OCR Text |
Show Motherlunge a novel 23 Bom unto a librarian, I am named for the goddess of sight, a yogic cosmologist, the long-lost daughter of Cleopatra and Caesar, a low-rent mistress of Harold Lloyd. My godmother is Judith Callahan, secretly bald chief librarian. I was bom a Scorpio, in the year of the rooster, and with a 28% increased risk of a mood disorder, likely with other mental health comorbidities. I suffer from myopia and have required corrective lenses since age three. Yet all my life, I considered myself lucky, fortunate, for I was bom the sister of Pavia. Neither of us, we two daughters of Walter and Dorothy, was bom cute. We are not petite, we have not the blonde hair and wide, winning smiles, nor yet the pert, lordotic butt-tilt so much favored in our hometown of Supernal. Still, Pavia has always been beautiful. Long limbed, tallish, she has hazel eyes and dark brown hair like I do-but she doesn't ruin the effect by talking too much or moving her face in odd ways. As far as I can tell, no one has ever told her to calm down, get over it, or go away. Instead, people are always trying to get her attention. When, in sixth grade, a boy scratched her name in his forearm with a ballpoint pen, she glanced at it only long enough to correct his spelling. "And on the other arm?" she said, smoothing her smooth hair behind her ear, "You've got, 'I love Satin.' You mean Satan, right? S-A-T-A-N?" Pavia defied the expectation established by the only child development book Dorothy consulted, a lime-green paperback with a black and white photo of three children grimly playing with blocks. According to Dr. Guesten, Pavia, being an ectomorph like her father, could be expected to be neurotic, hypersensitive, prone to concealment and dependency. Doctor Guesten also predicted many unsettling behavioral phases, phases in |