he summer I was born Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, Ted Kennedy put Chappaquiddick on the map, and my parents, along with my uncle Jake and me, set out on a pilgrimage to Woodstock. Only Jake got there. Midway across the George Washington Bridge, the car began sputtering, losing steam by the second. We made it just to the toll booth. My father, who’d had reservations from the start, saw this as a sign that maybe the trip just wasn’t meant to be. My mother accused him of being smug.

Cars passed by, there were offers of help, but the engine had totally died. Jake, at my mother’s insistence, hitched a ride with a blonde girl in a red Corvette. I want details, she said, kissing him good-bye. It took two hours before a tow truck finally came and carted my parents and me back to Brooklyn. I wailed, my mother was silent, my father and the driver talked. "I could kick myself for not hitching a ride, too," my mother always says when she tells the story of that infamous day. Her voice is like glass. Cold, clear, transparent with subtext. If it wasn’t for your father . . . Eventually she softens; the news reports, she had to admit, gave her second thoughts about being in a sea of mud with a nursing infant. Besides, my father had recently purchased an elaborate new sound system. All weekend long they listened to the crystal clear voices of their favorite WNEW-FM disc jockeys bring up-to-the-minute coverage right into our living room; it was almost like being there.

Irony sets the tone for my father’s perspective. "The last time I saw Jimmy Briggs was on a chopper leaving Saigon, and here he turns up driving the tow truck that takes us back home — that’s more than just coincidence, even for a cynic like me." All the way back to Brooklyn they talked about the endless nights and rain-drenched days in Vietnam, the buddies who had died and those still alive. They talked about Woodstock, too, which they agreed was nothing more than one big anti-war demonstration masquerading as a party. Not that my father wouldn’t have loved to hear Jimi Hendrix and the Butterfield Blues Band and Santana and the Jefferson Airplane live, on the same stage, within the space of a few days.

The starting point for Jake is a spoon he came across at a small shop in the town of Woodstock. Candy, the girl he drove up with, wanted to go antiquing before heading over to Yasgur’s farm. So they browsed through antique shops — she bought an old piano stool that barely fit in the trunk of her car — had lunch in a funky cafe, and stopped in a gift shop, where Jake found the small wooden spoon that he bought as a present for me.

Shaped like a flower petal and inscribed with the words "Make Love, Not War," the spoon ended up being more ornament than utensil. My mother kept it on the windowsill in the kitchen, next to the stained glass sun that illuminated the window like a bright smiling orange. Supposedly it was the source of my first word. Squirming in my high chair, I’d point to the spoon. "Boon," I’d say, refusing to eat until my mother gave me the smooth-as-pearl spoon to hold while she fed me. When it came time for me to start feeding myself, the spoon mysteriously disappeared. My mother accused my father of "accidentally" throwing it away. My grandmother, who had recently bought me a silver spoon from Tiffany’s, said it was just as well. "Wood splinters," she reminded my mother. The admonishment irked my mother almost as much as the disappearance of her one and only memento from Woodstock. "And silver tarnishes," she said.

The summer I turned five I stopped —quite suddenly, it seemed— playing with my dolls. To my mother, a social worker, it was no big deal, just some latent anxiety over my parents’ impending marriage. My grandmother, who was less prone to psychoanalyzing my behavior, immediately went out and bought me a new doll. The way she saw it, I was bored with dolls that looked like babies so she got me a "more mature" one with a black silky bob for hair and a red satin dress. Instead of putting her in the large basket where I kept my other dolls, I placed her on a green wicker chair in my room. The chair had a flat floral pillow and, enthroned in it, she took on the aura of a princess.

I told my grandmother I loved the doll, just so she’d stop saying, "I hope you don’t think you’re too old for dolls already." Giving up dolls, she believed, meant I was growing up too quickly. Like my mother, though, she had totally misjudged the situation. Six tiny dolls, not the kind you could cradle in your arms and squeeze and pretend to feed, had captured my imagination.

