your hands behind you and sometimes they would put tape
over your mouth. The game was to be the witch and have
them chase you and catch you and put you in a wooden cage
and tie your hands and hoist you up a telephone pole and tie
the rope so the cage would stay up high: you weren’t supposed
to want to be the witch but if you were a girl and running
there was nothing else to want because the game was for the
boys to chase you. Everyone else just stood around waiting
until the boys got bored and tired and let the witch down.
*
The horses were running as fast as they could, Roy Rogers
was sort of standing up on the wagon driving them on,
shouting go boy go faster faster, and you could see the horses
streaking by up and down the roughest mountain roads, the
fringes on his cowboy jacket were all swept back by the wind,
and he looked back over his shoulder as he sort of stood up and
shook the reins so the horses would go faster and shouted how
you doing back there do you like this you uppity little thing or
something like that with his grin from ear to ear like a smartass,
and instead of the covered part of a covered wagon there was
a wooden cage like maybe from a medicine show that had a
circus and transported animals and it was heaving over the
rough roads at the full speed of the horses with Roy making
them go faster and faster and up against the slats Dale Evans
was holding on, her face all dirty, imprisoned in the wooden
cage and saying she would never speak to him and he had
13
better let her go. She had been snotty to him and he had gotten
her in the cage and locked her in and taken off, making the
horses go faster and faster and she was screaming and
screaming for him to stop and saying she never would never
not as long as she lived and he was shouting back over his
shoulder as the hills flashed by and the horses’ manes stood up
on end from the wind and the fringe on his cowboy jacket
went the same direction as the horses’ manes and his gun and
holster were tied to his leg, had enough yet I’ll tame you you
little devil. Eventually she was tired and dirty and saw he was
stronger and she got quiet and loved him and he won. They
were in love then. Once she quieted down he slowed down the
horses and took her back to town, leaving her in the cage,
singing her a song. Back in town, all his friends, the Sons of
the Pioneers, got to see her come out of the cage, quiet, dirty,
and she got out of the cage, all the men knowing.
*
I had a cowgirl suit, a cowgirl hat, a gun, a holster. There was
nothing more important than being a cowboy, even though I
had to be a cowgirl because I had to wear a skirt, with fringes,
and a blouse, with fringes, and the cowgirl hat and the gun
and holster didn’t entirely make up for it. It was my favorite
thing to wear, even though we never did play cowboys and
Indians. It had more to do with wanting to be a gunslinger and
learning how to draw fast and shoot straight. I would practice
my draw for hours at a time but no one would go along with
me and have a gunfight. I would draw my gun on my father
and my brother, who would be wrestling and tickling on the
living room floor. There was vague disapproval of the gun in
the air and so I would shoot it outside and it would make a
huge noise and I would gleefully shoot round after round of
caps, a red paper that sort of exploded and burned. I had a
rifle too and boots. But it was the gun I loved, and Annie
Oakley. She wore a skirt and was a crack shot and once we
went to see her at a live show with Gene Autry. I wanted to be
her or Roy Rogers or the Lone Ranger, not Dale Evans, not
ever, not as long as I lived.
*
The wooden cage would hang from the telephone pole, hoisted
by a rope or a piece of clothesline. It would dangle there, the
14
before they put her in the cage. Sometimes they would tie her
hands. The wooden cage hung over the black asphalt lined by
garages, some open, some not, and garbage cans, all the fathers
at work, all the mothers inside the houses or in the front on
the steps visiting. It would be desolate on the asphalt, boys all
huddled around the cage with the one caught girl, and slowly
girls converging back there from all the directions they had
run in, some coming back from a long way away, having run
and hidden, run to the very edges of the boundaries of our
street or having run up and down the back ways and in and
out of garages, avoiding boys, hiding from them, and then
enough time would pass, and they would dare to drift back,
lonely perhaps, thinking enough time had gone by that
someone else had been caught or the game was over, and there
would always be the one girl surrounded by boys being pushed
into the cage and the cage being hoisted off the ground, or the
cage would already be tied up there. And the boys would stand
under it, watching it, watching her, and the other girls would
stay far away, around the edges, each alone, afraid to get too
close, afraid perhaps that the boys would grab them and do
something to them, also lonely, also left out. It was our saddest
game. It never ended right.
