When I was in grade school, in Southern California, we didn't have weather. I never thought of the season or spring or fall. Summer was when there was no school. Winter was Christmas, which involved snow scenes and snowmen, which were like motifs in fairy tales, not physical reality.
Once in a while we did have fog. I was walking to school one morning, when I was in first or second grade. The air felt damp against my legs. I could barely see the houses along the sidewalk. I wasn't sure whether I had turned left and was nearly at school or was still on my own long block. I could see no one. The houses looked unfamiliar.
Maybe I had gone too far. Had I crossed a street? It was a clutching feeling, this fear, as if some wild thing had grabbed me by the chest. I turned back and then turned again, or maybe twice, and then I wasn't sure which way I was going.
At length I saw something familiar, a blue mailbox, in front of the house where the old lady once lived, and then I knew where I was. Such relief! Then I looked around to see if anyone had witnessed my confusion. No one was there. They could not have seen me anyway in the fog.
I first met the lady on Halloween. She didn't have any candy left when Nancy and Marsha and I got to her house. There were dozens of kids on our block. They surged around the neighborhood like army ants. The lady was old. I think she lived alone. She looked frightened as she pointed to the big empty bowl. She shook her head no. I said, "It doesn't matter. You can have some of our candy."
She moved a frail hand from her mouth to her ear. Somehow I understood that the lady could not speak. I upended my grocery sack over the bowl, and all the candy and apples and gum clattered into it. Nancy and Marsha dumped their sacks in, too. Nancy declared, “We can even go get you some more!”
The lady cried and one by one she held each of our faces between her bumpy hands.
She could have just turned off her porch light when she ran out of treats. Everyone knew you can’t go to a dark house on Halloween, but I guess the lady didn't know about that rule. Well, we had saved her from whatever mischief other kids might have visited on her, the bad boys from one street over, for example.
Nancy and Marsha and I went back to the street, chattering and excited with our own generosity, and soon we had begged more delicious candy, not-very-good apples, and sticks of gum at other lighted porches. We took that haul back to the old lady, too. This time she met us all smiles at her door and put her hand over her mouth as we poured our loot into her bowl. It was the best Halloween we ever had.
After that I sometimes stopped at the lady's house on my way home from school. I took her small gifts, a mint from the candy store, a small ashtray I'd made in school, a tiny perfume bottle in the shape of a cat, the extra one when I had a duplicate in my collection. She always greeted me joyfully
One day she took a small notebook out of her pocket and wrote something on a page. She showed it to me. I didn't recognize the word, so I sounded it out. “Deh-aff.” And then I got it. DEAF! It was not only that she could not speak. She could not hear, either. Well, we could still smile at each other.
I never told anyone at home about my friendship with her, for I was not allowed to talk to strangers. Not that I was talking to her any more, now that I realized she was deaf, but I knew it was wrong. And because we did not speak, I never learned her name.
One day she was gone from the house. A family moved in. I wondered what had happened to the deaf lady, but it never occurred to me that there was any way to find out. She just disappeared. That was the way things were in this world I had found myself in.
A long time later, when I was old enough to ride the bus by myself, I was walking down the aisle looking for a seat, and someone pulled at my sleeve. There was the deaf lady, looking up at me, and she was smiling and nodding, as if she was really excited to see me.
I sat down next to her, and she patted my hand, and we smiled. I could write a little bit by then, and we exchanged a few notes on the pad of paper she carried. I don't remember what we wrote to each other, but I was glad to find she was still alive and living somewhere. The fog had not swallowed her. And in fact almost anything might still be anywhere, just out of sight, hidden but not gone, ready to reappear at any moment.