Where It Hurts
Janet learned to hate her feet on the first day of second grade, when she wore flip-flops to school and Lizbeth English teased her about her big toe, how much bigger it was than the others. Lizbeth teased her about the hair on her legs too, and her My Little Pony t-shirt, which was so last year, but for Janet it all came back to the toe. If she hadn’t worn the flip-flops, Lizbeth wouldn’t have found her opening and would have picked on Mary Russel instead, whose legs were just as hairy and who was wearing a Dukes of Hazzard jacket besides, which wasn’t so much last year as it was last decade.
This is what Janet is thinking about as little Audrey Hamel walks away from her Genevieve, arms crossed, tears in her eyes, to stand alone at the bus stop. This is the picture Janet wishes she could paint for her daughter right now to wipe that smug look off her face.
But Janet can’t show Genevieve a thing, because the bus is here and all there is time for is the last second hug that Gen never forgets to give her mother, the last minute kiss on the belly that is meant for the baby inside.
Audrey Hamel is smiling by the time she boards the bus, laughing at some joke told by the obese woman who drives it. But Janet can spot a smile for show from a mile away. It is her job to spot the fakers, to teach them to be real.
“It is not about acting,” she tells her students, “but reacting.”
Some glaze over; others reach instinctively for the notebooks she has told them will not be allowed in her class. Three take in the lesson without words, without the exaggerated nods their classmates offer up. Those three, they already know. They will be the most fun.
She sends them home with two assignments. They are to pick a Shakespearean sonnet and they are to memorize both parts of a scene from Godot, a scene none of them will ever understand — except perhaps for the bright three — but then, that’s the point. She wants them to be able to regurgitate the words on command. Then, they’ll spend the rest of the semester shaping their verbal vomit into any number of forms. They’ll make comedies of it, tragedies, and everything in between.
“The words alone mean nothing,” she tells them. “It is what you do with them that counts.”
When she visits the playwriting class that afternoon, across the lawn in the second of the college’s two classroom buildings, she does not say such things, though she believes with all her heart that they are true. Instead, she tells the budding playwrights that, without their words, an actor has nothing, can do nothing. There is one student who takes both classes. He does not call her on her contradiction. But he does write it down.
She meets her husband at the snack bar before heading home to get Gen off the bus. Tom is an admissions counselor, a salesman for the school, and his three-button suit is as much a part of him as his impeccable smile. He does not so much play the part as he inhabits the role. And when Janet tells him about the scene with Audrey Hamel that morning, he is quick to move into his second favorite sales pitch: the case for Genevieve’s innocence.
“Gen is a critic,” he says. “Her mind is incisive. She calls it like she sees it, and the only problem is that most kids her age aren’t ready for her particular brand of honesty.”
Janet sips at her Coke — no longer Diet, because of the baby — then nibbles at the taco salad she knows she will not finish, that she knows will end up in the trash alongside half-eaten hamburgers, on top of French fries made soggy by sodas dumped for having too much ice. Her stomach churns at the image, even as she tries to turn off this terrible visual mind of hers, all the more visual since the pregnancy.
“Did she hit the kid?” Tom asks.
“No,” says Janet.
“Then it’s not really bullying, is it? Teasing maybe, but — ”
“It doesn’t matter what you call it,” she says. “I don’t want Gen acting like that.”
“You don’t want Gen acting like herself?”
That’s right, she thinks, but does not say. You’re damned right I don’t.
Tom has a point about Gen, though. Janet can’t deny that. While Tom is at work at that night, the girls watch The Transformers: The Movie, and it is Gen who points out why Janet can tolerate it and not any of the episodes of the cartoon series. Tom has been introducing those to Gen little by little, since she fell in love with the movie during tech week for the college’s summer show, when there were seven daddy-daughter date nights in a row, when Janet wasn’t around to say “No” — her favorite word in the English language, according to both Gen and Tom.
“You like the movie,” Gen says, “because there are consequences.” It’s a word she’s surely heard, with a harsh-grading professor for a mother, but not one Janet knows her to understand. “This time, when Optimus and Megatron fight, one of them dies.”
Death, the weakest of a storyteller’s options when trying to make something matter, but the one the novice reader or listener or viewer is most likely to comprehend.
“Also,” says Gen, pointing to the pink robot on screen now, “there’s a girl.”
“Who is barely anything but a damsel in distress,” says Janet.
“What about how she saves Daniel?”
“The little boy?”
Gen nods.
“Well, that’s something,” says Janet. “But why is it that the most heroic thing she does is maternal in nature?”
“Maternal?” says Gen.
“Motherly,” says Janet.
Gen turns her attention back to the television set. “You don’t like being a mom very much, do you, Mom?”
Janet does not, in fact, enjoy parenting anywhere near as much as Tom does, or as much as the Hallmark cards she keeps in her hope chest told her she would when she opened them and the gifts she was showered with all those years ago. It’s a lot of work, the job of being a mother, and there are questions on the exam her daughter administers daily that were never covered in the books she studied, and studied, and studied again. Janet looks at her stomach, at the bulge of an elbow (or, perhaps, a knee) as the baby makes itself comfortable. At times, during her weaker moments, she’s not sure why she’s doing it again, except perhaps as part of a dare from Tom: “Do it better next time, if you think you’ve sucked so much this time around.” She looks past the belly, down at her toes, recalls Lizbeth English and her perfect pigtails.
Incisive. Was that what you called it, that ability to find the place that hurt the most, to drive the knife in there, and to keep on twisting?
“I’m sorry,” Gen says, remote in her hand, the TV muted. “Are you mad at me, Mommy?”
Janet says nothing. She unmutes the TV, gathers Gen up in her arms, and then snuggles with her on the couch. The robot that looks like a hot rod, he picks up the so-called Matrix of Leadership, and the next time he transforms he is no longer a hot rod but an RV with flames on its hood.
Janet says: “Do you think the movie means to imply that growing up, that taking on responsibility, automatically makes you lame?”
Gen says nothing, though Janet is convinced it’s not because she doesn’t have an answer. Gen wants to say something. Janet can tell by the way she chews on her lower lip. That Gen holds herself back — that’s proof of something. But Janet’s not sure what, not yet.
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