girls only a little more than he liked cats. Minnie had come into his life and stolen the attention he had thitherto had completely as his own. Maxie was twice Vanna’s height, and had the strength of his anger, as well. He hoisted Vanna with one hand on her childish chest and the other under her groin. Inadvertently his thumb pushed her panties roughly into her most private place. He picked her up in this way and set her aside, dropping her roughly on her hands and knees.
Vanna’s helplessness infuriated her. She screamed her fury. Dan came running. He found Maxie chasing Dora, who was too quick and clever for him.
“Vanna,” Dan said, “hush up! Father will hear you! What’s wrong?”
Vanna choked back her sobs. “Maxie touched me in a personal place,” she blubbered.
“Where?”
She pointed. Dan nodded. He put himself in front of Maxie. “You’d better go home,” Dan said. “You scared Vanna. It’s best to wait until she cools down.” Maxie opened his mouth to argue, looked carefully at Dan’s expression, and turned and ran across the fields to the tumbledown trailer where he and his family were staying.
“Now, Vanna,” Dan said. “Listen to me. Don’t say a word of this to anybody, understand? Father would only get upset, and maybe start a fight with the neighbors. We can’t have that, can we? It’d make Mama cry.”
Vanna nodded, and brought her tears under control. She banked her fury; she in no way extinguished it. Silently she vowed to find the secret of power, and grasp it for herself. She vowed to revenge herself on Maxie.
“Wash your face under the faucet outside,” Dan said. “The come to the house. We’ll pretend this never happened.” Vanna nodded again, and stood. She brushed her clothes as clean of straw as she could, and followed Dan to the house.
Aunt Mella Dee gave Vanna a means of revenge, although she hadn’t intended to. She laughingly told Vanna’s mother, Yuna, about a childhood incident where she had spilled the laundry into a poison oak thicket. Some of the garments collected sap from the plants, and the whole household had endured rashes and blisters for a couple of days until they deciphered the cause and re-washed the clothes.
Vanna knew poison oak. A large clump of it grew on the edge of the grove. She waited for the Mumm’s laundry day. Vanna, wearing rubber gloves, harvested a goodly number of leaves and stems. She crept up on the Mumm trailer and rubbed liberal amounts of urushiol into the crotch of each pair of boy’s briefs drying on the clothesline. She took the crushed leaves away, and threw the rubber gloves in the trash.
Maxie Mumm was soon in torment. He scratched at his privates all morning, until his teacher sent him home to bathe. Maxie bathed, and the hot water excited the urushiol to blisters. On the third day of his exposure, Chrysantha figured out what had been done to her precious son. Maxie wound up in the hospital.
Chrysantha immediately suspected Minnie had done the deed to revenge herself on her brother for some childish prank. Minnie finally convinced her mother that the probable culprit was Vanna, because Maxie had teased her kitten. Chrysantha rang up the Dee household. Dan answered. He told Chrysantha how Maxie had assaulted Vanna, and threatened to make the story public if she persisted in punishing Vanna. Chrysantha Mumm got the picture.
A few days later, the Mumms disappeared into the rural west. Dora, the kitten, avoided all humans, including Vanna, thereafter. In Vanna the seed of rage began to grow slowly; long years after it would blossom and bear dark fruit.
The Manila Envelope
Emma examined the stained manila envelope Mother’s attorney had sent. It had come by express delivery just as she had finished her morning coffee. Mother’s lawyer had sent it. It was old and smelled musty. “Emma” was on the front in her mother’s handwriting. It was only two weeks since Mother had died, and Emma was still adjusting to her absence.
She unwound the red string from the two cardboard buttons on the back. Mildew odors rose from the flap as she opened it. She carefully withdrew two folded sheets of paper. A yellowed snapshot fell out of the folded sheets. Emma opened the brittle sheets, careful not to tear them. Six more little yellow snapshots lay inside.
They looked like the pictures from a booth in a penny arcade. Seven different young men, all dressed in sailor’s uniforms, smiled at her. Emma put the snapshots on the table beside her and turned to the papers. Mother had written a note in pencil. Emma turned on a lamp to see the dim writing better through the tears blurring her eyes.
