Body and Soul: Short Story
Page 4
“You are the Lord’s little visionary,” she tells Terry.
Sometimes she is happy just to be alive and a witness. Sometimes she wants to run off with both girls to a desert island. “Why aren’t I adopted yet?” Terry occasionally asks, not so much wounded as puzzled. “It takes time” is Aunt Bea’s lame answer, but as the weeks pass and no more couples make inquiries, she begins to suppose that it really does take time. She begins to lose some of her awful anxiety and guilt.
The days settle around her, each blessed, hard-won day. She believes she is reaping the reward of prayer—she can sense the Lord in the apartment, keeping tabs on her blood pressure. She tugs down Julie’s shirt and slaps down Julie’s slapping hands and is no more upset than if she was hanging laundry on a windy day and the sheets were pelting her head. She remembers her own daughter’s tantrums at this age, her cruel tongue, and she tells Terry, “This is nothing. This won’t hurt you.”
One day, though, when Julie is stomping around the living room, the picture over the couch—an oil painting of two Scotty dogs exactly like Angus and Haggis, the litter-mates she and Norman used to have—comes crashing down, ripping away a chunk of plaster and missing Terry, who is looking at a magazine on the floor, by a fraction of an inch.
After the first seconds of silence following Terry’s scream, Aunt Bea turns to Julie and says, “Bad girl.” She is so angry that her jaw trembles.
Julie throws herself on the floor and begins to punch herself in the head.
“Bad,” Aunt Bea says. A sob leaps to her throat.
Terry is kneeling over the painting. It has landed face down and she seems to be trying to dig her fingers under the frame.
“Don’t do that!” Aunt Bea snaps.
“But where’s their backs!” Terry cries. “Where’s the back of them?”
Aunt Bea has no choice except to call Fred, the superintendent, to fix the plaster. She hates doing this because Fred always acts rudely interrupted and because the first time Terry saw him after the operation, she said, “I thought you would have hair.” But Fred says, “Christ, I guess I better take a look at it,” and arrives with powdered plaster, which he mixes in Aunt Bea’s cut-glass salad bowl. When he’s done he makes Aunt Bea come out of the bathroom so that he can hold the nail up before her eyes. “You mean to tell me you were using this?” he says.
Aunt Bea fails to understand.
“You can’t hang a picture that size with a half-inch nail. You got to use a screw. Drill a hole, stick in a wall plug.”
“Oh, I see.” Aunt Bea pats her heart. “Could you do that for me, Fred?” She doesn’t own a drill. She has palpitations and gas. She has just remembered that it’s her wedding anniversary. She can’t get Julie, who is still lying on the floor, grimacing wildly, to so much as glance at her.
“The plaster’s wet,” Fred says, as if she’s an idiot.
“When it’s dry then,” Aunt Bea says.
“I haven’t got all day,” he says. “I’ll do it now, a couple of inches over from where you had it. Doesn’t look like it was centred on the wall anyway.”
He comes back with a drill. Terry covers her ears when he turns it on, but Julie scrambles to her feet and stands right next to him, so close that he lifts his elbow and orders her to back up. A few seconds later he says, “Christ, now look what you made me do.” He’s drilled a hole too big for the plugs he has in his pocket.
He goes back down to the basement. Terry accompanies him to the elevator so that she can press the button. Aunt Bea goes into the bathroom to take more antacid.
Julie picks up the drill.
She doesn’t scream, she doesn’t make a peep. When Aunt Bea hears the whirring, all she thinks is, That was fast. She comes out of the bathroom just as Terry disappears into the living room.
Terry’s scream is as high and clean as a needle.
“Oh, dear,” Aunt Bea says, because she doesn’t know yet what she is seeing. Julie’s head jerks, as if she is sneezing. Red paint drips from her forehead. She holds the drill in both hands. Fred’s drill—that’s what’s upsetting to Aunt Bea. Fred’s paint.
Terry screams again. Right into Julie’s head the scream goes, right into the hole where Julie’s finger is going. Aunt Bea brings down the knick-knack holder on her way to the floor.
Everybody reassures Aunt Bea. The doctor pokes rods into a rubberized brain to demonstrate the harmless route the drill bit took and the dozen other harmless routes it might have taken. The child psychologist says that nothing short of boring the hole and sticking her finger in it was probably going to convince Julie there weren’t rocks in her head. The social worker says that Julie’s mother has been stunned into realizing that her parental responsibilities don’t end at a cell door. Another social worker, the one who takes Julie to the group home, says that Julie should have been living with mentally disabled children all along.
But Aunt Bea doesn’t let herself off the hook. When Terry leaves for school she starts remembering things that Julie said and did. Every gesture, every word seems to be a clue. Aunt Bea is appalled by the multitude of clues.
