Once, Candace thought she’d overheard Scotia say to Kimi in a laughing drawling voice—a mock-male voice, was it?—what sounded like fat cunt—but Candace hadn’t really heard clearly for Candace was not eavesdropping on her daughter and her daughter’s friends. And afterward when Scotia had departed and Kimi came downstairs flush-faced and happy Candace had asked what Scotia had said and Kimi replied, with averted eyes, “Oh, Scotia’s just kidding, teasing—‘fat cow’ she calls me, sometimes—but not, y’know, mean-like. Not mean.”
“ ‘Fat cow.’ That girl who looks like a young female twin of Mike Tyson has the temerity to call my daughter fat. Well!”
Candace pretended to be incensed though really she was relieved. Very relieved. Fat cunt was so much worse than fat cow.
Conversely, fat cow was so much less disturbing than fat cunt.
Another time, just the previous week, after Scotia came over to do homework with Kimi, next morning Candace was shocked to discover that, in the refrigerator, not a single smoothie remained of six she’d bought just the day before.
“Kimi! Did you and Scotia drink six smoothies between you?”
Kimi’s face tightened. The soft round boneless face in which large brown eyes shimmered with indignation.
“Oh Mom. I hate you counting every little thing.”
“I’m not counting—I’m recoiling. I mean, it was a visceral reaction—pure shock. I just went shopping yesterday and this morning all the smoothies are gone. No wonder you’re overweight, Kimi. You really don’t need to put on more pounds.”
This was cruel. Unforgiveable.
Kimi made a sound like a small animal being kicked and ran upstairs.
“Kimi? May I come in, please?”
This is a tip-off: something is seriously wrong. For Mom is behaving politely—almost hesitantly. Instead of rapping briskly on the door and opening it before Kimi can reply.
Kimi’s voice lifts faintly—whether inviting Mom in, or asking Mom not to interrupt her right now, she’s working; but the door isn’t locked, and Mom comes in.
“Hiya!”
“Hi.”
Candace’s eyes clutch at the girl—sprawled on her bed with her laptop opened before her, a shimmering screen that, as Candace slowly approaches, vanishes and is replaced with drifting clouds, exquisitely beautiful violet sky. Candace wonders what was just on Kimi’s screen but has decided she will not ask, even playfully. Kimi bristles when Candace is too inquisitive.
Kimi is lying on top of her bed surrounded by the stuffed animals of her childhood: Otto the one-eyed panda, Carrie the fuzzy camel, Molly the big-eyed fawn. Since returning home from school Kimi has changed into looser-fitting clothes—sweatpants, sweatshirt. Her feet are bare and her toes twitching.
Last summer Kimi painted her toenails iridescent green, and still flecks of shiny green remain on her toenails, like signs of leprosy.
On the pink walls of Kimi’s room are silly, lewd rock posters: Lady GaGa, Plastic Kiss, Raven Lunatic.
There is music in Kimi’s room—some sort of chanting, issued out of her laptop. Kimi brings a forefinger to her lips to silence her mom who nonetheless speaks: “Sweetie . . .”
When Kimi, frowning at her music, doesn’t glance up, Candace says she’d been summoned to Kimi’s school that morning—“D’you know Dr. Weedle?—she has some sort of psychological counseling degree.”
Kimi’s surprise seems genuine. Her eyes widen in alarm.
“Dr. Weedle? What’s she want with you?”
“She said that you were going to speak to me about an issue that came up at your school yesterday. But you didn’t.”
“Mom, I did. I mean, I certainly tried.”
“You did? When?”
In a flurried breathless voice that is an echo of Candace’s girl-voice Kimi tries to explain. She’d started to say something to Candace but Candace had been in a hurry and on her way out of the house and now belatedly Candace recalls this exchange but details are lost—crucial words are lost—Kimi had drifted away, and later that evening Candace heard Kimi in her room laughing, on her cell phone with a friend.
Candace has changed from her designer clothes into pencil-leg jeans, a magenta silk blouse, flannel slippers. She sits on the edge of Kimi’s bed with less abandon than usual. Bites her lip ruefully saying, to enlist her daughter’s sympathy, “I’m not good at whatever this is—a TV scene. If I can’t be original, I hate to even try.”
