A Southern Girl: A Novel by John Warley

Author:John Warley [Warley, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781611173918
Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
Published: 2014-05-31T07:00:00+00:00

22

Sarah, for all her geriatric vivacity, needs help with the yard. At least twice a year we dedicate a Saturday to her place on Sullivan’s. This morning, Allie and I stop at the college, pick up Steven, and the three of us, dressed in the oldest clothes we could find, are on the causeway headed east. We have not seen Steven since the weekend of my party so there is catching up to do.

“Physics is going to kill me, that’s all there is to it,” he is saying from the passenger seat and I flash a look in the rear view mirror to warn Allie against gloating over her grades in science.

“Boy, you and me both,” she says heavily. This is worse, I think disapprovingly. Condescension; how unseemly. “I panicked toward the end of last semester.” She lets us ponder this anomaly in silence before adding, “Yep, toward the end I was afraid I would have to buy a textbook.” Steven, stone-faced, fishes into the glove box, grabs a map, and flings it over his shoulder as she ducks, laughing gleefully.

Watching these two spar is like watching heredity and environment go fifteen rounds for the title. Steven and Josh are both their father’s sons, a fact simultaneously pleasing and terrifying. When Josh was three, running around the yard chasing the neighbor’s dog, I noticed he ran on his heels. Instantly, I knew that run, and I accurately predicted he would be straining, as I did, for middling speed as an athlete, struggling to break twelve seconds in a hundred yard dash on his best day in sports. To a confirmed jock, the run of his teammates is as distinctive as a photograph, and on a football team with seventy guys dressed out but without numerals on their jerseys, I could have named all of them from fifty yards away by watching them run a few strides. Put Josh in my old uniform, slap No. 50 on his back, and you couldn’t get odds from my teammates that it wasn’t me lumbering along under those shoulder pads. The Carter forehead, the curl of his hair in humidity, the square chin, the green eyes all attest to a biological unity.

But physical likeness pales in fascination on the day you notice a biological child’s character flaw. Like the caveman who bends over the lake for the first glimpse of his own image, you are stunned to see reflected back flaws, unseen until that moment. “Don’t procrastinate,” you instruct as you inventory the projects lying fallow on your own to-do list. “And don’t be a hypocrite.”

But a clear picture of a fuzzy image is fuzzy, and the melding of two genomes is a fuzzy matter indeed, a reality Elizabeth and I remarked upon many times as she also saw herself in them, as though the caveman had glanced down at the precise moment a jet ski roiled the water below. As with most, our boys are identifiable blends of their impassioned architects. So what to make of Allie?

An orphan adopted at birth is not so much a mirror as a prism.

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