The Queen of Bad Influences

Throughout her childhood, Constance called the gorse that grew on the hillsides above her house "honey-bottle," and gathered fistfuls of it despite the spines, so that her hands would smell of it, a smell that seemed to combine oatmeal and hot metal and sun.

- Jim Shepard

The smell was somewhat a solace when it came to her devastating shyness, a shyness that so galled her mother that when Constance retreated into sniffing her fingers in public her mother could hardly restrain herself from swatting her daughter's hands from her nose.

Her older sisters had no such inhibitions and considered Constance a minor mortification, while she understood their high spirits to be a manic display of an unhappiness that their mother viewed as a necessary part of their social success.

She agonized through birthday parties. She refused school games. She perambulated the fringes of family gatherings, setting everyone's teeth on edge. Her most vivid recollections of childhood seemed unconnected, like lighted rooms scattered across a city, and she had decided that the most painful felt only distantly related to her.

When she hadn't been absentminded she had been diffident, and when she hadn't been diffident she had presented as vacant. It was in no way clear to her how she had evolved into a moderately confident young woman of twenty.

Most of the girls she knew had married before they discovered what they themselves were really like, a decision that seemed to have generated neither harm nor joy. She marvelled at those few other acquaintances who carried themselves as if marked by fate at birth, young women whose decisiveness called to mind Joan of Arc, or Florence Nightingale, or Elizabeth Garrett Anderson.

Unlike those worthy role models, she had not been one for overcoming insuperable difficulties, and yet she had retained her stubbornness, despite her certainty that her path would have been altogether more congenial without it.