Nevertheless, I did feel under siege. My daughter had been half blinded, my husband doubted my sanity, and my son was flouting his butter-greased penis in my face. Abetting the sensation of assault from all sides, Mary Woolford chose this of all times to make her first indignant visit to our house—and the last, come to think of it, since the next time we’d meet would be in court.
She was still whippet slim then, her dark hair jet to the roots so I’d never have known it was dyed; the way it was pinned up was a tad severe. Even to make this neighborly call she was dressed to the nines in a Chanel suit, a demure jeweled spray on her lapel twinkling with respectability. Who’d have guessed that a scant three years later she’d be shambling the Nyack Grand Union in a streaked outfit that needed pressing and vandalizing raw eggs in the child seat of another woman’s cart.
She introduced herself curtly, and, despite the chill, declined an invitation inside. “My daughter, Laura, is a lovely girl,” she said. “A mother would naturally think so, but I believe her attractiveness is also apparent to others. With two important exceptions: Laura herself, and that young man of yours.”
I wanted to reassure the woman that by and large, my surly son failed to see the attractiveness of anyone, but I sensed that we were still in the preamble. This sounds unkind considering that my son would, in just over a year, murder this woman’s daughter, but I’m afraid I took an immediate dislike to Mary Woolford. She moved jaggedly, her eyes shifting this way and that, as if roiling from some constant inner turmoil. Yet some people coddle their own afflictions the way others spoil small pedigreed dogs with cans of pâté. Mary struck me straight off as one of this sort, for whom my private shorthand was Looking for a Problem—rather a waste of detective powers I always thought, since in my experience most proper problems come looking for you.
“For the last year or so,” Mary continued, “Laura has suffered under the misapprehension that she is overweight. I’m sure you’ve read about the condition. She skips meals, she buries her breakfast in the trash, and lies about having eaten at a friend’s. Laxative abuse, diet pills—suffice it to say that it’s all very frightening. Last September she got so frail that she was hospitalized with an intravenous drip, which she would tear out if not watched round the clock. Are you getting the picture?”
I mumbled something feebly commiserating. I would normally lend a sympathetic ear to such stories, though just then I couldn’t help thinking that my daughter was in the hospital, too, and not—I was fiercely convinced—because she done anything stupid to herself. Besides, I’d heard too many Karen Carpenter tales at Gladstone PTA meetings, and they often took the form of boasts. The prestigious diagnosis of anorexia seemed much coveted not only by the students but by their mothers, who would compete over whose daughter ate less. No wonder the poor girls were a mess.
“We had been making progress,” Mary continued. “For the last few months she’s submitted to her modest portions at family meals, which she is compelled to attend. She’s finally gained a little weight back—as your son Kevin was
more than eager to point out
.”
I sighed. In comparison to our visitor, I must have looked haggard. What I wouldn’t have looked is surprised, and my failure to gasp oh-mygoodness-me-what-has-that-boy-done seemed to inflame her.
“Last night I caught my beautiful daughter vomiting her dinner! I got her to admit, too, that she’s been making herself upchuck for the last week.
Why?
One of the boys at school keeps telling her she’s
fat
! Barely 100 pounds and she’s tormented for being a ‘porker’! Now, it wasn’t easy to get his name out of her, and she begged me not to come here tonight. But I for one believe it’s time we parents start accepting responsibility for our children’s destructive behavior. My husband and I are doing everything we can to keep Laura from hurting herself. So you and your husband might please keep your son from hurting her, too!”
My head bobbed like one of those dogs in car windows. “Ho-ow?” I drawled. It’s possible she thought I was drunk.
“I don’t care how—!”
“Do you want us to
talk to him
?” I had to tighten the corners of my mouth to keep them from curling into an incredulous smirk all too reminiscent of Kevin himself.
“I should think so!”
