Then—finally—I hit the ground, breaking my fall somewhat with my knees and my outstretched palms, though my elbows buckled and my chest hit the ground so hard I was sure my boobs—such as they are—must now be sticking out of my back. Fortunately my face did not make contact with the asphalt, though my glasses went flying.
That was where
fortunately
ended.
I heard the screeching of tires and the blaring of a horn. I could smell the rubber of someone's tires being left behind on the road. Even with my bare eyes, I could see one of those huge cars heading right at me—not straight on but sideways, because the driver, trying desperately to stop, had lost control of his vehicle. Not that sideways versus head-on was going to make much of a difference to me, not at the speed he was going.
Someone grabbed hold of the back of my shirt and yanked.
My collar bit into my throat as my torso was lifted enough off the road so that I flipped onto my back, my knees bent under me.
The car slid through the space I had just been occupying, close enough that I could see its whitewalled tires before the wind, and road grit of its passing made me blink my eyes.
When I opened them again, the car was just resuming normal forward motion rather than its previous slantwise slide, but still blaring its horn. Once the driver regained control, he kept on going.
I realized I was lying in the lap of my rescuer, who had fallen with me onto the side of the road, a good place to have gotten squashed right along with me. My rescuer was brave as well as strong.
And she was a girl.
Which I realized when she yelled at the retreating car, "Hey!" Then, "Hey! Come back!" And—when that didn't get any reaction—"I have your license number, you creep!" Then, in a much gentler voice, she asked, "Are you all right? Are you hurt? Should somebody call a doctor?" all in a breathless rush.
I turned to look at a girl who couldn't have been any more than a couple years older than me—seventeen, eighteen at the most. She was dressed in a gauzy
blue and white summer dress, her face pretty much as pale as the white of the stripes. "I'm all right," I managed to say, straightening my legs so I wasn't sitting on them. "You?"
She looked startled, then flashed a grin. "I think I feel the way you look," she told me.
Someone nearby started crying. Without glasses, my vision was okay enough to make out the form of another girl on the sidewalk behind us, probably a friend of my rescuer, because she said, "Oh, Eleni, I was sure I was about to see you get killed."
The girl who had saved me, Eleni, said, "We're both fine, Betsy." And, because her friend sounded like she was about to hyperventilate, "Come on, breathe deeply. Calm yourself."
The second girl, Betsy, fanned herself vigorously with a straw hat and took deep gulping breaths. I was clear witted enough to note that she was already wearing a hat, so I figured the one she was holding belonged to Eleni, who must have lost it in the scramble to save me.
Despite all her fanning, Betsy warned, "I think I'm feeling faint, Eleni."
"No, you're doing fine," Eleni reassured her. "Besides, if you faint, you'll drop the camera, and what will your father say then?"
Though this didn't make a whole lot of sense, it
seemed to be what Betsy needed to hear: some reason
not
to faint. She tightened her grip on the big, boxy camera she was holding, and her breathing became less quavery.
Just as I was thinking it really was time to stop this lying-down-in-the-street business, I was aware of someone crouching down beside us, and a male voice asked, "Did the car hit her?"
"I don't think so," Eleni said at the same time I sat up and said, "No."
It was the man with the bad suit, and he tried to hand me a stick.
Which made so little sense, I squinted to bring it into my seeing range. I recognized the object was not a stick but a piece of plastic, jagged at one end as though broken, with the other end curved. Something like, I thought, the earpiece of a pair of glasses.
"Damn!" I said.
Betsy gasped, "Golly!" Eleni looked shocked, like she'd never heard someone actually speak that word before.
The man looked disapproving but still spoke gently: "I'm afraid this is the biggest piece that's left of your glasses."
"I can't see anything without them!" I said. Which included, of course, the archway that had
gotten me here. Not that I knew where
here
was, but obviously I'd done
something
wrong, so I needed to go back around and try again.
Thank you, Larry. Thank you very much. "It transports you where you want to go." Yeah, right, you little blue freak.
What I WANTED was to go home.
