by Ann Hood
“—not to mention, adorable.”
Sparrow rolled her eyes.
“Well, I think he is,” Suzanne said. “And he’s so easy to be with. Remember when he took us to see 42nd Street? And for seafood at Anthony’s?”
Sparrow looked at her mother. “The play was stupid. Innocuous,” she said carefully.
Her mother smiled. “Innocuous. Yes, I suppose it was. But the night was fun. I mean, the three of us together like that.”
“I would never describe Ron as fun.”
“That’s not fair, Susan. He’s very nice to you. You haven’t given him a chance. And he’s so fond of you.”
Her mother rose, went to the bar, and poured a Chivas on the rocks.
“We have talked about it,” she said after she took a sip.
“What?”
“Ron and I have discussed the possibility of marriage.”
“Oh.” Sparrow squirmed uncomfortably. Another plane was getting ready to land now. She watched the red flashing lights on the wings.
“It looks like we might do it. Merge, as Ron says.” Her mother smiled, also uncomfortable.
Sparrow kept her eyes focused on the plane. She wondered briefly if it was coming from Maine.
“How do you feel about that?”
Sparrow shrugged.
“I know that it may take some time for you to get used to the idea. I mean, having a man around the house after all this time will certainly be strange. For me too. Shaving cream and boxer shorts everywhere.” Her mother laughed. “And men are such strange creatures. Your father used to—”
Sparrow’s head jerked around to face her mother.
Her mother inhaled quickly, then took another drink of her scotch.
“What?” Sparrow asked.
“I don’t know what possessed me to bring that up.”
Sparrow continued to look at her mother, waiting for more. Her mother drank again, averted her eyes.
“He used to have this routine at night. He would take a drink of water, then fluff up his pillow, stretch, fluff up his pillow again, and then get into bed. Odd of me to think of that. It’s just, well, men are such strange creatures.” Her mother’s eye met Sparrow’s again. “I’ve noticed that Ron puts salt on his food before he even tastes it. If that isn’t the strangest thing.”
The intercom buzzed.
“He’s here,” Suzanne said. “You know, he wants you to like him. It was really important to him that I talk to you about all of this. I mean, he’s concerned about how you feel about it.” She touched Sparrow’s arm lightly. “I want you to like him too. He’s the kind of man I’d like for you someday.”
No thank you, Sparrow thought.
The intercom buzzed again.
“Tomorrow night will be your night,” her mother said. “We’ll get take-out or go into Chinatown. Whichever you prefer. The three of us. How does that sound?”
“Boring,” Sparrow said as her mother went to the door. “It sounds boring.”
Suzanne came back holding on to Ron’s arm. She looked girlish. In her free hand she held a long-stemmed white rose. Ron was short with horn-rimmed glasses. When he smiled, he looked unnatural, like someone from a horror movie who had been zapped by aliens. When he entered a room, the smell of Paco Rabanne was so strong that Sparrow was forced to gag slightly. Ron was nothing like the sexy men in the cologne’s ad, who pounded at typewriters in rundown beach houses or called their lovers from rumpled brass beds. Instead, Ron looked like a corporate executive, which, in fact, he was. He always sat every straight and never loosened his tie, even in extreme heat or after a long day. When he and Sparrow’s mother were together, they never touched. They walked briskly in perfect step.
“Hello, Susan,” Ron said. “I brought this for you.” He handed Sparrow a thin volume of poetry. “Your mother tells me you admire Frost.”
“I like Allen Ginsberg or Gregory Corso, actually.”
“Ginsberg?” Ron looked questioningly at Sparrow’s mother. “I thought—”
“She’s just being ornery again.”
Ron smiled. “Ah!”
“We’ll be at Maison Robert,” her mother said. “There’s Brie and fruit in the kitchen. And smoked turkey, too, I think.”
“Mother was just telling me,” Sparrow said, “that my father used to have this funny routine that he would do every night. Before they went to bed.”
Ron and her mother exchanged glances.
“We were discussing the changes that would occur if there were a man around the house,” her mother said.
“Ah,” Ron said again.
