Collected Fiction

by Kris Neville

  At first the hands that touched her seemed no nearer than the far and dimly seen walls. Things existed, but they had no relation to each other and none to her.

  Objects first began to order themselves when she became aware that the addition of something to her lips produced the cessation of a sharp, painlike pang not at her lips. Later, she found that the wall of the crib arrested the motion of her fist. And after that, as knowledge of space, bit by bit, became a part of her, she was acutely aware of the increasing rhythm of light and darkness.

  Later still, she was able to localize the great pain, but by then it was not nearly so severe. It was in the left side of her body and eventually in the region of her left shoulder. Involuntarily, muscles seemed to want to exercise a second arm there; but the arm did not respond; it lay inert. One day she realized that the fist of the arm was tightly clenched. She tried to flex the fingers, but they would not flex. She cried herself to sleep.

  Time began to move faster after she was transferred from the hospital to the State Home for Orphan Children, but the months were still long, because each was still so large a part of her total existence. At length there came the day when her routine of feeding, exercise, and sleep was broken by strange perfume and by new, quiet voices in kind-toned gabble, and soft, gentle hands. The hands most of all were pleasant.

  “Isn’t she a darling little girl?” the woman said, and the man agreed, and the nurse said, “Her arm was injured in an accident. She’ll never have the use of it.” And the man and woman murmured sympathetically.

  Later, although Bettyann could not know this, the man and woman spoke with the gray-haired lady superintendent; and after that, they went away to think over all the implications of adopting a child with only one good arm.

  The car in which Bettyann had been found lay rusting in a scrap heap. The dust on the seat was gone as thoroughly as yesterday’s sunlight. The investigation of the accident was closed. And stranger things had happened before and will happen again in the memory of man than a demolished car and a deserted baby.

  The soft hands remained in Bettyann’s memory, and vaguely discontent, she wanted them to return.

  When finally the hands did return (and Bettyann was now her name), she gurgled happily, and upon being lifted, she kicked her feet in excitement.

  Solemnly, as though Bettyann could understand the words, the superintendent said, “This is your new mother, Bettyann. Momma Jane and Daddy Dave.”

  And because she was pleased, Bettyann told them what the nurse who fed her always said: “Da da.”

  The woman blinked her eyes, looking down at the infant, and said, “Would you like to go home with us, Bettyann?” And the man cleared his throat.

  The superintendent’s eyes sparkled, and she smiled almost enviously, “I’m sure she’ll be the kind of a daughter you deserve, Mrs. Seldon.”

  “Of course she will!” Mr. Seldon said. “And smart! She just said da da, didn’t she? She’s as smart as a tree full of owls already.”

  His wife said, “At first we’d half planned on a child a little older. In fact, we weren’t even sure we wanted a girl at all. Until we saw Bettyann.”

  After more words, equally unintelligible to her, Bettyann felt a blanket being wrapped tightly over her body, and after that she felt bright sunshine on her face and then a sickening forward movement and strange noises. Soon the movement became mixed completely with the sound and everything was a hurrying purr except for the bobbing green tassel from Mother Jane’s bonnet and the drowsy murmur of Daddy Dave’s voice.

  Jane studied Bettyann’s fist with minute attention, and Bettyann liked the feeling of the warm palm around her hand. “They’re awfully small, the fingers,” Jane said.

  “Let’s see,” he said, glancing over quickly. “Hummm. They are, at that. When we get home, you know, we’ll have to get a birthday cake for her. I forgot it.”

  “Isn’t she a little young for that?”

  “I wouldn’t say so, no. I’m sure I had one, my first birthday. I had a cake every birthday. When I went to college, my great-aunt, Amelia, sent me a cake my freshman year, as I remember, and she’d wrapped up nineteen little candles in waxed paper and laid them right on top. Of course she’ll have to have a cake.”

  Watching Bettyann, Jane said, “I think I’d rather not know her real birthday.”

  “Eh? And why not?”

  “To make it the day we take her home, that makes it seem as if she’s just been drifting around somewhere, waiting for us to come along.”

