In the apartment building across from theirs, six storeys above the ground, a cat walks along a balcony railing.
“Cat,” Julie announces, then stretches open her mouth in a pantomime of her mother screaming when there was a cat in their toilet.
“What colour is it?” Terry asks.
“Black and white.”
“Oh, black and white.” Terry’s disdain is her second foster mother’s disdain for black-and-white movies.
“Black and white and black and white and black and white,” Julie shouts, hitting her doll on the window-ledge.
“I heard you,” Terry says primly. As she turns from the window there is a sound from outside like a siren starting up. She is about to ask, “What was that?” but instead she screams, “Aunt Bea!” because Julie has begun to make the sink-draining noise in her throat. “Aunt Bea!”
“I’m coming,” Aunt Bea says, her sandals clicking into the room. Terry is bumped aside by her big hip, while Julie, who isn’t having an epileptic seizure, pushes away Aunt Bea’s arm.
“Now,” Aunt Bea chides, but Julie slaps the pencil out of Aunt Bea’s hand, then abruptly shuts up, providing a moment of dreamlike silence that signals to Aunt Bea the presence of the Lord. She feels her blood pressure draining from her temples like mercury down a thermometer. She smiles into Julie’s pearl-coloured eyes and says, “I guess we had a false alarm.”
Julie’s features contort into an expression of ugly, inconsolable, private and measureless grief.
“You’re all right now?” Aunt Bea says. She can never be sure, but she assumes that Julie is smiling back at her.
“Penny—” Julie points her doll at the window.
“Yes?” Terry says. “Penny” is what Julie calls Terry, nobody knows why.
Julie forgets what she was going to say. She begins hitting her doll on the window-pane.
“Hold your horses, I’m looking,” Aunt Bea says, inserting her hand between Julie’s doll and the window. She clutches the knob of the doll’s head. “Good heavens,” she says.
“What?” Terry cries.
Aunt Bea dips her chin to see out the top of her bifocals. “Well,” she says, “there seems to be a cat lying out there in the parking lot.”
“Fell,” Julie says in an anguished voice.
“Oh, did it,” Aunt Bea says. “Oh, dear.”
“Dead,” Julie says.
“No, no, I don’t think so,” Aunt Bea says, although from the pool of blood and unnatural angle of the cat’s head she’s thinking, Dead as a doornail.
“Is it bleeding?” Terry cries.
Aunt Bea hears, “Is it breathing?” and her heart constricts. It never fails to constrict Aunt Bea’s heart how eagle-eyed this little blind girl imagines everybody is. “Yes,” she says slowly, as if she is scrutinizing, “yes, you know, I think its chest is moving up and down.”
“Is it bleeding?” Terry repeats. She holds her hand out.
“It is not moving up and down,” Julie says in a severely reproachful voice.
Aunt Bea would swear that the only time Julie speaks in complete sentences is to catch her in a lie. “It’s hard to tell, of course,” she says.
“But is it bleeding?” Terry cries. The faint emanation of heat that she senses in her extended hand is Aunt Bea’s blood pressure going back up.
“Nobody seems to be coming down,” Aunt Bea observes to change the subject.
“You better phone the Humane Society,” Terry cries.
“I guess so,” Aunt Bea says. She snatches Terry’s hand and squeezes it to calm the child. “All right, I’ll go call them,” she says, and leaves the room.
“Is it bleeding?” Terry asks Julie. Blood concerns Terry. Eyes, she was disturbed to learn, can bleed.
“Dead,” Julie says.
“But is it bleeding, I asked.” Terry is on the verge of tears. She wants an answer to this question even though she never relies on what Julie says. Whenever Julie answers the phone and it’s a woman, she always says, “It’s my mother.”
“Black and white and black and white,” Julie says.
Terry sighs. “I know that,” she says, giving up.
Julie, however, is referring to the checkered dress of a woman who has run across the parking lot and is now kneeling over the cat. Mommy! Julie thinks, ecstatic, and then she knows that it is not her mother, and she chews thoughtfully on her doll’s foot.
“Bleeding doesn’t mean you die, though,” Terry says, making her way over to her dresser. With the palm of her hand she taps the bristles of her hairbrush for the tingling sensation that reminds her of drinking Coke. Terry believes that Coke looks bristly. Milk, being smooth, she thinks of as round. The only thing she cannot imagine, the only thing she is prepared to be surprised by, is colour.
Terry was born nine years ago to an eighteen-year-old migrant corn detassler who left the abortion too late, mostly out of curiosity as to who the father might be. By the colour of the baby’s hair, she’d know. But Terry came into the world bald and blind and with a birthmark covering most of the left side of her face, and Terry’s mother walked out of the hospital that same evening. To the nurse who tried to stop her, she hollered, “I coulda had her at home and thrown her in a dumpster, ya know!”
The nurses adored Terry. She hardly ever cried; in fact, she smiled most of the time. (Some of the nurses held this up as proof that a baby’s smile indicated gas; others said it proved that smiling was innate and not learned.) During the day they kept her in a bassinet at their station, on a table next to the photocopier, where it was discovered that the rhythm of the cartridge moving back and forth sent her to sleep. When she was teething, the head nurse left written orders that the copier was to be kept going for as long as Terry fretted. The head nurse, a collector and exhibitor of ethnically dressed dolls, made outfits for Terry in her spare time. Crocheted gowns, elaborately frilled, embroidered and aproned dresses, matching bows backed with tape so they could be stuck to her bald head. The other nurses bought her toys and sleepers. If an adoption agency was coming by to take her picture, they dressed her up and dabbed make-up on her birthmark to give her a fighting chance.
No couples wanted her, though. It took two years for Children’s Aid to come through with just a foster mother, and even she was obviously reluctant. Her name was Mrs. Stubbs. “Terry won’t be getting any special treatment,” she informed the nurses. “My own son’s asthmatic, and I treat him exactly like my daughter.” She refused to take the dresses because they had to be washed by hand and ironed. “I’ve got better things to do than that,” she said.
Such as housecleaning. In Mrs. Stubbs’s house the plastic was still on the lampshades, and Terry was taught to eat cookies with a hand cupped under her chin to catch the crumbs. There were two other children—the woman’s daughter, who eloped when Terry was six, and the asthmatic son, who was devoted to goldfish. Once he let Terry put her hand in the tank to feel fish swim by. She was startled by how soft and slimy they were; she had expected the cold hardness of her foster mother’s wedding band. Her foster mother admired the glass-cleaning snails but was disgusted by the goldfish going to the bathroom in the very water that passed through their gills. The bathroom in her house smelled like pine cones. Terry was slapped for leaving the top off the toothpaste, for wearing her shoes in the house, for spilling anything—those were the worst offences. Living with this foster mother, she became a high-strung child with fingers like antennae. She could extend her hand and sense if another person was in the room. By the air currents passing through her fingers, she could tell if somebody was breathing in her direction.
