Andrea Dworkin - Ice And Fire

the closest neighbors. The adults, mostly the women, would sit

on chairs up by their doors, or sit on the steps up by the doors

talking and visiting and watching the children, and the children

of all the houses would converge in the street to play. If you

looked at it you would see dismal brick row houses all the

same at the top of two flights of cement steps out in the wea­

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ther. But if you were a child, you would see that the adults

were far away, and that the street stretched into a million

secret hidden places. There were parked cars to hide behind

and under and telephone poles, the occasional tree, secret

valleys at the bottoms of lawns, and the mysterious interiors of

other people’s houses across the way. And then the backs of

the houses made the world bigger, more incredible yet. There

were garages back there, a black asphalt back alley and back

doors and places to hang clothes on a line and a million places

to hide, garbage cans, garages half open, telephone poles,

strange dark dirty places, basements. Two blocks behind us in

the back there was a convent, a huge walled-in place all verdant

with great trees that hid everything: and so our neighborhood

turned gothic and spooky and we talked of children captured

and hidden inside: and witches. Outside there were maybe

twenty of us, all different ages but all children, boys and girls,

and we played day after day and night after night, well past

dark: hide-and-seek, Red Rover Red Rover, statue, jump rope,

hopscotch, giant steps, witch. One summer we took turns

holding our breath to thirty and then someone squeezed in our

stomachs and we passed out or got real dizzy. This was the

thing to do and we did it a million times. There were alleys

near one or two of the houses suddenly breaking into the brick

row and linking the back ways with the front street and we

ran through them: we ran all over, hiding, seeking, making up

new games. We divided into teams. We played giant steps. We

played Simon Says. Then the boys would play sports without

us, and everything would change. We would taunt them into

playing with us again, going back to the idyllic, all together,

running, screaming, laughing. The girls had dolls for when the

boys wouldn’t let us play and we washed their hair and set it

outside together on the steps. We played poker and canasta

and fish and old maid and gin rummy and strip poker. When

babies, we played in a sandbox, until it got too small and we

got too big. When bigger, we roller-skated. One girl got so big

she went out on a date: and we all sat on the steps across the

street and watched her come out in a funny white dress with a

red flower pinned on it and a funny-looking boy was with her.

We were listless that night, not knowing whether to play hide-

and-seek or statue. We told nasty stories about the girl in the

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white dress with the date and wouldn’t play with her sister

who was like us, not a teenager. Something was wrong. Statue

wasn’t fun and hide-and-seek got boring too. I watched my

house right across the street while the others watched the girl

on the date. Intermittently we played statue, bored. Someone

had to swing someone else around and then suddenly let them

go and however they landed was how they had to stay, like a

statue, and everyone had to guess what they were— like a

ballet dancer or the Statue of Liberty. Whoever guessed what

the statue was got to be turned around and be the new statue.

Sometimes just two people played and everybody else would

sit around and watch for any little movement and heckle and

guess what the person was being a statue of. We were mostly

girls by now, playing statue late at night. I watched my house

across the street because the doctor had come, the man in the

dark suit with the black bag and the dour expression and the

unpleasant voice who never spoke except to say something bad

and I had been sent outside, I had not wanted to leave the

house, I had been ordered to, all the lights were out in the

house, it was so dark, and it was late for them to let me out

but they had ordered me to go out and play, and have a good

time they said, and my mother was in the bedroom with the

door closed, and lying down I was sure, not able to move,

something called heart failure, something like not being able to

breathe, something that bordered on death, it had happened

before, I was a veteran, I sat on the steps watching the house

while the girl in the white dress stood being laughed at with

her date and I had thoughts about death that I already knew I

would remember all my life and someday write down: death is

someone I know, someone who is dressed exactly like the

doctor and carries the same black bag and comes at night and

is coming tonight to get mother, and then I saw him come,

pretending to be the doctor, and I thought well this is it she

will die tonight I know but the others don’t because they go on

dates or play statue and I’m more mature and so they don’t

know these things that I know because I live in a house where

death comes all the time, suddenly in the night, suddenly in the

day, suddenly in the middle of sleeping, suddenly in the middle

of a meal, there is death: mother is sick, we’ve called the doctor,

I know death is on the way.

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The streetlights lit up the street. The brick was red, even- at

night. The girl on the date had a white dress with a red corsage.

We sat across the street, near our favorite telephone pole for

hide-and-seek, and played statue on and off. I always had a

home out there, on the steps, behind the cars, near the telephone pole.

*

Inside the woman was dying. Outside we played witch.

The boys chased the girls over the whole block from front

to back. They tried to catch a girl. When they caught her they

put her in a wooden cage they had built or found and they

raised the cage up high on a telephone pole, miles and miles

above the ground, with rope, and they left her hanging there.

She was the witch. Then they let her down when they wanted

to. After she begged and screamed enough and they wanted to

play again or do something else.

You were supposed to want them to want to catch you.

They would all run after one girl and catch her and put her in

the cage and raise it up with the rope high, high on the telephone pole out in the back where the adults didn’t see. Then they would hold the cage in place, the girl inside it screaming,