SARA PRITCHARD

THE VERY BEAUTIFUL SAD ELEGY FOR BAMBI’S DEAD MOTHER | Sara Pritchard

1952—You are two years old and eating a book. Albertine is four and reading aloud: James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George . . . . You wish that she'd shut up. The spine on your book is gold and particularly tasty. You gnaw on it with your front teeth likes it’s an ear of corn. Baby’s House the book says on its chipboard cover. This is baby’s house . . . the Little Golden Book begins, the text running underneath a bright illustration of a white clapboard house with a red roof.

This is baby’s living room . . . the next page continues, on and on—a real page turner—through the traditional American home of the Truman and Eisenhower years: baby’s dining room, baby’s kitchen, up the stairs to baby’s parents’ room (twin beds), baby’s brother’s room, baby’s bedroom . . . but your favorite room is baby’s bathroom. In baby’s bathroom, baby stands on a bright red bench beside a big clawfoot bathtub and brushes her teeth in front of a medicine cabinet mirror.

This is your bathroom, too. You also have a big clawfoot bathtub—big enough for your mother, your sister Albertine, and you to fit in all together—and a bench painted bright red, a brown door with a ceramic door knob and a shiny silver lock that goes click-click click-click—like your brother Mason’s pocket cricket—when you turn it back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. . . .

* * * * *
1955—The bathroom of the house at 41 Cherry Street in Ashport, Pennsylvania, has great acoustics: a high ceiling with a light you turn on and off by pulling a long string with a crocheted tassel, and a checkerboard floor of black and white tiles. There’s a tiny window with frosted glass that pushes out and affords an excellent, bird’s-eye view of the alley, Go-Jeff’s dog house, the cherry tree decorated with its white caterpillar tents, and the clothesline with its chorus line of laundry. There’s a radiator, too, for help climbing from the stool onto the sink, and above the sink a medicine cabinet with a mirror and chock full of salves, Band-Aids, various cold and stomach-upset remedies, plus iodine and mercurochrome in tiny brown bottles with glass sticks. There’s also a tall metal locker painted white, which smells inside of Cashmere Bouquet and has two shelves of scratchy towels, plus—to your five-year old wonder—magnificent and curious things in the bottom like a toilet plunger, which is really a combination pogo stick, wall sucker, and marching hat; a box of some kind of mattresses for the beds in a mouse hospital; a black rubber pear with a hole in one end and a little snoot, which is for puffing dead flies off the window sill; a big vitamin-colored rubber bag with a long, black rubber straw, which can glug up toilet water and other things; and—on the door—A LOCK!

Locked in the bathroom at 41 Cherry Street after morning half-day kindergarten, while your father is out working for Atlas Powder Company, your sister Albertine and your brother Mason at school, and your mother doing laundry or teaching piano lessons downstairs, you spend many happy hours laying out crayons on the radiator and watching them melt, tap dancing on the tile floor while singing the McGuire Sisters’ “Sugartime” or Burl Ives’s “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” playing Albertine’s flutaphone (which she keeps hidden in a Buster Brown shoe box under the bed and which you are forbidden to touch), eating Vicks VapoRub out of the jar with your finger, sipping Cheracol cough syrup, watching St. Joseph’s aspirin for children dissolve on your tongue, taking your clothes off and examining every square inch of your body with your mother’s hand mirror, shaving the hair off your arms with your father’s Gillette razor, or standing on the bright red bench, staring into the medicine cabinet mirror on the opposite wall and repeating endlessly your favorite phrase in many different voices, pronunciations, variations, accents, and volumes:

Yellow Velvet.

YEL-LOH VEL-VET!

yel-LOW vel-VET.

YEL-low VEL-velt.

YEL-low vel-VET.

VELVET YELLOW .

VELLOW YELVET.

VellowyYellowysmellowyVELVET

yellowvelvetyellowvelvetyellowvelvet.