Terry cried her heart out when she had to leave that home for a home closer to the school for the blind, but within a few days she loved her second foster mother to death. They spent most of their time together on the couch in front of the tv, one of the foster mother’s arms around Terry, the other holding the channel changer, which she used every two minutes because she wouldn’t watch commercials and because “Andy of Mayberry” was the only program that didn’t drive her crazy.
“Oh, right, give us a break,” she’d say to the newscaster, then eliminate him. “Christ,” she’d say, tapping her long nails on the wooden armrest next to Terry, “who comes up with this shit?”
Terry squirmed at the bad language, but the “us” flattered and enthralled her.
Her second foster mother’s husband was a jolly, longdistance truck driver. He came home once a week, then left early the next morning before Terry woke up. Terry’s foster mother groaned at the sound of his rig pulling into the driveway. She made him pork and beans and sat smoking and sighing at the dinner table while he relayed with his mouth full the hilarious things that he and his buddies had said to each other over their shortwave radios. Terry rarely understood the joke, but she laughed because of his infectious laugh, and then he would mess her hair and say, “You liked that, eh, Orphan Annie?” When he stopped coming home at all, she wasn’t surprised. If he’d been a man on their TV, he wouldn’t have lasted five seconds.
But she was surprised—and so distressed she began pulling out her baby-fine hair in her sleep; nests of it in her clenched fist every morning— when she learned that his disappearance meant she would have to leave.
Her third foster mother lived two blocks away. In a voice very familiar to Terry she said, “Mrs. Brodie is too formal. I don’t want you calling me that. How about if you just call me Aunt Joyce.”
“How about if I call you Aunt Bea?” Terry said.
“Aunt Bea?” Mrs. Brodie’s dead sister was named Bea, so she was taken aback.
“From ‘Andy of Mayberry.’ ”
Mrs. Brodie smiled. “Well, you know, I have to admit there’s a resemblance. She’s got a bun, though, as I recall. And I’ve got glasses, which I don’t think she has. Plus I’m about fifty pounds fatter. But our faces are kind of the same, you know, kind of …” She touched her face.
“Old,” Terry offered. She took it for granted that everybody had the same face.
“Old!” Mrs. Brodie laughed. “That’s right! Old! How would you like to help me bake a pie?”
The only bad thing about living with Aunt Bea was when her granddaughter, Marcy, came to visit. The first time she came she didn’t speak until she and Terry were outside in the playground, and then she said, “Everybody hates you” and pinched Terry’s arm.
Until then Terry had thought Marcy was a mute. There was a mute who used to play with her first foster mother’s son. Despite the fact that Marcy’s breath hit Terry at face level, Terry had pictured a soft, little mute you could hold in your hand. The pinch burst Marcy into the spiky shape of a scream. “Go home!” Terry cried.
“She’s my grandmother!” Marcy shouted. “You’re the one that better go home before I kill you!”
Terry began to run. But since she had a poor sense of direction and no concept of space, “far away” meaning simply that it took longer to get there than “nearby” did, she ran in a large circle and didn’t realize until a split second before Marcy shrieked in her ear that she had ended up back where she started.
“They’re getting along like a house on fire,” Aunt Bea said.
She and her daughter, who was Marcy’s mother, were keeping watch from the apartment. The daughter was trying to unlatch the window. She glanced over at Aunt Bea and thought, Jesus Christ, she’s as deaf as a post. When she got the window open, she stuck her head out and yelled, “Marcy! Don’t chase her out onto the road! Marcy! Do you hear me?”
“Yes!” Marcy hollered without looking up. She was racing to get a stick she had spotted in the sandbox. Terry stood very still and oblivious, like somebody waiting for a bus.
Sighing, Aunt Bea’s daughter closed the window. She could hardly blame Marcy. Suddenly there was this stray living in her granny’s apartment, sleeping in the bed that used to be reserved for her, playing with her Barbie doll. “I wish you’d talked this over with me first,” she said.
“You don’t have to shout,” Aunt Bea said gently.
Marcy speared the stick straight at Terry, missing her by inches. “Oh, God,” Aunt Bea’s daughter said. She glanced at Aunt Bea’s placid face. “They say you shouldn’t make any big decisions for at least a year,” she said. “Now you’re tied down again.”
Thank the Lord, Aunt Bea thought.
“Just don’t get too attached to her,” her daughter said. “She could be taken away at any time.”
Aunt Bea crossed her arms over the ledge of her bosom and said, “Yesterday I made meringues, and when I gave her one, you know what she said?”
“I have no idea.”
Aunt Bea chuckled. “She said, ‘This is good Styrofoam.’ “
“I can’t get it out of my mind that time I came here and you’d left the burner on,” her daughter said. “I’m going to worry myself sick when we’re living in Saskatoon.”
The idea was to get somebody full of beans like Marcy but a little older, eleven or twelve, maybe, somebody who could play with Terry and walk her to and from the school for the blind. That walk was the hardest part for Aunt Bea. The school wasn’t far, just a couple of blocks, but in the mornings, until she’d been up and around for a while, her ankles were so swollen they hardly fit into her shoes.
Out of some mixup, however, the social worker brought over Julie. It was a weekday afternoon, and Terry was at school. At the social worker’s recommendation Aunt Bea was waiting until she and the new girl—Esther, she had been told her name was—had met each other before she said anything to Terry. The visit was a trial. If Esther took a strong dislike to Aunt Bea (or vice versa, although Aunt Bea couldn’t imagine disliking a child), then Children’s Aid would come up with somebody else.
While she sat at the dining-room window keeping an eye out for the social worker’s old blue Chevy, Aunt Bea busied herself with knitting a skating sweater that was gradually, in her mind, changing from Terry’s to Esther’s. When she saw the car, she quickly folded the knitting up and put it in the sideboard drawer, then turned to the window again. The social worker was striding around as if to open the passenger door, but it opened before she got there. Aunt Bea adjusted her bifocals to get a good look.
“Oh, my,” she said out loud.
It was the name, Esther, that had misled her. She had pictured a Jewish girl—dark, undernourished … haunted Anne Frank eyes. She had pictured a cardigan sweater several sizes too small. The girl who climbed out of the car was fat—Lord, as fat as Aunt Bea herself—and she had short white-blond hair in some kind of crazy brushcut. She headed in a beeline for the wrong apartment building. When the social worker called her back, she turned on her heel and took up a new beeline. Like a remote-control car, Aunt Bea thought. There was something else funny about that walk, though … a looseness in the legs and torso, a struggle for co-ordination that didn’t seem at all right.
“Poor thing,” Aunt Bea said to herself. This was not so much sympathy as a resolute summoning of sympathy. “Poor little motherless thing.”
She scarcely had the door open when the girl said, “Hi.” She said it suddenly and loudly, as if to frighten Aunt Bea. Then she rolled her eyes as if she were about to black out.
“Hi! Come in! Come in!” Aunt Bea said enthusiastically, but she was thinking, “A retard,” and now she really was thrown for a bit of a loop. “Don’t sweat the petty things!” she said, reading the girl’s sweatshirt.
