We So Seldom Look on Love Read online

  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 t
hat 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.