Clean as a whistle thanks to its garbage bag shelter, Brian's homework was back on his lap. He sat cross-legged on the floor of Odelia's bedroom, putting the finishing touches on his report.
"How the fuck do you spell 'deficient'?" he asked.
"You are supposed to sound a word out if you do not know how to spell it," Courtney told him. "It starts with a duh sound, so that is a 'd'—"
"I wasn't asking you, 'tar—" he shot a wary look at Odelia, "—brat. I was asking the Blob."
Courtney turned Kaylee's head around on her weirdly elongated Barbie neck so they could both glare at Bryan, and then twisted it back to face Odelia. Wielding the borrowed Bethany Ann, Odelia walked her doll up to Courtney's, and bounced it a little to indicate it was doing the talking. "When you want something from somebody, you should ask politely. Don't you think so Kaylee?"
Courtney waggled Kaylee, saying for her, "Unless you want them to tell you to go eat boogers and toenails and puke yourself to death, because they hate you, because you are mean."
Brian twiddled his pencil, trying to decide which option he hated more, scraping some incivility off his request or trying to google the answer for himself. Finally he heaved a great sigh and said, "Would you puh-leeze tell me how to spell 'deficient,' O Great and Powerful Wizard of Poop?"
However mangled with contempt, he had said please. Positive reinforcement was in order. "D... E... F...," Odelia began.
"I,C,I,E,N,T," his mother's voice finished.
Brian's pencil stopped scratching and the Barbies stopped hopping.
Arms stretched out to either side in a posture reminiscent of crucifixion, Melanie stood framed in the open doorway, apparently leaning on it for support. With her hair disheveled, eyes swollen from crying and face streaked with melted makeup, she looked frailer than she had a few short hours ago, as if losing supremacy had diminished her in more than spirit. Odelia had never seen her look so vulnerable... or, come to think of it, vulnerable in any way at all... ever.
To Odelia's very great surprise, this elaborate display, clearly calculated to win pity, worked. She couldn't help herself. Tear-swollen eyes were to Odelia's sympathies what Pavlov's bell was to dog drool. Not that pity was the meat and potatoes of Odelia's response. No, it was more like a too-spicy and potentially overwhelming condiment to a main course of relief and side-dishes like satisfaction, contempt, and continuing anger.
The woman had gotten far, far less than she had coming, Odelia reminded herself, and infinitely less than Odelia could have meted out, were she a different sort of person, more like Melanie herself.
During a good portion of the time that Melanie had considered herself in control, she had in actual fact been at Odelia's mercy. She could have been literally squashed, or engulfed and smothered under an avalanche of sweaty flab; but since Odelia was not, had never been, and refused to become, the same sort of person as her tormentor, being at her mercy meant receiving just that.
And now Melanie had the nerve to present herself as suffering? Did she consider herself mistreated?
She had been on the losing end of one argument with her husband. That was the sum total of her punishment for months on end of dehumanizing abuse.
Play on my sympathies all you like, Odelia thought. Go ahead. Twang 'em like banjo strings, and see what it gets you... Odelia had fought too long and too hard to let her victory be overturned by an act of misplaced pity.
ŞİMDİ OKUDUĞUN
Tipping the Scales
ChickLitOdelia has spent most of her life so firmly under her brother's thumb that she might as well have been an insect trapped in a chunk of amber, but now, at long last, something is happening to her. Too bad it's not a nice, normal, something, like a '...