“Believe me,” the social worker said. “It was not my idea that she wear that.” She took the girl’s arm and turned her around.
“Pet the sweaty things,” Aunt Bea read. She didn’t get it.
“It belonged to her mother,” the social worker said, giving Aunt Bea a confidential look.
“Oh?” Aunt Bea said.
“Come on, Julie, don’t do that,” the social worker said. The girl was bunching up the shirt with her fists, revealing a belly like a mound of virgin snow.
Julie? Aunt Bea thought.
“Should we take off our shoes?” the social worker asked.
“No, no,” Aunt Bea said, blinking herself back into action. “Sit down anywhere. I’ve got shortbreads and chocolate milk, and coffee’s made. Would you like some chocolate milk?” she asked. She looked at the girl and added, “Julie?”
“Coffee,” Julie said loudly.
“Julie’s been drinking coffee for years,” the social worker said, falling into a chair. “And beer, and I shudder to think what else.” The social worker was a homely, frizzy-haired woman in dungarees and work boots. “Actually I wouldn’t mind a glass of chocolate milk,” she said.
Don’t sweat the petty things, Aunt Bea said to herself as she poured the coffee. Pet the sweaty things. Speaking of sweat, her body was soaked in it. “Everything’s fine,” she told herself. “Everything’s just fine and dandy.” She hummed a hymn:
“A charge to keep I have,
A God to glorify,
A never-dying soul to save
And fit it for the sky.”
The first thing she would do was give that crazy jailbird hair a perm.
Coming out of the kitchen, she asked Julie how old she was. Fifteen was her guess.
“Five,” Julie answered.
“Five?” Aunt Bea looked at the social worker.
“Eleven,” the social worker said with mild exasperation.
Aunt Bea nodded. At least Children’s Aid had got that right. She handed Julie her coffee, and Julie immediately gulped half of it down.
“There isn’t sugar in here,” Julie said, holding up her mug.
Aunt Bea was startled. She cast back to a moment ago. “No, there’s sugar.”
“It’s not sugar,” Julie said. She looked infuriated.
“Oh!” Aunt Bea laughed. “Yes, you’re right! It’s Sweet’n Low!” She beamed at the social worker. “I can’t tell the difference.”
“Just drink it,” the social worker said.
“No, no. I’ve got sugar.” Aunt Bea hurried over to retrieve Julie’s mug. She smiled into Julie’s suddenly blank eyes. Pale, pale pupils, almost white. Aunt Bea had never seen eyes like that.
The social worker seemed to assume that everything was settled. “I’ll bring her back Monday morning,” she said after Aunt Bea had given Julie a tour of the apartment, showing her the bed she’d share with Terry, the empty dresser drawers where her clothes would go, the chair that would be hers at the dining-room table. Julie exposed her belly and rolled her eyes.
At the front door the social worker handed over a file, saying, “You might as well keep this.”
“Oh, good,” Aunt Bea said, as if the contents were familiar but she’d better have them just in case. When she was alone, she sat on the couch with a cup of coffee and the rest of the cookies and opened the file. How she would end up explaining Julie to people (to her daughter) was that she was floored by the coincidences, especially the coincidence of Julie’s last name—Norman. “That was the clincher,” Aunt Bea would say.
To see or hear her husband’s name still threw weight on Aunt Bea’s heart, but to see his name written next to that poor, forsaken girl’s fogged up Aunt Bea’s glasses. She touched under one eye, and she was crying all right. Before Norman died she wouldn’t have believed it was possible to cry unbeknownst to yourself. Before Norman died she wouldn’t have said that her glasses fogged from crying, although she didn’t doubt that they had and she just couldn’t remember. The most startling and depressing news in her life these days was what she was capable of forgetting. Well, she wouldn’t forget the girl’s last name, she could guarantee that. She removed her glasses, wiped them on her blouse and lifted her feet onto the coffee table.
The report was handwritten, hard to read. Under “Mother” it said either “Sally” or “Sandy” and then “38.” Then there was a short, tragic biography. Sally or Sandy had an honours B.A. in English Literature but she also had a drug habit and a long history of arrests for possession and trafficking. She was currently serving a five- or an eight-year jail sentence. Her only other child had been born addicted to heroin and had lived just a day.
As she read, Aunt Bea shook her head in pity and amazement. It so happened that she had a cousin named Sally, who used to teach school but who lost her husband and her job due to addiction to alcohol. She died at age forty, a broken old woman.
“Heaven help her,” Aunt Bea prayed for Julie’s mother.
Under “Father,” all it said was “Michael, iii.”
“Good heavens!” Aunt Bea said. He must be a stepfather, she thought. Or maybe he was the mother’s father. But still … III. And then she let out a whoop of laughter as she realized that what it actually said was “Ill.” She laughed and laughed and had to remove her glasses and wipe them again. When she settled down she got a little irritated. What did they mean by “Ill”? Crazy? Dying? Dying from aids, which they didn’t want to say in case people were afraid to take Julie? Aunt Bea clicked her tongue to imagine so much ignorance.
She turned the page, and there was another coincidence—Julie suffered from epileptic fits. Aunt Bea’s younger sister, dead thirty-four years now, had suffered from epileptic fits. Aunt Bea was handy, therefore, with a pencil. Get the tongue out of the way first, tilt back the head. Nothing to be alarmed about, so long as there were unsharpened pencils all over the house.
“Prone to temper tantrums,” Aunt Bea read. “Domineering.” She thought of her daughter and felt herself well prepared. “Behavioural and intellectual age,” she read, “five to six.” “Well …,” she said dubiously. She had been very impressed by Julie’s detection of Sweet’n Low.
She told Terry the news that afternoon, on their walk home from school. It wasn’t until she was actually describing Julie that she recognized what a burden she was asking Terry to share. This wasn’t how she had planned it at all. The braindamaged girl she found herself bracing Terry for was a far cry from the helpful and spirited older sister she’d had in mind. She tried to brighten up the picture. “We’ll have a whale of a time, though,” she said, “the three of us.”
“Doing what?” Terry asked.
“Oh, I don’t know …” Aunt Bea thought back to when her daughter was small. “We’ll take the ferry to the island,” she said, although being on boats gave her heart palpitations.
Terry swept her white cane in scrupulous arcs.
“And we’ll go to the zoo,” Aunt Bea said, although the zoo was a good fifty miles away, and Aunt Bea no longer drove a car.
“Where will she sleep?” Terry asked.
“With you. If that’s all right. It’s a big enough bed.”
“What if she wets her pants? A boy at school who is five, he wets his pants.”
“In that department, I’m sure she’s eleven,” Aunt Bea said, although she thought, Good point, and wondered if she shouldn’t lay some plastic garbage bags under the sheet.
“Will she go to school?”
“She already goes. That school on Bleeker. You know, where the sidewalk’s all cracked?”
“Will she go by herself?”
“No, I don’t think so. We’ll both walk her there, and then I’ll take you to school.”
