In our apartment once more, I took the plush-toy eye from the paper bag and put it in the center of my freshly made bed, looking toward the pillows. I walked from one side of the bed to the other and back again, watching the eye, but it didn’t turn to follow me.
“Idiot,” I said, chastising myself for indulging in such a childish fear.
In the kitchen, I took a pitcher of lime Kool-Aid out of the refrigerator, poured a glassful, and sat at the table.
I thought about going to the community center and putting in four hours at the keyboard. School would start in less than two weeks, and after that my practice time would be limited to at most two hours in the late afternoon. Usually I couldn’t wait to get to the piano and see Mrs. O’Toole, but that day, I felt something big was happening right under my nose, something incredible, like on Christmas Eve when I still believed in Santa. Except that this was not all sparkly and hopeful and fun like Christmas; it was something closer to that old movie about voodoo in the city.
Except that this was for real. I couldn’t just switch it off.
On the Formica-topped dinette table, sweat beaded the drinking glass. The droplets of water on the upper part of it were clear, glimmering, like diamonds. The beads on the lower part of the glass, which still contained the lime drink, were as green as emeralds. They were neither diamonds nor emeralds, of course; they were just beads of water, but I couldn’t stop staring at them and thinking about jewels, about being rich, about how if I were rich, we wouldn’t have any problems. Mom wouldn’t have to work at Woolworth’s lunch counter. We could own a nightclub, and she could sing there as much as she wanted, and we could own a record company, too, and she could be as famous and happy as she deserved to be. We wouldn’t have to worry about Tilton trying to snatch me away from her, because we’d have expensive lawyers and bodyguards. We’d live in a big house on a hill somewhere, with lots of land around it and a high fence, and we’d be safe from everyone, everything, even riots and war and young punks who talked dirty to women they didn’t know.
After all these years, I vividly remember that sweating glass of Kool-Aid, the anxiety that plagued me, anxiety on the trembling edge of foreboding, too much for a boy of nine to handle, and the false hope of riches that, even if it had been fulfilled, would have solved nothing.
One of the best things about growing up is that, if you can learn from experience, you come to the realization that two things matter more than anything else, truth with a lowercase t and Truth with an uppercase T. You have to tell the truth, demand the truth from others, recognize lies and refute them; you’ve got to see the world as it is, not as you want it to be, not as others who wish to dominate you might say it is. Embracing truth frees you from false expectations, fruitless pursuits, disappointment, pointless anger, envy, despair. And the bigger kind of Truth, that life has meaning, is the surest source of happiness, because it allows you to recognize your true value and potential, encourages a humility that brings peace. Most important, the big-T Truth makes it possible for you to love others for who they are, always without consideration of what they might do for you, and only from such relationships arise those rare moments of pure joy that shine so bright in memory.
Little more than two months past my ninth birthday, I was many years short of understanding all of that. In our tenement kitchen, I daydreamed of diamonds and emeralds, wishing away all troubles and threats. When I finished the Kool-Aid, I washed the glass, dried it, put it away. I wiped the condensation from the dinette table. I went into the living room and stared at the TV. I didn’t turn it on, which I suppose might have been a small step toward a far-off maturity.
In my bedroom, the fabric eye lay on the mattress, still gazing at the pillows. I’d been foolish to think it might be animated by juju. There was nothing supernatural about it. It was just trash.
I didn’t return it to the paper bag, which lay on the floor, where earlier I’d dropped it. But I didn’t throw it away. Instead, I hesitated, picked it up, circled the bed, and opened my nightstand drawer, from which I withdrew a metal box with a hinged lid.