The Jodi Picoult Collection

by Jodi Picoult

  24 SAM

  If you look real carefully, you can see the scars on my eyes. I was born cross-eyed, and the first operation was done when I was so young I cannot remember. Medically speaking, the procedure involved tightening up the slack muscles that let my eye wander. Invisible stitches, I guess. There’s hardly anything there now, twenty-four years later, except a thin line of film in each eye, like a yellow eyelash. You can see this when I look out the corner of my eye.

  Until I had the second operation I wore thick Coke-bottle glasses; round ones that made me look something like a bullfrog or a lawyer. I did not have many friends, and during recess I’d sit alone behind the swings and eat the sandwich my mother had packed in my lunch box. Sometimes the other kids came up, called me four-eyes or crossed their eyes to make fun of me. If I came home from school crying, my mother would bury my face in her apron—it smelled of fresh flour—and tell me how handsome I was. I wanted to believe her, but I couldn’t. I took to looking down at my shoes.

  My teachers began to say I was shy, and they called up my mother, concerned. One day my parents told me I was going to have an operation. I would stay in a hospital, and I would have patches on my eyes for a while, and when it was all over my eyes would look just like everyone else’s. Like I said, I do not remember my first operation, but the second is very clear. I was scared it would change the way I’d see things. I wondered if when the bandages were removed, I would look the way I thought I looked. If the colors I saw would be the same.

  The day after the operation I heard my mother’s voice at the foot of the bed. “Sam, honey, how do you feel?”

  My father touched my shoulder and handed me a wrapped package. “See if you can tell what it is.” I ripped off the paper and ran my hands along the soft leather folds of a soccer ball. Best of all—I knew exactly what it would look like.

  I asked to hold the soccer ball when my bandages were removed. The doctor smelled like aftershave and told me what he was doing every step of the way. Finally he told me to open my eyes.

  When I did, everything was fuzzy, but I could make out the black and white boxes of the soccer ball. Black was still black and white was still white. As I blinked, everything started to come clear-clearer than it was before the operation, in fact. I smiled when I saw my mother. “It’s you,” I said, and she laughed.

  “Who did you expect?” she asked.

  Sometimes when I look in the mirror now I still see my eyes crossed. I’ve dated ladies who tell me how nice my eyes are: the most unusual color, reminds them of the fog in summer, things like that. I let the words roll right off my back. I’m no more handsome than the next guy, really. In a lot of ways I’m still four-eyes, eating lunch behind the swings at school.

  My mother burned all the photos she had of me with my eyes crossed. Said we didn’t need a reminder of that around the house, now that I had the operation. So at this point all I have left is this faulty perception, from time to time, and the scars. I also have that soccer ball. I keep it in my closet, because I don’t think that’s the kind of thing you should ever get rid of.

  25 JANE

  Oliver is the only man who has ever made love to me. I know, I grew up during the generation of sex and drugs and peace, but I was never like that. I’d met Oliver when I was fifteen, and dated him until we were married. We built up a repertoire over the years, but we always stopped at a critical point. I talked about sex with my friends and pretended I had done it. Since no one ever corrected me, I assumed I was saying the right things.

  As for Oliver, he did not really pressure me. I assumed he had slept with other women, like all the other guys I had known, but he never asked me to do anything I didn’t want to. The perfect gentleman, I told my friends. We would sit for hours on the docks downtown in Boston, and all we’d do is hold hands. He would kiss me goodnight, but perfunctorily, as if he were holding back much more.

  My best friend in college, a girl named Ellen, told me in excruciating detail about all the sexual positions she and her boyfriend Roger had mastered in the cramped quarters of a VW bug. She’d come into class early and stretch her legs out in front of her seat, complaining how tight the muscles in her calves were. I had been dating Oliver for five years, and we never came close to the unbridled passion Ellen discussed as casually as she talked about her pantyhose size. I began to think it was me.