Terry came to a stop and lifted her thin face in Aunt Bea’s direction. “Your feet will kill you!” she cried, as if delivering the punch line.
“Lord,” Aunt Bea said. “Lord, you’re right.”
Julie is holding Aunt Bea’s left hand. Terry is holding Aunt Bea’s right hand. The three of them take up the whole sidewalk, and oncoming people have to step out onto the road. Julie is thrilled by this, believing, as she does, that it is happening because she does not smell afraid. “Bastards and dogs can smell it when you’re afraid,” her mother told her. So Julie is walking with her head lowered to butt. Whenever somebody veers off the sidewalk she murmurs, “Bastard.”
Eventually Aunt Bea asks, “Where’s the fire?” She thinks that Julie is saying, “Faster.”
“Dog,” Julie says quietly—this time it’s a dog that has trotted onto the road. She laughs and pulls up her dress.
“No!” Aunt Bea says.
“No!” Terry echoes, recognizing the familiar sound of Aunt Bea slapping Julie’s clothing down.
“Oh-kay, oh-kay,” Julie says.
“Not now,” Terry says. Sometimes Julie and Terry play a game that Julie made up, where Julie chants oh-kay, oh-kay while she and Terry hold hands and swing their arms back and forth, just a bit at first, and then higher and higher until they swing them right around over their heads. Terry isn’t crazy about this game, but she plays it to calm Julie. She thinks that Julie is probably blue with lines. Aunt Bea is green. Blood is red.
Aunt Bea gives them each a Life Saver, then takes their hands. The sweeps of the white cane along the sidewalk strike Aunt Bea as a blessing, a continuous sanctification of their path. “I want you both to be angels in church,” she says. “It’s a special day.”
“I know,” Terry says importantly.
Julie sucks her Life Saver and rubs Aunt Bea’s wrist against her cheek.
“Do you know what?” Terry says.
“What?” Aunt Bea says.
“Julie poked the eyes out of her doll.” The hole in her Life Saver has reminded her.
“Yes, I saw that,” Aunt Bea says.
Julie isn’t paying attention. She is remembering her mother’s phone call and is daydreaming about her mother singing “Six Little Ducklings.” Julie smiles at her mother, which provokes Aunt Bea, who after a year still gets Julie’s smiles and grimaces confused, to say, “Listen, I don’t give a hoot. It’s your doll. If you want to destroy it, that’s up to you.”
“Just don’t expect a new one!” Terry cries.
“That’s right,” Aunt Bea says.
“My mother has left the jail,” Julie says.
“What?” Aunt Bea comes to a stop.
“She phoned yesterday. She told Penny.”
“No, she didn’t!” Terry cries. Her shrill laugh shoots pain through Aunt Bea’s eyes.
“Yes, she did,” Julie says slowly and murderously.
“It’s so funny!” Terry cries. She yanks her hand from Aunt Bea’s and pats the air in an excited manner. She is wearing white felt gloves. “You know how she always says it’s her mother on the phone? Well, do you know what? Yesterday the phone rang when you were in the laundry room, and I answered it, and it was a woman, and she said, ‘This is Sally, is Marge …’ or somebody … yes, it was Marge. She said, ‘This is Sally, is Marge there?’ And I said she had the wrong number, and then I told Julie, and she said that her mother’s name is Sally.”
“That’s right,” Aunt Bea says. “It is.”
“It is,” Julie says, scowling at Terry.
“But it’s so funny!” Terry cries. The strap of her white plastic purse falls down her shoulder. She reaches for it and drops her cane. “No!” she screams, imagining that the dog Julie mentioned a minute ago is racing to retrieve it.
Aunt Bea picks the cane up. “Honey, that was another woman named Sally,” she says to Julie.
Julie bunches the skirt of her dress and rolls her eyes.
“I told her,” Terry says.
“But your mother will be out of jail one day,” Aunt Bea says, tugging down Julie’s dress. “And until then Penny and I want you to live with us.”
Julie’s face empties. She has been dazed, suddenly, by a recollection of the woman who knelt over the cat that fell from the balcony, by a recollection of the woman’s black-and-white dress, exactly like her mother’s. She reasons that the woman was in jail before and is now out.
“Okie dokie?” Aunt Bea says.
Julie covers her mouth with both hands, the way the woman did.
“Okie dokie,” Aunt Bea answers for her.
In the middle of the sermon Aunt Bea is visited by the notion that the reason Julie calls Terry “Penny” might be that somebody, her educated mother for instance, told her about the pennies that used to be put on the eyes of the dead who, of course, can no longer see.
She gives Julie a ruminating look. Julie looks blankly back at her and begins to jerk. Before Aunt Bea understands what is happening, she kicks the pew. She swings her arm and knocks Aunt Bea’s glasses off.
“Stop it!” Terry says to Julie. Aunt Bea’s glasses have landed in her lap. She holds them over Julie, who has gone stiff and is slipping off the pew. Aunt Bea snatches her glasses back. “She’s pretending!” Terry says. “She’s jealous.”
“Shush!” Aunt Bea snaps. Julie begins jerking again. Aunt Bea pours out the contents of her purse but she can’t find the pencil. Finally she shoves a hymnal into Julie’s mouth, then throws her leg up and over Julie’s to stop her kicking the pew, at which point she becomes aware that Hazel Gordimer is leading Terry into the aisle, and that Tom Alcorn, the minister, is asking if there’s a doctor in the congregation.
“It’s all right,” Aunt Bea calls out. “This happens all the time! It’ll be over in a jiffy!” She smiles at the stricken faces turned toward her. She knows it looks worse than it is. Luckily, though, it’s a short fit. With a mighty heave, Julie relaxes her body, and Aunt Bea calls out to Tom Alcorn, “All finished! You can carry on now!” She looks around for Terry, but she’s not there—Hazel must have taken her outside. So she throws everything back in her purse, tugs the hymnal from Julie’s mouth and coaxes her to her feet. “Sorry,” she says to the people along the pew. “Thank you so much,” she says, referring to their prayers for Terry.
The last man in the aisle, a big man about her age, takes her arm and walks her and Julie to the back of the church. In the silence can be heard, clear as a bell, the Sunday school children down in the basement singing “All Things Bright and Beautiful.” Normally, Terry and Julie would be down there, but the topic of this Sunday’s service, “Suffer Little Children,” was dedicated to Terry, and Aunt Bea wanted her to hear it. Well, she heard most of it. She heard her name mentioned in two prayers. Aunt Bea runs a hand over her pounding forehead, and the man, whose name she wishes she could remember, gives her arm a squeeze. Oh, the consolation of big, church-going men! Aunt Bea allows herself to lean into him a little. Julie leans into her. Aunt Bea looks down at her and sees what she knows in her bones is a smile.
At the door the man draws his arm away, and the three of them go outside and descend the steps toward Hazel Gordimer and Terry. Terry’s eyelids are pink from crying. Suddenly Aunt Bea can’t bear it that those tender lids will feel the scalpel. Letting go of one child, she goes up to the other and hugs her.
