Becoming Sharon

Copyright © 2020 Suzanne Yuskiw.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Certain characters in this work are historical figures, and certain events portrayed did take place. However, this is a work of fiction. All the other characters, names, and events as well as all places, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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ISBN: 978-1-6632-0240-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6632-0242-0 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6632-0241-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020912252

iUniverse rev. date: 02/17/2021

For Michael

and Meredith,

who call me Mom,

and Jerre,

who called me darlin’

The soul walks not upon a line,

neither does it grow like a reed.

The soul unfolds itself, like a

lotus of countless petals.

—Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

For a minute Rose of Sharon sat still in

the whispering barn. Then she hoisted

her tired body up and drew the comfort

about her. She moved slowly to the corner

and stood looking down at the wasted

face, into the wide, frightened eyes. Then

slowly she lay down beside him.

—John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

CONTENTS

Prologue

ONE

Dancing to Tchaikovsky

TWO

Beyond the Black Lagoon

THREE

Waking Up

FOUR

Mistress of Your Own Life

FIVE

Moonlight

SIX

Simon

SEVEN

Fire and Ice

EIGHT

Easter Monday

NINE

Facts and Fictions

TEN

Beginnings

ELEVEN

Coming Home

TWELVE

Ironing Shirts

THIRTEEN

Sighing for Love

FOURTEEN

A Theory of Relativity

FIFTEEN

Mothers, Friends, and Widows

SIXTEEN

Bill Clinton and Me

SEVENTEEN

The Yard Sale

EIGHTEEN

Making Decisions

NINETEEN

Under the Red Horse

TWENTY

Five Women, Six Days, One Onion

TWENTY-ONE

Bed, Bath, and a World Beyond

TWENTY-TWO

More Things in Heaven and Earth

Epilogue

Some Poems by Trin

PROLOGUE

We sat on the small stone terrace with our morning coffee. My book was in a cloud document on the laptop, nearly finished.

It’s too long, I said. Tell me what I should cut, will you?

Yeah, I’m good at that, she said.

It was June in South Carolina, early enough in the day that we could begin our literary exercise outside before the full, uncompromising heat settled in. A carafe of coffee sat between us. I topped off my cup again—and once again—before plunging in to read aloud the stories of my life.

You won’t be annoyed when I talk about you, right? I asked her.

Well, she said, I don’t promise anything on that front. But take a chance.

It’s going to take hours—maybe days—to read the whole thing. Okay?

Oh, for God’s sake, Trin, just begin, will you?

So that was what I did.

ONE

Dancing to Tchaikovsky

Believe me, the reward is not so

great without the struggle.

—Wilma Rudolph

1950

W hen I was five, one very bad thing and several very good things happened to me. On the bad side, I got polio. But more about that later.

On a more positive note, I discovered Sigmund Romberg, Peter Ilych Tchaikovsky, and Howdy Doody. Oh, and poker—I was quite a card shark, as my aunt Ruthie often said. I mastered the rudiments of poker under her tutelage, learning numbers, enjoying the colorful picture cards, especially the pretty queens, and occasionally manifesting a full house. I have a house! I announced on one specific winter evening still held within memory.

A full house, my aunt breathed between her teeth. I suspect she cheated for me on occasion, but on that particular winter evening in 1950, she had left me to my own counsel, and I had triumphed. She pushed the pennies in my direction. There you are, Sharon Theresa, she said, not in the least annoyed.

We sat in the blue-draped parlor of our house on Pearl Street in Newton, Massachusetts, Ruthie and I. The Victrola played Vaughn Monroe, a song called Racing with the Moon. She sang a few phrases in her quiet alto, shuffled the deck, and dealt out another hand. I was five and should have been getting into pajamas and preparing for bed, but there was no urgency since I had no school that year, no kindergarten. Instead I stayed inside most days with Gram, learning to read the funny papers. Evenings, I tried to grasp the fine points of poker with Ruthie, my maiden aunt, before she got tangled up with the Italian guy next door and got married.

On that night as on most nights, Gram and Mom clattered dishes in the kitchen; Uncle Dan, thin and athletic, bent over the Boston Globe at the dining room table; and Grandpa drifted through the house, mumbling a shred of his favorite drinking song—I had a hat when I came in, and I’ll have a hat when I go out—before he settled into his chair by the kitchen stove. In the parlor, Ruthie and I dismissed an easy game of war as old hat and opted for the challenge of poker.

