Sample Passage 2: Prose
Fiction
On
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.
Sample Items for Passage 2