YALLLLLOUH VALL-VETTTT!

* * * * *

Now you’re a little older and learning to read and write. There are many wonderful words to say and write and spell, but the most glorious, wonderful word of all is SQUIRREL. SQUIRREL with its big, swirling S, its magnificent Q with the long squirrelly tail, its dog-barking R-R. SQUIRREL is a word to be written in the dirt in the alley with a stick, to be written with your finger on the side of your father’s DeSoto and on steamed-up windows in the kitchen and in the coffee-table dust and on the television screen. With one of your father’s mechanical pencils, SQUIRREL can be written very small on the wallpaper going up the stairs or low to the floor, just above the molding, or longways, marching up the corner of Mason’s room.

With a blue ballpoint pen, SQUIRREL can be printed in Mason’s Latin book, on your Aunt Frannie Linn’s playing cards, on dollar bills in your mother’s wallet, and inside Albertine’s Buster Brown shoes. With the mechanical pencil point, the word SQUIRREL can be scratched into the back of wooden doors and on bureaus underneath doilies, and on the headboard of your bed. One night in bed you think of SQUIRREL backwards, and the magical word LERRIUQS, pronounced Larry Ukus (the Mighty Mouse of squirrels) appears in blue ink on your sheets. Brushing your teeth one morning and looking in the mirror, the even more magical word appears on one of the white horizontal stripes on your pajama top where the word squirrel had once been.

Life is beautiful.

But briefly. You are no longer allowed to have a pencil, a pen, a crayon, a piece of chalk, nor any other writing instrument on your person without supervision. For one hour—Dale Evans time—you must sit quietly in your room and think about what you have done, and it is during this very thoughtful, quiet period that Blinker comes up with the idea of invisible writing: writing with water. Blinker is the person who fed Betsy Wetsy a bottle of real milk and then put her to bed without making her pee, and a rank odor began to spread from your corner of the bedroom. Blinker is the person who drank the entire bottle of Cheracol and then threw up in the hall. It’s a damn good thing he threw up, too, or he could be dead or in St. Vincent’s getting his stomach pumped. Blinker is the person whose breath smells like Vicks VapoRub. Blinker is the person responsible for the cricket lock on the bathroom door now rusting in a Chase & Sanborn can in the basement.

After this quiet, thoughtful hour is up, Blinker must go to the bathroom. There, Blinker experiments on a very small scale with the first invisible water writing, and it is quite successful, but Blinker can’t leave well enough alone. During dinner that evening, eating corn on the cob, Blinker comes up with the concept of butter writing. Butter writing is a kind of shiny water writing. After dinner, with a purloined stick of Land O’ Lakes, Blinker writes the word SQUIRREL on the wallpaper behind the davenport and then gives the remainder of the stick of butter to Go-Jeff, who gulps it down whole, paper and all. The next day while your mother is doing laundry, butter writing progresses to Crisco writing and escalates to Crisco erasing, which involves big globs of Crisco necessary to erase or blend together shiny spots on the wallpaper, leaving the can of Crisco full of dust and dog hair and big patches of the wallpaper a dark pee-colored yellow.

Blinker has really done it this time. You fear for your life, so you go upstairs and get in your bed and pull the covers up over your head. Downstairs, your mother comes in the back door with a laundry basket. She walks into the living room and sets the basket on the davenport.

“What’s this?” she says, but you cannot hear her because you’ree taking a nap, you’re sound asleep. Because you’re sick. Because you have a terrible stomach ache. Because you’re dying. You are so sound asleep and dying at the same time. you’re snoring loudly, as only dying people with stomach aches can snore: Ckckcooonkckck. Ckckcooooooonkckck.

Your mother is coming up the stairs calling your name. “Ruby!” she calls, “Ruby Jean Reese!”

Should you add the whistling exhale like in the Bugs Bunny cartoons or would that be too much?

Ckcknnkckck. Pffffwwwwwww. Ckckcnnnkckck. Pffffwwwwwwww.