My earliest memories settle softly in and around our front parlor on Pearl Street. As a four-year-old, I made tents behind the red brocade couch; tinkled on the ugly upright piano; recited an occasional rosary with the family on our threadbare oriental; and, of course, as soon as I could lift the lid, played the Victrola. It was not the old-fashioned kind of record player with a crank and a giant horn—ours plugged in—but it was big and antique-looking, and everyone in the house called it a Victrola anyway. Ruthie and Mom preferred the songs of the late 1940s, sounds that ran in the background of my early life. But more than Bing Crosby or Doris Day, I remember several large record albums bound like books.

These were your father’s, my mother said. He loved classical music.

Without brothers or sisters and left to myself most afternoons, I’d pull the parlor’s heavy pocket doors shut, and out of sight of my grandmother in the kitchen, I’d become the beautiful Izuri in Romberg’s Desert Song, draped in veils and diaphanous skirts. Cheap silk kerchiefs were plentiful in those days. Every woman had two or three. And for a little girl with a yearning for romance, they were a transforming disguise.

But exotic costumes notwithstanding, I preferred Tchaikovsky to Romberg every time. In my faux ballet way, I would pirouette and plié to sugarplum fairies and the ethereal dance of the reed pipes. I knew every note of the Nutcracker Suite by the time I was six. And in that Victorian parlor, surrounded by the lush spirit of the great Russian, several realities wrapped themselves around me. They are with me still.

One reality is that I never met my father, a second lieutenant in the United States Army, who died in Normandy a few days before I was born. Mom showed me the Purple Heart she kept in a buffet drawer beside the good silver. I rummaged through his footlocker when I got a bit older, hungry to know him. I found a musty green uniform, a silk parachute, and a packet of letters I was too young to understand. Yet somehow I knew that his spirit was in the classical albums and on a shelf of leather-bound books that witnessed my growing up. Even as a four-year old, I liked the look of those books with nameplates inscribed in a feathery script: Lieutenant Robert E. McCormick.

Those sweetly blurred memories of the parlor, the dancing, and the books turned with a sharp clarity in August 1949. It was a time of epidemic, though my family, healthy and hearty Irish stock, perhaps felt immune. Perhaps they thought their Catholic faith protected them. Perhaps they simply did not know that summers were especially vulnerable, as the polio virus moved like a viper through wading pools thick with kids. The virus was everywhere: in the ground, in the water, even lapping at the shores of our Cape Cod beaches.

In all the summers of my childhood, our family spent a few weeks at one beach or another. Sometimes that meant a little cottage in Falmouth or Hyannis. That year, they chose Swift’s Beach in Wareham. During the first week of our vacation, my mother stayed back in Newton, where she worked at the telephone company. Without Mom, Gram and Uncle Dan entertained me with beach afternoons and some memorable outings into town. One evening we went to a local talent show where kids performed songs and dances. When I saw those kids singing behind a huge round microphone, I knew I wanted to do that too. I wanted to sing. I wanted to dance.

Next year, Gram said.

That night, I practiced dance moves in the cottage, and Gram said I could start ballet lessons in the fall.

Another night, we saw The Wizard of Oz. It might have been my first trip to a movie theater; certainly the most memorable. I was fine when the screen turned from black-and-white to color and angelic Glinda floated into view. I was a little wary of the army of Munchkins and their galloping hyperactivity, but everything was generally fine until the witch showed up. Her furiously green face, angular and angry, and that sharp, hideous nose—it was too much for me.

I pulled on Gram’s arm. I want to go home, I said, crying and covering my eyes.

Ah, well, she said.

That was the end of our movie excursions for that particular vacation.

On Friday night, my mother drove in from Newton to begin her weeklong vacation, and on Saturday, we went down to the beach. It was sunny and hot, with the clear breeze Cape Cod is known for. My beautiful mom—I was happy to be with her, just the two of us stepping into the low waves. I hadn’t learned to swim, so we paddled around in the shallow water. She pulled me along by my arms, telling me to kick. Then we held hands and jumped the waves. It was a day I remember with the clarity of unclouded joy. I also remember a sharp bite on my baby toe. I looked down through the shallow water to see a horrible crab, a monster. Shaking it off and crying, I was undoubtedly mollified with ice cream and a warm towel. My mom was good at stuff like that.

