by Anne Rice
Rubbing her back harder (I could make out the chicken-bone tracery of scapula and spinal column under her jersey rugby shirt), I leaned over as far as my aching back would allow and assured her, “Oh, it just seems that way … Stephen probably just falls asleep after you do at night,” all the while wishing that I could scoop the little girl up and carry her off somewhere far, far from her doomed-to-be-an-infant brother. Anywhere away from him, cute and cuddly and almost-comical as Stephen was.
How cute is he going to look in five years? Or ten? Will a cooing teenager in diapers be so “clean” and adorable? I asked myself—but my mind wasn’t actually looking for any answers.
“Never,” she firmly reiterated, then, moving her right arm up to the level of her face, she slowly crooked one tiny-nailed finger. Getting off the child-size chair I’d been sitting on, I hunkered down next to Nancy’s cot. Once my face was sufficiently close to hers, the small girl with the ruler-straight Buster Brown bangs and perfectly combed page-boy haircut whispered, “Stephen’s dead in his head.”
“No, Nancy,” I said a little more firmly, but just as softly. “That can’t be. If he were, he wouldn’t be able to see, or make sounds, or wave his arms. He’s just … not like you and me, okay? But he’s okay for himself,” I lied brightly, hoping Mrs. Day Care wouldn’t notice me talking to Nancy, and bitch about it to my Intro to Ed professor.
On the low cot, Nancy resolutely shook her head, barely making a ripple in her dark, fine hair. “Dead in the head,” she said with that heartbreaking finality that told me not to try to convince her otherwise. As I got back on the little blond wood and enameled metal school chair, I delicately kept rubbing my hand along her knobby spine, telling myself, Don’t push the kid so hard. C’mon, what is she, three or four at the most? What the hell does she know about retardation or arrested development? Probably heard one of her folks say it—or some friend of theirs.
The truth was, I hadn’t even seen Nancy and Stephen’s parents yet, so I had no idea what sort of people they were. Profoundly disappointed, perhaps. Embarrassed? I doubted it; the children were both too well-turned-out to be the products of a family who didn’t want to show them off in at least the most basic way. Overcompensating? That sounded more like it; I could imagine a fussy, PTA-aholic Jaycette type of mother ironing their tiny underwear and probing their every orifice with a Q-Tip, just to make sure that no one would accuse her of not being an on-top-of-things parent. Clean kids, good home. And ever mind that Stephen would never so much as say his own name, let alone do his duty on his own.
Once naptime was over that afternoon (true to Nancy’s word, her brother never did drift off to sleep, but only turned the volume and the jerking down a couple of notches—but then again, Nancy’s dark eyes never closed for very long either), and Mrs. Day Care Incarnate bustled her polyester-painted bottom out of the building, two lines of hands-locked kiddies in tow behind her, one of the other inmates and I were supposed to clean up the nap area. Our job was to put away the now-folded cots and straighten up the litter of kiddie books and battered nap animals while the toddlers played for half an hour in the bright early-spring sunshine.
I’d never been all that close to Ruth, one of my fellow Intro to Ed classmates—she was an Early Childhood major, I was into Secondary Ed—but she was about ten years older than me, and her husband was a professor at the college, so, still vaguely disturbed by Nancy’s naptime statements, I decided to force myself to become just a little friendlier with the woman. After all, there was a good possibility that she might know something about Stephen and Nancy’s situation, or maybe even their parents.
