Caila Lipovsky

ACCIDENTS.

It was Show and Tell Day.  I brought my Hot Wheels cars, of which I had 3.  One of them looked something like this:

There was a peephole in the back window, and when you held it up to the light and looked inside, there was an illuminated drawing of a superhero.  We passed the toy in a circle and everyone looked in the window. Proud of the experience, I gave the peephole one more look.

The next day, I woke up and a river of pus was dribbling nonstop out of my eye socket.

Occular transmitted Infection from all those eyeballs touching my toy. 

 This condition didn’t occur in any of the other childrens’ eyes, just mine.

My mom was friends with a family I’ll call the Roses who were full-on Orthodox Jews.   Mrs. Rose had a shaved head and wore a head wrap. Their 3 year son Samuel had very long curly hair, as the Torah forbids haircuts until a boy turns 4, if I recall correctly. Their daughter Pinena (which I’m certainly misspelling) wore dresses to her ankles and had only heard rock music on the radio once in her life, at a Kosher pizza restaurant.

I enjoyed playing at the Rose’s–it’s where I saw the Wizard of Oz for the first time, back when televisions had knobs, before VCRs and cable tv were common. 

Peneena and I swung on her swingset after the movie and pled to the sky to give us a tornado.  We thought if we tried hard enough, we could make it happen.   Everytime we heard the trees rustle, we got so desperately excited. 

We swung as high as possible and prayed to the heavens till we were exhausted, gave up, and went back inside the house.

One afternoon, nobody was looking, and I grabbed hold of my mother’s lipstick and some crayons, gripped by a forceful need to color on the wall. 

I drew a girl.  She looked roughly like this.

(My bedroom wall was pink. 

This was one of my favorite things about my life.)

My mom stepped in the room.  She glimpsed the wall, then stopped and stared at it.  I felt a pang of terror.  She had a bad temper sometimes, and I knew on some level that drawing on the wall could mean trouble.

Mom continued to gaze at the picture for another moment then broke out in a huge smile and peals of laughter. 

She was incredibly proud of me!  She loved that I’d done this!

Mild shock. Tremendous relief.