The Magician's Girl by Doris Grumbach Read Free Book Online Page B

Spencer’s old plaid jacket to school. In it she felt confused. She felt she had lost herself, the ugly, roly-poly little girl with the fancy, dumb name. Her classmates laughed at her name, and at everything about her, the awkward fat way she had to turn over on her hands and knees before she could get up from the floor during exercises, the way the tip of her fat nose whitened when she drank milk. They thought her thick lips very funny and her heavy glasses a kind of vast joke. Once she wondered whether it was possible that, having fit into Spencer’s coat so early, she might metamorphose into her beautiful (no, handsome) brother. She imagined all his old grace flowing into her through the torn lining and yellow-and-green squares of his coat. She was afraid to look at the new, sick, withered Spencer. But she took pleasure in using his old jacket. Her mother had offered it to her at about the same time she was allowed to take four books at a time from the school library. The rest of that long winter of Spencer’s slow convalescence was lost to her except for one monumental discovery, that writing words and poems in composition books was as good as saying them over and over to herself, and more permanent.
    In June, Florence heard about the Children’s Seashore Home in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and told Maud and Spencer about it at dinner. Spencer now had a steel brace on his leg and could move slowly and jerkily with two canes. Florence said she was going to take him to Atlantic City for training and exercise as soon as Joseph came home on leave. She showed Spencer pictures of a long, rambling gray building with wooden ramps instead of steps to every door. ‘The Atlantic Ocean is just beyond the edge of the picture,’ she said, ‘and there is a boardwalk running along it where you can be pushed in wicker chairs by darkies.’
    Spencer said, ‘I won’t go.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Because it’s for crippled kids and I’m not a cripple. I’m getting better by myself.’
    Maud understood that Spencer saw himself as he used to be. That was how she sometimes saw him too. He was afraid he would be reminded of his true state by the other children in the Home. In spite of his protests, Florence took him to Atlantic City. She stayed in a rooming house on Kentucky Avenue while he was bathed and massaged and exercised in the Home. ‘He is having therapy,’ she wrote to Maud. ‘Therapy’ was the word for treatment, a new and lovely word to Maud, one she was to use several times in the poem about her college teacher, Otto Mile, in lines like ‘Tendered his eye as therapy/To her crippled poems.’
    Once while Spencer was being treated, Florence wandered over to the Boardwalk. It was a warm September day and the Boardwalk was clogged with people. Rolling chairs were lined up along the rail facing the sea. In them sat well-dressed elderly couples, their knees covered with bear rugs despite the heat of the day. Florence inched her way through the crowds until she was just behind the chairs. On the sand below she could see a number of young women in bathing dresses and black stockings posing for a photographer. The women held one hand behind their heads, the other seductively on their hips. The photographer’s head was lost under the black drape that covered the back of the camera. All Florence could see of him was his bent body, his white-clad legs behind the three poles of the camera stand.
    Florence watched for a time. Then she turned to a stick-thin man beside her. He was wearing a bathing suit and a policeman’s cap. ‘What is happening down there?’ ‘A pageant. They’re getting ready. To crown the most beautiful girl in the country.’
    Florence was too timid to ask anything else. She gazed at a small dark-haired girl who was turning slowly in her place, lifting her feet delicately now and then as though the sand were very hot.