Gladys
Gladys lay in bed contemplating the puzzle that was the English language. For example, why was tree such a short word? Mushy words like passion, fuzzy words like knowledge, rarely used words like parabola—they were all much longer than tree. Sun, she thought. Moon. Joy. Fear. Word itself! Could there be some strange, inverse ratio going on, so the more essential the word, the fewer letters it had?
This was the kind of thing Gladys loved to contemplate.
She fluffed her pillow and rolled onto her back, her preferred contemplating posture, as downstairs a baby began to wail. Two seconds later, another one joined in. Babies are empathetic creatures, Gladys’s mother said. They don’t know where they end and the rest of the world begins, so they feel the pain of others as if it’s their own. Mama, who ran an in-home daycare, was an expert on babies and young children.
“Gladys!” she called up the stairs now. “Can you come help?”
With a heavy sigh, Gladys rolled out of bed and pulled on a sundress printed with smiley suns. Though she was eleven, she was so small she wore clothes made for eight-year-olds. Long ago, before Mama and Dada adopted her, Gladys had “failed to thrive.” The doctors said she might still catch up. Gladys fervently hoped so.
She was dragging a brush through her recalcitrant hair when something drew her to the window. A woman she’d never seen before was walking her dog. Not walking. She was shambling. The barest possible energy that a living creature could expend, that was how she moved.
But the dog. It was adorable! Not that Gladys particularly liked dogs. When you were Gladys-sized, even a nice dog could knock you down with a whack of its tail or paws. And mean dogs? Well, did anyone like mean dogs? Besides, Dada was ultra-allergic to anything furry, and Gladys could never love anything that made her father sneeze and itch.
So why did this dog tug her heart? Medium-sized, shaggy, it had a head shaped like Mama’s garden trowel. Except for the milk-white stripe between its eyes, its fur was black with patches of gray and brown, as if it couldn’t decide what color to be. Its tail curled like a fishhook. It might have been a rock at the end of the leash, for all the attention that woman paid it. When she stopped to light a cigarette, the dog gazed over its shoulder mournfully, as if it had left something precious behind.
“Gladys!” Her mother’s voice rose above the din of baby wails. “I could really use some help here!”
Gladys called, “In a second!”
The dog heard. It lifted its head, its eyes making direct canine-to-human contact with Gladys, who leaned forward, flattening her nose against the screen.
But then the owner gave the leash such a hard yank, Gladys felt it in her own throat. Ow! The woman muttered something. Poochie? Did she call the dog Poochie? That was almost as bad as Gladys. With another cruel, heartless yank on the leash, she shambled onward.
“I’m coming!”
Was Gladys talking to her mother? Or to the dog? She didn’t know.
She watched till the crooked tail disappeared from view, then ran downstairs.
Where mayhem ruled. Cheerios were everywhere. You’d never guess how many Cheerios were in a single box till a toddler dumped them all out. Lily Harrison was using a naked Barbie doll’s feet to dig in the potted rubber plant, and Jackson Lamott was squealing because he’d gotten stuck under the sofa. Gladys pulled him out and dusted him off.
“What would I do without you, sugar?” Mama jiggled Mateo Brown on her hip. He grabbed the tip of her long red braid and sucked on it, but Mama was too harried to notice. “Angela called off.”
Gladys couldn’t believe it. Except she could, because this was the second time in a week that Mama’s so-called assistant had bailed at the last minute. “You should fire her.”
As if that would ever happen! Mama—or as everybody else called her, Ms. Suza—was all about helping people. Parents didn’t pay her on time, or picked their kids up two hours late, or persuaded her to babysit on weekends even though the daycare was closed, and Mama always cut them slack. Life was hard enough in this town, she said, especially since the auto plant across the river had “unallocated,” which was management’s cowardly way of saying “fired every last person’s butt.” Including Dada’s.
A saint, everyone said. That Ms. Suza is a saint.
Gladys used to love hearing that. She was proud of her mother and longed to be just like her.
Lately, though. Lately, she wasn’t so sure. Mama said if you looked for the good in others you’d be sure to find it, but Gladys couldn’t help noticing their faults. Angela, for example. She was a selfish excuse-maker who repeatedly took advantage of kindly Mama.
Had Gladys’s birth mother been a fault-finder, too? Was that where she got it from?
Questions like this were something else that was happening more often lately. They kept popping into her head. It wasn’t as if she wanted them to. It definitely wasn’t as if she knew the answers. But Gladys’s brain was made for questions. It wouldn’t stop asking them, even when she wished it would.
“Angela has enough trouble without losing her income,” Mama was saying. “She’s already living on the edge.”
Gladys sighed. She got the broom and began sweeping up Cheerios as Sophie Myers, a demon in the guise of a four-year-old, studied her.
“You got a pimple on your chin,” she informed Gladys.
“And your hair looks like you brushed it with an eggbeater.”
“My mother has hair in her armpits.” Sophie picked a Cheerio off the floor and ate it. “And other places, too.”
“That’s enough information, Sophie.”
It was going to be another hot day. Gladys herded the sprouts into the backyard, into the shade of the tree, and painted them all with sunblock. They hated this but they let her, holding out their arms like little scarecrows and squeezing their eyes shut while she did their faces. Moments like this, Gladys experienced complicated feelings toward them. Look how innocent they were. If a person they trusted told them to hold still while toxic slime was poured over their heads, they’d do it. Their helplessness made them lovable but also pitiful.
The shaggy dog trotted across her mind.