From the Corner of His Eye

surgery, Phimie was able to claim lingering symptoms, avoiding gym class-and the discovery of her condition-since the start of school in September.
        By the last week of pregnancy, the average woman has gained twenty-eight pounds. Typically, seven to eight pounds of this is the fetus. The placenta and the amniotic fluid weigh three pounds. The remaining eighteen are due to water retention and fat stores.
        Phimie gained less than twelve pounds. Her pregnancy might have gone undetected even without the girdle.
        The day previous to her admission to St. Mary's, she awakened with an unremitting headache, nausea, and dizziness. Fierce abdominal pain afflicted her, too, like nothing she had known before, though not the telltale contractions of labor.
        Worse, she was plagued with frightening eye problems. At first, mere blurring. Followed by phantom fireflies flickering at the periphery of her vision. Then a sudden, half-minute blindness that left her in state of terror even though it passed quickly.
        In spite of this crisis, and though she was aware that she was within a week or ten days of delivery, Phimie still could not find the courage to tell her father and mother.
        Reverend Harrison White, their dad, was a good Baptist and a good man, neither judgmental nor hard of heart. Their mother, Grace, was in every way suited to her name.
        Phimie was loath to reveal her pregnancy not because she feared her parents' wrath, but because she dreaded seeing disappointment in their eyes, and because she would rather have died than bring shame upon them.
        When a second and longer spell of blindness struck her that same day, she was home alone. She crawled from her bedroom, along the hall, and felt her way to the phone in her parents' bedroom.
        Celestina was in her tiny studio apartment, working happily on a cubistic self-portrait, when her sister called. Judging by Phimie's hyste ria and initial incoherence, Celestina thought that Mom or Dad--or both-had died.
        Her heart was broken almost as completely by the actual facts as it would have been if she had, indeed, lost a parent. The thought Of her precious sister being violated made her half sick with sorrow and rage.
        Horrified by the girl's nine months of self-imposed emotional isola tion and by her physical suffering, Celestina was eager to reach her mother and father. When the Whites stood together as a family, their shine could hold back the darkest night.
        Although Phimie regained her sight while talking to her big sister, she didn't recover her reason. She begged Celestina not to track down Mom or Dad long-distance, not to call the doctor, but to come home and be with her when she divulged her terrible secret.
        Against her better judgment, Celestina made the promise Phimie wanted. She trusted the instincts of the heart as much as logic, and the tearful entreaty of a beloved sister was a powerful restraint on common sense. She didn't take time to pack; miraculously, an hour later she was on a plane to Spruce Hills, Oregon, by way of Eugene.
        Three hours after receiving the call, she was at her sister's side. In the living room of the parsonage, under the gaze of Jesus and John F.
        Kennedy, whose portraits hung side by side, the girl revealed to their mom and dad what had been done to her and also what, in her despair and confusion, she had done to herself Phimie received the all-enfolding, unconditional love that she had needed for nine months, that pure love of which she had foolishly be lieved herself undeserving.
        Although the embrace of family and the relief of revelation had a bracing effect, bringing her more to her proper senses than she'd been in a long time, Phimie refused to reveal the identity of the man who raped her. He'd threatened to kill her and her folks if she bore witness against him, and she believed his threat was sincere.
        "Child," the reverend said, "he will never touch you again. Both the Lord and I will make sure of that, and though neither the Lord nor I will resort to a gun, we have the police for guns."
        The rapist had so terrorized the girl, so indelibly imprinted his threat in her mind, that she would not be reasoned into making this one last disclosure.
        With gentle persistence, her mother appealed to her sense of moral responsibility. If this man was not arrested, tried, and convicted, he would