apples are good,” I insist. “Unless you’d rather have bananas. Barbara brought a mess of bananas over this weekend, nice and firm. She brought enough of them for a hundred monkeys.” I say this, hoping to make her laugh.
She sweeps away. Long arms floating around. “This is stupid,” she snarls.
I suggest she and Zack and I sit out on the piazza, seeing that Zack has already disappeared around the corner there. “Ever played I-Spy-With-My-Little-Eye?” I ask Jane as I stand. “It’s a game we don’t need to set up.”
She follows behind me, her head hung to one side, miming a person who is weak with the agony of boredom.
I find my favorite wicker rocker and sink into it. It crackles all around me like a nest. Zack has taken an interest in the wooden trucks Gordon keeps around. A logging truck and a lumber truck and a box truck that holds two wooden oxen. All Settlement-made.
Jane stands near my chair. I am on her right, but she whispers as if to a person standing to her left, “I am starved.” A whisper filled with sorrow, on the edge of tears.
I will not ask DIDN’T YOU HAVE ANY BREAKFAST? I will not ask it. I know about the food problem they are having with Jane. I know breakfast this morning was probably offered twenty ways, all ways refused. Bev is always saying, “Poor tyke, it’s the only way she can take control over her life right now with this terrible thing that has happened to her and her mother, this Dracula-like bloodsucking evil thing, this separation of the living from the living. Two living deaths, mother and child.”
But Gordon tells us that Jane’s grandpa, Pete, “says the food thing isn’t new. The FOOD THING is as old as Jane is. Pete says Jane has controlled the tides and the rise of the moon and stars since her birth. Her first howl brought everyone to their knees. She was born with an IRON WILL. Jane WANTS. Jane GETS.”
I’ve never met Pete. But I believe him.
I look into Jane’s eyes now. I feel fear. I know she will grow up. She will probably grow up here at the Settlement. She will share in all of our lives. In my life. We will love her. But now as I look away from her powerful, unflinching, boiling, dark eyes, I feel afraid.
And now her voice, “Why do you do that stupid thing with your hair?”
“What do you mean?” Actually, my hair is fixed a little like hers. I have it up in a squeegee, a red squeegee. And my hair tumbles thickly over the back of my head and some loose squiggles on the sides. This is what my brother Dale calls “Cavewoman Hair.” Mine isn’t ringlets like Jane’s. Mine is just wavy, thick, and ripply and a little bit stringy at times. For some time now, I’ve kept it streaked blond through the dark, dark being my natural color. Yeah, the blond is actually kinda orange. Some like it. Some don’t. It’s me. It feels right. I have my contact lenses in today, so I’m the best I can look. I’m no Meryl Streep or Michelle Pfeiffer, but I’m not ugly. The five fake teeth I have on the bottom don’t really show. And I’ve learned to take good care of the teeth I have left.
Zack’s father, my present husband, Gordon, yes the Gordon, he will hold my face with both hands and whisper stuff that makes me embarrassed . . . stuff kinda like poetry . . . only he makes it up. And his kisses and sex are urgent and deep. VERY DEEP.
So why is it that now that I look into Jane’s eyes and see her revulsion at me that I BELIEVE she is right?
She won’t sit down. She crosses her arms like a floor manager or a teacher in a classroom and she smiles and shakes her head. “And you ought to do something with your face,” she says. “An operation. You ever hear of those operations?” And now her voice seems so sincere and truly helpful. “My mum says some people get to be really oldish but you can’t tell because they get the doctor to stretch right here.” She steps over to me and places the tips of her fingers on my jaws. Her fingers are warm and firm and instructive.
“Jane, I’m only twenty-seven years old!”
She jerks her hands back, folds her arms again, but with one hand free to gracefully gesture, “I know you aren’t that old. But the wrong shape.”
I sigh.
“You can get a whole new face and ribs removed,” she adds.
I laugh. “That’s showbiz people.”
She looks at me pityingly. Then an endearing warm expression, a motherly expression. Now she flutters her eyes and she flutters the fingers of her gesturing hand. “You know, I’m just trying to help you find guys.”
“I have a husband. A gorgeous husband.” I take a deep breath. I realize with horror that Zack is too quiet. But there he is, arranging some dirty coffee mugs in his logging truck. One actually has some coffee in it. Zack is meticulous and adept. His thick chestnutty hair in the silvery dappled light is one of the triumphs of my life. I ask Jane, “So have you ever played I-Spy-With-My-Little-Eye? It’s fun.”
She looks interested. She stands one foot on top of the other and stumbles a little, like a regular six- or seven-year-old getting the squirmies.
“What we do is this. One of us picks out an object, but without the other knowing what it is. Keep it a secret. The other person has—”
“I’m bored,” she says, laughing gently, as if to try to soften her words. As if she means no harm. She is just stating a fact. Like the fact that when it rains, you must pick up your picnic.
After lunch, Jane isn’t interested in a nap. And I gotta admit, I am bored now. While Zack naps on a pillow-covered porch swing, I doze off on the soft old mildewy sofa with the black cat curled on my ankles. I wake with a start and realize a good hour must’ve passed. And there is Jane standing there, arms folded, now wearing her sunglasses, which have white frames shaped like two hearts. She is staring at me. She had been watching me sleep. Seems I am more interesting asleep than awake.
I smile at her. And rub my eyes.
She doesn’t move. Neither her face nor her body moves. She just keeps standing mannequin-still and staring at me with those adorable (I must admit) funny white-framed glasses, as if through them she can see all my secret sins, my rages, my murderous side.
I smile again and get up.
She uses one finger to give her special glasses a micro adjustment.
Thirty-one cents an hour. What is the expression on his face as the warmly-dickered new figure of thirteen cents an hour appears so crisply in his mind? This, the special-deal-to-America minimum wage in the People’s Republic of China coming closer each day, negotiations rat-tat-tat in his night dreams in accents of Chinese businessmen.
Look into Bruce Hummer’s eyes if you are standing nearby. What do you see? Cauldrons of greed? Ice and stone? Fact is, they are a warm golden-green brown.
The
