Giants & Gryphons by NR Robinson

Giants & Gryphons
by NR Robinson

It was at the orphanage, Junior Village, during the spring of ’69, that my favorite comic book, The Amazing Spider-Man, was snatched from me and ripped apart.  

My comic books had not come easy. I had begged and traded, acquiring one twelve-cent funny book at a time until they could be alphabetized by title or sorted by issue or publisher or superhero and, when placed one atop the other, make a substantial enough stack to be considered a collection. A collection, any collection, was an accomplishment given my circumstances.

Our nine-month-long experiment living with our dad was recent history. For the past year, my sister, Cookie, and I had been back at Junior Village. It was there that I’d started collecting. 

I’d been reading, reclining in my dorm room bunk, when it happened. With a crease in my voice, I asked the kid, “Why’d you do that?!”   

“What you gonna do about it, four-eyes?” the bully shot back, words crashing like trapped sparrows around the fifty-bunk space. 

What was I going to do about it?  

Washington D.C. is built on a riverbank, not over a drained swamp as is often rumored. But it felt swampy that day. Humidity is the natural state of D.C. And it was an afternoon of wet, skin-broiling heat, no wind off the nearby Anacostia River wandering through the dorm’s open windows. T. Roosevelt Cottage was an ancient building, three floors of one hundred and fifty-year-old red-brick that belied the angular architecture of the institution’s newer, single-story cottages. 

The bully’s coffee-colored face was a study in concentration. With an air of casual indifference, I stood and walked slowly from the room, then raced like Jesse Owens down the stairs, out of the cottage, and into the swampy outside air. That night I carried my short stack of comics and a few library-lifted books from T. Roosevelt onto the single street that curled like a noodle through Junior Village. Past the high-steepled chapel and the tri-storeyed cottages of Taft, Harding, and Coolidge, I walked. Down past the single-storied Dining Hall and Admissions-Infirmary Building. Where the street flattened out, I waded into the woods covering the valley that held Junior Village like a fist. Beneath a kaleidoscope of starlight, I hid my box of books under a thorny shrub. 

The next day I turned thirteen.

There was no birthday celebration. Cookie and I did not find one another. Rather, I found myself transferred to ‘the big boys’ cottage,’ angular McKinley. On my thirteenth birthday, I stood hunched in the doorway of McKinley’s urine-spattered lavatory staring, owl-eyed, as one boy fellated another. The fellator was the bully who had snatched and ripped my Amazing Spider-Man.  

Feeling hot and cold all at once, my cranium clung to the details: the backed-up toilet smell of the space. The jeers of the tangle of teens ricocheting off gritty tile. The bully kneeling in the doorless middle stall, dungareed legs together, tee-shirted back muscular and spotted with sweat, head bobbing between two sooty knees. When the fellated pulled up his trousers with a smirk, the bully slumped, a bundle of rags.  

Where’re the counselors? I wondered. Why’d this comic book snatching bully turn victim? You would not have known it to look at me, but I wanted to cry. It was a familiar voice, my vigilant self, who tapped me on the shoulder and said: You’re watching an initiation. And it was true that the bully had turned thirteen days before me. He had been transferred to McKinley the day of his birthday, as had I. Be prepared, vigilant self warned, it could be your turn next. 

~

Time spun forward. As summer crumped into fall, my fears were still establishing themselves. The McKinley Cottage giants and gryphons had not yet fully bore down upon me. It was under this cloud of anxiety that a mysterious woman flew, like a hummingbird into window glass, into my life. 

Miss Smith had apparently been watching me from her living room window. She’d witnessed my early A.M. descents from the D.C. Transit bus. Watched my trudges past her house in Saint Anselm Abbey’s jacket and tie, on my way, that second semester, to outside school. It would have been easy enough for her to inquire at the Abbey, to learn I was the new scholarship boy and a ward of Junior Village and the D.C. government. 

