Emily

She knew she was no beauty. She could not climb into the sandbox and draw approving smiles the way the other little girls did from admiring mothers and nannies. The pails and shovels other children readily shared among themselves were not freely offered to her. When she presumed to borrow something without asking, the speed with which they retrieved their property and simultaneously voiced a squeal of protest quickly restored her to reality: She was not one of them. She was not pretty nor cute nor darling. She was just Emily.

She made no connection between the mothers' isn't-she-a-doll smiles and anything more than the simple fact of their daughters' physical beauty, which she herself had somehow been denied. She didn't imagine it all led somehow to prom dresses and engagement rings.

Unlike the other children, she got to go to the park twice most days. The morning visit was the more hectic. The adults wanted to get their charges into the sandbox by ten and home by noon for lunch and an afternoon nap. But Emily's guardian, a middle-age West Indian woman, didn't have to worry about getting Daddy's supper or straightening up the house between the hours of three and five to make up for an afternoon siesta. Molly had no responsibility but Emily. Another woman, also dark-skinned and anathema to Molly for reasons Emily could not fathom, came by twice a week to dust and vacuum.

It was a chilly day for August. Molly had insisted Emily wear a pullover. Emily had learned not to argue with Molly unless she was sure her father or mother would back her up. Nor could Molly be intimidated by the threat of being informed on. Once she and Molly had agreed on this fact, they quickly reached an understanding: Molly would make no unreasonable demands, and in turn Emily would not be difficult. It was a fragile truce, but it had held for six months, ever since her mother stopped complaining about the boredom of the playground and took her husband's advice to go back to work.

But today when they returned to the apartment, a vast interlinked cavern of sudden light and dark, instead of just the patient rug and unblinking television, she found her mother, a tall, amazingly beautiful woman, waiting to greet her with outstretched arms from which heavy ranks of gold and silver tinkled like the mobiles hanging above Emily's bed.

"There's my higgledy-piggledy!"

For a moment Emily was too intoxicated by the woman's embrace to notice there was someone else in the room. Hugs were usually reserved for bedtime or rushed goodbyes. It was Daddy who held her leisurely on his lap to watch their favorite television shows, his Daddy voice and Daddy smell indistinguishable from the antics of the familiar characters inside the TV.

"Guess what Mr. Arnold is going to do," her mother declared in the singsong she only used with strangers. "He's going to take your picture!"

A short, balding man was seated on the sofa, a cup of tea perched on his narrow knees. He was quite ugly, nothing like her father. Even half a room away he smelled of bad food.

"Would you like that, Emily?" he asked in the silly voice adults used when they were trying to be friendly, reaching out his gorilla hand to touch her, but not in time.

She popped a thumb into her mouth. Her mother promptly pulled it out.

"Didn't Mommy tell you that will ruin your teeth? You want to have pretty teeth, don't you?"

Emily didn't much care whether she had teeth at all, but she felt ashamed at having reverted to such an infantile habit in the presence of this unsightly stranger.

"Why don't we go inside and put on something pretty while Mr. Arnold sets up his equipment?"

Her mother rose from the sofa with a rustle of her billowy skirt—not the clothes she had gone to work in that morning. Emily noted three large black boxes near Mr. Arnold, his "equipment." She gave them a wary look, then turned the same look on the man himself to put him on notice he would not succeed in getting anything over on her, though she felt anything but confident about her ability to manage both him and her mother if they acted in consort. Of course, if her father were there...

Her mother undressed her and sat her down on the edge of her bed, the one they had bought when they decided she was too big for the crib now standing disassembled against the bedroom wall. The bed's coverlet was decorated with red and white clown faces—Emily's choice despite her mother's protests the pattern would clash with the wallpaper. The bed still had a clean, alien smell. She sometimes dreamt about her crib and its familiar aromas. "Smelly old crib," her mother had said as they watched her father take it apart. Now when Emily awoke and saw it standing in pieces like something dead or publicly humiliated, she mourned for it as she would a favorite doll.