“Yes,” Sparrow said as she opened her book again. “It would be awful.”
“Susan!” her mother said.
“Just for the record, Ron, my name is not Susan. It’s Sparrow. I’m sure my father calls me Sparrow.”
“Well, then,” Ron said. “Sparrow it is.”
Rebekah, 1985•
THE WORST INSULT IN the entire school was to accuse someone of liking Rebekah Morgan. Sally Perkins, head cheerleader since junior high, had just shouted the insult to her old boyfriend. She enjoyed breaking his heart. And tormenting him. So, after she told him she was going to the Freshman Frolic with someone else, she added with a toss of her blond ponytail: “Anyway, I heard you like Rebekah Morgan.” All the boys groaned and pretended to throw up. Rebekah froze. She stood against her locker, clutching her books, and prayed she would disappear. “Hi, Becky,” Sally said sweetly as she walked by with her friends. “Rebekah Morgan,” the boy groaned as he fell to the floor. “Ugh!”
REBEKAH’S ENTIRE LIFE WAS a series of such humiliations. She had an early memory of her family walking through town on a hot July afternoon and people pointing and whispering “look at those hippies.” All of her life, Rebekah hated the large sprawling house that they lived in and the pottery workshop and store behind it. She longed to eat Twinkies with her lunch instead of dried fruit and nuts. She wished her family had a Ford station wagon. But when she told her mother her wish, Elizabeth said, “Legs don’t make pollution.” Why, Rebekah wondered as she worked at the pottery store every weekend, couldn’t she have a job scooping ice cream at Friendly’s, and a pink and white bedroom in a split-level house? “Methinks,” her father said when she complained to him, “thou doth protest too much.” Lately, Rebekah was very aware that he was going bald.
REBEKAH HAD DECIDED THAT the source of her humiliation was her nose. Despite her mother’s donation of carob brownies to the junior high bake sale and her father’s refusal to pay income tax and the organic garden in their yard—despite everything—Rebekah decided that it was indeed her nose that placed her in the caste of Untouchable at school. Her nose was large and sprawling, like her house. And it had a bump on it. If it were small and smooth, Rebekah thought, life would be all right.
IT WAS MID-SUMMER AND the kitchen smelled like damson plums. The sweet smell hung in the air. Rebekah was boiling jars for the jam while her mother stirred the plums in a large pot on the stove. Outside, her father, Howard, and her brother, Jesse, tossed a Frisbee. The sun bounced off the copper countertops in the kitchen, caught in the grooves and scratches acquired from hundreds of loaves of bread being kneaded there and pounds of vegetables being chopped.
Her mother hummed, “Ode to Joy” it sounded like, and Rebekah was suddenly struck with guilt at her secret longings to be somebody else, to look different and have a different family. This was, after all, her family. Last spring they had bicycled to Canada, the four of them. Their faces and arms and legs had browned from the sun. Her father had made her a necklace from tiny shells they found on a beach. On their first night in Canada, they had stayed at a fancy hotel and eaten a banquet of fresh fish in a restaurant that overlooked the ocean. Rebekah’s mother took pictures of the trip and when they got home Rebekah helped her develop them. They worked together in the upstairs bathroom, her mother explaining exactly what to do.
Now Rebekah studied her mother’s face. Her h
air, like Rebekah’s, was black and unruly. She had it tied in a braid. Wiry strands had found their way free and stuck out around her head. Some of them were gray.
“Mom,” Rebekah said.
Elizabeth stopped humming and looked at Rebekah. They both had large dark eyes. Rebekah looked into a face that would look just like her own in twenty years—unless she did something. In the middle of that face was the same large nose, dominating the eyes, towering over the mouth.
“I have a problem,” Rebekah said. “A big problem.”
Her mother nodded.
“When was the last time I had a friend here?”
“What’s the point, Rebekah?”
“The point…is, the problem—”
“What is it?” “My nose.”
“Your nose? Does it hurt? Bleed? Run?” Elizabeth leaned toward her, inspected her nose, touched it, prodded it gently.
“No,” Rebekah said, and pulled away. “It just is. It’s huge and bumpy and it’s ruining my life.”
