Cursed Be the Child (5 page)

But Missy’s bedroom was freezing, and, as usual, Missy had waged her nightly war with the covers. They lay in a heap at the side of the bed, Winnie-the-Pooh face down on top.

Vicki went to set things right.

“Mom?”

The stuffed bear fell from Vicki’s hand. Then she smiled as a giggling Missy popped up like a jack-in-the-box and swung around to dangle her bare legs off the bed. Missy hated pajamas and insisted on sleeping in her underwear. A thin child and pale—she never tanned—she seemed almost ethereal, as though with blonde hair cascading down her back, she had just slid down a moonbeam from a fairy tale land to the Earth.

Vicki said, “And why are you awake?”

“’Cause I’m not asleep.”

“Hmm, that makes sense.”

Vicki sat down beside her, slipping an arm around her narrow shoulders. “Aren’t you chilly, honey?” Even as she said it, Vicki realized the room was not cold anymore. Then she thought she understood. She had been awakened from sleep by the call for “Mama” she thought she’d heard, and so it took awhile for your circulation to get going, for your internal thermostat to adjust.

“I’m not chilly,” Missy said. “I’m horny.”

The word jolted Vicki. Oh, it wasn’t as bad as the Ugly Awful “F” word that Missy, with her first grade reading skills, had learned from a public washroom wall a year ago, but it wasn’t anything Vicki wanted her daughter saying.

Quietly, Vicki asked, “Do you know what that means?”

“What? Horny?” Missy tapped herself on the forehead. “Like I have a horn or something, I guess.”

“Wrong.”

“I don’t know. This kid was yelling it in the playground today. He’s a big, fat slob. He’s in fourth grade.”

“I see.”

Missy said, “So what does horny mean, Mom?”

Every book Vicki had ever read on how to raise happy, normal, gifted, intelligent, sensitive, well-adjusted, non-homicidal-suicidal children offered virtually the same advice about these situations-tell the truth. Then in terms the child could understand, you explained that certain words were considered vulgar by many people and why they were not to be used.

Vicki, however, had her own way of dealing with this, one with which she was much more comfortable. “Never mind what it means. It’s a dirty word. Don’t use it.”

“Why?”

“Because I said so.”

“You never explain anything to me.”

“Check back with me in twenty years. I’ll explain then.”

“That’s a long time.”

“Okay, forty years.”

“Mom!” Missy squeaked in outrage.

Vicki said, “How about I tuck you in and you go on back to sleep?”

“Uh-uh,” Missy said. “I’m really a whole lot awake.” She tugged at Vicki’s sleeve. “Mom, you want to hear a joke?”

Vicki was used to a seven year old’s way of changing the subject. In a three-minute conversation, Missy was likely to cover a half a dozen subjects.

“Is it a good joke?”

“Awesome,” Missy said. “What’s green and throws rocks?”

“A green rock-thrower?”

“No. Give up?”

“Sure do.”

“A lawn. I lied about the rocks.”

“That’s some joke, all right,” Vicki said. “That’s a fine note of comedy for you to go to sleep on.”

“Hey, I learned a new song. Want to hear it?”

“They taught you a new song at school?”

“No. Not at school. Listen!”

Missy followed an elastically flexible melody set to no fixed rhythm. Her voice was as thin as she was but oddly plaintive.

The song of a lost child, Vicki found herself thinking, and wondered why she thought that.

There was a little bird

An itty-bitty bird,

And his name was Enza!

I opened up a window,

And in he flew!

In! Flew! Enza!

Vicki lightly applauded. “That’s some song, Missy. They don’t write them like that anymore.”

“Did you like it?”

“Sure did.”

“Want me to sing it again?”

“Sing it in your dreams,” Vicki said. “Time to take the trail to sleepy town.” She rose.

“Aw, Mom!” Missy whined. “I want to stay up!”

“I guess you are chilly after all,” Vicki said. “Your behind must be, anyway, because you’re acting like you want me to warm it for you.”

Missy sniffed indignantly. “I get it!” She stretched herself out on her back and lay as rigid as a plank.

In a moment, Vicki had both Missy and Pooh under the covers.

“You are very mean to me,” Missy said.

“I try. Kiss?”

Missy took a second to ponder the question of a kiss for a very mean mother. “I guess.”

