Duplex by Kathryn Davis

Author:Kathryn Davis [Davis, Kathryn]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781555976538
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2013-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Blue-Eyes

FOR MANY YEARS MARY COULD THINK OF NOTHING except her daughter and it was the same for Blue-Eyes—she couldn’t get enough of Mary. She followed her everywhere with a hand attached to some part of her mother’s body or clothes. Walter wanted to send the girl to a private school where they learned to speak foreign languages and handle money and say prayers, but the school was too far away for Blue-Eyes to attend as a day student, which would have meant leaving her bed empty night after night with no one for Mary to read to or sing to sleep. Of course this had been Walter’s plan all along.

Instead Blue-Eyes went to the same school Mary had gone to, the one just before the first of the three green hills leading to the Woodard Estate. When she got old enough Mary dropped her off at the head of the street and Blue-Eyes walked. She took the same route her mother had taken and, like her mother, she carried a new schoolbag. Several of the sycamores had died and been cut down; all of the bubblers in the schoolyard had been replaced by hygienic drinking fountains. Mary smelled the plastic of her daughter’s schoolbag and felt an ache in her heart, the same ache she felt when she first held the Yellow Bear. It was a smell associated with those moments when normal time was suspended and something out of the ordinary happened, like the first game of the spring when a ball landed at her feet and Eddie came running toward her and after he bent to scoop it up his face lifted—so close she could see all his eyelashes sticking out around his eyes like sunbeams in a drawing.

Blue-Eyes loved school, certainly more than Mary, who had preferred naptime and recess. Every Parents’ Night the teachers heaped nothing but praise on the girl, and her work was always prominently on display, bearing a gold star or an A+ or 100%. There was something not quite right about Blue-Eyes, though; Mary could see how uncomfortable every thing she did made the other parents and the teachers. For example, the movie about the Descent of the Aquanauts that she painted on a roll of shelf paper that got wound on chopstick handles past an opening cut in the bottom of a shoe box—once you started turning the handles it was like you were churning the sea inside the box to such a frenzy it was only a matter of time before it got out and then it would be everywhere, making such a mess you’d never be able to clean it up. “It isn’t that your daughter can’t do the work,” the teachers said, peering earnestly into Mary’s face. “She can do everything, but ...” They were never able to finish the sentence, a problem Mary had long since grown used to.

Teachers came and teachers went but the school itself remained remarkably unchanged. Strips of Palmer method script still hung

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