1.
From the moment she is born she is beautiful, so beautiful that every man in the world falls in love with her. In the delivery room, the old doctor takes a long time examining her pink folds of flesh, her tiny curled fists and eyelashes. They find him bent over her sterile bassinet, holding his stinking salmon in his hand, descending on her. The mother screams, the father pushes past the stunned white bodies of two nurses. He’s back in 1972 in the final game of the season against Dartmouth, halfback sprinting across the green, heart pounding, before the tendon in his knee snapped, before he ever looked at a briefcase, he leaps and tackles the old doctor with his two hundred pounds of brick.
The lawsuit is over by the time she says her first word (“da”) and takes her initial shaky steps across the carpet of their apartment. She seems not to have been scarred or stunted by the incident. They put it behind them. In these early days they stare at her for hours, fascinated by the movements of her sunny hands, her bright eyes blinking. They both notice the way bums in the street, taxi drivers, and vendors eye their daughter when they take her out in the stroller. They don’t speak of it, even to each other. Shaken up from the first moment, launched off on their uneasy journey, they are more nervous than most new parents. Every man on the street, the supermarket, in line at the bank.
They move to a place where there are no bums in the street, no taxis or vendors, a town where the sidewalks are smooth and all the people are white. The father joins a local firm. Their new house is huge and empty, smelling like wood, sunlight streaming in all the windows. They move from room to room, looking over paint swatches and carpet samples. Unexpectedly, the mother is pregnant a second time. They see no reason not to have it, but hire a professional midwife this time. Neither will ever fully trust a hospital again.
The boy emerges red, wailing, and unremarkable. The girl flourishes. As she grows, the emerging landscape of features amazes both parents. They are ordinary people. "She gets it from her mother," the father is apt to tell strangers, smiling, but they both know the mother never looked like this, not even in her debutante days when she was prettiest, a cornflower blonde with a waist. She learns to read quickly and devours as many as eight paper storybooks a day. She releases the mother’s twin parakeets from their cage and is praised by the father for the lie she concocts. The father combs her hair before work each morning, reads to her as she sits in her soapy bath, shows her flash cards between pouring cupfuls of water over her head. His right knee still aches when he gets up from a long day of sitting at his desk. He wants her to never feel limited.
They enroll her at a private elementary school. The mother watches her daughter on the playground, a cloud of small boys drawn up around her in her pink dress.
So it begins, boys chasing her across blacktop, crawling up beside her block tower. Boys give her sticks, rocks, indian clay, daisy chains, dandelions. Boys fight one another: kitten scratches, sandy hair. Boys hold doors open for her, press down on silver water fountains. Boys tug at her skirts, snap her bra straps. Boys fight one another: split lips, bloody noses. Boys give her pencils, chocolates, dime store earrings, dandelions. Boys scrawl graffiti about her on fences, draw dirty pictures of her in textbook margins, pin her against brick buildings.
At twelve she’s been pinched, slapped, traded, handled. She’s got palm prints all over her body. She swings her sneakers at the kitchen table while the father screams into the telephone.
After the third boy is expelled, the parents take her out of school. She stays home in her princess bed while the brother rides off on the yellow bus. The brother has turned out ruddy and healthy. He is slow to learn, flustered and angered easily, prone to blurting out foolish things in front of guests. He is a perfectly normal, wonderfully mediocre child. It is secretly a relief to both parents, who are proud of their daughter but never sure they are qualified to raise such an exceptional girl, afraid they will fail to nurture her gifts properly. They hire a private tutor to teach her literature, history and mathematics. Her world shrinks to the house, its big sunlit rooms now worn with the family’s footsteps, the stuffed couches, the yard full of flowers. The brother is her only playmate. Although he is nearly two years behind her, they grow close, playing the imagination games she’s outgrown. When he bangs in the front door each afternoon, playground gravel ground into his knees, she dashes through the halls to barrel him down.
