The Kind of Day to See an Albino Peacock

                                                                          For Anne and Katy

by Lynn Strongin

She loved birds, and kept swans and peacocks at the place in Milledgeville (a photo of one of her peacocks adorns the jacket of "Mystery and Manners"), but she was no more sentimental about them than she was about any of her human characters:

"I came back from my trip with enough money to order me another pair of swans. They are on their way from Miami and Mr. Hood, the incumbent swan, little suspects that he is going to have to share his feed dish. He eats out of a vase, as a matter of fact, and has a private dining room. Since his wife died, he has been in love with the bird bath. Typical Southern sense of reality." Jonathan Yardley, a review of O’Connor’s letters “The Habit of Being”

PART ONE

THE KIND OF DAY

The day my mother died was, I knew, the kind of day to see the albino peacock. Such days are always emotional peaks .We have one or two albino peacocks at the small children’s zoo. I woke up wanting to tell Sweetheart stories but she wanted to sleep, mellow soul she is with the alto voice I love in women.

The Little Ice age had returned: frost touched the donkeys and no Alabama Moon shone overhead, No moon the color of Grandmother Tisanne’s hair, piled in copper-blond braids round her head. Mother Marcelle’s mother was the elegant and earthy woman whom Magritte calls Aunt Suzanne. I cannot see Tisanne as an aunt. She is motherly to the core for me, her plump partridge breast heaving in a well packed blouse like the sailor boys with their well packed pants walking the boardwalks of Atlantic City, New Jersey, in war time. I was embarrassed when I saw them and turned away.

Custer La Rue sings: a street the hue of Custard.

When I lived down South I can remember writing “Tennessee Moon” from top to bottom of the chalkboard. If I started at the bottom my hand got tired by the top but starting at the top I could relax as I reached the bottom where the wood tray held the chalks, only a few coloured rose or green in those wartime days of my fifth and sixth years.. This was all because I’d misspelled the word “Tennessee” first in a bee, and then in a short story. I was curious about the birds and the bees. “A little boy holds himself,” Marcelle, our mother, began politely “when he goes to the bathroom.” “All the time?” I asked. “Most of the time,” she said. This too was down South. “The bee is attracted to the honey. The bee is the boy, the honey the girl. We have complementary parts. He introduces himself to her when they come of age.”

What was of age? What more did I need to know about introductions?

Oracular, more and more apocalyptic life had become in the South. Harrowing in the North, life expanded and then contracted like a fist or heart-muscle in the South. I pledged allegiance and my heart charged.

It rarely snowed in the South, the South was glassy with stars. My little sister, Chel, broke her leg the second winter there for the divorce so I see her cast from ankle to above waist—she will bear a scar for life in her midback—her cast put on even though the bone was set by a drunk surgeon in Sarasota, the best orthopedic surgeon in the area, Christmas Eve. Sipsie’s cast which made misery of her fifth winter and made a mess of mine was opaque yet at certain enchanted hours it gleamed: white as lilies, white as swans, white as the peacock who could bloom the day of mother’s death, fan against sky, defiance against depression. Sipsie waas my nicknme for Chel.

There was a time, during withdrawal from a prescribed drug, when I lived between the bed and the bathroom. Why not sleep in the bathroom? mother asked. Even though my red blood count was radically low, the white soaring I struggled to remain a gymnast. Goodbye, bullet, hello sun. Mother became natural around animals, dropping the air of dispossessed Southern belle. She lit up before the giraffe in New York’s Central Park Zoo. She told me the story of Gloomy the Camel before the supercilious caramel coloured camel. The hue of butterscotch, the creature was aloof. Gloomy was one thing I was not permitted to be. “Defense d’etre triste,” Mother instructed me in her bell-like Southern French. I scuffed my Buster Brown back and forth, feeling more threatened than menacing. Not even when my helium balloon floated off from me with a will of its own—like those big bloomers, hang gliders that Evelyn’s aunt took off one summer and let sail thru the moss and cypress groves till they snagged among the Spanish moss and who among us would say, but who could resist thinking pubic hair with panties tangled? My balloon let go and I watched it go bump bump bump up to the top of the vast three storied zoo cafeteria ceiling. The only ceiling I knew that cathedral-high was that other modern cathedral, Grand Central Station. The final bump of my white balloon on the ceiling reminded me of the lonesome hoot of a railroad train: both senses locked hands. “Not to cry” mother advised. “So our soul finally leaves our body.”

