The Jane Austen Book Club (6 page)

So Allegra told her:

1. There was a special class at my grammar school. A class for retarded children. Sometimes we saw them, but mostly they were kept away. They had a different recess, a different lunchtime. Maybe they only came for half the day.

One of these children was a boy named Billy. He carried a basketball wherever he went, and he sometimes talked to it.
Nonsense, gibberish. I used to think that he was only aping human conversation, that he didn't understand it involved actual words and people who talked back. He wore a hat, squashed down on his head, which made his ears stick out like Dopey in
Snow White.
His nose ran a lot. It made me unhappy to think about him, or about any of them. Mostly I didn't.

One day I saw him at the edge of the playground, where he wasn't supposed to be. I thought he'd get in trouble if anyone else saw him. The teacher for the special class always seemed to be shouting at someone. So I went up to him, congratulating myself the whole time on how caring I was, how I could talk to Billy just as if he were a real boy. But when I got close I saw he had his penis in his hand. He showed it to me, laid it flat along his palm for me to look at. It twitched there, like it was being poked with pins. I went back to my friends.

A few weeks later, there was a day when my father picked me up after class. He was distracted by something; I felt ignored. So I told him how there was this boy at school who'd made me look at his penis. An older boy. Daddy was more upset than I'd bargained for; right away I wished I'd kept my mouth shut. He demanded the boy's name, stopped to look the family up in the phone book at the drugstore, drove over to their house, banged on the front door. A woman came. She had braids like a child, but gray hair; it struck me as odd. She wore those winged glasses. Daddy started to talk and she started to cry. But angrily at first. “None of you give a damn about us,” she said. I wasn't used to people swearing, so I was shocked. And then she wasn't angry anymore; it was more like despair. “What do you expect me to do?”

“I expect you to talk to your boy—” Daddy was saying, when Billy appeared behind her, holding his stupid ball and muttering. Daddy stopped mid-sentence.

Daddy had a younger brother who was retarded. He died when he was fifteen, hit by a car. I've always been afraid that I wouldn't love a child unless it was beautiful. I've always been afraid to have children because of that. But Daddy says his mother loved her retarded child best. She always said that a mother's love goes where it's needed.

After his brother died, Daddy tried to get his mother to go out more. He and Mom tried to take Grandma to movies and concerts and plays. But she usually said no. He would drop by to see how she was doing, and she'd be sitting at the kitchen table, staring out the window. “I can't think of a blessed thing I want to do anymore,” she'd say.

So Billy was standing behind his mother, talking to his basketball with more and more agitation in his voice. Daddy was apologizing, but Billy's mom was having none of it. “What do you know?” she asked. “With your pretty little girl going off to college one day. Marrying. Having more pretty children for you.”

We got back in the car and drove home. Daddy said, “I wouldn't have added to that woman's troubles for anything in the world.” He said, “You must have known there was an important part of the story you were leaving out.” He said, “Why didn't you tell me? I would have handled things very differently.” “Go to your room,” he said. I hadn't known I could make him that angry. I was afraid he'd stopped loving me. He wouldn't take my hand. He wouldn't look at me.

I couldn't defend myself, even to myself. I tried. I thought about how I'd had no idea he would get so upset, no idea she would get so upset. I didn't know there would be tears. I wouldn't have said a word if I'd known. But why had I said a word? I'd just been idly angling for attention. I hadn't told
Daddy that Billy was retarded, because I knew I'd get more attention doing it the other way. I hadn't even minded when Billy showed me his penis. It seemed kind of friendly.

2. One time we went to a museum where there were paintings by van Gogh. I liked how thick they were. Daddy said that artists paint the way they actually see, or maybe he said something else, but I heard it that way. I thought about van Gogh looking out from his eyes at a world thick like that. I'd never wondered if I saw the world the way everyone else did or if I saw something better or wrong or different. How would you know? How would van Gogh say, Does everything look sort of thick to you? He wouldn't even think to say it.

The next day I lay out on the grass in our backyard and I looked straight into the sun, the way my mother had told me never to do because it would damage my eyes. I thought that I would grow up to be a famous artist and everything and everyone I saw, everything and everyone I painted, would be blinding to look at.

3. My parents believed children should have lots of free time. They believed in dreaming. I had piano lessons briefly, but they didn't take, and I didn't do after-school sports or anything until I was in high school. I read a lot and I made things. I looked for four-leaf clovers. I watched ant colonies. Ants have very little unscheduled time. Places to go, people to see. I adopted a particular nest, out by a stepping-stone in Mom's mission garden. I was very good to my ants at first. I brought them bits of cookies with sprinkles; I landscaped with shells and thought how
I'd
like to find a shell so big I could climb inside, go exploring.

I made tiny newspapers of ant events, stamp-sized papers at first, then a bit bigger, too big for ants, it distressed me, but I couldn't fit the stories otherwise and I wanted real stories, not just lines of something that looked like writing. Anyway, imagine how small an ant paper would really be. Even a stamp would have been like a basketball court.

I imagined political upheavals, plots and coups d'état, and I reported on them. I think I may have been reading a biography of Mary Queen of Scots at the time. Did you read those orange biographies as a child? The ones all about the childhoods of famous people, and the last chapter would be the accomplishments that made them famous? God, I loved those books. I remember Ben Franklin and Clara Barton and Will Rogers and Jim Thorpe and Amelia Earhart and Madame Curie, and one about the first white child born in the Roanoke colony—Virginia Dare?—but I guess that must have all been made up.