“She didn’t make the sink-draining noise,” Terry says coldly. “She always makes it first.”
Aunt Bea is unable to recall whether Julie made that noise or not. “It was bad timing, I’ll grant you that,” she says. Terry wrenches free and begins to sweep the sidewalk with her cane. “Where are you going?” Aunt Bea asks. Terry approaches the man, who makes way, and then Julie, who doesn’t. Terry has anticipated this, however, and she steps onto the grass one sweep before her cane would have touched Julie’s shoe.
“Bastard,” Julie murmurs.
“I heard that!” Terry says. At the stairs to the church she stops, confused—she thought she was heading in the other direction.
“Are you going back in?” Aunt Bea asks.
Terry doesn’t know. She starts crying again—high, puppy-like whimpers that plunge Julie into grief and start her crying, too.
“Here we go,” Aunt Bea sighs, walking over to Terry.
“Julie is stupid,” Terry says.
“Oh, now,” Hazel Gordimer admonishes.
“Julie has rocks in her head,” Terry says.
Two days later Terry goes into the hospital. She is supremely confident. At the admission desk she asks if anyone knows a blind girl who needs an almost brand new cane.
Aunt Bea is confident, too. The same doctor has been monitoring Terry ever since she was born, and he says she is the optimum age for the operation. He calls it a delicate but routine procedure with an extremely high success rate. “The only real worry I have,” he says, “is how Terry will react to suddenly being able to see. There are always adjustment problems.”
“You mean the birthmark,” Aunt Bea says, getting down to brass tacks. Even though the doctor has explained to Terry how next year a plastic surgeon is going to erase the birthmark with a laser beam (“erase”—that’s the word he used, as if somebody had spilled purple ink on her cheek), Aunt Bea doesn’t exactly expect Terry to jump for joy the first time she looks in a mirror.
But the doctor says, “Spatial problems. An inability, in the beginning anyway, to judge depth and distances.”
“Oh, well,” Aunt Bea says. She has spatial problems herself, if that’s the case. When she used to drive she had an awful time pulling out into traffic.
The church has arranged for a private hospital room, and members of the congregation have already filled it with flowers. Terry is exhilarated, Aunt Bea is touched, but when Aunt Bea has to go home, and Terry is lying down waiting for her dinner tray, all those bouquets surrounding that little body on the bed make Aunt Bea uneasy. Right after supper, leaving the dirty dishes on the table, she rushes back. She brings Julie this time, plus a big bag of chocolate-chip cookies, which, despite the flowers, Terry immediately smells. “I can’t eat those!” she cries.
“You can’t?” Aunt Bea says.
Terry gives her head the single nod that, for her, means absolutely not. “I can’t eat anything till the operation. I have to have an empty stomach.”
“Oh, that’s right,” Aunt Bea says, annoyed with herself. You’d have thought that after all of Norman’s operations she’d have remembered.
Julie is still in the doorway. Although she hasn’t said anything yet, Terry is aware of her. “Why are you just standing there?” she asks.
“Come on, honey, come over here and help me wolf some of these down,” Aunt Bea says, dropping onto the chair and digging into the bag of cookies.
“Can Penny see?” Julie asks in her loud voice.
“Of course not!” Terry cries. “I haven’t even had the operation yet!”
“In a week, Penny will be able to see,” Aunt Bea says. She hoists her sore feet onto the radiator.
Julie scowls and sticks a finger in her ear. She pushes so hard that she groans.
“What’s the matter?” Aunt Bea says. “Come on over here.”
Julie stays where she is. She is mentally scanning Aunt Bea’s apartment. She sees the hammer and nails in an apple basket on the broom-closet floor. She sees the two screwdrivers in a juice can. She moves to the bedroom and sees the hangers in the bedroom closet, and she lingers there as she remembers her mother straightening out a hanger and poking it up a hash pipe once.
Despite her bandage, Terry is sure that she is already detecting the colour red. “It’s very bright,” she says. “It could hurt you, even.”
Colours are all she talks about. For the first time in her life she wonders what colour writing is.
“Black,” Aunt Bea says. “Nine times out of ten.”
Terry can’t understand how it is visible in that case—she can’t grasp the idea of black against white, and Aunt Bea finally gives up trying to explain. “You’ll see,” she says.
“I’ll see!” Terry loves saying this. She thinks it’s the cleverest joke. She’ll see—everything will become clear to her in a few days. She takes it for granted that she will know how to read as soon as she opens a book.
She also takes it for granted that people will want to adopt her, now that she’s “normal.” Aunt Bea is wounded by the eagerness in her voice. In a cautiously optimistic tone she says, “They probably will.” Aunt Bea realizes, of course, that more couples will be interested, but there are still the adjustment problems that the doctor mentioned. And there’s the birthmark, not just the first, startling sight of it, but having to deal with the laser-beam operation and its aftermath—expensive lotions or infections or whatever. In Aunt Bea’s experience, there’s always something. She can’t help feeling the faintest breath of relief when she takes into account the birthmark. She hugs Julie and says, “Don’t you worry. Penny will be back home before you know it.”
Julie says, “Can Penny see yet?”
She asks every ten minutes. She is also suddenly obsessed by Terry’s mother. Whenever they pass a woman in the hall of their apartment building—even a woman she knows—she asks, “Is that Penny’s mother?”
“How many times have I told you?” Aunt Bea says, and this becomes another worry, not Julie’s questions (who can hope to fathom what goes on in that child’s damaged head?) but her own impatience with them. To strengthen herself she sings “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” One night she falls into such a swamp of pity over Julie’s childhood that she gets out of bed and sews her a dress out of the green velvet and white silk she’d intended to make Terry a dress out of. But when she presents the dress to Julie the next morning, Julie plants her fists on her hips and says, “Throw it in the garbage.” So Aunt Bea cuts the threads and turns the dress into Terry’s after all. She takes it to the hospital, her intention all along being that when the bandage is removed Terry should see the colour she has decided will be her favourite.
The doctor leads Terry to a chair and asks her to sit. Aunt Bea sits at the edge of the sofa.
“I just hope the blinds are closed,” Terry says.
“They are.” The doctor laughs.
“She doesn’t miss a trick, that one,” Aunt Bea says, leaning forward to smooth Terry’s dress. She regrets the white sash and trim—she thinks they give the impression that she had bandages on the brain. She startles herself by letting out an explosive sob.
“It’s so gloomy in here,” the nurse says sympathetically.
“Are you crying?” Terry asks. “What are you crying for?”
Aunt Bea extracts a wad of Kleenex from the sleeve of her sweater. “I always cry at miracles,” she says. She squeezes Terry’s bony knee. Terry is so keyed up that her legs are sticking straight out like a doll’s. She tucks them in fast, however, when the doctor asks if she’s all set. He moves a stool in front of her, sits, then signals to the nurse, who turns a dial on the wall.
