Steven Millhauser - Edwin Mullhouse - The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954

He gave her a black wax mustache and wax false teeth. When she wore the teeth to class, Mrs. Cadwallader took them away.

He gave her a magic trick consisting of a black ball, a blue plastic cup shaped like an egg and perched on a slim blue stand, and a circular blue disk that fitted exactly between the halves of the cup and held in its center, like the crown of a hat, the top half of a false black ball.

He gave her a blue-black plastic inkstain, a black rubber spider, a red rubber frankfurter, a white rubber fried egg with a yellow rubber bullseye, a yellow rubber pencil with a black rubber point. He gave her a brown rubber dog-dirt, but Mrs. Cadwallader took it away.

He gave her a dagger with a black rubber handle and a silver rubber blade. He gave her a gray plastic dagger with a retractable blade: she liked to stab herself in the heart and die, falling onto the playground with her pigtails streaming.

He gave her a dark green rubber frog attached by a rubber tube to a pink rubber ball: when you squeezed the ball the frog gave a hop. He gave her a yellow plastic chicken that stood on green plastic legs: when you pushed down on the chicken, a white egg came out.

He gave her fistfuls of glossy jumping beans, shaped like Mrs. Mullhouse’s allergy pills. When she placed them on the table they rolled over and over, like tormented bugs.

He gave her a strip of blue tattoos. When she returned from the lavatory her right arm was covered up to the elbow by a blurred blue anchor, a blurred blue heart and arrow, a blurred blue eagle, a blurred blue angel, and a blurred blue sailor with a blurred blue hat smoking a blurred blue pipe.

He gave her a ten-cent balsawood airplane and a piece of stiff paper covered with shiny decals: under a thin stream of tapwater Edwin loosened, like a layer of colorless skin from a suntanned shoulder, a delicate and transparent sheath, containing a white star in a blue circle from which blue striped bands extended on the left and right; and holding the sticky shining emblem over a wing, carefully he pressed it into place. But she gave the airplane to Gray and attached to the pale side of her table two blue stars, the letters U.S.A., and the number 47, before Mrs. Cadwallader caught her.

He gave her one Japanese fan with blue mountains and yellow boats on it and another Japanese fan with a white Japanese lady on it. He gave her a special fan that opened in an unusual way: grasping the bamboo strips at the bottom you drew them apart as if you were pulling on a wishbone, bringing them around in a full circle until they lay side by side; and as they opened, soft paper dyed in bright colors stretched and opened like a flower.

One morning Edwin entered the playground, walked along the side of the building, passed the corner, and suddenly stopped. Ten feet away, Rose Dorn in her bright red coat was standing before two older boys with tall blond hair; one stood with his hands in his pockets while the other rested his hands on top of an upside-down bat. She was wearing a pair of one-way silver eyeglasses, which covered her eyes like a silver mirror and reflected a piece of one boy’s face. In her yellow hair was a large red paper rose. Her fingers were full of colorful plastic rings and on each arm she wore a jingling bracelet of colorful charms. In her left hand she held an open Japanese fan. In her right hand she held a red-tipped candy cigarette that she raised to her lips and lowered, lifting her chin and blowing white breath-smoke into the bright chill air.

ALTHOUGH ROSE DORN liked Edwin’s gifts, she showed no sign whatever of liking Edwin. It is true enough that she liked to torment him. Often, when Edwin arrived on the playground, she would start to run away, looking over her shoulder to make sure he was following; and handing me his books he would set off after her. On and on they ran, weaving through games of tag and ring-a-lievio, around lines of jumproping girls and groups of card-flipping boys, past faces staring up in the air at a pink rubber ball that someone had flung against a brick wall, between two boys who were shaking their fists at one another three times in preparation for shooting out their fingers, up the grass slope, around the willow, down the grass slope, past the basketball court onto the distant part of the playground where the tar turned into dirt and weeds, then back again, Rose Dorn well ahead of Edwin but losing all the time, running easily on short strong legs that moved back and forth very quickly, so that you were reminded of a fleeing cartoon character whose legs and feet are represented as a blurred spinning circle, while Edwin, slowly gaining, ran with long awkward curiously delicate strides, landing gently on his toes as if he were afraid of disturbing people, as one might run through a library, until at last, anticipating one of her many turns, suddenly he caught up to her, holding onto her shoulder and forcing her to stop; and still grasping her with one hand he would stand bent over slightly, smiling and flushed and breathless, unable to talk, holding the other hand against his thin heaving chest, while Rose Dorn screamed and squirmed and flailed her arms and even kicked at his shins until she broke loose; and running off she would again look over her shoulder at poor Edwin, who again set off after her in long, awkward, delicate, exhausted strides.

Another of her favorite games was to separate me from Edwin. She would come over to us on the playground and say that she had a secret for Edwin; and turning to me with a look full of shame and sorrow, he would watch me go off by myself while Rose Dorn, making him bend to her, uttered between the frame of her hands loud sounds of feigned whispering: pssh-pssh-pssh-pssh-pssh.

She liked to humiliate Edwin. Once she went up to Mario Antonio, kicked him in the leg, and ran to startled Edwin for protection. Mario, whose fourth-grade brother Tony was already well known in Juvenile Court, brushed Edwin aside, knocked her to the ground, and sat on her stomach and pinned her arms while she shrieked and kicked. Poor ineffectual Edwin could find nothing better to do than tug gently at Mario’s sleeve, saying: “Hey, come on, stop it.” Mario simply ignored him. Finally Edwin ran off to find help, or to disappear, or to die, but before he got very far Mario had already gone back to his friends. Rose Dorn never bothered Mario again, but that evening Edwin burst into tears. For the next week he beat up pillows and imaginary Marios, falling backward onto his bed, kicking Mario into the air, and leaping nimbly on him as he hit the floor. He spoke of buying a pair of boxing gloves, but he never did.

It was with no small concern that I saw Edwin beginning to go the way of Carol Stempel. Oh, not that he shrieked and dropped things; nothing so obvious as that. But he began to have the same curious sympathy with Rose Dorn that Carol Stempel had had. Her fits oppressed him; her restlessness infected him; her habits obsessed him. Unwittingly, as it seemed to me, he began to imitate her. He picked up her habit, for instance, of swinging her arms together in a clap and swinging them apart as far as they would go. He imitated her way of standing against a wall or tree with one foot resting heel-first on the surface behind her. She had a way of pushing her lower lip out and down like a kind of flap, so that she seemed to have no upper lip and a vast underlip; one day when I looked up from my table I saw him sitting with his lip folded down, gazing off in a Dornish trance, quite unaware that he resembled an idiot. When it was her turn during a spelling bee she sometimes frowned, puffed out her cheeks, and placed the tip of her forefinger on her lower lip. The first time I saw Edwin do that I told him that he looked like Rose Dorn; he blushed and never repeated it. But he picked up her habit of sitting in her seat with both elbows sticking through the space between the wide wooden slat on top and the narrow slat below. For a while he imitated her unspeakable habit of suddenly banishing a smile or laugh from her face and staring at you without expression; I believe she considered such insolence amusing. She was fond of sticking out her tongue, but thank God Edwin never sank to that.