Marsha Myers was not my best friend. My best friend was Nancy, across the street. Nancy and I went to Sunday school at the same church. During the week we walked to school together, although she was in fourth grade and I was only in third.
Nancy was a perfect lady, my grandmother said, and her dress always looked as if it had just been pressed, because she didn’t get down in the dirt and ruin her clothes. Nancy was chosen to sing “The Old Rugged Cross” in front of the church on Easter Sunday, and afterwards my grandmother said Nancy looked just like an angel in her pink dress and her golden hair.
I had another friend who I had even more fun with than Nancy, though I didn’t get to see her as much. That was Marsha Myers, whose backyard was separated from Nancy’s backyard only by a thin wire fence. Marsha had brown hair, like mine. She didn’t go to our church, and she walked to school down the street one over, but she and Nancy and I played together. We had slumber parties at any one of our three houses.
Marsha was fun to play with because she could pretend like crazy. Sitting up in the peach tree in my backyard imagining things with Marsha was just like actually being zebras or dancing girls or anything else. Using only words, we built a cage for butterflies that was as big as the world, so that we could have them but they would still be free.
One day, up in the peach tree, I tried to convince Marsha that she did not exist but was only in my dream. “No,” she insisted. “I'm the one that’s dreaming. You're in my dream.”
“Prove it!” I challenged her.
“Because I can feel it when I pinch myself,” Marsha said, “But I can’t feel it when you pinch yourself.”
I argued back. She did not actually feel anything, because I was only dreaming she said that. We laughed and were good friends. We knew it was a game, but we felt that the game held a mystery at its center. Something that we could not discuss with adults, because they couldn’t understand.
The sun was having an episode of sunspots. We could see them from the back yard, black splotches against the white disk, in a string, like frogs’ eggs. We knew we weren’t supposed to look at the sun, because it was very hot and we could go blind, but sometimes we risked one eye. Then the next day, we couldn’t remember which eye we had used before, and we probably ended up using both eyes to look at the sun. If we damaged our vision, we never noticed the difference. That was one reason we didn’t necessarily believe all the terrible things that grownups told us would happen.
We decided that the sunspots were caves. Maybe if we could get to the sun we could go into one of them. It would be cool in there, and when we came out we would find ourselves far in the future or the past. No one would know who we were, and we could do anything we wanted.
Once, sticky from the ripe peaches we'd been eating, we planned what we would do if we were the last people left in the world. We weren’t worrying about an atom bomb. This was three years after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, but I didn't even know about that. It was not something the adults in my life talked about. Marsha and I were thinking about a tidal wave that would leave us all alone.
"Of course," we said, "we don't want a tidal wave to kill everyone else in the world." No, we certainly were not wishing for anything like that. We would be very sad if our families, including Marsha's little brother, were killed. But if a tidal wave should happen to come and wipe out all but two people, we hoped we would be the ones left.
What would we do, we asked ourselves up in the peach tree? Well, we would just walk right into the candy store and take as much as we wanted. And we would not go to bed until we felt like it.
We would do everything for ourselves. Build a big tree house, weave clothes out of bark, like that guy on the desert island, find some horses and ride them. Things like that.
We knew that when we grew up we would need to get married so that we could have babies and start putting people back into the world. For that we would need at least two boys, plus a minister to do our weddings. We were sure we could find wedding dresses. There would be lots of things left in the stores.
So we would search for more people. We would ride our horses up into the mountains and leave notes in rock piles. That’s how we would find two boys. And one minister, who would have a reason to go away somewhere else after the double wedding. Then we would be like two Eves and two Adams, and the world could start all over. Only now we would decide what children could to do. It would be much better.
One day Marsha and I were playing way in the back of my yard, behind the shop my father was building. I could hear my grandmother calling me from her bedroom window, which opened onto the backyard. The world that Marsha and I were making vanished like a soap bubble. I went to see what I was wanted for.
Oh, how my heart pounds as I begin to write what my grandmother said. How I long to excuse her, to tell you how tenderly she cared for me when I was a motherless child, and how once she rescued a white kitten from bad boys who were mistreating it and took care of it for the rest of its life. But there is nothing to do but tell you how my grandmother said something that day that I still feel awful about.
“What are you doing out there?” my grandmother asked, when I found her in her bedroom. She was making her bed.
“Nothing. Just playing with Marsha.”
“Well, tell that little Jew to go home,” she said crossly.
“How come?” I started, but she made a gesture as if shooing chickens. I stumped out to the backyard where Marsha was making a little fence in the sand next to my father’s workshop.
“She’s always spoiling everything,” I said.
Marsha looked disappointed, but we kids were used to the capriciousness of our elders. “Do you have to go in now?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said. So Marsha stood up and started to go home. To enjoy her company as long as possible, I walked beside her past the shop and the house and across the font lawn.
“What does she want you for?” Marsha asked.
“I don’t know,” I replied. “She just said, ‘Tell that little Jew to go home’.”
My friend’s face twisted up as if she were in pain, and she started to cry.
“What’s the matter? Oh, Marsha, what’s wrong?” I reached for her arm, but she pulled away from me and ran across the street and cut through Nancy’s yard on her way home.
With a growing sickness in my stomach, I realized what a mistake I’d made. I had recognized the unfriendliness in my grandmother’s words but took it as the natural hostility between adults and kids, between them and us. I’d thought Marsha and I were together on the receiving end of my grandmother’s stab, and that Marsha and I would complain together about grownups.
After Marsha disappeared around the side of Nancy’s house without looking back, I went indoors. In a suddenly changed world, I grasped the ugliness behind my grandmother’s expression.
“She sure went home in a hurry,” said my grandmother, as if asking for an explanation.
Somehow I knew that my grandmother would not be pleased I’d quoted her, so I said, “Well, Marsha was outside under the window when you said to tell that little Jew to go home, and she heard you. So she started crying and ran away.”
Of course, Marsha was all the way in the back part of the yard, with my father’s workshop between. She would never have known what my grandmother had said if I hadn’t told her.
But my grandmother replied without missing a beat, “I knew she was there listening. That’s why I said what I did. I wanted to teach her a lesson, the little eavesdropper.”
I knew my grandmother was not telling the truth, and I was surprised, because it was the first definite lie I ever caught her in. I just asked, “What’s a leaves dropper?”
“Eavesdropper!” My grandmother smacked at a wrinkle in the bedspread, leaving the impression of her hand. “A person who listens to what other people are saying, that’s not intended for them. Eavesdroppers never hear any good of themselves.”
Marsha was not an eavesdropper, but I couldn’t very well defend her without revealing that I also had lied. “Marsha’s really crying,” I said. “I’m afraid she doesn’t want to be friends any more.”
My grandmother assured me that Marsha would get over it. I’d quarreled with my friends before, she reminded me, and after a few days they it would all be forgotten and we would be friends again.
Marsha forgave me, after a while. But her mother did not forgive my grandmother—not that my grandmother ever asked for forgiveness. During the remaining two years that I lived there, Marsha’s mother never let Marsha visit my home again.
When I told my grandmother that Marsha couldn’t come over any more, my grandmother forbade me to go to Marsha’s house either.
Marsha and I still got together at Nancy’s house sometimes, and we saw each other school. But we never sat in the peach tree again to fly with butterflies and touch the past and future with our minds.
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This is simultaneously a lovely and terrible story. Beautifully written.