II

So there was a way we finally got free. But it had to wait for the day the hand let go the string. I collected string the way my cousin Nyrene did buttons. “Why collect string?” Marcelle, our mother asked, one hot noon in Florida. “For practical purposes,” I answered. “It’s picayune.” But my Scottish friend’s mother, Finoola, had said every bit of string was handy. Save them all: from parcels, from gifts.. I rose to my feet, planted hands on hips, my typical posture of defiance and said, “It ties things together.” “Which reminds me, Indigo” mother snapped back, “It’s high time you tied up those old Jack & Jills cluttering our parlor.” I threw back over my shoulders, “It could bind our lives.” The sense of our lives having unraveled after the war, and during divorce, haunted me.

I walked, or rather stalked, into the parlour. It’s true that in the North we would have called this room into which the auburn moons of autumn and winter burned our sunroom. Here there was so much sun we needed a parlour-shade. Up Northeast there were so many witch hunts and so much steely light that we captured, like fireflies in a jar, all the sun we could when it shone into our New Rochelle Sunroom. Here we rested up after various childhood illnesses which were legion: burst eardrum, mastoids, tonsillitis, a wool muffler wound round our neck, given hot tea to sip. “Isadora Duncan was strangled on one.” “Well, you wont” How come?” “Cause I’m too smart to give you such a vainglorious thing.” Vainglorious. That was a new world. “I could choke though” I came back, “This soup is so thick.” “Down the hatch” said mother. I remembered this after polio when the only thing that could save me from chronic constipation was one tablespoon of cod liver oil mixed in with half a glass of milk of magnesium.

Down the hatch went so much. Our grief went down it like coal sacked apples thudding into the basement down the cellar chute. Brighter was our pleasure which too was shoved into darkness like red autumn apples making a quilt colour and a quieter drum roll than the chunks of anthracite and bituminous coal delivered each October by the coal man with smudged features and thick gloves. We always had our first hot chocolate of autumn turning to winter after the coalman left. It was one of our holy rituals. Oracular, I thought, turning the luscious word round on my tongue. Visionary. But was it as far extreme as apocryphal?

Strung like a hammock between North and South I grew long, willowy, lean loved to snap green beans into a metal wash pan in which we also bathed in summertime. North and South shared certain things: the aisle-like order, symmetry, discipline of the ward I was later to learn. The bandages were crisper up North, longer down South where they began from the beginning of time and stretched it seemed forever. The ninth day of forever, the tenth is an infinitesimally small yet long time. Down South our counting began, however, with the number Zero pronounced “ought.” So we chanted “Ought, one, two, three, four, five.”

Numerically speaking, I did better down South. One schoolhouse, one classroom. There was one anthem to speak each morning, one Lord’s prayer (in whom I, a Jewish kid, did not believe) one flag rolled up the brass pole, one blinding sun.

Up North, there were multiples: a brick school with many rooms, many lessons—dance, art, piano—many houses to the towns, many rules to obey (set against the South’s one: Respect) and a sun that split into shards that made rainbows like oil on the road in a swirl and shone in a metal wheel in winter. This is how my New Zealand translator friend iconographs my name:

The surname is also possibly of Old English and Gaelic origin, meaning " lake ", " waterfall " or " pool ", and probably would have been given to a family living near such a body of water . Sometimes used as a diminutive of Linda (Spanish ) " pretty ". Used especially as a middle name and as a feminine beginning or ending in many name blends, Lin : beautiful jade Liona : light Linaeve : Tree of song Lynna : waterfall Lynsey : Linden tree Lyneth: beautiful one Lynn Tree of song Waterfall of words Света кельтско In your kelly green shoes You outshone Pavlova…. Without your feet ever leaving the ground. This is how she iconographs Anne-Magritte: this one was for Anne. they are not poems...just little gifts to say thank you.   Anna from Hebrew Hannah : gracious Aneko (Japanese) : older sister Anam : Gaelic - soul mate Ankareeda : light in the night.

Magritte I do not remember as a little girl but she remembers me, one of the few souls on this earth who could have seen me in Buster Browns walking. Was the child truly schizophrenic, insomnic—both Southern traits and stigmas like the marks of the stigmata—I meet her again as translator, professional linguist, when she is in her seventies, I in my late sixties, we are three years apart and she does prove gracious, older sister, light in the night. But am I, Indigo, Lynn, waterfall of words, tree of songs? I taught myself the tree of songs, the liona, the waterfall of words later in hospital when orgasm swept over me, its white billows transcending the hospital gown of medications, shimmering. I know I learned the meaning of apocrypha then.

iii.

