It had been a long and difficult time for Marianne, trying to find censure for the way things had went. She didn’t know what shape the house would be in, or if it was even there anymore. She had not been to Brass Hands since her family had left, after only being there three years, when she was seven, thirty-seven years ago.
The house had been red brick. A two story with white washed exterior wood that cascaded down into square-paned, bay windows. A door in the middle of the two of them. It had been a shop-front way back. As a girl Marianne imagined it had been a candy shop. But no one had known really what it had been.
Her family had rented in the upstairs apartment. Her, her Dad and Mom. Although they had moved around constantly, Marianne had always thought of this place as first. Her original home.
In those early days she was here everything was sun soaked. Summer lasting always. Golden sun through North Jersey maples and oaks. And something in the quality of sun that shone against it. In her mind the sun came from the orange matter of the crumbly brick which reflected out to her, and filled her up with some kind of exquisite warmth. Warmth like her shoulder length red hair. It had become the very warmth of memory for her.
As Marianne drove through Brass Hands she barely looked at the buildings and how things had obviously changed because she was so focused on her thoughts of the house, and what it had been to her, and what had finally happened there. It was odd enough that she was on this business trip in the Tri-State area, from Cali, and had enough time through the weekend to rent a car and make this jaunt.
Brass Hands may have been the most stable three years she had, since they left. Back then Brass Hands was a real suburban neighborhood. The way they made them in the seventies. Secluded. Safe. She rode her bike and went off with the other children without a care. Investigating the woods. Playing in sandboxes and swinging on swings. People in Brass Hands called across the neighborhood for their children, including Marianne’s parents who would call, “Mariannnnnnnnnnne! Time for Dinnnnnnn-errrrrrrrr! She thought of herself running across yards to come home. And sometimes not running. Once in the middle of summer, late, her parents cooking a 9 pm extravaganza of spaghetti for friends, she was in terrible trouble, taking over a half hour to arrive. Pockets filled up with squished fireflies that she had been catching and collecting in the dark dusk.
It was before her parents had split up, before they all had left the town quickly and hastily that third year.
The people that lived downstairs were Mr. and Mrs. Hibbler. Mrs. Hibbler stood out as a real "crazy looking lady" the first time Marianne had seen her. Even her parents had called her a crazy lady. The children in the neighborhood called her Mrs. Big Eyes. And they were ridiculously huge, especially through the magnifying glasses she wore. A short women compared to the grown-ups around her, she had the same loud, flamingo-y clothes as most old lady’s back then. Yet something made her more than strange, and it wasn’t just the eyes, or the hunch back she walked with. It was the look of her. A huge square waddle under the mention of a chin. An old, old lady, Mrs. Hibbler was plastered and clogged with smelly make-up, always, except a few mornings when Marianne got to look at her pallid, almost dripping, bare face. Still, she was fixed on this old lady’s big eyes, that looked around. That never really looked at Marianne. Or anyone. She just looked around from thing to thing, when she spoke.
But she was nice. As nice as any grandma, of which Marianne had seen little, or nothing of as a little girl. Mrs. Hibbler had spoken very kindly to her. Not talking down to her, but calling her dear and sweetness all the time, in a way that made Marianne feel comfortable, and safe. Isn’t it funny with children that they do forget the oddities of people easier, and forgive them. Mrs. Big Eyes knew all the kids had called her that name, and worse. How could she not? They yelled it to her, and taunted her over fences, and yelled it with their fingers pointing down drive-ways. Marianne hated that she called her that, to herself, along with the other mean kids.
Mrs. Hibbler’s husband on the other hand was a fat, squirmy fellow that couldn’t be nice even if you paid him.
He was balding with a grey crew cut and his neck in the back balled up in folds.
His name was Izzy. She forever would think of everyone calling him Izzy. Izzy Hibbler. She never knew Mrs. Hibblers first name. And for all the time Marianne was there in Brass Hands, in the red brick apartment, she had watched Izzy Hibbler taunt his poor old wife. Awfully. Like an icky secret that that end of the block didn’t talk about. No adult had. Because much of it took place outside, and everyone knew and watched, so why stir things up.
Izzy was in the habit of taking her keys to the low-slung, grey de Ville she dangerously puttered around town in. Dangling and jingling them in front of her.
Saying, “Come on you old bitch, come and get’m. Lets see you go-go-go. C’mon ya old cunt.”
Or something like that. Marianne heard the words echo in her ears. He drove Mrs. Hibbler to fits of rage, and she would fight back, using the f-word over and over and coughing up spittle as she hobbled around the yard after him. He’d stand by a fence and jingle and bang them against it, calling. And when she approached closer he would run to another part of the yard, and make the same nasty gestures, hanging the keys in front of his privates, and dangling them down there.
