Free Body and Soul: Short Story by Barbara Gowdy Page B

blind, but within a few days she loved her second foster mother to death. They spent most of their time together on the couch in front of the tv, one of the foster mother’s arms around Terry, the other holding the channel changer, which she used every two minutes because she wouldn’t watch commercials and because “Andy of Mayberry” was the only program that didn’t drive her crazy.
    “Oh, right, give us a break,” she’d say to the newscaster, then eliminate him. “Christ,” she’d say, tapping her long nails on the wooden armrest next to Terry, “who comes
up
with this shit?”
    Terry squirmed at the bad language, but the “us” flattered and enthralled her.
    Her second foster mother’s husband was a jolly, longdistance truck driver. He came home once a week, then left early the next morning before Terry woke up. Terry’s foster mother groaned at the sound of his rig pulling into the driveway. Shemade him pork and beans and sat smoking and sighing at the dinner table while he relayed with his mouth full the hilarious things that he and his buddies had said to each other over their shortwave radios. Terry rarely understood the joke, but she laughed because of his infectious laugh, and then he would mess her hair and say, “You liked that, eh, Orphan Annie?” When he stopped coming home at all, she wasn’t surprised. If he’d been a man on their TV , he wouldn’t have lasted five seconds.
    But she
was
surprised—and so distressed she began pulling out her baby-fine hair in her sleep; nests of it in her clenched fist every morning— when she learned that his disappearance meant she would have to leave.
    Her third foster mother lived two blocks away. In a voice very familiar to Terry she said, “Mrs. Brodie is too formal. I don’t want you calling me that. How about if you just call me Aunt Joyce.”
    “How about if I call you Aunt Bea?” Terry said.
    “Aunt Bea?” Mrs. Brodie’s dead sister was named Bea, so she was taken aback.
    “From ‘Andy of Mayberry.’ ”
    Mrs. Brodie smiled. “Well, you know, I have to admit there’s a resemblance. She’s got a bun, though, as I recall. And I’ve got glasses, which I don’t think she has. Plus I’m about fifty pounds fatter. But our faces are kind of the same, you know, kind of …” She touched her face.
    “Old,” Terry offered. She took it for granted that everybody had the same face.
    “Old!” Mrs. Brodie laughed. “That’s right! Old! How would you like to help me bake a pie?”
    The only bad thing about living with Aunt Bea was when her granddaughter, Marcy, came to visit. The first time she cameshe didn’t speak until she and Terry were outside in the playground, and then she said, “Everybody hates you” and pinched Terry’s arm.
    Until then Terry had thought Marcy was a mute. There was a mute who used to play with her first foster mother’s son. Despite the fact that Marcy’s breath hit Terry at face level, Terry had pictured a soft, little mute you could hold in your hand. The pinch burst Marcy into the spiky shape of a scream. “Go home!” Terry cried.
    “She’s
my
grandmother!” Marcy shouted. “You’re the one that better go home before I kill you!”
    Terry began to run. But since she had a poor sense of direction and no concept of space, “far away” meaning simply that it took longer to get there than “nearby” did, she ran in a large circle and didn’t realize until a split second before Marcy shrieked in her ear that she had ended up back where she started.
    “They’re getting along like a house on fire,” Aunt Bea said.
    She and her daughter, who was Marcy’s mother, were keeping watch from the apartment. The daughter was trying to unlatch the window. She glanced over at Aunt Bea and thought, Jesus Christ, she’s as deaf as a post. When she got the window open, she stuck her head out and yelled, “Marcy! Don’t chase her out onto the road! Marcy! Do you hear me?”
    “Yes!” Marcy hollered