Vicki kissed the child’s warm cheek. The brush of lips she received in return was perfunctory, but was followed a moment later by, “I love you anyhow.”

“I love you too, Missy,” Vicki said. “Sleep well.”

She stood watching her daughter as Missy, eyes closed, rolled on her side and curled up, and then she started toward the door. A gleam of light winked up from the floor, slipping just inside the peripheral boundary of her vision.

It lay on the carpet, Mickey Mouse’s nightlight nose pointing at it.

A rose, she thought, picking it up. The round glass paperweight rested on the flattened base of her palm.

She had never seen the paperweight before and wondered where Missy had gotten it. She couldn’t ask. The little girl who’d been “a whole lot awake” was already sound asleep. Perhaps this was a keepsake overlooked by the house’s previous owners when they were packing.

Whatever, Vicki Barringer did not like the paperweight. That was a feeling she had, not a thought. Sealed in the glass globe, the flower seemed a mockery of what was once alive, as insulting to life as a corpse too perfectly made up by a zealously artistic mortician.

She put the paperweight on Missy’s table. In the master bedroom, Vicki went back to People magazine but soon discovered she was reading words without comprehending.

Somehow her feeling of optimism, of the future’s glowing promise, was gone. Her mind was strangely burdened by ponderous thoughts of life and death.

And a rose.

— | — | —

Three

Look at it! He cranked page 68 out of the typewriter, the wrap-up of the dentist office scene, and read it aloud, in a low, flat voice, trying to keep his tone objective:

Mitchell’s eyes crossed as the needle

approached, and he braced himself for

the pain. But it wasn’t so bad, not so bad

that he couldn’t bear it.

And it came to him then in a moment of

drifting lucidity brought on by the oceanic

rushing of the nitrous oxide he’d been

inhaling that his entire life had been the

lengthy learning of pain acceptance, that

he could now withstand any pain, bear up

and get on, continue with a brute perseverance to live.

Yes, that was writing! That was solid. That was revelation and insight captured in words, and he, by God, he Warren Barringer, author, had written those words.

Not that it had been easy. Writing was never easy. It was racking your brain to find the right word, then struggling to find the right word to follow it, then hammering your mind still more to find the next right word—and the next and the next and the next.

Damn, he was writing well, better than he had ever written.

The house!

The thought came to him with stunning ice-blue clarity. Tense with concentration, he’d been hunched forward at the edge of his chair but now he slouched.

The house itself was helping him. It was the source of this new self-confidence, the feeling of inevitable achievement and accomplishment.

The house was right for him. Here he would become all he wanted to be, all he was meant to be. The house was imbued with a spirit that had summoned him here to his rightful place, as the sea had once beckoned Herman Melville.

Warren smiled to himself. He was being quite ridiculous and grandiose. A house was a house was a house.

Except the typewriter on his cluttered desk was not a typewriter; it was
his
typewriter. The green portable manual, an Underwood circa 1959, noisy as hell, was the typewriter he’d used to write the very first short stories, years ago, the machine which had produced his two novels,
Fishing With Live Bait
and
The Endurance of Lynn Tomer.
Certainly he could have afforded a new electronic typewriter or, the way prices were dropping every month, even a word processing computer, but he felt emotionally and spiritually linked to the Underwood. Call it superstition, but Warren Barringer considered it gut-level intuition.

And he trusted his intuition because he was a writer!

A writer, by Christ!

A Civilized Man
was going to be a masterpiece.

And if not? If the book goes nowhere, if things go bad, if things go so bad, if life goes bad, there’s the downturn, the down spiral, the down and down and going down, because, it can happen,
amigo
, it can happen, Jack, one day sailing along smooth, and then,
Titanic
…

Warren Barringer was prepared for the future.

He pushed back the chair and opened the right hand desk drawer.

He didn’t take out the gun, a loaded .25 caliber automatic. He just wanted to make sure it was there.

The gun was his secret, unregistered, bought from a lowlife he’d met in a lowlife bar during one of his lowlife bad spells. If he were forced to, if choice no longer existed for him, then he had the gun to put a final exclamation point to an intolerable life.

But hell, he had no reason to think this way, not now, not when
A Civilized Man
was shaping up so beautifully.

Warren slammed the drawer.

He checked his watch and was surprised to see that it was 11:45. When the writing was going well, he lost all track of time. He’d done enough for tonight. It was wrong to push it.