LITTLE MAGGIE HAS NO FACE
LITTLE MAGGIE HAS NO FACE
I BET SHE COMES FROM OUTER SPACE
That clever little sing-song rhyme sprang from Brian Berkowitz, a first grade boy with the heart of a poet and all the compassion of a Dochow prison guard. His trade was harsh words and irritating rhymes that spread through schoolyards like cholera. Of all his rhymes that one was the most popular among the first graders, despite the best efforts of the teachers to quarantine it. It was no use though, it caught on like wildfire. Lots of grown ups are under the insane delusion that children are innocent. Those people must have had all the memories of what it’s really like being a kid erased when they turned eighteen. They think of childhood only as some fairytale dream land, with pink eared bunny rabbits and rivers of freshly squeezed lemonade. They remember toasting marshmallows and catching fireflies during summer, or the building of snowmen and opening of presents on those sweet, splendid Christmas mornings. But they don’t remember the bruises, the bloody noses, the gut coiling fear… or the dread. To be a child is to be in a world that simply was not made with you in mind, and to be at the mercy of other similarly helpless but not so friendly creatures. Perhaps they are innocent, in their own way, but that doesn’t mean they can’t also be every bit as predatory and vicious as a school of needle-toothed piranhas.
The victim of Brian Berkowitz’ little nugget of poetic genius was one Maggie Fitzgerald, and rest assured she did indeed have a face.
After all, how could you not have a face? She wasn’t blind so she must have had eyes. She could eat and drink and speak… and sing. God, could she sing. So she obviously must have had a mouth. She could smell, and hear, so she was the owner of a nose and a pair of working ears.
Maggie did indeed have a face.
It’s just nobody for the life of them knew what that face looked like. Nobody. Not her classmates, not her teachers, friends, family, not even her own parents had any inkling to what Maggie looked like. Not the people who saw her every day, not the people who knew her the whole of her life nor the people who knew her for the entirety of their own life.
I’m getting ahead of myself though. I need to start at the beginning.
Magnolia Carol Fitzgerald was born November eleventh, 1982. By all accounts a perfectly normal newborn girl. Mr. and Mrs. Fitzgerald, nor the doctors, noticed yet. They still beamed with joy. She and her mother were discharged from the hospital two days later, swaddled in pink clothes like a tiny chrysalis. Madeline and Ted Fitzgerald were as proud and as happy as any new parents would be. Ted was a mini-mall tycoon, and Madeline, a secretary, enjoying a generous maternity leave. She intended to take full advantage of it by bonding with her new bundle of joy day in and out. It was her dream to have a precious little girl since she herself was a little girl. It was when Maggie was one week old did Madeline first discover something was wrong with her daughter.
Madeline was preparing supper. Pot roast simmering to perfection in the crockpot. She was talking with her own mother, the phone wedged between her ear and shoulder as she frosted the chocolate cake for dessert, and bragged about her blessed, precious little angel sleeping peacefully in the nursery upstairs. While they were talking, Maggie’s grandmother urged Madeline to tell her what her granddaughter looked like. Madeline was all too happy to oblige. All of her friends had been having babies left and right, and now it was finally her time to shine. Now she would be the one who would brag about how cute and beautiful her baby was, and she was about to do just that. But she couldn’t, because she couldn’t recall what her baby looked like.
She abandoned the cake half frosted and dashed upstairs to the nursery. The walls were painted with blue elephants and smiling, dot-eyed giraffes. Madeline looked at her daughter sleeping like a rock in her onesie. She felt her heart melt again, as if she were looking at her baby’s scrunched up little face for the very first time. How could she forget what her little girl looked like?
She headed back down stairs, back to her mother still waiting on the phone. She was about to describe her gorgeous daughter in great detail now.
But she couldn’t.
She scrambled back up to the nursery, turned on the lights, and Maggie woke up and started wailing. Madeline held her baby and tried soothing her, all the while keeping her eyes locked on her face. She studied every part of her, tried memorizing every detail. After a half hour she managed to get her to go back to sleep. She left her in the cradle, and the instant she looked away, she had no earthly idea what her child looked like.
When Ted returned home late for work he found his wife on the verge of a mental breakdown. He was terrified that this was some delayed postpartum depression. When he tried consoling his wife and she told him what happened he then worried maybe it was even worse than postpartum. A stroke? But when he looked at the sleeping face of the girl he fathered and named himself, he found that he did not know, could not know, what she looked like.
This was the peculiarity of Maggie Fitzgerald.
Looking at her you would never know anything was strange about her. She came across as an ordinary child. But the moment you focus on the details of her; the color of her hair, her eyes, her height, if she had freckles or not, then suddenly you go blank. Even looking straight at her. You could be holding her in your arms and not be able to say if she were black or white. She was a living illusion. Something that made less and less sense the more you thought about it. It’s quite difficult to understand unless you experience her first hand. If I had to come up with a metaphor—How did that one George Carlin bit go?
“Have you ever looked at your watch and then you don’t know what time it is? And you have to look again…and you still don’t know the time! So you look a third time and somebody says ‘what time is it?’ and you say ‘I don’t know.’”
That was what it was like to focus on the appearance of little Maggie.
It was quite unsettling to most people.
Ted and Madeline spent a pretty penny on pediatricians, psychologists, therapists, specialists (don’t know what kind of specialists, I don’t think they did either. Just “specialists”) and even consulted religious authorities, mediums, spirit photographers and what could only be described as U.F.O. truth enthusiasts who surmised she might be a flying saucer baby. Everything turned up dead ends.
