Excerpt from Characters on the Loose

From "What Lies Ahead"

In her chair by the radio, my mother says, "Who is the oldest, honey? You or your brother?"
"My name's not honey."
"Well, all right, what's your name, then, you know I forget," Mother says. She wipes her lips with a towel.
"I'm Delilah."
"I don't remember that name at all," my mother says.
"I'm your oldest child."
"Yes, that's what I wanted to know. I knew it was you or your brother. And how old are you now?"
"Seventeen."
"And your brother?"
"He's eleven. Ruthie's ten. There are three of us."
"Yes, that's right. Good," my mother says.
I sit at the sewing machine. I stitch the side seam of a blue cotton dress I've designed for myself. I wear only dresses, my father insists on it, and my mother says about sewing, "There's nothing to it."
My dresses, laughable in high school, look like costumes for a play, I know it very well and I'm satisfied: they're homegrown, plainness carried to a wild extreme?round collars, straight lines to the hem, the fabric belts. I think of myself as an alien girl, one-of-a-kind. In school, I walk with no one around me. Untouchable. It makes me smile.
Things blur around me. I pay no attention to the ways girls fix their hair or to the tones they take, talking. I say, Hello. I answer the teacher's questions, if I know the answers. Otherwise, I'm silent. When a counselor asks us to list three words that describe who we are, after struggling with the assignment, I come up with: lighthearted, calm, good. That's what I am.
My mother says, "You are a good girl."
I say, "Yes, I am."
"Arrogance," my father says, "is a vice. The same as fornication. Who says you are good? God says we are evil. We are evil. Say it, girl."
"We are evil," I say.
"No, we are each one of us evil. You must see it in yourself. No tricks with this. I see what you say. What does God say about you?"
"I am evil," I say.
My mother says nothing, not one word, about God. She prefers to sleep. Sleep smoothes her face. She falls asleep listening to the radio, and when she wakes, she says to me, "Look, I'm a young girl." She holds out her hands.
Across the room from her, I adjust the stitch length on the machine. There's a burnt rubber stink as the sewing machine runs, and I watch the stitches flow out ahead, dotted lines, like a passing zone all the way down the seam, nonstop.

Copyright © 1997 by Janet Kauffman. All rights reserved.