We So Seldom Look on Love Read online

  “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.

  Sylvie

  Although Sylvie draws a blank about what happened to her before her first day of school, her absolute recollection of certain moments after that day is a documented medical marvel. She doesn’t just remember verbatim conversations, she remembers how the air smelled and if there was a breeze. She remembers that while her mother waited for her father to answer, a train whistled far off and there were mice scratching in the walls. If there were three dead flies on the windowsill and she noticed them ten years ago, she notices them again in her memory. “It’s like dreaming when you know it’s a dream,” she tells the fat lady, Merry Mary. “You’ve got two lives going on at once.”

  “As if,” Merry Mary points out, “you don’t anyways.”

  Merry Mary is referring to the fact that Sylvie’s Siamese twin sister, Sue, is attached to her. Sue is nothing but a pair of legs, though. Perfect little legs with feet, knees, thighs, hips and a belly, the belly growing out of Sylvie’s own belly, just under her navel, and the feet hanging to a few inches below her own knees and facing away from her body, that is to say, facing in the same direction as her own feet. She has no more will over these little legs than she does over her ears, but she feels them, the cramps they occasionally get, the twitches, anything touching them. Off and on during the day she holds them by the feet and bends and stretches them, a habit drilled into her by her mother, who said that otherwise they would rot and fall off.

  The school nurse eventually told Sylvie that this wasn’t true. “No such luck,” was how the nurse put it, in spite of which she encouraged exercises to control the cramps. She also set Sylvie straight regarding her mother’s conviction that if she hadn’t been constipated throughout the pregnancy, there would have been enough room inside her for two babies to grow.

  “Malarkey,” the nurse said.

  “I thought so,” Sylvie murmured. But she went right on suffering survivor guilt.

  Sylvie never had reason to believe that her mother was upset about having a daughter with an extra pair of legs. The reason her mother sighed over everyone else’s good luck and made sarcastic remarks about their supposed problems was that she had a daughter who was nothing but legs. She knit blue-and-white or red-and-white striped stockings for Sue (Sylvie had to wear plain white) and bought her new shoes (Sylvie’s were secondhand, from the church bazaar). As if Sylvie weren’t there, as if she weren’t the one who felt what Sue felt, her mother squeezed Sue by her feet and massaged her calves and said, “How’s my baby? What kind of day did my sweet baby have?” By Sue’s round knees her mother said you could tell that she would have taken after her side of the family, the Scottish, blond, plump side.

  “These,” her mother said, knocking on Sylvie’s own bony knees, “are Portuguese.”

  Her mother’s obvious favouritism hurt Sylvie, but at the same time she felt sorry for her sister, and she appreciated her own good fortune in having an entire body, plus, at her sister’s expense, a second pair of legs, which, even if they didn’t work, no one else had. Given her mother’s behaviour, the last thing Sylvie suspected was that the legs were alarming. There was nobody to tell her. She was an only child, and her father, who worked long shifts in a light-bulb factory and was hardly ever at home, didn’t speak fluent enough English to say much. They lived at the end of a deeply rutted dirt road on a piece of poor land where German shepherds ran loose. Maybe Sylvie went to town a few times before starting school, she doesn’t remember. A year could go by without a visitor.

  The school inspector must have visited. They had no phone, so people had to come by in person to tell them anything. Her mother subsequently referred to the inspector as That Man, and when he died, a year later, she said that if they thought she was going to wax That Man’s coffin they had another think coming.

  Two days a week her mother cleaned at the funeral parlour for twenty dollars a month plus the wilted flower arrangements. On Sylvie’s first day of school the red ribbons holding her pigtails were cut from a Rest-in-Peace sash, as was the white trim that at the last moment her mother sewed along the hem of her skirt to make sure her little legs didn’t show.

  Her mother took her to school the first day, in the horse cart. Sometimes they owned a truck, but not that year. When the schoolhouse came into sight down the road, her mother said, “You keep Sue under your skirt. Don’t show her to anybody. Don’t exercise her until you’re back home.”

  Sylvie was standing in the cart to see over her mother’s shoulder. “Are they playing tag?” she asked rapturously as the children stopped playing and cried, “Here she is!” and “It’s her!” and ran out onto the road.

  “Sit down,” her mother said.

  The cart creaked and clacked up to the school. With a pang Sylvie noticed that all of the girls’ skirts were shorter than hers and that none of the girls had pigtails. Her mother drove about twenty yards past the children before stopping. “Go right inside,” she said. Her eyes were on a boy who was off by himself, smoking a cigarette.