Mother did not put me in ringlets because she knew better than have metal bite my skull. “Wringlets” my New Zealand friend writes it. How perfect: I think of the reams of our words, the one long sheet mother put thru the wringer of her morals, her moods. Some days it turned out that ice cream was blue. Blueberry-blue. Some white. It depended also on the nights. We had a nurse lady from Decatur, Illinois who came to look after Chel-Susanne (I called my little sister Sipsie all that hot winter in Florida probably due to the fact that I drank lots thru straws. Anything sipped thru a straw cooled the back of the throat.) This nurse was good but mother’s moods were like the moody skies up North: Now marble white, now blue thundershowers with the element and possibility of electrocution. I was lectured in my diction, my elocution. Electrocution was another thing.

Like Scout Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, I was forthright and didn’t believe in putting crosses or stars on graves. I saw before my opaque green-gray eyes ocean waves & waves of confederate and federal grass, when my pets died. They all did: first the kitten, Lacrosse, then the canary, Tebaldi and so on. There were cycles of death near sand and limestone.

“I thank you kindly,” and “You have a gentleman caller,” Southern phrases return under an Alabama or under a Hoosier, or a Massachusetts moon.

I am sassed when I don’t even hear water running. The South lost the Civil War and it is stamped all over its face like war poetry which squares the shoulders and puts a bolt of steel into spine, like scars on a forehead and chin. Witnesses were called for. Yes, war calls for witness a fact I knew hard as a nail driven in when I was nine turning ten, a veteran. Strategic, poetic my statements tended to be. My New Zealand friend wrote me a postcard from Italy which I thrilled to at age nine being in love with language from the cradle:

I write too fast and make spelling mistakes.

I remember my Grandmother saying that when I was small... I realised after I left NZ just how Irish an upbringing I had...even much of my vocab in English is Gaelic influenced.

I started to teach myself Gaelic...but have reverted to Maori instead... it is more inspiring for my painting and I feel "more kiwi than Irish really."

Well, in the South I was Elizabethan, Jewish, Northern.

What the Black & Tans wore so different from the Redcoats yet underneath there was the uniform always streaming, blaring forth is colors like a trumpet fanfare. I plugged my ears to it. I am a Redcoat marching up and down the attic stairs. I carry the Union Jack only to set it on fire. A high spirited, rambunctious child, I would find Sipsie’s urine samples in the fridge with the little orange caps and pull them out and gaffe “Chidden soup.” I was in five different first grades, “and you never reverted, Indigo,” mother boasted. “What way?” “Reggies’ kids took to wetting their beds. You never did.”

We moved that often so I remember the sound, this is one of my most vivid and early auditory memories of lots of glass tape wrapping boxes when we moved, lots of cutting when we unmoved as we came to call resettling. “We’re like the early settlers, girls,” Marcelle would beam. “You mean the Pioneers?” I asked, "Or do you mean the Puritans because the latter conducted some of the worst witch hunts in our nations’ history."

Of course our mother meant the Pioneers. The log cabins we built outback in the North we did not here down Dixie way where the magnolia trees have their small cigarette burns. But we toured the everglades, posed for photographs, Sipsie and I, before St Augustine’s Fountain of Youth, and we and saw real live crocks.

The day mother died we had to see the miraculous unfolding of a white peacock like the silk white handkerchief unfolding and unfolding from the magician’s hat to save the world from drabness. For that’s why she was sent. That was another way in this revelatory life we got “free with our souls.” We needs must see an albino peacock—sole bird to counter the mahogany lustre of her long awaited divorce and death, long-suffered-toward death.

So Sweetheart and I drove out, the South full in me, stinging my bosom. The woods were dark-bright, chiaroscuro It was the month of May.. My mother and father died exactly the same day a symmetry a woman like Jane Austen might appreciate. It was a small yet profound touch, a fine brush on ivory.

When at first Sweetheart and I drove to Beacon Hill Park where the peacocks live all was silent like before a big storm. The sky was strewn with mares’ tale clouds sliding thru trees, rain forest dripping from recent rain. Felt loneliness I told Sipsie about at age nine crawling up from my stomach with the deep belly button of which I was proud. I recalled a friend’s aunt’s grave, traceable only by the sunk-in soil a little over her and 1941 scratched in. She had reminded her niece of a yellow finch which stuck in my mind.” The name was scratched on with a nail” Sabella told me. Nobody could explain death to me better than that cotton white balloon letting go. But now there was the death of herself who’d told me it was the soul getting free and no peacock in sight.