* * * * *
a few days later

You’re sitting on the davenport with your bride doll on your lap, your brother Mason beside you. You’re watching Mighty Mouse, and Mason says to you, without turning his head:

“So did you hear about that buddy of yours, that er—Blinker, is it?—fella, Blinker the famous Crisco painter?”

“What about Blinker?” you ask.

“He bought the ranch,” Mason says.

“What ranch?”

“He turned up dead, stupid.”

“Did not.”

“Did.”

“Did not.”

“It was on the radio . . . last night . . . while you were asleep. Blinker was run over by a truck and decapitated.”

“Well, maybe he got run over by a truck and he was declumpertated, but he’s O.K.,” you insist. (Blinker had been run over by a truck on one other occasion, but it turned out to have been a mistake. It was somebody else.)

“He got his stomach pumped and now he’s O.K.,” you elaborate. “Dr. Elsworth said Blinker’s O.K.”

“Yeah, he’s O.K. alright. He’s just fine without a head!” Your brother Mason starts laughing hysterically and beating on one of the davenport’s fat arms. “Yeah,” he laughs, “he’s just gotta big canna Crisco where his head used to be! Ha ha! Ha ha! Ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha! Ha ha! Ha ha ha ha ha!”

“Whadda mean, without a head? Blinker’s got a head. He does too got a head!”

“No, stupid, he’s been DE-CAP-I-TATED. You don’t even know what DE-CAP-I-TATED means. It’s too big a word for you.”

“Shut up. I do, too, know what D-coppertated means.”

“D-coppertated!!! Ha ha ha! Ha ha he he ha ha! You can’t even pronounce it! Ha Ha ha! Ha ha ha! Ha ha he he! So what does D-coppertated mean, Smartypants?”

Silence.

“DE-CAP-I-TATED means he got his head got cut off!” Mason says. “Blinker got his head cut off. Just picture Blinker’s head rolling down the street like a bowling ball. Ha ha ha ha! Ho ho ho ho! He he he he he!”

“Don’t tell her a thing like that!” Your mother scolds. She’s passing by the living room and has overheard Mason’s remark. She walks around the corner and swats your brother on the back of his head with a tea towel and then leaves.

You watch some more Mighty Mouse, and then it’s over. Sky King comes on, then Sergeant Preston of the Yukon.

“Mason, how do you spell that clumpertated word?” you turn and ask your brother.

* * * * *

“I believe in the holey ghost, the holey Christian church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting, Hey men!” you say to yourself, bouncing a ball, walking Go-Jeff on a make-believe leash, jumping rope, hopping on one foot, skipping to school, whumping your slinky down the stairs. “The life everlasting, Hey men! The life everlasting, Hey Men! The holey Christian church. The holey Christian church. The holey-moley, roley-poley, holey Christian church.”

Now it’s Thanksgiving vespers, and after your favorite poem, the Apostles’ Creed, everyone is singing one of your favorite hymns, “Bringing in the Cheese,” their voices happy and cheerful, their faces kind in the yellow light. Mrs. Kline, at the pipe organ, is trying to keep up, her crow wings flapping, her feet going one direction, her hands the other.

Bringing in the cheese, bringing in the cheese,
We shall come rejoicing, bringing in the cheese.

You stand next to Albertine in the children’s choir and sing as loud as you can, sort of shouting. You sing with your top lip curled under and your top teeth sticking out like a mouse because this is a hymn written by church mice, and you are pretending to be one of them as you sing. Gus and Jock—from Cinderella—probably had a part in composing this wonderful hymn. They probably know it by heart. They are probably singing it right now at the top of their lungs in one of the dark, echoing alcoves of Riverview Lutheran Church, maybe over to your right there behind the baptismal pot, standing on a big hunk of Swiss cheese.