  Sylvie picked up her lunch pail and climbed out. When she reached the children they parted to make a path. The look on some of the children’s faces made her instinctively shield the front of herself with her lunch pail, and yet she wasn’t connecting her little legs to those looks. Her mother’s warning to keep Sue under her skirt, she had taken to mean: don’t be immodest, don’t show off.

  She was now at the schoolhouse steps. Holding the lunch pail pressed against her little legs, she turned and waved to her mother. Her mother snapped the reins, a sound Sylvie heard in her left ear, while in her right ear she heard a voice pitched like her own—her first experience of another little girl speaking to her.

  “Can we see them?” the girl asked.

  “See what?” Sylvie said.

  “Your legs.”

  “My mother said I’m not allowed to.”

  “Is that where they are?” a second girl asked, pointing at where Sylvie held the lunch pail. This girl had mean eyes and long teeth.

  “I’m supposed to go right inside,” Sylvie murmured, and she started to walk around the children.

  Somebody tried to lift her skirt. When she swung around to see who, a hand darted in front of her, under her lunch pail, and smacked one of her little legs on the knee. “I felt them!” the mean-eyed girl screamed. A boy yanked Sylvie’s hair. She let go of her lunch pail, and immediately the front of her skirt was under attack. “Don’t!” she cried. Somebody pushed her, and she fell to the ground. Her skirt was pulled above her knees. Her arms were pinned, a hand clamped over her mouth. The hand smelled like tobacco. The children who could see gasped and fell silent. “I’m going to bring up,” a girl whispered, and Sylvie thought that it was because of her underpants showing, hers and Sue’s, but then a boy touched her little leg on the shin, a quick testing pressure with the ends of his fingers, and Sylvie got the picture—her little legs were white slugs when you turn over a rock.

  When everyone had taken a look, some of the older girls helped her up. They swiped dirt from her skirt, careful to avoid the front of her. They examined the cut on her arm. It didn’t need a bandage, they agreed. A girl who wore glasses picked up Sylvie’s lunch pail and praised the strawberries painted on it. “Don’t cry,” she said. “They just looked like normal legs to me.”

  “It’s your own fault,” the mean-eyed girl rasped in her ear. “You should have showed us when we asked nicely.”

  That was the best advice Sylvie ever got. From then on, if anyone asked to see her legs, nicely or not, she hiked up her skirt. Kids brought their older brothers and sisters and their parents to the school yard to see her. One boy brought a blind aunt who, after gripping each of Sue’s thighs, said, “Just as I thought. Fake. Plantation rubber.”

  It didn’t take long for Sylvie’s parents to find out what was going on. Sylvie’s compliance was the thing that her mother coul
dn’t get over. She called Sylvie a dirty dish rag. She said that a steady diet of scratches and pokes in the eye would have soon taught the children a lesson.

  “But if I don’t show them, they’ll scratch and poke me,” Sylvie said.

  “Then that is your lot!” her mother shouted. “That is your cross to bear! Think of what Sue has borne! Think of what I have borne!”

  At this point her father appeared from another room. “Why not she stay here?” he said.

  “What?” Her mother looked startled by this rare intervention.

  “You give her the lessons,” he said.

  “What?” her mother said louder.

  “Like before.” He shrugged.

  “What did I tell you?” her mother shouted at him. “What did That Man say? Truancy is against the law! Against the law! Do you want us all hauled off to the slammer?”

  At dismissal the next afternoon her mother showed up and laid into Sylvie’s teacher, Miss Moote, for not being on the ball. From then on, Miss Moote kept Sylvie inside at recess and waited with her outside the front doors until her mother arrived in the cart. Tuesdays and Fridays, the days her mother cleaned the funeral parlour, her father was supposed to come for her, but more often than not he got tied up at the factory, and finally Miss Moote would walk around the school and say timidly that all the children were long gone, she was sure it was all right for Sylvie to walk home.

  It was never all right. Boys ambushed her and poked and tickled her little legs to see them kick. One day the boy who chain-smoked stuck his finger up between both pairs of her legs, her little ones and then her own, and she had to race home to wash out the blood that dripped onto her underpants.

  She lay them in the warming oven to dry, but Sue’s pair, a higher-quality cotton than her own, were still damp when she heard her mother opening the front door. She had to put them on anyway (she and Sue owned only one pair each) and just hope that her mother wouldn’t notice.