The Other Shoe by Matt Pavelich Read Free Book Online

her to try it again. “Who,” he’d ask her, as if she were someone he’d recently met, “who do you think you are? You can’t eat what’s made for you? Go ahead and be as stubborn as you want, but this is it. This is all the supper you’ll get.”
    Karen could hold that soup in her mouth for a very long time. The stuff would pulse in her throat, and she’d gag and gag, but she had never given her father the satisfaction of seeing her puke. She held it until he was forced to relent and let her spit it into the kitchen sink, and then she was left with the vile aftertaste in her mouth. During these contests of will, a hatred vibrated her father’s voice so that even the twins were uneasy at hearing it, so Galahad would take them into the living room and wrestle with them, a pair of mewling, farting,relentless teddy bears, while Karen would clean up the supper dishes. He’d play with her brothers. He’d bathe them and put them to bed. He’d tell them—she could hear it from just down the hall—that he loved them. And then, sometimes, Galahad would put his head inside her door to say “good night.” Never more than that. In long, habitual hopefulness she would stand by her bed to await these visits, but then she’d be just enough startled when he came that she couldn’t find a way to answer, though she wished to somehow make a conversation of it. Once he had come all the way into her room, and he stood there for a while pretending fascination for the poster on her wall, a poster she had already outgrown but would never take down, a princess with a sparkling wand who was also, as it happened, a pig. Her father had stared at this until he began to tremble, and then he had surrendered a single, unprecedented tear, and when it reached his chin he told her, “Get in bed.”
    â€œI’m . . . my jeans are kind of . . . well, they’re dirty.”
    â€œGet in that bed,” he said. “And pull the covers up.”
    After that he didn’t come to her door. Wednesday nights her father would put the boys down with a little story, and he’d go to the living room, and sigh, and turn on the television. Karen would sleep then, lulled by muffled laugh tracks and with her dreams buoyed up by the fact that tomorrow, while tomorrow might be many things, would not be Wednesday.
    One day she was taken along with the other girls of her fifth-grade class to visit the office of the school health nurse. There the girls were given a short lecture on touching. Some of it was good, they were told, and some of it was bad. Emily Schact asked for clarification. Resigned to answer, responsible for some answer anyway, the health nurse inhaled deeply and her great bosom heaved. “It depends,” she said. There was a silent thirty seconds before Emily asked, “Depends on what?”
    â€œLike I said before,” said the health nurse, “didn’t I already tell you this? It depends on who touches you. And where they touch you.” The health nurse illustrated her point with a drawing that was supposed to represent a girl’s body but looked more to Karen like one of the weatherman’s clouds, and it was for her purposes less illustrative. The health nurse pointed to it from halfway across the room, and one of the fifth-grade girls began to cry, several others to laugh. A second session was held the following week, and this time the health nurse had been joined by a county social worker to ask the girls individually, one by one and in promised confidence, particular questions about their experience of touching. Karen, thinking she was defending an indifferent father, told them that Galahad touched her all the time. Where? “Everywhere,” she said. Regular affection, she meant, affection in every room of the house. Touching. The health nurse and the social worker became grave and told Karen she could share with them anything