  Dave muttered happily to himself.

  After a moment, she said, “Dave, dear. You don’t really suppose the parents will turn up?”

  “Of course they won’t turn up!” he snapped, suddenly almost angry. “What the devil should they turn up for? After running off and leaving her in the wreck like that!”

  “That’s what I think, too. But you’re not worried?”

  He puffed his cheeks. “Even if they did, how could they get her back? What difference would it make?”

  Bettyann was five, and it was her last spring before school, and she sat at the window staring longingly into the forbidden yard. She and Jane had had a postbreakfast clash about the toy doll. (“Bettyann, you simply must not leave your toys scattered about where someone’s liable to stumble over them.”) It was at least the tenth offense in the last two months, and Jane, at last becoming angry, had punished her.

  All morning she sat at the window pensive and sad, and lunch eaten, she resumed her post. Her patience was rewarded when finally, relenting, as Bettyann intended she should, the severity of the confinement, Jane said, her voice slightly amused, “Very well. You may go outside now.”

  Bettyann slipped from the chair, her lips tucked into determined resistance. She went to the door without a word, and through it, proudly, into the sunshine. She was stubbornly indignant, and her childish jaw was set with unshakable resolve. She went directly from the porch, through the small cherry orchard, to the wealth of hollyhocks along the alley fence. She found a bee upon the lip of one of the flowers, a stunted plant within her reach, and with scarcely an instant’s hesitation, she scooped up the bee and imprisoned it in her good right hand. She knew that Momma Jane would feel very sorry when she got stung. Daddy Dave, were he home, would chuckle not unkindly at the sting and say, “It’ll feel better when it quits hurting”—his favorite statement for greeting her, oh so important scratches and bruises, a statement which infuriated her only to make her laugh through angry tears. But Momma Jane, seeing the savage hurt, would run to her and say, “Now, dear,” kissing it, “let Mother put something on the nasty old pain right away.”

  The bee, when it finally stung her, hurt much worse than she had imagined it would, and she slapped her hand desperately against her dress to rid herself of the uncooperative insect. Then she ran toward the house crying, “I got stung! I got stung by a bee!”

  The kitchen window faced the alley fence, and Jane stood beside it, waiting for her. She had her hands firmly planted on her hips, and when Bettyann rushed into the kitchen, she said, calmly, “I saw you deliberately pick up that bee, dear.” Bettyann blinked her eyes in surprise. “You did?”

  “I most certainly did.”

  When she came to realize that the expected sympathy would not be forthcoming, Bettyann said, “I wish I hadn’t, now.” She left the kitchen and went to her room, and after crying a bit in frustration, she saw the humor of the situation, and she laughed about it, and eventually the bee sting stopped hurting.

  Once more during the final, preschool summer, she received a bee sting, quite accidentally, this time. It was promptly administered to. And aside from the bees, of course, the summer was a pleasant one, and when fall finally came, as, she felt, it well might not have, Bettyann knew a touch of genuine sadness. Her question of the previous winter returned to puzzle her: Why must everything die in wintertime when we need the live greenness most of all? But as summer continued to fade away with quiet inevitabil
ity, she began to look forward, half fearful, half excited, to the new mystery into which she was shortly to be initiated.

  On the first day, Jane walked with her to a foreboding white rock building from which she remembered having heard pleasant laughter the previous spring, and there introduced her to a not at all terrifying person who was to be her teacher for a whole, long year. She felt momentary fear, after Jane had gone, at being in a strange room, surrounded by strange and possibly hostile faces. She felt, for the briefest moment, as if she had broken away entirely from the certain security of the familiar home; the flower bed, the garden, the weathered oak, all solid and real, now seemed in memory, substanceless. She wanted desperately to rush after Momma Jane and run with her down the tree-lined walk, hurrying as fast as her feet would go, because the flower bed, the garden, and the weathered oak might not be there if she waited one endless hour. (Aunt Bessie had said to Momma Jane, “That’s when you first begin to lose them. They’re never quite the same after that. The teachers manage to take them away from you.” To which Daddy Dave had said, “Nonsense, Bessie. She is, after all, only five.”