The room darkens. Everything white seems to leap out—his gown, the silk, the bandage, the moons of his fingers touching the bandage. Aunt Bea looks at the moons in her own fingers, at the Kleenex. She glances up at the light, wondering if it has a special bulb. On the far wall are staves of light from the gaps between the venetian blinds.
“Oh,” Terry says.
The bandage is off.
The whites of her eyes are so white.
“Do your eyes hurt?” the doctor asks.
Terry blinks. “No,” she whispers. The doctor waits a moment, then raises his hand a fraction and the nurse turns the dial.
“Angels,” Terry says. All she can see are dazzling slashes and spots.
Aunt Bea is overcome. “Oh, dear Lord,” she sobs.
“That is light,” the doctor says.
“I know,” Terry agrees. Now the slashes and spots aren’t so brilliant, and she is beginning to make out shapes filled in with what she realizes must be colour. Between the coloured shapes there is black.
“What else do you see?” the doctor asks.
“You,” she whispers, but it is an assumption.
“What did she say?” Aunt Bea asks, wiping her fogged-up glasses.
“She sees me.”
“I see you,” Terry says, and now she does. That is his face. It grows, it comes closer. He is staring into one of her eyes and then the other. He is pulling down on her bottom lids. She stares back at his eyes. “An eye is greasy,” she says.
When he moves his hand away, she looks down at her dress, then over at Aunt Bea, who isn’t green. More startling than that, Aunt Bea’s face is different from the doctor’s. Men must have different faces from women, she thinks, but when she looks at the nurse, her face is different, too. The nurse is very tiny, only an inch high. Terry looks back at Aunt Bea and considers the gleaming lines between her eyes and her mouth. “I see your tears,” she says.
“Oh, honey,” Aunt Bea says.
Terry extends her hand, and though it seems to touch Aunt Bea, it doesn’t. She waves it, and it brushes the doctor’s face. “But—” she says, confused.
“That’s what I was telling you about,” the doctor says to Aunt Bea. “It’s going to take her a while to judge distances.” He turns to the nurse. “Let’s open the blinds.”
The nurse goes over to the window. Terry watches her. She expands as she approaches Terry, shrinks as she moves to the other side of the room. This is no surprise—Terry has always figured that certain people are big close up and little far away. But she had no idea that you could see behind you, that what was behind you remained visible. She twists back and forth to try to catch the space behind her in blackness.
“Stand up, why don’t you,” the doctor says.
Terry comes to her feet and faces the window.
“That’s sky and clouds at the top part,” the doctor says. “Blue sky, white clouds, and trees underneath, the green leaves of trees. These windows are tinted, so it’s all a bit darker than it is really.”
Terry takes a step. She stops, certain that she has reached the window. She holds out her hand, and Aunt Bea jumps up and grabs it. “Oh, honey,” she says. It’s all she can say.
“No,” Terry says sharply, shaking Aunt Bea away. She feels better with her hand out in front of her. She takes two more steps, but she is still not at the window. Two more steps, two more. The nurse moves aside. Two more steps, and Terry’s fingers hit the glass.
It is her hand that arrests her, pressed flat against the pane. “What are those cracks?” she says, referring to the wrinkles on her knuckles.
Aunt Bea is beside her. She scans the view outside. “On the building?” she asks, wondering if Terry means the lines between the bricks. “Over there?”
“No!” Terry slaps the window. She is suddenly panicky. “Where is Julie?” she says.
“At school,” Aunt Bea says, putting an arm around her. “You know that, honey. You’ll see her at home.”
“Where’s my face?” Terry says, and starts to cry.
“Okay,” the doctor says. “It’s a little overwhelming, isn’t it, Terry?” He tells her to sit down and close her eyes. Whenever she is overwhelmed, he says, she should close her eyes for a few moments.
Terry targets the couch. She waves her hands to keep Aunt Bea from helping. She has the impression that she is walking into a picture of flat shapes and that the heat she senses radiating from Aunt Bea’s body is what’s causing the shapes to gradually melt from view.
Terry’s hand is on her reflection in the bathroom mirror.
“That’s coming off, remember,” Aunt Bea says. “It’ll be the same colour as the rest of your skin.”
Terry’s hand moves from the mirror to the fair side of her face. With the tips of her fingers she dabs herself, making what strike Aunt Bea as oddly haphazard leaps from cheekbone to jawbone to eyebrow, nose, mouth and then to the other side of her face—her cheek—where she halts for a moment.
She begins to smooth the skin there—she is testing if the birthmark wipes off. “You know what?” she says.
“What?”
“I love purple,” she says wistfully.
“So do I!” Aunt Bea exclaims.
“But I thought purple would be green,” Terry says. She turns her head as if her eyes were in danger of falling out. Her eyes look completely different since the operation. They seem smaller … and older—they have the vague intensity that reminds Aunt Bea of old people listening to something difficult and new.
“Would you like to see more purple?” Aunt Bea asks.
Terry’s eyes fix on Aunt Bea’s left hand. “Do you know what?” she says. “I thought veins would be red.”
On the bus ride home, behind oversized sunglasses to eliminate glare, Terry had studied the veins in Aunt Bea’s hands. Every few minutes she carefully lifted her head to look at the other passengers and at the ads above the windows, but she didn’t look out the windows, although once or twice she caught sight of her dim reflection, she recognized the movement of her own head, and the first time this happened she said, alarmed, “That’s a mirror!”
Between these investigations, she had returned to her real interest—examining the back of Aunt Bea’s hand. As they were walking from the bus Aunt Bea showed her how when she held her hand up for a few moments all the veins disappeared, then when she brought it back down they re-emerged and made it seem as if she were ageing fifty years in five seconds. Terry loved that. “Again,” she said. “Again.”
As soon as they entered the apartment, however, she impatiently pushed away Aunt Bea’s hand, looked down the hall and said, “The mirror over the sink, that’s a real one, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Aunt Bea said warily. In the hospital, despite asking where her face was, Terry had closed her eyes every time the doctor had tried to get her to look in a mirror. “Yes,” Aunt Bea said, “that’s a real mirror.”
“Will you hold these?” Terry asked, taking off her sunglasses. Then she made her way down to the bathroom.
Now she comes out into the hall, stops and shuts her eyes. This is how she walks—stopping every five or six steps to close her eyes and assume an expression of beseeching concentration. Aunt Bea tries to get her to put the sunglasses back on, but she says they should turn off the lights. Everywhere she sees lights. In the benjamina plant, in Aunt Bea’s hair, strips of light on a vase, squares and spills of light that take Aunt Bea a moment and some wilful hallucinating to discern.
Terry switches on the television. There is a face not unlike the doctor’s. It upsets her when Aunt Bea says it’s not him. Every time the picture changes she cries, “What’s that?” although she usually figures it out before Aunt Bea answers. After about a quarter of an hour she switches the tv off, saying, “It’s too crowded.” She wants to see Julie, who is being walked home from school by a neighbour.
“She’ll be home at four o’clock,” Aunt Bea says.