She is resigned to having Terry taken away from her as well. She is almost glad. Her daughter is right—she is too old for this, and it could have been a lot worse. When a social worker she doesn’t know phones to ask if she is interested in another girl, she suspects it’s a mixup and starts explaining who she is and what happened. But the social worker has heard all about it and blames Children’s Aid.
“This new girl is bright,” the social worker says. “The only thing is, she’s missing both arms just above the elbow. She’s in the process of being fitted with new artificial arms, though, and very sophisticated mechanical hands.”
At supper that night, Aunt Bea tells Terry. “We don’t have to have her,” she says. “I’m happy enough just with you.”
“I’d love to see a girl without arms!” Terry cries.
“If she lived here,” Aunt Bea says, “it would involve more than just seeing her arms.”
“Would her artificial arms come off?”
“I imagine so.” Aunt Bea strokes the purple side of Terry’s face. The birthmark is being “erased” in a month.
Terry takes Aunt Bea’s hand and lifts it up. “Show me your veins,” she says.
Aunt Bea holds her hand over her head for a minute, then puts it on the table. The blue rivulets emerge as if the hand is under an evil maiden-to-crone spell.
“Too bad I can’t go around with my hands up in the air all the time,” Aunt Bea says.
“You know what?” Terry cries. Her feverish, old-woman gaze still startles Aunt Bea a bit when it fixes on her.
“What?”
“Too bad you can’t go around with your whole body up in the air!”
The girl’s name is Angela; she is twelve years old. She is perky, pretty (long black hair, flirtatious brown eyes), and she performs a tap-dance routine to “Singin’ in the Rain,” which she has on a cassette tape.
Terry is enraptured. Aunt Bea is too, but not so much because of the dance—her daughter took tap-dancing lessons. What wins Aunt Bea’s heart is the sight of those two little winglike arms flapping at one of her artificial arms (she insists on putting them on her herself), flapping and failing to grasp it, flapping and failing, and at last lining it up, slipping the stump into the socket, and clicking it in.
If you enjoyed “Body and Soul” by Barbara Gowdy, look for the print and e-book versions of the entire short story collection We So Seldom Look on Love.
E-book: 9781443402484
Print: 9780006475231
About the Author
BARBARA GOWDY was born in Windsor, Ontario, in 1950. When she was four, her family moved to Don Mills, a suburb of Toronto that would come to inspire the settings for much of her fiction.
Gowdy considered a career as a pianist until she decided her talent was mediocre. While working as an editor at the publishing house Lester & Orpen, she found herself writing cha
racters into her clients’ non-fiction and took this as her cue to start writing professionally.
Her first book, Through the Green Valley (a historical novel set in Ireland), came out in 1988; the following year she published Falling Angels to international critical acclaim. Her 1992 collection, We So Seldom Look on Love, was a finalist for the Trillium Award for Fiction. Four years later, the title story from this collection was adapted into Kissed, a film directed by Lynne Stopkewich. Falling Angels was also adapted to film in 2003, with Esta Spalding as screenwriter.
Gowdy’s books, including three bestselling novels—Mister Sandman (1995), The White Bone (1998) and The Romantic (2003)—have been published in twenty-four countries. Gowdy has also had stories appear in a number of anthologies, including Best American Short Stories, The New Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English and the Penguin Anthology of Stories by Canadian Women.
Gowdy has been nominated repeatedly for many prestigious literary awards: four times for the Trillium Award and two times each for the Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. The Romantic earned her a Man Booker Prize nomination in 2003. In 1996, she was awarded the Marian Engel Award, which recognizes the complete body of work by a Canadian woman writer “in mid-career.” Nine years later, Ben Marcus praised Gowdy’s literary realism in Harper’s Magazine, singling her out as one of the few contemporary writers who has “pounded on the emotional possibilities of their mode, refusing to subscribe to worn-out techniques and storytelling methods.”
Barbara Gowdy has also appeared on television as a regular commentator on literary matters and has taught creative writing courses at Ryerson University. Her sixth novel, Helpless, was published by HarperCollins in 2007.
She lives in Toronto.
Also by Barbara Gowdy
THROUGH THE GREEN VALLEY
FALLING ANGELS
MISTER SANDMAN
THE WHITE BONE
THE ROMANTIC
HELPLESS
Copyright
“Body and Soul” © 1992 by Barbara Gowdy.
All rights reserved.
Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
This short story was originally published in We So Seldom Look on Love by Barbara Gowdy, first published in print form in 1992 by Somerville House Publising. First published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. in print form in 2001, and in an ePub edition in 2011.
Original epub edition (in We So Seldom Look on Love) April 2011 ISBN: 978-1-443-40248-4.
This ePub edition OCTOBER 2012 ISBN: 978-1-443-41994-9.
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