"A brown one with white spots!" adds Norma.
Matt points to Charlie standing near the wall.
"Did you forget you told your son he couldn't have one because we didn't have the room, and no one to take care of it.
Remember?
When he asked for a dog?
Are you going back on what you said to him?"
"But I can take care of my own dog," insists Norma.
"I'll feed him, and wash him, and take him out…"
Charlie, who has been standing near the table, playing with his large red button at the end of a string, suddenly speaks out.
"I'll help her take care of the dog!
I'll help her feed it and brush it and I won't let the other dogs bite it!"
But before either Matt or Rose can answer, Norma shrieks:
"No!
It's going to be my dog.
Only my dog!"
Matt nods. "You see?"
Rose sits beside her and strokes her braids to calm her.
"But we have to share things, dear.
Charlie can help you take care of it."
"No! Only mine!… I'm the one who got the A in history—not him!
He never gets good marks like me. "Why should he help with the dog?
And then the dog will like him more than me, and it'll be his dog instead of mine. No!
If I can't have it for myself I don't want it."
"That settles it," says Matt picking up his newspaper and settling down in his chair again.
"No dog."
Suddenly, Norma jumps off the couch and grabs the history test she had brought home so eagerly just a few minutes earlier. She tears it and throws the pieces into Charlie's startled face.
"I hate you!
I hate you!"
"Norma, stop that at once!"
Rose grabs her but she twists away.
"And I hate school!
I hate it!
I'll stop studying, and I'll be a dummy like him.
I'll forget everything I learned and then I'll be just like him."
She runs out of the room, shrieking: "It's happening to me already. I'm forgetting everything… I'm forgetting… I don't remember anything I learned any more!"
Rose, terrified, runs after her.
Matt sits there staring at the newspaper in his lap.
Charlie, frightened by the hysteria and the screaming, shrinks into a chair whimpering softly.
What has he done wrong?
And feeling the wetness in his trousers and the trickling down his leg, he sits there waiting for the slap he knows will come when his mother returns.
The scene fades, but from that time Norma spent all her free moments with her friends, or playing alone in her room.
She kept the door to her room closed, and I was forbidden to enter without her permission.
I recall once overhearing Norma and one of her girl friends playing in her room, and Norma shouting:
"He is not my real brother!
He's just a boy we took in because we felt sorry for him.
My mamma told me, and she said I can tell everyone now that he's not really my brother at all."
I wish this memory were a photograph so that I could tear it up and throw it back into her face.
I want to call back across the years and tell her I never meant to stop her from getting her dog.
She could have had it all to herself, and I wouldn't have fed it, or brushed it, or played with it—and I would never have made it like me more than it liked her.
I only wanted her to play games with me the way we used to. I never meant to do anything that would hurt her at all.