Only Begotten Daughter by James Morrow Page B

locker room. At Brigantine High, defeats were not discussed. Toweling off, she rehearsed what she intended to say to Phoebe. “Yes, of course I can score anytime, sink the damn ball from midcourt if I want. Don’t tell me what to do with my life, Sparks.”
    “I’m not telling you what to do with your life,” Phoebe insisted the next day. “I’m simply saying you’re an outside shooter—you wouldn’t have to get physical, nobody’d suspect anything supernatural.” They wove through the clattering cafeteria, found a table, slammed down their trays. “If the point spread stays under twelve at the Saint Basil’s game, I’ll walk away with sixty dollars. Naturally I’ll go halves with you.”
    Surveying the food, Julie winced. Why did she have to work so hard at maintaining a half-decent figure while Phoebe lived on sugar and never gained a pound or grew a zit? “I’m not throwing a game just so you can make thirty dollars.”
    “You throw a game when you lose it, not when you win it.” Phoebe shoved lemon meringue pie into her mouth. “Hey, you think it’s easy being your friend, Katz? You think I’m at peace about it? I mean, here you come ripping into the world like Grant took Richmond, and you’ve got these damn powers, and some sort of God exists, and I have to keep quiet. It’s driving me absolutely nuts. Mom too.”
    “Be patient. My mission’s not worked out yet.”
    “I am patient.” Phoebe devoured a doughnut. “Hey, did I ever ask you for help with my shitty grades? When my cousin got knocked up, did I ask you to fix it?”
    Julie’s face grew hot. “There’re lots of things you never asked me to do.” She pointed across the cafeteria to Catherine Tyboch, her stocky body suspended on crutches. “You never asked me to make Tyboch walk. You never asked me to cure Lizzie’s anorexia.”
    “I was getting to them.”
    “I’m sure you were.”
    “Let’s face it, buddy, running up and down a basketball court isn’t exactly fulfilling your potential.”
    Vengefully Julie forked a hunk of Phoebe’s pie and ate it. “There’s a room in my house you’ve never seen.”
    “Where you and Roger hump? Hope you take precautions. Like Mom says, ‘His bird in your hand is worth two in your bush.’”
    Phoebe’s genius for sex did not surprise Julie. Phoebe’s face was gorgeous, her shape lithe, her dark skin creamy and iridescent. Typically, God had given better flesh to Phoebe than to her own daughter. “Roger and I don’t do that. He worships me.”
    Phoebe giggled. “Worships the water you walk on.” She ate a brownie the color of her skin. “Really, can’t you do better than Roger? I mean, isn’t he sort of boring, isn’t he sort of a prude? You’re smart, friendly, got nice boobers, and score twelve points a game. Not like me with my F in math and these acorns for tits. Why waste yourself on Roger?”
    “He’s a good Catholic. I need that. It helps me.”
    “Helps you to love your mother?”
    “Helps me to stop hating her.”
    “You shouldn’t hate your mother, Katz.”
    “I hate her.”
    “What room?”
    Her temple, Julie called it. Once it was the Angel’s Eye guest room, now the place that kept her sane. The project had begun modestly, nothing but a few tragic stories clipped from Time and the Atlantic City Press and pasted in a scrapbook. But soon it spread to the walls, then to the ceiling and floor, until all six inside surfaces positively dripped with humanity’s suffering, with earthquakes, droughts, floods, fires, diseases, deformities, addictions, car crashes, train wrecks, race riots, massacres, thermonuclear bomb tests.
    Was all this really essential? Pop had wanted to know.
    It would keep her off the high road, Julie had explained.
    He never questioned the project again.
    “Impressive,” said Phoebe, surveying the collages on the afternoon following the Lucky Dogs game, “but what’s the point?”
    Julie approached the altar, a former card table on