In spite of her parents who told her that Mr. Hibbler was only crotchety, Marianne had hated him, terribly, really hated him. They had said he was the landlord and people shouldn’t judge other peoples lives. Sometimes, once in a while, Izzy would sit and drink a beer with her dad. Once he was talking about the fat on his belly, so he grabbed a hold of it through his undershirt, and jiggled it for everyone to see, jiggled it over and over, like the keys, until everyone sat in silence feeling uncomfortable, and wishing he would quit it. Even now, today, Marianne never questioned that this man had been a real weirdo, and had obviously done much worse things. Things she could never know about.
She turned on Erie and then Glen, now wondering about the backyard. There had been a few cast and white-washed cherubs around, close to a flagstone space. Plants on trellises. Grapes maybe they had been. Things that once made this space a proper and charming garden were strewn about the yard. She had understood it because it was “gratefully unkempt”. Mrs. Hibbler had said so, and Marianne thought of her, often haggling a dollar to help clean up. But she was too young to be of any real help. Mrs. Hibbler had always given her the dollar anyway.
Brass Hands really had changed. Many stores and parking lots were different, rebuilt. It had started to lose it’s country appeal. Marianne went up Glen Ave, up the long hill, where at the top the house would lay.
If anything, looking down the streets inspired her to a sense of nostalgia, in more of an uplifting way than she had expected. The non-descript and vacumned rental car crested the hill and came finally upon the the old vestige. And it was there! Almost as it had been. She looked, and avoided it, deciding to curtail it for a moment more by driving around the block. No need to rush this recompense while she was sentimental feeling, and wanting to revisit the neighborhood. She passed the house that use to belong to “Uncle Bill” the retired town Chief of Police. Many memories of him, she smiled. All the kids sitting on his porch while he smoked his pipe and talked about trout fishing, and how he grew his tomatoes with aluminum stakes. The cracking, moldy green floor littered with matches, burned and strewn about, and strangely fragrant pipe ashes engrained in the paint of the porch, from years and years of smoking.
Across the street was Philip Dreyer's house. Since, it had been knocked down and rebuilt. Not the same structure at all. The barn in the back had been turned into a couple of adjoining apartments, and the monstrous Oak tree they all went around and around with their bikes had been chopped down. Smirking, she pictured him, asking her to take her clothes off and strip as he sometimes did. He was a nice boy, her same age. It had amounted to playing doctor, mostly posturing to show each, and would they or wouldn’t they. Once when they were on the swing set, he had wanted her to go in the back of the barn, and she made the deal that they were not going to get married if they went and took their clothes off, a deal which Philip had taken. A deal that didn’t make any sense except in kid speak. At the time it did give Marianne some feeling of leverage, that she wasn’t giving in to everything her little courtier wanted.
Philip, truly had been a charming little boy, and even when he asked her to spread it open so he could see inside, it was asked in as innocent a fashion as the bairn that he was. Like many things at that time, in that place, she used it as an experience by which to judge all others, and had actually spent years wishing lovers would be as caring as little Philip was, to whom she had given up her mental virginity, when she was also just a pea.
Many, if not all the houses and people in them had some kind of history for her, and she could probably fire off all their names if she had to. There was no staving off her pre-planned reconciliation any longer though. It was time to come face to face with this old berth where she once had lived.
It had been a ball and a fleeting bad intention that had caused Marianne, as only a seven-year-old, to think she killed Mrs. Hibbler. It had happened simply enough. It was on some morning. Marianne was playing ball in the garden. Mr. and Mrs. Hibbler began to argue in the house. Mr. Hibbler did his thing. This time, instead of her keys it was her glasses. He called her frightful things and kept going into the house, and then out of the house, finding somewhere to stand and taunt her, teasing her with the glasses in his hand. Calling her Mrs. Big Eyes, and Mrs. This and Mrs. That, just the way the children had.
“Misses Big Eyes”, he called. “Come and get’m. I bet you can’t get over here and get’ummm, you cum-sucker you. Misses cum-suckerrrr, misses cum-suckerrrr.” he called with yucky suck noises.
Marianne had a genuine distaste for vulgarity ever since.
Then Izzy re-entered the house and they’ed fight, and she called him horrible names back, in her old, scratchy, grandma, hibbler, mrs. big eyes voice.
Marianne went over it all vividly. All of it. Again. She remembered her feelings of hate toward him. How horrible a man he was to do that to her. How Mrs. Hibbler would never say such things if it weren’t for him. Feeling such hate as a little girl. Such malintent.
And in a quick moment, with her little girl mind she decided to set a trap for Mr. Hibbler, back then, in that third year she had lived here, when she was seven. A little precocious, but none-the-less an easy decision to quickly run, and place the ball at the doorstep of the stoop. So he could trip. So that is what she did. Mr. Hibbler had been in and out, and in again, twice. It was obvious to her he would just come out again. Marianne quickly placed the ball. She waited in some secret fashion around the corner. Froze in fear when it was Mrs. Hibbler that came bumbling out of the door. Yelling. Without her glasses on. She tripped. Stepped right on the ball and fell. She screeched and crumpled down the cement stoop, landing on her side. Everything after that was muddier in what Marianne could recall. Only that an ambulance came. Mrs. Hibbler was taken away. She remembered her last look at Mrs Big Eyes, being pushed into the ambulance. She had her glasses on now. She was quiet, looking around from thing to thing.
