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yourself flattened out straight by a train."
    "What's dagowine?"
    "Just a thing you drink to get drunk."
    "Do you? Does Tatie?" Suddenly I was filled with fear for Tatie, that she might drink dagowine on her day off, lie down on the railroad tracks, and be flattened. I could see in my mind her copious brown body in its starched uniform, as one-dimensional as a paper doll, foldable, inert, immobile, and blank-eyed, gone from me forever.
    "Nope. We Full Gospel. Full Gospels don't drink."
    "Don't drink dagowine, you mean."
    "Right."
    He scribbled in the hard earth for a minute. Then he whispered, "I tell you a secret, though. My mama does."
    Gwendolyn, with her long, pointed scarlet nails and
her laugh like water-fountain bubbles. "Does she get crazy?"
    Charles hooted with laughter. "My mama, she crazy all the time. When she drink, she just get crazier. Victor, he fold her right up and bring her home. Him and me, we plunk her into bed. Next morning, she don't remember nuthin'."
    "Charles," I said, "your life is more interesting than mine."
    "No, it ain't. You got them woods with them turtles. Hey—" he said, thinking, "sometime, when your grandma takin' her nap in the afternoon, you and me could go up the back alley so nobody see us, and..."
    "No," I said, frightened.
    "I ain't scared."
    But I was. "No," I told him. "I'm never going into those woods."

7
    Prance,
I THOUGHT , liking the word. I am prancing. I am prancing in and out of the kitchen from the back porch, with my feet high in the air like a thoroughbred pony.
    In truth, my feet were high because Grandmother, stern and exacting, had braided my pigtails as tightly as she crocheted the edges of organdy placemats; my forehead felt pulled smooth as a mask, and my ears hurt less if I walked on tiptoe. When Mama braided my hair, she did it softly, with deft and accustomed hands.
But Mama was busy now, mornings, with the baby.
    I wanted to be barefoot, but barefoot was not allowed at Grandfather's house. Going barefoot, said Grandmother, was tasteless and caused hookworm. Often Charles and I shed our shoes beside the garage or out behind the lilac bushes, where no one could see. Before I rebuckled myself into my practical brown sandals, I always checked my feet for small worms that would, I thought, have tiny mouths shaped vaguely like the tops of wire coathangers.
    Sometimes Charles and I tasted the dusty Pennsylvania earth that accumulated on our feet. Tatie said that everyone had to eat a peck of dirt before they died. I worried about Charles, because he confessed to me that he had eaten quite a bit already.
    "Aren't you afraid of dying?" I asked him.
    He sighed his patient, you're-so-dumb-Elizabeth sigh. "
Children
don't die," he pointed out.
    Charles was so logical and reassuring. And he was daring. Once he had even tasted a worm.
    Sometimes I wondered vaguely if my father had eaten his peck of dirt. Grandmother, I was quite sure, hadn't, and would probably live forever.
    "You better not bang that door," Tatie said, as I pranced through again from the porch.
    "I'm not," I said haughtily, closing the screen door with exaggerated care. "I never bang the door."
    "Ha." She spat on a brown index finger, hissed it against the iron that stood on one end of the ironing board, and unrolled a dampened tablecloth.
    I leaned against the tall wooden cupboard that held the kitchen dishes, scratched a smeared-open mosquito bite on one leg with the toe of the opposite sandal, and watched her iron with broad, heavy strokes. Sometimes she let me do the napkins. "You want to see what I did outside? I made a flower store."
    She set down the iron with a muted thump and looked at me. "You didn't pick any flowers, did you?"
    Some.
    Her hands went to her wide hips and she leaned toward the windows. "You didn't pick them
roses
, did you?" She checked the rose bushes through the window and relaxed.
    "Of course not. I'm not
stupid.
I picked hollyhocks. There are three billion hollyhocks out