“Oh Stevie—you mean our little angel? It’s sad, really,” Ruth said in that chicken-laying-an-extra-large-egg crackle-cackle voice of hers as she quickly folded a metal-frame-and-webbing cot into a neat square bundle. “His parents are the DeGrootens, you know, Dr. DeGrooten, in the ethics department—”
“Oh, yeah, I had him last semester … gave me an A even though I never said more than five words at a time in class. Said I understood what he was talking about during his lectures,” I found myself babbling, now suddenly anxious to leave the subject of Stephen—and Nancy—far behind us. But I was a little too late; Ruth’s tongue was now firmly locked in the On position:
“Terrible thing, what happened with Stephen. He would’ve been fine, if only Marta’s doctors had listened to her and taken him that same week he was due to be born. What are you, a sophomore? Oh, a freshman. I was going to say, if you’d have been around here four years back, you would’ve remembered—it was all over the school. Well, anyhow”—Ruth deftly manipulated another cot into a tight tubular bundle—“Marta was a couple of weeks past her due date, and she wanted the baby out, but her doctors said, ‘Wait, there’s no rush, you could’ve miscounted.’ But she was already thirty-five or six by then, so I don’t know what the doctors were waiting for, Hitler to rise from the dead or something, so anyhow, they didn’t induce labor, even though Marta kept insisting that she wasn’t feeling well, that the baby wasn’t moving as much. But you know how doctors are, they just slap that stethoscope on your belly and if they hear a heartbeat, it’s alive and they don’t give it a second thought. This was around Christmas. I remember how huge she was in that woolen cape of hers when I met her in the Penney’s store. The baby was already three weeks overdue, and I don’t know if her doctors had her chart mixed up with some elephant or what, but they wouldn’t take it. Marta told me she was worried sick about the baby, and her color was just off, almost the same shade as her cape, and that was sort of a Prussian blue—”
Figuring that Ruth wasn’t about to get to any really important details for a few minutes (after all, she was going on about what the unfortunate Mrs. DeGrooten was wearing in the J.C. Penney’s store), I found myself muttering “Uh-huh” after every overemphasized word while I looked through the blinds-bisected windows, which faced the tiny playground now swarming with shrieking toddlers. Only, since the windows were airtight, I couldn’t hear any of them, just see their mouths snap open and shut quickly, like hungry baby birds who’d tumbled en masse out of the nest. Mrs. Day Care was off to one side of the play area—a four-foot-high geodesic-style jungle gym, three bucket-seats-with-legholes-type swings, a short sloping slide, and a sandbox—animated wrinkled face bright, pink-nailed hands gaily clapping in time to some rhythm none of the toddlers were following. It was tragic, how that woman had missed her true vocation—trained seal at the water park.
Stephen had been dumped into one of those bucket-seated swings, his wiggling plump legs thrusting through the leg openings, his hands up and vaguely wiggling. As usual, his mouth was wide open, pale tongue lolling almost sweetly to one side, his huge eyes vacant and glistening. While Ruth was yammering “—and so I told her, ‘Just go find another doctor, then.’ I mean, honestly, it wasn’t like—” I searched the play area for Nancy. I finally saw her squatting down close to the curved retaining wall built around the swing-set, pawing intently at the asphalt and dirt ground, as if slowly grubbing for bugs. Her pinched face, ever-framed by that new-doll immaculate soft brown hair, was distant, yet oddly intent.
Behind me, Ruth’s rambling story suddenly took on a more definite—and chilling—direction:
“—days before Christmas, Dr. DeGrooten demanded that the doctors do something, so they did an emergency caesarian after breaking her water didn’t work … and it was awful. One of my friends, she’s an obstetrics nurse, and she was there that afternoon, so she saw everything. You see, when they broke Marta’s water, it came out all … foul, not clear or just bloody even, but with all this greenish-black … yuck in it. And the smell … well, the doctors suddenly knew then that something was wrong after all—” Under her head of permanented curls, Ruth’s freckled face grew queasy—pale, like curdled cottage cheese. “And when they opened her up—well, my friend said it was lucky Marta didn’t develop a septic infection from what was inside her coming in contact with the incision. The baby, he
’d been much too long in the womb, he should’ve been taken at least two or three weeks sooner, because—” here Ruth’s crackly voice lowered to a rusty rumble. “—the baby … went all over himself in there. Did a number two. Only with unborn babies, there’s a name for it—my friend told me, but you know how it is with those medical terms. Anyhow, it was all green-black and sticky, and it had gotten into the baby’s brain via his ears and eyes, and it infected his mucuous membranes and even his brain. That’s why the baby was retarded—and almost blind and deaf, too, even though he makes all that noise. Just horrible. When they pulled him out of Marta, she saw a little bit of him, even though she was pretty much sedated. He was all ooze-covered and black … ‘like he was rotted,’ she told me.
