Unpretty Girl

Also stemming from a Story Club Challenge … I know that "magic pencils" were one of the elements, but I've long since forgotten the others!


*


You’d want me to make you pretty.
You’d ask for different hair – bouncing red waves or blonde ringlets or a dark silken waterfall over your shoulders. You’d want a different face, too – one of cherub-like sweetness with sparkling blue eyes or something darkly exotic with full curling lashes.
But I can’t change you.
Try as I might, I can’t see you any way but how you were, all bones and angles with mousy boy-cut hair, a hesitant gap-toothed grin, awkward posture and hand-me-down clothes from your cousins that never quite fit.
I see more than that, though. I see the quick light of intelligence in those grey-green eyes, hidden behind too-large plastic-framed glasses. The gentleness of those small hands as they stroked Toby’s ragged coat. The promise of future grace, an awakening lithe slenderness in those pointed elbows and twig-thin legs.
You’d never believe me. You couldn’t see those things. You just saw the unpretty twelve-year-old.
She’s the heroine of my story.
“But that’s not right,” you’d say. “You can’t have a story without a pretty heroine.”
That’s where you’re wrong.
Because I can’t change you. I won’t. But I’ll tell a story anyway.
“What do you want in your story?” I’d ask you.
I know what you’d say.

*

Magic.
When you were little, you’d watch me write – always by hand, in a blue-covered school notebook. I didn’t like the electric Olivetti much, though your dad was so proud of it when he got it for me that Christmas.
You asked me once if I wrote with a magic pencil to make my stories turn out right.
“Yes, “ I told you. “I do.”
You believed in magic pencils for a long time.
When you started to draw – when you discovered that light and shade and perspective were to you what plot and character and theme were to me – you’d ask every Christmas for magic pencils to make your drawings turn out right.
I didn’t believe in magic pencils, exactly, but there was something uncanny about what happened when you sat down with your sketchpad and pencil, absently giving the graphite an occasional lick as you pondered the page in front of you.
You laughed at me that day when I curled up cross-legged with you in the living room with my own paper, your pack of Laurentian pencil crayons between us.
While you sketched with swift, sure strokes, I drew slowly, painstakingly, taking refuge in the bland safety of landscape.
You peeked over at my page, giggled and tossed a new pencil at me.
“Grass isn’t chartreuse, Mom! Try forest green.”
I tossed it back.
“I want chartreuse. And my sky will be periwinkle. So there.”
I bent over my paper with my best imitation of your sulky pout.
You ignored me, but I could see your lips twitching.
I added cerise birds to my periwinkle sky and drew in scarlet flowers and a lemon sun for good measure.
Then you shoved your sketchpad in front of me. There we were. You, me and him. You were in the centre, in a posture that suggested you’d been drawing. I was sitting beside you. He was in the doorway, looking on as though he’d just walked in.
Maybe it was intentional on your part. Maybe it was a quirk of line. An accident of angle.
He was staring at you, smiling in that way of his – the delighted enthusiasm that could sweep the world into the warmth of its beam.
He didn’t seem to see me at all.

*
Love.
With a wrinkle of your pointed little nose, you’d concede the need for some of that in a proper story.
There was so much of it, from that very first moment.
I noticed him first, but I never admitted it. I always let him tell it his way.
“I saw you on the park bench,” he’d say, smile lighting his blue eyes. “Your head was bent over your notebook, and the sunshine caught your hair and turned it to gold. Then you looked up at the sun and smiled, and I knew I had to say hello.”
I never told him I’d already seen him. That I wasn’t startled when he tapped me on the shoulder. That I’d felt my stomach flip a little when I saw him walking towards me with that confident stride, that windblown hair, that all-encompassing smile.
Neither of us spoke for a moment. Then he said hi.
And that was that.
It all seemed inevitable after that. As though the moments from park bench to church aisle were part of a story that had already been written and I just had to keep turning the pages to get to the end.
You always liked looking at my wedding photos. Not so much at my long white dress – “ it’s just a wedding dress,” you’d say with a shrug – but at your aunts’ strange fashions.
Connie and Rose got lots of looks that day, with their short skirts and beehive hairdos. More looks than me, I joked.
But not from him.
He didn’t take his eyes off me the whole day.
Connie, for one, found that hilarious.
“Enjoy it while you can,” she warned darkly. “The honeymoon will be over soon enough.”
Connie had to admit she was wrong when you were on the way.
He’d gaze at me, wonderingly, as if I were Mona Lisa in his living room. He’d reach out and caress me with hands so gentle I could almost believe I had imagined his touch. Then he’d place both his hands on my stomach and lean in close to sing to you.
He couldn’t carry a tune. But that never mattered.
You seemed to like his voice. Later, when your crying would wake us up, he’d cradle you against his chest and croon tuneless versions of Shilo and Sweet Caroline.
You’d snuggle against him and sleep.
Then he’d look at me with an expression that said, How did I get so lucky.
When did that end, I wonder.