  One night when Oliver and I went to a movie, I asked if we could sit in the back row. The movie was The Way We Were. As soon as the opening credits rolled on the screen, I handed Oliver the popcorn and began to trace my thumb along the inseam of his jeans. I thought, if that doesn’t get him excited, what will? But Oliver took my hand and clasped it between his own.

  I tried once more during the movie. I took a deep breath and started to kiss Oliver’s neck, the edge of his ear. I did all the things I had heard Ellen talk about that I thought might work in a public theater. I unbuttoned a middle button of Oliver’s oxford shirt, and slipped my hand inside. I rubbed my palm over his smooth, olive chest, his strong shoulders. The entire time, mind you, I was staring at the movie screen like I was really watching.

  Oh, Oliver was gorgeous. He had thick blond hair and a smile that ruined me. His pale eyes gave him the air of being somewhere else. I wanted him to really see me, to stake a claim.

  During the scene where Robert Redford and Barbara Streisand take a walk on the beach and discuss names for the baby, Oliver grabbed my hand and withdrew it from his shirt. He buttoned himself up again and gave me a sidelong look. He pulled me out of the theater.

  Oliver didn’t look at me. He waited for the popcorn attendant to turn the other way. When she did, he slipped up the stairs to the balcony, which was closed for the night.

  The balcony was empty and cordoned off with golden silk ties. Oliver pressed against me from behind. He had removed his shirt and was silhouetted against the satin wall of the theater. “Do you know what you do to me?” Oliver said.

  He unbuttoned my cotton blouse and ripped the zipper of my jeans. When I was standing before him in my bra and panties, he took a step back, and just looked. I began to worry about the people below us, if they would turn around and see this show instead. And like he could read my mind (which I think he could do back then), Oliver pulled me down to sit on his lap.

  We sat on the aisle seat in the back, me straddling him and blindly facing the projection booth; him glassy-eyed, facing the movie. He lowered my bra straps from my shoulders and held my breasts in his hands, like a scale. He held them very lightly, like he didn’t quite know what to do with them. He let my bra fall to my waist and then he unbuttoned the fly of his jeans. With some acrobatics, we pushed his pants down around his ankles, and I didn’t even have to stand up. In the background I heard the characters talking.

  “Do you love me?” I whispered into his neck, unsure if he would hear.

  Oliver looked at me, absolutely looked at me, the first time I was sure I had one hundred percent of his attention. “Actually,” he answered, “I think I do.”

  I started to do the things that Ellen told me about, pressing against him and rocking my hips slowly, then faster. I felt the crotch of my panties becoming damp. The tip of Oliver’s penis peeked through the fly of his boxers, swollen pink. Gingerly, I brushed it with my index finger. It jumped.

  When Oliver touched me I thought I would faint. The back of the chair in front of us supported me, otherwise I am sure I would have fallen. He pulled aside the crotch of my underwear and then with his free hand pushed himself through his shorts. I was riveted; I watched this pulsing, knotted arrow and completely forgot that it was attached to Oliver. I watched the entire time while Oliver positioned himself and then lifted my hips and in an awful siren of pain I saw him disappear inside of me. Ellen did not tell me that this would hurt. I didn’t scream, though, or cry, because of all the people below. I kept my eyes wide and stared at the satin curtain of the back wall. Only then did Oliver say, “Have you ever done this?”

&nb
sp; When I shook my head I expected him to stop but by then it was too late. Not sure of what I was doing, I moved with him in a primitive sort of dance, a bump and grind, and I watched Oliver’s eyes close in disbelief. At the last moment he grabbed at my hips with the force of Atlas and pushed me off. He crushed me against his chest, but not before I saw him, red and slick, distended, quivering. He ejaculated in a fountain of heat, a sticky glue that matted our stomachs together and made a rude noise when I tried to sit back.

  I managed to walk out of the movie theater that night but I was sore for several days. I stopped asking Ellen about her dates with Roger. Oliver started to call me two or three times a day, when he knew perfectly well I was in class.