  “But then, I suppose,” Aunt Bessie had said, “it won’t seem quite so bad for you, Jane, dear, as it would for—for, well, you know . . .” At which Momma Jane’s face had turned very red. And Bettyann had wanted to ask why that should be.)

  After the initial shock of adjustment, Bettyann found the strange faces around her to be friendly. The first, bashful smiles of acquaintance came to be smiles of pleased recognition. Days began to hurry toward Christmas. And then, all at once, the holidays had come and gone, and bright, washed faces told with excited tongues of wonderful gifts from Santa Claus. And because there were so many new things to be done, it seemed that in no time at all sweet, lazy spring was back.

  Just three weeks before school was dismissed, Miss Collier, the teacher, distributed finger-painting sets. “You’ll get to play with sets like these all next year,” she explained. And within fifteen minutes, she was standing over Bettyann’s desk. Bettyann was working excitedly with brilliant colors on large, heavy paper. “What do you think your picture looks like, Bettyann? Is it supposed to be a big, brown cow or what?” Still working, Bettyann said, “It’s a man in a tree.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes,” Bettyann said, wrinkling her forehead, “the tree bark’s all crum’led up, and the man’s face is all crum’led up—right in the bark.”

  “How very odd,” Miss Collier said. “It looks as if you really painted it in, once I look for it.”

  “I did.”

  “No, child: I meant on purpose.”

  “It was on purpose,” Bettyann insisted, and Miss Collier laughed, rumpling her hair, “You should be a painter, then.” After Miss Collier had gone, disappointed at being misunderstood, Bettyann drew her fingers through the man in the tree and began to fashion the figure of a little girl. She tried to make the little girl’s face seem as though you were looking at it from two directions at once.

  During the final week of the school year, Miss Collier gave the children a series of simple aptitude tests. (Miss Collier was a recent college graduate.) Bettyann understood that the results would be very important throughout all the eight grades, so she tried as hard as she could. Later, when the principal was congratulating Miss Collier on her efficiency, while wondering what, exactly, should be done with the results of it, Miss Collier said, “This one, here, on Bettyann Seldon. She’s certainly very intelligent, but I couldn’t help feeling that the tests weren’t getting at her real abilities; she seemed only half tested. I made a note about it on her form.”

  “Oh, yes, I see,” said the principal. “Of course,” Miss Collier said, “I only had three units of elementary testing.” And the principal, who had had none, remarked, uncomfortably, that he was sure it would be all very helpful and that he couldn’t expect, after all, his teachers to know everything.

  Bettyann was in the second grade for less than a month when one of her crayon pictures (“Almost good enough to be the work of an eighth grader”) was posted on the big bulletin board in the main hall. Of another of her drawings, however, a semi-exploded view of a house with displaced hedge and chimney and furniture floating around the walls, her teacher said, “A little too unreal.” And Bettyann resolved to be more careful in the future, for she did not want to be misunderstood.

  She found the very elementary reading baffling until, midway through the year, she quit trying to associate the words with the pictures in the reader and began associating them with speech: and after that, reading was easy. She found in the group games and for ball passing in particular, that, with increasing familiarity, the shriveled arm presented scarcely any handicap.

  But during the last part of that year and all of the next, her third, she came more and more to feel estranged from her classmates, and to a lesser degree, from her teachers, and even, but to a lesser degree still, from her parents. In classroom she came to fear that at any moment an unfortunate remark would elicit spasms of laughter; and at home she felt that there were things neither Jane nor Dave could understand, not in the way she understood, no matter how they might try, and failing to understand would, if she spoke of them, misunderstand not the thing itself but her for speaking. She withdrew inch by inch and became silent when others laughed and hesitant when others spoke boldly. (“She’s a shy and sensitive child.”)