Kimi smiles to signal yes, she knows that her mother is a funny woman, and clever, and original; but Kimi is tense, too. For Mom has let herself into Kimi’s room for a purpose.
“Kimi, I have to ask you—is someone hurting you?”
Candace is hoping that this will not turn out to be the horror film in which the perpetrator of evil turns out to be the protagonist—or maybe, on a somewhat loftier plane, this is Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex.
Though knowing—She has never touched her child in anger still less has she abused her child. Or any other child.
Kimi sits up, indignant. Kimi tugs her sweatshirt down over her fleshy midriff. “ ‘Hurting me’? You mean—making me cry? Making me feel bad?”
“Yes. Well—no. I don’t mean ‘hurting’ your feelings—exactly—but ‘hurting’ you. Physically.”
Kimi squirms and kicks, this is so—ridiculous! Candace sees a paperback book on the bed—Kimi’s English class is reading To Kill a Mockingbird and this is consoling, to Candace.
“Mom, for God’s sake! That is so not cool.”
“Sweetie, this is serious. You are saying that no one has hurt you? No one at your school? Or—anywhere?”
“No one, Mom. Jeez!”
Yet Kimi’s voice is faltering, just perceptibly. You would have to be Kimi’s mom to hear.
“Will you—let me examine you?”
“Examine me!” Kimi laughs hoarsely, an uncanny imitation of her mother’s braying laugh. “What are you—a doctor? Psychiatrist? Examining me?”
Nonetheless, Candace is resolved. The roaring in her ears is a din of deranged sparrows.
“Will you let me look, Kimi? I promise that—I—I won’t be—won’t over-react. Dr. Weedle said something about a head injury—”
Kimi is scuttling away, crab-fashion, on the bed. Stuffed animals topple onto the floor with looks of mute astonishment.
“You hit your head on a—locker at school, and cut it? Did you go to the school nurse? Did you tell anyone? Did you tell me?”
Kimi would swing her hips around to kick at her mother but Mom has captured her, kneeling on the bed. The mattress creaks. Another stuffed animal falls to the floor, and the paperback To Kill a Mockingbird. Candace is panting gripping Kimi’s head between her spread fingers—not hard, but hard enough to keep the girl from wresting free—as Kimi hisses, “Mom, you smell! Disgusting cigarettes, wine—you smell!”—as Candace peers at the girl’s scalp through a scrim of fine feathery pale-brown hair at first seeing nothing, then—“Oh! My God”—Candace sees the dark zipperlike wound, something more than a simple scratch, about four inches long, at the crown of Kimi’s head.
Candace is stunned, staring.
Feebly Kimi protests, like a guilty child.
“I didn’t mention it to you because it’s just nothing, Mom! I was stooping to get one of my shoes, in the locker room, after gym, and banged my head on the edge of a locker door—it didn’t even hurt, Mom. It’s just nothing.”
“But it must have bled, Kimi—head wounds bleed . . .”
“Well, sure—but I didn’t just let it bleed. I had tissues in my backpack and some girls brought me toilet paper, I just pressed it against the cut. After a while it stopped bleeding. Scotti had some kind of disinfectant, we went to her house after school, and she put it on the cut with an eyedropper.” Kimi smiled, recalling. A guarded look came into her face. “Scotti’s going to be a doctor, she thinks. Neurosurgeon.”
“Is she! I wouldn’t doubt, that girl could do it . . .”
But
Candace doesn’t want to get sidetracked into talking about Scotia Perry, whom Kimi hero-worships. Not right now.
Staring at the dark wound in her daughter’s scalp, that had existed for how many days, without Candace knowing, or in any way suspecting, beneath the feathery child’s-hair, Candace feels a sensation of utter chill futility—emptiness: the way she’d felt, just for a moment, in the women’s restroom where she’d seen the poster with the photo of the bruised and battered girl—ARE YOU A VICTIM OF VIOLENCE, ABUSE, THREAT OF BODILY HARM? ARE YOU FRIGHTENED?
How awful the world is. No joke can neutralize it.
She has failed as a mother. She has not even begun to qualify as a mother.
Maybe just, oh Christ—cash in your chips. Tune out.
Suicide: off-self. Candace has always wondered why more people don’t do it.
