Auntie, as we called her, took me to the local school for
pre-admittance diphtheria shots. I hadn't a clue what we were up to, so, properly dressed, I was taken through the town to stand at the end of a line made up of kids and their parents. The line lead up to a card table set before the school's red doors. A man in a white coat sat at the table, attended by a standing woman, dressed completely in white with an absurd little hat stuck on the top of her head. There was something fishy and possibly nasty about that pair. I saw that each child leaving the table was sobbing. That did it.
When I got to the table, without much as a word, I hauled off and socked the startled doctor, thinking it better to take the offensive rather than wait for some feeble explanation while they jabbed me. Needless to say, I was sent home, chastened and strapped down by lectures of compliance and threats as to what would happen if I repeated my performance. I got my shots the next day, hunkered down into silence by the rampant and obvious injustice of it all. Somehow though, I got the feeling that Auntie was very pleased with me.
Auntie was a tough old bird, someone mother had hired to take care of me. We all loved her. She was a Canadian widow of a sea captain with whom she had travelled the world. When she came to our family, she was well in her seventies - a stout, substantial woman who was blessed with a spirit that could cut to the essential. My parents' marriage was floundering, and they were soon to separate for the first time. But mother, in her distress and pre-occupation, had found someone so full of love that I - we - all felt cherished. I had long braids, something I had ambivalent feelings about as no other girl in the school had them. Getting me ready in the morning, Auntie would take me on her ample lap to brush my hair and plait it. We'd sit in the sun by the open window. She would hold me and tell me seafaring stories of places called England or Greece or Japan. When it came time to do other things, she made me feel special somehow by taking the hair from the hairbrush, balling it up and putting it on the warm window's ledge.
"The robins will come," she promised, "and they will use your hair to build their nests,"
Of course I felt special, would you?
Long after, when we had to let her go in the wake of the Depression, mother took me on the two-hour journey by foot, bus, ferry - two of them - and trolly car that it took to get to her one-roomed apartment on Staten Island. It was a mistake. I'd become a little snob and saw my old friend now grown old and living in a crowded room. She smelled old and musty, the way people do who need superheated rooms and don't move about anymore. The walls and tables were covered with photographs and memories, which I examined, while she offered us tea. The bathroom was shared and separate, down the hall, and this only served in my child's mind to heighten my sadness for my friend. I never saw her again. But she would still send us four children on Valentine's Day - as she had done when she lived with us - her homemade, cinnamon-hot, mouth-tingling, red lollypops formed in the shape of a heart.
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