Alison Lurie - Foreign Affairs

“Yes?” Vinnie says.

“I got somethin’ to tell you.” The girl grabs a fold of Vinnie’s coat sleeve. “My sister says you’re wantin’ rhymes. Rhymes you wouldn’t tell the teachers.” She grins unattractively; her teeth are chipped and irregular.

“I’m collecting all sorts of rhymes,” Vinnie says, with a professionally friendly smile. “What I told your sister’s class was that there might be some they wouldn’t want to recite in public, because they weren’t very polite.”

“Yeh, that’s what I mean. I know a lotta those.”

“That’s nice,” Vinnie says, repressing her desire for tea. “I’d like to hear them.” The girl is silent. “Would you like to say some for me?”

“Maybe.” A precocious shrewdness twists the spotty unformed features. “How much you paying?”

Vinnie’s first impulse is to break off the conversation. No child or adult has ever before proposed to sell material to her; the very idea is unseemly. Folklore by nature is free, uncopyrighted-as a Marxist colleague says, it’s not part of the capitalist commodity system-and this for Vinnie is part of its glory. But it’s possible that this unpleasant little girl knows some interesting, even unique rhymes; and Vinnie has learnt in over thirty years never to turn down material, or judge the value of the text by an informant’s appearance. Besides, God knows the child looks as if she could use the money.

“I don’t know.” She laughs awkwardly. “How about fifty pence?”

“Okay.” The reply is animated, almost avid. Vinnie realizes she’s offered much more than was expected. She gets out her notebook and pen; then, noticing the child’s suspicious stare, she rummages in her purse. When she first came to England, the old silver coinage was still in use; the new octagonal fifty-pence piece, once she finds it, looks more than ever like some sort of cheap medal. Britannia, sitting between her lion and her shield, seems shrunken, defensive.

And where is Vinnie to sit? Reluctantly she lowers herself onto the only available horizontal surface, a ledge of dirty-looking cement alongside the school building.

Clutching the coin, the mauve-haired girl darts down the alley to scan the now-empty playground, then back in the other direction toward the street. Perhaps it was all a begging trick, Vinnie thinks. But after surveying the scene the child sidles back up the passage.

“Okay,” she says.

“Just a moment, please.” Vinnie opens her notebook. “Could you tell me your name?”

“Wha’ for?” The child takes a step back.

“It’s just for my records,” Vinnie says in a reassuring tone. “I’m not going to tell anyone.” This isn’t strictly true: in her published work she always identifies and thanks her informants, and over the years more than one child, coming across Vinnie’s books or articles later, has written to thank her in turn.

“Uh. Mary, uh, Maloney.”

The manner of delivery makes Vinnie certain that this is not the child’s name; but she writes it down. “Yes. Go ahead.” “Mary Maloney” bends toward her and says in a hoarse whisper:

“Mother, mother, mother pin a rose on me,

Two little nigger-boys are after me,

One is blind and the other can’t see,

So mother, mother, mother pin a rose on me.”

It would be idle to pretend that Vinnie likes this rhyme. But since she has never heard it before she records the lines and then, as is her custom, reads them back for confirmation.

“Yeh. You got it.”

“Thank you. Would you like to say another one?”

Mary Maloney slouches against the sooty bricks above Vinnie, mute. The ripped hem of her skirt hangs down on one side; she wears sagging pink bobby socks and scratched red plastic clogs, and her thin white legs are prickled with gooseflesh. “You want more, you gotta pay for more,” she whines.

Now it is Vinnie’s turn to be silent; the sordidness of the transaction has overcome her.

“I betcha you’ll get more brass ‘n that when you sell my stuff.”

“I don’t sell these rhymes.” Vinnie tries to say this pleasantly, to keep both distaste and rebuke out of her voice.

“Yeh? What d’you do with them, then?”

“I collect them, for, uh”-How can her life’s work be explained to a mind like this?-“for the college where I teach.”

“Oh yeh?” The girl gives her the look one gives a liar whose bluff one has decided not to call. It is clear that she believes Vinnie to be collecting dirty rhymes for some dubious, even perverse purpose. It also seems likely that for enough money she would sell Vinnie, or anyone else, anything they wanted-that she would say and do horrors. “Okay.” A peeved sigh. “Tenpence.”

Now that she is in so far Vinnie feels somehow constrained to go on. She reopens her purse and extracts another tinny, debased coin. Mary Maloney leans closer, so close that Vinnie can see the dark, dandruff-clogged roots of her synthetic mauve hair, and smell her sour breath.

“I wish I wuz a seagull,

I wish I wuz a duck,

So I could fly along the beach

And watch the people fuck.”

Vinnie’s pen pauses in its transcription. She likes this verse even less than the preceding one: not only is it vulgar, it contradicts her thesis. A few more of these and her theory about the difference between British and American playground rhymes will be down the tube, as they say here.

“Thanks, that’s enough,” she says, shutting her notebook on the unfinished rhyme and rising to her feet. “Thank you for your help.” She gives a tight smile. A cold wind has begun to scour the darkening playground and funnel through the passageway, blowing shreds of paper rubbish with it.

“Hey, I ain’t finished.” Mary Maloney follows her out into the street.

“That’s all right; I have enough now, thank you.” Vinnie begins to walk down Princess Road; but the girl follows closely, clutching at her coat.

“Hey, wait! I know lots more rhymes. I know some really dirty ones.” Mary Maloney presses nearer; in her clogs, she is taller than Vinnie, who always wears sensible low heels on field trips.

“Would you let go of me, please,” Vinnie exclaims, her voice tight with revulsion and, it must be admitted, fear. The street is almost empty, the clouds low and unpleasant.

“Mary had a little lamb-”

A dread of hearing what will come next gives Vinnie the strength to pull her coat away. Breathing hard, not looking back, she walks off as fast as she can go without actually running.

Back in the sanctuary of her pleasant warm flat, with a pot of Twining’s Queen Mary tea on the table before her next to the bowl of white hyacinths, Vinnie begins to feel better. She is able to pity Mary Maloney for what must surely be a tainted and deprived background, a premature exposure to all that is synthetic and filthy in popular culture.

It might be possible, she decides, buttering the second half of her cinnamon bun, to exclude those last two texts from her study. After all they are not, to paraphrase her projected title, British Rhymes of Childhood, but rather rhymes of a precocious and corrupt adolescence. Besides, she never got Mary Maloney’s age; very likely she is older than she looked, undersized like many slum-dwellers, maybe fourteen or even fifteen, not a child at all.

All the same she feels a nagging unease. Mary Maloney remains in her mind: the skinny white gooseflesh legs, the flat dirty face, the chipped teeth, the matted acrylic hair; the pressure of her greed and her need.

It also occurs to Vinnie that in a sense the girl was right: she will get more than tenpence for each rhyme in her notebook when her study is published. And more still if, as she hopes, Janet Elliot in London and Marilyn Krinney in New York agree to print a selection of her rhymes as a children’s book; negotiations for this project are already underway. And what would her Marxist friend say to that? Depending on his mood, which is highly unstable, he might say either “Well, we all have to live” or “Capitalist bitch.”