Candace is stammering—not sure what Candace is stammering—drawing a forefinger gingerly along the scabby cut in her daughter’s scalp—“Not to have a doctor look at it, Kimi—it should have had stitches—I should have known . . .”
Not even begun to qualify as a mother.
Kimi pushes Candace’s hands away. Kimi is flush-faced as if her soft smooth cheeks have been slapped.
“Mom, I told you—it’s just nothing. If there’d been stitches—they’d have shaved my head, think how ugly that would be.” Kimi makes a fastidious little face, in unconscious mimicry of her mother.
“But, Kimi—not to tell me about it, even . . .”
Kimi scuttles away drawing her knees to her chest. Candace is surprised as always by the fleshiness of her daughter’s thighs, hips—the swell of her breasts. And now the hostility in Kimi’s eyes, that are red-rimmed, thin-lashed as if she has been rubbing at them irritably with a fist.
You don’t know this child. This is not your child.
See the hate in her eyes! For you.
“That really bothers you, Mom—doesn’t it? That you were not told.”
“Yes of course. Of course—it bothers me. I was summoned to this terrible woman’s office—in your school—‘Lee W. Weedle, Ph.D.’ It was an occasion for your school psychologist to terrify and humiliate me—and to threaten me.”
“Threaten you? How?”
“She might report your ‘injuries’ to—some authority. ‘Abuse hotline’—something like that.”
“But—I told them—my ‘injuries’ are accidental. They can’t make me testify to anyone hurting me because no one did.”
“This cut in your scalp—does it hurt now? Does it throb?”
“No, Mom. It does not throb.”
“It could become infected . . .”
“It could not become infected. I told you—Scotti swabbed disinfectant on it. And anyway it doesn’t hurt. I’ve forgotten about it, actually.”
Candace lunges—clumsily—this is what a mom would do, impulsively—to hug Kimi and to kiss the top of Kimi’s head, the ugly zipper-scab hidden beneath the feathery hair as Kimi stiffens in alarm, then giggles, embarrassed—“Jeez, Mom! I’m OK.”
Candace shuts her eyes, presses her warm face against Kimi’s warm scalp, disheveled hair. She is fearful of what comes next and would like to clutch at Kimi for a little longer but the girl is restless, perspiring—resisting.
“Mom, hey? OK please? I need to work now, Mom—I have homework.”
“Yes, but—it can wait for a minute more. Please show me your shoulders now, and your upper arms. Dr. Weedle said—you’re bruised there . . .”
“What? Show you—what? No!”
Now Kimi shrinks away, furious. Now Kimi raises her knees to her chest, prepares to use her elbows against Mom.
Candace is trembling. Is this abuse?—this? Asking her fourteen-year-old daughter to partly disrobe for her, to submit to an examination?
Candace is in terror, for maybe she is to blame. In her sleep, in an alcoholic-drug blackout, abusing her own daughter and forgetting it?
Kimi is more fiercely protective of her body beneath her clothes than she was of the wound in her scalp. Panting, crying—“Leave me alone! Don’t touch me! You’re crazy! I hate you!”
Candace kneels on the bed, in the twisted comforter, straddling the resisting daughter. Kimi is shrieking, furious—Candace is trying to pull Kimi’s sweatshirt up—has to pull it partly over her head so that she can see the girl’s shoulders and upper arms—oh this is shocking! frightening!—the bruises Weedle described, on Kimi’s pale soft shoulders—ugly rotted-purple, yellow. In order to see Kimi’s upper arms, Candace has to tug the sweatshirt off Kimi’s head as the girl kicks, curses—“I hate you! I hate you!” Kimi’s fine soft hair crackles with static electricity—Kimi’s eyes are widened, dilated—like a furious snorting animal Kimi brings a knee against Candace’s chest, knocking the breath out of her. Candace is disbelieving—how can this be happening? She, who loves her daughter so much, and Kimi who has always been so sweet, docile . . . “You fat cunt! I hate you.”
