Free Sylvie: Short Story by Barbara Gowdy Page B

older brothers and sisters and their parents to the school yard to see her. One boy brought a blind aunt who, after gripping each of Sue’s thighs, said, “Just as I thought. Fake. Plantation rubber.”
    It didn’t take long for Sylvie’s parents to find out what was going on. Sylvie’s compliance was the thing that her mother couldn’t get over. She called Sylvie a dirty dish rag. She said that a steady diet of scratches and pokes in the eye would have soon taught the children a lesson.
    “But if I don’t show them, they’ll scratch and poke
me,”
Sylvie said.
    “Then that is your lot!” her mother shouted. “That is your cross to bear! Think of what Sue has borne! Think of what
I
have borne!”
    At this point her father appeared from another room. “Why not she stay here?” he said.
    “What?” Her mother looked startled by this rare intervention.
    “You give her the lessons,” he said.
    “What?” her mother said louder.
    “Like before.” He shrugged.
    “What did I tell you?” her mother shouted at him. “What did That Man say? Truancy is against the law! Against the law! Do you want us all hauled off to the slammer?”
    At dismissal the next afternoon her mother showed up and laid into Sylvie’s teacher, Miss Moote, for not being on the ball. From then on, Miss Moote kept Sylvie inside at recess and waited with her outside the front doors until her mother arrived in the cart. Tuesdays and Fridays, the days her mother cleaned the funeral parlour, her father was supposed to come for her, but more often than not he got tied up at the factory, and finally Miss Moote would walk around the school and say timidly that all the children were long gone, she was sure it was all right for Sylvie to walk home.
    It was never all right. Boys ambushed her and poked and tickled her little legs to see them kick. One day the boy who chain-smoked stuck his finger up between both pairs of her legs, her little ones and then her own, and she had to race home to wash out the blood that dripped onto her underpants.
    She lay them in the warming oven to dry, but Sue’s pair, a higher-quality cotton than her own, were still damp when she heard her mother opening the front door. She had to put them on anyway (she and Sue owned only one pair each) and just hope that her mother wouldn’t notice.
    Not only did her mother not notice, she had a gift from the funeral parlour. After stroking and massaging Sue and asking about her day, she stood up, reached in her coat pocket and withdrew a folded piece of paper.
    “Found it beside Mr. Arnett on the slab,” she said, unwrapping the napkin to reveal a dead praying mantis. “Right beside his ear, like it was praying for his old skinflint soul and then keeled over from the formaldehyde. Don’t ask me how it got in there, though.”
    As Sylvie carefully picked the insect up, the boy’s finger stabbing her and Sue became the darkness before the dawn, the terrible trial that had earned her this otherwise unaccountable blessing. The blessing wasn’t just that Sylvie had never seen areal praying mantis, it was that her mother had been trying for months to find a buyer for the microscope. Her father, claiming to have got the microscope cheap at a fire sale, gave it to Sylvie on her birthday. Ten dollars, her father finally confessed, and for a day Sylvie’s mother muttered and raged that amount, and then she posted For Sale notices on telephone poles in town. But there were no takers, and meanwhile Sylvie used the microscope to study insects.
    With the praying mantis, she began a collection. First she studied the insect from every possible angle, then, after flattening it with a rock or by rolling a pencil over it, she cleaned it off with vinegar and water. When it was dry she ironed it between pieces of wax paper and glued it into a scrapbook.
    She filled three scrapbooks in three years. In her fourth scrapbook she branched out to include larvae and worms. By then she was identifying