Stationed on her stoop one crisp November morning, she greeted me as I passed: “You’re Nick, aren’t you?” A taut, mid-fortyish, brown-skinned woman with the air of a Mother Superior, Miss Smith wore no perfume, makeup, or jewelry. Her hair was hot-ironed straight and cut, medieval monk-like, above the ears. In a round-voweled voice, she asked, “Would you care for a cup of hot chocolate?”  

Imagine me sitting prim, a young hope-to-be with Her Highness, sipping nectar on an overstuffed sofa, softly conversing, surrounded by the civility of salon wallpaper inside a whisper-quiet home full of sunshine. Mix recurring instances of this irresistible experience into the chemical soup that are the enzymes of a Junior Village boy and you end up with a burning desire for what seemed like epic living.

That detour to Miss Smith’s for cocoa and a chat became a routine I grew to adore. There was only a single spark of misunderstanding during our bright beginning: when she learned I had a sister for whom I felt responsible, she chuckled—J. Edgar Hoover peepers peering, bifocals perched on the tip of her prizefighter’s nose— and quipped: “That’s unfortunate, isn’t it?” Suspecting her quip was at Cookie’s expense, I frowned. But her amusement was catching. When I began chuckling along with her, her laughter became a part of mine. 

When Miss Smith brought up the possibility of a trial adoption, I barely wondered, Why me? I’d gleaned that behind her eyes lived an intense interest at the ambition and intellect, perhaps, of an ‘orphan’ who’d tested his way to a prestigious preparatory school. I sensed promise with Miss Smith: a relationship destined to be different. What I thought was, She’s my escape from Junior Village. I said to her, “Cookie goes where I go.” 

Months later, as the frosty New Year swept in, Cookie’s social worker, Ms. Shickles, expressed doubts about Miss Smith and her application. Mr. Surrey, my social worker, said, “Something seems not right with her.” Reading to me from Ms. Shickles’ report, “The applicant is unmarried, does not like girls, and has lost some interest in Nick since he was expelled from Saint Anselm’s” (for truancy, ‘a poor attitude,’ for flunking Latin and eighth-grade algebra). Mr. Surry said, “I want the best for you. I’m not sure she’s it.” 

Well, I was sure. That year, 1970, Junior Village was at more than four times its two-hundred-fifty child capacity. There were shortages of food, clothing, medicine, staff; shortages of everything except kids. I was desperate to escape.  

When Cookie and I’d first arrived at the chaos that was Junior Village, we’d lost track of one another. I found her in one of the orphanage’s oldest named-after-US Presidents cottages, Harding. My hard-faced, eleven-year-old sister was gnawing her nails while propped in a corner window of the cottage’s ‘greeting room.’ The furnishings were a few aluminum chairs and a tweedy sofa and matching recliner. Smudged-looking girls and their clumps of conversation were draped over and around the space. A bundled-up counselor puffed a cigarette on the bottom step of the first-to-second floor staircase. The air felt practically glacial inside.

Cookie had transformed over those months apart, from an effervescent ten-year-old to a distant surly girl intently focused on her ragged nails and the mechanics of survival. Purposefully attentive, straddling cold aluminum, I filled the empty air with mostly neutral observations— about the knuckleheads of McKinley; my new favorite comic book hero, Green Lantern; and the latest Jackson 5 song, “I’ll Be There,” blasting on all the radios. But particularly and explicitly about good times with Miss Smith. 

“What I’m sayin’, Cookie—”

“Cookie a little girl name. Everybody callin’ me Kacie.” 

“Arright, anyway, whatever. What I’m sayin’, Kacie, is you gonna love Miss Smith.”

“Miss Shickles an’ Mr. Surrey don’ like ‘er,” said Kacie-not-Cookie. The second-hand coat she wore hung loose on her frame. The chill didn’t seem to touch her.

“Since when you listenin’ to social workers? 

We stared past each other for a few elastic seconds. Then, mouth flatlined, she kicked up from the corner. Slumping past the counselor, she started up the steps: one, two.