"Every night, when you go to sleep," said Jake when he gave me the small painted box that contained the dolls, "you tell these dolls your troubles and they take them away." He had recently returned from a trip to Guatemala, filled with stories about dusty pyramids jutting through lush jungle foliage, and a king known as Great-Jaguar-Paw, and a ten-year-old girl named Carmelita who lived in a village called Chichicastenango. I laughed, tried repeating the tongue twister— Chichi . . . Chichicha . . . Chichicas . . . — laughed some more. It was Carmelita who, after a dream one night in which she saw herself flying on the back of a bird, had made the cloth purse that Jake gave me along with the dolls. I’d never seen anything like it. Running along the edge was a braid of black cotton that framed the remarkable bird woven into cross-stitches of red, blue, green, and purple. I traced the bird with my finger. Its beak was too large for its body and its feathers, spread across the purse, reminded me of a king's robe. In short, there was nothing about this image that should have conjured flight. But like all things that become the sum of their parts, the bird soared.

The name of this rare bird, Jake told me, was Quetzal, and once, when he was sitting in the square with Carmelita, he saw one perched in a tree. He was about to take a picture, with Carmelita in the foreground, when, out of nowhere it seemed, like a small boulder, her grandmother came barreling in front of him. She didn't say a word to Jake, just put her hand over the camera lens, and when he asked her why she did it, she pursed her lips, looked him squarely in the eyes, said, with all the wisdom and superstition of a culture he later came to understand, "If you take a picture, you take away the soul." She then handed Jake a box of Trouble Dolls. For a child he loved.

I immediately turned my attention to the dolls, which lay in a jumble on the coffee table. At first glance, there was nothing striking about the six stick figures of paper and wire. Three of them wore woven skirts (one red and blue, one purple, and one blue and white) and three wore pants. Their shirts, each a different color, were made of threads coiled across them like shawls and they all seemed to have the same face of painted dots and lopsided smiles. In a way I liked their tininess, though I really did not know what to make of them. I tried standing them up; they fell down. I shook them as if they were dice, then dropped them to see if they would come up face up or face down; five out of six, or all six, always landed face up, which made me pay particular attention to the way their arms, outstretched like the arms of wooden soldiers on the march, were forever poised in a gesture of giving.

I picked up the dolls, one by one, and lined them up in my hand. They had no weight to them, they were hollow, but lying side by side in my hand they were somehow transformed, right before my eyes, into a flesh-and-blood family. Mother, father, grandmother, grandfather, and two more — maybe a girl and her uncle — became a unit that, if Jake was right, would somehow dissolve my troubles, whatever they might be.

I gently placed the dolls, one by one, in their box, slid the box into my precious new purse, and gave Jake a kiss of thanks. Then I took him by the hand and led him to the door. "Let's go to Chichicastenango," I said.

"Right now?" Jake asked.

"Right now."

"Don't we need to pack first?" No one indulged my whims the way Jake did.

"Nah — it's better to travel light."

Jake let out a hearty laugh, told me I had wisdom beyond my years. I didn't really know what was so funny — I was simply saying what my mother said to me whenever we went away for a weekend and I wanted to take half my toys with me— but I laughed along as we headed out the door. It was a soft summer afternoon, the kind of day that rings with the voices of children and the bells of ice cream trucks, and we made our way to the park, past baseball fields, deeper into the park where we sat ourselves on a shaded bench alongside a lake, pretending we were in Chichicastenango. All around us were children with olive eyes and thick black shiny hair, Carmelita's the thickest and shiniest of all. It was siesta time, Jake explained, and while the fathers slept and the mothers fed the leftovers from lunch to hungry dogs and cats, the children skipped around the square singing their favorite songs or, in the case of Carmelita, sat close by in the shade of a tree, humming along and patiently weaving dreams.

At the bottom of my grandmother’s large mahogany armoire is a drawer she calls her junk drawer and rummaging through it was a favorite pastime of mine. There was always some new treasure to unearth — scarves screened with flowers or abstract designs or the names of celebrated cities, wallets in all sizes and shapes, bobby pins still in their cardboard, hairnets, batteries, rubber bands, packs of writing pads and pens.

The night before my parents' wedding, while Grandma took a bath, I sat myself on the floor in front of the drawer and began combing through it to see if any new knickknack had been thrown in. Like the magician who pulls out the endless scarf from his sleeve and somehow comes up with a rabbit, I reached deep into the drawer. At the very bottom — under the red and gold scarf that had coins hanging from its fringes and turned me into a gypsy making my way through the Black Forest — was a rectangular black box, plain except for the red letters spelling an unfamiliar word — S-C-R-A-T-C-H—O—M-A-T-I-C —and a drawing of a woman holding something against her back.

