When Penelope was five, we lived in Florida at the end of a cul-de-sac. I search my mind for fond memories of the bungalow but all I know is I wouldn’t set foot in it today. A crooked fire hydrant in the front yard and a small square patch of grass. Every time the air conditioner kicked in, the lights flickered on trembling currents due to faulty wiring. We were able to afford the house because the interior was dated and overhead power lines cut through the backyard, mere feet away from the porch. Metal towers loomed above us and I often wondered if it was safe to live there.
For hours on end, Penelope played with her dollhouses, scooting across the cheap carpet until her knees turned pinkish red from the friction. She’d sit with what I interpreted as sharp concentration but as time passed I saw it for what it was: an obsession, a way of soothing herself. She rearranged plastic dolls and dainty accessories and when I interrupted her, she’d snap her head back and flip her ponytail by weaving her fingers through her hair, whipping it around.
Penelope—we called her Pea as a baby and toddler, Penny as a child, Penelope starting as a teenager—never made friends easily. She didn’t care for other children. It sounds callous, but it wasn’t so much her not liking others as her enjoying her own company. I found what I thought was the solution to her isolation and bought her an outdoor playhouse, hoping it would attract children from the neighborhood. I had an image of Pea and her friends having tea parties and tucking their doll babies in strollers, playing dress-up and wearing princess dresses.
I didn’t read the description and the playhouse arrived in hundreds of pieces of wooden shapes with numbered and lettered plastic stickers and a bag of screws, nails, and hex keys. That Edward was going to put the playhouse together was wishful thinking on my part; he has not so much as hammered a nail in the wall.
I found a handyman in the Yellow Pages who put it together the very next day. After he left, Penelope stared at the house for a long time, then circled it as if she was pondering its intended use. “Go on,” I said and watched her step inside as I stood on the back porch and beheld the structure: the scalloped cedar shingles, the cast-iron bell, the stained-glass window in the door which allowed plenty of sunlight to sneak inside, where a delicate heart-and-swag stencil pattern adorned the walls.
Penelope disappeared within the structure and a sudden gust of wind slammed the playhouse door shut and the stained-glass pane shattered though it took me some time to connect cause and effect. Penelope screamed and I ran to find her with a gaping cut from the tip of her index finger down the palm of her hand to her wrist. The cut bled so profusely, I was unable to staunch the bleeding. I rushed her to the ER and Edward did the sutures himself and eventually all that was left of that day was a faint white line in my daughter’s palm. It seemed to float, to sit above her skin. Penelope didn’t so much as shed a tear. She knew no pain. I say that without judgment, that was just the body she lived in.
There was something about Penelope, something that made me—
Outside my window heavy footsteps sound. More laughter. I got you. Stop being silly. The voices grow weak, then fade, swallowed by the lush landscaping until there’s nothing but silence spilling into my room. There one moment, gone the next.
In the blink of an eye. That’s my go-to comment when I encounter families in the park outside my window. “Children grow up so quickly,” I say and smile though I shudder when small sticky hands reach for me. I bury my hands in my pockets and add, “Before you know it, they are grown. In the blink of an eye. Gone.”
Like my daughter, Penelope. My husband, my entire life. Gone.
My mind bends in on itself, pondering my role in it all. There’s a lesson in here somewhere, but what the lesson is I don’t know.
3
PENELOPE
That playhouse. Penelope knew what her mother was trying to do: like the man in the book, the Pied Piper, she wanted children to march into the backyard and up the wooden steps into the miniature house with shelves and benches and tables. Those kids might appear but not a single one of them would stick around.
It wasn’t her earlobes, which were flatter than any lobe she had ever seen—not even her parents had them and how she got them, she couldn’t be sure. She didn’t comprehend biology or genetics or inheritance quite yet but was told she had her mother’s fine hair and her father’s nose, so everything about her came from them but her lobes were a puzzle to everyone.
But that wasn’t what made her different.
There was the accident in the cul-de-sac. A girl fell off her bike, having just learned to ride, still clumsy and off balance, teetering left and right. Penelope watched her glide across the concrete and come to rest against the curb. She imagined the girl’s skin scraping against the asphalt and there was a lot of blood though Penelope’s father later explained to her that head wounds always tended to bleed profusely. It wasn’t the fact that Penelope had remained calm when the blood collected in the sidewalk dip—the very hollow in which a puddle formed and she jumped after a rain shower—it was the fact that all the kids who saw the blood gasped and turned pale. Even the boys backed up and one began to cry.
But not Penelope. She stood and stared at the blood pooling in the indent in the asphalt and the girl’s mother came running and pushed Penelope to the side, pressing a handkerchief against her daughter’s head.
The children were led away from the scene and huddled by a nearby tree. During the frenzy of cries and cars coming to a screeching halt offering help, Penelope wandered back and decided to observe the scene up close.
She stared at the pool of blood. It wasn’t as scandalous to her as it was to the onlookers—she thought of the moment later, how it was twisted into something it was not—and she was merely attempting to see something up close she was fascinated by, not any different than looking at cells under a microscope, something doctors do, like her father.
Penelope kneeled down but couldn’t get a good look at the blood and so she lowered her bottom, her legs turned out and away from her body, her thighs spread apart, her eyes hovering inches above the ground. Ever since then, the children thought her to be odd and all the playhouses in the world weren’t going to change that.
The day the playhouse was put together and the window shattered—Penelope didn’t have power over the wind, didn’t slam the door shut, didn’t make the window break, and therefore the entire affair was not completely her doing—Penelope took a shard and sliced her hand open. The cutting part scared her at first but once the skin opened up, she was mesmerized and felt no pain. Who is to say why she did what she did? To distract her mother? To spare herself the humiliation of playing alone? The anticipation of having her father spend an entire hour getting the sutures just right?
Penelope sat in a squeaky chair for the better part of an hour waiting in the ER. “Any doctor can suture that cut,” the nurse said, but Penelope’s mother wasn’t having any of it. Only Dr. Pryor’s expertise would do. Her mother trusted no one else to close the wound just right, and she didn’t want even a hint of a scar, Penelope overheard her say to the nurse.