Maggie’s peculiarity stretched even farther than the human mind. Maggie’s parents purchased a Polaroid Sun 600 just to take pictures of their angel. Top of the line, the best polaroid camera on the market at the time. They took many pictures of newborn Maggie with it, and when they had them developed they all came back distorted. Not even cameras were immune from Maggie’s curse. In any picture that was taken of her she was just an amorphous blur. A smudge in the shot, vaguely girl shaped but void of details. When the Fitzgeralds purchased a new film recorder they found similar results. It captured her voice, her laughs, but not her body. The image deteriorated into frenzied static whenever she was in the frame. There was no way to really see Maggie.
She was like a ghost.
#
Because Maggie was normal in every other way she started kindergarten the same as all the other children. They considered homeschooling her, but that was impractical, and in a rare instance of agreement both parents thought Maggie did not need to be further differentiated. Madeline and Ted’s marriage was getting choppy by this point. Maggie was not to blame, but she was the cause. Poor Madeline was having a catastrophic time trying to bond with her baby girl. How could you bond with a child you can’t remember the face of? Madeline could not picture her blessed precious while she was away from her. Maggie remained a vague idea in her head; more like a concept than flesh and blood. Madeline felt she still didn’t have the perfect little girl she had always dreamed of.
They divorced quietly while Maggie was still sucking on her thumb. Only five years old and her nuclear family was dashed to pieces. Those family photos you see that come in picture frames, the ones with the generic families having generic fun? That would not be Maggie’s lot in life. Soon enough in less than a year Madeline remarried. His name was Gregory Smith, a CPA who didn’t make quite as much as Ted, but made up for it in sheer veneration. The man worshipped Madeline, along with the ground she walked on. She was pregnant within three months of their marriage.
That was another reason the last marriage melted down. Madeline wanted a whole litter of kids, but with Maggie being the anomaly that she was, not only did that take up too much of her time to have another, but she could no longer trust Ted’s seed. Who’s to say they won’t go and have another… well, she didn’t say what, but I could infer from that guilty look.
Freak…
And so, just days after Maggie’s sixth birthday party (nobody came), her younger half sister was born. They named her Margarette Smith. Margarette Smith. Madeline was relieved that this one was perfectly normal. The perfect little girl she always wanted. But now where did that leave Maggie?
#
The children were put off by Maggie right away. Children have a special sense for things that are odd. They did not yet have the vocabulary to articulate what exactly was off about Maggie, but they felt she was alien nonetheless. Children almost always see things for what they are, and in the worst possible way. The grown ups had different yet equally harmful behavior. They were warned well in advance by the Fitzgeralds (Or Fitzgerald and Smiths by this point) of Maggie’s peculiarity. They felt they were obligated to tell anyone who would be responsible for Maggie, mostly to avoid any potential problems or logistics to come about, but also just the common decency to warn them that trying to picture their child’s face could quick-fry your brain if you put too much effort in it.
Did you know human brains are designed specifically to seek out faces? If you didn’t then it shouldn’t be a surprise. Haven’t you ever seen a stain or a mark on wallpaper that just popped out at you as a face? Eyes, mouth and sometimes a nose. We see faces even when there aren’t any. We also remember faces more clearly than any other thing. I once read about a girl who would remember her things by drawing faces on them. That made it less likely for her to lose or forget them. This left Maggie (whose face could not be registered) in a very hard spot.
Without a face that could be remembered Maggie was often forgotten. She was forgotten in the classroom. The teacher would never call on her, no matter how enthusiastically desperate she was to be called on. Like trying to hail a cab in Times Square on New Year’s Eve. When the kids would pick teams for P.E. she would be the last one selected, if at all. During recess she was missed when it was time to line up; she just slipped the teachers mind. That left Maggie with a lot of free play by herself on the playground until she was eventually noticed by another member of faculty. She usually played by herself anyway, and after all, it only happened once, or twice…maybe thrice. And it goes without saying, but picture day was always a catastrophe…
There was one especially savage instance her mother recounted to me. Maggie was playing with a group of kids in the neighborhood, or more accurately she was co-existing in the same space as them as they were playing. Hovering around and trying to unlock the secret code that would allow her to join in. God, what an outsider she was…
The kids decided to play hide and go seek. Maggie gleefully joined in and in her bright red galoshes she raced to find the perfect hiding place. She could climb like a monkey, or so her mother said, and struggled her way up a tall elm tree, hugging the trunk near the top and settling in to be found and congratulated on her ingenuitive hiding place.
None of the children bothered looking for her.
She stayed up in that elm tree long after the children had stopped playing and went home to their respective suppers. Hours and hours, just waiting to be found. I can only imagine how she felt. How long did it take for her to consider that she wasn’t being looked for? How long did it take for her to come to terms with that? That she had been forgotten again. And then, I imagine, that she continued to stay in that tree, clinging to the bark for no other reason than coming down would mean accepting that fact. It must have felt like being in limbo, or being an orphan. Maybe those two feelings are the same. But for whatever reason, she stayed in the tree even after the street lights came on.
Inevitably her folks went looking for her when she didn’t come in. They wouldn’t say but I suspect it took them longer to realize she was late then they would like to admit. They went up and down the streets calling for her, but Maggie stayed quiet. Her father found her in the tree and got her to come down. He scooped her up from off a low branch and she immediately broke into tears. Maggie sobbed into his chest all the way home. I interviewed them both separately, yet they both said that that night was the worst of all. Before the incident that is. We’ll get to that soon enough.
#
By the time Maggie entered first grade she had had enough. She was realizing just how much of an outsider her condition had made her. She was tired of going unnoticed by everyone in her classroom, tired of being forgotten, tired of being left behind. She had been getting plenty of that at home with Margarette taking the spotlight, and with a younger brother on the way to boot, drawing away more of Madeline and her step father’s attention. Maggie had decided to do something about it.