  We bought condoms and began to do this regularly, enough so that it stopped hurting, although I did not think I had had the orgasm that Ellen told me about. We did it in my dorm room, in Oliver’s car, on the grass near the Wellesley pond, in the locker room of the gym. It seemed the more illicit we got, the more fun we had. I saw Oliver every night, and every night we had sex. I started to tell Ellen about things we had done.

  One night Oliver did not make a move to take off my clothes. I asked him if he was feeling all right, and he told me yes, he just didn’t feel like doing it. That night I cried. I was certain this heralded the beginning of the end of our relationship. The next night I wore the dress that Oliver liked best, even though I knew we were going bowling. In the car that night, I didn’t give Oliver a chance to refuse me. I unzipped his fly as we were driving back to the dorm and made him pull over onto a dark sidestreet. No matter what I did, however, Oliver did not get involved. He was going through the motions. Finally I asked him what the problem was. “I just don’t feel like it tonight, Jane. Do we have to do this every night?”

  I didn’t see why not. As far as I was concerned, sex was love. If you had sex you had love. If Oliver didn’t want me all of the time, there was some problem. I told Ellen that he was getting ready to break up with me and when she asked how I knew I told her why. She was shocked. She said all guys wanted to have sex, all the time. I locked myself in my dorm room and cried for two days, in preparation.

  What Oliver returned with, however, was a diamond ring. He got down on one knee, just like in the movies, and he proposed. He said he wanted me with him forever. It was a half-carat, and nearly flawless, he said. We set a date for that summer, the day after graduation. Then, on the rough carpet of my dorm room (with my roommate due back momentarily), we made love.

  I do not know how many months into it I started to realize that sex did not equate with love. Oliver and I, once married, had different schedules. We went to sleep at different times and he was reticent about having sex in broad daylight. Sometimes the patterns of our lives kept us apart for a couple of months, and then we’d have sex again and drift our separate ways. Rarely did we both want to make love at the same time. Things had changed so much since college; Rebecca was conceived on a night when I was wishing Oliver would just leave me alone so that I could sleep.

  When I told Rebecca about sex I made sure I mentioned it was something you do when you are married. It was not said to be hypocritical. Rather, it was a way of ensuring that she might feel this fire in marriage, and not just the heat of its ashes.

  26 REBECCA

  July 19, 1990

  The sign for Hansen’s orchard—a white one with hand-painted apples as a border—is on the left-hand side of the road. My mother sees it without me having to point it out. We turn into the driveway and our tires creak against the gravel. Lining the path are two stone walls, imperfect enough to let you know they were crafted by hand. There are pits in the driveway, filled with rainwater.

  We drive to the top of a hill, and everywhere I look there are neat rows of apple trees. Well, I know they are apples because of Uncle Joley, but I wouldn’t be able to tell otherwise. Most are almost bare and scrawny. Far away, on just one tree, I think I can make out tiny green apples. Somehow, I expected to see fruit on every single one, all at the same time.

  My mother parks on a mound of grass that looks just big enough for a car. Several hundred yards away is a garage with an old station wagon that looks like our old one, and a big green tractor. There are all kinds of machines and gadgets in there that I do not recognize. Opposite the garage is a large red barn. On the hayloft is a Pennsylvania Dutch Hex sign.

  “I don’t know where Joley is,” my mother says. “I mean, we’re on time.” She looks at me, and then at the unbelievable view. Below the barn, below the acres and acres of apple trees, is a field of tall grass that comes right to the edge of a lake. Even from up here, you can tell how clear the water is, how sandy the bottom.

  On the crest of the hill is a huge house, white with green trim. It has a double porch and a hammock swing and factory doors with wavy glass. From its outside I just know it has a long spiral staircase inside. There are four windows on the second floor alone. “I don’t see why we don’t take a look around,” I suggest, and I make a move towards the house.

  “Rebecca, you can’t just walk into someone’s house you don’t know. We’ll walk around out here, and see if we can’t find Joley.” She links her arm through mine.

