The Name of the World - Denis Johnson [39]
“Before I can tell you the story of my name,” Flower said, “I believe I have to tell you the story of your face.”
I felt better when she said that. “A sad, ugly tale.”
“I don’t want to! But it’s necessary.”
She’d found a sketch pad, a sheaf of newsprint in large sheets. She sat on a stool behind the nearest easel, set up the pad, took a thick pencil from the easel’s tray, and began, I guessed, to draw. She was left-handed.
“Your lips are thin. You have a big space between your nose and upper lip, like a monkey, but you miss having a monkey face because your chin is too small and there’s not enough face beneath your mouth to make a monkey face. Your nose is small and pushed up too far. Too much of your nostrils show. That makes your eyes look sort of dull-minded and also sort of fearful.”
She stopped momentarily and honed her pencil on a piece of emery paper.
“Your eyes are a very beautiful blue. You have nice round cheeks, and bushy well-defined eyebrows. Very definite eyebrows. Your hair is nice, very tightly curled, kinked, really, and with lots of colors in it, brown and blond and some blue and mostly gray. And you’re small.”
Flower stood up and held the sketch pad out before her at arm’s length a full minute, looking back and forth between her rendering and her model. She turned the pad to me. It was quick, but recognizable.
“Your hands are small. I’ve told you you have an inner and outer smallness that’s very attractive, at least to me.”
“Thank you. I think.”
“The story of your face is over.”
“Thank you even more.”
“Now the other story. Once I was taken away by a guy to a gingerbread house.”
“Excuse me?”
“This is the story of my name.”
“Okay. All right.”
“When I was a little girl, one day a man led me away from my home and took me to a gingerbread house.
“He was small like you, Michael, and his nose was turned up too far, like yours, and his chin was too small like yours. But his face was narrow, and his whole head, too, and his ears were big and funny. Not like yours. You have nice ears.
“I was four years old. One morning he came to our back yard and took me away. They didn’t find me till after dark.
“He sang a song,” she said.
“Were you terrified?”
“I wasn’t. And I’m not terrified when I remember. But everyone I’ve ever told it to has been.”
(She looked at me quizzically, searching, I suppose, for my fear. I’m sure it was there and I’m sure she discovered it.
(Yet now these words came from me—I didn’t intend them and I didn’t even know what they meant—I just remember them now—I hear them—I said, “I still can’t feel anything.” No response from Flower. Maybe she didn’t hear.)
“I don’t remember much. Sometimes when I’m trying to recall what happened, I think I remember another little girl there. An almost sad little girl watching me. I didn’t think of sadness then, so I don’t know, but I almost think she was sad. Here’s what else I remember:
“In the morning I was playing in the garden. I had some mischief in my mind. The back yard was bordered all around by a flower bed about six feet wide, all along the base of this cinderblock wall that enclosed the yard. It was the spring season. I looked in the earth where I sort of understood, without actually remembering doing it, that my mother and sisters and I had planted bulbs in the fall, tulip bulbs, and I sensed there were tulips growing there right now, just under the dirt. I wanted to dig there and see. It was a mischief