Inside Madeleine Read Online Free PDF

Caroline and she left the room, instead of grabbing her cane that was propped against the door, she reached for Maggie. Maggie had stiffened. It shamed her that she stiffened, but she just did. It was involuntary. And then Caroline said, “People don’t want to help me because they think I don’t need it, or they think it’s condescending or something.” Maggie had felt that way, felt that it would be obsequious, or belittling, to offer to guide the girl. Caroline was so proud. So off-putting. “But I want the help. I want people to guide me sometimes. I want a break from trying, from being afraid of what’s out there, a break from all the things that want to hit me in the face. I’m alone in my world and I can’t see. I need help.” Maggie had loosened her arm by then, her initial stiffening giving way, and Caroline, sensing that, grabbed it all the more roughly. Maggie would do her best to guide her through the streets, but she worried. What if Caroline still bumped into something? What if Maggie didn’t guide her as smoothly as she should? What if a crack in the sidewalk made her trip, a crack Maggie didn’t see? It shouldn’t have mattered, but it did. To Maggie, and to Caroline as well, thought Maggie, as the blind girl’s face was screwed up in disappointment and resentment already.
    Maggie stepped toward the curb. Commonwealth Avenue was full of cars. She couldn’t cross. She couldn’t escape. She could only pass her, face her really, face her, but not, because Caroline couldn’t see Maggie. Digging her chin even deeper into the rough collar of her coat, she stomped by the blind girl.
    It was the cold, thought Maggie, it was just too cold to be bothered with anyone, she told herself. But that wasn’t true, and she knew it. In that moment, she had passed up a gift. A chance, a real chance—to grow, to regain her love—it flew up in a mad gust of air and disappeared into the frigid and howling Boston sky.

• down the alley •
    H ER RIGHT NIPPLE BURST, POPPED OUT LIKE A TIGHT WAD OF BUBBLE GUM, A PINK SWELLING THAT FELT ITCHY . She scratched it relentlessly. She was a scratcher, a fidgeter, a pen chewer. She had two chicken pox scars on her forehead from six years ago.
    “Don’t scratch! You’ll get scars,” her mother had warned, swatting her hand. Polly would run upstairs and crouch in a corner of her room and scratch and scratch until her forehead bled and she’d lick the warm, metallic blood off her fingers.
    That was before she knew how to say “fuck you.” But by the time her nipple turned into a mosquito bite, she knew how to say it. It was early fall, and Polly had just started at Jefferson Junior High, one of five hundred seventh graders who roamed the halls in a din of shouts, constantly vigilant of getting tripped, smacked, or spit on. It was 1986, in South Bend, Indiana.
    Polly was a skinny little white girl. Every day she learned new things at Jefferson. “Hey you little white bitch! Want to suck my dick?” said a big black boy, as he grabbed his crotch. He wasprobably fifteen, and the size of a grown man. This was in the yard, after lunch, in her first week. Jefferson was full of children who repeated grades numerous times. Later that day a girl told her, “You look at my man like that again, and …” The girl made a motion at her neck. Then she pulled out a pocket knife. “You get it?” The girl was white, but from a different part of town. Polly had no idea who her man was. Maybe the boy-man whose dick she didn’t want to suck.
    The first time she told her mother to fuck off, her mother was sitting on the dirty blue velvet couch, reading the newspaper. Polly walked into the living room, excited. Her mother didn’t look up. There was a bottle of beer, open, mostly full, sweating on the table next to her.
    “Fuck you!” Polly said, clenching and unclenching her fists.
    Her mother looked up, alarmed, but without missing a beat, she whacked Polly across the face with