Free Sourland by Joyce Carol Oates Page B

drier and more acrid like hair bleach and cigarette smoke. When she leaned back to look at me her mouth worked as if she were trying not to cry. Adelina had notbeen able to visit me in the hospital at the time of my most recent operation though she’d sent cards and gifts to my room at the Hospital for Special Surgery overlooking the East River: flowers, candies, luxurious stuffed animals and books more appropriate for a younger girl. It had been her plan to fly to New York to see me except an unexpected project had sent her to Milan instead.
    â€œYour back, darling!—you are all mended, are you?—yet so thin. ”
    Before I could draw away Adelina unzipped my jacket, slipped her hands inside and ran her fingers down my spine in a way that made me giggle for it was ticklish, and I was embarrassed, and people were watching us. Over the rims of her designer sunglasses she peered at me with pearl-colored eyes that seemed dilated, the lashes sticky-black with mascara. “But—you are very pretty. Or would be if—”
    Playfully seizing my lank limp no-color brown hair in both her beringed hands, pulling my hair out beside my face and releasing it. Her fleshy lips pouted in a way I knew to be distinctly French.
    â€œA haircut, cherie ! This very day.”
    Later I would remember that a man had moved away from Adelina when I’d first entered the lobby. As I’d pushed through the revolving door and stepped inside I’d had a vague impression of a man in a dark suit seated beside the striking blond woman on the settee and as this woman quickly rose to greet me he’d eased away, and was gone.
    Afterward I would think There might be no connection. Much is accident.
    â€œYou’re hungry for lunch, I hope? I am famished— très petit dejeuner this morning—‘jet lag’—come!”
    We were going to eat in the sumptuous hotel restaurant. Adelina had made a “special reservation.”
    So many rings on Adelina’s fingers, including a large glittery emerald on the third finger of her left hand, there was no room for a wedding band and so there was no clear sign if Adelina had remarried. My father did not speak of my “estranged” mother, and I would not have risked upsetting him with childish inquiries. On the phone with me, in her infrequent calls, my mother was exclamatory and vague about herpersonal life and lapsed into breathless French phrases if I dared to ask prying questions.
    Not that I was an aggressive child. Even in my desperation I was wary, hesitant. With my S-shaped spine that had caused me to walk oddly, and to hold my head at an awkward angle, and would have coiled back upon itself in ever-tighter contortions except for the corrective surgery, I had always been shy and uncertain. Other girls my age hoped to be perceived as beautiful, sexy, “hot”—I was grateful not to be stared at.
    As the maître d’ was seating us in the restaurant, it appeared that something was amiss. In a sharp voice Adelina said, “No. I don’t like this table. This is not a good table.”
    It was one of the small tables, for two, a banquette seat against a mirrored wall, close by other diners; one of us would be seated on the banquette seat and the other on the outside, facing in. Adelina didn’t want to sit with her back to the room nor did Adelina want to sit facing the room. Nor did Adelina like a table so close to other tables.
    The maître d’ showed us to another table, also small, but set a little apart from the main dining room; now Adelina objected that the table was too close to the restrooms: “I hate this table!”
    By this time other diners were observing us. Embarrassed and unhappy, I stood a few feet away. In her throaty aggrieved voice Adelina was telling the maître d’ that she’d made a reservation for a “quiet” table—her daughter had had “major surgery” just