Body and Soul: Short Story

by Barbara Gowdy

  She also takes it for granted that people will want to adopt her, now that she’s “normal.” Aunt Bea is wounded by the eagerness in her voice. In a cautiously optimistic tone she says, “They probably will.” Aunt Bea realizes, of course, that more couples will be interested, but there are still the adjustment problems that the doctor mentioned. And there’s the birthmark, not just the first, startling sight of it, but having to deal with the laser-beam operation and its aftermath—expensive lotions or infections or whatever. In Aunt Bea’s experience, there’s always something. She can’t help feeling the faintest breath of relief when she takes into account the birthmark. She hugs Julie and says, “Don’t you worry. Penny will be back home before you know it.”

  Julie says, “Can Penny see yet?”

  She asks every ten minutes. She is also suddenly obsessed by Terry’s mother. Whenever they pass a woman in the hall of their apartment building—even a woman she knows—she asks, “Is that Penny’s mother?”

  “How many times have I told you?” Aunt Bea says, and this becomes another worry, not Julie’s questions (who can hope to fathom what goes on in that child’s damaged head?) but her own impatience with them. To strengthen herself she sings “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” One night she falls into such a swamp of pity over Julie’s childhood that she gets out of bed and sews her a dress out of the green velvet and white silk she’d intended to make Terry a dress out of. But when she presents the dress to Julie the next morning, Julie plants her fists on her hips and says, “Throw it in the garbage.” So Aunt Bea cuts the threads and turns the dress into Terry’s after all. She takes it to the hospital, her intention all along being that when the bandage is removed Terry should see the colour she has decided will be her favourite.

  The doctor leads Terry to a chair and asks her to sit. Aunt Bea sits at the edge of the sofa.

  “I just hope the blinds are closed,” Terry says.

  “They are.” The doctor laughs.

  “She doesn’t miss a trick, that one,” Aunt Bea says, leaning forward to smooth Terry’s dress. She regrets the white sash and trim—she thinks they give the impression that she had bandages on the brain. She startles herself by letting out an explosive sob.

  “It’s so gloomy in here,” the nurse says sympathetically.

  “Are you crying?” Terry asks. “What are you crying for?”

  Aunt Bea extracts a wad of Kleenex from the sleeve of her sweater. “I always cry at miracles,” she says. She squeezes Terry’s bony knee. Terry is so keyed up that her legs are sticking straight out like a doll’s. She tucks them in fast, however, when the doctor asks if she’s all set. He moves a stool in front of her, sits, then signals to the nurse, who turns a dial on the wall.

  The room darkens. Everything white seems to leap out—his gown, the silk, the bandage, the moons of his fingers touching the bandage. Aunt Bea looks at the moons in her own fingers, at the Kleenex. She glances up at the light, wondering if it has a special bulb. On the far wall are staves of light from the gaps between the venetian blinds.

  “Oh,” Terry says.

  The bandage is off.

  The whites of her eyes are so white.

  “Do your eyes hurt?” the doctor asks.

  Terry blinks. “No,” she whispers. The doctor waits a moment, then raises his hand a fraction and the nurse turns the dial.

  “Angels,” Terry says. All she can see are dazzling slashes and spots.

  Aunt Bea is overcome. “Oh, dear Lord,” she sobs.

  “That is light,” the doctor says.

  “I know,” Terry agrees. Now the slashes and spots aren’t so brilliant, and she is beginning to make out shapes filled in with what she realizes must be colour. Between the coloured shapes there is black.

  “What else do you see?” the doctor asks.

  “You,” she whispers, but it is an assumption.

  “What did she say?” Aunt Bea asks, wiping her fogged-up glasses.

  “She sees me.”

  “I see you,” Terry says, and now she does. That is his face. It grows, it comes closer. He is staring into one of her eyes and then the other. He is pulling down on her bottom lids. She stares back at his eyes. “An eye is greasy,” she says.