I called after her, “With Mama in the crazy house, this could be our last chance!”

Kacie stopped. Turning, she stood glaring down at me.

“Kids qualifyin’ for Foster Care is from baby to preteen, before all th’ sex starts. We way past th’ sweet spot.”  

The same steely stare. I had no idea what motivated this sister of mine called Kacie. 

“Social workers desp’rate to place kids. Shickles and Surrey’ll let us go!”

“Okaay. I’ll try it,” she said with a sullen cast, “cause you want to so bad.” Then Kacie turned and tripped up the stairs.

Miss Smith’s red-brick, three-bedroom, single-family home sat primly on the corner of 12^th Place and Varnum Street Northeast, in a neighborhood gripped by Providence Hospital on the west, Saint Anselm’s Abbey to the east, Catholic University at the south, and, to the north and directly across the street, the Josephite Rectory. I pushed my collection of comics under the frame and climbed to the top-level of the bunkbed I’d share with Glenn, her nephew. Glenn was a standoffish boy a year older than me singularly focused on the build-it-yourself Mustangs and Corvettes, Zeroes and Messershmitts that adorned his room. Kacie bunked with Glenn’s sister, Sheila, a chunky girl her age with a laid-back demeanor. 

Glenn and Shelia, whom I’d met during my hot chocolate visits, were neutral to our presence. One could say that they were slow to friendship. While this might have discouraged some, Miss Smith’s was not our first foster rodeo (if one counted Grandma’s and Dad’s, as I did). Over the entirety of our stay, those two never despised me and Kacie’s poverty. They never ridiculed our institutionalization or envied our complexions.  Glenn never tripped me on the stairs. Shelia did not suck her teeth at Kacie. They both, in turn, were okay with us. 

We never got to the bottom of their not-nuclear family mystery. Miss Smith had never married. She had no significant other. Miss Smith met any mention of Glenn and Sheila’s absent parents with “We won’t be discussing that in this house.” She enrolled us at Birtie Backus, Glenn and Shelia’s middle school and the school at which she taught. And she did not like girls, particularly girls turned sullen by a history that had nothing whatsoever to do with her.

One night, just after we finished dinner, I watched Miss Smith side-eye my sister. I heard her sculpted voice ask Kacie: “Why do I have to constantly remind you to clear the table and do the dishes?”

As the truth blossomed from the girlchild, Kacie: “Nobody else doin’ no dishes. Why always me?” Glenn, Sheila, and I held our breath.

From across the tabletop came the icy reply: “Young lady, you and Nicky—particularly you—are lucky to be here. You’ll discover that backtalk will get you exactly nowhere in this house.”

Kacie, later, over dishwashing, said to the room, “She nasty.”  

“It’s here or Junior Village,” I muttered.

Kacie shot back, “The only reason I’m here is you.”   

Now Kacie could be one tough cookie, too. Since her rape and our father’s arrest, my baby sister had morphed into a pallid girl-Kato, punching anyone who looked at her twice. That was the way of Junior Village, you couldn’t walk and look at someone. Looking would get you beat up. Fighting earned her the respect Junior Village kids craved. 

Kacie had never been shy about volunteering her judgements and conclusions. She saw Miss Smith as one of the many Foster Care creeps we had learned to avoid over our time at the Village: professional parenters trolling for vulnerable children and the government checks that trailed them. So, yes, she had agreed to our placement for me. But Kacie had recently opined that I’d gone too far in my affection for Miss Smith. “You so far up ‘er butt, she can’t take a shit” is the way she put it.  

What I recalled developing between Miss Smith and me began one night shortly after we moved in. Glenn and I were lying in our bunks rehashing the events of the day when Miss Smith called, “Nicky, come here.” When I shuffled into her bedroom, puzzled, “There’s no talking in this house after we retire for the evening. You’ll sleep with me tonight.”   

 “What about Glenn? He was talkin’ too!”  