I opened the box to find a plastic hand attached to a thin metal rod. The fingers, about the size of a baby's, were curled, and the tips looked like tiny fake fingernails. There was also a cylinder in the box that looked like the body of a flashlight. I picked up the cylinder, put it next to the rod with the hand, quickly figured out how to attach them. Then I turned on a switch and was jolted by a vibration in the palm of my hand. Imitating the woman on the box, I reached behind me, placed the plastic hand under my shirt, started to laugh at the sensation of plastic fingers vibrating against my back. The lower part of my back started to itch. I repositioned the Scratch-O-Matic. The spot beneath my shoulder blade cried out for scratching. I slid the plastic hand along my back. Relief was never so much fun.

I was very much in a gypsy mood, so I put the red and gold scarf on my head, enjoying the jingling of the coins as they hit against each other, and tiptoed into the bathroom, back scratcher in hand. Grandma was in a sea of bubbles, wet cotton balls on her eyes, beads of sweat on her forehead, and I could never have anticipated that I would end up drenched and in tears as Grandma jumped from the bathtub screaming from shock more imagined than real. All I did was put the back scratcher to her neck. She opened her eyes, let out a howl, and I dropped the Scratch-O-Matic into the bathtub. That made Grandma howl even more and scream at me for trying to kill her.

"Help!" she cried out. "I'm being electrocuted. Help!" Grandma quickly hopped out of the tub, splashing me in the process, and reached for a towel. "Don't you put so much as one finger in that water," she warned me. "There's electricity in there."

"Shouldn't we drain the water from the tub?" I asked.

"No!" she snapped. "Just hand me my bathrobe — and let's get out of here." Grandma was in a frenzy and had me believing that sparks of electricity were about to burst from the water the way popcorn explodes in a pan. Under the assumption that electrocution can come in stages, she believed herself to be in the first stage of acute electrocution, a condition marked by dizziness and tingling, and headed for her bed, where she collapsed.

At the sight of her lying there, and the thought that I might have accidentally been responsible for her death by battery, I burst into tears. The phone on Grandma's night table caught my eye. I picked up the receiver, started to dial my phone number, 241-9848, got only as far as the four. Dropped the receiver back in the cradle. My parents were not home, they were at a hotel in the city, what am I going to do?

Dial 911, I thought. That's what my mother said to do in an emergency.

Terrified, I dialed the three digits: nine-one-one. A woman answered, identified herself, asked me what was wrong.

"My grandmother—" I stammered. "My grandmother—" No other words came out. How could I possibly say, or even believe, that I killed my grandmother? I tried again. "My grandmother . . . I think my grandmother . . ." It felt as if a ten-pound drum were inside me beating, beating, beating. I think my grandmother is dead, I think my grandmother is dead, I think my grandmother is dead. I began sobbing pitifully. "My grandmother—"

The woman at the other end of the receiver remained calm. "Can you tell me where your grandmother lives?" she asked.

"She lives here," I answered.

"The address, I mean. Can you tell me the address?"

"I don't know it," I cried.

"Do you know the street?"

With each question an eternity seemed to be passing.

Yes. Yes. Yes. I knew the street. "Avenue Z!" I blurted out. "Near Sheepshead Bay."

"What’s your grandmother's name?"

"Grandma Ruth."

"That's very good. Now what about her last name?"

"Cohen – Grandma Ruth Cohen."

The next question put me over the edge. "Can you spell that?"

"Cohen! Cohen! Cohen!" I shouted into the receiver. "I'm five years old. I can read but I can't spell names. My grandmother is . . . she needs help. Can you please send someone over here?"

"I'll tell you what," said the woman, who I imagined wearing a police cap and a blue short-sleeved police shirt. "If you can read the telephone number on the phone, we'll be there very quickly." I did as I was told.

I don't know how long it took the police to arrive. But in the time between the call and their arrival I seemed to have crossed a lot of ground. I was afraid to go near my grandmother or to touch her or to even look at her. And I was equally afraid to leave the room. So I stood against the bedroom door waiting for the police, thinking what I would say to them.

