Cathy

“Our family had nothing,” he said. He picked up a small wooden figure (was it a figure?) from the objects on his nightstand. He turned the object in his hands as he spoke. He didn’t look at it, but let hands explore its surfaces, as if he were a blind man, trying to fathom the whole from the shape of the parts.###

“We lived in a basement apartment. My father was the super. Everyone in the building was as poor as us. My father had a good heart: he did his job and anything they wanted him to do in addition. But there were hardly ever tips. Mother was sick, she hardly went out. I spent my childhood in a hurry to get old so I could get a job and make money to chip in. I think I was born wanting to work.”###

He smiled at me. His first smile since I met him. Of all the things to smile at: the thought of being born to work. I looked at his hands, the ones caressing the object. They were weatherworn. He had found work, eventually. I tried to make sense of the object in his hands, but I had to wait for his story to unravel.###

“I went along with my father on his rounds, after school. I even stayed home and helped him all day if he needed me. I missed half of first grade this way. The school sent a social worker, eventually, someone just like you, to scold us and explain I had to go every day. A witch, is how I thought of her.” He winked at me, teasing. ###

“I was just a child. A child with no toys, no time for play, no coddling. ‘Bring me a damp cloth,’ my mother would call to me, not ‘come sit on my lap.’ She held it like a cold compress to her forehead. One day my father made something with wood at our kitchen table, paying attention to every little surface, holding the thing as if it were made of glass, so gently. I asked what is it? ‘A toy truck,’ he said. Some new people had moved in, with a sick boy. He was making that child a toy.###

“I was jealous. ‘Will they pay for it?’ I asked. He said he hoped so, but if not, he would give them the toy anyway, because the kid was crippled from polio. He didn’t understand much about disease, so he told me not to come, he didn’t want me to catch it. He went off with the toy and I waited for him to come back, imagining him with a nickel and a sense of triumph. The image made me stop wanting the toy for myself.###

But instead he came back dejected. The parents had given him a penny but rejected his gift, afraid the wood had rough edges, afraid the bolts might give the child tetanus. Clearly they were frightened of losing that child, which worked out fine by me. I got the toy truck. It also looked like a rabbit. In my imagination I made it a superhero, a hungry pet, a bulldozer, a dagger, a king of invisible gnomes under my bed, and more. It magically turned an ordinary penny into a lucky penny. It was my only toy as a child, and it was everything I could ever want. ###