Raising Demons (19 page)

“Dig
that
,” Laurie said in admiration.

“
Jeekers
,” Sally said, eyes wide. “I went and unstuck the wrong
side
.”

“Please put that down somewhere,” I told my husband with a good deal of annoyance. “When I let you open the refrigerator door I hardly expected that you would go ripping it off and carrying it around the kitchen like—”

My husband set his back against the wall and put the door gently down onto the floor. He stood looking at it without saying anything and the children gathered gravely around him. “I did mean to unstick the
other
side,” Sally said apologetically.

“
Craaaaazy
,” Laurie said. “She ripped it right off the hinges.”

“Sarah,” my husband said at last, controlling his voice, “go to your room. Get a man to fix that,” he told me tensely. “Not a five-year-old girl with magic. A refrigerator repairman. Call him on the telephone and tell him to come over and fix that refrigerator. Not a five-year-old girl with magic—a man.”

He slammed the study door behind him.

The refrigerator repairman said he would come over right after lunch, and all the time I was getting out the roast beef and slicing tomatoes I could hear sounds of lamentation from Sally's room. Her father permitted her to come down for lunch, and when she came to her chair at the table she stopped to whisper in my ear. “I fixed
him
,” she said, with an evil scowl at her father. “I'm going to show
him
about how magic is better. He can just
wait
.”

I thought of Jerry Martin afraid to go to bed with a spell on him and of little Cheryl whose doll's head was on backward now because she had pushed Sally in the snow, and I said apprehensively, “What?”

Sally laughed. “
Don't
worry,” she told me ambiguously. “It's really good,” she added, seeing me frown. “Just about how Daddy will know magic is better.”

Conversation at lunch was monopolized by Laurie, who was planning a party for his birthday which was still seven months off. He wanted to invite twenty-one friends for lunch and a football game on the side lawn. He thought that it would not be any great inconvenience to put up goal posts, and he would get a can of white paint and do the yard lines himself. I thought that it would be much nicer, since we could not be sure yet what the weather was going to be like in October, if he planned on inviting two friends over for supper, and they could go to the movies. Laurie pointed out that if he invited twenty-one friends he would automatically get twenty-one presents, which was, he felt, real crazy. His father fined him fifty cents. Jannie suggested that it would be nice to have a play or at least a pageant honoring Laurie's birthday, and proposed the Fairy Rosabelle because then, she added prudently, she would not have to bother to learn something new. Sally, hugging herself, said that we were all going to have a wonderful surprise and Daddy would be sorry he had talked so mean about her magic. My husband remarked that the practice of magic was going to cost a certain young lady a considerable amount in fines before very long. Sally smiled mysteriously, and said he would be
glad
when he found out about her surprise. “Anyway,” she added, “
Jannie
can still tell time on the clock, sort of.”

“But Jannie is left-handed anyway,” I said. “Besides, we decided not to say anything more about the clock.”

“Maybe I could invite the whole class,” Laurie said. “All but the girls, of course. We could have a track meet, or a rifle shoot, maybe. Is it all right to build a campfire?” he asked his father. “We'll promise to pick up the lawn afterward.”

I said that unless table manners improved generally
no
one needed to think about birthday parties, and lunch continued as usual, except that Sally occasionally giggled to herself, and declined dessert, which was tapioca pudding, on the grounds that she was too excited about her surprise. Jannie was fined ten cents for elbows on the table, and Laurie talked himself out of a dollar and a half. All fines were remitted when my husband remarked absent-mindedly that his pudding was real cool. Barry was fined one jellybean for feeding tapioca pudding to his truck. Sally said my
goodness
, we were going to be so surprised.

The refrigerator man arrived while I was clearing the table, and he had a pair of hinges which luckily fit the door. Barry was allowed to stay up from his nap to watch the man put the door on again. My husband came out into the kitchen to watch, too, and he and the refrigerator man had a long, learned talk about baseball and what was apt to happen in Brooklyn during the coming summer. Laurie entered the conversation and was fined a quarter for saying that he thought Milwaukee would take the pennant.