My grandmother was taking a bath. I wanted to play. It was an accident.

I glanced at Grandma, who still had not budged. This is nothing more than a bad dream, I told myself. She couldn't be dead. It was just not possible. I loved her too much.

I closed my eyes, hoping that the suggestion of a dream — bad or good — would shatter the reality. Sounds took over. The dripping bathtub faucet. The hum of the air conditioner. The excruciating tick of Grandpa's alarm clock. I covered my ears, trying to drive away the sounds but they only became more pronounced, bringing with them visions more and more terrifying. Red Riding Hood's wolf was circling the bed and Captain Hook's crocodile was ticking along after me and all I could do was run out of the room, out of breath, up the stairs to the guest room that, from all appearances, had become my room. Toys, dolls, books, games, and puzzles that Grandma kept neatly in baskets between visits from me were all over the floor. And in the middle of the mess I saw the reason for the terror that had driven me upstairs. Without wasting a moment, I opened the purse Jake had given me, pulled out the box of Trouble Dolls. Dashed downstairs to Grandma's room and lay them out, one by one, on her dresser.

You have to help me, I told each and every one of them. I did something awful, and I need your help very badly. I picked up the one wearing a blue and white woven skirt. Bring Grandma back, I pleaded. Please bring her back.

Something told me to take the tiny doll and place her on the bed next to Grandma, which I did, not pausing long enough to realize that Grandma was breathing and of course had not died. When I was older and better able to reflect on why I hadn't done the obvious, that is, put my ear against her heart, I could not come up with a satisfactory answer. I was five years old. I panicked. Case dismissed.

In the process, of course, I learned the overwhelming power of guilt. To believe, even for a minute, that you've killed someone you love is unbearable. My body went cold, hot. Cold again, hot again. I couldn't stand still. I couldn't move. My legs buckled under me. My arms went limp. My hands became clammy. I cried, told myself this was a bad dream, laughed to will it away. Grandma was not dead, could not be dead, it was simply not possible. Not on the eve of the day my parents were to be married.

Thoughts went from the ridiculous to the sublime. I had to run away, get away, go someplace very far. The airport, I thought. I had to get to the airport. Jake had a friend who was a pilot and once when we took a ride to the airport his friend let us sit in the cockpit of a parked plane pretending we were flying to the moon. Maybe you’ll be the first woman astronaut, Jake had said. He loved to fly and wanted to be an astronaut himself but only certain kind of men become astronauts, he told me, and he wasn't that kind of man.

The airport, I thought. Somehow I would have to get to the airport.

I heard sirens, then a commotion as the front door opened. Jake and Grandpa had arrived the same time as the police. It sounded like troops were marching through the house. Grandma lifted her head from the pillow and at the sight of her — alive — I could feel the blood draining from me. I ran to Jake, collapsed in his arms, heard Grandpa's starchy voice above everything.

"What the H is going on?" he asked.

The two police officers went over to Grandma. One of them, husky, kneeled at the side of the bed, took her pulse.

"Easy," he said, helping her sit up. "Looks like you passed out. Your granddaughter over here called us."

Everybody looked at me. "I thought . . ." I burst out crying. "Grandma was taking a bath and I wanted to scratch her back and the back scratcher fell in the bathtub and she thought I electrocuted her." Nobody knew what I was talking about until Grandpa, who had gone to the bathroom to investigate, returned with a broad smile on his face and the soaking wet battery-operated back scratcher in his hand.

Grandma was not pleased that Grandpa was laughing. "Sure it's funny," she said sarcastically. "Remind me to laugh the next time you burn your hand taking a potato from the oven."

Grandpa turned to Jake. "Sonny boy, will you please tell your mother that batteries don't electrocute people."

Jake carried me over the bed, propped me against a pillow right next to Grandma. I reached out to touch her arm, to see if this was now the dream, and was overcome by the feel of warm flesh. I opened my mouth to say something — I'm sorry, I'll never scare you again – anything — but not a word came out. Even when Jake, cupping Grandma's hand, repeated that batteries don't electrocute people, not a peep came out of me. I had crossed a very fine line between reality and imagination, a line so fine that nothing seemed real to me and nothing — not Jake's words, nor my grandmother's soft, spongy flesh — could reassure me of my innocence.