“Rebekah, how is your life ruined?’
“No one will talk to me at school. Everyone laughs at me. With this nose, who can blame them? The only boy who has ever even noticed me is Henry and he’s weird. I’m ugly.” This last she added in a whisper. It was too awful and too true to say out loud.
“Bekah, you’re not ugly. You’re beautiful—”
“Don’t tell me I’m beautiful—”
And together they said: “—inside, where it matters.”
“All right. That’s not what you need to hear.”
“I’ve got to get a new one.”
“A new one?”
“Lots of people get them.”
“Wait a minute—”
“Mom, I can’t wait. My life is a disaster.” And then she began the argument for the idea that she had practiced in her mind. “I need a nose job. I need it more than food or clothes or anything in the world. It’s the only solution.”
Elizabeth sighed and wiped her forehead. “Your nose is just like my nose. People like me, don’t they? I had friends and dates and you will too. Soon enough.”
“Soon enough? I’m already fifteen, Mom. When is it going to happen? When I’m thirty and gray and even uglier?”
“If people are judging you because of your nose, then they are not the type of people you want as friends. You said yourself that Henry likes you. Nose and all.” Her mother waited for her to smile and agree but she didn’t. Instead, Rebekah just stared at her, her face wrinkled in an attempt to stop the tears from falling. Elizabeth shook her head. “Your nose is not ruining your life. And I think you know that.”
Rebekah looked away from her mother and out the window. Her father and Jesse were sitting on the grass. She watched her father. He was talking and moving his hands around and around, explaining, it seemed, about making pottery. He had studied in Japan to be a potter. Every time he lit the kiln, he gave an offering of sake to insure a good fire. Her parents had dedicated most of their lives to their beliefs, to living as pure and natural a life as they could. And now these beliefs were dooming her to a life of misery, a life with a huge nose. Rebekah imagined the years ahead of her, her nose growing larger as she grew older. She would be forced to live here forever and make pottery. The thought made her shudder. There must be a way, she thought.
REBEKAH WATCHED AS HER father worked with the clay, spinning, shaping, smoothing.
“Dad,” she said, “what do you think of Mom’s nose?”
Her father laughed. “I think it looks like her mother’s nose.”
“And mine.”
He glanced at her. “Yes. And like yours.”
“It’s a pretty big nose,” Rebekah said.
“It’s not so big. Look at Karl Malden. Or Jimmy Durante.”
“They’re men. Old men.”
“Barbra Streisand.”
Rebekah sighed. It was useless.
“What’s all this about?” Howard said.
“I’m thinking about getting cosmetic surgery.”
“Really?” he asked, amused.
“This isn’t funny, Daddy. My life is ruined. By this.” She pointed to her nose.
“Oh, Bekah,” he said, “you don’t have such a bad life. School will start again soon and everything will be fine. Summer has a way of making us bored. Lethargic. Come here, work on this vase awhile. Can you see the shape I’m trying to achieve here?”
Rebekah looked over. To her, the bumpy and misshapen clay looked exactly like her nose.
SCHOOL WAS BEGINNING IN six weeks. Rebekah circled the day in red on her calendar. She sat on the bed and stared at the circled day looming before her. She would not, she vowed, go to school with this nose. Instead, she would walk into her homeroom with a tiny, turned-up nose. Boys would gape, girls would stare, and her life would change. She might even try out for cheerleader.
Rebekah opened the Yellow Pages to Surgeons, Plastic and her finger settled randomly on one. Charles Warren, M.D. Charles Warren, M.D., would understand the importance of a smaller nose, she thought. He had grown up, no doubt, and still resided in, a world of perfect profiles. No bumps. No flaring nostrils. He would look at her nose and understand.
“FIFTEEN HUNDRED DOLLARS,” Charles Warren, M.D., said.
Rebekah gasped. One thousand five hundred dollars.
“And a parent or guardian must sign the consent form. Unless you’re eighteen. You’re not eighteen, are you?”
Rebekah shook her head. She looked into the pink face of Dr. Warren. His hair was blond and he wore rimless glasses. He looked like he belonged to a country club. His nose was perfect.
