A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [176]
I bought Emma some clothes at the Goodwill store, and with Vaseline I polished up a pair of patent leather Mary Janes that I’d found at a rummage sale. She is a very particular child, and I was grateful to her, another for our list, for not turning up her nose at most of the things I put in her closet. She had grown up over the summer, grown up and gone into her own world. She spent a lot of time lying on her bed, listening to books on tape from the library. She couldn’t yet read herself, but she listened to Heidi, The Little Princess, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, over and over again. She didn’t want me to read to her anymore. In the evening I’d lie on the floor or on the bed and listen with her. Sometimes I’d fall asleep and stay there all through the night. When I was small, I used to listen to my tape in the dark, to my dead mother reading Little House in the Big Woods. I used to try to believe that she was sleeping right beside me.
Chapter Twenty
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THE LEAVES IN THE park turned color and fell and we walked through them, scooped them up, pressed them flat in the dictionary. Emma found a kitten and I agreed to take her in, which overnight changed the smell of our unit. We had long since forgotten what it was to have a weekend and we were taken by surprise by the sheer fact of Friday, by the prospect of liberation. Even Howard’s heart finally temporarily eased at five o’clock every Friday evening, at the thought of two blank days. We had the habit of getting take out fish fry from the bar down the street. Howard usually managed to jam a log in the fireplace and we’d sit on the hearth with our dinners on our laps watching the flames. Over the course of the fall we went to Old World Wisconsin and watched women make butter and spin wool. We went to the science museum, the art museum, the lake front, the movies, the botanical gardens, the children’s museum, the state capitol, the train museum, the circus, and the wax museum. Howard was a working man and I spent his money without thought of tomorrow. What we were experiencing, I believe, is called Motion. I watched us in the reflection of the store windows in downtown Milwaukee, Howard pushing Claire in a stroller, Emma and I, hand in hand. We looked fine. We looked like perfectly regular people who were having a weekend. At the end of the day, we always came home exhausted, hungry, the four of us snapping at each other. I warmed up the brand-name supper the girls insisted upon: Kraft macaroni and cheese, and hot dogs to go along with it. They ate noisily with their faces right down in their bowls. Howard read the paper over his peanut butter and jelly and carrot sticks. Because of his job we not only had major medical insurance, but we also had dental insurance and ocular insurance. We had never before been so secure, so prepared for failure.
The trial was set for December second. At the end of October the three boys, Anthony Jenkins, Norman Frazer, and Tommy Giddings, dropped their charges. The whole story was like a carefully wrought pile of sticks, and it was Norman who began pulling out the supports at the bottom. He made half the structure cave in. He apparently started naming everyone at school, saying that the gym teacher had put a gun to his head, the art teacher made them drink paint, the classroom teachers put aside numbers and letters in favor of what sounded like Satanic rituals. When the investigators tried to pull him back to the original perpetrator, he remembered nothing that he had said before. Anthony Jenkins had also been giving inconsistent statements, and it was determined that his story would not hold up in court. The Giddingses decided that it was going to be more damaging to Tommy to have to testify than the already substantial harm that had come to him, and they reluctantly withdrew the charge. The older children who had been assessed were said to have grievances which would have required disciplinary