She finds them an insufficient compensation.
• • •
I am her most tangible artifact: as my father was the first to observe, I look like Felix Girard, the resemblance becoming more striking as I grow. But my mother does not caress me, nor does she seem to find, in me, any compensation at all.
Instead, she looks away.
I make her uncomfortable, the same way the ocean did, once.
She regards me, whenever possible, narrowly, from the corner of her eye.
It is getting so frightfully large, she says. I can’t lift it anymore, Leo, it hurts my back so!
I will lift her, my father says, grasping me by the armpits, hoisting me up and out of a box of my grandfather’s old books, which I have found, and opened, and climbed into, and rummaged through, and bent, and torn, and otherwise rearranged to suit myself.
It is hurting my Papa’s things! Why must it always hurt my Papa’s things, the beast!
She doesn’t mean to hurt them. She’s just a child.
How big it is! Look at its feet! So ungainly!
Meanwhile slipping into her own very delicate shoes.
Or:
It is like a giantess, she says, as she puts on her petite grey gloves, one slender finger at a time. I was never like that at her age. Will it ever stop growing, do you think?
• • •
It’s true: I am not like my mother, with her graceful, slender neck, lithe body, golden hair. Even at this early stage I am an ungainly, large-footed creature. I alarm myself as I outgrow, one after another, each of my childhood frocks. One day my blouse fits; the next day I thrust in my arm and burst a seam. I can’t fit my feet into my shoes, my neck into my lace collars, my rump into my pantaloons. My toes poke out through shoddily mended stockings. And I have, what’s more, a wild, curly mane of ginger hair that licks behind me like fire when I run. And I do run—as often as I can—on my long, sturdy, fast-growing legs: up and down and around those spiral stairs, from the kitchen to the parlor to the bedroom, from the bedroom to the parlor to the kitchen, and again, leaving in my wake butterflies off their pins, upended orchids, despoiled carpets, the terra-cotta heads of gods and goddesses rolling, wide eyed in surprise, all around the parlor floor.
Qu’est-ce qu’un sauvage! my mother cries. She has dropped her pearl earrings, a gift from Thomas Argument. They have fallen beneath the vanity in the bedroom; she cannot find them. She is on her hands and knees in her new yellow lace with her golden curls loose, unpinned. She is crying. And it is my fault—always my fault.
Go! Get away! Go bother your father for a change!
• • •
At least, that’s how I remember it. I don’t know if it’s true. Memories are tricky things.
• • •
She ought not be blamed. She is so unhappy.
• • •
Down there on the floor, looking for her earrings.
• • •
Later, though, she’ll go out again. That’s always the way. She’s gone out! She’s gone! She’s put on her gloves. She has taken her umbrella today, because today it is raining. She has put on her veil because today it is sunny. It is hot. It is cold. She has put on her boots, because there is snow. She is wearing her shawl. She’s forgotten her muff. Where is her hat? She’s gone. Again.
Where does she go, in the evenings, when she leaves us? The sound of her bootheels echoing on the cobblestones, echoing, relentlessly, til it dies away altogether, the sound along with her receding up the brow of Bridge Street.