The next day, I got very sick. For a day and a night, I slept. Intermittently, I would wake to waves of nausea as my body—my cells, I suppose—succumbed to some foul yellow intruder. There was pain in every muscle, in every limb, and there was whatever sort of delirium my five-year-old self experienced. Sometime in those days, a doctor came—doctors still made house calls in the late 1940s. He had a black bag and a kind face. My mother sat me in a chair opposite, and he asked me to walk toward him, but my legs wouldn’t work. I tried, but with the first step, my legs turned to jelly. He held my arms as I collapsed.

That afternoon, while I slept in the backseat, my uncle and mother drove me to a hospital in Boston, where I spent the next three months.

Three months can feel like centuries to a five-year-old. I have forgotten most of those early days, but a few nuggets of memory remain. When I was first admitted, I lay on a brown leather pallet, feeling alone in that sterile room. Blurred faces of nurses or doctors floated around me. Someone tested my muscles. Sometime in the first weeks of quarantine, I began scratching furiously at my scalp under my blonde hair and was taken to a white sink, where I was washed with strong shampoo.

As the acute sickness of the virus faded, I felt well enough to interact with the four or five other little girls in the ward. One lively girl across the way encouraged me to a contest. Both of us grabbed the exercise bar above our heads and pulled ourselves up by our arms in a kind of chinning motion. When we let go and fell backward, our backs too weak to sit up, we would laugh together at the game of it. The whole experience seemed like an adventure, a kind of summer camp. I recall no homesickness, only enjoyment at the unique companionship of other little people who looked like me. I felt sure my mom, Gram, and the others would eventually show up.

Only once did I allow myself to feel sad. It must have been during a Sunday afternoon visiting period. My mother and Aunt Ruth, who visited after the quarantine lifted, held me up to look out the tall hospital window beside my bed. It seemed a long way down, maybe four stories. Below, I saw Uncle Dan; his younger brother, Uncle Buddy; and Buddy’s girlfriend, Mae. She was always nice to me, sweet and funny. I saw her bright smile and her circle of curly, dark hair and felt sad. They were so far away. I turned my face from the window, the distance between us made clear.

That was the only time during those long, unnatural months when I cried, and for only a minute or two. I did not cry even when the dreaded blood cart came by a few times a week and a gentle nurse pricked my fingertip with a tiny razor or when a stern nurse mocked my shy self or chastised me for drawing with crayons on the clean white footrest. In those months, there were few tears. Maybe I choked them back, learning at an early age the value of showing a facade of strength. I would cry a little in that hospital window in the comfort of my mother and Ruthie, but I would be a strong soldier in front of strangers.

One day I fell out of the bed. It was a high metal-framed hospital bed. I seemed to be ten feet off the ground, an easy height for nurses to deal with. I usually kept well in the middle of the mattress, penned in by sheets and blankets. But on that day, the blankets had come loose as I was setting up my Little Women get-well cards fashioned in the shapes of the sisters, Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy. I lost track of myself, and in a flash, slid down the side of the bed and landed on the cold floor in a small lump. By some miracle, I hadn’t hurt myself, but within an hour, I was tethered into a harness attached to the sides of the bed.

The restraint technique failed. In a few days, I slipped over the side again, dangling like a parachute caught in a tree. The thing was, I had never slept in an adult single bed. At home, I still slept in a crib in my mother’s room. Perhaps my mother and Gram thought it was the most practical way of protecting me, even at the age of five. Maybe my mother hadn’t wanted to spend money on a new bedroom set for the two of us. Whatever the reason, the hospital bed was my first test in a big-girl bed, and I flunked it. After the episode in the harness failed, I was back in a crib and stayed in it until I left the hospital.

After some weeks of healing and growing stronger, my crib and I were moved to another ward filled with older girls and a few grown-up women. There was a wonderful dollhouse, and a radio played the tunes of the day. I learned all the words to I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts, which aired constantly on the radio. I would never hear it again in my life without being propelled back to that time at Haines Memorial Hospital.

Most days, I sat in a giant wooden-backed wheelchair, often situated out on the sunporch. Sometimes I was put in a big silver box full of heat lamps. My head stuck out at one end. It looked like the scary iron lungs I had glimpsed once from a hallway, the ones that helped other little kids breathe. My box was a fifteen-minute experiment, designed to stimulate dying nerves and muscles before a session of physical therapy. I exercised lightly, but was never asked to walk, probably because I couldn’t. It was not something I worried about. In my five-year-old soul, I knew walking would happen eventually.