People could not remember her face. She knew that much. And it extended to the rest of her appearance as well; height, weight, hair color, skin color etc. However, did that apply to what she was wearing? Could people remember and recognize her for her wardrobe and apparel? Whether or not she knew about the scientific method, she was deploying it by testing her hypothesis.
Because her mother and stepfather had become more and more preoccupied with her younger sibling, Maggie had become accustomed to preparing herself for school. That included waking herself, brushing teeth, readying hair, even breakfast. Madeline was still packing her lunch of course (she did that much at least), but other than that, Maggie learned self reliance in a way most children shouldn’t have to. Not through the gentle guidance of custodians, but through absent-minded neglect. This also meant that she had free reign to dress anyway she pleased.
How to describe her choice of apparel? It looked like a costume devised by an alien who had only Punky Brewster as their sole representative of the human animal. It looked like a tornado blew through a goodwill. A patch work, D.I.Y. costume store bargain bin, helter skelter, miss match of every style that came together into an outfit that was as colorful and cuckoo as jellybean rain showers.
Plaid, paisley, polka-dots, stripes, checkers, cross hatched and cruelly Frankensteined together in a rag doll skirt. Her grandmother’s sewing lessons paid off. Her shirt was the most integral part of the ensemble. It was a white t-shirt which she had smeared, dripped and dribbled with all manner of paints she took from her mother’s art room. Jackson Pollock would be proud. It was surrounded by a cardigan sweater that looked like it was cut from the carpet of an arcade. Along her chest looked like orange pom poms glued haphazardly making her look like a party favor. Rainbow striped socks and mismatched shoes. Around her neck, a yellow ascot loosely tied, and to top off her outfit as well as her head, an avocado-green bow with raspberry-red polka dots. Gaudy, gauche, and grandiose. If Maggie set out to stand out then that’s exactly what happened.
At first the children were bewildered. The teacher, Mrs. Womble, noticed, scanned to see if there were any specific dress code violations, and found nothing. However I think she could tell that there was a growing tension that was soon to blossom into an active disruption. As the class of first graders muttered and snickered to themselves, Maggie, who had noticed eyes were on her felt very proud. Very pleased with herself. But the children still whispered to each other, like spies transmitting treacherous information. Quiet taunts circulated through the class of twenty-two kids. They were planning an attack. I think even Maggie could feel it coming. It was a change in the air, like a thunderstorm charging up from the south.
During recess, they sprang their attack on her.
They crowded her like paparazzi while she was sitting on a swing set, and started out by asking such innocent questions.
“Where did you get that skirt?”
“What are you supposed to be?”
“Did your mom dress you?”
“I like your pants.”
“Did you make that skirt yourself?”
“What kind of shirt is that?”
“What are you supposed to be?”
What are you supposed to be? That last comment stuck with me for all these years. What is she supposed to be? She’s Maggie. That’s not what she’s supposed to be. It’s simply what she was.
Hiding beneath the surface were the barely submerged undertones of mockery and malice. At first Maggie tried to be flattered. This is what she wanted. She wanted to be noticed. But it seemed her wish was granted by an evil Djinn. The children, testing the waters, went further.
“It looks like it came from the trash,” said none other than Brian Berkowitz, resident bully of the first grade. His comment got a few giggles out of the other first graders. That was more than enough motivation to go further. They smelled blood in the water, and Brian was just beginning to cut his teeth.
“Nah, actually, it looks like the trash threw up on you. All over you.” Maggie deflated. More chuckles from the group. It nursed his ego. He needed to top it. Brian would have made a perfect subject for the Stanford Prison Experiment. “Do your parents get your clothes from the same place they got you? The garbage?”
The whole pack snickered like a feral bunch of hyenas. Not the giddy, sing-song laughter of children. A cruel snicker. It wasn’t that clever, but children are easily impressed. They all wanted to come up with their own clever comments. Brian got the ball rolling, but the other children ran with it. Poking, prodding, unfiltered, merciless comments. Maggie, poor Maggie, looked like a wilting flower. She stared at the ground and dug into the mulch and woodchips under the swingset with her boot. I think at that moment she wished she was invisible again. To just disappear.
Adults tell children all the time, “Sticks and stones may break your bones, but names will never hurt you.” What a brilliant pile of horseshit that is.
I was there, you see. I heard the vile awful things those kids were saying to her; the things they were calling her. I saw the expression on her face, a face I cannot ever remember yet the expression is burned into me as if pressed on the back of my eyelids in burning print. Look at that expression, that miserable, lip trembling, heart shattering look of sadness painted on her face and tell me that she wasn’t hurting. Tell me that those tears she shed weren’t from pain. Tell me that that moment did not stay with her long after the recess bell rang, long after the school bus brought her home, long after her bedtime, long after everyone else forgot what happened on that playground that day.
Tell me that that didn’t hurt her, and y’know what? If you do I’ll give you a few harsh words of my own, and on top of that I’ll throw in a few broken bones. On the house. So then you can really see which one of those hurts more. But I’ll save you the trouble right now and tell you: It hurts just as much. The only difference is that broken bones can heal seamlessly, but the scars left by cruel words are not so easily mended. Those take a lifetime to heal, if at all. And poor Maggie didn’t have a lifetime.
After that, Maggie was remembered. Oh yes, she was remembered. She had drawn attention to herself in the worst way possible. Instead of subconsciously writing her off because of her abnormality, the children of Mrs. Womble’s first grade class were now aware of it. They noticed her difference. That her appearance could not be retained in any capacity. That no physical feature of her body could even be identified even while directly observing her. This peculiarity opened a new and exciting avenue to be explored in the field of bullying.