The hymn is over. The congregation claps shut their hymnals, but everyone remains standing as Mason, an acolyte, puts out the altar candles with the big candlesnuffer on a pole. Reverend Creech raises his arms like he, too, is about to fly. “Let us pray,” he says, and then the beautiful words wash over you, the words you will always remember all the long days of your life and whisper to yourself when you’re afraid, when you’re alone, when all the sadness of being human gathers itself around you:

May the piece of God, which passeth all understanding,
keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus, Amen.

For many, many years you ponder just exactly which piece of God Reverend Creech might be referring to, but for now, you forget about all that because the choir is filing out and everyone is singing your very most favorite song in the whole world, the one your mother plays for you on the piano at bedtime, and your father has taught you and Albertine to sing in two-part harmony:



Now the day is over, night is drawing nigh,
Shadows of the evening steal across the sky.

Now the darkness gathers, stars begin to peep,
Birds and beasts and flowers soon will be asleep.

Thru the long night watches may thine angels spread
Their white wings above me watching ’round my bed

Grant to little children visions bright of Thee
Guard the sailors tossing on the deep blue sea.

Comfort every sufferer watching late in pain
Those who plan some evil, from their sin restrain

Jesus, give the weary calm and sweet repose
With thy tenderest blessing may my eyelids close.

* * * * *

1958—With very little coaxing and carrying, and only minor scratches, a big orange cat follows you and Albertine home from school. A big orange cat with silky fur and a big round pumpkin head. An orange cat who walks around the house rubbing her head on the legs of everything, including you. She walks in and out your legs, in and out, and her tail goes up your dress and makes you giggle.

“Our cat must have a very beautiful name,” Albertine announces. “Princess!” she exclaims. “Here, Princess! Here pretty Princess Kitty!”

“Kyrie Eleison!” you call, after the beautiful and mysterious words of the kyrie sung in church. “Here, Kyrie,” you call, crawling across the carpet toward your cat. “Here Kyrie! Kyrie Eleison!”

“Daisy,” Albertine says resolutely. “DAISY BUTTERCUP.”

“Here Dona, Here Dona,” you persist, “Here Dona Nobis Pacem!” and Albertine rolls her eyes so far back into her head they disappear completely. Only the whites—like Orphan Annie’s—show.

“Panis Angelicus?” you pout and beg, “Adeste Fideles? Agnus Dei?”

For many hours that night, you lie awake, wandering through the enchanted forest of all the words you know, bumping into trunks and branches, tripping over roots and stumps, searching for the perfect name for your beautiful orange cat: mimosa, marmalade, gladiola, peony, poppycock, forsythia, taffeta, pinochle, piano forte, aspen, pumpkinseed, Leviticus Numbers, lickety-split, fiddlesticks, Worcestershire, nincompoop, whippoorwill, whippersnapper, Fridgedaire, DeSoto, squirrel, pollywollydoodle all the day . . . and on and on. And then . . . lying on its back, humming “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” kicking its feet and doing the back stroke around your brain, you find it: the perfect name for your cat. So you can go to sleep now. But come morning, you wake up in a panic because the perfect name you’ve now forgotten! You should have written it down! Your heart is racing: mimosa, gladiola, peony, forsythia, taffeta, squirrel . . . Oh, praise the Lord, there it is! You run downstairs, but . . .

Your cat is gone.

“He wanted out,” Mason mumbles, dripping a big, sloppy servingspoonful of Wheaties up to his mouth and never looking up from the cereal box he’s reading.

