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.I said 'Behave, Goblin!' just as Sweetheart sometimes said to me,'Behave, Quinn!' and Goblin, pouting and making faces, disappeared."I started to cry.Aunt Queen was very distressed at this and asked the reason, and I told her that now Goblin would not come back for a long time.He'd wait and wait until I was crying and crying, and then he would come."Aunt Queen pondered this for a long time and said that I mustn't cry.'You know what I think, Quinn?' she asked.'I think if you remain quiet and pretend you don't need him, Goblin will come back.’"It did the trick.As I was helping her and Big Ramona to unpack suitcases, as I was playing with Aunt Queen's cameos, which she set out on her famous marble table, along came Goblin, peeping around the door and then pouting and sulking and coming in."Aunt Queen didn't mind my murmuring to him as I explained who she was and that everybody called her Miss Queen but we were to call her Aunt Queen, and when Big Ramona went to correct me and tell me to hush, Aunt Queen said, No, let me go on." 'Now, Goblin, don't run off again,' Aunt Queen said, and once more I was certain she could see him, but she said that she couldn't, and was only taking my word for the fact that he was there."For the entirety of Aunt Queen's visit she spoke to me as if I were an adult, and I also slept in her bed with her.She sent into town for some men's white T-shirts, size large, and I wore these as my little white nightshirts.And I snuggled up to her spoon fashion as I did with Little Ida, and I slept so deeply not even Goblin could wake me before I heard Aunt Queen's call to get up.Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html"Little Ida was a tiny bit put out over this, as she and I had been bedfellows since I was a baby, but Aunt Queen soothed her so that she let it go.I liked the white canopy over our heads better than the satin-lined baldachin in my own room up here."Let me move to another recollection which must come from the same time.Aunt Queen and I drove into New Orleans in her big stretch limousine.I'd never been in a car like it, but I remember little of it, except that Goblin sat on my right side and Aunt Queen on my left.Goblin tried to stay solid, but he flashed transparent numerous times."What struck me that day most strongly was that we got out on a shady side street with a long brick sidewalk, and all over that sidewalk were pink petals, and it was one of the most beautiful sights I've ever seen.I wish I knew now where that street was.I've asked Aunt Queen but she doesn't recall."I don't know whether those pink petals had fallen from a long flank of crape myrtle trees or from Japanese magnolias.I tend to think it was crape myrtles after a rain.I'll never forget that stretch of sidewalk and that lovely path of flower petals, as though someone had strewn them especially for people to walk on and be transported out of reality and into dreams."Even now, when existence seems unendurable I think of that sidewalk, I remember the drowsy light and the feeling of being unhurried, and the beauty of the pink petals.And I'm able to take a deep breath."It has nothing to do with my story, except perhaps to state that I had eyes to see such things, and a heart to be sensitive to them.But what is germane is that we went to the house of a very affected and artificial lady, much younger than Aunt Queen, who had a whole room full of toys, and the first dollhouse I'd ever seen.Not knowing that boys weren't supposed to like dollhouses, I was of course curious about it and wanted to play with it more than anything else."But the lady wanted to direct things, as I recall, and bombarded me with soft affected questions, in her phony baby voice, mostly pertaining to Goblin, who glared at her the whole while with a sullen and angry face.I didn't like her soft tone when she asked, 'Does Goblin do bad things?' and 'Do you feel sometimes that Goblin is doing something that you would like to do but can't?’"Young as I was, I caught her drift, and I wasn't surprised afterwards when Aunt Queen made a phone call to Pops from the limousine and said, quite oblivious to Goblin and me beside her, 'It's just an imaginary playmate, Thomas.He'll outgrow Goblin.He's a brilliant child and he has no playmates.So we have Goblin.There's no point to be worried at all.’"It was very soon after my encounter with the beautiful flower-strewn sidewalk -- and the lady psychologist -- that Pops drove me to a new school.I hated it passionately, as I had the others, talked to Goblin belligerently and without cease and was sent home before noon."The next week Pops made the long drive into New Orleans to take me to a fancier kindergarten in Uptown, but with the same result.Goblin made faces at the children and I hated them.And the teacher's voice grated on me, as she talked to me as if I were an idiot, and Pops was soon there in the pickup truck to take me back to exactly where I wanted to be."At this point, I have a vivid yet fragmented memory, very distorted and confused, of actually being incarcerated in some sort of hospital, of being in a small cubicle of a room and of sitting in one of those vast playrooms again, complete with a dollhouse, and of knowing that people were watching me Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.htmlthrough a mirror because Goblin made signs to me that they were.Goblin hated the place [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]