Read Online Sylvie: Short Story by Barbara Gowdy - Free Book Online Page A

going to wax That Man’s coffin they had another think coming.
    Two days a week her mother cleaned at the funeral parlour for twenty dollars a month plus the wilted flower arrangements. On Sylvie’s first day of school the red ribbons holding her pigtails were cut from a Rest-in-Peace sash, as was the white trim that at the last moment her mother sewed along the hem of her skirt to make sure her little legs didn’t show.
    Her mother took her to school the first day, in the horse cart. Sometimes they owned a truck, but not that year. When the schoolhouse came into sight down the road, her mother said, “You keep Sue under your skirt. Don’t show her to anybody. Don’t exercise her until you’re back home.”
    Sylvie was standing in the cart to see over her mother’s shoulder. “Are they playing tag?” she asked rapturously as the children stopped playing and cried, “Here she is!” and “It’s her!” and ran out onto the road.
    “Sit down,” her mother said.
    The cart creaked and clacked up to the school. With a pang Sylvie noticed that all of the girls’ skirts were shorter than hers and that none of the girls had pigtails. Her mother drove about twenty yards past the children before stopping. “Go right inside,” she said. Her eyes were on a boy who was off by himself, smoking a cigarette.
    Sylvie picked up her lunch pail and climbed out. When she reached the children they parted to make a path. The look on some of the children’s faces made her instinctively shield the front of herself with her lunch pail, and yet she wasn’tconnecting her little legs to those looks. Her mother’s warning to keep Sue under her skirt, she had taken to mean: don’t be immodest, don’t show off.
    She was now at the schoolhouse steps. Holding the lunch pail pressed against her little legs, she turned and waved to her mother. Her mother snapped the reins, a sound Sylvie heard in her left ear, while in her right ear she heard a voice pitched like her own—her first experience of another little girl speaking to her.
    “Can we see them?” the girl asked.
    “See what?” Sylvie said.
    “Your legs.”
    “My mother said I’m not allowed to.”
    “Is that where they are?” a second girl asked, pointing at where Sylvie held the lunch pail. This girl had mean eyes and long teeth.
    “I’m supposed to go right inside,” Sylvie murmured, and she started to walk around the children.
    Somebody tried to lift her skirt. When she swung around to see who, a hand darted in front of her, under her lunch pail, and smacked one of her little legs on the knee. “I felt them!” the mean-eyed girl screamed. A boy yanked Sylvie’s hair. She let go of her lunch pail, and immediately the front of her skirt was under attack. “Don’t!” she cried. Somebody pushed her, and she fell to the ground. Her skirt was pulled above her knees. Her arms were pinned, a hand clamped over her mouth. The hand smelled like tobacco. The children who could see gasped and fell silent. “I’m going to bring up,” a girl whispered, and Sylvie thought that it was because of her underpants showing, hers and Sue’s, but then a boy touched her little leg on the shin, a quick testing pressure with the ends of his fingers, and Sylvie got the picture—her little legs were white slugs when you turn over a rock.
    When everyone had taken a look, some of the older girlshelped her up. They swiped dirt from her skirt, careful to avoid the front of her. They examined the cut on her arm. It didn’t need a bandage, they agreed. A girl who wore glasses picked up Sylvie’s lunch pail and praised the strawberries painted on it. “Don’t cry,” she said. “They just looked like normal legs to me.”
    “It’s your own fault,” the mean-eyed girl rasped in her ear. “You should have showed us when we asked nicely.”
    That was the best advice Sylvie ever got. From then on, if anyone asked to see her legs, nicely or not, she hiked up her skirt. Kids brought their