At first they made games out of her. They stared and spied at her, seeing which of them, if any, could make out what she looked like. None of them could, naturally, but it was a fascinating effect to ponder, even by adult standards. And it still didn’t stop them from coming up with fake answers.
“I bet she’s really covered with warts and big red pimples.’
“Big bucked teeth, like a beaver.”
“Maybe she’s got green skin, and a big long witch’s nose, like an old carrot.”
“She probably looks like a rat, with big buck teeth like you said. She already plays in garbage.”
“Or she’s an alien from outer space, and it’s her way of staying hidden. Huh? Are you an alien?”
This is when Brian came out with his first big hit if you couldn’t piece it together. I can still hear it in his nasally voice. “Little Maggie has no face. Little Maggie has no face. I bet she comes from outer space.”
How I wish I could bludgeon that little shit…
Elementary School teachers are a lot like God. Seemingly wise and larger than life, but impotent in most things, and ultimately uncaring. Mrs. Womble was both unwilling and unable to crack down on most of the bullying. All Maggie could do was lay down and take it, and pray they didn’t claw out anything vital. On numerous occasions, I’m sure they did. Her parents were very descriptive on how hard the latter semester of first grade was for her. They noticed that much at least.
The Smiths had yet another child. Another girl, named Melody. Another M name, was she trying to make a brand? Yet another sponge to divert away much needed attention from Maggie. Ted was trying to be active, but he was becoming more and more busy with his expanding business ventures. That and he had a girlfriend. Some twenty something year old thing. He loved beautiful girls, and loved hiring them. And he just couldn’t help falling in love with them too. How else did you think he met Madeline?
Her name was Vallorie, and loved Ted dearly (or at least his money) but wasn’t the most fond of children. That meant Ted had to be a father at a distance. He sent Maggie very expensive gifts. She got a Super Nintendo before anyone else in the neighborhood. And enough Barbie playsets to create a scale model of Malibu. Generous of him, but luxurious gifts does not a fatherhood make. That’s something he told me himself, all of these years later with tears in his eyes. I’ve found that it’s hard hearing a child cry, but hearing a grown man, a man in the twilight years of his life sob? That’s truly the saddest thing to hear.
The gifts also furthered the wedge between her and her half siblings. Despite growing up around her, they still detected Maggie’s strange properties. They sensed something off about her, and stayed distant. Their father was by no means abusive, but he never tried to be a step-father. He saw her more as another child that happened to live with them. Amicable, but not tender. Madeline was similarly distant, more concerned with her other children. Her true brood. None of them were freaks.
Their children picked up on this, and treated the elder half sister accordingly. She wasn’t one of them. Not a part of their family. A lingering fragment of some other strange family maybe, but not a member of their clan. And of course when they noticed that she was getting so many more expensive toys than they were jealousy took root. For more information on why that is, consult Cain and Abel.
Maggie had withdrawn now, this time voluntarily. She no longer bothered raising her hand and praying to be called on. She no longer tried to wriggle her way into the games and groups of others only for her to be a cursory part of the game but not in the game. She was quiet now. She remained in the back of the class and doodled; making something worthwhile in the blank space of the paper.
The thing she drew most of all were faces. Not just the simple two dots and an ellipse smiley face that anyone can draw—faces of all sorts and varieties. Smiley faces, frowny faces, angry faces, scared faces, laughing faces, crying faces, smug, grinning faces, ugly faces, cute faces, beautiful faces, girls faces, boys faces, kid faces, grown-up faces, thin faces, wide faces, fat faces. Faces, faces, faces, faces, faces. Stamped all throughout her notebooks, and scratch paper and the back of her worksheets. A collage menagerie of a million imagined faces.
That’s what she wanted.
That’s what she needed.
A face.
A face that could be recognized, and known by. A face that could be remembered, and remembered fondly. Something that could be cherished and adored. An honest to God face.
In a childishly wise spur of human ingenuity and dream like-creativity Maggie made a face for herself. Using a black sharpie she drew a face of her own design on the back of a Great Value paper plate. She punched holes at opposite rims of the thing with her step fathers home office hole puncher, and weaved thick, brown, cotton strings through them to make it into a mask. She used a blue magic marker for her eyes. She wanted blue eyes, like her mother’s I suppose. The most stunning blue eyes.
This is something that all the people whom I have spoken to in regards to Maggie never consider. Not her parents, not her siblings, not her step father, not her teachers, not her classmates, not anyone thought about this simple, miserable fact about Maggie’s immutable and mysterious peculiarity: That it even worked on her. She could no more identify any feature about her physical appearance than anyone else.
When she looked in the mirror, what did she see?
Nothing she could ever know, or recognize. Not even she knew what she looked like, even though surely she must have wanted to. A blind person will never know what they look like, but they won’t know what anyone else looks like either. To Maggie though, she could see just fine—she saw everyone else as they were. She could see them, know them, remember them. They had appearances that could be held onto, faces that could be remembered. She was the only one who was blank. Most outsiders have a certain secret identity, one they hide from the world in order to protect it. Though they may hide it outwardly, inwardly they embrace it, celebrate it, rejoice in it. But Maggie was an outsider who didn’t even have that. She was an outsider to herself. A stranger. She did not know who she was, yet wanted so badly to.
Could you imagine? Never knowing what was in the mirror staring back at you.
Me neither…
But now she had a face. A home-made one. A face not of bones and flesh but of thick paper, string and marker ink. Maggie was complete now, she made herself whole. Like the ugly duckling that grew into a swan, like the caterpillar who transformed into the butterfly, Maggie’s metamorphosis was complete. She was a newly made, whole little girl. Sugar and spice and all things nice on two legs. Cookie cutter perfect and ready to make her debut.