Candace stares at the bruises on her daughter’s shoulders and upper arms—beneath her arms, reddened welts—and on the tops of her breasts which are smallish hard girl-breasts, waxy-pale, with pinprick nipples just visible through the cotton fabric of her bra—(Junior Miss 34B: Candace knows because Candace purchased the bra for Kimi). For several seconds Candace is unable to speak—her heart is pounding so violently. It does look as if someone with strong hands—strong fingers—had grabbed hold of Kimi and shook, shook, shook her.
“Your f-father? Did he—is this—? And you’re protecting him?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Mom! You know Dad would never touch me,” Kimi says scornfully. “I mean, Dad never even kisses me! How’d he get close enough to ‘abuse’ me?” Kimi’s laughter is awful, like something being strangled.
“Then—who? Who did this?”
“Nobody did anything, Mom. Whatever it was, I did to myself. I’m a klutz—you always said so. Always falling down and hurting myself, breaking things—my own damn fault.”
Kimi’s eyes shine with tears. Damn is out of character, jarring.
Klutz. Such words as klutz, wimp, dork, nerd are just slightly more palatable than the cruder more primitive and unambiguous asshole, fuckup, fuckhead, cunt. Or maybe the equivalent would be stupid cunt.
So to call your daughter a klutz, or to conspire with others, including the daughter herself, in calling her klutz, however tenderly, fondly, is to participate in a kind of child molestation.
This seems clear to Candace, like a struck match shoved into her face.
“Kimi, you are not a ‘klutz.’ Don’t say that about yourself.”
“Mom, I am! You know I am! Falling, tripping, spilling things, ripping my clothes—banging my damn head, my legs”—with furious jocosity Kimi speaks, striking her ample thighs with her fists. “And a fat cow-klutz on top of it.”
Family joke was that Kimi was a little butterball, chubby legs and arms, fatty-creased face like a moon-pie, and so eager—spilling her milk glass, toppling out of a high chair, spraining wrist, ankle in falls off tricycle, bicycle, down a flight of stairs.
Philip! Our baby daughter is a piglet. Cutest little piglet. With red eyes, red snub nose like a miniature snout, funny little pig-ears but—too bad!—no sweet little tail.
Young mother high on Demerol, entranced with her baby. Oh Jesus it is a—baby! But—mine? Not mine!
The horror washing over her, even as she felt love for the little piglet so powerful, could scarcely breathe and even now—fourteen years later—a muscle constricts in her chest, in the region of her heart—Can’t breathe can’t breathe love comes too strong.
And it was so—nursing started off so wonderfully—Peak experience of my life—then something went wrong. Little Kimberly ceased nursing as a baby is supposed to nurse, spat out precious milk, tugged at Candace’s sensitive nipples and the nipples became chafed and cracked and bled and now, not so much fun. More, like—ordeal, obligation. More, like—who needs this. Milk turned rancid, baby puked
a lot, cried and kicked at the wrong times. Young mother freaking God-damned depressed.
Fourteen years later not that much has changed. Except the baby’s father is out of the picture even more than he was then.
That day returning home from Weedle and yes, Candace took another thirty-milligram lorazepam reasoning that she will not be engaged in operating heavy machinery for the remainder of the day and yes, Candace washed down the capsule with a (only two-thirds full) glass of tart red wine but no, Candace did not sleep but spent headachy hours at her computer clicking onto abuse, girls drawn to read of abuse, rape, female cutting, slaughter in Africa until she became faint thinking, where were the girls’ mothers? how do they bear living? Thinking, jokes cease when little girls are raped, strangled, left to die in the bush.
Exactly as Weedle said: you can see the imprints of fingers in Kimi’s skin.
“I’m asking you again, Kimi—who did this to you?”
Kimi grabs her sweatshirt back from Candace and pulls it furiously over her head.
“Please tell me, was it a boy? I hope not a—teacher?”
Candace hears herself beg. Candace wants to gather Kimi in her arms for another hug but knows that the girl will elbow her impatiently away.
“Mom, for God’s sake cool it.”
“But honey—I want to protect you. I want to be a good mother. It isn’t too late—is it? Don’t push me away.”
Kimi yanks the sweatshirt down over her breasts, as far as it will go. Kimi is exasperated and embarrassed but seeing the expression in Candace’s face, Kimi says: “Well, see—what happened wasn’t primary. It was, like, a secondary factor.”
Black Dahlia & White Rose: Stories Page 8