“My husband is an excellent plastic surgeon. I will not have my daughter’s hand look like an experiment.”
Her father came to stitch up the wound. In Penelope’s mind, he had special vision: he saw how things ought to be righted that had gone wrong. How else was she to understand that he cut healthy people with a scalpel and then just stitched them up without having cured anything at all?
Penelope had expected the trip to the hospital—the first of her life, not counting her birth—to be a bigger ordeal. It was anticlimactic for the most part; there were no machines taking pictures of her bones, no cups she had to pee in, and no needles prodding her, they didn’t even tell her to take off her clothes so they could put a gown on her. The highlight of the day was her mother inspecting the sutures and whispering over them as if she could will the skin to close and heal without a mark.
Later, at home, her mother sat down next to Penelope.
“What happened?” she asked and watched for words or gestures meant to expose Penelope somehow. Her mother was smart that way, capable of seeing signs that gave her away: the rapid blinking of the lids she had no control over, the trailing of her eyes to the left and downward, a sure sign of a lie to come.
“You didn’t do this deliberately, did you?” her mother asked. There was a long pause as Penelope watched her mother brace herself for the answer.
Penny replied with a wobble of the head, which could have been a yes or a no.
“Did you?”
“I don’t know what that word means,” Penelope said instead.
“Were you trying to hurt yourself?” Donna rephrased but Penelope knew the meaning of deliberate.
“Hurt myself?” Penny said as if that was a question incomprehensible to her, like a concept that only adults understood and that didn’t make sense to her at all.
Penelope felt desperation run through her mother, could tell by her breathing and the red rash on her neck. Penelope liked this spark she felt inside of her; it made her feel powerful. She closed her eyes, kept her breathing steady, afraid her mother might demand an explanation.
“Okay.” Donna smoothed the pink duvet along the edges of the four-poster bed. “Okay. You go to sleep.”
Penelope traced the cut with the tip of her thumb for years to come. There was an occasional tingling of severed nerves and the red welt faded into a barely visible white scar passing as a second life line, as if Penelope could pick one fate over the other.
4
DONNA
Soon it will be winter. Everything will cease to grow and thrive and bloom. I’d like to have a word with the arborist. What he’s done to the crape myrtles is a sin and I want to tell him how to properly prune them. Cutting them off at a certain height is the lazy way out; no, each plant is different and requires individual treatment. All one has to do is remove any dead flowers and seedpods and if you keep fertilizing, they will keep vigorously producing blooms until the first frost. I seem to recall purple blossoms a while back but I didn’t pay much attention; I wasn’t in the right state of mind then.
Though I’ve come a long way since Edward left me, I’m still in a peculiar place. I told the therapist—also located in-house for our convenience—I will always be Mrs. Edward Pryor and I insist on keeping the Pryor name after the divorce, minus the house and the husband. Though I told him, as a side remark, that keeping it was something I feel compelled to do, the truth is I imagine with horror Edward demanding I take back my maiden name.
Belcher. Donna Belcher. It conjures up the picture of a matronly woman in sensible shoes and stiff Aqua Net hair waiting for her monthly check to arrive so she can go grocery shopping. I have zero proclivities to be that kind of a woman, ever.
* * *
• • •
Outside my window two women with visors walk past, their footsteps echoing sharply. They are dressed casually: jeans, fitted jackets, and neck scarves. Their arms and legs move in unison and I feel a pang of loneliness. Friendships are hard to come by, and I’ve been moody and ought to make more of an effort to meet people.
All day I’ve worn my hair in a bun, the bobby pins nipping and prodding my scalp. Without a mirror I struggle and they get tangled in my hair. I open a drawer and arrange the pins neatly on top of a sleek folder with a glossy cover and embossed letters in gold foil.
I had pulled it from the recycling bin within a stack of discarded newspapers. The folder was given to Marleen when I moved to Shadow Garden a year ago. She has removed most of the pages—the one with important phone numbers is tacked to the bulletin board in the kitchen, so is the waste schedule. Garbage is to be placed on the walkways on Monday and Thursday between eight and ten, securely tied up in bags and left beside the columns by the front doors to be picked up by a maintenance crew member. Marleen takes care of that and has the schedule committed to memory, I’m sure.
The back page of the folder is a map of the monarch butterfly migration, starting in Mexico beginning in March and subsequently journeying north to Canada. It’s a nice touch, though I lack understanding of the connection to luxury apartments, but I appreciate the juxtaposition with my own life of, say, reinvention and determination of one’s own journey. The calligraphy is exquisite and reminds me of invitations I used to send out. The rest of the pages I barely skimmed over but I recall sketches of floor plans with square footages, suggested furniture placement—management is a stickler for keeping the windows unobstructed by heavy pieces, for safety reasons I assume—reminders about the wildlife, and bait stations tucked underneath bushes and in the corners of breezeways. Apparently stray cats are frowned upon and rats are considered a nuisance, and just like in real life, friend or foe seem arbitrary but I keep my mouth shut.
I slide the folder back into the drawer of my vanity. So little privacy left with Marleen around every day but this drawer remains my very own space.
How long have I been sitting here, tinkering with my hair? The two women from earlier have passed by my window twice, maybe even three times. To lose track of time can be a blessing with the thoughts of—
The house phone rings twice. Always twice. Then it stops. How odd. I wonder what that’s all about. From the kitchen the cabinet doors bang, the dishes clink like cymbals.
“Marleen,” I call out. My voice sounds sharp. I’m not always kind to her and I promised myself I’ll do better. “Marleen?” Softer this time.
She appears as if she moves about by hovering above the ground.
“Yes, Mrs. Pryor?”
This is what it comes down to every day. “Any phone calls today?”
“No, Mrs. Pryor, no calls.”
“I heard the phone ring.”
“Oh, that,” she says and cocks her head to the side. “Just someone at the gate punching the wrong numbers, I guess. It stopped ringing.”