* * * * *

Other than the time Mr. Rossi crawled out on his roof and hollered for everyone to turn themselves into little children and the time Mrs. Wagner’s pressure cooker exploded split pea soup, there is not much excitement in Ashport. Except on Saturday. Every Saturday, you and Albertine walk to the Strand theater on Center Avenue. Matinees start at noon with double features that last until four o’clock. Every single kid in Ashport is there, it seems. Ushers dressed like Johnny Philip Morris unhook the velvet sausages and you pour in like lava, hundreds of you racing down the aisles and up the steps to the balconies, you and Albertine running, too, holding hands. The ushers close the doors and slouch around the lobby, smoking Old Golds, reading magazines, and playing cards, betting pennies, never paying you any mind until they open the doors hours later. Until then, behind the closed doors, it’s mayhem, a zoo. The Strand has two balconies; a gilded, domed ceiling; and tiered side boxes like the ones in Ford Theater where Lincoln was shot—two- and four-seaters with heavy maroon curtains. Kids are everywhere, screaming, running, hanging off the balconies like apes, choking on popcorn, losing their fillings and swallowing their teeth along with Jujubes, throwing wads of Bazooka bubble gum at the screen, and making elephant noises with empty Good & Plenty boxes.

You’ll watch A Light in the Forest and Johnny Tremain; Westward Ho! the Wagons; 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea; and Tarzan, the Ape Man, and it’s at the Strand you’ll see Old Yeller. There won’t be a peep out of anyone when Travis discovers Old Yeller has rabies. Everyone knows what Travis must do. All the children at the Strand will be sniffling, boo-hooing, wiping their snotty noses on their sleeves as Travis raises his twenty-two.

Shortly after Old Yeller, Walt Disney’s Bambi will come to the Strand, and around the same time, your father will begin reading you and Albertine The Yearling. Next will follow a book about an orphaned bear cub named Wob. Quickly and wholeheartedly you will begin to embrace the morose romanticism of female pubescence, priming yourself for the death of Beth in Little Women, a passage which Albertine reads to you every night in bed.

The Saturday you see Bambi, though, you will begin your life’s work as a writer and editor, an epic poem entitled “The Very Beautiful Sad Elegy for Bambi’s Dead Mother.” That is your poem’s final title, but it will go through literally hundreds of titles and revisions as you work on it over the next three years. “The Very Beautiful Sad Elegy for Bambi’s Dead Mother” isn’t just any old elegy. It is a very special genre: an illustrated elegy. Crying fawns standing on their hind legs and wiping their eyes with floral handkerchiefs crowd the side margins. Stiff dead deer with their legs sticking up in the air like upside-down coffee tables adorn the bottom. And, throughout, there is a lot of corn—corn on the cob and the Jolly Green Giant canned variety, too—because you know deer like corn, and for some reason you feel the poem should have both visual and taste appeal for deer. With confidence, your “Very Beautiful Sad Elegy for Bambi’s Dead Mother” could masquerade today as a long-lost collaborative effort between Rod McKuen, Andy Warhol, and Betty Crocker.

Here’s the first stanza of the final version of your poem, “The Very Beautiful Sad Elegy for Bambi’s Dead Mother”:

In the meadow still and calm,
Lays the lovely stag.
Never will she run again,
Nor never leap the crag.

You know the word ‘elegy’ because it’s the name of a song you learned to play on your Grandpa Doc’s trombone. At first you played it as fast as possible, like you play everything else, but when your mother told you to slow down, it was supposed to be sad because somebody had died, everything seemed to miraculously come together—music, art, movies, fairy tales, poetry—like the missing piece of a puzzle showing up at the bottom of a shoebox full of broken crayons.

You decide on the synonym ‘stag’ for deer after casually asking everyone you know: “Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me, what’s another word for ‘deer’?” Your brother Mason offers you ‘stag,’ a wonderful word, a great gift. Likewise, ‘crag’ would be found by asking people the meaning of every possible word you can come up with that rhymes with ‘stag,’ as in, “Excuse me, is ‘klag’ a word?”

In fact, the whole poem will be written pretty much that way. You have never heard of a thesaurus, although you are learning to use your father’s Webster’s dictionary.

