Cat's eye

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:

Salome was a dancer, she did the hoochie kootch;

And when she did the hoochie kootch, she didn’t wear very mooch.

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.