“Am I expected to guess?” she asked, never removing her gaze from the bijou dangling from its fragile gold chain. “Well? Am I supposed to tell you why you are here? What it is you want?”
She didn’t know, she couldn’t, and suddenly I didn’t want her to. I said: “I like to tap-dance.”
For an instant her attention was diverted from the sparkling new toy.
“I want to be a tap dancer. I want to run away. I want to go to Hollywood and be in the movies.” There was some truth in this; running away to Hollywood was high on my list of escape-fantasies. But that wasn’t what I’d decided not to tell her, after all.
“Well,” she drawled. “You sure are pretty enough to be in picture shows. Prettier than any boy ought to be.”
So she did know. I heard myself shouting: “Yes! Yes! That’s it!”
“That’s what? And stop hollering. I’m not deaf.”
“I don’t want to be a boy. I want to be a girl.”
It began as a peculiar noise, a strangled gurgling far back in her throat that bubbled into laughter. Her tiny lips stretched and widened; drunken laughter spilled out of her mouth like vomit, and it seemed to be spurting all over me—laughter that sounded like vomit smells.
“Please, please. Mrs. Ferguson, you don’t understand. I’m very worried. I’m worried all the time. There’s something wrong. Please. You’ve got to understand.”
She went on rocking with laughter and her rocking chair rocked with her.
Then I said: “You are stupid. Dumb and stupid.” And I tried to grab the necklace away from her.
The laughter stopped as though she had been struck by lightning; a storm overtook her face, total fury. Yet when she spoke her voice was soft and hissing and serpentine: “You don’t know what you want, boy. I’ll show you what you want. Look at me, boy. Look here. I’ll show you what you want.”
“Please. I don’t want anything.”
“Open your eyes, boy.”
Somewhere in the house a baby was crying.
“Look at me, boy. Look here.”
What she wanted me to look at was the yellow stone. She was holding it above her head, and slightly swinging it. It seemed to have gathered up all the light in the room, accumulated a devastating brilliance that plunged everything else into blackness. Swing, spin, dazzle, dazzle.
“I hear a baby crying.”
“That’s you you hear.”
“Stupid woman. Stupid. Stupid.”
“Look here, boy.”
Spindazzlespinspindazzledazzledazzle.
IT WAS STILL DAYLIGHT, and it was still Sunday, and here I was back in the Garden District, standing in front of my house. I don’t know how I got there. Someone must have brought me, but I don’t know who; my last memory was the noise of Mrs. Ferguson’s laughter returning.
Of course, a huge commotion was made over the missing necklace. The police were not called, but the whole household was upside down for days; not an inch was left unsearched. My grandmother was very upset. But even if the necklace had been of high value, a jewel that could have been sold and assured her of comfort the rest of her life, I still would not have accused Mrs. Ferguson. For if I did, she might reveal what I’d told her, the thing I never told anyone again, not ever.
Finally it was decided that a thief had stolen into the house and taken the necklace while my grandmother slept. Well, that was the truth. Everyone was relieved when my grandmother concluded her visit and returned to Florida. It was hoped that the whole sad affair of the missing jewel would soon be forgotten.
But it was not forgotten. Forty-four years evaporated, and it was not forgotten. I became a middle-aged man, riddled with quirks and quaint notions. My grandmother died, still sane and sound of mind despite her great age.
A cousin called to inform me of her death, and to ask when I would be arriving for the funeral; I said I’d let her know. I was ill with grief, inconsolable; and it was absurd, out of all proportion. My grandmother was not someone I had loved. Yet how I grieved! But I did not travel to the funeral, nor even send flowers. I stayed home and drank a quart of vodka.
I was very drunk, but I can remember answering the telephone and hearing my father identify himself. His old man’s voice trembled with more than the weight of years; he vented the pent-up wrath of a lifetime, and when I remained silent, he said: “You sonofabitch.
She died with your picture in her hand.” I said “I’m sorry,” and hung up. What was there to say? How could I explain that all through the years any mention of my grandmother, any letter from her or thought of her, evoked Mrs. Ferguson? Her laughter, her fury, the swinging, spinning yellow stone: spindazzledazzle.
The End