You repeat this poem to yourself all the time and work on it every day after school in a very ritualistic fashion. You keep it rolled up, with a rubber band around it, in a black metal miner’s lunch pail that your father has given you, along with some broken crayons, a mechanical pencil your brother Mason has been looking for for some time, a beautiful fountain pen on loan from your mother, a jar of Schaeffer’s blue ink, a candle stub, and some books of matches from the Knotty Pine. The fountain pen is a dark, marbled blue, with a little metal lever on the side that lets the pen suck up ink like an elephant’s trunk. “The Very Beautiful Sad Elegy for Bambi’s Dead Mother” is written on very thin graph paper (also from your father) with a pale blue grid.

You keep the lunch pail under your bed. Every day after school, you crawl under the bed, retrieve the lunch pail, and take it up into the attic where you light the candle and work on your chef d’oeuvre. It’s all very difficult—the writing and drawing on the uneven, splintery floor boards, the curling paper, the fountain pen and all, but this is the path you’ve chosen.

The only person you ever show your poem to is your mother, whom you read it to many, many times, every revision. Every time you sit on your mother’s lap and read her “The Very Beautiful Sad Elegy for Bambi’s Dead Mother,” she hugs you and then puts her hand over her heart and says, “Sweetheart, that’s really, really beautiful. I know you’ll be a famous poet someday, Ruby Jean.”

When you are nine, though, in September 1959, you start fourth grade with a young, pretty teacher, Miss Barrett. Miss Barrett is just out of state teachers’ college. She’s very stylish in a Thalia Menninger kind of way, with fawn-colored hair. Miss Barrett wears muted cashmere twin-set sweaters and a single strand of pearls with a big gold clip. You’ve always been quite shy, but you trust Miss Barrett with her fawn-colored hair and fawn-colored camel’s hair coat, her fawn-colored sweaters and white pearls, and you really want her to like you. After much deliberation, one fall Friday when school is over and Miss Barrett is in the front of the room erasing the blackboards, you tiptoe up to her desk and place “The Very Beautiful Sad Elegy for Bambi’s Dead Mother” on it, rolled up and tied with a hair ribbon, and tiptoe away. All weekend you daydream about Miss Barrett reading your poem, imagining that she will love your poem, love you, praise you. She’ll probably come to school on Monday, you speculate, with her eyes all red and puffy from crying.

On Monday morning, you put on your favorite dress—black watch plaid with a big white Pilgrim collar and a black velvet bow—and your patent-leather maryjanes. Miss Barrett is wearing her tan cashmere sweater, her white pearls, and her camel’s hair skirt—her most fawn-like ensemble. She’s walking up and down the aisles, calling names, taking roll, something in her hand with a rib—. . . Could it . . .

When she calls your name, Miss Barrett places “The Very Beautiful Sad Elegy for Bambi’s Dead Mother” on your desk—without a word—in front of the whole class—and pats you on the head. Embarrassed, you stuff it quickly into your plaid bookbag.

All day you feel sick.

After school, you run home, Go-Jeff nipping at your heels, and race upstairs to the attic stairwell, throw open the door, heart pounding, and click it shut. Unbuckle your bookbag and unroll “The Very Beautiful Sad Elegy for Bambi’s Dead Mother.”

On the first page in red ink, Miss Barrett has printed in her big, neat handwriting: A stag is a male deer!!! Three exclamation marks and a thick red underline like a bad cut.

A little ways down the page and running right over a particularly poignant fawn (possibly even Bambi herself) in the margin, Miss Barrett has drawn a thick red circle around the word ‘lay’, and written: Only chickens lay!!! Three more big red exclamation marks like war paint and, again, the thick red underscore like an open wound.

You are overcome with shame and humiliation and tears. Into your room you run, banging the door, and under the bed you scramble and grab the black miner’s pail. Up the attic stairs you fly with your pail and your stupid elegy poem, your maryjanes flashing, and into the attic closet where you kick the door again and again and strike the matches and set that stupid poem that goddamn stupid holey shit Christian goddamn beautiful sad piss-on-it damn elegy on fire.