On Union Boulevard, St. Louis, in the 1950's, there were women in
their eighties who lived with the shades drawn, who hid like bats in the
caves they claimed for home. Neighbors of my grandmother, they could be
faintly heard through a ceiling or wall. A drawer opening. The slow
thump of a shoe. Who they were and whom they were mourning (someone had
always just died) intrigued me. Me, the child who knew where the cookies
waited in Grandma's kitchen closet. Who lined five varieties up on the
table and bit from each one in succession, knowing my mother would never
let me do this at home. Who sold Girl Scout cookies door-to-door in
annual tradition, who sold fifty boxes, who won The Prize. My
grandmother told me which doors to knock on. Whispered secretly, "She'll
take three boxes—wait and see."
Hand-in-hand we climbed the dark stairs, knocked on the doors. I
shivered, held Grandma tighter, remember still the smell which was
curiously fragrant, a sweet soup of talcum powder, folded curtains,
roses pressed in a book. Was that what years smelled like? The door
would miraculously open and a withered face framed there would peer
oddly at me as if I had come from another world. Maybe I had. "Come in,"
it would say, or "Yes?" and I would mumble something about cookies,
feeling foolish, feeling like the one who places a can of beans next to
an altar marked For the Poor and then has to stare at it—the
beans next to the cross—all through the worship. Feeling I should have
brought more, as if I shouldn't be selling something to these women, but
giving them a gift, some new breath, assurance that there was still a
child's world out there, green grass, scabby knees, a playground where
you could stretch your legs higher than your head. There were still
Easter eggs lodged in the mouths of drainpipes and sleds on frozen
hills, that joyous scream of flying toward yourself in the snow.
Squirrels storing nuts, kittens being born with eyes closed; there was
still everything tiny, unformed, flung wide open into the air!
But how did you carry such an assurance? In those hallways, standing
before those thin gray wisps of women, with Grandma slinking back and
pushing me forward to go in alone, I didn't know. There was something
here which also smelled like life. But it was a life I hadn't learned
yet. I had never outlived anything I knew of, except one yellow cat. I
never had saved a photograph. For me life was a bounce, an unending
burst of pleasures. Vaguely I imagined what a life of recollection could
be, as already I was haunted by a sense of my own lost baby years,
golden rings I slipped on and off my heart. Would I be one of those
women?
Their rooms were shrines of upholstery and lace. Silent radios
standing under stacks of magazines. Did they work? Could I turn the
knobs? Questions I wouldn't ask here. Windows with shades pulled low, so
the light peeping through took on a changed quality, as if it were
brighter or dimmer than I remembered. And portraits, photographs, on
walls, on tables, faces strangely familiar, as if I was destined to know
them. I asked no questions and the women never questioned me. Never
asked where the money went, had the price gone up since last year, were
there any additional flavors. They bought what they remembered—if it was
peanut-butter last year, peanut-butter this year would be fine. They
brought the coins from jars, from pocketbooks without handles, counted
them carefully before me, while I stared at their thin crops of knotted
hair. A Sunday brooch pinned loosely to the shoulder of an everyday
dress. What were these women thinking of?
And the door would close softly behind me, transaction complete, the
closing click like a drawer sliding back, a world slid quietly out of
sight, and I was free to return to my own universe, to Grandma standing
with arms folded in the courtyard, staring peacefully up at a bluejay or
sprouting leaf. Suddenly I'd see Grandma in her dress of tiny flowers,
curly gray permanent, tightly laced shoes, as one of them—but
then she'd turn, laugh, "Did she buy?" and again belong to me.
Gray women in rooms with the shades drawn . . . weeks later
the cookies would come. I would stack the boxes, make my delivery rounds
to the sleeping doors. This time I would be businesslike, I would rap
firmly, "Hello Ma'am, here are the cookies you ordered." And the face
would peer up, uncertain . . . cookies? . . . as if
for a moment we were floating in the space between us. What I did
(carefully balancing boxes in both my arms, wondering who would eat the
cookies—I was the only child ever seen in that building) or what she did
(reaching out with floating hands to touch what she had bought) had
little to do with who we were, had been, or ever would be.
Naomi Shihab Nye, "The Cookies." © 1982 by Naomi Shihab
Nye.