I recalled a bag I tied together with string of Southern wisdoms: oracular, apocryphal, one boils steel straps to get the scent off, overlap palmetto roofing so rain slides down, soak deerskin two days and it comes out with two days softness. I could understand these things.

Her death, no lean-to affording us shelter. Mothers Sweetheart and I unscrewed the thermos herself had given me “Gadabout” and coffee steam rushed forth fogging our glasses causing us to smile. “Gadabout,” I smiled, “That’s what she wasn’t.” And she had loved the zoo. I saw thru trees like thru windows pocked, chipped from years of our gazing out. Everything was going smoothly as greased lightning. Like lightning, however it struck limning us, her two children, daughters, and sweetheart in blue.

The linen canvas of sky was bare and then we heard a blood-curdling shriek such as one hears form the bolted window of an insane asylum. (Is there any asylum for the insane?)

“There he is!" sweetheart said in a stage whisper.

It was a heartstopper. A pain struck beneath my left ribs. Whiter than snow, whiter than the South, stiff as starched dress for first communion saying his vowel over and over “Veeyowl” the one white peacock strutted under the trees of green flame, under the remembered chalkboards of the South, beneath the arched and chill vaulted sky of our mother’s death.

I woke, even before she died, with the knowledge hot in me that it would be a day to see the Albino peacock. The bird disappeared like a Diamond Safety match struck on the foot of daddy’s shoe and, like him at the final hour, gone.

PART TWO

NECTAR DROPS FOR NERVES

Sweetheart and I had a bit of a hack up last night. She made whipped cream (wicked cream) for the pumpkin pie. I helped myself to seconds. She said, “Hey! leave some” but it was a bit late. A war child I am a goner for cream.

Today, Sunday we drove down Maud Street and saw a sign “Character for Sale.” They’d left out the word house. I thought of Sipsie’s first child, daughter Raissa, on nectar drops for nerves by age three. I thought of the buttocks boils I’d had in my adolescence from scraping along the pavement to the pool which they said was good for post polios. I hated that term and kept thinking of ballroom dancing in my wheelchair. I could spin on a dime.

“It’s the kind of day one could see an albino peacock” I told her, packing brie and cheddar sandwiches, with lettuce and sliced green onion and putting it all with mother’s gadabout thermos in a bluejean bag I hung on our front brass doorknob. “What’s that?” I asked. “What do you see?” (I always needed to have a child, a daughter preferably.” “A picnic,” she laughed.

So we piled in my fifteen-year-old Buick Vita which I no longer drive but which really belongs to Sweetheart now and drove to the top of Beacon Hill where we looked out. “That’s my land,” I said, “No?” “Eh?” she said. “Oh yes.” This was the hill from which ships were signaled and beacons set, flares. Warning said everything about my arrival North twenty-seven years ago. Yet I not only came but stayed where rubber-banded mail stood unceremoniously in a wicker secondhand basket, bought at the Sally Anne rather than being hand-delivered in brushed metal slots as back in my homeland, the States.

When you have been a child in a hospital, when you have had boils on your buttocks at age twelve, and seen children take the drip—nothing as benign as nectar drops for nerves—before you turned a teen you turn toward anyone who takes you in with Kindness. The Southern kind? No, the human kind. Where is your heart we could not say to the nurses but longed to. Maud street with its “Character for sale” receded in the rearview mirror. There are other kinds of days on which to look for an albino peacock its feathers like curled cream but not many. They don’t have to be birth and death days. You might have won the spelling bee as I did.. Your mother might have died. The red letter day you had expected at the music academy might have turned pewter, dulled to steel, then blown to crematory ash.

But albino peacock days—like albinos themselves—had always been to me a sign of providence coming. Apocrypha, visionary they stood against the drab design of daily brick and granite days and they shone shone shone.

Your losses might have stood out most clean, like beads of bone. They shone too. They were abacus counters. How hard it was to be a whippersnapper, that bright, and have to always plot strategies how to swing first one long-legged brace, then the other up the curb.

The explosion of the albino peacock, despite all my learned and mastered stage-presence stopped my heart. Other things were heart-stoppers but not like this.

