An American Childhood - Annie Dillard [74]
The steps landed between and behind two small ordinary Pittsburgh brick houses; a walkway sloped down into the daylight of Dallas Avenue, where buses ran. If I stood on Dallas Avenue waiting for the bus to art class and looked across the street at the corner, by squinting down across the rows of sycamores at St. Bede’s I could make out our first house. There it was on the farthest visible corner, painted white again, and there were the Lombardy poplars behind it, next to the alley. Down that now leafy street Jo Ann Sheehy had skated, and I had run from the nuns and run from the man whose windshield we hit with a snowball. There were the maple trees Henry planted when Amy and I were born.
Too old to play on the steps, instead I dreamed about them—how I dreamed about them!—a hundred steep steps dark as a chute. Fuzzy staghorn sumac poked their cold pipe rails. I dreamed about the blackened soil and frozen candy wrappers on the dizzying cliff they spanned. I dreamed the steps let me down in the wrong place. I dreamed the steps swayed underfoot, and rose, and tilted me over the ocean. I dreamed I couldn’t find the steps.
That first spring our family walked out together, as we had not done for many years, to see the Memorial Day parade pass down Dallas Avenue. Our neighbors did, too; once a year the pale families emerged from their stone houses and climbed stiffly down the Glen Arden steps to watch the Memorial Day parade.
Now our family was seeing the once familiar parade from the other side of the street. A dozen bands passed, and the brass horns wagged from side to side in time. The kids from the big all-black high school came bopping and tossing batons. I felt the low drumbeats in my breastbone. More marching bands passed, then shuffling ranks of men, then children, in uniforms. Horses, of all things, walked by or skittered, backing the crowd. Then, to everyone’s boredom, open cars drove by; it was over. Loose children on bikes, mad with excitement, rode squiggles and loops at the parade’s rear, like tails on a kite. We stayed to hear the music wind away up toward the cemetery.
When the parade had passed, the people from the two sides of Dallas Avenue were left looking at each other. There were our former neighbors. Mother crossed over and talked to some of them. There were some of my earliest friends, altered, and my dear old friend Cathy Lindsey, whom I had already met up with again in our big public art classes; we always sat together. Now we waved across Dallas Avenue. The Sheehy women were there: Jo Ann in pink makeup, and her mother listless in a wide housedress, holding some sort of baby. The nice Fahey boys weren’t there; they had moved. Father and I saw the polio boy who had worn such a tall shoe; now, miraculously, he had grown almost all the way up and had two equally long, good legs. He never knew us, so we didn’t wave.
People were scattering. The Glen Arden families wordlessly climbed back up the thirty cement steps, and burst out like dead souls on another full scene enacted on a higher plane. They looked around strangely from between the two high houses, got their bearings so that the highest circle of Glen Arden Drive seemed like the very horizon, glided to their own houses, and closed their doors again.
SINCE WE HAD MOVED, my reading had taken a new turn.
Books wandered in and out of my hands, as they had always done, but now most of them had a common theme. This new theme was the source of imagination at its most private—never mentioned, rarely even brought to consciousness. It was, essentially, a time, and a series of places, to which I returned nightly. So also must thousands, or millions, of us who grew up in the 1950s, reading what came to hand. What came to hand in those years were books about the past war: the war in England, France, Belgium, Norway, Italy, Greece; the war in Africa; the war in the Pacific, in Guam,