Body and Soul: Short Story (3 page)

“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.”