  We walk down the slope of the hill to the back side of the barn, and as we get closer there is a buzzing sound. I unlatch the hinge of the fence that leads into this penned-in area. There are little pellets everywhere—you don’t have to be a genius to know manure. Under the ledge of the barn is a man with a power tool of some kind, which is attached by a cord to an outlet somewhere above him. He has a sheep sitting like a human, on its rear end, and he is standing behind it and holding its front legs. At first glance, it looks like they are performing a sort of dance. The man takes the tool—it’s a razor—and begins to run over the matted coat of the sheep. Funny, I think. It doesn’t look at all like a cloud, like sheep are supposed to. The coat falls off in a thick blanket; it lands in the hay and dirt. As the sheep gets progressively naked, I notice its potbelly and tired eyes. From time to time the man wrestles with the sheep, the razor waving. He pushes with one foot and twists the body of the animal so that it lies this way or that. It always lands the way he seems to want it to land. When the man does this, the muscles in his arms stand out.

  Finally he turns off the humming razor and helps the sheep to its feet. It looks at him like it has been betrayed. It doesn’t resemble a sheep at all anymore, but a goat. It runs down a rocky path towards the apple trees. The man wipes his forehead with the sleeve of his T-shirt.

  “Excuse me,” my mother says, “do you work here?”

  The man smiles. “I suppose you could say that.”

  My mother takes a step closer. She watches her feet to see where she is stepping. “Do you know someone named Joley Lipton? He works here too.”

  “I’ll take you to him in a minute, if you’d like. I’ve got one more to shear.”

  “Oh,” my mother says, disappointed. “All right.” She leans against the fence and crosses her arms.

  “If you can help me out this will go faster. Just give me a hand in here bringing out the last ewe.” He opens a door I did not notice, one that must lead to a pen inside the barn. My mother rolls her eyes at me but follows the man inside. I can hear him saying things softly to the sheep. Then they appear at the door, all three of them, and the man motions towards the ledge where he was shearing before.

  My mother’s shirt is falling off her right shoulder, where she is bent down. Her arms look tight and uncomfortable. “What would you like me to do with this?”

  The man tells her to walk the sheep to where the other one was. She does and then the man lets go on his side to pick up the razor. As he does this, my mother lets go of the sheep on her side. “What are you doing?” the man yells, and the sheep bolts away. “Catch it,” he yells to me, but every time I take a step towards it, it runs in the other direction.

  He glares at my mother, as if he has never seen anyone so stupid in his life. “I thought it
would just stay put,” she says. Then she runs to a corner of the pen and tries to grab the sheep by the wool of its neck. She comes close but she slips on wet hay and lands in a pile of manure. “Oh,” she says, on the verge of tears. “Rebecca, get over here.”

  In the end it is the man who catches the sheep and who shears it single-handedly. He either pretends he has not seen my mother fall or he just doesn’t care. He runs the razor over the body of this sheep in minutes, leaving a soft fleece on the ground like snow. My mother stands up and tries to shake off manure. She doesn’t want to touch it with her hands, so she rubs up against the fence. The man, who sees this, laughs.

  When he has let the sheep run free, he closes the hinge door on the pen inside the barn and unplugs the razor. He walks over to where my mother and I are standing. “Tough break,” he says, trying not to crack up.

  My mother is furious. “I’m sure this isn’t appropriate behavior for a field hand. When I tell Joley about this, he’ll report you to the person who runs the place.”

  The man holds out his hand, and then on second thought withdraws it. “I’m not too worried about that,” he says. “I’m Sam Hansen. You must be Joley’s sister.”

  I think this is hilarious. I start to laugh and my mother glares at me. “Could she clean up before we find Uncle Joley?” I say, and then I hold out my own hand. “I’m Rebecca. Joley’s niece.”

  Sam takes us up to the house on the hill, which he calls the Big House. He says it was built in the 1800s. It is decorated with very simple country-style furniture: lots of light-colored wood and blue and red. Sam takes us to our respective rooms (up the spiral staircase). My room used to be his as a kid, he says. And my mother is staying in his parents’ old bedroom.

  My mother washes off and changes and comes back downstairs holding her dirty clothes. “What should I do with these?”