“Dearest child, I’ve decided to call you Emma. I’m writing this to you one year after you were born. When you are old enough, I will give this to you to read. You deserve to know your history and your mother’s error. I am your birth mother. Your father is one of the seven men in the pictures with this note. Whichever man he is, he is dead. They were all on a military transport plane that crashed during a training flight. I wrote to them and told them I was expecting. When they died, the Navy notified me they all had made you beneficiary of their insurance. They were all gentlemen. Be proud one of them is your father.
If you turn out to be the proper sort of girl, I intend you to be, you will wonder how I ever came to be pregnant with you. Almost two years ago I went to the Zoo. I was watching two monkeys wrestle when seven sailors stopped near me. These seven sailors were nearby enjoying the monkeys. I made some comment, and one of them explained to me what the monkeys were doing. I was obviously embarrassed. They apologized, and insisted I come with them for a glass of wine.
I had more than one glass, and when they suggested we imitate the monkeys, I agreed. We spent the night in a hotel room. In the morning, we took these pictures in a photo booth. I confess I may have been with any or all of them. You are the issue of that event.
When I told my mother you were on the way, she disowned me. I bowed to her rejection, and never saw her again. Very soon after, she died. Let her lie where she is. She will never know the joy you are. That joy replaces any lost fmily love. With the money your fathers have left me I will study library science, hoping to make a better life for my little girl than I have had.
Neva Freed.
Emma folded the sheets and laid them beside the manila envelope. Then she laid out the snapshots in an arc. One by one she turned them over. Yes, there was a date, April 2, 1941, penciled on each one, and a name. The pictures of Ed, John, Harry, Dick, Will, Dan, and Ted lay before her. She wondered which pictured her father. She could not find a match for her own face among them. Her mother’s features had too strongly shaped her own.
Emma realized that she was half again as old as these men were when they had their photographs made. Emma sat for a long time staring at the seven photographs. When she was a small child, she had asked her mother several times about her father. Her only reply was that he had died honorably in the war. When she asked about grandparents, her mother had answered with vague generalities. Emma soon guessed that Mother would rather not hear any more questions on those topics, so she stopped asking.
“So, Mother,” she said to the empty room, “I’ve been rather naïve, haven’t I?” She gathered the note and the pictures and slipped them carefully into the envelope. A knot loosened somewhere inside Emma. Fury rose in her. She began slapping the upholstered arm of her chair.
“You lied to me, Mother! Is everything you told me a lie? All those years you told me to keep myself pure!” The words choked Emma’s throat. She slapped the chair harder. “All those dates you talked me out of, because the men weren’t as good as my father! No wonder you never took me to the Zoo!” Emma had begun crying. She hadn’t noticed when. Her tears were more angry than sad.
“All the years I took care of you, Mother, and you couldn’t tell me the truth about my own father, because you didn’t know who he was!” She stood and paced around the room. She snatched up Mother’s picture and laid it face down on the sideboard. “All the chances I lost! I hate you, Mother, I hate you!” Emma sc
reamed a primal scream, and collapsed into the chair, breathing heavily. The room did not answer her.
In the Zoo, the unicorn with the unique horn raised its head and listened to the howling of the distant winds.
Vanna’s Proposal
Vanna approached Dickon after some days with a proposal. They had completed their supper of beans, ham, and slaw, and Vanna had done the dishes. Dickon had gone in to the living room to read the evening paper.
“Dickon,” she said, “I think I should get a job.” She tousled his hair with her fingers. She thought he found it charming. He actually hated it, but had never told her so.
“Doing what?” he asked, setting aside his newspaper.
“Typing. It’s a skill I have. Or answering phones. I could do that.” She noticed Dickon’s hair was a little thinner at the crown than it had been several years earlier, when she married him.
“Why do you need a job?” She stared at his upturned face. It took a moment for her to realize he couldn’t know what she had been thinking.
“To keep my mind from collapsing with boredom.” She spoke as reasonably as she could.
“Surely parish work should provide you with a lot to do and with mental stimulation as well.”
“The church is your job. I don’t fit into church work.” She
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