Have You No Shame? And Other Regrettable Stories

Nazis in the Walls: Part One

I was quite small, perhaps eight, when it occurred to me how deeply I disliked the other children.  I mean, I didn’t want them dead or anything; it just didn’t seem as though we had much to say to one another.  I had made an effort when we first moved to the neighborhood, dutifully ringing doorbells and dragging the sprinkler from the garage, but one can only spend so many afternoons throwing dirt clods at passing cars before the soul cries out for something finer.  I’m sure that murdering fireflies and smearing the glowing intestines in a lurid streak across the grass with one’s shoe has its own rewards, but none that compare to an evening spent indoors, memorizing the recitative to an obscure Gilbert and Sullivan operetta and congratulating oneself on one’s own superiority.  Peering out my bedroom window with bemused disdain at the local gang of young ruffians, vulgar Philistines who had probably never heard of Derek Jacobi, as they pelted each other with water balloons or gleefully terrorized some delicate future interior decorator, I invented games of my own.  Solitary, secretive games, tailored especially to my peculiar fixations.  For example:

PEOPLE  WHO WOULD  HIDE US  FROM  THE NAZIS.

This wasn’t my only game, naturally.  There was How Many Times, a favorite in which I would select a video—generally something with an epic feel: Gone With the Wind, The Ten Commandments, Doctor Zhivago--and aided by a potent combination of candy corn and Dayquil, see how many times I could watch it in a row before I began to hallucinate. I would read the collected works of Tennessee Williams out loud to an audience of inanimate objects: stuffed animals, Barbies, and my sister, four years younger and as yet unable to protest. Teddy Snowcrop and Marty the Monkey still cite my performance as Blanche DuBois as the indelible reading of the decade, and while Mr. Popple called my Amanda Wingfield  as a “miscast, half-hearted tribute to Laurette Taylor that bears little resemblance to the original”; my “electric and electrifying” portrayal of Alma Winemiller in Summer and Smoke was, in a word, “definitive.” (At press time, my sister could not be reached for comment.)

But far and away my favorite way to spend another long afternoon indoors was to curl up with my favorite blanket, a legal pad, and 2-liter bottle of Diet Coke, and make my special lists. 

1.    The Petersons next door

2.   The Begleys across the street (1st choice--pinball machine in basement)

3.   Mrs. Olsen from school

4.   Ms. Koons from school (start coming in with my math homework actually finished, instead of copying answers from board when we check in class.)

5.   Julie from ice skating (learn last name)

And so on.  Sometimes, if she was in the mood, my mother gave me a hand. 

            “The Nagels?” she shrieked.  “Are you kidding me?  The Nagels would own slaves if they could.” 

            “The Nagels give out king-sized Snickers bars on Halloween!”

            “The Nagels belong to the NRA and go to that church off Dodge Street where they had Jerry Falwell speak.  Cross them off the list.”

            I crossed the Nagels off the list on account of them being slave-owning, gun-toting, Nazis.

            My mother began to enjoy herself. “Your little friend Julie?  Honey, I know how much you like each other, but that mother of hers would spread her legs for the first S.S. man that bought her a goddamn beer.”

            With this I could not argue.

            “How about your friend Gretchen’s parents? Aren’t they Quakers or Mennonites or something?  They’d probably do it, if they hadn’t been rounded up with the Jehovah’s Witnesses.” She scanned the list again, tapping her teeth together gently.  “Hmmm.  I don’t know if the Petersons are such a good idea.”