I happen to like Milwaukee and so, since I did not have a quarter, I thought I would go upstairs and get the laundry put away. I heard my husband and the refrigerator man telling each other goodbye, and the refrigerator man saying we ought to think about a new refrigerator, really, because this one was getting pretty old and shaky and my husband said he was glad I had gone upstairs before the refrigerator man said that. I heard Sally singing “—is the best girl in the world.” I went to the top of the stairs and called down for her to stop it, but I could not make her hear me.

I was putting away pajamas in Barry's room, which is in the front of the house, when I heard a crash which I thought at first was the refrigerator door falling off again, and then I realized that it came from outside and sounded irresistibly like the car of the repairman of the refrigerator backing into a stone gatepost. Almost at once, from the front porch, I heard Sally's voice raised in fury. “
Jeekers
,” she wailed, “wrong side
again
.”

My husband fined himself five dollars for remarks made upon this occasion. The man who came a few days later about the insurance felt that rather than going to the expense of having both gateposts straightened it would be simpler to take them down altogether, before, as he explained, “they fall down on someone's head and
really
cost you money.”

No one around town ever remarked upon the fact that our left-hand gatepost leaned at an angle and our right-hand gatepost was now just slightly off its foundations. I got the impression that there was a general feeling that we ourselves had made the ultimate deadpan joke about the crooked gatepost, and further discussion would be superfluous. I was just as pleased to leave it that way.

We tried to enter Sally in dancing school, but she came right home again. She sulked for a week at home, and stormed around the kindergarten like a mad thing. There were high words in the study after dinner, but all pencils were confiscated, and, even though it was agreed that we were not going to say anything more about the clock, my husband made Sally take the spell off Jerry Martin and turn Cheryl's doll's head around again, and fix it so the teacher's umbrella would open right, the way it used to. We got Sally a pair of roller skates, but she gave them to Jannie. She announced at dinner one night that when she grew up she was going to be a mean mean old lady who lived in a forest and people came to her for advice and spells, except, she added, turning to look directly at her father, except wicked trolls.

The refrigerator door went right on sticking, but I discovered that I could open it by pounding violently on the side of the refrigerator with the frying pan. When I did this Sally liked to sit on the kitchen stool and sneer.

Then, after perhaps ten days, it seemed that she was relenting a little. She agreed to say good night to her father, and they were able to get back to work again in the kindergarten. Before I could do more than wonder at the change, she came down with chicken pox, although I do not believe it was deliberate. Laurie and Jannie had both had chicken pox, so, on the assumption that Barry might as well catch it now as later, I let him play freely with Sally, and during the long afternoons he sat on the foot of her bed, coloring, looking at books, and listening to Sally's stories.

We were coming to have, at that time, a distinct feeling around the family that most of our knotty domestic problems were pellucidly clear to Barry, although he tactfully forbore to comment on them. He had taken to chattering a good deal, a kind of cheerful running series of observations, but he spoke almost entirely in his own language, which bore a disconcerting similarity to our own, so that it was possible to be entrapped into listening closely to him, persuaded that he was communicating something of vital, although cheerful, importance. Consequently I was sure that Sally might safely confide in him and I could sometimes hear his small voice reassuring her in lovely long elegant sentences. As a result of this, of course, Sally became almost the only person able to translate Barry, although I believe that her translations were somewhat free, since Barry seemed so often to be saying exactly what Sally wanted him to.

When Sally's spots had begun to fade and she was allowed to come downstairs, interestingly pale and requiring a good many small services, to lie on the living room couch, she was very sweet to all of us. She permitted her father to bring her little phonograph and set it up beside the couch and she accepted, with a wan smile, the small offerings from the rest of us—
Little Women
, from Jannie, and a little carved dog from Laurie, and paste and colored paper from me; illness, in fact, seemed to have taught her the fruitlessness of anger; we did not perceive at once that something had taught her the usefulness of guile. It was not until her convalescence was almost complete that she showed her hand. One morning Laurie and Jannie had gone off to school as usual, and Sally was enjoying the rare freedom of lingering late over her breakfast while her father and I had our second cups of coffee; because of the imminence of chicken pox Barry had been kept home from nursery school, and he was pushing grains of cereal down to the bottom of the bowl with his cereal spoon and giggling helplessly when they popped up again.

