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Show All the Variables & Other Love Stories 109 whispers of Cory, her gray-blue eyes, disproportionately large ears, double-jointed elbows, her skin prone to rash, to over-sweating, the inventory was endless. Angie stopped taking this inventory, but months ago she had been obsessed with cataloging every shadow of Cleo's sperm-donor. When Cleo would wake in the night and need to be fed and comforted back into the darkness, Angie would pace the nursery with the limp body dangling in her arms and scour it for pieces of Cory. She hated him with a cold, composed hatred. Thinking of him made Angie icy to her most unfathomed reach. It had frightened her at first. She had never experienced anything like it. Anger had always been hot in her and boiling; there had been an element of revolt to it This was an acceptance of defeat, and it didn't scare her anymore. She frankly found it soothing. It was the same sensation that came over Angie when she started seeing Patrick in Cleo. She'd somehow absorbed his looks. Cleo inherited Patrick's hunched posture, his swaying gait. Cleo's favorite toy was a plastic ball covered in variously shaped holes through which corresponding blocks could be inserted. This bright blue puzzle earned her ire more than anything she'd yet encountered. Cleo longed to punch square blocks through oval holes. She had an angry passion for proving Angie's insistence on the square hole unnecessary. The slightest suggestion of the square hole would kindle all her anger, loud and brief as a firecracker. Cleo's face would twist while formulating new strategies against the insolent ball, eyes half closed, her tongue pasted against the comer of her upper lip, just in such a way. It was the face Patrick made while fiddling with the bathtub leak. Exactly. |