Just last night, Sweetheart spoke to me of “the renaissance of the red apple.” Only she could speak this way. An instruction was turned into a poem. I did not know the apple had suffered a setback, almost died.

Today, seeing Maud street with the sign “Character for Sale,” once again, although we spied no albino peacock, I feel my blood iron unfurl, oracular. “It would have been visionary,” I tell sweetheart, “To have seen one.” But nonetheless, with autumn's resurrection of red apples, with mother now five months safely sealed from sorrow and gone, the trees are glowing, I can count our blessings and it is in fact, “Apocryphal” I whisper to her a moment before we swing back into our drive to take umbrage once more in the sanctuary of home. Whether or not we have had our vision, we have had our vision. I may create one for myself in dream as I made up words for the bees, in the time when I did not know precisely how the honey attracted the bee or how our parts were complementary. In dream, for a second, I will feel how I become disentangled from things of this earth. How I glide in kelly green shoes over a ballroom floor again, my hand in the hand of he whom I kissed when the bottle spun and stopped at one whose mouth was full of metal. My soul, Hannah, Annike, Linea, an albino peacock we did not see. Only a pariah, a freak of nature could be so lovely. Yet in my dream for the blink of a birds’ eye, in a heartbeat, I will have got free.

PART THREE

SHUT SHOP ON EMOTIONS

Children rarely shut shop on emotions. Neither would they see a peacock as a swanked up chicken. When I think of the night there was the fire in Alabama, at a farm where we were staying, and fourteen-year-old Nabeela lost her wooden leg, I draw up to the surface of my memory—which usually keeps this night in a vault—the image of her crying. “My one good leg to dance on.” She had lost it to sarcoma and had radiation. For a year the stump was weeping. Then she had a dry socket. She began dancing lessons immediately at the Arthur Murray Dance Studio in Selma and became the fastest Black girl on the floor. Color should not have counted but it did.

I stash this with other medical memories like Tanya my Russian friend who has a cancer on her face. It wouldn’t be bad but it’s so near the eye and rooted.. I thought back on her childhood in Russia, the convent and how Sipsie and I had been virgins for the longest time—or so I thought but Sipsie wasn’t. “They’ll think you’re out for business, “Marcelle stood, arms akimbo in our Manhattan front hallway where the phone conversations went on which could never be private. “Proud as a peacock,” she’d light up a cigarette, “That’s what you are, Chel.” Chel never answered back. She just left. But it got me started thinking of and researching peacocks which, it turns out, Flannery O’Connor raised. She had lupus. Unlike me, was not deathly ill as a child but later on till the voice of the peacock was heard in the land of Milledgeville, Georgia. She had Catholicism. I had none. I had only the staff of a vivid imagination on which to lean.

There is a certain hour of twilight when the nerves are in torment. Nectar drops are out of the question. Almost everything is in a state of indecision and everything out of the question.

Like a small coal-mining town in West Virginia or Pennsylvania the Protestant South O’Connor grew up in was “Christ-Haunted.” The child I spoke to down South was also Christ-haunted saying the devil had a red tail and would get me if I didn’t obey my mama.

Scared as I was of Sabella, I heard my dark blond head in the boy bowl haircut high and said, “Sabella Smith, no, he won’t." She spooked me but I acted brave. You know that’s a tall tale. “No, it ain’t” she screamed. “My Mama and the preacher both told me so.”

I kicked a stone at my foot and walked away thinking such parents and priests were wimps.

At the same time, I was aware of the haunting: in my own life. The overwhelming sense that death could never truly happen because once my own consciousness was extinguished, other people would be lit into being. There is comfort somewhere. Or nowhere. But life carries on.

Nothing was done with perfect ease. But when I scooped up my ten jacks and red bouncing ball, or skipping my jump rope, the universe aligned. There was harmony. It encompassed those rows of shacks with secondhand lumber and tin rooves which comprised Southern porches on our street, the floorboards of porches sagging like sofas, or pulled taffy.

These homes were rubber. The people sure were real in contrast. The father of my best friend, Camille, worked in the trauma unit of Selma Hospital. Burn cases, traumatized accident victims, hypochondriacs, and schizophrenics all came under his care. A series of pariahs passed before my vision like celluloid negatives to photographs which would never make it up thru the acids in the darkroom with its red bulb to the light.

I dared in the dark to touch myself.

“You will go to hell,” shrieked my Christ-haunted friend.

Haunted also, I told Camille. She said, “Nevermind. I do the same.”

“Have you told your mama?”

