Read Body and Soul: Short Story for Free Online

she hasn’t washed since Norman died because she believes she can still detect his body odour in it. Also she gives herself a penance—grateful dedication to Julie. When Terry is glued to the television or leafing through the piles of magazines the specialist brings over, Aunt Bea and Julie go down to the swings. Aunt Bea has to laugh at the two of them flailing their legs like beetles on their backs, a pair of fatsos in danger of bringing the whole set crashing down onto their heads. After a few minutes, though, Julie squirms off her swing to give Aunt Bea a push. She’d rather push than be pushed, and Lord knows she’s as strong as an ox, and as dogged. If she could, she’dstand there pushing Aunt Bea all day. She pushes her so high that the chains buckle and Aunt Bea cries out.
    It is always a surprise to Julie every time the specialist leaves without taking Terry with her. Then she remembers that there is a bad man over at Terry’s mother’s house, that’s why. He’s the same man who punched Julie’s mother and drowned the cat in the toilet.
    “When the man goes to jail,” she assures Terry, “your mother will take you home.”
    “I don’t have a mother!” Terry cries.
    “When the man goes …,” Julie says, nodding. Her faith in this is invincible.
    She waits for her own mother to show up. She rushes to answer the phone and the buzzer, often persuading herself that it
is
her mother in the lobby, so that when it’s only Anne Forbes, or the specialist, or somebody else, she is incredulous. She hurries over to the window, hoping to catch sight of her mother walking away. She thinks that what happened was her mother changed her mind. She throws herself into a fit. She swats at Aunt Bea. One day, while Aunt Bea is talking to someone out in the hall, she snatches Aunt Bea’s blue sweater from the back of her chair and drops it out the window. A minute later Terry emerges from the bathroom, leans out the window and cries, “There’s a little lake down there!”
    “Lake! Lake!” Julie mocks her. It enrages her when Terry makes these errors. A sweater is not a lake! Terry’s mother will get mad! With her shirt up around her neck, Julie struts around the living room, enraged and growing brave. Before Aunt Bea manages to get away from her visitor, Julie has gone into the kitchen, taken a chopstick out of the cutlery drawer and stabbed it through a plastic placemat.
    “No!” Terry screeches.
    Julie holds the placemat up. “Oh-kay, oh-kay,” she says, disappointed. The hole is so small she can’t even poke her finger through.
    Terry sees things that Aunt Bea has never seen before or has forgotten having seen. When the subway is leaving the station, Terry thinks it’s the platform not the subway that is moving. She sees the spokes of bicycle wheels rotating in the opposite direction than they actually are. She sees faces in the trunks of a tree. The bark of a tree she compares to the back of Aunt Bea’s hand. She says, “The sky comes right down to the ground”—they are standing on the shore of the lake at the time—and Aunt Bea thinks, It’s true, the sky isn’t up there at all. It is all around us. We are
in
the sky.
    “You are the Lord’s little visionary,” she tells Terry.
    Sometimes she is happy just to be alive and a witness. Sometimes she wants to run off with both girls to a desert island. “Why aren’t I adopted yet?” Terry occasionally asks, not so much wounded as puzzled. “It takes time” is Aunt Bea’s lame answer, but as the weeks pass and no more couples make inquiries, she begins to suppose that it really does take time. She begins to lose some of her awful anxiety and guilt.
    The days settle around her, each blessed, hard-won day. She believes she is reaping the reward of prayer—she can sense the Lord in the apartment, keeping tabs on her blood pressure. She tugs down Julie’s shirt and slaps down Julie’s slapping hands and is no more upset than if she was hanging