The Human Stain

Back in September she misspelled her first name and her second name. Fresh from kindergarten and the only word on the word list she could recognize was 'not.' She didn't understand that print contains a message. She didn't know left page before right page.

She didn't know 'Goldilocks and the Three Bears.' 'Do you know "Goldilocks and the Three Bears," Faunia?' 'No.' Which means that her kindergarten experience—because that's what they get there, fairy tales, nursery rhymes—wasn't very good. Today she knows

'Little Red Riding Hood,' but then? Forget it. Oh, if you'd met Faunia last September, fresh from failing at kindergarten, I guarantee you, Dad, she would have driven you wild."

What do you do with the kid who can't read? The kid who is sucking somebody off in a pickup in her driveway while, upstairs, in a tiny apartment over a garage, her small children are supposedly asleep with a space heater burning—two untended children, a kerosene fire, and she's with this guy in his truck. The kid who has been a runaway since age fourteen, on the lam from her inexplica-ble life for her entire life. The kid who marries, for the stability and the safeguard he'll provide, a combat-crazed veteran who goes for your throat if you so much as turn in your sleep. The kid who is false, the kid who hides herself and lies, the kid who can't read who can read, who pretends she can't read, takes willingly upon herself this crippling shortcoming all the better to impersonate a member of a subspecies to which she does not belong and need not belong but to which, for every wrong reason, she wants him to believe she belongs. Wants herself to believe she belongs. The kid whose existence became a hallucination at seven and a catastrophe at fourteen and a disaster after that, whose vocation is to be neither a waitress nor a hooker nor a farmer nor a janitor but forever the stepdaughter to a lascivious stepfather and the undefended offspring of a selfobsessed mother, the kid who mistrusts everyone, sees the con in everyone, and yet is protected against nothing, whose capacity to hold on, unintimidated, is enormous and yet whose purchase on life is minute, misfortune's favorite embattled child, the kid to whom everything loathsome that can happen has happened and whose luck shows no sign of changing and yet who excites and arouses him like nobody since Steena, not the most but, morally speaking, the least repellent person he knows, the one to whom he feels drawn because of having been aimed for so long in the opposite direction—because of all he has missed by going in the opposite direction—and because the underlying feeling of rightness that controlled him formerly is exactly what is propelling him now, the unlikely intimate with whom he shares no less a spiritual than a physical union, who is anything but a plaything upon whom he flings his body twice a week in order to sustain his animal nature, who is more to him like a comrade-in-arms than anyone else on earth.

And what do you do with such a kid? You find a pay phone as fast as you can and rectify your idiotic mistake.