Ice And Fire

friends watching, and it is in the process of getting up that you

see you have to do it alone, and it is in the process of getting

up that you realize without even thinking that anyone can see

how much you hurt and your friends are just standing there,

watching, staying away from you. It is the process of getting

up that clarifies for you how afraid they were for themselves,

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not for you, and how chickenshit they are, and even though

you are tiny and they are tiny you know that even tiny little

girls aren’t really that tiny, in fact no one on earth is that tiny,

and then they say sissy and it makes you understand that you

and your daddy are different from them forever and there is

something puny at the heart of them that smells up the sky.

You can be seven or eight and know all that and remember it

forever.

*

Diane was holding her scarf, real pretty with lots of very pretty

colors: and it was Marcy who said, your daddy is a sissy.

*

I got home down long blocks bent over and not crying and

they walked all around me not touching me, staying far away.

My stomach was kicked in but my face wasn’t hurt too bad. I

was bent and there was no way on earth I could straighten out

my back or straighten out my stomach or take my hands away

from my stomach but see I kept walking and they kept walking:

oh, and after that everything was the same, except I never

really liked Marcy again, as long as I live I never will: and I

still would have done anything for Diane: and we played

outside all our games: and I didn’t care whether they lived or

died.

*

Down the far end of our block, not the end going toward

school but the end going somewhere I never saw, there was a

real funny girl, H. She lived almost at the very end of our

block, it was like almost falling off the edge of the world to go

there and you had to pass by so many people you knew to get

there and they expected you not to go that far away from

where you lived, from the center of the block, and they

wondered where you were going and what you were going to

do, and I didn’t know too many people up that end, just some,

not any of my favorites: and also the principal of the Hebrew

School was up that way, and I didn’t like going by his house at

all because in heavy European tones he chastised me for being

alive and skipping about with no apparent purpose. So I

avoided going there at all, and also I was really scared to be so

close to the end of the block, but this girl was really funny and

so sometimes I went there anyway. She had a real nice mother