Miss Smith, giving me the deadeye, patted the mattress. I grudgingly clambered into her four-poster wearing what I always slept in – my white cotton briefs. Within minutes, her breathing settled into a regular cadence. I tried to settle in, too.  

I was awakened by Miss Smith’s hand brushing my back. When I looked over, she was fast asleep. A short time later, I was roused by some soft part of her coming to rest against me. I lay embarrassed but excited until the intermittent cars in the street began to roar like lions and the rhythm of her breathing, regular as raindrops, coaxed me back to sleep. I awoke the next morning with my usual A.M. hardon. Miss Smith was already up and at ‘em. Not a word was said by anyone about where I’d slept.  

At least one night every few weeks something similar happened. As bedtime approached, Miss Smith would find some fault. I’d be summoned to her bed where parts of her would settle against parts of me. During the day-afters, no one made mention of our sleeping together. Even Kacie seemed oblivious.  

I began looking forward to nights with Miss Smith. I’d come to believe that her slumberous touches were purposeful. Foster home shenanigans were urban legend at Junior Village. Since the age of nearly-eleven, I myself had learned—by this way or that—of foster dads touching girls. In retrospect, maybe Mr. Surrey’s “Something’s not right” concern was Miss Smith liking me in some similar but better way. Better because I welcomed her attention. 

I’d begun masturbating as a teen. During the months of sharing Miss Smith’s bed, I beat off con brio: before arising from sheets suffused with her scent, in the prickly school cloakroom, during my toilet at night. I tried to bring my longing to Miss Smith’s attention. She refused to acknowledge my tented briefs, my vigorous chunks of bathroom time.  

By springtime, my nighttime desire had wandered into afternoons of a reserved Miss Smith transformed by the translucent cotton nightshifts into which she changed after school. I was tormented by hints of her nakedness: the bumps of her nipples, the shadowy isosceles at the meeting of her thighs. During one after-dinner study session, nodding towards a nude-under-nightshift Miss Smith, I whispered to Kacie, “Not bad for forty-sompin’.” 

Kacie’s eyes widened, “Eeuwww! You like Old Raisin Tits?” 

I was rocked by her reaction. 

What my sister didn’t understand: Miss Smith had rescued me. It was as if she had parachuted in and personally whooshed me away from the bad boys in that bad place, Junior Village. She made me feel appreciated. She saw me when no one else had. And when she, a grown-ass woman, touched me at night, my heart banged and clattered. Should I be ashamed for caring for someone who so clearly cared for me? 

I never again broached the subject. But it was during this time that I began to return Miss Smith’s nighttime touches: my fingers brushing her shoulder, my foot grazing hers. She never awoke, never protested. I grew bolder: my hand at her hip, thigh, until an apparently still sleeping Miss Smith turned. I persisted with my cautious touching, but nothing intentional came from her in response. By morning I was a wreck. She seemed rested and ready for the day. 

As my longing for Miss Smith intensified, interest in girls my age waned. After a day of touch football, a Saturday night of slow dancing at red-lighted basement parties, I raced home, anticipating, “Nicky, you’ll sleep with me.” But though she sometimes summoned me, frequently she did not. I felt bedeviled, stymied by her, like a middle school dropout presented an algebraic proof. Then came the incident that cut through the springtime anesthesia.

We were alone in the house the afternoon Miss Smith asked, “Nicky, would you like to watch a little television?” Then, “It’s cooler down in the den.”

The closed basement door sealed me in with her. She had not seemed drowsy. But she unfolded the foldout and then fell past me into an apparently deep sleep, leaving me alone with the television. On it, two revolver-toting dudes in cowboy hats took potshots at one another. Ms. Smith lay in a curl facing away from me, nightshift straining against her back and across the swell of her otherwise bare buttocks. 

Her repose was as beguiling as a slow wink.

She’s got to be faking sleep, is what I thought. Her persistent summons, our nightlong episodes of touch and turn, I could not interpret this as anything but an invitation. 

