“Rabbits on walls?” I held up my fingers in profile as if I held them before a candle flame, and wiggled the “ears.” “Here’s a rabbit, here’s a wolf, here’s a crocodile.” “Of course,” said Agatha.
And we were at the desk. Quiet music drifted about us. Somewhere behind the walls, there was a waterfall of machinery flowing softly. As we arrived at the desk, the lighting changed to make us look warmer, happier, though we were still cold.
All about us in niches and cases, and hung from ceilings on wires and strings were puppets and marionettes, and Balinese kite-bamboo-translucent dolls which, held to the moonlight, might acrobat your most secret nightmares or dreams. In passing, the breeze set up by our bodies stirred the various hung souls on their gibbets. It was like an immense lynching on a holiday at some English crossroads four hundred years before.
You see? I know my history. Agatha blinked about with disbelief and then some touch of awe and finally disgust. “Well, if that’s what they are, let’s go.”
“Tush,” said Father.
“Well,” she protested, “you gave me one of those dumb things with strings two years ago and the strings were in a zillion knots by dinnertime. I threw the whole thing out the window.”
“Patience,” said Father.
“We shall see what we can do to eliminate the strings.”
The man behind the desk had spoken.
We all turned to give him our regard.
Rather like a funeral-parlor man, he had the cleverness not to smile. Children are put off by older people who smile too much. They smell a catch, right off.
Unsmiling, but not gloomy or pontifical, the man said, “Guido Fantoccini, at your service. Here’s how we do it, Miss Agatha Simmons, aged eleven.”
Now there was a really fine touch.
He knew that Agatha was only ten. Add a year to that, and you’re halfway home. Agatha grew an inch. The man went on:
“There.” And he placed a golden key in Agatha’s hand. “To wind them up instead of strings?” “To wind them up.” The man nodded. “Pshaw!” said Agatha. Which was her polite form of “rabbit pellets.”
“God’s truth. Here is the key to your Do-it-Yourself, Select Only the Best, Electrical Grandmother. Every morning you wind her up. Every night you let her run down. You’re in charge. You are guardian of the Key.”
He pressed the object in her palm where she looked at it suspiciously.
I watched him. He gave me a side wink which said, well, no … but aren’t keys fun?
I winked back before she lifted her head.
“Where does this fit?”
“You’ll see when the time comes. In the middle of her stomach, perhaps, or up her left nostril or in her right ear.”
That was good for a smile as the man arose.
“This way, please. Step light. Onto the moving stream. Walk on the water, please. Yes. There.” He helped to float us. We stepped from rug that was forever frozen onto rug that whispered by.
It was a most agreeable river which floated us along on a green spread of carpeting that rolled forever through halls and into wonderfully secret dim caverns where voices echoed back our own breathing or sang like Oracles to our questions.
“Listen,” said the salesman, “the voices of all kinds of women. Weigh and find just the right one … !”
And listen we did, to all the high, low, soft, loud, in-between, half-scolding, half-affectionate voices saved over from times before we were born.
And behind us, Agatha tread backward, always fighting the river, never catching up, never with us, holding off.
“Speak,” said the salesman. “Yell.”
And speak and yell we did.
“Hello. You there! This is Timothy, hi!”
“What shall I say!” I shouted. “Help!”
Agatha walked backward, mouth tight.
Father took her hand. She cried out.
“Let go! No, no! I won’t have my voice used! I won’t!”
“Excellent.” The salesman touched three dials on a small machine he held in his hand.
On the side of the small machine we saw three oscillograph patterns mix, blend, and repeat our cries.
The salesman touched another dial and we heard our voices fly off amidst the Delphic caves to hang upside down, to cluster, to beat words all about, to shriek, and the salesman itched another knob to add, perhaps, a touch of this or a pinch of that, a breath of mother’s voice, all unbeknownst, or a splice of father’s outrage at the morning’s paper or his peaceable one-drink voice at dusk. Whatever it was the salesman did, whispers danced all about us like frantic vinegar gnats, fizzed by lightning, settling round until at last a final switch was pushed and a voice spoke free of a far electronic deep:
“Nefertiti,” it said. Timothy froze. I froze. Agatha stopped treading water. “Nefertiti?” asked Tim. “What does that mean?” demanded Agatha.