“Tell him to be
sensitive to the feelings of others
and to
remember the Golden Rule
?” I was leaning on the door jamb with something close to a leer, and Mary stepped back in alarm. “Or maybe my husband could have a
man-toman chat
, and teach our son that a
real man
isn’t cruel and aggressive, but a
real man
is gentle and compassionate?”
I had to stop for a second to keep from laughing. I suddenly pictured you jaunting into the kitchen to report,
Well, honey, it was all a big misunderstanding! Kevin says that poor skin-and-bones Laura Woolford simply heard wrong! He didn’t call her “fat,” he called her “fab”! And he didn’t say she was a “porker”—he said she told a joke that was a “corker”!
A grin must have leaked out despite me, because Mary turned purple and exploded, “I cannot for the life of me understand why you seem to think this is funny!”
“Ms. Woolford, do you have any boys?”
“Laura is our only child,” she said reverently.
“Then I’ll refer you back to old schoolyard rhymes as to just what
little boys are made of.
I’d like to help you out, but practically? If Franklin and I say anything to Kevin, the consequences for your daughter at school will be even worse. Maybe it’s better you teach Laura—what do the kids say? To
suck it up
.”
I would pay for this bout of realism later, though I could hardly have known then that my hard-bitten counsel would be trotted out in Mary’s testimony at the civil trial two years hence—with a few acid embellishments for good measure.
“Well, thank you for nothing!”
Watching Mary harumph down the flagstones, I reflected on the fact that you, Kevin’s teachers, and now this Mary Woolford woman were regaling me that as a mother I must
accept responsibility.
Fair enough. But if I was so all-fired responsible, why did I still feel so helpless?
Celia came home at the beginning of March. Kevin had never been to visit her once; protective, I’d never encouraged him. You’d issued the odd invitation to come along, but backed off in deference to his trauma. He never even asked how she was doing, you know. Anyone listening in wouldn’t have thought he had a sister.
I had only made modest headway in accommodating myself to her new appearance. The burns spattered on her cheek and streaked across her temple, though starting to heal, were still crusty, and I begged her not to pick at them lest she make the scarring even worse. She was good about it, and I thought of Violetta. Hitherto out of touch with monocular fashions, I’d expected her eye patch to be black, and Shirley Temple flashbacks of
The Good Ship Lollipop
may have comforted me with anodyne visions of my little blond pirate. I think I’d have preferred a black one, too, so that I might have run out to buy her a three-cornered hat and made some pathetic attempt at turning this macabre nightmare into a fancy-dress game to distract her.
Instead, the flesh color of those stick-on 3M Opticlude patches turned the left-hand side of her face blank. Swelling on the left side obliterated any defining structures like her cheekbone. It was as if her face wasn’t quite three-dimensional anymore, but rather like a postcard, with a picture on one side and clean white paper on the other. I could catch a glimpse of her right-hand profile, and for a moment my cheerful moppet was unchanged; with a glimpse of the left, she was erased.
This now-you-see-me, now-you-don’t quality to her countenance gave expression to my painful new awareness that children were a perishable consumer good. Though I don’t think I had ever taken her for granted, once she came home I pretty much gave up on whatever effort I had ever made to disguise my preference for one child over the other. She could never bring herself to leave my side any longer, and I allowed her to shadow me softly around the house and join me on errands. I’m sure you were right that we shouldn’t have let her slip any further behind in school and that the sooner she got used to her disability in public the better, but I still took some time off from AWAP and kept her home for two more weeks. Meanwhile, she lost some of the skills she had mastered, for instance, tying her tennis shoes, and I’d have to go back to tying them for her and start the lesson from scratch.