  When he moves his hand away, she looks down at her dress, then over at Aunt Bea, who isn’t green. More startling than that, Aunt Bea’s face is different from the doctor’s. Men must have different faces from women, she thinks, but when she looks at the nurse, her face is different, too. The nurse is very tiny, only an inch high. Terry looks back at Aunt Bea and considers the gleaming lines between her eyes and her mouth. “I see your tears,” she says.

  “Oh, honey,” Aunt Bea says.

  Terry extends her hand, and though it seems to touch Aunt Bea, it doesn’t. She waves it, and it brushes the doctor’s face. “But—” she says, confused.

  “That’s what I was telling you about,” the doctor says to Aunt Bea. “It’s going to take her a while to judge distances.” He turns to the nurse. “Let’s open the blinds.”

  The nurse goes over to the window. Terry watches her. She expands as she approaches Terry, shrinks as she moves to the other side of the room. This is no surprise—Terry has always figured that certain people are big close up and little far away. But she had no idea that you could see behind you, that what was behind you remained visible. She twists back and forth to try to catch the space behind her in blackness.

  “Stand up, why don’t you,” the doctor says.

  Terry comes to her feet and faces the window.

  “That’s sky and clouds at the top part,” the doctor says. “Blue sky, white clouds, and trees underneath, the green leaves of trees. These windows are tinted, so it’s all a bit darker than it is really.”

  Terry takes a step. She stops, certain that she has reached the window. She holds out her hand, and Aunt Bea jumps up and grabs it. “Oh, honey,” she says. It’s all she can say.

  “No,” Terry says sharply, shaking Aunt Bea away. She feels better with her hand out in front of her. She takes two more steps, but she is still not at the window. Two more steps, two more. The nurse moves aside. Two more steps, and Terry’s fingers hit the glass.

  It is her hand that arrests her, pressed flat against the pane. “What are those cracks?” she says, referring to the wrinkles on her knuckles.

  Aunt Bea is beside her. She scans the view outside. “On the building?” she asks, wondering if Terry means the lines between the bricks. “Over there?”

  “No!” Terry slaps the window. She is suddenly panicky. “Where is Julie?” she says.

  “At school,” Aunt Bea says, putting an arm around her. “You know that, honey. You’ll see her at home.”

  “Where’s my face?” Terry says, and starts to cry.

  “Okay,” the doctor says. “It’s a little overwhelming, isn’t it, Terry?” He tells her to sit down and close her eyes. Whenever she is overwhelmed, he says, she should close her eyes for a few moments.

  Terry targets the couch. She waves her hands to keep Aunt Bea from helping. She has the impression that she is walking into a picture of flat shapes and that the heat she senses radiating from Aunt Bea’s body is what’s causing the shapes to gradually melt from view.

  Terry’s hand is on her reflection in the bathroom mirror.

  “That’s coming off, remember,” Aunt Bea says. “It’ll be the same colour as the rest of your skin.”

  Terry’s hand moves from the mirror to the fair side of her face. With the tips of her fingers she dabs herself, making what strike Aunt Bea as oddly haphazard leaps from cheekbone to jawbone to eyebrow, nose, mouth and then to the other side of her face—her cheek—where she halts for a moment.

  She begins to smooth the skin there—she is testing if the birthmark wipes off. “You know what?” she says.

  “What?”

  “I love purple,” she says wistfully.

  “So do I!” Aunt Bea exclaims.

  “But I thought purple woul
d be green,” Terry says. She turns her head as if her eyes were in danger of falling out. Her eyes look completely different since the operation. They seem smaller … and older—they have the vague intensity that reminds Aunt Bea of old people listening to something difficult and new.

  “Would you like to see more purple?” Aunt Bea asks.

  Terry’s eyes fix on Aunt Bea’s left hand. “Do you know what?” she says. “I thought veins would be red.”

  On the bus ride home, behind oversized sunglasses to eliminate glare, Terry had studied the veins in Aunt Bea’s hands. Every few minutes she carefully lifted her head to look at the other passengers and at the ads above the windows, but she didn’t look out the windows, although once or twice she caught sight of her dim reflection, she recognized the movement of her own head, and the first time this happened she said, alarmed, “That’s a mirror!”