I could see every atom of her under the thin cotton shift. I wanted to lift her flowered nightdress but dared not. Heart slamming, I unzipped my dungarees then inched forward, caterpillar like. When my body touched hers, I stopped and held my breath. 

She lay silent, breathing deeply.  

I pressed myself against her warm nightshift-over-skin. I could not feel the zippered teeth scraping my flesh. It was the tingle I felt. A tingle that within seconds swelled and then erupted onto her shift, staining flowered cotton.  

My ragged panting ripped the air. The room was a tomb with a television. Miss Smith remained absolutely still, her breathing even.

How humiliating! Confusion bound me like a straitjacket—Could I have mistaken her invitation? And shame. If I thought she liked me, why not somehow bring it up? Why not ask? What kind of man was I, at thirteen, to do this? 

I began to work my way back across the tarpaulin-like foldout. Hot-faced, I stood. When Miss Smith did not stir, I beat a sneaky retreat up the creaking wooden staircase.

Weeks later, I was sitting in class in a near catatonic swivet doodling V Smith, not comprehending the helplessness I felt, when class was interrupted by the eighth-grade call to recess. On the small playground, it was impossible not to hear her name on their lips: Three young Tarzans from her homeroom beating their bony chests and yodeling feats of conquests, a shimmering huddle of boys I hardly knew. They never saw me, could not know that she and I shared the same house, the same bed.

First boy: “I heard she fuckin’.”

Second boy: “Fuckin’?” 

First boy: “Miss Smith. I heard Reds boned her.”

Third boy: “Oh, I hit that, too.”

 First boy: “You? Pu-lease.”

Third boy: “Don’t believe me? Listen in when I talk to ‘er!”

First boy: “Ha! I wouldn’t fuck her with your dick.”

Second boy: “Niggah, don’t you know old bitches like that give you worms?”

Third boy: “Bend over n’ I’ll feed your ass some worms.”

But it was when the first boy jeered at the third, “Bet you in love now!” that all three folded over in laughter. They knew love was not part of the game. Any boy who developed feelings for a female was pussy-whipped, an automatic loser.  

I would not have leaned my weight on any belief in those boys. Even if I had, I’d never confront Miss Smith with what I’d heard. Who was I to broach with her a subject so intimate as sex? But I newly saw Miss Smith through Kacie’s eyes. Miss Smith could be a bully. She could be manipulative, too: the unlikely invitations. And utterly unpredictable: my foster mother sleeping with me, a thirteen-year-old. In our underwear! I felt manipulated, wronged even. The hurt that crammed my heart seemed to push out all the seeded trust. Was this what betrayal felt like? 

Of one thing, I was then certain: Miss Smith was no superhero.

The next time Kacie complained—“Can’t stan’ ‘er snooty ass!”—I concurred, “Yeah, she off actin’.”  

“Your saint, Miss Smith?”  

“She be workin’ you like a maid.”

“Like you just noticin’,” the words slanted from Kacie’s mouth. When I slung an arm across her shoulders, she shrugged it off. “Whatever she did, it must be bad,” Kacie said, looking at me sideways, “‘cause you trippin’.”  

Was I tripping? What I did feel was anger, and that everyone was complicit. I felt deceived by Glenn, her nephew: they must’ve slept together too. What other explanation was there for his nonreaction to my many nights in her bed? I resented the schoolboys for messing up my mind. I detested the bullies at Junior Village, the JV counselors for facilitating my abuse.    

What I said to Kacie was, “It ain’ just Miss Smith, they all fucked up.” 

Kacie’s raised eyebrows told me I was ranting. “Nicky, what’s wrong?”

“I’m just sayin’,” I said, hiding behind my lenses, “somebody should’a said sompin’ before sending us here.” 

“Well, I said sompin’,” Kacie recalled. “Mr. Surrey and Miss Shickles said sompin’, too.” 

Kacie reminding me of her on-point instincts and my piss-poor judgment only angered me more.