She entered the classroom, both hands clutching the straps of her purple backpack. The class was quiet at first. Just staring. Observing. Waiting to see what someone else would do. Maggie must have been holding her breath underneath that paper plate. She did cut small slits in it so she could see, but not well enough. Maggie moved slowly and purposely, touching desks, chairs or parts of the wall where she could steady herself towards her assigned desk.
Mrs. Womble noticed and told her she couldn’t wear a mask in class. She got up and went to remove it, and she almost did, but Maggie shrieked the second she tried to take off her make-believe face. Not just a temper tantrum—the kind of shrill scream a child lets out when they’re in real, dire pain. Mrs. Womble trying to remove her mask was like trying to tear off her real flesh. It was so visceral that Mrs. Womble relented, and decided to “let it slide for now.” The bell rang class started as normal. Everyone waited to see if this would turn out like when Maggie put on those silly clothes.
Recess came around. Maggie simply sat on the bench as she had done countless recesses before. The children looked and stared sometimes, but they mostly kept to their own games. Either they had gotten bored with Maggie or developed a twinge of mercy for her.
Every child left her be—except one.
Brian Berkowitz.
He was looking to relive the glory of his former mocking. He liked the attention—he thrived off of it. He didn’t laugh, didn’t taunt, didn’t sneer or deride. No clever insults. Brian simply walked up to Maggie by himself, mitts in his pockets, and then suddenly, quickly, aggressively, maliciously, grabbed her paper plate mask by the rim and tore it off of her, breaking the string and crumpling it to ruin in the process. Maggie barely had time to attempt to stop him.
Brian was smiling—fucking smiling. Looking around waiting for other kids to congratulate him, praise him. Like he just won a game. A contest in who could be horrible first. But nobody was smiling with him. Behind him, Maggie was crumpled on the sand, covering her face. There was a whimper that rose into an uncomfortable sobbing. In that moment, Brian saw what true pain looked like, and recognized himself as the cause of it.
“My face…” she whimpered, so softly. “You ruined my face…” she sniffled and swallowed, as if she was actually truly deformed by his assault. In a way she was. That thing, while paper, was her face. And Brian ruined it for her, because he wanted to—because he thought it would be fun. But most of all, just because he could.
“I just wanted a face—like you…”
In that instant he felt such a burning and dire regret he wished he could take it back. Uncrumple her home made-face, mend its string, unsay the words. But he couldn’t. He wanted to help, or give comfort, but out of fear of causing more pain he dropped Maggie’s crumpled face and left—like a coward.
There was some good to come from all this. During art class, the only time of the school day when the children were free to pursue what they liked, a few of the students showed sympathy for what Brian did to her. By this point, most of the kids in Mrs. Wombles’ class had been the victim of Brian’s unkind words, and now they could sympathize with Maggie. They actually tried to help her make a new face.
It started with just one, then two, and then in a flash half the class were all drawing on paper plates trying to make a new mask for Maggie. Some were quite good, others not so much. The only one excluded from the fun was Brain, doodling in the corner of the class trying to forget what he did. Now it was his turn to wish to feel invisible.
They all buzzed around her, like bees around a queen, each one asking if she liked the faces they drew for her. Eventually she settled on one designed by Josh Sharp. I can remember how happy she sounded when she saw it, and how proud Josh was that she picked his. Like a knight who won the favor of the princess. He was the quiet, artistic kid of the class. I wanted to interview him for this, but I discovered that he got hit by a drunk driver in 2001. He was seventeen years old.
The art teacher punched holes in it for them, and they tied a string through it as a strap. Maggie dawned her new face and now the whole class felt proud and together. They felt the joy of someone else’s pleasure, maybe for the first time. Brian couldn’t help but feel bitter over it, but that would pass in time. She really was like a princess in a fairy tale, or Humpty Dumpty if all the king’s horses and all the king’s men were successful in putting him back together. This was the high point for Maggie I believe. A soaring and grand one, but ultimately ephemeral. It must have felt sweet though.
Now it’s time to tell you how Maggie’s story comes to a close. Forgive me, I never intended to be cruel to you, my dear readers.
#
There was a Piggly Wiggly down the street from Maggie’s neighborhood. It closed down sometime in the 70s, smothered to death by Sam Walton. The derelict building was left to stand like the ancient temple to some forgotten, porcine deity. Its parking lot was now a cracked, sun-bleached moonscape. The lettering of the logo was removed and in its place faded after-images like ghosts. The porky pig-esque logo of Piggly himself remained mostly intact. Chubby rounded cheeks, semi-circle snout, and big eyes with massively dilated pupils. He remained permanently fixed above, surveying the dusty parking lot he once ruled over like an Ozymandias from a time long ago. To the ego of a child, something which existed before your birth is ancient. That old Piggly Wiggly grocery may as well have been the pyramids of Giza.
The children simply called it, “The Lot.”
The Lot made a nice place to test out bicycles, skateboards, roller blades, scooters, and other such unconventional modes of childhood transportation. A safe haven to play street hockey without the bothersomeness of automobiles. In other words, it was a scraped knee and elbow factory. Many fond memories were forged there, in the golden twilight of summer’s long past. Those were times of friendship and joy, then un-savored and now mourned.
Maggie spent time there too. It was a shared experience for all the kids within its radius of influence. Communal stomping ground, binding in its sanctuary. That’s where she played, or rather, she hovered.
She hovered close by to play groups hoping to slip in. She never had much luck. In games of tag she was never it, but also never pursued. That was until Brian ripped apart her first mask. Apart from actually bringing her into the fold of the class, I think the mask itself may have actually helped. The face was what people focused on. It was what confused them, frustrated them, and eluded them. The mask made a barrier that shielded them. You could at least remember and recognize the child-like, cartoon face that she wore. So in the summer of 1991 Maggie finally got to play. Really play.