Summer gave way to fall, and my hair, growing longer and darker and increasingly out of control, splashed awkwardly across my forehead. I peered through it like curtains. One of my therapists decided to address the issue. She may or may not have asked Mom’s permission, but one day she took a sharp pair of scissors, told me to hold still, and cut a new set of bangs across my forehead. She held up a mirror for me to see. I liked the look. My wan little face sprinkled lightly with freckles seemed fuller and prettier. I smiled at myself. When my mother saw me, she was shocked but soon warmed up to the new look, and by the next week, she, too, came in with a new hairstyle, complete with Jane Wyman bangs.

When I returned home just before Thanksgiving, I still could not walk, but I could crawl. Traversing the distance from parlor to dining room to kitchen and back again on my knees, I began to feel a bit of strength in my weak left leg. I didn’t care that I was crawling instead of walking—didn’t care a whit. I was moving under my own steam—that was the important thing.

After the initial illness, the strength in my back and right leg had returned, but my left leg was almost useless. Mom did physical therapy every afternoon during her midday break from the telephone company. I began using crutches around the house and gradually needed just one. By the end of February, I had gained enough strength to walk carefully through the house, holding on to furniture for balance.

The Victrola, that squat playmate, waited for me in the parlor. The Nutcracker sat in its album. I wondered if its magic would still work. At first, I tried a tentative swishing movement to the music. The Russian troika was too fast for me, I knew, but the Arabian Dance was slow and easy. My upper body swayed with the woodwinds’ eerie melodies.

Occasionally, I thought about what I had lost and grew sad. I even wondered about my own death as I sat in the parlor one wintry afternoon. I recall the event with the clarity of yesterday’s sunset. I sat on the floor in front of the brocade-covered rocking chair, and realized that someday I would die, that I would cease to exist. Perhaps my recent three-month stay in the hospital caused me to confront the eternal verities at the age of five. Perhaps it was the music. Whatever the cause in that moment, the idea of beauty, eternity, and my own pensiveness became interwoven. It is a veil I have never fully tossed away.

Not that music conjures up sad images for me. On the contrary, I find it comes closer to the idea of God—to perfect beauty—than anything I know.

My brush with the idea of death was fleeting. I climbed up on the rocking chair, said a prayer to Jesus, and knew that old age—sixty or seventy—was a long way off. Besides, I figured Jesus would take care of me. Then I shook off all morbid thoughts, walked to the Victrola without holding on to anything, and played the Waltz of the Flowers.

Evenings, Ruthie continued her guidance in card playing. That was the winter when several good things happened: I learned how to play a decent hand of poker, I learned how to crawl, and I learned how to walk again. I memorized most of the Nutcracker Suite, and on our tiny brand-new Motorola television set, I was introduced to Howdy Doody.

But I never imagined as we sat at that little table in the parlor on Pearl Street that life would stretch out in ways both ordinary and extraordinary, that it would be full of adventure, music, theater, books, songs, stories, poetry, travel, love, and loss—and dance. In my own way, though I would never study ballet, I would somehow dance.

TWO

Beyond the Black Lagoon

Well, it seems to me a scientist

has need for both vision and confidence.

—Kay Lawrence, The Creature from the Black Lagoon

1955

H unting rhubarb, Lori and I dragged a rotting post away from the back fence. As the log rolled away, its underside exposed black wood and a mass of crawling white worms. Lori, who was nine and without fear, immediately crouched down to investigate. More than a year older than she, I knew for sure I hated those ugly, disturbing creatures, and turned away to avoid a direct view.

Leave it alone, Lori. Forget the rhubarb. Let’s go in. My voice sounded whiny even to myself.

Lori’s round gray eyes read, Sissy. Her pale little face, with those preternaturally straight, thick eyelashes, froze in disdain. But for once, I didn’t care. I just wanted to get away—erase the wormy image before it slipped into my dreams. Lori backed off, shrugging with her usual resignation at my natural reserve. We gave up on the rhubarb.

Until that summer of 1955, when I turned eleven, I had lived in a velvet world. Despite never knowing my father, except through the few possessions I’d inherited, and despite my early illness and the surgeries that resulted, my life was cushioned by Gram and my mother. We three were a team. On Saturday nights, my mother washed my wild honey hair in the kitchen sink and rinsed it in lemon juice, humming one of the old tunes as she moved her hands over my scalp. It was idyllic and luxurious in its way. Then Gram would tie my hair up in little rags. Like Topsy, she said.

