Marbles on a Window-Ledge

MARBLES ON A WINDOW-LEDGE / Rushworth M. Kidder THAT FALL, THE TREES along Kellogg Avenue shed leaves like shreds of brown arithmetic paper. They floated past the windows of Miss Powers' third grade classroom, swirling across the new-paved playground where the janitor had painted basketball courts and the girls had chalked their hop-scotch. Eventually they lodged against the low wire fence in the corner where the shade was thick and the brown earth packed and grassless. I never knew whether Miss Powers had been drawn to teaching by her name or had taken the name after she entered her first classroom. Whichever way, it was a perfect match—especially with the "s." She was a woman of many parts, but without a despotic bone in her body. Strong-handed but happy-voiced, youthful but firm, she kept us in enough order to learn—with enough humor to relax. Under her watchful eye and pretty face, it somehow mattered that if Jenny traded 14 gumballs to Suzy for four cookies, each cookie was worth three-and-ahalf gumballs. It was all a perfectly natural part of a morning's work. But so, of course, were the bells at recess-time. If we had been bad—for even the best of us had to be forever probing the limits of teacherly patience—the bell meant only a session of washing blackboards, clapping erasers on the fire-escape, or writing "I will never again pass notes to Ann" fifty times on white composition paper. But on normal days the bell was still ringing as Charlie and Tut and Dave and Steve and the rest of us thundered down the stairs for twenty minutes of glorious irresponsibility. And for marbles. Once outside, we would make for that corner where the leaves gathered. Brushing them aside with a foot, we would kick in the ground a heel-deep hole as big around as a baseball. Several paces away we would draw the foul line. And then we would take out our marbles. Where they came from I was never sure. I have no recollection of ever buying any—although Hastings' had them for sale at the back of the store with the squirt guns and the model airplane kits, in little net sacks with stapled paper labels. Now and then you found them under bushes or in the street-gutters on the way home. But mostly you just had them. Years later, I heard the tale of the young wife who asked a prominent Boston dowager where she got her wonderful hats. "My dear," the lady replied haughtily, "we don't get our hats—we have our hats." I guess I felt that way about our marbles. Except, of course, that you could always win them. To that end we selected carefully, each morning, the marbles we were willing to hazard 298 · The Missouri Review at that day's recess. Some brought them in string-throated muslin bags or small flip-lidded tobacco tins. But most of us kept them in the pockets of what we called (since the word "jeans" had yet to win its current cachet) our dungarees. We brought them in all varieties: as small as overgrown peas, as large as jaw-breaker gumballs, clear silver and purple and green and red, or porcelain-smooth and opaque with swirls of color. Some had a steel-hued metallic sheen, flecked with brighter spots like stars seen through haze. Others were strangely-made cat'seyes , with ribbons of color set deep inside their transparent globes. I remember collecting thirty-some-odd in a pattern of azure, gray, and white, like a sunset before it turns pink. I even had, once, a stainless steel ball bearing; but I lost it to Dave, whose father kept the local inn and who played his cards very close to his chest, and who was reputed to have had one of the largest marble collections in town. Strangely enough, I don't remember exactly how the game was played—except that we chucked our marbles, underhand, from behind the line and then flicked them into the pit with bent forefingers. Somehow it was a winner-take-all...