  Beginning her fourth year of school, no more than a week after the first session, one late autumn afternoon it was, when for the first parent-teachers’ meeting, class was dismissed early and still unreacquainted children lingered in the schoolyard, Bettyann saw one of the older girls, a seventh or eighth grader, run from the empty teeters, kicking up white sand with flying tennis shoes, toward a vacant classroom, and she cried silently as she ran. Bettyann could see no reason for her action: the girl had been some distance from the nearest child. In that moment, Bettyann learned, and it was feeling more than thought, a second of certain insight, that each person was unique unto himself, and the memory of the tearful face told her that each, to his own degree, is misunderstood; and she, perhaps no more alone than the older girl, no more misunderstood than all the rest.

  She was to have the same lesson repeated once more before she became a fifth grader. The second incident occurred not at school but while the class, under the supervision of Mrs. Fox, the eighth grade teacher, who, Bettyann knew, went off to herself for a few minutes upon arrival to smoke a forbidden cigarette, was on a tour of the zoo some eighteen miles away in Joplin. The class went from Mark Twain School in a chartered bus, each child but Elmer carrying lunch in a brown paper bag. (Elmer carried a grown-up lunch box.) Within the park, for it was called a park rather than a zoo, there were many strange and wonderful and exciting animals. And when the eager class stopped beside the kangaroo, Willie, one of the smaller, less well-dressed boys, said, “Look! Bettyann’s got a kangaroo’s arm!” Bettyann, puzzled, looked at the kangaroo, frowned momentarily, and answered, “No, the kangaroo’s arms are both all right; there’s nothing wrong with either of them.” Then she realized that the comparison was not based upon physical similarity. There had been resentment in Willie’s voice, and viciousness, too. She knew of no offense that she had given him. She could not remember even speaking to him more than once or twice for he sat across the room from her and usually played by himself during recess. There was certainly no one-to-one cause and effect relationship. And, in thinking the incident over later, she wondered how it might be generalized in a picture of human relations: a group of people, perhaps, in pairs, each member of the pair chained to all the rest, with everyone pulling against the chains in an attempt to get closer to his partner.

  She was supposed to skip the fifth grade; Dave, however, would not permit it. “She started school early as it is.” And Jane agreed after the first excitement of her pride passed: “It wouldn’t be fair for her to be almost two years younger than the others when she gets to high school.”

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sp; “And college,” Dave added proudly. The parents nodded, and Dave held Bettyann on his lap and said, “She’s as smart as a tree full of owls,” and Jane said, “Be careful, Dave, or she’ll grow too big for her britches.” Dave said, “Nonsense. It gives her self-confidence.”

  All during her fifth year in school Bettyann made a special effort to accept the occasional strangeness of her playmates, to understand, as nearly as she could, their attitudes, and to adopt those attitudes for her own. At first it required conscious effort; later, it became automatic; and, as the school year drew to an end, she thought much as her playmates thought.

  Spring came and then summer. And alone, one hot afternoon, she went to the flock of English sparrows on the lawn before the house and picked up one, gently, in her hand and held it to her face and cheeped to it. Dave came out, letting the screen door slam, and the birds flew in terror, and Dave said, “How the devil did you manage to slip up that close to them, Bettyann?” Laughing, she answered, “I just did.” It occurred to her, then, to ask the question of herself; but there was no answer other than the one she had given. “I must have just been thinking right,” she amplified, and Dave snorted, “Damned sparrows’ll have the whole country some day.” She turned to watch the sparrows fly from their tree limbs to settle a safe distance away in the dust of the driveway. And watching them fly, it seemed that she could, if she only knew how, join them and be as free to sail the skies as they. For an instant she knew great longing, longing to be released from the narrow, confining space of her world; to float, as the song said, where the south winds rise; to be, as the birds. . . And the feeling passed: she was content. Here, around her, the quiet, sleepy afternoon . . . She smiled, thinking of the light restrictions on her life: dishes to do, for which, of course, she was paid: “Helping around the house,” Dave’s inclusive phrase that meant very little; attending the long, sleepy Sunday school, which Jane said, “Won’t do any harm . . .” No, here in the hot afternoon she was free; and here, with the beat of town life around her, exciting, she was happy, and she was at a loss to understand the vast longing of a moment before.