Born Confused by Tanuja Desai Hidier Read Free Book Online Page A

shoulder back at the lawn, mesmerized by all these beautiful dolls, bigger than even me at the time. And just then something stirred, a small but mighty shadow by Mary Dolly’s genuflecting self. A tiny figure crawled noiselessly out of the manger and stood, shaking off shards of snow like a cold-bathed puppy. It was unmistakably a little girl, pastel pajamas rolled up to the knees, her icy white mass of curls springing out in every direction. A little girl, probably my age.
    She had no shoes on and stood perfectly still, staring at me with that extraterrestrial-recognizing-extraterrestrial fascination of children discovering each other. Then, she lifted her hand to blow me a kiss. Nobody saw this. It all happened in a heartbeat. Her feet were bare and I wanted to give her my shoes—they were so warm and fluffy inside with fake pink fur, little igloos in non-igloo colors.
    But she was already on her porch and did something that puzzled me. She took something from around her neck—I thought it was a necklace, maybe, like my mother’s glittering maharani chokers. Then she unlocked the door with it and let herself in.
    I don’t know why I didn’t say anything to my parents. But that kiss had been just for me and I savored it, like a secret on the tip of my tongue. We walked slowly, zigzaggily, over the ice patches back home, my father gripping me safe in one arm, his other wrapped around my mother’s waist so she wouldn’t slip.
    But when we got back to our dead end I couldn’t keep it in.
    —What is it, bacchoodi? said my father, alarmed, his forefingers gently collecting my tears in their tracks.
    —I wanted to give her my shoes, I sobbed.—I should have given her my shoes. Can we go back?
    —Who, beta? my mother asked.
    —That little girl!
    —What little girl? said my father.
    —Don’t worry, beta, my mother said.—Her feet aren’t cold. It’s just a statue.
    —No, no, there was a little girl. She came out into the yard.
    —You must be imagining things, bacchoodi.
    My mother felt my head for fever.
    —No parents would let their little girl out in the cold like that, she said.—And alone at this hour, too.
    So did she live all by herself in the big double-drived house, and bake sheets of gingerbread cookies for breakfast, and talk to animals like an American Pippi Longstocking? The world behind those double doors titillated my imagination with its magical possibilities. Soon after the first Gwyn sighting I met her for real and discovered the truth: Gwyndolyne Baxter Sexton did have parents, two for many years that I could remember, years counted in front-yard Nativities. And then suddenly there was no more Jesus, Mary, or holycrew. And round about the same time there was no more Mr. Sexton. Not that I had ever seen much of him anyways. Just usually Mrs. Sexton splayed out coltish on one of the divans, the television tuned into something with a laugh track, an invisible audience chortling menacingly in the otherwise dark room. Her face was always lit by blue TV screen light, swording so many emotions from the lofty cheekbones and tweezed brows, plucking the skidding stars from the bottle by her side, the fat goblets, the cut glass ashtray glowing with embers like a distant UFO parking lot.
    We had to cross this room to get to most anywhere in the house and I always felt terrified in that two-second passage, the pull to something sweet and dark that I worried we would not be able to escape or resist. But we always made it through, and usually ended up out back in the playhouse, in our own wooded universe, making up passwords and stories, imagining movie kisses by rolling our tongues back upon themselves, learning the constellations of each other’s birthmarks and beauty spots. In India, the latter were believed to be protection against the evil eye; Gwyn had one, fierce and solitary, freckling a place that I would stop seeing around the time when boys would begin to.
    Then just as suddenly as she’d