Free Black Dahlia & White Rose: Stories by Joyce Carol Oates

durable as polyester—like the “pantsuit” she’s wearing—short-cropped graying hair and a pug face like an aggressive ex-nun.
    “If my signature is on the card, it is my signature.”
    Candace speaks bravely, defiantly. But this isn’t the issue—is it?
    Hard to recall, in the lorazepam haze, what the issue is.
    “You can’t expect children to leap through flaming hoops each semester. Kimi has been an A student since day care—it’s cruel to be so judgmental . I don’t put pressure on my daughter to get straight A’s any more than I’d put pressure on myself at her age.”
    Since the ex-husband is the one to praise their daughter for her good grades at school, as a sort of sidelong sneer at Kimi’s mother whom he’d taken to be, even in the days when he’d adored her, as an essentially frivolous person, Candace takes care never to dwell upon Kimi’s report cards.
    Now the thought comes to Candace like a slow-passing dirigible high overhead in the lorazepam haze—she hadn’t done more than glance at Kimi’s most recent report card. She’d had other distractions at the time and so just scrawled her signature on the card having asked Kimi if her grades were OK and Kimi had shrugged with a wincing little smile.
    Sure Mom that smile had signaled.
    Or maybe Oh Mom . . .
    For this visit to the Quagmire Academy—i.e., Craigmore Academy—which is Candace’s first visit this term—Candace is wearing a purple suede designer jacket that fits her tight as a glove, a matching suede skirt over cream-colored spandex tights, and twelve-inch Italian leather boots; her streaked-blond hair has been teased, riffled, blow-dried into a look of chic abandon and her eyebrows—recklessly shaved off twenty years before when it had seemed that youth and beauty would endure forever—have been penciled and buffed in, more or less symmetrically. Her lipstick is Midnight Plum, her widened, slightly bloodshot eyes are outlined in black and each lash distinctly thickened with mascara to resemble the legs of daddy longlegs. It’s a look to draw attention, a look that startles and cries Whoa!— as if Candace has just stumbled out of a Manhattan disco club into the chill dawn of decades ago.
    Weedle is impressed, Candace sees. Having to revise her notion of what Kimi Waxman’s mom must be like, based upon the daughter.
    For Candace has style, personality, wit—Candace is, as the ex-husband has said, one-off . Poor Kimi—“Kimberly”—(a name Candace now regrets, as she regrets much about the marriage, the fling at motherhood and subsequent years of dull dutiful fidelity)—has a plain sweet just slightly fleshy and forgettable face.
    Weedle is frowning at her notes. Which obviously the cunning psychologist has memorized that she might toss her dynamite material, like a grenade, at the stunned-smiling mother of Kimi Waxman facing her across the desk.
    “ . . . at first Kimi convinced us—her teachers, and me—that her injuries were accidental. She told us that she’d fallen on the stairs and bruised her wrist—she’d cut her head on the sharp edge of a locker door, in the girls’ locker room, when she was reaching for something and lost her balance. The more recent bruises—”
    Injuries? More recent ? Candace listens in disbelief.
    “—are on her upper arms and shoulders, as if someone had grabbed and shaken her. You could almost see the imprint of fingers in the poor child’s flesh.” Weedle speaks carefully. Weedle speaks like one exceedingly cautious of being misunderstood. Weedle pauses to raise her eyes to Candace’s stricken face with practiced solemnity in which there is no hint—not even a glimmer of a hint—of a thrilled satisfaction. “I am obliged to ask you, Mrs. Waxman—do you know anything about these injuries?”
    The words wash over Candace like icy water. Whatever Candace has expected, Candace has not expected this.
    And there are the moist protuberant eyes which are far steelier than