“No, only my sister.”

“Well, Sipsie knows.”

Then we giggled, ‘Nice girls don’t’ touch,” she echoes our teacher Miss Brown. “Legs are like best friends. They always stay together,” I echoed her and in gales of laughter we joined hands and two girls of nine going on ten ran down to the river laughing.

What we hoped to find there was an extension of our release. But guilt descended, a Southern murk, a fog instead. I had not yet read Faulkner, learned about his fictional county but would soon. Too soon.

Mother was boiling noodles when I came home that evening. “Chel comes out of her cast soon.” Oh. I wondered if the leg would appear purple yellow, withered when it came out. I wondered whether I would be jealous of the attention she would receive.

“She’ll need special care,” Mother warned.

I must have pouted a bit because she said, “Indigo, don’t puff up like a toad.”

My chin quivering I ran into the dirt yard and skipped stones.

I had taught myself and rarely got to skip them over water, only over the dirt like a scared chicken running in our own semblance of a back yard. Alabama moon rose that night, poor, now illumining golden velvet or satin earth every piece of shrub, scrub and pebble in our yard.

I turned over the various woes of my neighbors and kin: Nabeela was outfitted with a new wooden leg, but it was never as good as the old which she had named Aunt Jane and used to thwack. The new one remained “Miss Nameless,” and she wept, hard bitter tears. I threw my arm around her shoulder because we were leaving town soon and she dared trust me with her emotions.

I thought about my friend, Camille’s father, frail himself—or seeming so, a smoke or wisp of man always smoking and with a dry cough—who worked the hardest psychiatric cases in Selma.

I thought about Sipsie. Would she heal up right? That drunken surgeon on Christmas eve could have set her leg bone wrong. Would she limp for life? I didn’t think about myself and see the slammer, polio, coming but looking in the mirror turned away knowing I was a changeling, Ingrid Bergman’s daughter, not our mothers.

It has been over half a century since I played “Spin the bottle, kiss me.:” The bottle is still spinning. In a profound sense, I am still waiting to be kissed. That albino peacock? Like the winter circus folk of Barnum & Bailey whom we saw, Sipsie and I, they are indeed freaks, Ishmaels, Pariahs. But then so are we all whom I love: Hannah or Anne, Marcelle herself, a closet Lesbian who must have kissed a woman on the lips at least a year before she conceived her to-be-aborted son.

I am a Christ-haunted Jew.

I rise in the Canadian night thinking how profound my needs, how frail my helpers. Doctor and so on are mere toothpicks than crutches, the sturdy ones I would need if I were ever to walk again. But I won’t. I won’t even try. Flannery hobbled about in her Georgia yard on crutches, aluminum ones. I hand it to her. She brought off what I cannot.

The Albino Peacock who might have been was drowned in gasoline when wind whipped up flames in my dream. No faith could douse them. I nightmared and cried like a howler monkey--did Anne--Hannah ever scream like this in the asylums?-- about Nabeela's burned wooden leg being stolen like the Bible Salesman stealing the girl’s in that O’Connor story. How could one be so God-haunted and so humorous at the same time?

Constantly I want to take leave of people. Is it because I never got to kiss the children in the ward goodbye in 1951 when measles swept me away like a salty wave, benign but powerfully muscled, landing me back home? Sipsie, I lie in bed again a child hospitazlied. I was too young to know the words, “This, too, shall pass.” But I knew them. I think of the London urchin who pointed up to the stars and said “Look at all them bedbugs.” Forever, Hello. Forever, Goodbye. Tonight I can trace the white peacock in the stars. “I seen the little lamp” said Kesia in Katharine Mansfield’s story, “The Dollhouse.” Whether or not we saw the albino bird today we saw him. “I’d be hurt if I had feelings,” Mother Marcelle often used to say. I am always dancing even though my feet never leave the ground.

A stranger passes a shop in dreams. Summer is over. I no longer sip water thru a straw. I ask hesitantly, “Chel, do you miss her, mother?” “Yes, strangely enough I do. The way things used to be.” The shop has pennies in a jar in the window.On the door the sign which catches first flakes of winter snow and moonlight, "“Closed." But behind it is not a child. For a child the sign reads perpetually “Open,” like Flannery scattering her peacocks with her aluminum crutches. One is thought-haunted. Even though there may be no, or few buyers for one’s vision; even though the folk in this town may be as mother claimed“a bit emotionally thin” the child never shuts shop on emotion.