effervescent Joey since Mama had made him get rid of his monster models
and posters. Amy worked hard at making him laugh, and he did laugh,
but his good humor seemed like a facade to her. He was tense
underneath, and she hated to see him that way, but she couldn’t figure
out how to reach him and cheer him up.
Later, in her room, she stood nude again in front of the full-length
mirror.
She appraised her body with a critical eye, trying to decide if she
did, indeed, measure up to Liz. Her legs were long and quite well
shaped. Her thighs were taut, the muscle tone in her whole body was
very good. Her bottom was round and sort of perky, very firm. Her
belly was not just flat but slightly concave. Her breasts weren’t as
large as Liz’s, but they weren’t small by any definition, and they were
extremely well shaped, up-thrust, with large, dark nipples.
It was definitely a body well designed for sex, for easily attracting
and satisfying a man. The body of a courtesan? The body of, as Liz
put it, an intimate companion? The legs and hips and buttocks and
breasts of a whore? Was that what she had been born for? To sell
herself? Was a future as a prostitute unavoidable? Was it some how
her destiny to spend thousands of sweaty nights clutching total
strangers in hotel rooms?
Liz said she saw corruption in Amy’s eyes. Mama said the same thing.
To Mama, that corruption was a monstrous, evil thing that must be
suppressed at all costs, but to Liz, it was nothing to be afraid of,
something to be embraced.
There couldn’t be two people more different than Liz and Mama, yet they
agreed on what was to be seen in Amy’s eyes.
Now Amy stared at her reflection in the mirror, peered into the windows
of her soul, but although she looked very hard, she wasn’t able to see
anything more than the characterless surfaces of two dark and rather
pretty eyes, she couldn’t see either the rot of Hell or the grace of
Heaven.
She was lonely, frustrated, and terribly, terribly confused. She
wanted to understand herself. More than anything she wanted to find
the right role for herself in the world, so that for the first time in
her life she would not feel tense and hopelessly out of place.
If her hope of going to college and her dream of becoming an artist
were unrealistic, then she didn’t want to spend years struggling for
what she was not meant to have. Her life had been too much of a
struggle already.
She touched her breasts, and her nipples sprang up at once, stiff,
proud, as large as the tips of her little fingers. Yes, this was a bad
thing, a sinful thing, just as Mama said, yet it felt so good, so
sweet.
If she could be sure that God would listen to her, she would get down
on her knees and ask Him for a sign, an irrefutably holy sign that
would tell her, once and for all, whether she was a good person or a
bad person.
But she didn’t think God would listen to her after what she’d done to
the baby.
Mama said she was bad, that Something lurked inside of her, that she
had let go of the reins that had been holding that Something back.
Mama said she had the potential to be evil. And a mother should know
that kind of thing about a daughter.
Shouldn’t she?
Shouldn’t she?
Before he went to bed, Joey counted the money in his bank again.
During the past month he had added two dollars and ninety-five cents to
the contents of the jar, and now he had exactly thirty-two dollars.
He wondered if he would have to bribe someone at the carnival to let
him run away with them when they left town. He figured he would need
twenty dollars as a minimum bankroll, which would keep him in grub
until he started earning money as a carny, sweeping up after the
elephants and doing whatever else a ten-year-old boy could find to do