On Sunday morning, Mom sculpted curls with a long-stemmed comb, and Gram slipped one of many starched and immaculate pastel dresses, often handcrafted, over my head. Then the three of us, along with the rest of the family, went to Mass.

The whole family had moved when I was nearly seven from the rented Victorian two-family house in Newton to a more modern single-family home in Watertown—modern in the sense that it had been built in 1920 rather than in 1890. We now had a kitchen with a white electric stove instead of the clunky black one in the old house—a black Mariah, Gram called it. We had a Westinghouse refrigerator instead of an icebox, and we had a backyard with actual grass. My mother had used my father’s life insurance payment—$3,000—as a down payment on our family’s first owned house. It had four small bedrooms: Uncle Dan occupied one, along with Uncle Buddy before he married Mae and moved out; my grandmother was in a second, along with Ruthie before she fell for the Italian guy next door and did the same; Granddaddy was in the tiny third bedroom for the few brief years before he died; and my mother and I shared the small but elegant twin-bedded back fourth bedroom. The house had one bathroom upstairs, tiny closets, and a musty basement where I could play out my fairy tales, sometimes with Lori, sometimes alone.

It was August now, and except for the occasional crawling creature, life was good. Massachusetts summers were clear and warm. I would loll in bed until nine thirty, feeling the new morning sift through an open window. Through the screen, the smell of grass was rich and inviting. The day buzzed with locusts—that strange, droning blat we only heard in summer. The waiting world was telling me to get up and get outside.

But first I would go downstairs to a bowl of Rice Krispies and a cup of cocoa. Mom and Uncle Dan had gone to work long since, and Gram was sewing in the dining room. The sewing machine silenced when I came into the kitchen, and Gram appeared in the doorway.

Morning, Gram. It’s okay. I can get the cereal myself, and I can heat the water for cocoa. Everybody else does. I had just turned eleven, after all.

No, no, Trinnie. I don’t want you fussing around the stove. It’s no bother.

I sat at the kitchen table, confronting the pulpy, freshly made orange juice, anxious to gulp down breakfast and get outside.

On the front porch, I sat and watched the day begin. Like curious bees, the kids collected in David Barlow’s driveway. Across the street, I could see them checking out their reflections in his ’49 Ford. David Barlow was fourteen and spent his life shining that car. In a few years, when I get my license, he had said once to his adoring audience, I’ll give you all a ride. To the other kids, it sounded like a long time to wait. I, on the other hand, considering his nice smile and curly brown hair, was willing to wait as long as necessary.

By ten thirty most days, a half dozen kids would come straggling out from the porches and side yards of Preston Street. The group might include Denise Shumaker and her brother, Dennis, who spent a lot of time at the library. Sometimes Cheryl from Olcott Street joined the assembly. Cheryl was a quirky redhead who sang torch songs in backyard shows in a throaty vibrato that was very impressive. Then there were the Newcombs, Lori and her brother Bobby.

I liked them all pretty well, though I’d hang back, watching the others from my stoop, until Lori came out. Then I’d wander down to Barlow’s with the rest of them, sticking close to Lori. She was my best friend in the neighborhood—only in summer, though. When I started back to school, most of the kids walked to Browne Elementary a few streets away—they were Protestant, Gram explained—while I got driven over to St. Agnes Catholic School in Newton. So when summer came, I always felt like the new kid, the odd man out. Still, I did my best to fit in, using two crutches instead of one to keep up as they all dashed up and down the street. Once in a while, I’d toss the crutches and try jump rope, but usually, I just held one of the ends.

I was accepted pretty well by everybody in the neighborhood, except Bobby Newcomb, Lori’s older brother. He had Lori’s face, the same round gray eyes with their fringe of long, straight eyelashes. But instead of her wide-eyed, bland expression, his eyes were tinged with anger mixed with a shadow of disgust—disgust at me, I came to realize. The origin of his dislike for me or the course of its evolution I never discovered, nor did I ever ask.

When I first moved to Preston Street just after first grade, I knew him from a distance. He was a year older than I and a real athlete, so the talk went, and supposedly, he got all As in school. At first, he treated me the way I imagined all older brothers treated their little sisters’ friends: with quiet dismissal. By the time I was in fourth grade, he made no secret of it: he hated me. When Granddaddy died of kidney failure in the winter of fourth grade and I stayed in Lori’s apartment while my family held his wake, Bobby’s antipathy was obvious. I saw it in his face as he walked into his dining room. I was sitting at the table, doing my homework. His mother was making much of me, saying how pretty my hair was and how smart I must be. She was so nice she never noticed the embarrassment that passed between Bobby and me.