  Between these investigations, she had returned to her real interest—examining the back of Aunt Bea’s hand. As they were walking from the bus Aunt Bea showed her how when she held her hand up for a few moments all the veins disappeared, then when she brought it back down they re-emerged and made it seem as if she were ageing fifty years in five seconds. Terry loved that. “Again,” she said. “Again.”

  As soon as they entered the apartment, however, she impatiently pushed away Aunt Bea’s hand, looked down the hall and said, “The mirror over the sink, that’s a real one, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Aunt Bea said warily. In the hospital, despite asking where her face was, Terry had closed her eyes every time the doctor had tried to get her to look in a mirror. “Yes,” Aunt Bea said, “that’s a real mirror.”

  “Will you hold these?” Terry asked, taking off her sunglasses. Then she made her way down to the bathroom.

  Now she comes out into the hall, stops and shuts her eyes. This is how she walks—stopping every five or six steps to close her eyes and assume an expression of beseeching concentration. Aunt Bea tries to get her to put the sunglasses back on, but she says they should turn off the lights. Everywhere she sees lights. In the benjamina plant, in Aunt Bea’s hair, strips of light on a vase, squares and spills of light that take Aunt Bea a moment and some wilful hallucinating to discern.

  Terry switches on the television. There is a face not unlike the doctor’s. It upsets her when Aunt Bea says it’s not him. Every time the picture changes she cries, “What’s that?” although she usually figures it out before Aunt Bea answers. After about a quarter of an hour she switches the tv off, saying, “It’s too crowded.” She wants to see Julie, who is being walked home from school by a neighbour.

  “She’ll be home at four o’clock,” Aunt Bea says.

  So she wants to see the kitchen clock. Aunt Bea removes it from the wall and lets her hold it. “But where’s the time?” she cries, distressed.

  It’s the same with the Bible. “But I can’t see what it says,” she cries. They are sitting on Aunt Bea’s bed, the Bible opened on Terry’s lap to a page of all-red words, which is Jesus speaking.

  Aunt Bea says, “Of course you can’t, honey.”

  Terry closes the Bible. With an air of respectful but absolute dismissal she sets it on the bedside table. She looks down at Aunt Bea’s hands. “Show me your veins,” she says.

  They are still in the bedroom when the apartment door opens. “In here!” Aunt Bea calls, and suddenly Julie is standing in the doorway, with Anne Forbes, from down the hall, behind her.

  “Hi!” Terry says in a dreamlike voice. She knows which one is Julie, and Julie so rivets her that Anne Forbes, a tall, horse-faced woman wearing gold hoop earrings and two green combs in her red hair, is nothing but an unfocused mass of colours.

  “Can Penny see yet?” Julie asks.

  “I see you,” Terry says. “You have blue on.”

  “Well,” Julie sighs. She glances back at Anne Forbes. “Your mother is here.”

  “Oh, my goodness!” Anne Forbes trills.

  “That’s Mrs. Forbes,” Terry says. She recognizes the voice.

  “Oh-kay, oh-kay,” Julie says loudly.

  “For heaven’s sakes, Julie, you know that’s Mrs. Forbes.” Clutching the edge of the dresser, Aunt Bea pulls herself to her feet.

  Julie throws her head back so that she is gaping into Anne Forbes’s face. “Oh-kay, oh-kay,” she shouts, and rolls her eyes.

  “Is it a fit?” Anne Forbes asks with a jittery laugh, stepping back.

  “No, no,” Aunt Bea says, “she’s just a bit upset.” She starts to go over to Julie, but Terry stands up and begins making her way there, so Aunt Bea stays where she is.

  Terry crosses to the door without a halt. Her fingers hit Julie’s shoulder, and Julie, who seemed to be ignoring her, now looks at her and says, softly for Julie, “Oh-kay, oh-kay.” She and Terry appear very engrossed, very dutiful as they clutch each other’s hands and proceed to swing them back and forth.

  There is no convincing Julie that the specialist who visits twice a week to help Terry adjust—a black woman, no less—is not Terry’s mother. She also can’t seem to get it through her head that Terry no longer needs her to relate what’s going on in the parking lot and playground next door.

