Lion and Magic Boy

That is, if you had a three-sided coin. The question? Why, what to post about tonight, of course. Here are the contenders:

1. Something about how the kids are cleaning their rooms. Yeah, yeah, it’d be both funny and poignant.
2. The cat post I’ve been mulling over since October.
3. Blah blah blah my childhood abuse issues.

Yeah. And guess which one won?

At 5, I started kindergarten. The school was around the block, a long walk up the hill and around the corner and then the next corner and then the short bit down to the school. Memories of this walk always mix up in my mind with the part in “To Kill a Mockingbird” where Scout and Jem are walking home from the pageant with Bob Ewell on their heels.

But usually I walked from a different location, the street that turned off of mine, at a house at the far end of the street where it turned into an “L” and made a right to some unknown destination. At the “L” lived Debbie, and it was her mom’s job to watch me before school and after.

Next door to Debbie lived Wesley, a so-blond-he’s-almost-albino kid my brother’s grade. Wesley’s family kept their milk out on the table during meals, a practice I was convinced would lead to lukewarm undrinkable milk. It tasted funny, too.

A girl who owned a hula hoop lived across the street from Debbie, right in the crook of the “L”. Another kid lived just around the corner. We’d gather on Debbie’s lawn and play “Mother May I” and “Red Light Green Light” until Debbie had to go in to pee after having waited so long she hopped into the house with her legs crossed. I always thought that was silly. Why didn’t she just go when she needed to?

Debbie’s mom sewed things. The house was dark and there were piles of things everywhere, boxes maybe.

Years later I noticed how much I hated waiting. It was the anticipation more than anything. Playing hide-and-seek was painful, almost, waiting for what I knew was going to happen eventually. It was the same when I was briefly in the military, playing at army games in the woods of South Carolina: that sense that someone would find me, that I wasn’t safe anywhere, was chokingly stifling. In those instances I’d want to scream but nothing came out.

I left Debbie’s house abruptly, I think. It may have had something to do with leaving that school after my strange combined kindergarten/first grade year to accompany my mother to a town several miles away to go to school where she was a teacher; then again, it may have been something else. Debbie’s mother gave me two gifts, though, for Christmas: a stuffed penguin made from blue corduroy and a stuffed bear made from fabric printed to look like a bear (all one had to do was cut out the outline and sew around it), also blue. I placed them on a shelf in my closet and rarely took them down or played with them. They made me feel a little funny, those pathetic apologies.

Later in high school Wesley was circulating a rumor that he’d had sex with me when we were all kids. My brother asked me if it was true and I knew it was ridiculous but all I could remember was that somebody’s older brother was in a shed out back without his pants.

But the worst part I think was Debbie’s house. There’s a reason I don’t remember there being a dad there. I can feel him, though. I can feel him and I can feel the waiting, the knowing what was coming next.

Somewhere that year a little girl was lost.

I want her back.