“Anyhow,” she went on, brightening as if she’d put the worst of her story behind her, “his parents are in the process of suing the hospital, all the doctors involved, and even the parent clinic this hospital in town belongs to. Considering that Stephen could’ve—should’ve—been normal, I don’t blame them, even if them winning will jerk up the cost of care out at the hospital.”
Out in the play area, Mrs. Day Care Goddess was clapping her hands furiously, and mouthing something. I barely made out the silent “come in!” before Ruth added, “Of course, Marta and Etan won’t even talk about the whole incident anymore, just dress Stephen and his sister up like nothing’s wrong—”
As the children slowly massed into entering-the-building formation, I turned around, a stuffed elephant still in one white-knuckled hand, and asked quickly, “How old is Nancy?” The little brown-banged girl didn’t seem to be much older than Stephen, nor was she obviously younger. But even though I’d only been half-listening at times to Ruth’s story, I knew that she’d only mentioned Stephen’s sister that one time—
“Nancy? Y’know … I’m really not sure. After what … happened to Stephen happened, they took off a year or so, went to stay with his folks … or was it hers?” Ruth paused to scratch one of her eyes under her glasses, making the rose-brown plastic frames do a jig on her plain face. “Well, whatever, once they came back, they were toting around both kids, and they were at an age where it’s hard to tell, really. Stephen always was a big baby, I mean literally big, and Nancy was already toddling even then—I just didn’t know them all that well to be able to really say how old Nancy is. Come to think of it, though … I don’t remember them ever talking about Nancy, but I didn’t know them all that well, just faculty mixers, occasional dinners at the Dean’s house. They could’ve had her at home with a sitter, for all I know. My husband, he wasn’t—isn’t—that close to Etan either. He and Marta had only come to the college a year before Stephen was born.”
I could hear the toddlers running down the hallway outside, and took that as my cue to hurry back into the kitchen/play area, to greet the first of the arriving children. Faintly, I could hear Mrs. Day Care scolding one of the children, “—and we don’t put things like that in our mouths, do you hear me?” while Stephen cooed and hooted merrily. Apparently the day-care head was holding onto the boy, as she usually did, but when she finally walked into the room, I saw that she had Stephen’s sister held firmly by one dirt-grimed hand. The girl was trying not to cry.
Ruth hurried over to take Stephen, and lead him off to a quiet corner where he could play with his plastic bristle blocks, while Mrs. Day Care Witch continued to reprimand Nancy. “Shame on you! Your mommy will be so angry at you! Now you go let Anya wash off those dirty hands—” Motioning to me with her free hand, Mrs. Day Care sputtered, “Anya, this bad little girl was doing things she shouldn’t have been doing—and she wouldn’t even go potty before play time. Take her down to the washroom and make sure she goes and washes up before she comes back!” The air in front of me reeked from the odor of the woman’s dentures; she’d been spitting her words out so forcefully. Without waiting for my response, she bustled off, fat bottom wiggling under her slacks, in the direction of the sink.
As I placed both my hands on Nancy’s shoulders and gently began to guide her out of the room, I heard the plosive splat of the water faucet turned on full force behind me. Glancing back at Mrs. Day Care, I saw her frantically scrubbing her hands, while Ruth and the children watched her in numb amazement.
Once we were out in the hallway, I bent over Nancy and whispered, “What happened, honey? Doesn’t she want you playing in the dirt?” Some of the jocks on the college track team were ambling around in the FAC—the gym was located there—and Nancy ducked her head shyly when she saw them coming. The guys mumbled a greeting to me, which I returned quickly, before herding the girl into the women’s room located about ten feet from the gym doors.
Once I’d pushed open the pink-enameled door, Nancy walked away from me and let herself into one of the stalls. It took her a while to reach and secure the latch, but I didn’t insist on going in the stall and helping her. One of the part-time day-care workers, a dour, bespeckled woman with hippie-long black hair and a down-turned mouth, always made it a point to join at least one child a day in the stall, lingering in there for minutes on end. I never said anything about it to Mrs. Day Care (I was on both work study and an academic scholarship, and Mrs. D.C. could blow both of them with one negative report to my professor), but I still hated to think about what might be going on in those stalls. Instead, I hoisted myself onto one of the dingy sinks jutting from the wall and asked the girl casually, “Was the teacher mad at you for something you did … or was she just in a bad mood?”