*
lt would begin in a blaze of excitement. Someone would say
let’s play witch. Everyone’s eyes would look wildly around,
scanning the street for where the adults were. We were
accomplices in this game. We all knew not to tell. No one ever
talked about this game or mentioned it any other time than
when we were going to play. The boys would get together and
count to ten fast because it was a ferocious game: the chase
was fierce and fast and it had to be close and there had to be
the excitement of being almost caught or having a hard time
getting away and they had to be able to see you and get you. It
wasn’t a patient game like hide-and-seek. It was a feverish
game, and it would begin at a fever pitch of the boys chasing
and you running as hard and as fast as you could but you
wanted to keep them after you as much as you didn’t want to
be caught so you would have to slow down to stay in sight,
and they would divide up going in twos and threes after one
15
girl or another and they would hunt someone down but if she
wasn’t the one they wanted they would pretend not to see her
finally hiding or they would suddenly turn and run after
someone else or run in another direction pretending to run
after someone else and in the end they would all have circled
the same girl, whoever they had decided on, and they would
herd her from wherever they had caught her, sometimes far
away from the wooden cage, and push her and shove her until
they got her to the telephone pole with the wooden cage. Once
they caught her it was against the rules for her not to go with
them anyway. The game slowed down after the first few
minutes and each girl was running on her own figuring out,
independent of what the boys had planned, whether she wanted
to be caught or not: and what to do to get caught or not to get
caught: and did the boys want her anyway? It became a game
of slow loneliness, of staggering solitude: breathless, dizzy, she
would stop running in a fever and turn to see no one chasing,
no one following. Had she won, outsmarted them, outrun
them, or had she lost, they had never really been after her
anyway. She might hide, or stalk the boys, dazzle them by
showing herself, and then they would chase her and she would
lose them again or hadn’t they really tried at all? Or she would
see one in the distance, maybe half a block away, and he didn’t
see her, or did he, and she would start running and running
and congratulate herself on getting away, or had she? Then a
long time would go by and she would get bored and tired and
want the game to be over and wonder where everybody was
and make her way back to the starting point and no one would
be there so she would make her way to the back alley and the
telephone pole, but from far away, toward it but not to it, not
directly walk up to it, always stay far away from it and the
boys, safe, and see the boys huddling around the cage and try
to see who was in it and hear the screams and watch the cage
go up, two or three boys hoisting it while the rest stood under
it and watched, and you could never see who it was. Later
when they let her down you could see. They would untie her
hands and walk away and she would be left there and the
scattered ring of lonely girls would watch. She was the witch.
No one talked to her at least the rest of the day.
♦
1 6
The convent gave us the right atmosphere. We never saw anything except the thick stone walls, and they were thick, not brick or cement, but huge stones like something medieval,
black and dark gray with moss and other hanging things and
shadows falling like God over the stones: and above the high
walls thick leafy green trees all casting shadows and it seemed
like no sky or light could ever get through them, in or out. It
was completely silent. We never saw anything or heard anything. No door ever opened or closed. No Latin poured out, no bells chimed, no music pierced the early dawn or night.
The wooden cage was hoisted in the back alley closest to the
convent, and you could see it from there, hanging over the
tops of the houses, a place of gothic mystery, Catholic, eerie.
From the telephone pole, hoisted up, inside the wooden cage,
you were raised above the stone walls and the ghastly trees:
and with your hands tied there you were the witch: and the
Catholics could see you.
