Asymmetry - Lisa Halliday Page 0,60

uncomfortable position for non-yoga-practicing adults: cross-legged on the floor. Reluctantly, down I went, with pre-arthritic objections from my knees, and landed next to a Snow White absorbed in gluing glittered macaroni to a cardboard mask. What’s that? I asked, in a voice higher and tighter than my own. A mask, the girl replied, without looking up. I watched her work for a while and then turned my attention to a tiny swashbuckler who, with his eye patch parked high on his forehead, was busy stacking blocks. To him I said nothing. These kids did not need me. Here to help might as well have been my own costume. In fact, as the afternoon wore on, I began to feel that I was the one being helped, and not least by this tireless demonstration of how very simple and egoless an existence can be: Put one block on top of another. Now another. Now another. Now knock ’em all down. Repeat.

I was not of use to no one that day. About an hour before the end of my shift, a woman wearing an abaya appeared in the doorway holding the hand of a little girl. This girl looked about seven or eight, and, other than being a little on the thin side, healthy as they come. Someone had drawn six whiskers on her face, but otherwise she did not have a costume—only a purple long-sleeved T-shirt and jeans that stopped a good inch above her frilly white socks. By this point I was leaning against a wall, my legs outstretched, while a couple of princesses (or ballerinas—one couldn’t be sure) arranged and rearranged a Lilliputian gathering of stuffed animals around my ankles. The woman in the doorway stood watching for a long moment, then pointed in our direction and led the girl over. Hnana, she said, picking up a frog puppet. Here. The girl took the frog, inserted a hand inside it, and sank to the floor. She had a striking face, smooth and boyish, with long eyelashes and a sleek black bob tucked neatly behind her ears. The whiskers looked like an indignity she could have done without. She held the frog in her lap, belly-up, and at one point absentmindedly scratched her shoulder with its nose. Meanwhile, the princess-ballerinas continued setting up for some sort of stuffed-creatures convention. This involved lots of high-pitched ventriloquism and decidedly unballetic leaps over my legs and back again, the pink netting of their skirts rustling and jouncing with each unsteady jump. I thought maybe they hadn’t noticed the new girl—until, unbidden, one of them picked up a rabbit, swiveled abruptly on her chubby pink legs, and held it out.

Want this?

The new girl shook her head.

This? The other princess held up an owl.

Again, the new girl shook her head. Then she removed her hand from the frog, pointed deep into the menagerie, and said a word so softly that none of us could hear.

Son, maybe. Or sun.

Hsan, I blurted. Horse.

The girl nodded, then turned to look at me with surprise. One of the other girls tossed her the horse. Discarding the frog, the new girl took up the horse and, blushing a little, began to comb its mane of yarn with her fingers. I reached behind her for the frog puppet and wriggled my own hand inside it. I wish I was a horse, I made the frog say, in Arabic. The girl smiled.

• • •

When the costumes came off, you saw the iniquity of illness more clearly. You saw its symptoms, or rather the invisibility thereof, and you could not resist trying to predict the poor child’s chances. An arm or a leg in a cast was not so bad. Often just a playground casualty that in eight weeks would have already faded into family lore. A port-wine stain covering half a face seemed much more unfair—although, with time and lasers, it too could be persuaded to fade. Harder to behold were the more structural disfigurements, like Microtia, Latin for little ear, or Ollier disease, a hyperproliferation of cartilage that could turn a hand as knobby and twisted as ginger root. I read about these and all manner of other disorders in the basement of the bioethics council, where a bookshelf jammed with medical dictionaries became my most reliable lunchtime companion. It wasn’t always easy to arrive at a diagnosis. The doctors at the hospital did not readily share their conclusions and, being a mere playtime volunteer, I generally did not feel in