I wonder if the play she finally got to enjoy on that old parking lot was what she wanted. Were those memories as sweet to her as my own memories are to me? Or were they only bitter sweet. After so much loneliness and pain, did it finally soothe her? Or did it make her realize that not even that was enough to make her content? To make her whole. I asked a few of the kids she played with about her. They’re all grown up now and I could see the faint ghosts of the children they used to be in their faces. Everything from managers, to doctors, to forklift operators to waitresses at greasy spoons. They all remembered Maggie in one way or another. Some took a little prodding, but they all got there. They recalled her as being sweet, shy, and more than a little odd, but nothing much more. Most of them didn’t even remember her peculiarity, they thought her mask wearing was just a “quirk.” They admitted they only played with her out of a sense of pity and obligation.
Maybe that’s why she did it.
Well, I’ve been putting it off long enough. I try not to make it a habit to tease my audience. Far be it from me to keep you all in terminal suspense. But these things are difficult to recall. They’re even harder to put into words on a page. Like trying to pour lake Eerie into a teacup. I’m stalling now I know. Here’s what happened.
It was June first, 1991. Another Golden age of summer vacation had come. Maggie left her house just after lunch wearing a yellow dress, red rain boots, and the mask of her face. She left the driveway atop of her bicycle, a Christmas present from her dear father, too busy grabbing ass in the love nest he was making with Valorie to be present for the holidays.
Maggie told her mother before she was going to the Lot to play with some other kids in the neighborhood. Madeline, while washing dishes, told her firmly that she had to be back before the streetlights came on. Madeline hated the mask Maggie wore. At least when she wasn’t wearing it she could pass as an ordinary girl to outsiders. But that mask said to the world “my daughter isn’t normal, she has problems, probably the mother’s fault.”
Maggie said to her mother, behind her paper plate face: “Yes, Mom. Seeya.” and left on her red bike.
That was the last time Madeline saw her daughter.
She did make it to the Lot. There were other children there. They played for some time. That same, by the numbers, unspirited play she had been having for a few months. Playing was a lot like making love, your heart had to be in it. Malaise crept over all of them. And as the sun crawled up to the zenith of the sky and drove the concrete beneath their tennis shoes to sizzle like a stovetop, the kids left to go back to their homes for shade, popsicles, lemonade and T.V. They left one by one, then by pairs until little Maggie was left all by her lonesome. It would be Jason Biddy, a boy the same age as Maggie who lived down the street from her, who would be the last person to ever see Magnolia Fitzgerald.
The sun crept back down beneath the tree line. The bright sky dimmed like cooling metal. Venus twinkled in the western sky. The street lights came on. Maggie had not come home.
Madeline waited on the porch, tapping her foot, hands on her hips, readying to scold her the moment she saw her rolling down the street on her bicycle. She had never spanked Maggie, but after being more than fifteen whole minutes late she was certainly mulling over the idea.
After thirty minutes anger melted into anxiety. Dreadful ideas slithered into her mind from her belly, coiled, and nestled there. She stared at the corner where Maggie was due to appear, any second now, she thought.
She saw lights coming. It was Greg. He was home from work and still Maggie was nowhere to be seen. Greg left immediately to go find Maggie. Probably somewhere in the neighborhood, or more likely at that goddamn parking lot. He went up and down in his sedan, around and around, looking this way and that. Not a sign of Maggie. He went to the Lot. Desolate.
Eight o’clock came around. Not a trace.
Maggie was missing.
Let me illustrate for you just how bad this was.
Maggie was a special girl. One who, for one reason or another, be it science or magic, had an appearance which could not be retained in any capacity. Not by the human eye, not by photo, not by video, not by illustration.
What do you do when a girl like that disappears?
You can’t give a description. What? Tell all the available officers, “be on the lookout for a girl you can’t recall the appearance of,”? Put up missing posters of a blur? You couldn’t even put her on a fucking milk carton. It was not like trying to find a needle in a haystack. It was trying to locate an invisible needle in a stack of invisible needles. It was a monstrously hopeless problem, the full danger of which Maggie’s parents and step father didn’t consider until it was far too late.
All at once there was a massive search. Countless adults wielding flashlights combed through every twig of forested area, calling her name again and again. It seemed that the entire town was in on it, even my dad joined in to help, and I can’t remember a day in my whole life when that man lifted a finger to help anyone. He did bitch about the inconvenience of it plenty enough though. I distinctly remember him saying: “I hope when they find this brat, her folks ring her neck out for me.”
My father had such a tender heart, didn’t he?
After seven agonizing days of looking there was nothing. No Maggie, no body, no body parts, not an article of clothing, not a scrap of her yellow dress, not one of her red boots, not a footprint, nothing. Well, one thing. A paper plate with a string woven through it. On it, a face drawn on. Left tangled in underbrush, seemingly discarded by its owner. It was the one Josh Sharp made for her. They found it three miles south of the Piggly Wiggly. That was the only thing people could hope to identify Maggie with. With that, things went from worse to hopeless. After forty-eight hours the chances of recovering any missing child plummet to practically infinitesimal odds. And Maggie, being the girl she was, without her mask/face was just gone. Dropped off the face of the world without a whisper.
Ted, Madeline, and Gregory didn’t quit though. What parent would? She was still their child. Even if they weren’t quite acting like parents when they needed to be. That’s the thing about parents, they always come through for you…in the end—only in the end. Usually when it’s too late. And not a moment before. Ted offered ten thousand dollars to anyone who could find anything that would help locate his daughter. Two days after that, he raised it to fifty thousand. By the end of the month he was offering 100k.