“I know.”
The salesman nodded me to tell.
“Nefertiti,” I whispered, “is Egyptian for The Beautiful One Is Here.”
“The Beautiful One Is Here,” repeated Timothy.
“Nefer,” said Agatha, “titi.”
And we all turned to stare into that soft twilight, that deep far place from which the good warm soft voice came.
And she was indeed there.
And, by her voice, she was beautiful …
That was it.
That was, at least, the most of it.
The voice seemed more important than all the rest.
Not that we didn’t argue about weights and measures:
She should not be bony to cut us to the quick, nor so fat we might sink out of sight when she squeezed us.
Her hand pressed to ours, or brushing our brow in the middle of sick-fever nights, must not be marble-cold, dreadful, or oven-hot, oppressive, but somewhere between. The nice temperature of a baby-chick held in the hand after a long night’s sleep and just plucked from beneath a contemplative hen; that, that was it.
Oh, we were great ones for detail. We fought and argued and cried, and Timothy won on the color of her eyes, for reasons to be known later.
Grandmother’s hair? Agatha, with girl’s ideas, though reluctantly given, she was in charge of that.
We let her choose from a thousand harp strands hung in filamentary tapestries like varieties of rain we ran amongst. Agatha did not run happily, but seeing we boys would mess things in tangles, she told us to move aside.
And so the bargain shopping through the dime-store inventories and the Tiffany extensions of the Ben Franklin Electric Storm Machine and Fantoccini Pantomime Company was done.
And the always flowing river ran its tide to an end and deposited us all on a far shore in the late day …
It was very clever of the Fantoccini people, after that. How?
They made us wait.
They knew we were not won over. Not completely, no, nor half completely.
Especially Agatha, who turned her face to her wall and saw sorrow there and put her hand out again and again to touch it. We found her fingernail marks on the wallpaper each morning, in strange little silhouettes, half beauty, half nightmare. Some could be erased with a breath, like ice flowers on a winter pane. Some could not be rubbed out with a washcloth, no matter how hard you tried.
And meanwhile, they made us wait.
So we fretted out June.
So we sat around July.
So we groused through August and then on August 29, “I have this feeling,” said Timothy, and we all went out after breakfast to sit on the lawn.
Perhaps we had smelled something on Father’s conversation the previous night, or caught some special furtive glance at the sky or the freeway Rapped briefly and then lost in his gaze. Or perhaps it was merely the way the wind blew the ghost curtains out over our beds, making pale messages all night.
For suddenly there we were in the middle of the grass, Timothy and I, with Agatha, pretending no curiosity, up on the porch, hidden behind the potted geraniums.
We gave her no notice. We knew that if we acknowledged her presence, she would flee, so we sat and watched the sky where nothing moved but birds and highflown jets, and watched the freeway where a thousand cars might suddenly deliver forth our Special Gift … but … nothing.
At noon we chewed grass and lay low …
At one o’clock, Timothy blinked his eyes.
And then, with incredible precision, it happened.
It was as if the Fantoccini people knew our surface tension.
All children are water-striders. We skate along the top skin of the pond each day, always threatening to break through, sink, vanish beyond recall, into ourselves.
Well, as if knowing our long wait must absolutely end within one minute! this second ! no more, God, forget it!
At that instant, I repeat, the clouds above our house opened wide and let forth a helicopter like Apollo driving his chariot across mythological skies.
And the Apollo machine swam down on its own summer breeze, wafting hot winds to cool, reweaving our hair, smartening our eyebrows, applauding our pant legs against our shins, making a flag of Agatha’s hair on the porch and thus settled like a vast frenzied hibiscus on our lawn, the helicopter slid wide a bottom drawer and deposited upon the grass a parcel of largish
size, no sooner having laid same then the vehicle, with not so much as a god bless or farewell, sank straight up, disturbed the calm air with a mad ten thousand flourishes and then, like a skyborne dervish, tilted and fell off to be mad some other place.
Timothy and I stood riven for a long moment looking at the packing case, and then we saw the crowbar taped to the top of the raw pine lid and seized it and began to pry and creak and squeal the boards off, one by one, and as we did this I saw