I don’t know how or when it started, but I know full well by the time I was eleven that Bobby Newcomb hated me, Sharon Theresa McCormick, with a burning, unearthly passion. You’d think he’d have better things to do, being a brainy baseball player and all, but when summer came and the outside crowd assembled or when Lori and I were playing cards on the Newcombs’ front porch, Bobby never passed up an opportunity to fire some little assault.

Couldn’t you find your way home, Theresa? he’d whine in my direction. Why don’t you go find someplace else to mess up? Do you have cooties? Watch out—she’ll give you cooties.

Lori mainly ignored it, rolled her eyes, and said, Don’t worry; he doesn’t mean it.

But I knew he did mean it. I especially knew one cloudy afternoon in early August as Lori and I were getting into a furious game of war on her porch. Bobby wheeled his bike into the dusty patch of weeds that made up the Newcombs’ front yard and bounded up the front steps two at a time. He stopped over our card game.

Who’s winning? he said, almost sounding interested.

Nobody yet. We just started, Lori answered.

I looked up into his face to read his expression. He stared down at me, his eyebrows frozen in a quizzical stare.

Who are you looking at? he said. You with your big ears. You look like the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

Shut up, Bobby, Lori said. Nobody asked your opinion.

I never had a ready response for his attacks, cursed as I was with a life of gentle handling. Later, I thought, Why didn’t I say, And you look like the Blob? But of course, I didn’t think of that at the time; I only wondered why on earth Gram had put my hair in those stupid pigtails that made my ears look big and stick out more than ever. Maybe he was right. Maybe I did look like a monster from a horror movie.

I managed to get a grip on myself, look down at the cracked wooden porch slats, and whisper, Maybe you should find something better to do and not go around insulting people.

He replied without taking a breath, Oh, I don’t do it very often. Only to you. And people like you.

I didn’t know exactly what he meant by that. I assumed he thought I was ugly or dumb. It had not occurred to me, or at least I had never allowed the thought, that the small wooden crutches tossed casually behind me had something to do with his pointed cruelty.

Bobby turned away, laughing to himself, and breezed up the stairs to his family’s second-floor flat.

Later, I studied myself in the bedroom mirror, trying to determine the degree of my hideousness. I was thin. Small bones protruded like seashells from either side of my elbows. Yet my arms and chest had muscle, had built up strength from a couple of years using crutches off and on after various operations. I could fly around the neighborhood with the best of them on the crutches; didn’t give it a second thought as long as I could keep up. Lori and Cheryl liked to try them out. They were like toys. But they had a harder time swinging along because their arms were not as strong as mine. Sometimes Lori and I arm-wrestled, laughing mostly. Then her mouth would set, and her tough little arm would show its muscle. It would start out as a joke, but I could see she was determined to show me that even though she was a year younger, she was superior. Sometimes she won, but mainly, I did. It was my one claim to fame. Lori tried to be good-natured about losing, but I could see it bothered her. She didn’t like to lose at anything.

People like you, Bobby had said. The words drifted in the space behind my thoughts, but I could not confront their real meaning, not fully. Instead, I studied my face in the mirror. By some standards, I was considered pretty in my class. Sherman Minot thought so. There had even been a couple of fistfights in third grade when Sherman and another kid, Raymond, went at it on the way home from school. Nosebleeds ensued. We had all been walking toward my friend Eileen’s house, when the boys dropped back for a few minutes. Raymond had come back with a bloody nose. Sherman had disappeared. I asked Eileen what on earth they had been fighting about. You! she said. It was a surprise to me. Sherman had made no secret of his admiration, but Raymond? It was all a mystery. Boys! I liked both of them all right, but once out of sight, I gave them barely a second thought. Back in third grade, I had given fistfights no currency. Fighting was just something boys did.

In the mirror, my face was small, thin, and pale. I wanted to gain weight, but it was hard with my grandmother’s basic Irish cooking: beige-colored beef stew and chicken soup flecked with puckered skin.

And my hair! Shoulder-length and uncurled in the summer, it drowned my freckled face in a wild explosion. I fiddled with it in the mirror, rolled it on top like Cinderella at the ball, and stuck a few bobby pins in it. That’s nice, I thought, except for the ears. Bobby was right. I had big ears, and they stuck out. He had called me Ears more than once. Something had to be done about the hair.

