C4 antho - Chamber Four

Peacocks ~95~
“Instant friends,” Rebecca echoed, and I heard in the
blankness of her voice the simple-mindedness of my presumption.
Later, I made soup for her, my mother’s vegetable bean.
The day after I delivered it, she left the pot outside my door,
scrubbed clean and without any sort of note inside.
* * * *
I was surprised, then, when Rebecca showed up with her
daughter at the playground a few days later. The little girl,
whose name was Vera, wandered over to the edge of the
sandbox. Clutching her doll, she watched the other children
dig.
In a manner of speaking, Rebecca became part of our
group, but she held herself above it, like someone who refuses
to join the party and demonstrates her refusal further
by waiting outside the room on a wooden chair. The two of
them would arrive late in the morning, Rebecca wearing a
man’s shirt and Vera a perfect little dress. Rebecca would
nudge her daughter to go play, but Vera stood to the side
with her doll while her mother read on the bench. Sometimes,
one of us prompted our children to give her a turn
with a tricycle or shovel, but whenever she was offered, Vera
just shook her head and gnawed on her doll’s arm.
It crossed my mind that Vera might be mentally retarded,
and I told myself that would be a terrible thing, a
tragic thing, for a clearly intellectual woman like Rebecca.
But one day, Vera approached as I was unpacking my boys’
snack. Her eyes widened as she watched me hand out Fig
Newtons and pour juice from the Thermos. She stared while
Joel and Peter devoured their food in thirty seconds flat.
Over on the bench, Rebecca turned a page in her book. I