What Cannot Be Undone
Sarah Pollock I was four. I stood in the doorway of the bedroom I shared with my two older sisters, regarding our mess of cast-off clothes, half-dressed dolls, and mismatched sneakers. In my hand, I held my mother’s sewing shears, which had been left on the table beside her sewing basket. (Perhaps the baby had begun to wail and my mother had stood to give him a bottle. She was usually more careful.) With both hands, I spread the blades apart and then carefully brought them back together, apart and together, as slowly as the wings of a butterfly. Then I closed the blades and inserted the four fingers of my right hand into the largest loop on the black handle, my thumb into the smaller hole. I pulled the loops apart, pleased to see that the scissor’s blades also widened, just as they did for my mother. I practiced for a while, delighted with the fluid motion of the blades spreading, the satisfying clack of their return. Again, I surveyed the bedroom, looking for paper. There was none. I cleared a space in the mess and sat down cross-legged on the battered hardwood floor, slowly opening and closing the scissors, watching with satisfaction the way the blades glinted in the sunlight that streamed through the dusty window. Glide, glint, clack. Glide, glint, clack. Beside me was the floral tiara I had worn to Mass that morning. It was a much prettier head covering than the lace doilies my sisters wore. (The girls had to cover their heads, but the boys did not. I didn’t know why.) The tiara was not really a tiara, of course, but a wicker headband decorated with seven blowsy roses made of pink chiffon. It was beautiful. I had felt like a princess that morning, sitting in the pew beside my two sisters, my dangling legs kicking idly at the kneeling bench as I drew in the familiar scents of furniture polish, incense, and Sunday perfume. Now I set the scissors down and picked up the tiara, fingering the flowers. The papery feel of the chiffon was smooth. The flowers bent and popped up again beneath the light pressure of my fingers. I picked up the scissors again with my right hand, slipping my fingers into the big grip and flexing the blades. With my other hand I held the tiara, and very slowly I navigated the blades toward the base of one of the flowers, testing whether I could nick the stem. The blades closed – click – and the beheaded flower fell to the floor, a casualty. I stared at it in shock. The sudden transformation was astonishing, the power of my hand made manifest. Mesmerized, I moved the blades toward another stem and – click – the flower dropped. This was fun. Again and again the blade clipped the stems, dropping the flowers one after the other until there were no more attached to the headband. The flowers lay strewn on the floor in front of me and I gazed at the denuded headband in horror, my reverie shattered. It was ruined. Anxiety bloomed in my chest like the flower that unfurls from one of those toy clamshells you drop in a glass of water. I knew that the destruction was terrible and suddenly I recognized that it couldn’t be changed. It was permanent and irreversible, two conditions that I hardly grasped, but now acknowledged for the first time. Surely I was punished. Probably I was spanked. The following Sunday I wore a handkerchief bobby-pinned to my head, a badge of shame. Mostly likely, it was a hasty fix when at the last minute before church nothing more suitable could be found. But what I remember most is this: the absolute and utter certainty that I couldn’t possibly have committed the actions that I obviously had committed, the shock that no one believed my denials when I so fervently believed them myself, and the sense of betrayal and sorrow that the world could turn so swiftly from joy to despair, and that actions could be taken even at four that could not be undone. |
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About the Author:
Sarah Pollock’s writing has appeared in Story|Houston, Mother Jones, Afar, Sierra, California Wild, Newsday, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Hartford Courant, among others. She headed the journalism program at Mills College for twenty years and was a senior editor at Mother Jones. She divides her time between Northern California and rural Norway.
Sarah Pollock’s writing has appeared in Story|Houston, Mother Jones, Afar, Sierra, California Wild, Newsday, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Hartford Courant, among others. She headed the journalism program at Mills College for twenty years and was a senior editor at Mother Jones. She divides her time between Northern California and rural Norway.