Read Study in Perfect for Free Online Page A

more responsive since attending its “classes” with her school-mates.
    But our joy was somewhat dampened by a notice from the school informing us that in
this
Co-op, cooperating means selling unappetizing quantities of fruitcakes. And so … … you have been chosen to share our burden. Will you buy a pound or two of fruitcake? It costs $1.10 per pound. Delivery is guaranteed. It happens, by the way, to be very good fruit-cake, which makes it easier for us—and you. Call us any time at FE8-1765. Our staff of assistants will be happy to take your order.
    Fondly, All the Gorhams.
    Dear reader, we were that staff of assistants. Our house was a processing center, with each of Beckie’s sisters stamping, packaging, taping, writing out addresses, licking labels and envelopes. I can’t even tell you if we liked the stuff, which crowded our freezer and grew fur by June. I will confess that I dug out the green and red cherries, leaving the rutted cake on the counter-top to dry. What a team we were!
    Beckie was our
wabi
, the distinctive flaw that made our family an exquisite paragon. This Japanese concept, with its sister
sabi
, guides us with three important principles: nothing lasts,nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect. Asymmetry, asperity, oddity, and incompletion have a place in art and life! Indeed,
wabi-sabi
can lead us to enlightenment. Here was something to crow about. So I crowed, reviewing books for a journal of exceptional children, writing reports on the retarded, combing through library catalogs, hungry for literature that portrayed them as human, with sisters and brothers and aunts, like us.
The Sound and the Fury, Of Mice and Men
, and especially,
To Kill a Mockingbird
. Atticus was my hero, mother and father blended into one. I loved that next-door tree with its mysterious, miraculous knothole. In the movie, their neighborhood was bathed in lustrous black and white, with wailing screen doors and wicked-witch branches. We called my sister “Boo,” for the sensitive Mr. Radley who emerged from the Halloween shadows.
    Then she pitched into adolescence and we had to admit her presence was not so benign. It was consuming just to maintain the all clear in our house—dishes, silverware, homework, potting soil, nail scissors, dirty socks, crayons, Coke bottles—everything went in her mouth, or crashed to the floor. Her nose was crusty, her teeth crooked and difficult to clean. Saliva soaked her T-shirts, and the collars were often ripped from ceaseless chewing. She had moments of over-the-top excitement. If an ambulance passed at full scream, Boo threw herself down on the sidewalk and flapped like a beached seal, her pleasure bodywide. At first, this was funny. Then not so funny. In the Bethesda garden center, or Kmart, or the Giant, we let her drive the cart, dragging that leg as if it were made of steel. Inevitably, something would set her off. The Muzak shifted, the intercom chimed, and down she went, fanning herself deliriously, oblivious to startled housewives and sales clerks on alert. Thesight of my sister stirred something deep and disorienting in others—a baby in a teenager’s body, the damaged child as monster, from the Latin
monere
, “to warn.”
    My parents agreed to experiment and place Boo in a “boarding school” with an excellent reputation. The results were disastrous. Staff-to-patient ratio was poor and Beckie deteriorated quickly. I accompanied my mother on her last visit through the Pennsylvania suburbs to Woods School. We were directed to a pool, where Beckie was taking swimming lessons. She sat on a bench, dwarfed in her lifejacket—a wispy, bony little bird. She’d lost nearly fifteen pounds on an already slight frame. Mother scooped her gangly baby into her arms and fled home, lips drawn tight the entire two-hour drive.
    They would try again, twice, at last settling for a large yellow clapboard Victorian in the Delaware