Her mother selected a green corduroy jumper Emily sometimes wore to the park. But after holding it up to the light for inspection, her mother said, "Green isn't really your color, is it." She opened the bureau drawer and took out a pink party dress. She brought it over to the window and examined it carefully, scraping at something with a long red fingernail and making faces. Her father also made faces, to make Emily laugh, but her mother clearly intended no amusement, pursing her lovely mouth and frowning the way she did when she was handling a piece of suspect meat in the supermarket.

"I guess there's not much alternative."

Emily had only worn the dress on one other occasion, when she had gotten chocolate cake smeared all over the skirt. Everyone else at that party had also soiled their clothes, and none of the other mothers had complained. But in the cab riding home, her own mother had refused to let her sit on her lap, and when she took the dress off her, she asked Emily why she had to be such a tomboy. Emily had laughed at the word she had never heard before. But her mother only became more irritated and said the next time Emily went to a party, she would wear just an undershirt and panties.

The rough fabric scratched her skin as her mother pulled it over her head. Emily hated the dress not just because it was itchy but because she knew it did not suit her, that it belonged on one of those cutie-pies from the sandbox.

"Sit still. One would think you were being tortured."

But Emily continued to wriggle in protest even after the dress was on.

"Now for socks."

Emily hated the socks even more than the dress. Little pink tubes, their color reminded her of the funny-sweet medicine Molly gave her when she had an upset stomach, and which she always promptly vomited back up.

Her mother put the socks down on the bed and said, "Mommy's going to make a quick trip to the bathroom. Can you sit still like a good girl till I get back?"

Emily nodded gravely.

"There's a good girl."

Her mother's words hung in the afternoon light, defining her by what the woman clearly did not mean. "Daddy's girl" was all right (though she could never, of course, be a "Mommy's girl"), even "naughty girl" when she was cranky or made a fuss about her food. But "good girl" amounted to an insult, a backhand slap or consolation prize.

She stared down at the socks as if at a fate she could no more avoid than she could the shape of her face or her eye color. But then a notion struck her, an idea no less compelling than the breeze sometimes bending the heavy tree branches near the sand box. She picked up one of the detestable socks and, with the awkwardness of someone who had not yet been allowed to fully dress herself, pulled it over her foot. Then she picked up the other sock and with some difficulty pulled it over the first. She compared her two feet, one doubly socked, the other naked, and smiled.

"Now Mommy's ready."

Her mother had put on fresh lipstick and added rouge to her cheeks as if it were she, not her daughter, whom Mr. Arnold had lugged all that equipment up to their apartment to photograph.

"You put a sock on! What a good girl!"

Emily smiled back, aping her mother's expression so accurately, her mother wrinkled her brow and said, "Aren't you the funny monkey. Now, where did that other sock go?"

Emily bent the toes of her feet up and down but said nothing. Her mother checked the bed on both sides of her, then looked on the floor, and finally went down on her hands and knees to look under the bed. Emily couldn't help but laugh at the spectacle of her exquisitely attired mother down on all fours.

"I don't think it's so amusing, young lady. What did you do with the other sock?"

Seeing this woman who was always so much in control not only of her young daughter but of her husband and, Emily assumed, everyone else as well, suddenly unable to figure out the simple trick just played on her, filled Emily with a strange delight, a thrill of power such as she had never felt before. In response to her mother's continuing demand to produce the missing sock, she merely shrugged her shoulders the way she had seen the little girls in the sandbox do.

"Yes, you do know, you horrid child. You've hidden it. Now tell me where."

Emily felt a thrill of fear—she had never doubted the power of the rage she had always sensed in this woman.

"Tell me!"

Emily was about to reply she didn't know where the sock was, or having had her moment of triumph, to simply confess to the ruse she had played. But she would never know which of these options she would have chosen because the next thing she knew her thigh was stinging as if something hot had been pressed to it.

"All right, young lady," her mother said as Emily bawled her pain, "you can have your picture taken with just one sock on and everyone will make fun of you."

