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catalogues and a box of old
Life
magazines, and these she studied with the excessive intensity that she studied herself in reflective surfaces—mirrors, windows, the toaster, spoons…
    You could coax her up from the laundry room but not out of the closet. Once she was in the closet you might as well be appealing to a cat, her green eyes shining and vigilant. Stroke her hair, squeeze her feet in their white newborn shoes, the pleasure was all yours. She would emerge when she was good and ready. When you were gone. You wouldn’t hear her walk down the hall, you’d hear her pipsqueak hum, or you’d turn off a light and a second later hear that dry click again,
behind
you this time.
    Dr. Ackerman, their family doctor, an elegant, burly man with black eyebrows like fur stoles, declared her “As healthy as …” He opened his hands balletically.
    “A horse?” Doris said.
    He smiled. He asked Doris if she had considered Einstein. “A genius,” he said in his soothing bass, “who didn’t speak a word until he was …” Another opening of the hands.
    “Did he act like that?” Doris said, indicating Joan. In a chair in the farthest corner of his office Joan sat with her eyes squeezed shut and her palms pressed over her ears. A littleghost (only when she was out of the closet did Doris appreciate how white her skin and hair were), her lips moving quickly as if in desperate prayer, but Doris knew that what she was doing was faintly echoing a repeated sound—the clock, maybe.
    “Joan is high-strung,” Dr. Ackerman said, his lovelorn gaze floating over to her. “That’s all.”
    “High-strung?” Doris said after a minute.
    “There’s nothing physically the matter with her eyes. There’s nothing physically the matter with her ears. So, that leaves us with?” His smile wafted back to Doris.
    Doris waited. “Nerves?” she said finally, sceptically.
    A single, savoured nod.
    “Well, how do you explain this closet business if it’s nerves? I’m telling you, she just sits there hour after hour. I’ve never heard of a kid sitting still for that long.”
    “And you stand for it?” He was still smiling but as if despite a tragedy.
    “How do you mean?”
    “I mean it seems to me she has the whole family worried as …”
    “Can be,” Doris admitted.
    “Have you thought of trying …” He clapped. Up by his ear, like a Spanish dancer.
    “What?”
    Another three claps. A suggestive lift of the eyebrows.
    “Applauding?”
    “Warming her fanny.” His tone so kindly that it took Doris another minute.
    “Spanking her?” she said.
    He might as well have asked if she had tried slamming her across the head with a two-by-four. As far as Doris was concerned he might as well have said string her up.
    What she and Gordon did instead was make the closet more hospitable. If she must hide, they preferred her to be upstairswhere it was warm and dry and from where she didn’t materialize clutching centipedes. Gordon removed all the boxes and blankets and clothes and installed a piece of thick-pile rose carpet. On the inside of the closet door he taped a miniature reproduction from
Life
magazine: Monet’s “Garden at Argenteuil,” and right next to it, on the wall, he hung a three-foot-high mirror (which from then on she always sat facing so that at least she now faced the door as well). He hooked up a shaded twenty-five-watt light designed to illuminate a small circle while keeping the rest of the closet in relative darkness, but before doing that he bought her a pair of pink-framed sunglasses (why hadn’t he thought of sunglasses sooner? he wondered guiltily) and once she had them on, that was it, she wouldn’t remove them to undress, to go to bed, wash her face, those sunglasses were glued to her. The wax earplugs that he bought a few days later were not such a hit. Them she used to patch a hole in the closet wall where some plaster had fallen away.
    She seemed happy enough, but Doris could hardly stand the sight