A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [31]
“Oh yes,” said Mira, “I think all this is good for him.” She smiled at Jerome, then reached into one of the grocery bags, pulled out an orange, and tossed it in his direction. “Vitamin C,” she said, then laughed as Jerome, having missed the catch, chased the fruit across the room.
The girl stretched her arms into the air then, keeping her back straight, bent at the waist, and swung her arms behind her where they remained extended like wings.
Sylvia thought about this odd gesture as she walked down the alley toward the street. The light was beginning to decline. She buttoned her coat against the cold.
Sylvia began to think of her husband, of the way he came into her life. A good young doctor, her father had said, feeling fortunate to have enticed him away from the city and into the backwater that was their County in order to join the practice. He had been speaking, of course, to her mother, not to her. He attempted to converse with Sylvia only occasionally, and when he did, he used the tone one reserves for a very young child. Sylvia was twenty at the time, but had not often left the house since she had completed high school and had walked forever away from a world where—despite her anxiety and confusion in the face of anything social, answering only when spoken to—she had felt almost happy when lost in the satisfying task of learning facts. There had been no talk about university, though her grades had always been exceptional: there were no universities in the County and both parents had accepted that their daughter would never leave home. And she hadn’t left home, had not been “admitted,” despite her mother’s frequent threats when she was a child, and had not gone away for the suggested stint at a summer camp for “special” children. It had been her quiet father who had protected her from such departures, his grim silence eventually winning out over her mother’s desperate requests, her mother’s arguments.
The good doctor had been invited to dinner soon after his arrival in town. This customary courtesy when taking on a new locum or partner had been endured by Sylvia two or three times in the past. A stranger in the house could cause almost anything to happen to her: utter paralysis, a loss of motor skills, total withdrawal, awkwardness, collisions with furniture, or, at best, rote behaviour of a more or less civilized kind. Still her father had not wanted to exclude her. He had accepted, and expected others to accept, her disability, though no one had been able to identify the affliction.
She wondered now how she had been explained to Malcolm. What exactly did her father say about the strange daughter in order to prepare the young man for her presence? My daughter is disabled was a sentence she had heard him use on more than one occasion, often in her presence as if she hadn’t been there at all, or as if she were locked in an adjoining room. If the person he was speaking to was a stranger, he or she would often look her over in a puzzled sort of way, seeking the flaw, and when unable to find it, no one had had the courage to make an inquiry. Only one very elderly and courtly man, whom she and her father had encountered while out walking, a man revisiting the town of his youth, had been able to come up with an interesting reply. “Your daughter,” he had said with sadness, “is disabled by her beauty.” Sylvia would always remember this, and often whispered it to herself at night before going to sleep though she had never been able to fully understand what the word beauty meant, at least in reference to her own physical self.
Malcolm had spent most of the visit gazing at her with an eager, frank curiosity, while she fidgeted under his scrutiny. She had left the dinner table in mid-meal in order to be closer to the three china horses that stood on a table in the corner of the dining room. Her parents had once or twice tried to introduce a pet, a kitten or a dog, into her life, but the unpredictability of live animals had disoriented her, though she had always been and remained delighted by