grew louder and brighter, singing and laughing, but Edith paid them no more and perhaps less attention than she paid to the trilling of late-afternoon birdsong in the treetops. She was wondering where, if they were to show up today and ask her for help, she could build a snug little home for the Borrowers. She had been reading the book about the tiny family that lived under the grandfather clock and furnished their home with items they borrowed from the humans to her mother at bedtime. The Borrowers seemed to like to be on the inside of houses. But perhaps she could persuade them to try a cozy woodland burrow like Mole’s home in Wind in the Willows. Or maybe like Rabbit’s hole in Winnie-the-Pooh—where tubby Winnie got stuck for days after having too much honey for his tea. Winnie-the-Poohwas one of Kitt’s favorite books, and as soon as Edith was old enough to be read to, her mother had read it to her so often that Edith had learned it all by heart by the time she was four and a half, before she really knew how to read. Kitt and Arthur had been surprised and pleased when she “read” them the story about falling into the Heffalump trap. They never suspected she had memorized the whole story. Now, of course, she really could read, although she’d only just finished first grade. In school she had pretended that, like most of the other children, she was just learning how. After she’d polished off the boring Dick and Jane and Spot story, she’d usually sneak one of her own books out of her bookbag during “quiet reading.” She was afraid she would get in trouble if her teacher saw that she was reading the wrong book.
The big stump of an old ash tree by the barn would be perfect for the Borrowers. Its thick roots had lots of crevices and nooks. If she furnished it nicely with things she stole from the house . . . and she began to review the contents of the kitchen in her mind. Matchboxes would make nice beds, with Kleenex for covers. Tin cans for tables. Maybe caps from whiskey bottles for chairs.
Her musings about the Borrowers were interrupted when she heard Uncle Edwin start to play the guitar chords for “What Shall We Do with the Drunken Sailor?” That meant Arthur had gone to get Marcus up from his nap. “Drunken Sailor” was Marcus’s dancing song. Really it was more of a lurching and swaying song, since not-yet-three-year-old Marcus was none too steady on his feet, even when they were both on the ground, and he didn’t know how to hop, skip, or twirl as Edith could. Edith’s dancing song was “Shebeg Shemore”—an Irish song that Arthur said was about two fairy armies having a battle, though he didn’t know any words for it. And Edwin said if there were words, they’d be in Gaelic and anyway he thought the song was really about butterflies. When Arthur played her song on his fiddle, she put on her pink tutu and the ballet slippers that Kitt bought her last spring after they went to a matinee of the New York City Ballet. She twirled on her toes with her arms gracefully held over her head, pretending that she was the tiny ballerina inside her Russian grandmother’s precious porcelain egg. Baba had brought the fragile handpainted egg all the way from her childhood home in Saint Petersburg. (Whenever that city was mentioned, Arthur said it was properly called Leningrad.)
Although she’d finished crying, Edith didn’t feel a bit like dancing. Sliding off the rock onto the grass, she laced her fingers together so that her pointers made a steeple. Softly she intoned, “Here is the church and here is the steeple.” The disappointingly unmusical blade of grass was still between the church doors of her thumbs. She softened her breath and held her thumbs close to her lips so that her gentle blowing warmed and tickled the people inside. She was lying on the grass by the Crying Rock on her stomach now, propped up on her elbows and not minding that her blue-checked dress got pulled up and that her bottom under her underpants felt pink and pebbled from sitting on the granite for such a long time. She whispered to the little people inside the church of her palms and heard them singing softly a let-us-out song with a tune like “Danny Boy” that Kitt had made up for her when she taught her the finger play. Kitt could make up a poem without trying at all.
Oh little friend
We’re calling on your sympathy
We’re stuck inside
on such a lovely day
Please let us out
so we can, as we’re meant to be,
Be free to roam
the world and free to play.
Then, louder, Edith proclaimed, “Open the door and out come the people!” She opened the thumbdoors. Rushing out of the little church came eight or nine Wood Elves, magical folk who sometimes let her see them. Today the minute figures scurried around, and they began loading two little boats, about the size and shape of walnut shells, that sat in a sparkling stream she suddenly spotted in the glade beneath her face.
All the tiny elves, no taller than Edith’s fingernails, were dressed in old-fashioned clothes of velvety brown and gossamer green. A father elf and his little girl were taking leave of the others; the girl was helped by her father into the first of the boats. He gave her a paddle the size of a chicken’s pin feather. The second boat was tethered to the first and the father now finished securing the sacks and boxes with which it was filled. Perhaps those contained their food and gear for the journey. The little girl jumped out of the boat again and ran up the bank to hug a round, comfortable-looking Granny elf, who wiped away tears with a cobweb hanky. They were so small that Edith had to have her nose right in the grass to see them.
So Marcus’s wailing startled Edith, and at once the Wood Elves and their gear vanished without a trace. Kitt was looming over her, tall and barefoot. Her pregnant belly stretched her turquoise Mexican skirt so it looked like a pumpkin was underneath it. Sobbing and flailing, Marcus hung askew from his mother’s pincer-like grip on his right shoulder. Twin reflections of the sinking sun shone in her round spectacles.
Kitt was in the state of mind she referred to, when in good spirits, as “high dudgeon.” She addressed Edith. “Since it appears that you plan to spend the rest of your life posed on this rock like the girl on the White Rock soda bottle,”—here she gave the dangling Marcus a shake in the rock’s direction—“kindly be so good as to take this horrid changeling before I am forced to beat him to a pulp.”
It was so unfair. Edith was lying on the grass: how could she look like the White Rock girl? And she hated hearing “beat him to a pulp,” which was one of Kitt’s favorite phrases. It conjured up mental images that made her stomach flop over in her belly. Instead of thinking about it, she imagined she was wrapped in an invisible shield like the one in the television ad for Colgate toothpaste. It was a clear barrier that stopped germs and decay from rotting your teeth. In the advertisement, various objects thrown at the people behind the shield bounced back without hurting them.
Kitt knew she sounded as if she were performing an opera, but there was no help for it. After his nap, Marcus had cried because she put the wrong (from his viewpoint) pants on him. This had driven Kitt, who had passionate views on her children’s dress, to fury. So now he wasn’t wearing pants at all, just his damp naptime diaper. He still wet the bed, despite the deafening alarm they’d put under his sheet that rand that woke everyone up in the house when he peed at night. To make matters worse, this afternoon he had squirmed out of Kitt’s grip and bolted for the stairs, which, as he full well knew, he was not allowed to climb without supervision. To keep him from falling, she’d grabbed him by his clambering bare foot and yanked him down the stairs. She’d heard his hard little skull thwonk twice on the steps. Why didn’t he listen to her?
Edith knew that a “high dudgeon,” when her mother spoke theatrically, with odd words no one else used, was usually followed by a meltdown. Kitt would scream and curse and wail that she wished she were dead, wished she had never been born, never gotten married, had never had children. This tirade would be punctuated by her walloping anyone nearby, but mostly herself. Now she swung Marcus, no lightweight, down to Edith with his arms and