Though Eleni tried to make me stay put, saying, "Maybe you should just—" I got to my feet. My jeans had ripped at both knees, and my right knee was bleeding, though not emergency-room-quantity bleeding. And the palms of my hands stung. They were scraped and had gravel embedded in them. None of that stopped me from jumping back up onto the sidewalk and looking for the gate.
Nothing.
From either direction.
Of course not. I needed my special glasses to see such things.
I tried stepping through where the arch had been, at the edge of the curb.
Home, home, home,
I thought, picturing my own room.
Nothing.
I tried stepping through with my eyes closed, thinking maybe not seeing the wrong reality might somehow affect something—or some such: How was
I
supposed to know how magic worked? Hey, I was desperate.
Bad-Suit Man caught me when I nearly toppled off the curb again.
"Is she all right?" asked one of the bystanders, maybe the woman with the child, too far away for me to make out now, with my limited eyesight.
"I'm fine," I insisted, sounding more snappish than I intended. I headed farther into the street without even looking, so it was a good thing it wasn't a busy street and the few cars on it had all stopped at my recent near-accident. I figured the occupants were still watching, maybe expecting a delayed-reaction fatality.
I found one lens, which was all cracked, but I thought maybe it would still let me see well enough to find the elusive archway. But when I went to pick it up, the pieces fell loose, pieces about as big as shredded carrots in a salad. I searched for the other lens but couldn't find it.
The girl who had rescued me came up behind, putting one hand on my shoulder and taking hold of my opposite elbow with the other. "Why don't you sit down on this nice lady's porch?" she suggested, pulling me out of the street into someone's yard.
An old woman with gray hair that had a definite tinge of blue to it and who was wearing a housedress (no hat, the anal-retentive part of me noted) held
open the screen door to her house. But my knees were going all shaky on me, and I wouldn't make it that far. I sat down heavily on the concrete step outside.
"I've called for an ambulance," the old lady said. "Did the car hit her? Is that a piece of metal sticking out of her?"
I remembered the accident victim I'd seen, long, long ago this morning, patting his chest, asking, "Is the steering wheel column sticking out again?" and I wondered if I was in shock and only
thought
the car had missed me. The old woman was close enough that, by squinting, I could see where her eyes were looking.
"Holy moley," Eleni muttered. Anticipating seeing the car's fender sticking out of my abdomen, I checked—but it was only my belly-button ring. I tugged my shirt down over the top of my jeans.
"I don't need an ambulance," I told everyone. I rested my face in my hands. How could I ever get home if I couldn't see the way? What was the matter with that mini-munchkin-gone-bad Larry, not giving me better instructions? "Larry?" I called. Had he come through with me? "Larry, if you're here, you come out this instant."
"Who's Larry?" Eleni asked.
If my jeans and my belly-button ring were getting weird looks, talking about little blue guys was sure to get me committed. "Nobody," I assured her.
"Let me get you a washcloth for your poor head," the old woman said.
"I don't need one," I told her.
Betsy, who had joined us from across the street, murmured, "I could use a cold cloth, please," and she followed the old woman back into the house.
Because I hate to wear glasses, over the years I've gotten good at extrapolating things about my surroundings without the benefit of actually seeing much. I was aware of a small crowd at the edge of the old lady's yard, with one person significantly shorter than the others—probably the little girl I'd glimpsed before. It had just struck me that the murmur of their voices sounded more disapproving than sympathetic, when the child's shrill voice raised above the others, demanding, "Mommy, why is she dressed so funny?"
There were some titters from the crowd.
The answer, while still rather quiet, was louder than the previous murmuring had been. Louder and disapproving: "I don't know, honey. Maybe she's a farmworker."
Like anyone would wear Abercrombie jeans to work on a farm.
Encouraged by the obvious amusement of her elders, the little girl said, "Her pants are so tight, if she bent over to feed the chickens, she'd bust right out of them."
More tittering.
Any mother-daughter team wearing white gloves and hats outside of an Easter parade should
not
consider themselves the fashion police, but—being stranded here—I didn't have the heart or energy to tell them what I thought of them.
