A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [73]
“Their mother and I happen to have kind of an important meeting tomorrow afternoon, in fact, and I was wondering if the girls could come over for an hour or so. I’d be glad to pay you. I’d pay you.”
She may have been struck dumb that anyone would talk to her about something other than the price of eggs. I waited a while for her to respond. She was breathing heavily, the “ah, ah, ah,” of each breath coming right into my ear. She finally spoke. “They mouth off?”
“They’re good girls,” I said. “They are very good girls. Would around one thirty be all right?”
“Who was that?” Emma called from the landing.
“Miss Bowman,” I said. “Tomorrow you—”
“I’m NOT going to her house.” She came into full view. “I’m not! She only has half an eye!”
There were moments, and that was one of them, when my knees almost folded up, when despair passed over me like a waft. It had been enough to call Miss Bowman and ask her to do something she wasn’t suited for. Claire was sitting right in front of the television, just about in the screen. I squatted down and whispered in Emma’s ear. “Tomorrow,” I said, “if you do not go to Miss Bowman’s for one short hour, I will not be able to visit Mother.” I had never called Alice “Mother.” “I won’t be able to find out how we can help her. I won’t be able to find out when she is coming home. If you sit here and make an awful stink, I will stay and watch you. Mom will sit and wait and wonder.”
“I want to come too,” she protested, her voice weakening as she spoke.
“Ch-children aren’t allowed.”
“Why can’t I come? Miss Bowman looks like a bird, like one of those naked birds that fell out of the nest.” In fact that was exactly what she did look like. I forced myself to whisper, to speak mildly. My new and gross instinct was to shout. I had never laid a hand on the girls. I could now imagine shaking them hard. Rafferty had called that morning to tell me about the parents’ meeting at Blackwell Elementary. They had brought in a speaker, a social worker who directs the Sexual Assault Unit at a Milwaukee hospital. She had urged the parents to watch their children carefully for nightmares, biting, bed wetting, masturbation, spitting, or any unusual behavioral changes. She suggested making an appointment with a physician who would be able to determine if physical injury had taken place. She wrote down alarming statistics on the blackboard about the prevalence of abuse. “We can all stay here and we won’t know anything about Mom,” I said to Emma. “And she won’t know anything about us.”
Emma covered her face and wept without much sound. I sent her into the living room to sit with Claire. Because they fought over the seating arrangement, I packed them off to bed without a story. I could hear Emma crying in her room for a short time before she fell asleep. Rafferty had tried to make the parents’ meeting sound benign, even casual, not much to worry about. I’m sure the social worker didn’t tell the parents that many of the behaviors she described were normal for young children. I knew, and Rafferty also knew, that those parents might as well have poured gasoline in a circle around our house and thrown a few matches in the grass.
In the end, on Sunday afternoon, I left the girls in Miss Bowman’s living room. I left them standing in front of her whatnot. They were holding their own hands, trying to keep themselves from reaching out to touch the china pitchers and the glass-blown figurines. They stood, mute and wide-eyed, in spite of themselves, at the rare view of Miss Bowman’s life. She had plastic slipcovers on her sofa and the chairs. They had a stiff new look to them. I wondered if she’d put them on to protect her upholstery from the girls. There was an upright piano in the corner, boxes of canning jars and lids on the coffee table, a bowl of orange velvet apples on a metal tea cart. There were egg cartons stacked halfway up the wall. The house smelled of cats and the gas stove, of mildew and overripe fruit. Miss Bowman stood paralyzed in the middle of her kitchen. Her territory had never been besieged by midgets before.