“It’s just that we don’t know its full effects, you see,” he would say sorrowfully. “In an ideal world, Maisie, my girl, I would encourage you to have your fill of touching. Touch everyone and everything. The skin is a marvelous organ, marvelous indeed. Yet unfortunately, with your condition, I must insist that you refrain. From touching. We just don’t know enough, you see.”
To his credit, Peter endeavored to know more. He set me up with homeschooling once I’d turned five, and steered me on my own course of studies while continuing with his. I was an early, avid reader. Though I learned little about social interaction, I studied philosophy and history, poetry and science, learned mathematics and the phases of the moon. I especially loved mythology and literature—stories of adventure, tests of fate. From the kitchen where I sat turning pages, I dreamed of one day embarking on an adventure of my own.
While I was immersed in my studies, Peter would write letters and journals and books about my case, none of which led us any closer to my own diagnosis, but did earn him some prestige among his colleagues. He developed a devoted following of those who were hungry to believe—men and women who’d grown tired of the tedium of peer review and soulless academia, who themselves studied parapsychology and extraterrestrials and uncertain religious phenomena. Peter omitted my name in his recountings, referring to me only as “the Child,” and rerouted our mail so that the curious could not find us. Yet for one who figured so prominently in such a large branch of Peter’s studies, I took a distinctly small role in their direction. It was unheard of to voice my own suggestions, anathema to strike out on my own. He published his ongoing case study under the nom de guerre the Toymaker, a reference to an old fairy tale. I belonged to my father. We were family. All that was mine was also his.
“Are you ready to play?” Peter would ask me, and I, knowing no other sort of group play, would drop my occupation and race up to the old nursery, which since I’d grown out of my cradle had served us as lab. I was to sit very still, to be silent, while Peter took note of our conditions: the hour, the weather, how much I’d slept and what I’d had that day to eat. In his notebook he would draw whatever object was to be that morning’s focus, some liminal thing, neither thoroughly alive nor clearly dead: a carved wood figure, a bit of cotton, a glass of juice.
“Very good,” he would say with a smile once done with his sketch.
I’d beam back at him, pleased as any other child would be to receive candy, or a gift. Because I was deprived of physical affection, words meant much to me. I could live on a “Well done” from my father for weeks, siphoning the fatty bits of it like a camel drawing food from its hump.
I did not want to sit still, to be studied. I was a little girl constricted, and I wanted to touch everything in sight. There were moments when I thought the utter force of need within me would burst, that my quivering little body would explode, unless I gave in to temptation. Still, I contained myself. I knew that Peter’s rules would make me safer. I recognized—from the panic Peter could not conceal when I asked about my history, from the absence of my mother since my birth—that my natural dispositions were dangerous. If I were to indulge myself and run my bare hands over unvarnished hardwood, to sneak up behind my father with my fingers made a mask to hide his eyes, to give a full examination (as Mrs. Blott had once caught me attempting and curtailed) to the warm lips of my pelvis, any number of awful things might happen. There was a badness in my body that had cursed me.
As such, I did not trust my instincts. It was safer to heed Peter. I thought that if I tried very hard to do exactly what he asked of me, my father would forgive me all my failings. I forced myself to sit and smile, and each time I felt an impulse I would fold it in my mind, a sheet of paper that creased easily at first, and then required more muscle as desire took on thicker, complex layers.
THE EXPERIMENTS THEMSELVES were methodical, practical, and conducted only after weeks of theoretical research. Good, scientific experiments, Peter assured me, though I was not the one who needed convincing: despite his best efforts, my father never garnered the respect of the established scientific community. Say our subject was a glass of juice. While I watched, Peter might slice an orange, squeeze it into a cup he had sterilized with alcohol once taken from the kitchen, cover it quickly with a cheesecloth or wax paper so the subject remained pure. A drop of juice might travel into the crook between his thumb and forefinger, and reflexively he would bring the sticky hand to his tongue. He would look at me with a troubled expression, embarrassed at having interfered with our results.
After licking his fingers or coughing (or whatever other action he’d performed that day that could dilute his findings), my father would become very serious, atoning for his lapse in judgment, his misplacement of mind, by being even more exacting.
“Not yet, not yet,” he would warn me if I scooted to the edge of my plastic folding chair. “Let me set my watch and then precisely on the hour . . .”
Tempted by the bracing scent of orange, the softness of fleece, my small body would tremble as I resisted the urge to indulge. I’d hold my breath, squeeze my eyes shut.
“Patience,” said Peter, “and temperance are a lady’s most valuable assets. And you do want to be a lady, Maisie, I know.”
He had me there. I very much wanted to be a lady. To be a lady, I imagined, meant welcoming visitors, making trips into the nearby village of Coeurs Crossing, perhaps being courted by gentlemen.
“Now Maisie,” Peter would say, finally, “come forward. Dip the tip of your littlest left finger . . . no, my dear, your other left, into the very top of the . . . shallow, very shallow, just a . . . no, no, a lighter touch, a light one, and pull up, up, quickly up, and come and blot against this . . . no, darling, not the paper but the . . . there you are, the towel. Yes. Good.”
I’d close the rest of my hand to a fist and stretch out that little finger, inhaling citrus that would not be wiped away. My tongue might dart out, I might lean forward, and Peter would make the sort of sound one makes to a young child, not a true word but an escalating, disapproving vowel. I’d sit back.
“Has the color of the sample changed, my dear?”
Most often it had not.
“Do you feel a slight sensation in your fingertip?”
Never.
“The rest of your body feels well?”
Very well, although once I had the hiccups and Peter spent a long while speculating on their cause.
These experiments were never ambitious. We could have tried to cure diseases, prevent species extinction, combat the injustice of the world. Instead, we practiced small, controlled behaviors, tests whose most unpleasant outcomes had little effect on all parties involved. Occasionally we would see something unexpected: a bit of polished wood would writhe, a seed would shake, try to take root. Peter would watch with wide eyes for a moment, then instruct me: “Be a good girl, now, Maisie. Correct it.” And I wanted to be a good girl, so I would.