So she wants to see the kitchen clock. Aunt Bea removes it from the wall and lets her hold it. “But where’s the time?” she cries, distressed.
It’s the same with the Bible. “But I can’t see what it says,” she cries. They are sitting on Aunt Bea’s bed, the Bible opened on Terry’s lap to a page of all-red words, which is Jesus speaking.
Aunt Bea says, “Of course you can’t, honey.”
Terry closes the Bible. With an air of respectful but absolute dismissal she sets it on the bedside table. She looks down at Aunt Bea’s hands. “Show me your veins,” she says.
They are still in the bedroom when the apartment door opens. “In here!” Aunt Bea calls, and suddenly Julie is standing in the doorway, with Anne Forbes, from down the hall, behind her.
“Hi!” Terry says in a dreamlike voice. She knows which one is Julie, and Julie so rivets her that Anne Forbes, a tall, horse-faced woman wearing gold hoop earrings and two green combs in her red hair, is nothing but an unfocused mass of colours.
“Can Penny see yet?” Julie asks.
“I see you,” Terry says. “You have blue on.”
“Well,” Julie sighs. She glances back at Anne Forbes. “Your mother is here.”
“Oh, my goodness!” Anne Forbes trills.
“That’s Mrs. Forbes,” Terry says. She recognizes the voice.
“Oh-kay, oh-kay,” Julie says loudly.
“For heaven’s sakes, Julie, you know that’s Mrs. Forbes.” Clutching the edge of the dresser, Aunt Bea pulls herself to her feet.
Julie throws her head back so that she is gaping into Anne Forbes’s face. “Oh-kay, oh-kay,” she shouts, and rolls her eyes.
“Is it a fit?” Anne Forbes asks with a jittery laugh, stepping back.
“No, no,” Aunt Bea says, “she’s just a bit upset.” She starts to go over to Julie, but Terry stands up and begins making her way there, so Aunt Bea stays where she is.
Terry crosses to the door without a halt. Her fingers hit Julie’s shoulder, and Julie, who seemed to be ignoring her, now looks at her and says, softly for Julie, “Oh-kay, oh-kay.” She and Terry appear very engrossed, very dutiful as they clutch each other’s hands and proceed to swing them back and forth.
There is no convincing Julie that the specialist who visits twice a week to help Terry adjust—a black woman, no less—is not Terry’s mother. She also can’t seem to get it through her head that Terry no longer needs her to relate what’s going on in the parking lot and playground next door.
“Red car,” she says, and Terry glances out and says, “I know, I see it.” In fact, Terry, who is making what the specialist calls astounding progress, adds, “It’s a hatchback.”
“Hatchback! Hatchback!” Julie shouts, and continues shouting it and exposing her stomach and breasts until Terry bursts into tears.
“Julie feels abandoned,” Aunt Bea explains to the woman from the newspaper, who happens to witness one of Julie’s tantrums. “Of course,” she adds, “Terry is high-strung.”
“I can see that,” the woman says. But in her “Everyone’s Children” column, which advertises a different foster child each day, she decides that all she saw in terms of Terry’s character was a “quick-witted, independent charmer … a friendly and cheerful chatterbox.” After a morning of arguing with herself, Aunt Bea phones the columnist up and gives her a piece of her mind. “It’s only fair to paint the whole picture,” she says. “I mean, it’s not like there’s a money-back guarantee.”
“At this early stage,” the columnist says, “the strategy is to stir up interest.”
The interest of three couples is stirred up. For one reason or another, though, they all change their mind before even paying Terry a visit. Aunt Bea’s heart breaks over these near misses, and yet she also feels as if she’s been granted an eleventh-hour reprieve, and consequently she experiences attacks of guilt, such bitter attacks that she writes Ann Landers a letter signed “Possessive in Port Credit.” Since she asks for a confidential response she doesn’t really expect an answer—it was just a case of getting a load off of her chest. Just the same, she checks the newspaper every day, and a month later, lo and behold, there’s a two-sentence response for “Possessive in P.C.,” which Aunt Bea assumes must be her despite the fact that the message doesn’t really add up. “Get the egg off your face, yokel,” it says. “Do yourself a favour and seek counselling pronto.”
What Aunt Bea does instead—what she’s been doing all along—is get down on her knees and pray, three and four times a day, dimpling her forearms on the chenille coverlet she hasn’t washed since Norman died because she believes she can still detect his body odour in it. Also she gives herself a penance—grateful dedication to Julie. When Terry is glued to the television or leafing through the piles of magazines the specialist brings over, Aunt Bea and Julie go down to the swings. Aunt Bea has to laugh at the two of them flailing their legs like beetles on their backs, a pair of fatsos in danger of bringing the whole set crashing down onto their heads. After a few minutes, though, Julie squirms off her swing to give Aunt Bea a push. She’d rather push than be pushed, and Lord knows she’s as strong as an ox, and as dogged. If she could, she’d stand there pushing Aunt Bea all day. She pushes her so high that the chains buckle and Aunt Bea cries out.
It is always a surprise to Julie every time the specialist leaves without taking Terry with her. Then she remembers that there is a bad man over at Terry’s mother’s house, that’s why. He’s the same man who punched Julie’s mother and drowned the cat in the toilet.
“When the man goes to jail,” she assures Terry, “your mother will take you home.”
“I don’t have a mother!” Terry cries.
“When the man goes …,” Julie says, nodding. Her faith in this is invincible.
She waits for her own mother to show up. She rushes to answer the phone and the buzzer, often persuading herself that it is her mother in the lobby, so that when it’s only Anne Forbes, or the specialist, or somebody else, she is incredulous. She hurries over to the window, hoping to catch sight of her mother walking away. She thinks that what happened was her mother changed her mind. She throws herself into a fit. She swats at Aunt Bea. One day, while Aunt Bea is talking to someone out in the hall, she snatches Aunt Bea’s blue sweater from the back of her chair and drops it out the window. A minute later Terry emerges from the bathroom, leans out the window and cries, “There’s a little lake down there!”
“Lake! Lake!” Julie mocks her. It enrages her when Terry makes these errors. A sweater is not a lake! Terry’s mother will get mad! With her shirt up around her neck, Julie struts around the living room, enraged and growing brave. Before Aunt Bea manages to get away from her visitor, Julie has gone into the kitchen, taken a chopstick out of the cutlery drawer and stabbed it through a plastic placemat.
“No!” Terry screeches.
Julie holds the placemat up. “Oh-kay, oh-kay,” she says, disappointed. The hole is so small she can’t even poke her finger through.
Terry sees things that Aunt Bea has never seen before or has forgotten having seen. When the subway is leaving the station, Terry thinks it’s the platform not the subway that is moving. She sees the spokes of bicycle wheels rotating in the opposite direction than they actually are. She sees faces in the trunks of a tree. The bark of a tree she compares to the back of Aunt Bea’s hand. She says, “The sky comes right down to the ground”—they are standing on the shore of the lake at the time—and Aunt Bea thinks, It’s true, the sky isn’t up there at all. It is all around us. We are in the sky.