Gram, will you cut my hair?

She stood at the sink, washing potatoes.

I touched her arm to get her attention.

Oh, I don’t trust myself, dear. Ask your mother when she comes home.

My mom would be home from work at five thirty. I waited in the living room. When she came through the door looking tired and flushed with the heat but as pretty as always, I wasted no time.

Mom, cut my hair, please?

Trinnie, she said, using my family’s nickname, I’m afraid I’d make a mess. Why not wait and get a nice cut before school starts?

School was a month away—an eternity. I didn’t tell them why it was so important; I never mentioned Bobby Newcomb, his insults, or the fact that walking up the dusty sidewalk reminded me of saints I’d read about in religion who were roasted on spits or had their tongues pulled out. He’d be nice for a while or ignore me altogether, which was okay too, and then, from nowhere, a voice would sing out from behind the bushes: You make me sick. Why don’t you drop dead?

I had no comeback, except an occasional Why don’t you? Nobody’d care.

Something told me not to engage with him. Even at eleven, I had a whisper of understanding that to acknowledge the reality of his attacks would somehow confirm my own reality, the unspoken, unfortunate, embarrassing reality that shadowed my life.

Despite everything, there were some normal kid mishaps, complete with bumps, bruises, and black-and-blue marks. In July, Sherman Minot, on deck for a rare afternoon visit, and I were riding my bike down our hilly street. It was a two-wheeler with training wheels attached since I couldn’t balance the usual way. I was sitting behind him, holding on to his waist, and we were going much too fast. The inevitable happened: the bike tipped over into the gutter. My leg was skinned all along the side, bloody and sore, and I went home crying to Gram. Sherman and I both got mercurochrome, some Band-Aids, and a severe talking-to. I never tried that kind of joyride again.

Sometimes I complained to my mom about an argument with Lori. One time Lori sided with Bobby, who had asked me why I was so skinny. My mother said, Never mind. Just tell them your father was very thin too. It just runs in the family. But the other thing, the dark cloud that enveloped me when Bobby Newcomb was around, I never mentioned at home. The shadow he cast had become a habit I barely acknowledged, like the leg brace I wore to school.

The final days of summer unwound in a stubborn heat that locked itself in the tiny rooms of our house on Preston Street. Some nights, while Uncle Dan, out of modesty or because he never felt the heat, opted for his bedroom upstairs. Mom, Gram, and I slept downstairs to catch a breeze from the open living room windows. My mother wanted to open the front windows as wide as they would go, along with the dining room windows at the back of the house. She and Gram always had the same argument.

Whisht, Marie, Gram said, don’t open them so much. We’ll look like a shanty house. Her sweet face was pink with moisture, and wisps of white hair curled along the hairline. Her look was lamb-soft, as always, but her Irish resolve was full of steel as well.

Mom lost her patience. You know, Ma, she said, if you’d just let me open these windows when the sun goes down, I could cool the house off with no trouble.

No, Gram said, it’s cheap looking.

So, with the windows barely one-quarter open, the ladies sprawled on the easy chairs, while I curled up on the love seat. Perspiration collected in the crease of my neck as I floundered into wild and sweaty dreams.

On one Amazonian night, I was hounded by tigers, chased through brambles, my legs churning up dirt. Everything living and dead clawed at my feet. Crawling low through the brush, I saw a wild-eyed creature ahead. With teeth like daggers, he was as tall as a man. His yellow eyes darted from side to side as he approached me. Brown hair stuck out of his head in jagged knots, streaked with blood, but it was not his head that scared me. What scared me were his searching, brooding eyes and his wide, determined mouth.

He was seeking me out. I could feel it. I stopped breathing, making myself small in the underbrush. Maybe he won’t see me, I thought. But he lunged at me through the darkness. His big monkey hands tore my clothes, dragging me toward him. In a fit of self-survival, I doubled up my body, put my feet flat against his chest, and pushed away from him. The force of my legs propelled me back into the brush, and as if by a miracle, he lost his balance and fell backward.

He growled in surprise. Then the growls turned to panic. As I lay in the weeds, I heard him thrashing, grabbing air in a frantic whoosh, as the ferns crackled under his weight. His wordless anger was aimed at me, but it was fading. Even as the grunts grew more frantic, I sensed his voice dying and a funny gurgling sound coming from the spot. Maybe he was going away.