Marianne had finally parked and got out of the car to walk up to the house. The blue stone graveled drive-way was empty. The front of the house was more weathered and didn’t have that glossy, candy store shine it had once had had, but it was as pretty as ever. So was the old orange brick. There appeared to be no one home. She walked down the drive-way and looked at the door where the incident had happened. She looked at the garden which was more overgrown than ever. There were grapes on the trellis but they begged for water now. They weren’t full anymore, like they had appeared in her mental picture of the place. They were craggy and the whole garden had lost the charm she remembered it having.
Marianne had not led her whole life in a state of self-loathing. Although she had panicked as a child to the point of silence. It was at that moment, when Mrs. Hibbler fell, that the endless golden summer of her youth ended. She felt, even as a young girl that she was capable of bad, evil things.
It had gotten worse for the old lady afterwards. Everyone had slowly told it to her, after days and days, that she was in the hospital for a broken hip. Then it was that Mrs. Hibbler had had a stroke. And then things went completely downhill, and she died, of complications, and heart failure.
Now, staring at the doorway, Marianne didn’t know why she hadn’t said anything. She was scared. A tiny girl at the time. An opportunity had never arisen she guessed, and then much time passed. Yet over the years it mucked around in her. Worse. Marianne believed she was unlucky. In her darker moments she was a monster. At other times she rejected things people tried to give her entirely, feeling un-worth it. A bad seed. Always courtroom drama in her brain. Living life like a defendant. Always hoping for a fair verdict of involuntary man-slaughter, at best.
The years of therapy that ticker-taped through her. Proper acts of contrition Stenographed and catalogued. The “forgive yourself” speeches she got, when as an adult she finally “came clean”, whirl-pooled in her like water down a bathtub drain. Through her body right out her feet, into the gravel. The speeches hadn’t done anything. Nothing. She looked again at the stoop in question. The same unrest for herself. Worse. Why did she think, even imagine that coming here would bring an end to the contempt for herself that she lived with?
Vivid recurrences of being in the town crashed in on her as she stood up against the quiet surrounds. She savored the moments too, as she knew she wouldn’t ever see this house, yard or even Brass Hands again. There was no quelling of ghosts here at all, as she had wished. In her head she could hear the children taunting the old woman. She could see the faces of all the friends she rode bikes with, and played in the woods with. It was funny to her that even though this place had been a place where a serious apple had been bit, it was also the place where she had her best, and possibly only great childhood recollections.
These had been the first years of her life. There-had-been wonderful summer days. There had been the sunlight that bounced from the brick house to her red hair, that now was greying, she cynically thought, and put a lock in her mouth. A bad habit she could never seem to entirely break.
Being in the midst of a landscape she had dreamed of for 35 years, she found it difficult to separate the angst from the bliss in her head. This was the place where they all became confounded.
More flashes of things. Wonderful Halloweens. Her first day of school where she lit up because Peggy Papke was in her class, with whom she had spent the summer before mixing Pixie Stix with water in her little plastic tea set, and pretending to tink the little cups and sipping the sugary elixer down, with pinkies up in the air. Secretly playing by herself one day in Eileen’s fancy play house her dad had made for her, and waiting too long to leave, finally pooping in her pants. And crying home.
Marianne smiled at the image of herself coming down the block, with such simple little girl problems as a heiney filled with number two. It was this silly memory that caught her up, and she then cried. Wept for the years in between then and now.
Had nothing changed? She continued to leverage with herself that it was not real malintent. That she was only a little girl. Maybe if she didn’t recall so specifically how it had all gone. Hadn’t remembered her decision, and making it. Putting the ball there. Knowing she would do it again.
She had been standing here too long she thought, sick in her stomach that she was even back here. There were no surprises in the things she saw. They were burned into her. It was a joke that she had even decided to come. Nothing had changed for her.
She turned. Walked back out toward Glen Avenue. To get to her car. And then she walked toward another branded anamnesis she had spent a life mulling over. A small cluster of pines that had been on the corner there. Two summers in a row dead and dying baby birds on the ground underneath. The first year it had been a fluke, an accident. But the second year she had seen the same thing. A dead ugly baby bird under the pine trees, still moving, trying to breathe as it died. How could this be? Something must kill these baby birds. Some kind of malintent. It had always eaten at her.
The trees were there on the corner and had grown larger, and taller. From where she could see on the ground there were no birds in them at all. No dying baby birds underneath.
In her car she pulled away, and decided she would get a pack of cigarettes at the store, on the way out to the highway. She hadn’t smoked for a couple of years now.