“You are the Lord’s little visionary,” she tells Terry.
Sometimes she is happy just to be alive and a witness. Sometimes she wants to run off with both girls to a desert island. “Why aren’t I adopted yet?” Terry occasionally asks, not so much wounded as puzzled. “It takes time” is Aunt Bea’s lame answer, but as the weeks pass and no more couples make inquiries, she begins to suppose that it really does take time. She begins to lose some of her awful anxiety and guilt.
The days settle around her, each blessed, hard-won day. She believes she is reaping the reward of prayer—she can sense the Lord in the apartment, keeping tabs on her blood pressure. She tugs down Julie’s shirt and slaps down Julie’s slapping hands and is no more upset than if she was hanging laundry on a windy day and the sheets were pelting her head. She remembers her own daughter’s tantrums at this age, her cruel tongue, and she tells Terry, “This is nothing. This won’t hurt you.”
One day, though, when Julie is stomping around the living room, the picture over the couch—an oil painting of two Scotty dogs exactly like Angus and Haggis, the litter-mates she and Norman used to have—comes crashing down, ripping away a chunk of plaster and missing Terry, who is looking at a magazine on the floor, by a fraction of an inch.
After the first seconds of silence following Terry’s scream, Aunt Bea turns to Julie and says, “Bad girl.” She is so angry that her jaw trembles.
Julie throws herself on the floor and begins to punch herself in the head.
“Bad,” Aunt Bea says. A sob leaps to her throat.
Terry is kneeling over the painting. It has landed face down and she seems to be trying to dig her fingers under the frame.
“Don’t do that!” Aunt Bea snaps.
“But where’s their backs!” Terry cries. “Where’s the back of them?”
Aunt Bea has no choice except to call Fred, the superintendent, to fix the plaster. She hates doing this because Fred always acts rudely interrupted and because the first time Terry saw him after the operation, she said, “I thought you would have hair.” But Fred says, “Christ, I guess I better take a look at it,” and arrives with powdered plaster, which he mixes in Aunt Bea’s cut-glass salad bowl. When he’s done he makes Aunt Bea come out of the bathroom so that he can hold the nail up before her eyes. “You mean to tell me you were using this?” he says.
Aunt Bea fails to understand.
“You can’t hang a picture that size with a half-inch nail. You got to use a screw. Drill a hole, stick in a wall plug.”
“Oh, I see.” Aunt Bea pats her heart. “Could you do that for me, Fred?” She doesn’t own a drill. She has palpitations and gas. She has just remembered that it’s her wedding anniversary. She can’t get Julie, who is still lying on the floor, grimacing wildly, to so much as glance at her.
“The plaster’s wet,” Fred says, as if she’s an idiot.
“When it’s dry then,” Aunt Bea says.
“I haven’t got all day,” he says. “I’ll do it now, a couple of inches over from where you had it. Doesn’t look like it was centred on the wall anyway.”
He comes back with a drill. Terry covers her ears when he turns it on, but Julie scrambles to her feet and stands right next to him, so close that he lifts his elbow and orders her to back up. A few seconds later he says, “Christ, now look what you made me do.” He’s drilled a hole too big for the plugs he has in his pocket.
He goes back down to the basement. Terry accompanies him to the elevator so that she can press the button. Aunt Bea goes into the bathroom to take more antacid.
Julie picks up the drill.
She doesn’t scream, she doesn’t make a peep. When Aunt Bea hears the whirring, all she thinks is, That was fast. She comes out of the bathroom just as Terry disappears into the living room.
Terry’s scream is as high and clean as a needle.
“Oh, dear,” Aunt Bea says, because she doesn’t know yet what she is seeing. Julie’s head jerks, as if she is sneezing. Red paint drips from her forehead. She holds the drill in both hands. Fred’s drill—that’s what’s upsetting to Aunt Bea. Fred’s paint.
Terry screams again. Right into Julie’s head the scream goes, right into the hole where Julie’s finger is going. Aunt Bea brings down the knick-knack holder on her way to the floor.
Everybody reassures Aunt Bea. The doctor pokes rods into a rubberized brain to demonstrate the harmless route the drill bit took and the dozen other harmless routes it might have taken. The child psychologist says that nothing short of boring the hole and sticking her finger in it was probably going to convince Julie there weren’t rocks in her head. The social worker says that Julie’s mother has been stunned into realizing that her parental responsibilities don’t end at a cell door. Another social worker, the one who takes Julie to the group home, says that Julie should have been living with mentally disabled children all along.
But Aunt Bea doesn’t let herself off the hook. When Terry leaves for school she starts remembering things that Julie said and did. Every gesture, every word seems to be a clue. Aunt Bea is appalled by the multitude of clues.
She is resigned to having Terry taken away from her as well. She is almost glad. Her daughter is right—she is too old for this, and it could have been a lot worse. When a social worker she doesn’t know phones to ask if she is interested in another girl, she suspects it’s a mixup and starts explaining who she is and what happened. But the social worker has heard all about it and blames Children’s Aid.
“This new girl is bright,” the social worker says. “The only thing is, she’s missing both arms just above the elbow. She’s in the process of being fitted with new artificial arms, though, and very sophisticated mechanical hands.”
At supper that night, Aunt Bea tells Terry. “We don’t have to have her,” she says. “I’m happy enough just with you.”
“I’d love to see a girl without arms!” Terry cries.
“If she lived here,” Aunt Bea says, “it would involve more than just seeing her arms.”
“Would her artificial arms come off?”
“I imagine so.” Aunt Bea strokes the purple side of Terry’s face. The birthmark is being “erased” in a month.
Terry takes Aunt Bea’s hand and lifts it up. “Show me your veins,” she says.
Aunt Bea holds her hand over her head for a minute, then puts it on the table. The blue rivulets emerge as if the hand is under an evil maiden-to-crone spell.
“Too bad I can’t go around with my hands up in the air all the time,” Aunt Bea says.
“You know what?” Terry cries. Her feverish, old-woman gaze still startles Aunt Bea a bit when it fixes on her.
“What?”
“Too bad you can’t go around with your whole body up in the air!”
The girl’s name is Angela; she is twelve years old. She is perky, pretty (long black hair, flirtatious brown eyes), and she performs a tap-dance routine to “Singin’ in the Rain,” which she has on a cassette tape.
Terry is enraptured. Aunt Bea is too, but not so much because of the dance—her daughter took tap-dancing lessons. What wins Aunt Bea’s heart is the sight of those two little winglike arms flapping at one of her artificial arms (she insists on putting them on her herself), flapping and failing to grasp it, flapping and failing, and at last lining it up, slipping the stump into the socket, and clicking it in.
If you enjoyed “Body and Soul” by Barbara Gowdy, look for the print and e-book versions of the entire short story collection We So Seldom Look on Love.
E-book: 9781443402484
Print: 9780006475231