They had things called nuns, women dressed all in black, all
covered up, and we thought they walked around in twos and
never said a word and had their heads bowed and shaved and
their hands together in prayer. But we didn’t know. We weren’t
supposed to go too near it, the convent, and we were afraid of
disappearing in there for life, because once you went in you
could never come out. There were ghosts there too. We didn’t
know if anyone in there was really alive. When you saw the
top of the convent and the menacing trees above the backs of
the row houses and the wooden cage with a slight figure inside
it hoisted high on the telephone pole and tied there with a rope
and the afternoon began to fade and it got dusky or cloudy
and there were just the silhouettes of things, the starkness of
the cage and the figure in it, the tautness of the rope, the city
ugliness, barren, of the telephone pole, all against a sky that
had begun to lose light, reigned over by old European stones
and impenetrable trees, you knew you were near something
old, chill, something you knew but didn’t know: something
God was supposed to protect you from: something on the edge
of your memory, but not your memory. When it got late in the
day or the sky darkened with clouds or oncoming rain, the
silhouettes were awful drawings of something you had seen
before: maybe in a book: somewhere: and you stood completely
17
still and watched and prayed for the wooden cage to come
down, for the figure in it to disappear, not be there, that slight
figure, for the convent to go away, to be somewhere else: and
especially for the dread boys, the crowd, to notice the coming
dark and be afraid of what they had done. We were overcome
watching: the great shadow of the convent and its thick trees,
its cold walls of stone, and the great imposition of the wooden
cage and the caged figure on the darkening sky. It was eerie
and unhappy: and one was drawn and repelled: drawn to the
convent and the cage, wanting to run inside the house.
We were all supposed to stay away from Catholics. The
convent represented their strangeness and malice: the threat of
their ghostly superstitions. A holy ghost lived there and they
drank blood and ate cookies and kneeled down. They wanted
all the children: and at night you could disappear into those
walls and no one would ever see you again. Standing outside
the great stone thing, even in broad daylight, even with traffic
all around, because one side of the convent was right on a very
big street at a very big intersection, a child was frightened of
the unscalable cold stone and the height of it. We could never
find a way in or out and the walls were too high to climb. I
wanted to see it and go into it but I was afraid even to stand
near it. Once another girl and I stood on that street corner for
hours collecting money for a charity and if you got enough
money you got to go to a special dinner in a restaurant and I
just thought about the traffic, how regular it was, and the sun,
how bright it was, the people walking on the street, how they
looked and dressed, because behind me was the penetrating
silence of those stone walls and I was cold and afraid. I could
feel it behind my back and I could feel the cold stones there
and I could feel the giant height of the wall and I could feel the
reaching coolness of the shadows from the great trees. Then a
car stopped to give us money after we had been there for hours
and this girl I was with went up to the car and then she got
real frightened and wouldn’t say what the man said to her and
said we had to go home right away and was really scared and
since it was right next to the convent I knew it was something
really bad so we went right home and she talked to her mother
who talked to my mother and I kept asking what had happened
and what the man had done to her. Finally my mother said he
18
asked her to get in the car with him. It was very terrible and
ominous to get into the car. The air was heavy with warning
and fear and my own inestimable incomprehension. There was
this edging of my fear away from the convent t
o the man in
the car and to getting into a car. I thought he must be Catholic.
The girl would never speak of it or answer anything I asked.
My mother said never to say anything about it. I asked if he
had hurt her. My mother said: he didn’t get the chance.
*
There were Jewish blocks and Catholic blocks and black
blocks. We were supposed to stay off the black blocks, though
it was never put that way. We were always just showed how
to walk, down which streets, and told where not to go, which
streets. The streets we weren’t supposed to go on just had that
in common: black faces, black children. The Catholic streets
and the Jewish streets were all inside the same area, alternating,
no mixing. But I liked to go where I wasn’t supposed to, and I
often walked home alone down the Catholic streets, because
no one could tell by just looking at me exactly. I would make
new routes for myself down streets my friends didn’t go on.
Sometimes I went down black streets, because I wanted to.
Then, getting closer to the one central elementary school,
where all kinds of children converged from every direction,
there were blocks that we all had to walk down because we
were all going to the same place and it was just a fact that no
matter who lived there we all had to walk by or through,
however timidly.
Our street was bounded on one end, the one going to school,
by a busy street with lots of cars and across that street was a
Catholic block, Polish. We were supposed to walk up half a
block before crossing that busy street and continue going
toward school on a Jewish block, and usually I did. But coming
home I would want to walk down the Catholic block because
it was different and it seemed more direct. I knew I shouldn’t
but I didn’t exactly know why I shouldn’t except that it did
seep in that they were different from us and we weren’t
supposed to marry them. I wasn’t even ten yet because I was
ten when we moved away.
I had a friend on that block, Joe, and we would say hello
and talk and say shy things to each other. Their houses were
19
different, all brick row houses, but right on the sidewalks, no