to my classroom.
Afternoons I ran with a neighborhood gang of older kids, eight- and nine-year-old Wonder Bread-white boys. I was the only girl and proud of it. Our territory was three square upper-middle-class blocks of mellow old Washington houses with leafy yards and new cars parked in the driveways. We communicated with a call that was somewhere between the cry of a howler monkey and the Bedrock quittin’ time whistle.
My gang status was secured the afternoon I got into a cat-fight with a girl who had recently moved into the neighborhood. Her house was the biggest and fanciest one around, and it was set up high over an elm tree-lined sidewalk that looked like an illustration for shifting tectonic plates, what with all the roots snaking under it. The turbulent concrete wreaked havoc with my Sting-Ray’s training wheels and made my roller skates go from twenty to zero without warning. I felt the new girl was to blame for all that, plus she was so ugly that two separate dogs had bitten her in the face on two separate occasions. And dogs know.
I can’t remember who made the initial overture, but we agreed to settle it at the alligator graveyard in my backyard. Behind our house, a long grassy triangle ran down a steep hill to a stand of three tall maples. At their base was a collection of tiny pebble-marked graves containing the curled-up corpses of a dozen baby alligators. I had spent a lot of time organizing the little cemetery, and I kept it raked and ordered, and solemnly decorated with pansies from my mother’s straggly flower bed up the hill. The most recent inductee had arrived from Miami with my name on its box, and only three legs. It had quickly succumbed to crippledom, though Will’s alligator was still alive (of course), so it had to endure bath time twice each night in 120-degree water, with Mr. Bubbles, to compensate for its continued good health. It would be in the ground in another week.
The ugly girl and I went at each other in the flattened dirt, name calling and swinging misses and clawing the air. The boys ringed us, yelling and egging us on, and I felt like an Indian princess warrior. We were getting absolutely nowhere, when suddenly my opponent grabbed my hair and pulled out a massive chunk. I couldn’t believe my scalp had betrayed me like that. We both stood there in disbelief, she with a nine-inch-long ponytail in her thin fist, me with a reddening bald spot over my brow. Now I was mad. My hair was just starting to be a big deal to me, and I had spent the night before trying to deconstruct the mystery of Spoolies. I lunged for her, grabbing her sleeveless cotton shirt and ripping it off her sunken torso, revealing inverted nipples and a strawberry birthmark that looked like the head of one of the dogs that had bitten her.
The ugly girl ran home mortified, and I was cheered by the boys, including some of the ten-year-olds. Even after I was forced to apologize to the ugly girl and her mother, who was always dressed in a fancy ruffled dressing gown, no matter what the time of day, I had the sharp, delicious taste of victory on my tongue.
For weeks I glowed. I finally mattered.
That revelatory feeling even carried me through the birth of my brother Edward, a few months later, and my unceremonious demotion from the status of youngest child. The question of whether my mother even knew she was harboring a two-inch embryo when she received the call from the city morgue remains a mystery.
We stayed on in the house on Forty-second Street for another year. The week before we moved, I was up in the attic after school one afternoon, languidly poking around in some cardboard boxes. When my father’s youngest brother, Ordway, used to stay with us on weekend leave from boarding school, he always brought a hoard of Playboy magazines, and I was trying to find his leftover stash. I was pretty sure they were well hidden after the last time I had uncovered them (and planted one in my brother’s room, open to Miss December), but I kept up the search.
Over by the south-facing window there were some cardboard file boxes sealed up with tape and string. Tape and string means one thing to a busybody: Open me.
The first box was boring: just a bunch of files, checkbooks, and gun magazines. The second box was all gun magazines, and so I almost didn’t open the third, but I did. On top of a pile of manila folders, positioned squarely in the center, was a newspaper clipping. The headline, in heavy italics read:
WILLIAM BURDEN 3D IS RULED A SUICIDE
Washington, Feb 28-A certificate of suicide was issued today in the death yesterday of William A. M. Burden 3d. He was found shot in the head in his automobile . . .
I sat back on my heels and tried to absorb this piece of information. I knew what suicide meant, but because it said shot in the head, it sounded like someone else had done the shooting.
I skimmed the rest, anxious I might be caught, because surely this was way worse than looking at centerfolds. My eye focused on the end: a son, William, 7, and a daughter, Wendy, 6.
The very last word was my name! And ha ha ha, I wasn’t six anymore, I was seven and a half. I threw the clipping back in the box, slammed down the flaps, resticking the tape as best I could, and raced for the stairs. I had to tell someone my name was in the papers!