Haywire by Brooke Hayward (android based ebook reader .txt) 📕

misdeed on the part of one of us, was brought up for required general discussion. Presided over by Mother, the dinner table was like a mirror in which all our behavior was reflected, a family tribunal, a microcosm of our total lives. Whoever missed a meal because of sickness, or was excused from the table for misbehavior, lost track of things and had to be filled in later.

• • •

That fall, the fall of 1945, Bridget and I went on the school bus to the public school in Brookfield. After years at the gentle hands of Miss Brown, school came as something of a shock. Moreover, we were extremely conspicuous for several reasons. The fact that we were the children of a celebrity who had mysteriously settled in that distant territory set us apart from the first day of school; it seemed the entire community knew about us, and were both suspicious of and flattered by our presence, although we couldn’t figure out why. Mother had successfully isolated us from the remotest idea of what a movie star was; the only movies we’d ever seen were King Kong, Dumbo, Bambi, and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. As if we didn’t feel foreign enough, we looked it. There was the matter of our hair. Mother, who disliked beauty parlors, always cut not only her own hair but ours. One sweltering day in August, she experimented on Bridget and me: waving her professional shears around, she clipped off first our long braids, and then, unable to resist the temptation, continued snipping away bit by bit, until, like Father’s table, there was almost nothing left. Our hair was shorter than Bill’s. “Oh it’s so becoming! You both look so wonderful and cool! And aren’t you lucky, to look just like boys without having to be them!” We believed her until we got to school.

That first day was a catastrophe. It was bad enough being stared at like aliens, but to be ridiculed by our peers, taunted, pointed at, left alone at recess and lunch with only each other to talk to—we were outcasts in a monstrous country. And by far and away the worst part was the sense of confusion and betrayal we felt. It was one thing to be different from everybody else, but to find it out like that? Why hadn’t Mother told us? “Mother,” we shouted, charging through the vestibule, the kitchen, the dining and living rooms, to find her at last, supervising the hanging of a side of beef in the cold-storage room. “Why didn’t you tell us how terrible it is to be a movie star? What is a movie star? Why can’t you be like other parents? And why did you tell us our hair looks adorable when everyone else thinks it just looks funny? And why can’t we take our lunch in paper bags?” (Mother had made a project out of decorating our new lunch pails with her fingernail polish.)

“Oh, my darlings, what an awful day you’ve had!” Mother appeased us breathlessly. “Now listen to me. Sometimes people are cruel just because they’re jealous and insecure and they don’t know how else to get attention. You must learn not to pay the slightest bit of attention—that’s just what they want, and if you act hurt they’re one up on you—you must just ignore them—but be polite! And say to yourselves, ‘Sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me.’ And never be afraid to be different—you don’t want to be exactly like everyone else. How boring that would be!”

And so we went back to school and never quite fit in. We were way ahead of our grades in every subject, which made us self-conscious, and our clothes and shoes were unlike anyone else’s, as were our sandwiches—cut in triangles, with the crusts neatly trimmed off, and stuffed with exotic fillings like cream cheese and olives or deviled ham, while the other children brought hunks of salami and cheese and gooey chocolate-covered marshmallows, which were forbidden us because they were bad for our teeth.

Bill was excluded from the nightmare of school because he was too young. Up to this point, Bridget and I had thought of him as a younger extension of ourselves, with a few savory, even enviable physical characteristics thrown in (one of Bridget’s first paintings, for which Mother was hurriedly called to a conference at nursery school, was entitled “Bill with a Beetle Crawling up His Pants”; in the painting, the infant Bill stood facing front with his arms outstretched and his blue suspender shorts raised to display, in scrupulous detail, what could only be a black beetle securely affixed to the tip of his penis), whom we could mold and pattern as we wished. Either he was beginning to change or we were; it was hard to tell. He even smelled subtly different from us, and as he instinctively moved away from the center of our control, we were only too happy to let him go—just as long as we could yank him back if we felt like it.

“Dear Bill,” Bridget coaxed him in her best handwriting on her best notepaper, “would you be so kind as to get in bed with me? It will be very kind if you do. Love, Bridget.”

Or, if he fell from disfavor, a harsh denunciation in blue crayon, written October 21, 1945:

Bill is a duck.

Bill is a toilet.

Bill is a wee wee

Bill is a B.M.

Bill is a frog

Bill smells terrible

Bill is a dish of ice cream.

(relenting, as usual, at the last moment).

Although we went on assuming that Bill was our property, we also began to be aware that there were more than anatomical dissimilarities between him and us. His personality was toughening up. Of the three of us, his disposition had always been the best—that is to say, the least moody or mercurial—but he was starting to get into the kind of bold trouble that would