and wonderful? Is my child awful? But Ms. Harriet knew what all children were, she knew what normal was, and she was horrifyingly lucid about the strengths and weaknesses of her only progeny.
As a little girl, Ann Marie had been whiny and sticky, not naturally moral or empathetic, prone to being quite mean actually. She was the kind of little girl who taunted, who teased, who grabbed a toy from your hands and then ran off with it, and when you chased her, burst into tears and told the teacher you attacked her. In short, she was the sort of child other children disliked, and Ms. Harriet was daily aware of this. Bunny’s commentary was, “I always got the feeling Ms. Harriet liked me more than Ann Marie, and that made me feel so bad that I was always extra nice to Ann Marie so we became friends even though I never liked her.”
From preschool through about third grade, Bunny and Ann Marie were best friends. If Bunny had been a dog or a horse, what she possessed would have been termed “a good temperament.” But there is not a precise category for this kind of personality type in humans, one characterized chiefly by tolerance and a kind of good-hearted obliviousness. Mean jokes and pranks slid off her, and she was untroubled and unaware that she was not popular and that her friendship with Ann Marie made her even less so. As they grew older, she was aware that Ann Marie wanted to continue playing with dolls long after Bunny and other girls had stopped, but she felt only pity for whatever fever seemed to clutch Ann Marie when she looked into the inert face of a doll. Once, Ann Marie had told her that she believed dolls came alive when you weren’t looking or when you were asleep. She was the kind of girl who continued believing in Santa too long, who didn’t get the memo about the tooth fairy. A true literalist, she once informed a boy at school that he was definitely going to hell because his family didn’t go to church and that Satan was going to press hot skewers into his body. “You’re gonna rot,” she said, her eyes lit up with excitement. “You’re gonna burn!” (While the preschool was Catholic, Ms. Harriet was not, and she and Ann Marie attended the evangelical church that was pleasingly located across the street from the donut shop, and hell seemed to interest them a lot more than heaven.)
But Ann Marie was not all bad, Bunny was quick to point out. When Bunny’s mother had died when the girls were seven, Ann Marie had said nothing at all about Allison going to hell, even though Bunny’s family didn’t go to church either. If anything, Ann Marie was swept up by the tragedy of it, crying more orgiastically at the funeral than even Bunny herself. She suggested to Bunny elaborate ways that they might mourn together, and wanted to contact Bunny’s mother’s ghost using a scented candle and one of Allison’s old scarves that still smelled of her perfume. She made them black armbands that they wore for weeks.
In third grade, however, something shifted. One day on the monkey bars, Ann Marie pointed out to the other girls that Bunny’s legs were unshaven. “Look,” she said, “her legs are hairy like a man’s!” And the other girls had laughed. Bunny had not been aware that everyone had begun shaving, and she dutifully went home and asked her father for a razor, which at first alarmed him, but when she explained about the teasing, he quickly acquiesced. Ray Lampert was nothing if not keen to the necessity of fitting in, even if it meant sexualizing the legs of his eight-year-old daughter.
But even once she was shorn, Ann Marie liked to point out that Bunny’s stubble was thicker than the other girls’, that Bunny’s throat was too thick, that Bunny walked like a boy. Bunny, in fact, did not walk like a boy. She walked like a girl who was naturally 90 percent fast-twitch muscle fiber and who was already a head taller than the tallest boy. She walked like a girl who could, and sometimes did, lift up the entire end of the living room couch to scout for change underneath. She walked like a girl who could dangle one-handed from a monkey bar while she ate an apple with the other hand. “They shouldn’t have named you