The Fourth Child by Jessica Winter (best classic novels TXT) 📕

youwould be like fucking a rag doll.” Beside him, Pat snickered into his collar and looked away.

That’s when Jane knew. Knew it was going to happen. Not that day, probably not on this trip—the students’ days were too scheduled,too chaperoned, their hotel rooms closely monitored. She hadn’t even found the opportunity to smack herself in the head forlaughing at the Virgin Mary. But Thing One and Thing Two had discussed and evaluated her as a prospect, and come to a decision,and now, gathered and seated here on the Metro, she was being advised of their decision.

“And you would know, wouldn’t you, Colin? You love to play with your dollies,” said Elise, as Jane flushed hot with her shame and her power.

She tried and failed to find a reproduction of the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa in Rome. Instead she brought home a print of Caravaggio’s Madonna and Child with Saint Anne: a buxom, sexy Mary and a naked toddler Jesus stomping decorously on the evil serpent, as Anne, gaunt and ancient, strugglesto pretend to admire their work while still remaining upright. Jane also bought a packaged chunk of the Colosseum, about asbig as a softball.

“That’s not real,” her mother told her. “How many hours did you have to babysit to buy that hunk of crap?”

Cree-ap. Jane’s mother, too, at moments of high dudgeon, could fall prey to the Buffalo accent.

Jane propped up the Caravaggio reproduction on a matboard atop her bedroom dresser, and as she expected, her mother said nothingabout it. Surely she objected to it—Mary’s bosom, Jesus’s penis—but if her mother said a word, she would only be revealingthe places where her own dirty mind could go.

 

Jane felt prepared for the pain. Sonja had done it with Larry Priven over Thanksgiving, much to Elise’s restrained dismay; Sonja said the pain was narrowly preferable to a torn ligament. On the thinly carpeted cement floor of Pat’s family’s freshly drywalled basement, where Pat and Colin and Brad Bender spent off-season afternoons lifting weights and drinking smuggled Budweiser, Jane observed the pain from a distance, her body splayed alongside a kettle ball and a dumbbell rack, but her mind’s eye elevated, like Teresa atop her plume of marble, as Pat’s courtly ministrations—the tender forehead kisses, the stroking of hair—began to give way to a procedure more autonomic and zoological, something Jane seemed almost incidental to. For an instant, Jane wondered if God was watching, if pain, even in this case, was the presence of God. She bit down on her tongue to punish herself for the thought. God was not so lewd, so prurient. His mind didn’t go to those places; he had better things to do.

He is not even looking at you.

Pat was two different people, and Jane liked that, for a long time. When he was sweet, he was so sweet. Mostly when they werealone. Jane loved how much he loved how skinny she was. She loved how easily he could scoop her up and sling her over hisshoulder, how he kneaded her rib cage and hip bones with the pads of his fingers, called her String Bean and Mrs. Bones andFatso and the Buttless Wonder. She loved that he loved how she would order French toast and souvlaki at Stavros’s Diner orhot wings at the Anchor Bar, manage a couple of small bites, and smile apologetically as she pushed her plate away, becauseshe did love to eat, you see, but she was too dainty and adorable, too easily overwhelmed, too much his sweet girl—because when he was sweet, he saw her, too, as sweet—to eat up the world she was hungry for.

“She tries so hard to pack it away,” he said to a waitress at Perkins one night, while they were waiting for Colin and Bradto join them, and she nibbled at pancakes already going cold.

If Jane and Pat were with other people, they were usually with his squad of jocks, who found few points of intersection withElise’s coalition of high achievers, although Elise and Christy did find time to sit beside Jane on the bleachers during Pat’shome games. With his friends, Pat tended to turn away, irritated, if Jane murmured in his ear; he’d scowl if she spoke toone of his friends in a way he found untoward.

“Why do you have to say colossal when you can just say big—who are you trying to impress?” he asked at Perkins, after Colin and Brad showed up.

And then: “Why do you have to make that face?” Her hand went up to her cheek to find out what kind of face she was making.

But just when Jane would begin to grow bored of her own embarrassment and vigilance, when she was ready to retreat from Pat into Elise’s sober and mostly chaste world of homework parties and volunteering for bingo night at the senior center, the Saturday nights at the Vines’ and the Sunday afternoons in the chirring walnut chairs of the Clearfield Library, he would return to her. He would place her hand in his and gaze at their fingers curled together, tug playfully at her ponytail, press his thumb and forefinger on the nape of her neck or the base of her spine. Right there in front of his friends. He wouldn’t do his crossword puzzles in front of his friends, but he would do this. Jane’s head tipped back beneath the gravity of his benediction, his tactile declaration of ownership, his pride in what he owned. With his letterman jacket draped over her shoulders, she felt the privilege of being owned, of being wanted exclusively, and the joyous unlikelihood of Pat’s choice—that he’d passed over any of the cheerleaders waiting to pair off with him, all yellows and golds with their Farrah-feathered hair and fourteen-karat nameplate necklaces, in favor of her, of all people, shy and gangly, tongue-tied and flat-chested Jane.

One time in the basement, Jane apologized for her small breasts.

“Tits are for milking,” Pat said, and Jane was moved.

She had accomplished something hard. Pat’s intervals of snappishness and