Magical Thinking - Augusten Burroughs [75]
And I have a wide, deep cruel streak. This is not something I am proud of. But it’s a fact I’ve come to accept about myself. Maybe I’ll bring it up in therapy, after I have addressed my other issues (fear of intimacy, sexual dysfunction, obsessive-compulsive behavior, social anxiety disorder, and mania).
Last week Dennis and I were browsing in a store in Northampton, Massachusetts, that sells a selection of incongruous though carefully chosen items. For example, they sell dishwashing detergent with retro, nineteen-fifties packaging alongside greeting cards handmade from fibrous paper and flowers picked from a lesbian’s garden. I happened to be looking at a beautiful book of magic spells and incantations when I stepped just a few inches to my left and shifted my weight onto that leg.
I felt something under my foot, an unevenness. It hardly registered, it was so subtle. Almost like a floorboard beneath the carpeting was warped. Just the same, I glanced down and was surprised to see the hand of a little girl, almost a little baby girl.
She couldn’t have been more than two, because she didn’t have any teeth. I saw this now because her mouth was all the way open, and her eyes—both of them—mirrored her mouth. Her whole face was all the way open. She was about to scream; I was certain. The wonderful thing about children is that they do not yet have complex emotions. They have the starter set of factory-standard emotions. And they cannot hide them. She was feeling the shock of pain in her little fingers, and she was going to scream.
I quickly slid away. I walked a good twelve feet to my right and began fingering the display of colorful wool pillows.
And that little girl screamed. It was shrill and passionate, and her mother came immediately to the rescue.
The mother had been standing just a few feet to the left of the little girl, inspecting some soy-based gift-wrapping paper. Now, the mother was crouched down to be face to face with her little screaming girl thing.
“What is the matter?” she asked in that musical tone of voice parents use.
The girl would only wail. She was too young to form thoughts, let alone sentences. She only looked vaguely in my direction and then back at her mother, screaming and streaming tears.
The store had thoughtfully placed items for small children at floor level, near the register where I had been standing next to (or actually on top of) the little girl. These were cute toys, colorful and soft. There were tiny stuffed lambs with black collars, blocky wood cars and trucks, a number of squishy plastic things that had bubbles trapped inside neon liquid.
The girl reached her damaged hand out toward her mother, but because her sense of direction was not yet fully formed, the hand landed on the shelf, among the toys.
“No, you are not getting one of those,” the mother said. “And I want you to stop crying this instant. You may not have those.”
The girl cried harder.
The mother picked her up and scolded. “What’s gotten in to you?” she said. “Why are you acting like this all of a sudden? Do you need a nap? Well, we’re going to leave right now and I’m going to set you down for a nap.”
So now the girl would be punished after having had her hand stepped on by a gay guy from New York.
Horribly, I laughed.
This poor little girl had been crawling along the floor next to her mother. When suddenly, perhaps, she did see the pretty little blocks with letters printed on the sides in bright, primary colors. Perhaps she wormed her way over just a foot, and then I crushed her little fingers flat into the carpet.
Now a scolding, and soon a nap.
I, like an especially clever and devious shoplifter, was entirely off the hook. It was sheer luck that some other mother hadn’t seen me and come to the rescue. “No, that bad man there stepped on your daughter’s fingers!”
The fact is, life is hideous, and it’s a good thing this girl learned it now. I convinced myself of this later.
Because later I was feeling remorse. I was feeling awful that I hadn’t rushed over