Second Nature Read Online Free PDF

came to talk to those of us just starting down the road. Most were in the helping professions, counselors or nurses or teachers. Some were teachers because they embraced the common fallacy that children are gentler. In fact, normal children are ruthless little brutes, programmed to survive. Kids might be more honest, forgiving, and way, way cuter. But they’re also hand mirrors of the selves those people would have been. Most of the people who visited to inspire us were living what was still a middle life, not quite this or that.
    Marie wouldn’t hear of that for me.
    I was going to be the world-champion faceless person.
    I had to do everything I could that normal girls did. I wanted to quit ballet after the fire, although I’d studied it since I was four. Nix. A year later, I was back at the barre. In junior year of high school, I was in a master dance class. Just before recital, several mothers of the other girls sent a discreet but firm note to the dance teacher, who made the big mistake of passing it on to Marie. While they entirely understood my situation, their daughters were unsettled by my appearance when they performed—ballet was intended to be an act of essential beauty. Marie’s response was to buy every seat in the recital hall, so no one but our family could attend.

    Marie was right. But there were times when I just couldn’t do it: I balked at the threshold of the world. College interviews? Volunteer work? The harder she pushed, the harder I pushed back. There were times I was sure that the nonagenarian lady next door would stroke out from the sound of Marie and me screaming at each other. (Mrs. Rainflow finally did die—not because of us. But at the funeral , Marie made the heirs an offer for Mrs. Rainflow’s place, in order to knock out the wall and combine both apartments into two big studios linked by a massive kitchen and dining room.) Despite all her insistence that I make my own way in the world, without compromise, I know Marie really believed I would live at home but not quite at home, all my life. After all, I’d been given plenty of chances to attend conferences, juicy junkets, as part of my job. I’d even received two awards. But they were sent to me in the mail, because there was no way I would ever get on an airplane or even the el—planes sometimes burst into flames; the train gave off sparks when it braked. There was no way I would ever go up to a podium, in front of people, and let anyone snap a picture of me being handed some little bronzed statuette of a pen and a paintbrush.

    And yet, probably surprised because I behaved as though I deserved my propers, people responded. I made friends beyond my tight high school circle (at Holy Angels, I got a kind of deferment as a fire survivor and a martyr’s daughter). When Joey and I met up again in college, after he got out of the military, he asked me out—asked me out, me alone, on a date, not as part of a congenial group. While we had always been friends, I figured Joe was a pervert or had suffered some odd genital injury in the military. Marie thought that was nonsense. Still, we started slowly, with Kit and me joining a group of friends we had in common with Joe, for a movie, then a cookout; I always found a spot to sit far from the barbecue grill. He was sensitive to me: He never did things like ask me out to a bar where people would be dancing. Our first real date was a late afternoon of Christmas shopping downtown, which I thought was awfully romantic. Our second was a winter picnic at the harbor. When we went out to dinner, it was to small places on the West Side, where people had known my family, not to swanky spots, where even haughty waiters had permission to stare. Joey became the leading wedge that opened a way for me into the world of summer tavern volleyball and vodka frost parties and … eventually everything. Still, the more comfortable I got, the more frightened I felt. When I confided, Marie urged me on.
    “What