Eleni, however, went to the fence. I heard her coo, "My, what a lovely little girl you have there, ma'am." Then, just as sweetly, she asked, "Do you ever plan to teach her human kindness, or were you intending on raising a poisonous little hyena?"
This did not endear her to them nearly as much as it did to me.
The mother spoke to her child, saying, "These are both obviously
bad
girls, dear," and she tugged on her child's arm and dragged her away.
Eleni put her hands on her hips, and the rest of the crowd dispersed, obviously unwilling to risk her turning her wrath onto any of them.
Even Mr. Tweed-Suit Man, who had crossed back over to this side of the street again, was heading for the corner when Eleni called him back, demanding, "What if we need you?"
He returned, opened his satchel, and handed me a card.
I squinted and read:
B
UZZ
A. T
INNELL
F
ULLER
B
RUSH
S
ALESMAN
TELEPHONE NUMBER
:ID
LEWILD
6-0296
Things were weird, but I was perplexed at just how weird. I looked from Eleni to the man and asked, "You want me to buy a brush?"
Eleni took the card and tucked it into a pocket of her gauzy summer dress. "This is if you need another witness, an adult."
Well, that clarification didn't help a whole lot.
she gestured down the street. "To testify that that driver never even stopped to see if you were hurt."
Okay, then. But that was
not
number one on my list of worries.
I was aware of Eleni sitting down on the stoop next to me. "I'll stay with you," she assured me, which I realized meant the salesman had left as soon as I wasn't looking, eager to be about his Fuller-Brushing where there were no delusional accident victims or sharp-tongued rescuers.
I had my head in my hands again, so all I could see was the bottom part of my rescuer's leg, with her
dress billowing around her feet. she was wearing high heels. I was thinking about telling her that she shouldn't be sitting on the concrete step in her good clothes when finally I recognized the blue and white striped dress—one of a kind, handmade in Italy.
Finally I took a good look at her face.
And
finally
I recognized that, too.
Despite the wrong name, Eleni was my grandmother.
Larry had said the arch would transport me to where I wanted to go, and I had gone and let my mind wander for an instant—as though picturing Gia and Nana sitting together looking at the photo album wasn't reckless enough—to picturing the photos themselves. Which is not to say it wasn't Larry's fault that I ended up smack in the 1950s.
"Larry, you ought to be flushed down a toilet," I muttered.
Eleni—Nana—raised her eyebrows at me. Her dark-colored, young eyebrows. Nana's name was
Helen,
not
Eleni,
but how could I not have recognized
her? I'd seen pictures of her as a child and as a young woman, but I always thought of Nana as she'd always looked to me. Now here she was with her skin un-wrinkled; her shoulder-length hair bouncy and dark rather than in the short, permed, and gray style which was all I'd ever known; and she was slim, though for as long back as I could remember, she'd always been a bit ... roundish. The aides at the nursing home were always saying how attractive she'd been as a young woman, but—as much as I loved her—to me she was attractive in a grandmotherly way, not as the kind of girl who would turn heads at her high school. Yet here she was every bit as gorgeous as Tiffanie Mills—and I mean on one of Tiffanie's good days.
Now, my young grandmother was looking at me with worry in her eyes, and she assured me, "Help will be here soon."
"I don't need help," I told her. Well, I did, but not the kind she meant. I could hear the faintest wail of a siren approaching. That was the last thing I needed: to be taken off to a hospital, to have people start asking questions. I scrambled to my feet. "I've got to get out of here," I said.
"No, it's okay," Eleni said. she tugged on my arm to try to get me to sit down again. "The ambulance will be here in another two minutes."
Which was exactly the point.
Eleni seemed to realize that. She tipped her head and looked at me quizzically. "What's wrong?" she asked.
"I've got to get out of here," I repeated.
Again the eyebrows went up. But what she asked was, "Are you sure? You may well have hit your head when you fell, and someone should take a look at that knee in case you need stitches."