5. The Playground (cont.)

Staying little meant wearing pretty velvet bonnets and white high-topped shoes, baby shoes. Staying little meant remaining content in Mommy’s warm little world, never being naughty, always doing what Mommy said. It meant agreeing with Mommy that the babushkas and brown oxfords the other girls wore were ugly and that other children didn’t really know how to behave. Other children agreed with one another that I was babyish and a bit odd, but I was my mommy’s little girl and didn’t care.

The crib stood along the wall, just inside the door to the bedroom. On the opposite wall was a window and Will’s bed. In between the beds, on one wall, was a desk, painted blue. It had a front that lowered to make a surface for writing. The desk was Will’s. A dresser and the door to the closet occupied the other wall. A linoleum rug covered the floor.

Sometimes, after Will and I had gone to bed, we talked and giggled across the dark divide between our beds. Sometimes Mommy got cross when we did that. One night, we talked so long that she finally came in and commanded, sternly, “Turn toward the wall. Both of you! And go to sleep!”

When they came to the wall next to my crib, they had grown almost to full size, and by the time they circled my crib and came out into the middle of the floor, they were as big as I had ever seen them in town. The wagon needed to be big, I could see now, because it was full of children.