She made it seem as though this task were bestowed upon her, a giant honour – yes, madame, oh yes. I recognized the overacting even when I was young. She was trying too hard, but I didn’t tie this behaviour to any particular variables, as I didn’t link her zealous swearing after Friday-night Bingo, her maudlin embraces of the dog, to the sharp smell on her breath when she bent over my bed to rub noses, Eskimo kisses goodnight. Goodnight, champ. Sayonara. Bon soir. Ciao. That incalculable behaviour of grown-ups. Sig revealed my namesake one summer, around the time when childhood edges began unravelling, icons blown out: first the Tooth Fairy, then Santa Claus and on and on, magic dissolving like a baby tooth in the depths of a Coke bottle. The girls in my class were named after goddesses: Athena, Helen. They had modern names that seemed directly linked to their popularity: Tiffany, Brittany, Jaime, Brooke. The gorgeous names. They wore them like boas, like diamonds. And in the midst of the attendance sheet’s movie-credit names was mine, Isabel.
