however, were not normal. Their limbs were elongated and out of proportion. The eyes were much too large and resembled the sockets of a skull. Hope, leaning over Judith’s shoulder one Sunday afternoon as she painted at the dining room table, exclaimed, “Isn’t that arm a little stretched?”
Judith shook her head. Her hair was fine and blonde and cut short and she had pulled it back with bobby pins and there was nothing especially pretty about her hairdo, but it was impossible to suggest a different look for Judith. She would just say, “I like it this way.” And now, she shook her disordered head of hair and bit her lower lip and set to, ignoring her mother. The skyline in the painting revealed storm clouds, perhaps a tornado, while the girl in the foreground was beneath a tree and she was reaching, with her elongated limb, for the hand of another girl who was sitting in a topmost branch. The girl in the tree was looking away.
Hope thought the whole endeavour was deeply depressing and she worried about Judith’s state of mind. She showed Roy the painting that night as he was sitting on the edge of the bed, removing his shoes. She thrust it at him, as if it were to be feared, and said their daughter’s name, “Judith.”
He took it and examined it, holding one of his shoes in his other hand, and then he set the shoe down on the rug and said, “She’s got talent.”
She knew that many people perceived Roy as wise. “Wisdom” was another word for level-headedness or prudence, though in Eden it was wrongly used in place of “parsimonious.” So Hope thought. Most people she knew were parsimonious, and this was not only in matters of money. Parsimony could be extended to narrow thinking, to religion, to the claim that baptism by immersion was superior to sprinkling or pouring—all nonsense, according to Hope. Not that she thought her husband was like that. He was far too reasonable. However, when it came to this painting and numerous other paintings like it that Judith had produced, Roy’s “wisdom” was beginning to smell of indifference.
She snatched the painting from him, studied it again as if she might have missed something, and then pointed at the surreal outstretched arm. “It’s like a vision of some other world,” she whispered. “It’s not realistic.”
Roy had removed his other shoe and was standing now, loosening his tie. “What are you worried about, Hope? Is she eating?”
Hope admitted that she was.
“Has she run away from home?”
“Not yet.”
“Has she talked of it?”
She shrugged.
“Are others worried? Mrs. Penner, for instance?”
Mrs. Penner was Judith’s second-grade teacher, and yes, she had been troubled, but Hope decided at that moment, as Roy was hanging up his pants, standing with his back to her, his thin white legs sticking out of his shorts, that this was not something he needed to concern himself with. He worked far too hard as it was. And so she lied and said, “No, she’s not.” The previous week, though, at the parent–teacher meeting, Mrs. Penner had raised the issue of Judith’s drawings and her clinginess to Angela. All of this, the disturbing drawings, the clinginess, had troubled Hope. In fact, the whole situation was so complicated that she could not make sense of it, which is why she had thrown it so desperately at Roy.
Angela was the daughter of Mrs. Emily Shroeder, a woman whom Hope had met at the beginning of the school year, and who had quickly become one of Hope’s best friends. In fact, she would say that Emily was her only true friend. She loved her. Emily was witty and well read. She had recently presented Hope with a gift of a book: Pascal’s Pensées. Emily had kept her own name when she married, a radical act. She worked part time at the local newspaper, writing obituaries, and with the money she made she flew to New York, where she went to the theatre and stayed up till all hours drinking in small bars. She travelled alone. Her
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