“You won’t look like Brooke Shields,” he said. “Everyone these days wants to look like Brooke Shields.”
Rebekah assured him she did not.
“That’s what they all say.” He lifted her face toward the light. “You will look better. A definite improvement.”
That was enough for Rebekah. Better. An improvement.
“May I have a consent form, please?”
EVERY SATURDAY REBEKAH WORKED in the pottery store. In summer, tourists en route to Tanglewood or to the Norman Rockwell Museum found their way to her parents’ store. Middle-aged women with stiff blond hair bought wedding presents for their nieces. Younger women in Polo shirts and wraparound skirts bought entire sets of dishes. “No one will have anything like this,” they would say as they cooed over the different patterns. Rebekah hated working there. She hated smiling at these people and explaining how her father had learned the art in Japan.
Today was no different. The store was hot and dusty, filled with people in brightly colored summer clothes.
“Can I put these in a dishwasher?” a tanned woman wearing monogrammed glasses asked.
“Yes,” Rebekah said for the tenth time that day.
The line of customers at the register was long. Rebekah took the money mechanically. Hurricane lamps, coffee mugs, vases. She made change, wrapped the pieces.
“Can you change a hundred?” a man asked. “I only have a hundred.” He was holding a baby. The baby had on a T-shirt that said DAVE’S DAUGHTER.
“Sure,” Rebekah said.
She took the hundred-dollar bill and began to make change. Suddenly, her hands froze. Her eyes darted down to the cash drawer. There were fifties, twenties, tens—stacks of them. This was the third hundred-dollar bill she had changed that day. There was, in the drawer, much more than $1500. There was probably twice that. She fingered the money she was holding and smiled. Here, before her, was her new nose.
THERE WERE NO SECRETS in Rebekah’s family. Her parents smoked marijuana in front of her. She had seen her father naked. And she knew that they kept all their money in a strongbox in their bedroom closet. Today, Rebekah watched as her father collected the money from the till. He was tall and muscular, with shiny blue eyes. With his friendly face and deep laugh, he reminded Rebekah of Santa Claus. Until recently, she used to love to climb into his lap and bury her face and finger
s in his beard.
“Want to run away to South America?” he asked her, laughing as he put the money into an envelope.
Guilt hit Rebekah so hard she doubled over slightly.
Howard’s smile disappeared. “You okay?”
“Yes,” she said as she straightened. “Yes.”
WHILE HER PARENTS AND Jesse were out for a walk, Rebekah opened the strongbox. She slowly counted out fifteen hundred dollars. It didn’t seem to leave even a tiny dent in the pile of money in the box. She put the money on the bureau and smoothed out the wrinkles. It seemed like so little, really. Rebekah saw before her an autumn day when she would walk into school with her new nose. She would wear her hair loose that day, and put on blush and lip gloss. She would have on a plaid skirt, Izod shirt, and loafers with tassles. Rebekah bit her bottom lip. She knew that taking the money was wrong. It was, in fact, a crime. Maybe even grand larceny. But she also knew that without it, her life was over. As one hand clutched the money, the other traced the bridge of her nose, paused over the bump.
She heard the screen door slam downstairs and the sound of voices. Her father laughed. Rebekah folded the fifteen hundred dollars and shoved it deep into the pocket of her jeans. She could always put the money back, she thought. For now, just having it there, seemed enough. She closed the strongbox and put it back into the closet.
LINED UP AGAINST THE wall in Rebekah’s room were more than a dozen large teddy bears in fancy costumes. Henry and his brother had surprised her and delivered them one day. Secretly, Rebekah loved them, thought they were funny and chic. But Henry was, like her nose, a constant reminder of her oddness. Before her parents went into the pottery business, they had lived on and run a produce farm with Henry’s parents. To Rebekah, being the daughter of a potter was only slightly better than being the child of a farmer. The farm was no longer a working one, and Henry’s father sold copy machines in Western Massachusetts and Vermont. If it weren’t for all these things, Henry might seem a little more interesting. But all those things were there.