STORIES OF THE THINGS THAT HAD NO POWER OF THEIR OWN
Evelyn Hampton
I would take the things that had no power of their own into my plastic play home. It was there that I pretended to be a woman. I was hungry and bored by the story of the fox and wolf.
I had plastic things that I pretended were remnants of a future I had yet to inhabit: branches of dogwood; carcasses of dead birds, squirrels, chipmunks; the limbs of my brother's plastic figurines.
Using a watering can, I filled these remnants with what filled the faces of our neighbors when they heard their proper names called out. It was very bright and could not be eyed directly. My ability to do this was often questioned from a window of my parents' bedroom.
As a child, I thought the future promised this: God and some disciples show up in a van, they fix the parts of the landscape that were ruined by us when we were desperate and unaccountable even to ourselves. When the landscape is restored, we would again become accountable. So much of what we became depended on the upkeep of the landscape.
My family had problems that were caused either by my parents' ineptitude or someone else's, or neither, or both. I didn't feel like a girl, and I didn't feel like a boy. But I had been named, and the name took on the shape that I grew to inhabit.
I often didn't immediately recognize them as my parents when I saw them from a distance, or when they were standing in a place or in a certain way I hadn't expected to find them. I was often assigned the role of the father when playing house. The plastic play home would bend and change shape when the sun weakened the internal structure of its walls.
I did not question how much I loved money. I thought it was beautiful, and that its absence was the bank's beige waiting room when I was hungry and lightheaded and my mother was hungry and lightheaded and she would say to me, “Sit still and read the story of the fox and wolf while I talk to someone who will help us.”
From where I sat waiting, the back of her head was certainly someone else's. On the other side, I expected to find a stiffly painted expression that mirrored the stiffly painted expression of the man or woman who sat on the other side of the desk.
The future I had yet to inhabit was everywhere filled with the satisfaction of the purchase of the plastic play home—the moment when authority relents to my wishes. It's sunny, I'm at the top of the plastic play home's tower. I can do anything. I'm in charge of the ones in charge. God is a melting plastic figurine in the grass, and the sun makes the plastic tower curve softly. I'm getting too heavy for this play home.
It was an unreliable satisfaction: the soft parts of my body were smooth when we were wealthy, and rough and sweaty when we were poor. They became so changeable, and I began to mistrust them as I would another's body.
In the story of the fox and wolf, one always knows just how to manipulate the other. The manipulator is always punished.
Sometimes, especially when we were poor, it seemed that the landscape was more crowded and difficult to pass through. Some part of it would snag on us; some part of us would break. We would have a flat tire because someone had strewn nails on the highway, and we would buy milk that smelled the way the dogwood did in the spring, when it festered with stunted worms, and something alive was dying in the gutter.
Something appeared to want to punish us, and when we were punished, we wanted to punish other people. When we were poor we would call the neighbors more often for help, and we would say, “Hey Bob Gary Susan, could you?” Often it was Mom who called for favors while Dad mended his ladder, because, when we were poor, something always seemed to be up there on the roof in the gutters clogging up our lives.
When we were poor Dad tried to fix his ladder. When we were wealthy he said, “To hell with that ladder, why should I climb? I'll just hire some kid to come and unclog us.” And he did. The kid came with his own ladder and crawled up onto our roof and unclogged us. While the kid crawled above us, Dad would be nodding into his book. He often read books by men. Yes, very good, he seemed to be approving, by way of the book's author, the kid's work, which was an indirect approval of his own work, since it was Dad's work that gave him the money to pay the kid.
I wondered, when we were wealthy, was every book Dad nodded into an indirect approval of our family's happy economy? Because when we were poor, he would pick up a book, put it down, pick up another, put it down, and so on, unable to read them, and he would mutter, and look out the window, and shake his head. “Hell, hell,” he would say, and we all had bad haircuts.
The fox would win because the fox could read and thus became clever. The wolf could only read certain words, such as its own name. The wolf was vain, and in children's stories, one is always punished for vanity, usually with ugliness and exclusion.
I braided my own hair by reversing any thoughts about my body. I unraveled my name by writing it over and over, forward and backward, sensing the oddness that goes into and comes out of language—how the word ENTER on the revolving door of the bank only seemed spooky when we were out of money: ENTER, seen from every which way, was awfully similar, in my desperate mind, to RENTER, which (Mom said “God forbid”) we would never be.
