On the other side of the room, beneath a poster of the Gobi Desert, is a wastepaper basket. Janice makes it to the basket in time to vomit. She vomits all over an empty juice carton and pencil shavings curled like a ribbon of orange peel. Then she vomits again. She straightens up, wipes her mouth with her hand. Her eyes are wet and she dries them with her sleeve, but more wetness rises up and she realizes she is crying. Walking to the door of the classroom, she glances at Ms. Matthews and sees that she looks stricken, shocked; more shocked, Janice thinks, than if she had gone ahead and slapped her.
A foot, once bound, will be bound forever: Few can withstand the pain when bones awaken. Tend to it carefully, but always in darkness. The beauty snared beneath the bandages may dissipate in light.
SHE SITS IN A café for a few hours until the staff put the chairs on the tables and begin to mop around her feet. When eventually she goes home, she finds the hall and the downstairs rooms in darkness, save for the flicker of the TV in the living room. Becky is sprawled on the couch, her feet bound in white bandages and propped on a beanbag. Janice switches on the light. “Becky,” she says. “We need to talk.”
Becky blinks, rubs her eyes. She mutters something under her breath, then picks up the remote and begins surfing channels.
Janice positions herself between her daughter and the screen. “I went to see Ms. Matthews today.”
Becky puts down the remote, letting the TV come to rest on a cartoon station.
“Your father and I are very happy, Becky. Do you understand that?”
Becky stares at her mutely.
“And if you ever have worries about that, or any worries at all, you come to me first, okay? I’m not blaming you for anything, Becky, please don’t think I’m blaming you, but we’re a family, we’re a team, and we need to trust each other.”
Becky is examining her fingernails, poking at her cuticles.
Janice sighs. “All right,” she says. “I’m going to make a start on dinner. Then we’re going to sit down together and you’re going to tell me what you said to Ms. Matthews.”
“I can’t really remember,” Becky says. “We talked about lots of stuff.”
Janice feels the nausea returning. “You must try to remember,” she says. “It’s important.” She nods at Becky’s feet. “And I know that’s not homework, so take off those bandages.”
Becky gives no indication of having heard.
“I said take them off, Becky.”
Slowly, Becky raises one foot onto the couch and begins to unwind the bandages, letting them fall in spirals to the floor. Underneath, her foot looks white and pale and startled. Red marks run across her toes where, Janice sees now, she has used elastic bands to hold the tights in place. Becky examines her toes, the arch of her foot. Her small toe is a bluish-white color, beginning to pinken as the blood comes rushing back. She forgets for a moment that she is fighting with her mother. “Look,” she says, holding up her foot, “it’s got smaller.”
Janice bends and squints at her daughter’s foot. “It’s exactly the same size it always was.”
“It’s not,” Becky says. “It’s smaller.” She gets up and hops across the floor to where she has left a pair of canvas pumps. She slides her bare foot into one and wriggles it around. “See?” she says, “it’s loose. It wasn’t loose before.” She hops back across the room and flops onto the couch. She reaches for a strip of cloth from the floor.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m going to sleep in them, see what my feet are like in the morning.”
“You most certainly are not.”
“You hate me,” Becky says. “You want me to have big, ugly clown feet like Ms. Roberts.”
Janice pulls the strip of fabric from her daughter’s hand, rips it in half, then in half again, and flings the pieces onto the carpet.
“Stop it! You’re ruining them!” Becky jumps up, swaying a little, hopping on her one bare foot. She tries to gather the strips, but Janice kicks them, sends them scattering across the floor. “I hate you!” Becky screams. “I wish you weren’t my mother. I wish I had any other mother in the world except you.” She hobbles to the stairs, one foot still bandaged. Holding on to the banisters, she hops up the first set of steps, stopping to rest on the half landing.
“Get down here now,” Janice says. She begins to climb the stairs after her daughter.
Becky shakes her head. Outside on the street, the lamps come on, a soft glow falling on the stairs, on the table with its crystal animals, glittering as if they’d been torched, sparking with light and fire. Becky, in that instant, is alight, too, as fierce and beautiful as a starlet from an old black-and-white movie, her hair falling loose of its bun, her face flushed. And in the next moment, she is a child again, dismayed, confused, scorched by the life sap bubbling up through her.
Janice is beside her now. “Come on, Becky, you’re being silly.”
Becky wipes away a tear. “Yeah?” she says. “Well, maybe I’m silly, but at least I’m not fucking pathetic. No wonder Dad hates you.”
Her hand catches Becky high on the cheek, just below her left eye. She watches, as if in slow motion, her daughter toppling backward, the table crashing to the floor. The little figurines collide as they fall, cracking, splintering, slivers of crystal lodging like miniature stalagmites in the carpet. And in the immediate aftermath, just for a second, there is utter and complete silence; that brief, fleeting silence she has heard described on television by survivors of terrorist attacks and explosions. Becky gets shakily to her feet, putting one hand to the wall to steady herself. Her face is pale, apart from a red gash beneath her eye that has already started to bleed.
“Oh no,” Janice whispers. “Oh no.” She sinks down beside the upturned table, the floor all around glinting with shards of birds and animals. She looks at her hand, tingling still from the force of the slap. The ring on her middle finger was a gift from Philip years back that she has kept meaning to get resized. It has slid around, as it is wont to do, the stones now to the underside, a hard ridge of diamonds.
Becky puts a hand to her cut cheek. She barely seems to register the blood on her fingers when she takes them away. As if in a daze, she rights the table, returns it to its position beneath the window. Then she drops to her hands and knees and begins to gather up the crystals: the ones that have survived and the broken ones, dozens of severed limbs and shattered torsos.
“Don’t,” Janice says, sobbing. “Don’t bother. There’s no point.” Reaching out, she traces a finger along the trail of blood on her daughter’s face. “He will leave me now,” she whispers. “He will never stay with me after this.”
How beautiful the tiny slippers, the swaying walk, that will forever keep her from the fields. Let her begin now her dowry: slippers embroidered with fish and lotus flowers, crafted by her own hands.
THERE IS A CRAB apple tree, planted by a previous owner, at the end of the garden, the ground all around a pulp of bruised windfalls, though she had sworn that this year she would harvest them. She leans against the trunk, listening to the river flowing by on the other side of the fence. Looking back at the house, she sees that the light is on in Becky’s bedroom, the curtains closed. Later, lights come on downstairs and she sees Philip moving about the kitchen, and she makes her way back up the garden to the house.
When she slides open the patio doors, she sees that she has startled him. He still has his coat on and is taking a beer from the fridge. He turns and she studies his face from across the kitchen, trying to gauge what he knows. “You scared me,” he says. “I didn’t realize you were home. Where’s Becky?”