When asked if she needed anything, Little O would always ask the social worker for something for Joe. He needed a walker to help him get from the couch back to bed. She knew that Little O couldn’t help but be anything but selfless. The social worker put together a bag of things for Little O all the same one day. She gave her a pair of used ice skates and an empty notebook with a photograph of a horse on it. Little O smiled and said, “You shouldn’t have.” The social worker almost began to weep.
They were selling aluminum balloons that had roses on them. Little O had terrible taste. She always went for that sort of thing.
Little O was sitting and peeling a hard-boiled egg on the steps of her building. The boy in Apartment 12 came and sat down next to her. She told him that her grandfather was from a little village outside of Poland and that if a little boy and a little girl sat across the table from one another and ate hard-boiled eggs, then they would be married.
The little children were all coming from a festival in the park. They had butterflies and cat faces painted on. They lived in a completely different world than she did.
His mother had a huge pitcher of water filled with slices of lemon in the fridge. It weighed about as much as a bathtub at the bottom of the ocean.
They went and looked at the strange and beautiful and mysterious things that his mother kept at the bottom of her underwear drawer. There was a pack of playing cards with naked men wearing construction helmets and firemen hats. There was a lozenge container full of pot. There was a package of specialty condoms.
It was strange that adults all had sex. It was strange how appalled they were about the idea of young people having sex. Why that of all things?
Joe would never actually be able to go in for a parent — teacher interview and they had no telephone. So Little O photocopied the report card and gave herself all As. The whole night he talked about how she had inherited her smarts from him and that he had raised her right. He had tears in his eyes. Joe put his arms around her. Her face was damp with his tears.
Little O and Guy were sucking on jawbreakers. Their tongues were changing colours inside their heads.
She went to the zoo to feed the elephant peanuts. When its trunk gently touched her hand, it always turned her on.
Many of the animals were fed from baby bottles. She thought there was something wrong about that. They couldn’t have liked being treated like babies. She didn’t think that there was anything worse on earth than being treated like a baby and having food shoved down your throat all the time. It was rubbing the fact that they weren’t free in their faces.
One of the zookeepers knew her. He told her that when she was eighteen, she would come to the zoo and he would make love to her. Would she like that? he asked. Yes, she said.
She went and sat on a stool at the Chinese restaurant that was on the first floor of her building. The stools were covered with red vinyl and little tiny gold stars. The placemats had drawings of fancy goldfish on them. The place was filled with the late-night crowd. She sat there in her pyjamas and watched the television that was above the cash. The owner always gave her free soup and fortune cookies.
A man came in after a hockey game and lit up a sparkler. He waved it over his head in the restaurant. Everyone laughed. Little O put her hands over her head as if it had just started to rain.
She wanted to know if she could come over and they would read Slaughterhouse-Five together.
She put a balloon under her T-shirt. Taking his hand and placing it on her belly, she asked him whether or not he could feel the baby kicking.
His mother watched them out the window. Of course she was going to end up being pregnant young, the mother thought. There was no way around it. She did not want her son involved in that. Little O would ruin the future prospects of whichever boy got her pregnant.
The mother couldn’t believe that she was having those kinds of thoughts. She blamed Little O also for putting such terrible thoughts into her head. She really hadn’t known that she was that type of person until Little O came along into her front yard.
There was supposedly a little boy who lived in that apartment building who could sing Elton John songs really well.
He was wearing a pair of penny loafers. There was a penny in one of them. The other one seemed to have disappeared.
She took all her clothes off and weighed herself on a scale in her bathroom. She liked that she was skinny. She didn’t know why she was proud of the fact that she was thin, except that it was the type of thing that girls were supposed to feel accomplished about. The other girls would point out in an admiring way how skinny she was.
Little O had to put Joe’s socks on for him and then take them off. Sometimes Joe was afraid to tell Little O how much he needed her. Because he thought that if he did, she would pack her suitcase with clothes and climb out the window and run away. So he yelled at her out of desperation. The logic of love is often incredibly faulty. Love has a lot of trouble making sense out of anything.
Joe screamed at Little O that she had gotten the groceries all wrong. He told Little O that she never did anything for him. He said that she was a useless little girl and that other girls helped their parents out around the house.
Little O knew that Joe didn’t really mean it, but it made her cry all the same. She went down to the stoop to cry all by herself. The tears streamed down both of her cheeks as though her eyes were broken faucets. A neighbour stopped to look at her on his way up the stairs. He had never seen eyes so blue. It was as though he were witnessing a miracle.
She climbed into the bathtub. The water rose up around her. She pretended that she was the moon making the tide rise.
She climbed up his fire escape. The cats in the windows raised their eyebrows in surprise as they saw her go.
They decided to have phone sex. She went down to the lobby and dialed up. He could hear the echo of the lobby as she talked. She stopped for a moment because someone came in. It was Mrs. Foucault from Apartment 7. By the time she was done asking Little O what she was doing there, he had lost his erection.
He had his plastic wristband from the amusement park on his wrist from eight months before. Holding up the scissors from the kitchen, she said that it was time to let her cut it off. The scissors made the sound of a guillotine’s blade descending. He felt completely naked after she snipped.
The winter wind blew the last orange leaf off the tree just like it was blowing out the flame of a candle.
Little O and Joe put on paper crowns at Christmas time. She had a yellow one and he had a purple one. They watched the show about Rudolph. She ate her fruitcake out of a soup bowl with a spoon. It had started snowing outside.
The big red pompom on her knit hat looked like she had an apple balanced up there and she was waiting to be shot by William Tell.
She didn’t know how she felt when a dodge ball hit her hard.
The man in Apartment 6 used to open his door and look every time she passed. It was that kind of building.
He had a calculator on his wristwatch that he was wearing over a tattoo of a tiger that was half scratched off. They were sharing an armrest and his wrist was coming awfully close to hers.
She was reading a paperback book called Calories. It gave you the amount of calories that an apple or a piece of pumpkin pie might have. She was tearing through it as if it was an engaging spy novel.
His mother called him Bird affectionately.
There were naked girls all over the city. They were in bathtubs. They had just been made love to. They were in tiny changing rooms with dresses all over the floor around them, like cherry trees that had dropped their blossoms.