 Even the social workers recognized her type and still approved her application!

Kacie asked, “Did Miss Smith do sompin’?” 

“Naw. She didn’ do nothin’.” 

As far as I knew, I was telling the truth. My speculation about what Miss Smith might have done was just that. But I had done to her whatever I could get away with (to the extent to which I was capable). Who had been wronged, me or Miss Smith?    

If I seemed wishy-washy, it’s because I was. I felt confused, enticed, defeated. How could I, after hearing those boys, have likened Miss Smith to the kid who had abused the bully in the bathroom? That gryphon. If pressed, I might’ve accepted the idea of female sex offenders, and that they rarely entered the legal system. I wouldn’t have guessed that women commit one quarter of all child sexual abuse. As I couldn’t have imagined the nuances of what I’d come to know as pedophilia: that offenders do not have to penetrate or be penetrated, that women interested in sex with young boys often practice a form of seduction and misdirection called ‘the Mrs. Robinson approach’ (after a character in the movie, The Graduate). How could I know that boy victims were taken less seriously because of the assumption that to be seduced by a woman is every little boy’s dream come true?

I only knew what I felt under my anger: that amidst all my doubt and confusion, I wanted to rush in like Flash to Miss Smith’s rescue; to shield her from my conclusions; represent what she might offer in her defense. Because she, I knew, would not have stooped to defend herself. Living as we did in our bog of silence, the only thing I can say with certainty is that I never, truly, knew her intent. 

The earth revolved. As spring crawled to a close, I suffered the pain of boyhood adoration betrayed. A cloaked resentment had sneaked up and settled itself within me. Kacie, as usual, read me like a funny book. My growing bitterness became her planted flag of hatred for Miss Smith. By the close of May, Kacie revealed to me her intention to return to Junior Village. 

“So-o sick of ‘er. . . I’m out’a here!” 

I felt punched in the gut. Kacie’s decision to leave squeezed me into a domestic cataclysm—forced to choose between Miss Smith and living as close to a normal existence as a kid like me could hope for, or my only sister and that place, Junior Village, where one child raped another. 

When I built up the nerve to spill Kacie’s decision, and my own, to Miss Smith, “Me an’ Kacie goin’ back to the Village,” she froze, J. Edgar Hoover peepers reconnoitering my face for a hint of the rupture between us. 

In her round-voweled voice, she asked, “What about Shelia and Glenn?” 

I shook my head wretchedly, “Right.” 

It was then she urged, “Let Kacie go, and I’ll forget you ever wanted to leave,” as if this was an offer too good to refuse. She did not touch me as she spoke, though my eyes whispered how much I wanted her to. It sounds silly now, but I hoped she would not only embrace me but confess her romantic love. I hoped she would say she’d concealed her affections because of the legal consequences, then beg me to stay. 

No confession forthcoming, with marble lips, I said, “We goin’.” Those two words were worse than weeping.

Spring slammed into summer. It was closing in on the middle of 1970 the heat-hazed morning Kacie and I walked out of Miss Smith’s ambit. Slipping past her, books and bags in hand, I breathed her in. She smelled of sundried grass and cracked earth. I was not yet fourteen. As Mr. Surrey’s blue Barracuda idled at the curb, I glanced back at her thin dark form radiating in the doorway. 

Collected in the back seat were Kacie, my comics, and me. Kacie was leaning forward, already tilting into freedom, it seemed, hair wild—having pointedly refused to brush it that morning. 

A gypsy child. This version of her looked somehow gratified, as if a good meal had been eaten. The syncopated thuds of car doors closing confirmed that our departure was not a figment of my imagination. I felt that feeling of hot and cold at the same time. As the Barracuda drew slowly away, Glenn and Sheila waved limp farewells at the rear windshield. Miss Smith looked after us, eyes fastened on me doggedly looking back; her eyes goggling, ogling, gobbling me up. Her very soul, it seemed, in her eyes.

Bonus audio of N.R. reading from his essay…

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