I turned back to the mailboxes, still feeling sorry for Mira, and tucked our mail in my back pocket. Then I heard something behind me. When I turned around, I saw the Big-Headed Baby for the first time.
I recognized her instantly: there was no way not to. She was about two years old, wearing a frilly pink dress and white sandals. Her hair was blond and wispy, and there was a pink elastic ribbon with a bow stretched across her head, which just made it look bigger, if that was possible. She had true-blue eyes and looked up at me, open-mouthed, clutching her skirt in her hand.
Man, I thought. Mira had been right: it was quite a cranium, somewhat egg-shaped, the skin on her scalp pale and almost translucent. The rest of her body seemed toylike in comparison.
She stood there and stared at me, the way kids will when they haven’t learned it’s rude yet. Then she lifted one hand, touching a chubby finger to her lips in the exact place where my piercing was. She held it there, still watching intently, for a few seconds. I couldn’t take my eyes off her.
And then, just as quickly as she’d appeared, she turned and toddled back around the corner, her tiny footsteps barely audible on the tile floor.
I was still standing there when the women walked past—the baby clinging to the hand of the taller one—and out the door, the bell clanking behind them. They were talking about someone else now, about husbands and divorces and real estate. They didn’t see me.
I watched them go, two middle-aged women in shorts and sandals. The one with the baby had curled blond hair and was wearing a sweater patterned with sailboats. They stopped outside, still talking, and smiled and waved at a little old woman with a walker coming up the steps. The baby ran down the front walk, arms outstretched, toward the white picket fence and the roses growing across it.
It didn’t matter how old you were. There were Caroline Daweses everywhere.
I stood at the window of the post office, watching them get into their cars and drive away. Then I walked back to Mira’s.
“So,” she said with a smile, flipping through the mail. “What’s the word on the street?”
I heard that woman’s voice in my head, so snide, and felt that same dry spot in my throat, the same flush across my skin.
“Nothing,” I said.
And she nodded, believing me, before turning back to the TV.
It was so much easier with wrestling. There was a balance: you had your good guys, like Rex Runyon, and your bad guys, like the Bruiser Brothers. The bad guys sometimes pulled ahead, but there was always a good guy in the wings, ready to run out and clock someone with a chair or throw them over the side or slap them into a figure four, all in the name of what was right.
As I watched, I realized that Mira probably did know it was all faked; she had to. But there was something satisfying about watching the Bruiser Brothers reduced to limping off the mat, heads in their hands, paying for what they’d done. It restored your faith. And it was enough to push aside your skepticism and just believe, if only for a little while, that good always wins out in the end.
“The thing is,” Morgan said, scooping out another measure of coffee and dumping it into a filter, “Mira has always been different.”
We were at work, before opening, and I’d told her what had happened at the post office. She’d just sighed and nodded, as if she wasn’t really surprised.
“I mean,” she went on, “ever since she came here, people have been talking. Mira’s an artist and this is a small town. It’s practically natural.”
I nodded. I was rolling silverware: knife, then fork, on a napkin, then the napkin pulled taut at a right angle and three tight rolls. Morgan watched me out of the corner of her eye, checking my technique, as she talked.
“I can still remember the first time I saw her. Me and Isabel were in high school, about your age, I guess. We were checkout girls at the Big Shop, and Mira came up one day on her bike, wearing some bright orange parka. She bought about six boxes of cereal. That’s all she ever seemed to buy. I kept waiting for her to go into sugar shock, right there at my register.”
I kept rolling, afraid she’d stop if I said anything.
“Anyway,” she said, straightening the stack of filters, which was just slightly crooked, “after a while, she started to get involved in the community. I remember my mom took this painting class Mira taught over at the Community Center. It had been taught before by this old lady who had a rule that everyone could only paint flowers and animals. And then here comes Mira, talking about the human form, and perspective, and encouraging everyone to just throw the paint around and whatnot.”
I smiled; that sounded like Mira.
“But the worst part was she talked the mailman, Mr. Rooter-- who was about seventy, even then--into modeling for the class.”
I looked up at this.
“Nude modeling,” she added, doing another filter. “Apparently, it was quite horrifying. I mean, my mother never really recovered. She said she could never look at the mail the same way again.”
“Wow,” I said.
“I know,” Morgan replied. “Mira never understood what all the fuss was about. But from then on, everyone already had their ideas about her. You’re not rolling those tight enough.”
“What?” I said, startled.
“You need to pull that napkin tighter,” she said, pointing. “See how they’re kind of loose and floppy?”
“Oh,” I said. “Sorry.”
She watched me, eyes narrowed, until I shaped up. “But Mira didn’t even seem to notice that everyone was up in arms until they asked her to leave. And poor Mr. Rooter. I don’t think anyone made eye contact with him for at least a year. The next week that class was back to flowers and puppies again. My mom painted this awful lopsided basset hound that she hung in the bathroom. It was really scary.”
I wasn’t quite sure what to say to that.
“So that was kind of how it started,” she went on. “But there were other things, too. Like when some parents wanted to ban some books from the middle school. Mira freaked out about that, started showing up at school board meetings and making a real commotion. It just made people nervous, I guess.”