The Color Master: Stories by Aimee Bender Read Free Book Online Page B

ridiculously long neck.”
    “William!” barked my mother.
    “William, may I speak to your mother alone for a moment?” the doctor asked.
    I stormed out. I emptied the entire lobby candy jar into my pockets and left the building. There was a candle shop next door, so I went in there and smelled wax for a while; the one that said it smelled like chocolate was wildly misleading. I have an excellent sense of smell. On the street, I tried to look at all the people walking by, but they just looked like walking people to me. I didn’t see why I needed to read their faces. Wasn’t there enough complication in the world already without having to take in the overload of details and universes in every single person’s fucking face?
    The drive home was mostly silent. My mother didn’t wave at the drivers when she changed lanes, which is unlike her. In general, she’s at her best in the world with strangers, and gets great reassurance from a wave or a nod between cars. Buton this drive home she changed lanes on her own without acknowledgment of anyone and was quiet until we pulled into the driveway.
    “I just don’t understand,” is all she said then.
    My dad walked in from work late that night, as usual, and found some frozen pizza thawing in the refrigerator by accident. It had never been cooked, but he didn’t bother to heat it up and just ate it cold. “Cold pizza,” he said, smiling at me, as little flecks of cheese fell to the floor. “It’s not the same,” I told him. When he was done, my mother asked if she could speak to him in the other room. Ginny was playing hospital with her torn stuffed animals, and I skulked around their door as they settled in the bedroom and I heard her whisper to my dad that we went today to the doctor who did lots of tests and was very kind and professional and William has a real problem and the doctor diagnosed him with facial illiteracy.
    “Wait, what?” I said from the hallway. I leaned in the door frame. “She said what?”
    My mother’s eyes were enormous. Okay, I could see them. My mom only, sometimes. My father’s hair was a mess from exhaustive mussing, and he said: “Facial illiteracy? What the hell is that?”
    “He cannot read a face,” said my mother, wincing. “He cannot recognize facial or, for that matter, bodily signals. He can’t read people at all. And, Stan,” she said, “it’s true.”
    “Oh, what
ever
,” I said, kicking the door. “I bet the doctor made that name up right on the spot.”
    “Go to bed, William.”
    “It’s nine o’clock.”
    “You’re a growing boy. Go to bed.”
    “So what does it mean?” asked my father.
    “I don’t know,” she said. “He may have to take special classes. On recognition. Of faces and people.
Go to bed
, William!”
    I stayed by the door until she came and closed it on me.
    Shoving my ear against the wood, I heard my father’s tones of mild protest and my mother’s rising pierce. “Soldiers!” she was saying. “All dead! He thought they were happy!”
    At the TV, I found Ginny surrounded by her now mended stuffed toys, watching the sitcom about the people who work at the pet store and act like animals. She likes the boss, who talks like a monkey. I tried to look at each actor’s individual face, but all I saw were eyebrows and teeth. No one emerged from the parental bedroom for over an hour, and I fell asleep on the couch. That’s where I woke up with the first light of morning, covered with stuffed bears just barely held together by clusters of staples and tape.
    (There was a moment, once. I was eating dinner with Mom, and Dad was at work late, and Ginny was at a friend’s house learning fractions. I barely remember this; it’s sort of made up, if you want to know the truth. But we were eating spaghetti and cottage cheese, and Mom looked at me, and then all of sudden it was like her face melted; the lines around her eyes all pointed down, arrows down her face to the lines around her mouth,