LITMIR.BIZ

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sun pours through the bedroom and living room and the afternoon light fills the small kitchen and dining room.

      Larry’s and my separation is complete, the final papers signed; only the formality of the divorce remains, and this has been postponed until January for tax purposes.

      Elizabeth and Rick are back in school, tanned and healthy from the summer, and my own impatience to begin work, to see the children, wells inside me.

      Bedlam. The first day in our new room is bedlam and Dan and I barely have a chance to speak to each other. Eight children in the room. Supposedly four are mine and four Dan’s, but we can never remember exactly who is whose.

      Brian is back, taller, still flapping.

      “Hey, Bri, did you have a good summer?”

      “Mary. Mary. Is your father dead?”

      What is this now? “No. My father isn’t dead. Why?”

      “Where does he live?”

      “In Guilford, Connecticut.”

      “Yule O’Toole lives in Guilford.”

      “Who is Yule O’Toole?”

      “Yule O’Toole is dead. I thought maybe you were dead, too – the summer was so long.”

      “Not me, Bri. I’m going to be around for a long time. I’ve got a lot to catch up on.” Later I found out that Brian’s grandfather had died during the summer.

      Stuart comes sliding in the door.

      “You look perfectly darling this fall, Mary.”

      “Thank you, Stuart. I’m glad to see you.”

      “Shit,” he says and kisses my hand, licking it with his tongue. Jeffy Olivero and his widowed mother have disappeared without a trace over the summer, and I wonder if he still sleeps beside her, pressing her earlobe between his thumb and forefinger, wherever they may be.

      Tom and Ivan, Dan’s boys from the year before are back; the new room is strange to them and Ivan whirls and jumps in one corner, his beautiful face a silent mask, while Tom pulls up his turtleneck and paces back and forth along the wall.

      “Good morning, Tom,” I say.

      “Good morning, Tom. Goddamn fucking son of a bitch. Lost on the mountain. Call the one o’clock call.”

      And I know that he remembers me, although I am not so sure that he is glad to see me in this new room. Changes are difficult for all children; for ours, they are doubly so. Their own self-image is so fragile that any alteration in the immediate external environment is a major threat.

      If it is hard for the returning children, it is even harder for the four new ones, two boys and two girls.

      Tony, seven years old, black eyes bright, perches on a table beside me. “Kee-rist. What a bunch of weirdoes.” Tony’s mother ran away when she discovered she was pregnant again, and he lives now in a single motel room with his father and his father’s mistress. Before the morning is out I am extracting a five-dollar bill that he is transferring from my purse to the inside of his shoe. When I take it back, Tony yells in rage. “See. I knew it. I knew it. You goddamn whore. No matter what you look like, you’re mean. Mean. Like all the rest of them.”

      Alice is the first girl for either of us. She is twelve, with tight blond braids and angry, slanted eyes. She spends the first hour drawing at the blackboard as the others arrive, drawing huge ice cream cones, labeling in careful letters each mound of ice cream … vanilla breast … chocolate breast … butter pecan breast. Twenty-seven flavors?

      Dan asks her what she’s doing and she says, “Shut up. I want my own way in the world. Why can’t I have my own way in the world?”

      “You better take her,” says Dan. “She seems to need a maternal influence.” “Thanks a lot,” I say.

      Jenny Woodriff is our second and only other girl. She isn’t new; she had been in Renée’s class, but neither Dan nor I had known her well. She is eight but seems much smaller because she walks doubled over, hands almost touching the ground. Her auburn curly hair is pulled down over her eyes, hiding most of her face. She doesn’t speak; she only barks. Jenny thinks she is a dog.

      “She’s for me,” says Dan.

      “Aw, come on. You’re making all the decisions.”

      “Okay, okay. You get to pick the next one.”

      Rufus stands in the doorway dressed like a middle-aged businessman, blue suit, necktie, glasses, large briefcase held in front of his fat stomach.

      “I am Rufus Jay Greenberg,” he announces. “I live at Six-eight-nine Harrison Avenue. You may call me Rufus, or Rufus Jay – or if you are very angry, Rufus Jay Greenberg.”

      “Come on in, Rufus,” I say.

      Rufus extends his hand, warm, moist, pudgy, and says, “Is that what you are going to call me?”

      “I guess so. Would that be okay? What do your friends call you?”

      For the first time he looks up and I can see the nystagmus that moves his eyes rapidly back and forth, back and forth, like the carriage on a typewriter.

      “I don’t have any friends,” he says.

      He spreads his arms wide, the briefcase still dangling from his right hand, and sails to the farthest corner of the room. He pulls a wooden toy chest away from the wall and squats behind it, arms wrapped around his briefcase.

      Rufus is eight. His family moved to the area so that Rufus could attend our school. Both his mother and father had given up good jobs to make the move, she as a teacher, he as a chemist in a large pharmaceutical firm. Rufus had been in a “special school” in Pennsylvania and, because of the family’s educational and chemical-medical background, had been tested and retested. Rufus’ file is thicker than the rest of my children’s put together. He has been given tests by psychologists, psychiatrists, neurologists, in major cities all over the East. Each report differs from the next: – “normal intelligence with emotional disturbance” – “retarded” – “brain-injured” – “normal to bright” – “normal with schizophrenic tendencies.”

      How could there be so many different opinions? No wonder the parents were discouraged and Rufus himself had an absentee record that was higher than the days he had attended school.

      “I want him,” I say to Dan.

      Brian’s bright, pointed little face contorts with un-happiness. He copes with jealousy by accelerating his flapping and uttering the old-time squawk, “Awk, awk. Gonna go to the doctor’s.”

      Finally we are all there, the six boys – Dan’s Tom and, Ivan from last year, my own Brian (Matthew is in a neurologically impaired class in a public school) and Stuart, and now the two new boys, Rufus and Tony, and the two girls, Alice and Jenny.

      We had our own circle now, the eight children – Tom, Ivan, Tony, Jenny Woodriff, Brian, Stuart, Alice, Rufus – and of course Dan and me. Dan ran our circle but it was not called “Circle” anymore. Dan referred to it as “opening exercises.” “Circle is a baby name,” he said. “You can’t treat these kids like babies and then expect them to act like eight- or ten- or twelve-year-old kids.”

      We saluted the flag and sang “America the Beautiful.” Of course, only Dan and I sang, and I have a very small, off-key voice so it was really only Dan, but he sang with gusto. And when we had finished singing about America he got out his guitar and sang “A Frog He Did A-courtin’ Go” and “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.”

      By the end of the second week Stuart began to sing with us in a high, clear tenor. Neither of us had ever heard him sing before, but now he was totally absorbed. Feet off the ground, legs stretched straight out in front of him, eyes fixed on a distant point, hands moving in some ritual before his face, Stuart sang. He knew the words, he knew the tune.

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