OCR Text |
Show 14 "I see," said the mother. The mother's presence changed his life a lot. She would not let him go out alone even in the building, but made him stay with her in the apartment. She bought a little rhinestone-studded collar and a leash, cat-size, and insisted they walk the cat outside, in the shrubbery beside the building, as if it were a dog. Occasionally she took him for interviews at special schools, but he found that if he did nothing, but merely sat in the corner, or perhaps threw something like an eraser or a block of wood for no apparent reason, that they would leave, his mother with a long unhappy face, and he would hear no more about the school. He hoped she would go away, and that he could get back down to the basement. But she stayed there, day after day, sometimes interviewing housekeepers, who never came back; sometimes reading books on deviant children, and of course cooking the meals he would be forced to eat: kidneys and kale, cabbage, okra. In the evening the father would come home, and the boy hid himself in the bedroom. Whenever he came out, he had the feeling that they had just stopped fighting, so that he would not know. They smiled flat smiles and stood with their arms placed around each other, until he went back into the bedroom. He pulled the eyes off the rest of the bears, and cut a bald patch in the long fur of the cat. After that his mother had a lock installed on one of the drawers in the kitchen, and took away the scissors, his penknife, even his sharp-pointed pencils. |