I think he would have sold everything—everything—just for a clue to where his baby girl was. He would have sold an arm, a leg, an eye, his hair, his teeth, and a kidney, then spent the rest of his life in a cardboard box. Given up his soul. Anything.
Ted and Greg butted heads after this, more than normal. He was never completely comfortable with another man raising his child (even though he still allowed it), but he kept it amicable for both his ex-wife and his daughter. Not after this. Ted accused Greg of not being present, and letting this happen through his neglect. Greg might just have taken it, albeit through gritted teeth, until Ted started berating his wife as well. She was already broken over Maggie’s disappearance and now this rich yuppie who was the least present in Maggie’s life out of all of them was yelling at her for being neglectful? He lost it. They got into a screaming match while at the Smith house, things escalated and a fight broke out that Madeline had to break up by literally coming between them. Both of them said that the other threw the first punch.
Madeline fled to TV. She called on journalists and reporters and they came like locusts. She gushed about Maggie to them and begged the whole world to listen and try, just try, to find her baby. Her poor faceless baby, lost and alone in the world. She got in the papers a few times, and was in front of a reporter’s camera once or twice, but interest decays quickly. It has a shorter shelf life than old milk.
About three months after Maggie’s disappearance the story did eventually get picked up by a low-brow, tabloid TV program. Greg was upset with his wife for it. He felt they were bringing too much attention to themselves, and now Madeline was gunning to get on a show filled with weirdos, baby mama drama, and the lunier specimens of the American species. Greg refused to be on the show, but Madeline managed to pressure Ted to be on. He was desperate for anything that could conceivably help find his daughter.
In September of 1991 Madeline and Ted appeared on the Jack Freely show. A square jawed, native born Oklahoman who was attracted to sensationalism like a fly to pig shit. A discount cousin of Jerry Springer and Maury Povich.
At the start of the segment Jack was sweet, somber, soft spoken. He introduced Madeline and Ted with a warmth and tenderness that was so authentic Jack could have won an Emmy for it. He let Madeline and Ted gush their hearts out for a few minutes while he simply listened and nodded in patient understanding. The kleenex box placed purposefully on the coffee table got its use.
Madeline had finished her spiel and blew her nose like a trumpet. Jack was still very thoughtful looking, and then, very gently, asked: “And haven’t you got a photo of Maggie?”
Ted and Madeline’s eyes widened. Madeline swallowed and said, almost trying to whisper despite having a mic taped to her shirt, “We told you about her…condition…”
Jack’s brows furrowed. “Yes you told us about Maggie’s ‘Condition,’” he made air quotes with his fingers to the audience. “Should I tell the good people in my audience what you told me? That you don’t have a single photo or video of your missing child, the one you say you love so much, because, according to you, your daughter can’t be captured on film. Really?”
The live studio audience murmured to themselves. Ted and Madeline felt they were suddenly on trial. “We—we showed you,” said Madeline. “We showed you proof. We sent in photographs.”
“Yes, you did. Let’s look at the photos, shall we?”
A montage played on the big screen behind them. All the pictures they tried taking of Maggie over the years, plus all the family photos they took in which Maggie was simply incidental, mostly from after the divorce and the birth of her siblings. You could see them lined up, her younger sister and brother crystal clear and perfect, but Maggie was blurred out.
“Plenty of photos. A happy family. Why isn’t Maggie in any of them?”
“She is!” Ted said. He was sweating heavily under the studio lights.
“And you, or your wife, or both, edited her image out, didn’t you?”
“No, no, we didn’t!” screamed Madeline.
“Sure you didn’t. Your daughter is just some kind of mutant that destroys film with her appearance, right? Folks, we’ve heard an awful lot of kakamamey stories on my show but I think this may just take the cake. Next you’ll be telling us that she wasn’t human. Was she an alien baby too? Did she go back with her birth parents to outer space and that’s why she disappeared? Please tell us. Just how delusional are you?”
“It’s the truth!” Madeline pleaded.
“The truth, eh? What do you folks think?” he turned to his people, “Do you think it’s the truth?”
“NOOOO,” roared the audience.
Ted and Madeline looked like deers caught in headlights.
“I’ll tell you what I think,” said Jack, full of righteous indignation, “I think you made up that phoney story to cover for yourself. That you neglected Maggie, didn’t you? She reminded you of your failed marriage didn’t she? And that’s why you altered all of the photos after the fact. Because you wouldn’t accept her as part of your family…right? Right???”
They were speechless.
Jack kept going. He was merciless.
“Never in my twenty years of working in television have I seen two parents so hellbent to cut their daughter, their own flesh and blood out of their lives. Going through and changing family photos, just to cut her out.”
From the belly of the audience came sounds of disgust.
“And on top of that, concoct some raving delusion to cover their own rears. And now, this daughter of yours, this child no older than nine years of age has gone missing. Without so much as a snapshot to give the authorities any kind of help tracking her down! How do you expect them to find your daughter without them knowing what she looks like? She barely has a chance to be found now, and all because you erased her!”
The audience clapped and cheered as Freely tore Madeline and Ted to pieces, live on cable television. After twenty more minutes of ripping into them they both looked catatonic. As if they couldn’t believe what was happening. Like they were in a dream and now looked from side to side waiting to wake up from it. By the end of the segment I think they half believed the garbage that Freely was spewing out. His talent for concocting high and mighty moral declarations was on par with a preacher. What helped was, I think at least partially, what Jack said was true to a degree. And Ted and Madeline knew it.