At night they sneak out the window and pound sneakers through the still silent neighborhood, white houses looming in the dark. She isn’t let out alone during the day. They duck through lawns, pluck round tennis ball lemons from the Walshs’ lemon tree, climb the chain-link gate of the community pool and swim in the moonlight.
For her birthday, she is given a little silver whistle on a chain from her aunt instead of the book (Slaughterhouse Five) she wanted. The family crowds around her lit birthday cake, the mother pressing everybody’s sleeves back from the candle flames, the father leaning in close to brush her hair with his lips. "Make a wish."
That night, the brother tells her to watch, then cannonballs into the freezing water first. He crashes to the surface, rubbing chlorine out of his eyes, hair dripping over his forehead. She toes the diving board, hesitant in her plain cotton bra and pants, her pale hair suffused by the glow of the street lamp on the corner. But more important is below that: how the yellow lamplight strokes her body, illuminating the curves and hollows, the goosebumps shivering over her bare flesh. Look at those thighs, those ripe breasts. The half of the brother under the water’s dark surface starts to feel heavy. He looks away and calls out at her to jump already, you stupid girl.
2.
The mother worries. She worries about her children, about the kind of body her daughter is getting. Memories of her own adolescence are bittersweet: agony over her complexion and waistline, the letterman who never noticed her in the hall. As the years pass she waits for some sign of awkwardness in her daughter: some unsightly hair, a constellation of acne. She waits in the wings, ready with cotton swabs and pink plastic razors, but the girl never seems to need her help. She is swelling, glowing, more present than other objects in the house. Each evening the father comes home from the office, sets down his briefcase and sits at the kitchen table with her, telling her all the details of his day, while the mother listens, unable to turn, soaked to her wrists in lemon soap.
The mother restricts the girl’s diet, feeding her salads, locking away dessert. "You’re getting too heavy," she says. "You’ll thank me later," she says, though for what she cannot say. She knows this must be stopped, contained somehow. It does no good. From the kitchen where she bakes her cakes and scrubs the dishes, she watches her daughter bloom slowly, inevitably, and without interruption into a hothouse rose.
She worries that her son spends too much time alone in his room when he could be out in the fresh air, playing sports or going out with girls. She helpfully suggests one after-school activity after another, but in his fourteenth year he prefers the solitary vice, finds no hobby more easy or satisfying than masturbation. When he closes his eyes he pulls one of several well-worn nights to study, to rewrite and relive with his hands. He still sneaks out these nights with his sister, passes her seconds under the table. Now, however, the brother lives in a state of longing like suspended animation. He can’t keep from listening to her sing in the shower, or fingering the worn shirts she leaves on the floor of her bedroom, lifting them to his face to breathe in the scent of her: sweat, soap. With his eyes, he rips her clothes off like a starving man, but he no longer touches her. He is thrilled and terrified even to wrestle her for the remote control.
The father, too, notices the shape of his daughter changing. One day she rises late, per usual, coming in the kitchen for lunch in her nightgown. The afternoon sun is bright; her nipples show through the thin fabric. The father tells her to put some clothes on.
"I will later," she dismisses him.
"Now," the father says.
"Let me just eat first," she says, reaching for the bacon. He slaps her hard across the face.
Later he is bent over the edge of the bed in the master bedroom, sobbing into his small square glass of Scotch. The mother closes the door quietly. It is now that she begins looking through college brochures.
3.
The school is one of the oldest, most prestigious girls’ colleges in the country. They fall in love with her special transcripts, her outstanding essays. She says a tearful goodbye at the airport. The father hugs her quickly; the mother smiles tightly, knowing it is for the best. She holds onto the brother longest, giving him the silent message: Take care of yourself. The brother embraces her for the first time in years, closing his eyes into her hair, letting the ecstasy of her arms sweep through him like a tidal wave.