Nancy said something unintelligible over the sound of something splashing in the water in the bowl. She was so tiny, I couldn’t even see her feet, so I had to assume she was doing “number one,” as the day-care women liked to euphemistically dub taking a piss.
“What, hon?”
Somewhat louder, Nancy said—presumably again—“I was digging for worms.”
“Oh … okay,” I said uneasily, wondering why a girl would be into something like that. I remembered my male first-grade classmates digging worms out of the sandbox and then eating them, just to scare the rest of us girls, but I mentally and physically shrugged it off, as I said, “Well, don’t do it in front of the teacher, okay? It freaks her out. And then she yells, and that’s not fun, is it?”
“—my friends,” Nancy was saying, but she’d just flushed, so some of her words were swept away in the gurgle of water. I was about to ask her to come again when she unlatched the pale pink door and emerged from the stall, her pants and underpants pulled up in one huge, doughnutlike roll around her tiny waist. Nancy looked funny, but her face was still so serious. In the sputtering white-green fluorescent lights, she looked exceptionally pasty, as if formed from white Play-Doh. I simply bit my lips to suppress my smile and gingerly unrolled the tube of fabric from around her waist, making sure that I didn’t let my fingers come in contact with her flesh. That was around the time of the McMartin case, after all. And with her folks being professors—even her mom occasionally taught summer courses in biology—I sure as shit didn’t need them coming down on me for touching their little girl in the wrong place.
I did notice that the swirling waters behind her didn’t quite whisk away the lingering odor. I don’t know what it was about babies and little kids, but they sure do have a bad smell. I noticed it again when I lifted her up so that she’d be level with the sink; hanging onto her with one hand, I worked the soap dispenser for Nancy, letting a greenish-yellow stream of strong-smelling soap dribble onto her damp outspread hands. But when she caught sight of me in the above-the-sink mirror, she smiled shyly at me—the first time I’d seen her do so. Wondering, Would Stephen have been like her? I helped Nancy dry her hands—again, avoiding contact with her—and then led her back to the Toddler Pit, guiding her slightly by the rugby-shirted shoulders.
Even fifteen feet away from the door, she and I could both hear Stephen hooting and whooping—and under that immaculate, tiny shirt, I felt Nancy’s shoulders stiffen, then droop in resignation….
&nb
sp; During the walk home that afternoon, after my last class of the day, I found myself remembering my first class-session with Dr. DeGrooten, during my core-requirement ethics class.
Etan DeGrooten was a tall drink of water (as my folks used to call tall, thin people), with a mostly salt and cinnamon beard and not too much hair on top of his head. He jerked when he walked or gestured like one of those wooden puppets with the string dangling under them—jumping jacks, I believe they’re called.
He sputtered when he spoke, stuttering and stalling and leaving great significant pauses between paragraphs. I can’t remember if he even wore a wedding ring; I do recall he wore either a bolo set with some polished flat caramel-colored stone or a withered red-print bow tie for every class-session. And those awful tweedy no-color sports coats with the leather oblongs on the elbows. He seldom referred to our textbooks, but instead would go off on bizarre tangents—the most memorable one was in regard to a discussion of situational ethics:
“Talk about … about sit-sit-situational ethics. My mother, she was faced with the all-time … I was seven, and I’d just written ‘I Love You Mommy’ on the wall, in my own excrement, and … course, after she saw what I’d written, what I’d written it in, she didn’t … I mean what does one do in such a sit-situation? Hug or hit? So … she gave me a whack on the bottom and then she hugged me.”
At the time, my view of situational ethics was affected by the thought, If you were old enough to write, you shouldn’t have been writing with that, and from that day on, I’d dismissed DeGrooten as a kook. A fifty-plus-year-old man with an infant’s mentality. That he wound up giving me one of the few A’s of the semester came as something of a surprise; I’d never spoken to him outside of class—or in class, either. Not that I saw much of him when not supposedly learning about ethics; only infrequently would I see him hurky-jerking down the winding hallways outside the classroom. And I’d never seen his wife; she was only a name—M. DeGrooten—beside a list of summer biology classes in the stapled, photocopied schedule that appeared prior to each summer session.