After their appearance on the Jack Freely show, both Ted and Madeline retreated from the public eye. They still looked for Maggie of course, but what else was there to do? She was gone. Period. Ted’s 100,000 dollar reward remains uncollected to this day (although he admitted to me that he never had the hundred grand to begin with).
Her case went cold, and was by and large forgotten by those not close to it—just like Maggie herself. But I never forgot. I think it’s time I admit my own guilt in all of this. I’ve been misleading you good people long enough, and now I’m due to tell you what role exactly I played in Maggie’s story.
Remember that little piss stain Brian Berkawitz? The snot with the big mouth that came up with that god-awful rhyme—ripped up her first mask and made her bawl. Well…that little piss stain was me.
The more observant of you could have probably worked that out by now. You were probably the types to get gold stars on your worksheets in grade school. Most of you know me by my pen name, Ray Gilman. A combination picked out of the phonebook. But the more dedicated of my readership who know of my birth name knew from the start. Sorry to spoil it for you, but I was never one for twists to begin with. At least I put my talent for wordsmithing to better use since first grade.
Consider this story, partly, my confession.
Now, I could sit here at my vintage Olympia model typewriter, my ass planted firmly in my reasonably comfortable chair and dribble out some trite, sob-story designed to pluck at your heart strings. Some violin jerking, pathetic, pity party in print to take some of the blame off of myself like a politician in hot water. I could tell you that my dad used my ear for an ashtray, or that my mom was popping oxycodone pills like m&ms, or that my older sister used me as her own personal punching bag, but those wouldn’t be anything resembling excuses. They would just be reasons.
The fact of the matter is, I was just a little shit. A bully. Plain and simple.
Maybe that’s why I used a pen name when I started writing my books. I didn’t want to be associated with the little monster from the first grade. I never liked my name to begin with. Brian Berkowitz. It’s a name that tastes like bile saying it, and I got bullied for it plenty. People used to call me “Brain.” And by people I mean meat-loaf handed little brutes that are responsible for the staggering number of dental implants in my mouth today.
Oh, that’s right. Despite being a bully myself, don’t think for a moment that that saved me from the social darwinism of the public schooling system. I was still at the bottom end of the food chain. Just not the very bottom. I’m glad for it too. I deserved it all, and then some. But you won’t ever hear from me, “It made me the man I am today,” that’s horseshit too. People become great despite terrible things, not because of them. If Maggie were still around today… Well, I doubt she would ever want to thank me for what I did to her.
She could be, y’know. They never found a body, or any trace of a body. More than likely she was found by someone (a hunter probably), maybe years after the fact, and taken as a Jane Doe. Her anomalous ability probably wouldn’t be detected, or if it was, just ignored. Probably buried in a mass grave somewhere. But that need not be the case. What if she never died? What if she just… left? What if Maggie, very displeased with her life, got up, opened the door to it, took a bow, and exited? Closing the door behind her. Never to be seen again.
If Elvis Pressley and John F. Kennedy could all still be around and kicking like the tabloids always say, why can’t Maggie Fitzgerald get a shot? Maybe she went somewhere new. Got a new identity. A new name. Started fresh. Lived, grew, matured. Maybe she has kids of her own by now. Maybe that’s just a delusion—but it keeps me sane.
I still wonder what she looks like. Maybe that’s why I still find myself coming back to her in my head. I can’t even picture the face of the person I want to apologize to. Always behind a curtain of magic, never to be seen. She’s an idea… a concept. I still wake up in cold sweats, stare up at the ceiling and replay those moments over in my head. Just a string of silly, stupid words, and I would carve out my own heart if I could go back and unsay them. Maybe then poor Maggie wouldn’t have vanished. Left because the world was no place for a being like her.
I never went to her funeral, by the way.
She was declared dead when I was in High School. I had the opportunity to come. I thought about going. But when it came down to it, I didn’t have the guts. Add that on top of the mound of regrets piled up for me. Going to that funeral would have been facing up to what I did. I didn’t have the nerve to look her parents in the eyes.
They didn’t even know what I did.
They still don’t know. They just thought I was some classmate turned author looking to make a story about their daughter. Either once again, Madeline and Ted didn’t take the interest in their daughter’s life that they should have, or Maggie never had a bad word to say about me. I prefer to think the latter, for more reasons than you may think. I believe Ted and Madeline would believe the former. They surely feel more guilt than I. That’s their cross to bear I suppose, but still very heart breaking. When I came to them they didn’t just look old and grey, but worn out. They looked exhausted. They not only obliged me by telling me about Maggie, but they seemed relieved. They wanted so much to unload everything out onto another. To shout to the whole world that they loved their daughter and still love her in her absence. I am happy to have given them that much at least.
If I had the chance to see her again, just one more time…words fail me. I can’t quite describe the true depths of my regret. I would apologize to her like a sinner on Judgement Day. I would beg her for forgiveness, and be content if she denied it to me. I would walk across a sea of jagged rocks barefoot for her to understand how truly sorry I am. Or just to see her smile. A smile from a mouth I won’t remember.
I used to live in New York. That’s where all the big publishers were. But I had to move. There were too many people. Oceans worth of people. An ocean’s worth of faces. Any one of them could be Maggies, and I would never know it if they were. She could have walked by me on the street, shoulder to shoulder, and I would never know. I couldn’t handle that. That uncertainty. I can’t imagine how her parents must feel. Now I live in—well, I won’t tell you that. But suffice it to say that it’s remote, scarcely populated and out of the way. Maybe I was destined to be a hermit.
If any of you reading this ever want to look for Magnolia Fitzgerald then all you must do is this:
Find the most beautiful girl in the world.
That’s her.
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About
Jack Brennan is a Sci-fi/Fantasy writer that has been published in Deathwish Poetry Magazine where he also assists as a copy editor.
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