The Perfect Sonya
The Perfect Sonya by Beverly Lowry
Chapter One
The bear was huge. Reared up on its hind legs, it loomed over her, beyond feet and inches, a dreamlike presence which did not yield to common measure: dark, still, more like the shadow of something larger than she might ever have imagined than a real bear.
Pauline held onto a wooden post a car's length away, refusing to come closer.
"It won't hurt you," her father said. He stood beside the bear, smiling, motioning her to come toward him, scooping his arm toward her and back. A black square camera hung on a strap around his neck. The camera was hers, a Christmas present. The Kodak, they called it. It was that long ago.
Pauline would have been eleven that year, twelve in August. Her chest was flat, her body smooth and hairless. She had that childlike swayback stance that punched her stomach forward and made her butt stick out, those sinnia-stem legs, knees knobby as chicken joints, her shinbones long with long feet tacked on at right angles like boxes, giving her a storky look. Already she was too tall.
The bear, stuffed of course, stood on a dusty Arkansas street in front of a souvenir shop, inviting the curious to come closer. On wooden sidewalks, barefoot Indians in feathered hats stat cross-legged, their wares spread out on blankets before their feet: turquoise rings and keychains, beaded belts, play tomahawks. The village was not real but manufactured for tourists, fake old, fake Indian, fake everything.
Her father crooked his finger and wiggled it. How could she stand it? Such a joke excuse for a father, like a miniature replica of a real man, a perfectly formed, walking, talking figurine. The top of his head came barely up to the bear's shoulder. Even then, when fathers loomed larger than bears, Pauline knew how ridiculously small he was.
Meantime she was growing, growing, all legs and arms and long pliant feet. That year her father was taller by maybe an inch or so. In two years she would pass him. When she was fifteen she bested him by inches. By then it was over. They were locked together in battle for good, size had been declared such an issue between them.
She shook her head and held on harder to the post.
Pauline looked like a Messican, Jack said, a tall Messican, with that dark skin, that nose and mouth. Everybody else in the family was white and short. Where did Pauline get her looks, he asked–asked her, as if she had anything to do with it–the woodpile?
He went over and smacked the bear on the shoulder. Dust flew. He had on his usual costume, jeans and skin-tight, pearl-snapped Western shirt, high-heeled cowboy boots and a 10X beaver cowboy hat with a high crown. People on the trip called him Tex instead of his real name, Jack Miller. They did live in Texas and so the name was geographically appropriate but about his size no one was fooled.
"See?" he said. "Stuffed."
He didn't have to tell her. She was eleven going on twelve: Didn't she know the bear was stuffed?
The bear's lips were drawn back, his teeth locked in a permanent snarl, his nose pinched so that it looked like a pig's snout with two deep wrinkles. All this was calculated to make the bear look ferocious, which it did. Then you were supposed to ignore that. You were supposed to go stand close, as if the face was somewhere else. Impossible. And all the rest was nothing compared to his eyes: glassy, vacant, yellowish gold with shiny flecks. Something was back there, an empty otherness. Pauline couldn't stand, a promise of, who knew? Wherever she went, the bear watched her. He knew where she was and what she was thinking. She could not stand the thought of being close to him.
In her adult dreams things come after her. Things? A man, stalking her from out of the darkness. It is always nighttime in the dream, usually misting rain. She is in the city with friends. They have attended some meeting–convention, lecture, class, what the occasion is is not clear but the event is always benign, the spirit of the group quite friendly–and now they are all going home. Pauline, who lives in a different direction from the others, has decided to walk. Her friends try to dissuade her. The street is not safe, they say, dangers are everywhere, they are taking a cab and so should she. But she, having always been a daredevil kind of girl, a girl who believes herself up to whatever risks and dangers come her way, refuses. What could happen? Hasn't she always taken care of herself? Isn't she a lucky sort of person? And so in the dream she leaves her friends and begins to walk. And then on the way the horrible man (dark and dirty, sometimes driving a leaking, rusted-out car, old, with busted springs, a dripping transmission, a crumpled fender) comes after her, pursuing her from behind, close enough to feel. Too late, she turns. He is on her, smiling, slimy in triumph. She has nowhere to go. She feels not only terrified, but at fault and stupid as well. Doesn't she deserve what she gets? Didn't she ask for trouble, imagining herself endlessly self-sufficient and immune to harm? Why didn't she listen to her friends? The dream stops there, at the moment of greatest fear when she realizes the man has her and there is nothing to do. She wakes up whimpering, heart and gut turned to water. Then cannot shake the dream but goes through the next day still feeling the man's eyes on her, thinking What terrible thing just happened?Sometimes she can't tell if the feeling evoked by the dream is closer to fear or the erotic. Or if both are involved, one intensifying the other until her very core of self is shaken. The dream never leaves entirely but only lies in wait. After a while she dreams it again some other night. And does not reflect on what it means–she is an actress, after all–but only dreads its recurrence.
The bear's arms were extended in a wide embrace, talons clasped. People–tourists visiting the mock-Indian village, shopping for Indian souvenirs–took turns stepping inside the bear's arms to have their pictures taken, them and the bear, together forever. And so the bear is eternal, like Niagara Falls and Mount Rushmore, a concrete backdrop for the untrusting traveler's need for proof of what has been seen, done, experienced.
Pauline asked the owner of the nearby souvenir store if the bear stayed outside when it rained. The store owner laughed. "I don't guess he had a house to go to when he was living. And he sure as heck don't have one now." Jack laughed with the man. They both looked at her as if she were a funny toy. She did not hate him yet but it was building.
A small boy on the wooden sidewalk shifted his feet and loudly ahemmed. The boy was waiting for Pauline to get inside the bear's arms and have her picture taken so that he could take his turn.
Pauline shook her head no. She put her finger in her mouth, like a baby. Her father smiled. He was still in an agreeable mood, so far. Things could change fast.
"Hey," he said. "Watch me." He bent his head and went under.
Inside the bear's embrace, he rested his chin on the bear's paws and danced a jig. The camera bumped his chest. Pauline sucked her finger. He didn't have to show her. She knew the difference between a live bear and a stuffed one. He didn't have to make a fool of himself again. She hated this so much, everybody watching while she and her family did their dance, like performing monkeys in red suits turning flip-flops for change.
Mavis, who had been negotiating with an Indian for a string of beads, came up behind Pauline.
"Go ahead, honey," she whispered in Pauline's ear. Pauline pulled away. "It won't hurt you."
Her mother exuded her usual smells, sweet perfume and sticky lipstick, too many cigarettes and the other, her most persistent, the flowery aroma of bourbon. At the hotel, the three of them slept in two double beds in the same room. Before they left to come to the Indian village, Pauline had walked in on Mavis in the bathroom, sitting on the toilet, tossing down a water glass half-filled with bourbon. As she set the glass down on the sink, Mavis made a face and groaned, then flushed the commode so that Jack wouldn't know.
"Just go on and do it," her mother said. "It'll be over with before you know it."
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