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Excerpt
Jane
Spencer collects pictures of slim young men. In the bottom drawer
of her desk, between swatches of silk and old business cards for
Spencer Interiors, she has two photos of James Dean, one of a deeply
wistful Jeremy Irons in Brideshead, arm in arm with the boy holding
the teddy bear, a sepia print of Rudolph Valentino in 1923, without
burnoose or eyeliner, B. D. Wong's glossies as Song Liling and as
his own lithe, androgynous self, and Robert Mapplethorpe slipping
sweetly out of his jeans in 1972. She has a pictorial history of
Kevin Bacon, master of the transition from elfin boy to good-looking
man without adding bulk or facial hair.
The summer Jessie Spencer turned five, she played Capture the Flag
every day with the big boys, the almost-six-year-olds who'd gone
to kindergarten a year late. Jane never worried, even in passing,
about Jesse's IQ or her eye-hand coordination or her social skills.
Jesse and Jane were a mutual admiration society of two smart, strong,
blue-eyed women, one five and one thirty-five, both good skaters
and good singers and good storytellers. Jane didn't mention all
this to the other mothers at play group, who would have said it
was the same between them and their daughters when Jane could see
it was not, and she didn't mention it to her own sweet, anxious
mother, who would have taken it, understandably, as a reproach.
Jane didn't even mention this closeness to the pediatrician, keeper
of every mother's secret fears and wishes, but it sang her to sleep
at night. Jane's reputation as the play group's good listener was
undeserved; the mothers talked about their knock-kneed girls and
backward boys and Jane smiled and her eyes followed Jesse. She watched
her and thought, That smile! Those lashes! How brave! How determined!
Jane sometimes worried that Jessie was too much of a tomboy, like
Sarah and Mellie, even faster runners and more brutal partisans;
it was nothing to them to make a smaller boy cry by yanking up his
underpants, or to grind sand into the scalp of the girl who hogged
the tire swing. These two didn't cry, not even when Mellie cut her
lip on the edge of the teeter-totter, not even when Sarah got a
splinter the size of a matchstick. But Sarah and Mellie, in their
overalls and dirty baseball jerseys, never had the boys' heartless
prankishness, the little devils dancing in the blacks of their eyes.
Jessie had exactly that, and the other kids knew she wasn't a tomboy,
never strained to be one of the boys. There was no teasing, no bullying
line drawn in the sand. Jane knew that one day soon, in the cove
behind John Lyman School, the boys would pull out their penises
and demonstrate to Jessie that she could not pee standing up, and
it would be terrible for Jessie. Jane was wrong. Jessie watched
the boys and practiced at home, making a funnel with both hands
and a baggie. When Andrew and Franklin went to pee on the far side
of the rhododendron, Jessie came too, unzipping and pushing her
hips forward until there was, if not a fine spray, a decent dribble.
The boys thought nothing of it until first grade, and when they
did and the teacher pushed Jessie firmly into the girls' bathroom,
she walked home at recess, horrified by the life ahead, and Jane
could not coax her back for a week.
It was worse when Jane took her to get a simple navy blue jumper
for a friend's wedding. Jane held it out, pleased that she'd found
something in Jessie's favorite color without a ruffle or a speck
of lace, and Jessie stared at it as if her mother had gone mad,
wailing in rage and embarrassment until Jane drove her to Macy's
for a boy's navy blazer with gray pants and dared the salesperson
to comment. They compromised on patent leather loafers and a white
turtleneck. People at the wedding thought only that Jane was her
fashionable self and Jessie adorable. Very Kristy McNichol, the
bride's mother said. Driving home, Jane knew that she had managed
not to see it, as you manage not to see that your neighbor's new
baby has your husband's eyes and nose, until one day you run into
them at the supermarket and you cannot help but see. Jessie slept
the whole way home, smears of buttercream on the white turtleneck,
rose petals falling from her blazer pocket, and Jane cried from
Storrs to Durham. She had appreciated and pitied her mother and
adored her father, a short, dapper man who cartwheeled through the
living room at her request and told his own Brooklyn version of
Grimm's Fairy Tales at bedtime. She had liked Jessie's handsome
father enough to think of marrying him until he was revealed to
have a wife in Eau Claire and bad debts in five states. It did not
seem possible that the great joke God would play on her was to take
the love of her life, a wonderfully improved piece of Jane, and
say, Oops. Looks like a girl but it's a boy! Sorry Adjust accordingly.
It took Jane all of Jessie's childhood to figure out what the adjustment
might be and to save fifty thousand dollars to pay for it.
Excerpted from A BLIND MAN CAN SEE HOW MUCH I LOVE YOU: Stories
(c) Copyright 2000 by Amy Bloom. Reprinted with permission from
Random House. All rights reserved.
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