Crooked Little Heart Read Online Free PDF

punishment for having been a teenage daughter. She went back to making dinner—chicken enchiladas and salad.
    It grieved her to have given someone life who was now going to have to endure being a teenager. Some girls hit thirteen with gusto, filled with confidence, bursting through the door saying, “Here I am!” But not Rosie. Rosie was destined, just as Elizabeth had been, to edge through the back door with slouched, rounded shoulders, arms held in front of her chest. The heartbreak was huge, the sorrow of moving from the land of childhood, where life smelled like grass and earth and sap and berry pies—pies made from berries you and your best friend, scratched and stained, have gathered—to the steely metallic world of puberty, where everything smells like pennies, like sheared copper, and you still have friends but you all know now that you’re really just trading cards: you have a certain worth and dispensability. A year ago Rosie still smelled like a child, of clean dirt and salt and shampoo and sweets. Now, mingled with the clean soapy smell of shampoo, came the sharp whiff of medication, dabbed on her skin every morning to prevent breakouts, and of a flowery spray deodorant that smelled like week-old leis. The scent of a locker room hung in her bedroom now, too, for Rosie’s huge feet in the last year had begun smelling as gamey as James’s, like salt and dirt and fur, like a moose’s might.
    Elizabeth remembered the sense of hopelessness she had felt at that age: the conviction that life was so tense and disgusting and false that she wondered how she’d ever survive. The deep disappointmentof realizing at thirteen that although she’d survived childhood, the rewards she’d hoped for—respect, autonomy, romance, thrills, belonging—were still out of reach. She remembered feeling glamorous and aloof, like a twenty-six-year-old inside who was still stuck among all these children. The boys around her were all absurdly tiny, and she was alone, an outsider. She hung out with another misfit, named Jessie, and they’d barricaded themselves in Jessie’s room, talking conspiratorially, trashing the in crowd as conformists, shallow featherheads with no compassion. That she had to go home every night was a nightmare. Her room, which had been a refuge all those years, was suddenly too small. And everything was too real; life at twelve and thirteen, she remembered now, stopped feeling so cartoonish and instead started feeling steely and unpleasant. You couldn’t use toys anymore to shift the world through your imagination. Looking at her daughter, sad or sullen at the dinner table, Elizabeth remembered that feeling—that half the time the world was just there, life was just there, like a long dull irritating play, and the other half of the time it was fraught with danger.
    When Rosie was six, smart as a poodle, and had just mastered tic-tac-toe, the two of them sat playing in the kitchen one day. Rosie hated to lose, as Andrew had hated to lose, and Elizabeth watched her daughter’s fierce competitiveness with some amusement. Rosie announced that the person who went first got to go twice in a row and that she in fact would go first. And that she would be
O
’s. A few minutes later, she drew a larger grid than usual and drew an
O
with wavy lines radiating out from it, like the sun. “That,” she said, “is a fireball.” Then she took a penny, slid it under the paper, and made an
O
with a pencil rubbing of Abe Lincoln’s head, unrecognizable and evil. “That is the devil warrior,” she announced. Then she handed her mother the pencil. “Your turn,” she said.
    Elizabeth looked all over the paper for some place to put her mark.
    “Where can I go to be safe?” she asked. Her daughter, looking at her with some pity, said softly, “There are no safe places for you, Mommy.”
    T HE girls were so luscious. Elizabeth had been watching them all morning at a weekend tournament in San Francisco: out on the