Anyway, there was this short news day for the ants. I'd run out of political plots, or I was bored with them. So I got a glass of water and I created a flood. The ants scrambled for safety, swimming for their lives. I was kind of ashamed, but it made good copy. I told myself I was bringing excitement into their usual humdrum. The next day, I dropped a rock on them. It was a meteorite from outer space. They gathered around it and ran up and over it; obviously they didn't know what to do. It prompted three letters to the editor. Eventually I torched them. I was always way too interested in matches. Things got a little out of hand and the fire spread from the anthill into the garden. Only a little, not as bad as that sounds. Diego came and stamped it out, and I remember crying and trying to get him to stop, because he was stepping on my ants.

But what a horrible, heartless queen I turned out to be. I will never seek the presidency.

4. There was this boy I fucked when I was twenty-two, just because he wanted it so much. He was a student from Galway, and we met in Rome and traveled together for three weeks. On our last night together, the night before I had to go home, we were in Prague. We went to dinner and then out to the bars, and I drank until I was wetly sentimental, and demanded an exchange of tokens. He gave me a photograph of him holding a cat. I forced my silver ring onto his finger. It caught at the knuckle, but I pushed it down.

He said how touched he was. He swore he'd never take it off, and then he tried to take it off and he couldn't. His finger began to swell and turn odd colors. We went to the restroom of the pub and tried to soap it loose, but it was too late, the finger far too swollen. We asked for butter and got it, but that didn't work either. His face was now turning an odd color as well, sort of a fishy white. You know how pale the Irish are; they never go outdoors there. We went back to the hostel and I tried to take his mind off it by fucking him, but this was only a temporary diversion. His finger was round as a sausage and he couldn't bend it anymore.

So we went looking for a taxi to take us to a hospital. By now it was about three in the morning; the streets were dark, cold, and silent. We walked several blocks, and he was actually starting to whine, like a dog. When we did finally find a ride, the driver spoke no English. I made siren sounds and pointed, again and again, to the finger. I pantomimed a stethoscope. When you picture this, you have to picture me very drunk. I don't know what the driver thought initially, but he did get it at last, and then the hospital turned out to be less
than a block away. He coasted forward and let us out. He was saying something as he drove off. We couldn't understand it, but we could guess.

The hospital was closed, but there was an intercom and we spoke on it to someone else who didn't speak English. He begged us to be intelligible and then gave up and buzzed us in. All the hallways were dark, and we walked down several until we saw some lights in a waiting room. I used to have dreams like that, dark hallways, echoing footsteps. Labyrinths that twisted and circled, with the directions printed on the walls in some alien alphabet. I mean I had the dreams before this happened, and I still have them sometimes: I'm lost in a foreign city; people talk, but I can't understand them.

So we followed the light and found a doctor, and he spoke English, which was a bit of luck, really. We explained about the ring and he stared at us. “You're in internal medicine,” he said. “I'm a heart surgeon.” I was prepared to go back to the hostel rather than put up with such embarrassment, but then it wasn't my finger. (Though it was my ring.) But Conor—that was his name—was not leaving.

“It hurts more than I can say,” he said. Which is sort of a koan, if you think about it. Anyway, I was thinking about it.

“You're drunk, yes?” the doctor asked. He took Conor away and removed the ring, screwing it off by force. Apparently this was astonishingly painful, but I slept through it in the waiting room.

Afterward I asked Conor where the ring was. He'd left it in the doctor's office. I pictured it lying in one of those blue kidney-shaped dishes. Conor said it had been badly dented in the removal, but I'd made it myself, so I was the tiniest bit hurt that he'd forgotten it. I would have gone back for it if the
doctor hadn't been so cross. “I wanted you to have it as a keepsake,” I told Conor.

“I guess I'll remember you, all right,” he said.

T
he phone rang in the kitchen and Allegra went to answer it. Daniel was on the other end. “How's your mom doing, sweet-pea?” he asked.

“
Bueno.
She's lovely. We're having a party. Ask her yourself,” Allegra said. She put the phone down and went back into the living room. “It's Dad,” she told Sylvia. “It's a guilt call.”

Sylvia went to the phone, carrying her wine. “Hello, Daniel.” She turned off the kitchen light and sat in the dark, her glass in one hand and the phone in the other. The rain was loud; one of the gutters on the roof emptied right outside the kitchen.

“She'll hardly speak to me,” he said.

Sylvia hoped she wasn't being asked to intercede. That would be too much. But she knew how Daniel loved Allegra; she couldn't help feeling sorry for him, order herself as she would to stop. The refrigerator gave one of its funny rattles; the familiarity, the hominess of the sound nearly undid her. She pressed her glass against her face. A moment passed before she could trust herself to speak. “Give her time.”

“I have someone coming on Saturday to look at the upstairs shower. You needn't be there, I'll come and deal with it. I'm just giving you fair warning. You and Allegra. In case you don't want to see me.”

“It's not your house anymore.”

“Yes, it is. I'm leaving the marriage, I'm not leaving you. As long as you're in the house, I'll take care of the house.”

“Fuck off,” said Sylvia.

There was a burst of laughter from the living room. “I'll let you get back to your guests,” Daniel said. “I'll be there between ten and twelve Saturday. Go to the farmer's market, buy those pistachios you like so much. You won't even know I've been by, except that the shower will be fixed.”

C
orinne joined a writing group that met once a week. She hoped it would function as a kind of deadline, forcing her to work. She did seem to be spending more time at the computer, and occasionally, Allegra heard the keys. Corinne's mood had improved, and she talked a lot at dinner now about point of view and pacing and deep structure. All very abstract.

The writing group met at a Quaker meeting hall, and initially there'd been some question, the Quakers being so kind as to allow the use of their space without remuneration, whether the group shouldn't honor Quaker principles in the work they brought there. Was it right to accept this gift and then share work with violent or unwholesome themes? The group decided, after much discussion, that a work might need to be violent in order to espouse nonviolence effectively. They were writers. They, of all people, must resist censorship in whatever guise. The Quakers would expect no less of them.