But I could take apart
gadgets like nobody's business. Someone -- maybe Auntie's long dead
husband -- had left her a junky tool kit with cracked handles and
chipped tips, and I attacked anything that I could get unplugged from
the wall: the big cabinet TV and radio, the suitcase record player, the
Sputnik music box. I unwired the lamps and peered at the workings of the
electric kitchen clock.
That was four. Five was the year I put it all back together again. I
started with the lamps, then the motor in the blender, then the toaster
elements. I made the old TV work. I don't think I knew how any of it
*really* worked -- couldn't tell you a thing about, you know, electrical
engineering, but I just got a sense of how it was *supposed* to go
together.
Auntie didn't let me out of the apartment after five. I could watch the
kids go by from the window -- skinny Hasids with side-curls and
Filipinos with pretty ribbons and teenagers who smoked, but I couldn't
go to them. I watched *Sesame Street* and *Mr. Dressup* and I began to
soak up English. I began to soak up the idea of playing with other kids.
I began to soak up the fact that none of the kids on the TV had wings.
Auntie left me alone in the afternoons while she went out shopping and
banking and whatever else it was she did, and it was during those times
that I could get myself into her bedroom and go rooting around her
things.
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