I watched her around Kevin like a hawk. I admit that she did not act afraid of him. And he went right back to issuing her a plenitude of bored orders; ever since she’d gotten old enough to run and fetch, he’d treated her like a pet with a limited range of tricks. But even in response to some small, harmless request like to grab him a cracker or toss him the TV remote, I thought I now detected in his sister a momentary hesitation, a little freeze, like a hard swallow. And though she had once begged to carry his quiver and felt honored to help him prize his arrows from the target out back, the first time he casually suggested that she resume these duties, I put my foot down: I knew he was careful, but Celia had only one eye left and she was not to go near that archery range. I had expected Celia to whimper. She was always desperate to prove of use to him and had loved to watch her brother stand Hiawatha-tall and release those arrows unerringly into the bull’s-eye. Instead she shot me a glance that looked grateful, and her hairline glistened from a light sweat.
I was surprised when he invited her out to play Frisbee—play with his sister, now that was a first—and even a little impressed. So I told her it was all right so long as she wore her safety glasses; my relationship to her good eye now was hysterical. But when a few minutes later I looked out the window, he was
playing with
his sister only in the sense that one plays with the Frisbee itself. Celia’s depth perception was still very poor, and she kept grabbing for the Frisbee before it had reached her, missing, and then it would hit her in the chest. Very funny.
Of course, the hardest part at first was addressing that hole in Celia’s head, which had to be swabbed frequently with baby shampoo and a moistened Q-Tip. While Dr. Sahatjian assured us that the secretions would subside once the prosthesis was fitted and the healing complete, at first the cavity oozed that yellowish discharge continually, and sometimes in the morning I’d have to soak the area with a wet Kleenex because the lid would have crusted shut in her sleep. The lid itself sagged—
sulcus
, her oculist called it—and was also puffy, especially since it had been damaged by the acid and had been partially reconstructed with a small flap of skin from Celia’s inner thigh. (Apparently eyelid augmentation has developed into a fine art because of high demand in Japan for anglification of Occidental features, which in better days I’d have found a horrifying testimony to the powers of Western advertising.) The swelling and slight purpling made her look like one of those battered children in posters that encourage you to turn in your neighbors to the police. With one eyelid depressed and her other eye open, she seemed to be winking hugely, as if we shared a lurid secret.
I’d told Sahatjian that I wasn’t sure I could bring myself to clean that hollow daily; he assured me that I’d get used to it. He was right in the long run, but I fought a swell of nausea when I first lifted the lid myself with my thumb. If it wasn’t quite as harrowing as I’d feared, it was disturbing on a subtler level. No one was home. The effect recalled those almondeyed Modiglianis whose absence of pupils give the figures a hypnotic mildness and tranquillity, though a dolorousness as well, and a hint of stupidity. The cavity went from pink at the rim to a merciful black toward the back, but when I got her under the light to administer her antibiotic drops, I could see that incongruous plastic conformer, which kept the socket from collapsing; I might have been staring into a doll.
I know you resented my fawning over her so much, and that you felt bad for resenting it. In compensation, you were firmly affectionate with Celia, drawing her into your lap, reading her stories. Me, I recognized too well the mark of deliberateness about these efforts—so this was
trying to be a good father
—but I doubt that it looked to Kevin like anything other than surfaces would suggest. Clearly his little sister’s injury had won her only more doting—more
Do you need an extra blanket, honey?
more
Would you like another piece of cake?
more
Why don’t we let Celia stay up, Franklin, it’s an animal show
. Checking out the tableau in the living room as Celia fell asleep in the crook of your arm and Kevin glared at “My Granny Had My Boyfriend’s Baby” on Jerry Springer, I thought,
Didn’t our little stratagem backfire.
In case you’re wondering, I did not ply Celia unduly for details about that afternoon in the bathroom. I was every bit as shy of discussing the matter as she was; neither of us had any desire to relive that day. Yet out of a sense of parental obligation—I didn’t want her to think the subject taboo, in case its exploration would prove therapeutic—I did ask her just once, casually, “When you got hurt? What happened?”
“Kevin—.” She pawed at the lid with the back of her wrist; it itched, but lest she dislodge the conformer she had learned to always rub toward her nose. “I got something in my eye. Kevin helped me wash it out.”