There was also the appearance of our last name in cursive on the mailbox, in which we would often find threatening, desperate, insulting and untoward language—Delinquent, Canceled, Never, No, No love—some of which I had written and addressed to myself out of boredom with myself.
The fox found out the wolf's hovel, and when the wolf was out hunting the fox, the fox laid a trap there.
We were most of the time average, but sometimes we were poor, and sometimes we were wealthy, and less of the time we were very poor, and even less of the time we were very wealthy. This left us in a Rambler with a sloping yard heavy on all sides of us, and on all sides of our sloping yard were neighbors with stern, empty faces that filled with something unnamed when we called their names: “Hey Bob, Frank, Marlene, Betty, Hey Jake, Chris, Sarah, Emily, Hey Susan Thomas Gary Henry Hey Mike and Adam.” It was as if their names, like hunks of bread off a common loaf, filled them, and made them alike and happy.
As it turned out, the hovel where the fox laid its trap was not the wolf's only hovel; the wolf had many hovels, many ways to conceal its appetite.
At night, standing outside my plastic play home and looking inside our Rambler-home, I could see Dad rubbing his hands together outside my bedroom door. Read the story of the fox and wolf quietly to yourself and then turn out your lights, he must have said to my closed door. He looked hungry. Once—we must have been poor—I watched him eat an entire loaf of bread by tearing hunks off and stuffing them into his throat.
The wolf had a bad reputation for tricking little children and for always being hungry. I knew this from other stories. Still, I often sympathized with whatever was set up as a bad example. I was often hungry.
We were most of the time average, and this average way of being arranged the landscape so that most ugly things were hidden from our eyes, and most nice things were just out of reach, but many good and reliable things could be purchased in the Red Owl or the Rainbow or the Target. These colorful places gave objects lore and mystique and a kind of inner movement that made me want them uncontrollably.
The landscape, the one we could afford to inhabit, was mainly flat, with a few hills built by tractors for sledding, and ravines dug by diggers for taking things away that had no power of their own, and there were many, many lakes that concealed the small lives shifting beneath their surfaces. There were many such surfaces and I wanted to touch beneath them. There was something that I wanted there, but I didn't know how to just grab it. This not knowing how to just grab the thing I wanted, which seemed to be everywhere and nowhere, created a tension that appeared in me as bad moods, tantrums, irrational grievances, petty theft, addiction to candy, uncertainty, poor math skills, and occasional child-on-child violence in unteachered corridors and playgrounds.
I preferred to fight beneath slides, where the sand was always shaded, moist, dark, and absorbent. I thought I wanted the braids of the blond child, and so I grabbed them. But the braids screamed, and I was punished. I thought I wanted the pony of the spoiled child, so I mounted it, and I was thrown off. And so on. Things were taken from me in several swift movements.
A swift downward movement: something was removed, a block of my tower, so that the tower tilted and what once held the tower up was now broken. No efforts were made to rebuild the tower.
“No, no, leave me alone, I hate those books, I hate this, I hate you.”
"Go to your room."
The girl was taken to the top of the tower by the unseen upward movement of hunger. A fox and wolf were preparing a meal in the kitchen. The wolf asked the girl, "Why is your dress so filthy?" The fox said, "Leave her alone, can't you see she's hungry?" The wolf said, "That's got nothing to do with it! I'm hungry too!" The fox said, "Oh, you're so stupid. Why do you make things harder for yourself, for us all?" The fox called its bank account by angrily pushing buttons recessed in gray plastic. The wolf backed into the corner the refrigerator made with the wall and touched a coil of metal. The girl was seen fleeing the tower in the direction of a neighboring tower, knocking on a door, running to the next tower, falling down, knocking, crying, and so on, down the block of towers—
"You're too old to be doing that!"
Another swift movement.
Something is taken away.
In this way, through a series of swift movements, and with each movement taking something away, I aged.
The fists at the ends of the comically muscled arms of the plastic figurines held nothing. They were molded that way, to grip cylinders of nothing. Their genitalia were the vaguest of hopes. Their jaws snapped open to say nothing. If nothing can be shaped or remade, the landscape is nothing; we name it, inhabit its shape, and then we tell its story, as in the novels my father adored for their descriptive passages of constructed scenery.
"You are good and brave," I finished every story I told myself.
My father nodded. I was named after his favorite author.