  “Red car,” she says, and Terry glances out and says, “I know, I see it.” In fact, Terry, who is making what the specialist calls astounding progress, adds, “It’s a hatchback.”

  “Hatchback! Hatchback!” Julie shouts, and continues shouting it and exposing her stomach and breasts until Terry bursts into tears.

  “Julie feels abandoned,” Aunt Bea explains to the woman from the newspaper, who happens to witness one of Julie’s tantrums. “Of course,” she adds, “Terry is high-strung.”

  “I can see that,” the woman says. But in her “Everyone’s Children” column, which advertises a different foster child each day, she decides that all she saw in terms of Terry’s character was a “quick-witted, independent charmer … a friendly and cheerful chatterbox.” After a morning of arguing with herself, Aunt Bea phones the columnist up and gives her a piece of her mind. “It’s only fair to paint the whole picture,” she says. “I mean, it’s not like there’s a money-back guarantee.”

  “At this early stage,” the columnist says, “the strategy is to stir up interest.”

  The interest of three couples is stirred up. For one reason or another, though, they all change their mind before even paying Terry a visit. Aunt Bea’s heart breaks over these near misses, and yet she also feels as if she’s been granted an eleventh-hour reprieve, and consequently she experiences attacks of guilt, such bitter attacks that she writes Ann Landers a letter signed “Possessive in Port Credit.” Since she asks for a confidential response she doesn’t really expect an answer—it was just a case of getting a load off of her chest. Just the same, she checks the newspaper every day, and a month later, lo and behold, there’s a two-sentence response for “Possessive in P.C.,” which Aunt Bea assumes must be her despite the fact that the message doesn’t really add up. “Get the egg off your face, yokel,” it says. “Do yourself a favour and seek counselling pronto.”

  What Aunt Bea does instead—what she’s been doing all along—is get down on her knees and pray, three and four times a day, dimpling her forearms on the chenille coverlet she hasn’t washed since Norman died because she believes she can still detect his body odour in it. Also she gives herself a penance—grateful dedication to Julie. When Terry is glued to the television or leafing through the piles of magazines the specialist brings over, Aunt Bea and Julie go down to the swings. Aunt Bea has to laugh at the two of them flailing their legs like beetles on their backs, a pair of fatsos in danger of bringing the whole set crashing down onto their heads. After a few minutes, though, Julie squirms off her swing to give Aunt Bea a push. She’d rather push than be pushed, and Lord knows she’s as strong as an ox, and as dogged. If she could, she’d stand there pushing Aunt Bea all day. She pushes her so high that the chains buckle and Aunt Bea cries out.

  It is a
lways a surprise to Julie every time the specialist leaves without taking Terry with her. Then she remembers that there is a bad man over at Terry’s mother’s house, that’s why. He’s the same man who punched Julie’s mother and drowned the cat in the toilet.

  “When the man goes to jail,” she assures Terry, “your mother will take you home.”

  “I don’t have a mother!” Terry cries.

  “When the man goes …,” Julie says, nodding. Her faith in this is invincible.

  She waits for her own mother to show up. She rushes to answer the phone and the buzzer, often persuading herself that it is her mother in the lobby, so that when it’s only Anne Forbes, or the specialist, or somebody else, she is incredulous. She hurries over to the window, hoping to catch sight of her mother walking away. She thinks that what happened was her mother changed her mind. She throws herself into a fit. She swats at Aunt Bea. One day, while Aunt Bea is talking to someone out in the hall, she snatches Aunt Bea’s blue sweater from the back of her chair and drops it out the window. A minute later Terry emerges from the bathroom, leans out the window and cries, “There’s a little lake down there!”

  “Lake! Lake!” Julie mocks her. It enrages her when Terry makes these errors. A sweater is not a lake! Terry’s mother will get mad! With her shirt up around her neck, Julie struts around the living room, enraged and growing brave. Before Aunt Bea manages to get away from her visitor, Julie has gone into the kitchen, taken a chopstick out of the cutlery drawer and stabbed it through a plastic placemat.

  “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.