Excerpt
Capacity
By the time she was eleven, the house was deep in old-age quiet. She had tender breasts already and my God, what looked like hips, said the Shapiro aunts, turning her this way and that in the kitchen. Her mother and the aunts kept her well-surrounded: no dark fact could break into this picture, dirty it up or confuse it. But it was 1936, and her father's store was in trouble, and something else was wrong. His eyesight was failing, and he got up to pee five times a night. Nobody spoke of it. The aunts swarmed in her mother's parlor, clutching Clara to their bosoms, giving her big smacking kisses. "Doll," they called her, and "Cutie-pie," words that didn't suit her then, that never would. She felt, at the same time, shunned by life, as if it didn't think her worth the effort, and was deliberately keeping away.
It made her wild, that feeling. She imagined clawing her way out of Aunt Bea's grasp, kicking over her mother's Havilland dessert set, putting her boot down on a neighbor-lady's gloved fingers. But this was a secret, cherished craziness; the opposite was what showed. One day, she overheard two girls in the classroom refer to her as "Miss Goody-Two-Shoes," and felt, for the first time, the icy slow pull of a certain kind of anger. She stepped neatly past the girls and sat down at her desk, but she couldn't forget. The scene rose up when it saw fit: in the bleak hollows of a hot afternoon, or deep in the ticking night, making curves of her new window shade, its dainty fringed balls, go foreign, ugly, alive.