*
Conflict.
A good story needs some of that, too.
Ten minutes is all you need. Ten minutes to shift the direction of your story forever.
As soon as I arrived, I could sense that something was out of place.
That’s how I would begin this in a story, though in truth that’s not how it happened.
I don’t think I registered anything, other than slight surprise that his gleaming red Volvo was in the driveway. I hadn’t expected him home yet. I knew you were going to Annie’s to work on your science fair project, and I was looking forward to having the house to myself.
Still, I smiled a little at the thought of surprising him. I let myself in quietly, intending to sneak up behind him in his usual spot – the recliner in front of the TV – and put my hands over his eyes, playing our silly game of Guess Who.
He wasn’t in the recliner. He was on the phone. A snippet of conversation caught my ears as I walked quietly across the hall.
“Oh, really? Now that sounds tempting.”
It wasn’t the words that made me pause so much as the tone. The teasing lilt and throaty chuckle he never used with anyone but me. It was the chuckle, I think, that made me freeze in the living room, poised outside the kitchen door, listening to the rest of the conversation with a growing sense of inevitability.
I’d known, hadn’t I? Hadn’t I felt it in the tiredness he’d claim as he’d roll onto his side and turn out the light with a token kiss. The too-frequent showers after late nights at the office. The faint, unfamiliar floral scent that clung to his dress shirts.
I saw the cliché. I just hadn’t admitted to myself that I was living it.
“Listen, Tess, I’ve gotta run. You know how it is. But we’ll talk tomorrow, okay?”
The kitchen door must have pushed itself open, because I don’t remember doing it.
I just remember standing there, staring, seeing the look on his face. Dread mixed with relief, as if he too sensed the inevitability of the moment.
He opened his mouth, looked ready to speak.
“Spare us both,” I said.
I turned around, feeling tears welling up, unwilling to let him see me cry.
“ I want you gone when I get back.”
That was all I said before I fled, grazing the doorframe and bumping the recliner on my way to the door, blinded by the tears that were already flowing down my cheeks.
I thought you were at Annie’s.
You were supposed to be at Annie’s.

*
Endings.
You always said they were the most important part of the story. And they had to be sad, because happily ever after was for kids and hopelessly old-fashioned mothers.
This is the part where you’d want me to make you prettier.
“It’s always sadder when the heroine is pretty,” you’d say.
Maybe you were right.
Maybe that’s why I won’t make you pretty.
I won’t let this be sad.
I’ll change the ending.
It’ll go something like this:
The driver looked away for just a second and then looked back. She swore. Slammed on the brakes in time to see you scurry, white-faced, back to the lawn, Toby in your arms.
The driver didn’t feel the sickening moment of impact. Did not hear the dull thud, the crunch that sent her heart leaping into her throat. Did not get out of the car screaming your name.
She did not see you lying there, white and still, legs splayed, neck bent awkwardly. Did not see Toby nuzzling your hand with a plaintive mewling that was nothing like his usual imperious yowl.
That did not happen.
Neither did the rest.

I need your magic pencil now. I’ll flip it over and use the pink rubber to make it all disappear.
Erase the frantic phone call. The sirens. The lights. The white-coated ambulance attendants who seemed to move in slow motion as they took you away.
Edit out the journey we took to the hospital, he and I, trapped in a silence we couldn’t break, a chasm too deep and wide to cross.
Remove the moment the doctor came into the room, face grave, eyes gentle.
Delete the words: Skull fracture. Cerebral edema.
None of it was real.
Nor was that day, with its parade of faces, its endless series of hugs and meaningless murmurs of consolation. As if there was any to be had.
“Be strong,” his dad said. “For Carrie.”
“Don’t cry,” my mother said. “God’s taken her home.”
Strike my response.
“Home? Her home was with me.”
Lose the bitter tone that echoed in the muffled silence of the church.
Most of all make me not have said those final words that lashed out at him with lethal venom.
“This was your fault. I left because of you.”
Make him not have replied. Not have spoken in a tone so quiet I could barely hear the words, so icy cold I felt its sting like a physical blow.
“You were driving. Not me.”
Rub out those words, every one of them, syllable by syllable, letter by letter. Remove them from the page and they will not have been said.
Write it my way.

*


You watch me as I bring the car to a halt and leap out. I race to you and capture you in my arms, feeling the unrelenting stiffness of your small body.
“Don’t frighten me like that again,” I say, hugging you so tightly you start to squirm.
“’Kay, whatever,” you mutter. “I was just getting Toby.”
I release you and run a hand through your hair.
“It’s all right,” I say softly. “I was just scared, that’s all.”


There.
It isn’t sad anymore. It will be real, if I will it to be.
The heroine will come in at any moment with her thin awkward body, her short mousy hair, her gap-toothed grin. Her glasses will be slightly askew as she runs to me, eyes alight behind the thick lenses.
She’ll fling her arms around me in an impulsive childish moment of love.
“Hi Mom,” she’ll say. “I missed you today.”
Then she’ll race upstairs to get a book.


You won’t like my ending much.
It’s not sad enough. And the heroine isn’t pretty.
But I’m not changing that part. Not even for you.
I like it better my way.