"I don't care what you say," Grandma insisted. "I felt a shock."

"Bet it felt good," teased Grandpa as he placed the instrument of imagined doom on the bed. Jake dried it off, inside and out, and turned on the switch.

"Still works, Mom. Want to give it a try?" The back scratcher had been a present from Jake to Grandma before he went off to Vietnam. "If ever you get blue thinking about me when I'm away," he had written in a note accompanying the present, "take this out and tickle your back."

Ignoring Jake, Grandma turned to me. "Look at her in that babushka," she smiled. "Is that a face!" She kissed me, and my cheeks burned with dry tears. Whatever had left me speechless had also taken away my tears. I wanted to run out of the room, far away, where I would not have to hear another word about the bath that Grandma said took ten years from her life, or see the smirk of the skinny police officer who said this was one for the books, or hear the voice of the husky one telling me I did a good thing by calling. Clutching my box of Trouble Dolls tightly I squeezed my eyes shut, imagining I was out of the room when suddenly I felt the beginning of a warm trickle between my legs. I quickly jumped up, embarrassed but at the same time relieved that my escape was within reach.

No sooner was I off the bed than Grandpa, camera in hand, yelled, "Hold it!" To admit that I couldn't hold it would have only furthered my embarrassment so I stood stock still — and held it — while Grandpa, who treasured the candid moment and had made a hobby of chronicling it with his trusty Polaroid camera, snapped a picture. Jake tried to divert him and Grandma threatened to rip up the photo but Grandpa had learned to be quick.

"Look at this." In the palm of his hand, which seemed forever coated with sawdust from his years as a carpenter, was a photo in the making. Before my very eyes a blank piece of paper turned iridescent with images. First I saw the head of a girl who I thought was Carmelita and in the background her grandmother but very quickly the images sharpened and there was Grandma, despite her professed annoyance with Grandpa, grinning broadly, and the two police officers also smiling, and Jake not smiling, holding up the back scratcher, and me looking very twisted and not very happy. When Jake told me that the Indians in Guatemala wouldn't let him take their picture because they thought the camera would somehow suck up their souls, I did not understand what they were afraid of. Now I think I do. To someone who was not there on that peculiar night the photo would be very funny, but how would anyone know that Jake was holding up his hand not to show off the present he had given Grandma, only to stop Grandpa from taking away my soul?

The police finally left, and after graciously thanking them for their help Grandma turned on Grandpa, once again threatening to rip up the photo. Grandpa was not intimidated. He knew, as well as she did, that one day in the not very distant future she would look for the photo not to rip it up but as an embellishment to her telling of the crazy night she thought she had been electrocuted by a gypsy in a babushka (the night before Susie's wedding no less) and how two very handsome policemen saved her life.

For me, on the other hand, there would always be hidden images shadowing the anguished face of a five-year-old in a babushka, images of my grandmother as she jumped up from a peaceful bath soaking wet and naked and shrieking, and of me calling the police thinking she was dead and waiting waiting waiting until they arrived and to my surprise and joy resurrected her, though in time I would laugh, too, at the funniest images, the ones never photographed, those of Jake when we were alone upstairs huddled in a tent made of blankets and he ceremoniously untied the scarf jingling with coins, which I had forgotten I was still wearing, and put it on himself. He looked silly in the scarf, and I told him so, and that only made him do sillier things especially when I pretended to take his picture as he made a giant drooping bowtie out of the scarf, then coiled it like a turban and shook his head so the coins would sing. The turban fell apart from the shaking and became a veil and I pronounced Jake Queen of the Gypsies and myself the King, which made him laugh so hard that his sides hurt, and his laughter made me laugh though of course I would not get the joke for many years. And even when I did come to understand how much a part timing and innocence play in humor, I would never laugh at the idea of Jake a queen only at the image of him in a gypsy scarf, the most heartwarming image of that peculiar night (and the funniest), the photo never taken, the one that Jake said is up here (pointing to his head) as if to remind me that things all too often are not what they seem to be.

© Deborah Batterman