Now, What Do You Want?

The sophisticated lady sees the small helpless child contained in a steel cylinder. The child’s anxious upturned face is framed with shoulder-length blond hair that needs combing. The little girl wears a baggy print dress, striped socks, and high top shoes.
“What do you want?” asks the sophisticated lady.
“Hold my hand,” says the child. A hand appears.
“Now, what do you want?”
“I want you to pick me up, hug and kiss me,” pleads the child.
The little girl’s father picks her up and kisses her passionately on the mouth.
Horrified, the sophisticated lady says, “Fathers and daughters don’t kiss that way.”
“Let them do it and see what happens,” another woman says.
The father and child continue kissing, then the father gives the little girl a firm kiss on the cheek, more like a father would.
The sophisticated lady takes up her questioning again. “Now, what do you want?”
The little girl smiles. “I want to sing and dance,” she says, as she flings her arms about and kicks up her legs. She leaps through the air into the arms of the sophisticated lady.
The other woman says, “That is physically impossible. The child is too little to jump so far.”
The sophisticated lady asks again, “Now, what do you want?”
“I want you to love me.”
The sophisticated lady puts the child down, and they glare at each other.
The other woman says to the child, “Why don’t you talk to the lady?”
“I don’t like her,” the child responds
The other woman asks the sophisticated lady the same question, gets the same answer.
The sophisticated lady kicks the child in the leg with the pointed toe of her high heeled shoe. The little girl does nothing. The lady kicks her again. Nothing. The sophisticated lady kicks and does not stop.
“Stop kicking that little girl,” the other woman says indignantly. “That’s not fair; you are cruel.”
The sophisticated lady stops, thinks about why she is kicking the child, why she doesn’t like her. “That little girl made me get hurt and humiliated so many times. It wasn’t her fault, but she was the cause.”
The child hits the sophisticated lady in the face with her tiny doubled-up fist.
The other woman says, “That’s also impossible. The little girl can’t reach that far.”
A table appears. The child stands on it, pummeling away at the sophisticated lady’s face.
The other woman floats up to them, puts her arms between them. “Stop fighting,” she demands.
The sophisticated lady watches the little girl spurt toward the beach. “Why are you running away from me?” calls the lady, fear in her voice.
“Because I am afraid of you,” says the child, over her shoulder. She runs faster and faster, disappears behind the dark pointed rocks.
The sophisticated lady is desolate, because she can’t find the little girl for many days. She lies in bed crying, becoming more panicky. She says over and over, “I can’t find her. She is lost.”
The sophisticated lady sees the child far away, once more wrapped in the steel cylinder. “Now, what do you want?” she asks the child insistently.
“I want you to love me,” repeats the little girl.
The sophisticated lady draws the whimpering child to her chest, remembering the warmth of her own child as she’d kissed the baby’s head and gently patted its back. She lays the little girl next to her. They curl up like fetal twins and go to sleep.