The elaborateness of the gear Mr. Arnold had assembled stunned Emily into silence. When her father took a picture, all he required was a camera he could easily hold in one hand and move around the room with until he found the right angle.

"If you'll both just sit right there," the photographer said, indicating a settee he had moved into the middle of the room. "Let's try a shot with the little girl on your lap."

Her mother sat down, arranged the hem of her dress across her knees, then lifted Emily up into her lap. "Ooph," she said as she did so.

"Ooph!" Emily replied as if returning an insult.

"Look this way, please."

Curious what he would do next, Emily obeyed.

"Ver-y good..."

The blinding flash made her jump two inches off her mother's lap. She immediately set up a fresh howl.

"Dad-dy!" she wailed, paying no heed to her mother's assurances her father would be home soon and oblivious to the scoldings that followed this self-serving lie. It was as if another, even more deeply aggrieved Emily had been set free from some essential part of her, someone she had till then merely suspected of existing. She was as amazed by the volume and urgency of this second Emily's complaint as was her mother or the photographer.

Mr. Arnold gave up and began packing up his equipment. Emily watched through a thick glaze of tears. It was like trying to see through her father's fish tank. Her chest heaved up and down just as it did when she had the hiccoughs. But she had no desire to make it stop. She knew if her mother had been angry with her earlier for tricking her about the socks; there was no telling what her fury would be like now.

But after seeing Mr. Arnold to the door, her mother merely picked her up roughly and carried her back into her room, then slammed the door behind her.

For a while Emily sat sniffling, ready to resume a full wail should her mother reappear. But there was no sound from outside her bedroom door, so she slid off the bed and sat down on the rug where her favorite toys were gathered. "Sit right there," she told Raggedy Andy. "And you," she said to his sister Raggedy Ann, "don't move a muscle!"

For the better part of the next hour, she alternately scolded and petted her doll children, improving their posture, helping them take their clothing on and off as they slept or waked, teaching them better table manners. But when she heard her father's voice call, "Anybody home?" her tears, the photographer's outlandish gear, even her shock in response to the camera's flash, all seemed to have happened just a few moments ago.

She heard her mother's voice, then two voices raised together in a familiar pattern of invective. She knew the dispute was about her, that she was the essential and crucial element of their incongruity.

"...spoiled the child rotten."

And then a little later in her father's voice, "Maybe that's just what we should do. Maybe we should have done it a long time ago!"

"Should do!" Emily told Raggedy Ann, thinking hard what it could be her parents should have done a long time ago. Sometimes she sat on her father's lap as he watched the evening news and heard stories about children who had been beaten or starved to death. She did not believe her father would ever allow something like that to happen to her. But what if his wife insisted? What if their daughter had disrupted her mother's opportunity to have herself properly photographed so all the world could witness how beautiful she was, would he change his mind and see his child as his wife did: "spoiled rotten" like an apple left in the refrigerator so long, only Molly would want it, saying, "Waste not, want not"?

Maybe they would give her away, maybe even to Molly. That would be better than having her head smashed against the wall and thrown into a garbage can. But if Molly took her, when would she get to see Daddy? Unless of course he and Molly got married, though she sensed that union could never happen.

She heard the apartment door slam shut, and then there were no more sounds from the living room. For one dreadful moment she thought her father had abandoned her and she would have to face her mother's wrath alone. But then her bedroom door swung open, and he scooped her up in his arms. His face and neck smelled of a subtler and more appealing fragrance than the heavy perfumes her mother used. She clutched him tightly to make up for the upset she had caused. After a few moments, he tried to pry her loose, but she hung on, knowing somehow she would have to make amends for forcing him to choose between wife and daughter.

"It's okay, sweetness," he said.

But she knew it was not okay. His own slow-witted sex knew nothing of the deep machinations its opposite was capable of. It was he, not herself, blood sister to the woman who had just walked out of both their lives, who did not understand... and never would.