“Sally,” I said tactfully, “it is most pleasant to have you well again.”

Sally gave me an inscrutable smile. “I have enjoyed being sick,” she said. “Thank you very much for letting me.”

“Not at all,” I said. “Barry, eat your cereal.”

Barry put down his cereal spoon and regarded me darkly. “You untreat me like a genman,” he said. “Once more, Pudge.”

“
Barry
!
” Sally opened her eyes wide. “Dearest Mommy did
not
untreat you like a gentleman, and you went and said Pudge without making the magic sign and that's
awful
.”

Hastily Barry slid off his chair and turned slowly around three times. “There,” he said.

“Wait,” Sally said. “I did, too.” She got down and circled.

I stared, bewildered, and my husband put down the
New York Times
. “Besides,” Sally said to Barry, “you promised.”

“Can I have a srop?” Barry asked me.

“A srop? What for?”

“Dangerous trees.”

“Sally?” I said, appealing.

She smiled and shrugged.

“What is Pudge?” my husband said.

I shook my head, but Sally and Barry both got down off their chairs and circled slowly.

“
You
better watch out,” Sally told her father. “Or else make the magic sign.”

“Get a srop,” Barry advised.

“Or say something else,” Sally said. “Call him the Great Wizard. Or the Most Powerful One.”

“Great Grizzard,” Barry said.

“All right,” I said, “but
who
—?”

“Well.” Sally leaned back in her chair and took on her storytelling face, eyes wide and looking far away, hands clasped under her chin. “Well,” she said, “when I decided to put together the land of Oz and the country of the hobbits and Rootabaga and Mother Goose Land, because they were all scattered all over and I kept forgetting which book I had to take to get to each country—well, anyway, I decided to put them all together. Fairyland, too, of course. So it's all called Gunnywapitat now, and Ozma lives there, and all the hobbits, and the Cowardly Lion and the old woman in the shoe, and Peter Pan, and Oberon and the rest, all there where I can get to them easy. Gunnywapitat. And Pudge helped me.”

“Magic sign,” my husband put in nervously.

“Thank you.” Sally got down and turned around. “So I put the entrance to his country right under his tree. Pudge's tree.” She turned around. “And Barry needs a sword to pertect him because all the other trees have evil spirits trying to get into Gunnywapitat, the big tree and under it all the magic world.”

“Yggdrasil?” said my husband, startled.

“What?” said Sally. “Anyway, we go to visit and it's always in the middle of the night or else while you're busy or something and if we go in the day we take weapons, because lots of times children go in and they do not ever come out except maybe after—oh, ten years or so. And then they're old and everything has changed and all their friends are gone and their mothers and fathers.” She gave her father a brief look. “And down there
every
one does magic,” she said.

“So I need a srop,” Barry said.

“And we have parties with lots of candy and cookies. And the entrance is guarded by lagatours and dragatours.”

“And policemans.”

“Of course,” she said, glancing again at her father and then at me, “
you
couldn't go.”

“
I
am Trixie Pixie,” Barry said smugly. “A lepercorn.”

“There is one whole city made of chocolate,” Sally said. “Even the houses and the cars and the dogs and cats, all chocolate.”

“Can I unfinish? My cereal?”

 • • • 

Sally spent most of the morning drawing me a map of Gunnywapitat, showing the chocolate city (Mishmutat) and the river of wild animals (Cody Wop) and the upside-down section (Gilywimpis) and Pudge's capital city (Gunypostafall); in Gilywimpis, she told me disturbingly, even the birds had wings. In the afternoon the sun was shining and it was so pleasant that I said that she and Barry might play outdoors for a while if they stayed near the house and Sally was careful not to get herself tired, or chilled, or excited. Barry asked to be put into a long-sleeved shirt because they were going to play Gunnywapitat, and he made himself a srop out of a twig. For quite a while I was in the kitchen, cleaning the refrigerator and then scrubbing the kitchen floor, which I had not had time to do while Sally was sick, and I heard them playing happily outside. “Lagatours!” Sally shouted once. “Charge!” “Avaunt!” Barry cried, and charged, presumably brandishing his srop.