At school she gets the tower room, the highest chamber with the tiny window, the most difficult to sneak boys in or out of. Her roommate is a short girl with a shaved head. She feels distaste for the roommate, purposely ugly, on sight. She does not socialize well. The girls in her dormitory speak an easy language to one another, whispering during class, trading lipstick and packaged tampons in the bathroom, raucous laughter bursting forth from behind closed doors. She is awkward, unable to break past a cordial surface. She pours herself into schoolwork, knocking next door at midnight to tell them to turn down the music. When girls smoke in the dormitory bathroom, she makes a show of coughing and opening all the windows. Stuck-up, the girls call her behind her back, or Bitch.
In college she buys lipstick, wine coolers, low cut shirts she’d never dream of wearing back home. She looks out her window over the spacious campus, and beyond to the mountains. The whole world seems stretched out ahead of her.
When the boys’ college visits, all the girls get ready, the dormitory a heady jungle of female spraying, powdering, plucking, rouging. Tall American boys are shipped in by the busload. It is a tradition since fifty years ago, and these boys could have been preserved from that time, in their clean suits and neatly combed hair. Notice the dance floor from above: her pale head in the center, a ring of boys hovering around her from the edges, their eyes following her every move. Her beauty radiates farther and farther under the weight of their stares, her smile stretching thin, until, like a star imploding, it creates a black hole. They begin to rush inward, pulled by an urgent but unnamable force. Luckily, the tall blonde boy sweeps her up, shielding her with his body from the other boys in their suits, who are left to spin on the floor like unmatched chromosomes. Propelled by unstoppable desire with no target, they tear into one another, punching and kicking, polished dress shoes bulleting into soft stomachs, white shirts ripped, streamers torn, punch flooding the room like a bath, hair falling from fists, blood dripping to the wood floor as horrified chaperones and girls look on, shrieking. Amidst the destruction, she gazes into the eyes of her escort, noticing nothing but the way she fits neatly into his arms while they waltz. He looks like a toy soldier. He smells like aftershave, fresh pine. This, she thinks: It’s happening, my love story.
The next sunny day he takes her out in his car, playing easy listening hits on the radio. She watches the movie theater swish by in the rearview mirror. She tugs his sleeve. "Let’s park somewhere first," he says. She knows something is wrong but if she speaks she’ll sound silly. Her blue eyes blink, silent, her knees twitch.
They park in the shadow of some trees. Over her weak protests he reaches for her, inside her blouse, up her skirt. She curses herself for not keeping that silver whistle instead of letting it fall behind her bookshelf back in her old room. A black and white car pulls up to her rescue—they are parked illegally. She gratefully accepts a ride home in the back of the squad car, behind the cage.
Snow White at the psychiatrist: her fear of biting into apples since the attack. Anger at her father’s negligence. Symbolic dreams of dousing her pretty cheeks with gasoline and striking up a match. If awarded any super power, she would choose to be invisible.
She sits in the tower room staring out the gray window. She throws out her low-cut shirts and lipstick. Her world shrinks to her own interior, red and firework veined where sunlight seeps through her eyelids.
Her bald roommate looks at her, still sitting by that window. "Don’t you have class?"
She says nothing.
"Hey," the roommate pokes her. "What’s wrong?"
When she reluctantly tells about her weekend, she expects mocking, or a disinterested shrug. Instead the roommate is outraged, launching into a string of rancorous and inventive curses.
Locked up in the tower, the roommate teaches her to fight. They circle the carpet, the roommate swinging mock punches at her face. "Keep your fists loose," the roommate keeps saying as our beauty squeals, tripping, swearing. "Don’t tense up. You got it."
And things are all right for a while.
4.
The father’s heart fails. She is rushed home to mother and brother. In a Jewish hospital the father lies under white sheets, IVs dripping clear fluid into him. The family sits in chairs watching him for hours, until the doctor tells them they’d better just go home.
