The Darkest Evening of the Year

bedspread is tight and tucked, the pillows plumped. No dust dulls any surface.
    Piggy is required to keep her room clean, and periodically her mother conducts an inspection with stern standards and with sterner punishments.
    Harrow suspects that the child would keep a spotless room even if she were not required to do so. The threat of chastisement is not what guarantees her cleanliness.
    She exhibits a desire for order, for quiet continuity, and a longing for fixity in all affairs. This is evident in the way she marshals the images in her collages and in the classic patterns of decoration that, with thread and needles, she applies to the dresses of the dolls.
    “Piggy, you can’t eat just the sandwich,” says Moongirl. “You don’t know what a balanced diet means, but I do. Have some potato salad.”
    “I will,” Piggy replies, but she still makes no move toward the plastic container.
    In Moongirl’s company, the child seldom raises her head, and she rarely makes eye contact. She knows that her mother wants humility from her, and self-abasement.
    As with the yearning for order, humility is not something Piggy learned to please her mother. This quality is as natural to her as feathers to a bird.
    Self-abasement, on the other hand, she resists. She has a quiet dignity that should not have survived ten years like those she has endured.
    She accepts the scorn, the insults, the meanness that her mother visits upon her, every affront and vexation, as though it is what she deserves, but she refuses to disgrace herself. She can be dishonored by another but never abased.
    Harrow suspects that the girl’s innate dignity, free of pride, is what has kept her alive. Her mother recognizes this quality in her and wants, more than anything, to destroy it before she destroys the child.
    To please Moongirl, this breaking must precede the burning; the spirit must be fatally wounded before the flesh is fed to fire.
    Now Piggy opens a lunchbox bag of potato chips, and her mother says, “That’s why you’re fat.”
    The child neither hesitates nor stuffs the chips into her mouth defiantly. She proceeds calmly with her meal, head down.
    With greater diligence, Moongirl rips out the needlework from the doll’s dress.
    Piggy is permitted to have these toys only so they can be taken from her as punishment. So it is with all she has.
    Each time Moongirl sees that the child has grown fond of one doll above the others, she acts. She seems to have determined that the one on which she now works is such a favorite.
    Sometimes, the child cries quietly. She never sobs. Her lower lip trembles, the tears roll down her face, and that is all.
    Harrow is certain that often, if not always, the tears are false, summoned with an effort. Piggy knows that tears are wanted, that her mother is a creature who feeds on tears.
    This is metaphorically true, but it is also a fact. He has never seen Moongirl kiss her daughter, but twice he has seen her lick tears from the corners of the child’s eyes.
    If Piggy did not occasionally give her mother a reward of tears, she might be dead by now. The tears have suggested to Moongirl that in time her daughter can be broken; and it is this breaking that she desires more than all else, for which she has been patient.
    The pent-up violence in Moongirl is like the megadeath condensed in the perfect sphere of plutonium in a nuclear weapon. When a blast is finally triggered, the explosion will be awesome.
    Having cut most of the needlework out of the doll’s dress, she now rends the dress itself, not with the scissors but with her bare hands, grinding her teeth with satisfaction as she rips each seam.
    Perhaps she has begun to suspect that her daughter’s dignity can never be taken from her. This would explain why she might commit to burning Piggy tomorrow night.
    Although Harrow is an imaginative man, his imagination fails him when he tries to envision the horrors that this woman will visit on her daughter before setting her afire. After ten years of unslaked thirst for infanticide and then parricide, Moongirl will surely make a memorable spectacle of Piggy’s final hours.
    At the desk, the child opens the bag of cookies, again passing on the potato salad. She has an instinct for her mother’s traps.
    Moongirl now holds a naked doll. Its limbs are articulated so that it can be manipulated into almost any position. But when she bends an elbow joint backward, she snaps off one of the forearms.
    “Fat little