I raised my head from the green brush, and suddenly, I was above him, watching as the last spikes of tangled hair disappeared into a funnel of quicksand.

Quicksand! The nightmarish stuff of Saturday afternoon movies. I was floating above a swirl of sand circling toward the center of the earth. As my body grew heavy and lost altitude, my gasps broke free and woke me up. I was safe.

My heart rumbled in my ears. But it was only a dream, and I could handle it. I had forced him backward and gotten away. I had been strong in that dream. My legs had worked fine. I straightened the square brocade pillow under my head, moved closer to the open window, and fell asleep.

The next day, it rained—and the next day too. Thank God, Mrs. Newcomb said.

I was up in Lori’s flat, on the sunporch, playing whist and watching the rain. I didn’t go to Lori’s often and was always surprised when I did. The Newcombs had bare linoleum floors with no rugs. Plastic curtains with pink flowers hung in the dining room windows. A long strip of sticky paper dotted with flies dangled from the kitchen light. My own house was different. We had carpets and never used flypaper. We had a flyswatter that hung on a hook in the pantry. Our floors had rugs.

That day, I was invited to share a grilled cheese sandwich in the kitchen. Lori’s mom was younger than my mom and had long black hair. She wore an orange housecoat in the middle of the day and smoked Lucky Strikes. She was always gentle and pleasant with me, sometimes commenting on my brown eyes and honey-colored hair.

Does your mother curl your hair? she asked that morning.

Yes, ma’am. Sometimes. But now I can do it myself. Almost every night when I go to school.

Well, aren’t you the smartest? I bet you do well in school too.

Oh, pretty well. Usually first honors but sometimes second.

I didn’t usually brag about myself like that, but I raised my voice a little now, feeling comfortable with Mrs. Newcomb and hoping Bobby might be listening. He was hunched over his cheese sandwich with a copy of Sports Illustrated. He ruffled the pages and growled a little under his breath. Little Stevie Newcomb, who was about four, was trying to separate the two pieces of fried bread and scoop up the cheese with a spoon. I watched him, fascinated.

After lunch, Lori and I started a game of rummy. Bobby was in his room. Suddenly, he called out to us.

Hey, you two, come in here. I want to show you something.

We went into his room. It seemed an interesting invitation. I was flattered he had included me after all the other stuff. Except for Uncle Dan and, of course, Sherman Minot, I had barely any close contact with boys or men. I went to school with boys, but mainly, my world revolved around women, my girlfriends, and the nuns. I was a little afraid of boys, actually—of their strength, their close-cropped muscularity. I felt fear mixed with a fascination of the unknown. Now Bobby Newcomb was inviting me into his den to share something important.

Look. I found it in the backyard. It was dead. I’m going to do surgery. Wanna help? Bobby had his chair pulled over to the bed, where a piece of plywood lay on the sheet.

A small dead mouse was stretched out on the plywood. I could see his little whiskers and long, skinny tail. His gray skin was shaded in white, and he looked stiff. I felt a growing lump of nausea rising in my throat and wanted to make any excuse to get out of there, go down the stairs, and head home, but I knew the teasing from both of them would never end if I did. So I leaned up against the chest of drawers and tried to look interested.

It was a small, narrow room. The three of us filled most of the available space. Bobby had his mom’s buttonhole scissors.

She said I could use them if I clean them off afterward, he said. I think I’ll be a heart surgeon when I grow up, so this is a good chance to start practicing, ya know?

Lori was all eyes and ears. She’d apparently never seen anything so fascinating. She moved in close as Bobby laid the mouse on its back and started his incision under the chin. Snip, snip. I heard the scissors cut through skin and crackle a little as they hit breastbone. I tried studying a corner of the headboard and the poster of Ted Williams over the bed. Lori was huddled across the bed, blocking my view a little, but I could tell from Bobby’s hand movements that he was into the tiny chest cavity. He asked me to hand him the common pins to fasten the skin back against the plywood.

Hey, look at this. Here’s the heart and lungs. And the kidneys, I think. Lori, get my science book in the kitchen, will you?

Lori took off, leaving me alone with Bobby and the mouse. There was nowhere to hide.

Come on, Theresa. Take a look at this.

Bobby pushed the little cadaver over toward me. I was still clinging to the bureau, but in that small space, there were few other places to look. I gritted my teeth and looked down. Pink and yellow liquid oozed from the open cavity and sat