The house seems bigger and darker than she remembers. Maybe it is the father being gone. She walks around the house from which she has been cast out, touching the curtains and the counters. The brother can’t speak.
Late that night, she sneaks out of the house. She wanders the night streets of the town, washes up at a glowing neon bar. She goes inside. At this moment the father’s heart is palpitating, he is sitting up in a hospital bed, his fists clutching at air. A short man in a suit sits at the bar next to her— "hey there, sugar"— call signals ring through the hospital. Now a nurse is bending over the father still fluttering like a moth strangled by a pin, soothes his forehead with a palm, recites a Hebrew blessing. The short man buys her a cherry-red drink which she downs, then falls asleep.
She wakes up the next morning in a hotel room. There’s blood on the sheets where he broke her open like a beer bottle: a real virgin. She finds her dress and climbs out the balcony window.
On the street, walking home in the harsh light of day, everything looks different. The men on the street, the men on line at the bank, stay turned around. Nobody glances her way. She has never experienced the absence of eyes on her and she thinks for a minute she is dead. It is a strange sensation, as though a radio that had always been playing softly in the background has been shut off: the silence is huge, sucking, deafening.
When she tiptoes through the front door of the sunny house, the mother has been awake for hours. "Where have you been?" the mother screams. And she learns that the father is dead.
After the funeral, she travels back to college. All is calm, books and lectures and papers, until her body begins to betray her (not again); she’s flushed, swollen, lit by an unearthly glow. "Quit lying there," the roommate says. "I’ll help you." Teachers and other pupils note the change. It can’t be, they think, until her stomach protrudes like a tumor. "I’ll push you downstairs," the roommate offers. "I’ll punch you in the gut."
But she shakes her head.
The school sends her home to her pink bed where her mother stands over, clucking. Not enough that the father is dead. Now this. It is what she always feared. She tries to find solutions. She offers to have the baby neatly killed. Our girl declines. The mother sighs for her poor family. Where her beautiful daughter once stood, the mother now only sees a swollen, insolent brat. "Your choice," she says, throwing up her hands.
Another incarceration begins: she is shut up in the pink room where mother and brother bring her soup, fresh pillows, rub her feet. She gets bigger and rounder, stretch marks snaking across her belly, giving her the appearance of a globe. Milk ducts beneath the flesh inflate.
When the day comes she is taken to the Jewish hospital. On the bed, her pink cervix yawning, she doesn’t cry but grits her teeth and pushes, even when stretching flesh gives way and cells split to blood, she keeps her mouth clenched shut and spills her guts into the doctor’s hands. As they clean off the wailing thing, she is left exposed on the bed, her vagina torn down like the Berlin wall. She has a baby girl.
From the first day, she never takes her eyes off her new daughter. She stares for hours, fascinated by the movements of the sunny hands, the bright eyes blinking. She feels herself fading, knows it has stopped being her story. She is a mother now: practical, hair pulled back. Her face shows lines formed during the birth. The event has aged all of them. Their internal clocks are sped up, the mother’s hair going gray at the temples, spots darkening her hands. She packs up and moves to Florida. The brother, a man now, inherits the big house.
Our girl buys a cottage outside the town where she grew up and lives there with her daughter. Every so often she goes into town for fresh meat or sugar and the older people nod to her and whisper to each other: Remember how beautiful she was?
Today, the brother visits her with his wife. He is balding but still boyish in his business suit. The wife sits on the stiff couch while the brother holds the child on his lap, touches the soft head, looks in the big blue eyes. During this she drifts in and out of the kitchen, chatting with the brother and his wife, a dish towel in her hands.
At the end, the brother hugs her in the doorway. Walking out to the car with his wife, he looks back at his sister, letting his eyes touch her pale legs planted in the doorway, her dark eyes. What he longs for: to slip his hands between her ribs and close his palms around her heart. He looks away and tells her to write. She nods, and goes inside to wash what is left of the plates.