“No, little mouse,” my grandmother said. “You will see her very soon. Now let’s put your things away.”
She took a quick inventory of the contents of the valise. Just before she said it, I knew she was going to say “Oh la la,” an interjection I always enjoyed. She put everything but the buckaroo vest in the chest of drawers and said that we would get some things at Alexander’s when we went to buy me a Matchbox car with all that dirty money.
I asked her what I should do about the vest. She told me I should put it on because she had a presentiment that we might need to be cowboys today, and if I wore the vest it would establish a mood.
“This will be our inspiration,” she said, the first time I can remember having heard the word used. “I am inspired.”
She went into her bedroom, and when she came back she was wearing a Pierre Cardin shearling “cowboy coat” and a pair of Ferragamo “cowboy shoes” with chased-silver clasps on their stacked heels. She said that I should put the valise in the closet, but I ended up leaving it just outside the closet door. On the other side, in the hatbox, the masked Robber and his confederates bided their time.
*
I was known (by me) as the Cheyenne Kid. My sidekick or (as she put it) “kickside” styled herself Tumblesweed Bill. Tumblesweed Bill had curious ideas about how cowboys talked, what they did, and the cowboy way of life. Her cowboy accent sounded like Buckwheat on The Little Rascals. Her cowboy walk looked like a sailor hornpipe performed in slow motion. She had assimilated the notion that cowpoke was another word for cowboy, and as we trotted to the bus from the Skyview to Fordham Road and Grand Concourse, she did a lot of poking among our imaginary herd with an invisible picador’s lance (which she called an “arpoon”).
The Cheyenne Kid and Tumblesweed Bill went to Alexander’s and bought T-shirts, underpants and a pair of shorts, and a Matchbox car (a Land Rover like they drove on Daktari, brown plastic luggage packed on its roof). Then Cheyenne and his kickside came home and baked a tarte tatin. As always when she was in this kind of mood, the time passed swiftly. I forgot to worry about my mother for long stretches of the afternoon.*
The blue over New Jersey deepened and then faded. My grandfather was still at the office. Earlier there had been talk about what he might want for his supper when he got home, but when Bill and Cheyenne ate an entire tarte tatin, the question of the night’s menu lost its urgency. Tumblesweed Bill, to my dismay, seemed to vanish along with the daylight and my grandmother’s half of the pie. Her voice darkened. Her eyes went sad. A new mood was gathering the folds of its cloak around her. I had seen it happen before.
“Whatcha wanta do now, Bill?” I tried.
My grandmother didn’t reply but at first seemed to be considering the possible responses. After a moment she began to pinch and press at a certain spot at the base of her skull. She got up from the table, and from the expression on her face you would have said that she had just delivered herself of an opinion in the matter of what we ought to do next, even though she had said nothing at all. I had seen that happen before, too. She stood in the middle of the kitchen frowning, as if she had forgotten why she stood up. She opened a drawer, then another. She started rooting around until she found a tin of her Wintermans cigarillos. She clasped the tin in both hands and made a grateful sound but then once again seemed to lose track of her intentions. She laid the tin of Wintermans against the place at the back of her neck.
“Mamie?” I said.
I was surprised by how shaky and small my voice sounded. I was not afraid of my grandmother, exactly; I was never afraid of her except at those times when she was actively trying to scare me. I felt abandoned by her, or by my faithful kickside, and as the sky darkened outside the windows and night came down, I started to think about the puppets again. I did not want to think about the puppets or to be afraid of them, but before long it would be time for bed and already, in the imagined dark of their closet, I could see the shine on their lidless glass eyes. I could hear their voices whispering that my mother was dead. Before she had sent me out to play that morning, my mother had offered to tie my sneakers for me, even though she knew I could tie them myself. At the time I had rebuffed her, but now her offer struck me as ominous. Knowing that she was about to die, she had wanted only to tie her little boy’s shoes for him one last time. And I had refused her!
“I want to hear a story,” I said to my grandmother. I saw that I had surprised her; I had surprised myself. For my grandmother, enticing a story from the deck of fortune-telling cards was not like baking, going to the movies, or playing piquet. Her stories were like moods or fevers: They came over her.
“You want to hear a story,” my grandmother said.
I nodded. In fact, I didn’t want to hear a story at all. Between my mother’s operation and the half-intelligible rustlings from the closet, I had plenty to unsettle me already. She looked doubtful, and I hoped fiercely that she was going to decline, but she just looked at me, rubbing the tin of Wintermans against her nape. I decided to issue a retraction, but it got stuck in my throat and I could not seem to dislodge it.
“Little mouse,” my grandmother said. “Don’t cry.” She came to me, put a hand on top of my head, and tilted my face to hers. The hand slid down to caress my cheek. “I know you are worried, but don’t worry. All right?”
“Yeah.”
“Yes?”
“Yes.”
“Go. Go and get the cards.”
I went very slowly to find the tin of almond kisses and returned to the kitchen more slowly still. By the time I got back, I had managed to console myself with the idea that at least now my grandmother would not be abandoning me, which, of course, I now see, must have been the impulse behind my asking for a story in the first place. When she acted out the parts and did all the different voices, it would be like a continuation of her turn as Tumblesweed Bill. And for however long it lasted, the story would prolong the hours until I was sent to bed, and the voices she gave to her characters would drown out the whisperings and insinuations from the hatbox in the closet.
I gave the fortune-telling cards to my grandmother and sat down across the table from her. I watched her compose herself around the deck of cards, as if it held a quantity of something rare and important. Our eyes met, and then with a nod she broke open the deck and decanted its contents in a torrent from one hand to the other. The deck of cards became a wide elastic band that she stretched and snapped and stretched again. She riffled the cards with her thumbs and sprang them with a flourish. Then she set the deck on the table in front of me. I cut it. I cut it again. I reached for the topmost card.
Abruptly, she covered my hand with hers. Her wedding ring struck my knuckles and I cried out.
“No,” she said. “Never mind.”
I looked up, my fingers stinging, feeling reprimanded. Her cheeks were wet with tears. I could not remember having seen my grandmother cry. For some reason the sight displeased me. “Do you have a migraine?”
She shook her head. She opened her arms, and with a powerful reluctance I got up and took a step in her direction. She grabbed me and pulled me to her chest. My grandmother’s embrace was something implacable and impersonal. It was like an undertow or the impact of a concrete sidewalk. Her amber miasma of Chanel was too much, a mouthful of honey.
“You’re choking me!” I said.
“Oh!” She let go. “I’m sorry!”
She was smiling. There was something about her smile and the flush in her cheeks that made me feel I had done something unforgivable. Her hand went to the place on the back of her neck.