A Woman Not Five Feet Tall, with a Grotesque, Protruding Stomach, Was Wheeling

Chapter 10

A woman not five feet tall, with a grotesque, protruding stomach, was wheeling

an old black baby carriage down the street. Two or three small children of various sizes,

all pale, with smudgy faces and bare smudgy knees, wobbled along in the shadow of her

skirts.

A serene, almost religious smile lit up the woman's face. Her head tilted happily

back, like a sparrow egg perched on a duck egg, she smiled into the sun.

I knew the woman well

It was Dodo Conway.

Dodo Conway was a Catholic who had gone to Barnard and then married an

architect who had gone to Columbia and was also a Catholic. They had a big, rambling

house up the street from us, set behind a morbid facade of pine trees, and surrounded by

scooters, tricycles, doll carriages, toy fire trucks, baseball bats, badminton nets, croquet

wickets, hamster cages and cocker spaniel puppies -- the whole sprawling paraphernalia

of suburban childhood.

Dodo interested me in spite of myself.

Her house was unlike all the others in our neighborhood in its size (it was much

bigger) and its color (the second story was constructed of dark brown clapboard and the

first of gray stucco, studded with gray and purple golfball-shaped stones), and the pine

trees completely screened it from view, which was considered unsociable in our

community of adjoining lawns and friendly, waist-high hedges.

Dodo raised her six children -- and would no doubt raise her seventh -- on Rice

Krispies, peanut-butter-and-marshmallow sandwiches, vanilla ice cream and gallon upon

gallon of Hoods milk. She got a special discount from the local milkman.

Everybody loved Dodo, although the swelling size of her family was the talk of

the neighborhood. The older people around, like my mother, had two children, and the

younger, more prosperous ones had four, but nobody but Dodo was on the verge of a

seventh. Even six was considered excessive, but then, everybody said, of course Dodo

was a Catholic.

I watched Dodo wheel the youngest Conway up and down. She seemed to be

doing it for my benefit. Children made me sick.

A floorboard creaked, and I ducked down again, just as Dodo Conway's face, by

instinct, or some gift of supernatural hearing, turned on the little pivot of its neck.

I felt her gaze pierce through the white clapboard and the pink wallpaper roses

and uncover me, crouching there behind the silver pickets of the radiator.

I crawled back into bed and pulled the sheet over my head. But even that didn't

shut out the light, so I buried my head under the darkness of the pillow and pretended it

was night. I couldn't see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.