Danielle Steel - Big Girl

He had been joking about her looking like Queen Victoria, but they both agreed that they liked the name, and Jim took it one step further, and suggested Regina as a middle name. Victoria Regina Dawson, for Queen Victoria. Victoria the Queen. The name seemed strangely apt as they looked at her, and Christine agreed. She wanted her husband to be happy with the choice of name at least, if not the sex. She still felt as though she had failed him by having a girl. But by the time they left the hospital five days later, he seemed to have forgiven her.

Victoria was an easy, happy baby who was good-natured and undemanding. She walked and talked early, and people always commented on what a sweet little girl she was. She remained very fair, and the white blond fuzz she’d had when she was born turned into a crown of blond ringlets. She had big blue eyes, and pale blond hair, and the creamy white complexion that went with it. Some people commented that she looked very English, and then Jim always commented that she’d been named for Queen Victoria, whom she looked like, and then laughed heartily. It became his own favorite joke about the baby, which he was more than willing to share, while Christine tittered demurely. She loved her daughter, but the love of her life had always been her husband, and that hadn’t changed. Unlike some women who became totally focused on their children, the central focus of her world was first Jim, and then the baby. Christine was the perfect companion for a narcissist of Jim’s proportions. She only had eyes for him. And although he still wanted a son to complete him, and toss a ball with, they were in no hurry to have a second child. Victoria fit easily into their life and caused few disruptions, and they were both afraid that two children, particularly if close together, would be hard to manage, so they were content to have only Victoria for now. Mother Dawson rubbed salt in Jim’s wounds by saying it was too bad they hadn’t had a son, because then they wouldn’t have had to consider having a second child, since only children were always brighter. And of course her son was an only child.

Victoria appeared to be extremely intelligent as she got older. She was chatty and amiable, and had nearly adult conversations with them by the time she was three. She said funny things, and was alert and interested in everything around her. Christine taught her to read when she was four. And when she was five, her father told her she had been named after a queen. Victoria would smile with delight every time he said it. She knew what queens looked like. They were beautiful and wore pretty dresses in all the fairy tales she read. And sometimes they even had magic powers. She knew she had been named after Queen Victoria, but she had no idea what the queen looked like. Her father always told her that she’d been named after the queen because she looked like her. She knew that she was supposed to look like her father’s grandmother, but she had never seen a picture of her either, and she wondered if she had been a queen too.

Victoria was still round and chubby when she was six. She had sturdy little legs, and she was often told that she was big for her age. She was in first grade by then, and taller than many of the children. And she was heavier than some of them too. People called her a “big girl,” which she always took as a compliment. And she was still in first grade when she was looking at a book with her mother one day, and saw the queen she had been named after. Her name was written clearly under her picture. Victoria Regina, just like Victoria’s own name.

The queen was holding a pug dog, who looked astonishingly like the monarch herself, and the photograph had been taken late in her life. Victoria sat staring at the page for a long time and didn’t say a word.

“Is that her?” she finally asked her mother, turning her huge blue eyes up to her face. Christine nodded with a smile. After all, it was just a joke. She looked like Jim’s grandmother and no one else.

“She was a very important queen in England a long time ago,” Christine explained.

“She’s not even wearing a pretty dress, she doesn’t have a crown, and her dog is ugly too.” Victoria looked devastated as she said it.

“She was very old by then,” Victoria’s mother said, trying to soften the moment. She could see that her daughter was upset, and it tugged at her heart. She knew he meant no harm, but Jim’s little joke had momentarily backfired, and Victoria looked stricken. She stared at the picture for ages, and two tears rolled slowly down her cheeks. Christine didn’t say a word as they turned the page, and she hoped that Victoria would forget the image she had seen. She never did. And her sense of how her father viewed her, like a queen, was never the same again.

A year after Victoria saw the photograph of Queen Victoria, which forever changed her image of herself, her parents informed her that she had a baby brother or sister on the way. And Victoria was thrilled. Several of her friends at school had had siblings by then, she was one of the few who didn’t, and she loved the idea of a baby to play with, like a real live doll. She was in second grade when they told her the news. And when she heard her parents talking about it late one night, when they thought she was asleep, she heard the frightening words that the new baby was an accident, and she wasn’t sure what that meant. She was afraid that it had been injured somehow, and feared it might even be born without arms or legs, or maybe it would never walk when it got older. She didn’t know how bad the accident had been, and she didn’t want to ask. Her mother had cried about it, and her father sounded worried too. They both said that things were fine the way they were now, with just Victoria. She was an easy child who never bothered them and did as she was told. At seven years old, she gave them no problems, and her father said during the entire pregnancy that he hoped it would be a boy. Her mother seemed to want that too, but this time she decorated the nursery in neutral white instead of blue. She had learned that lesson once before, when Victoria took them by surprise and turned out to be a girl. Mother Dawson predicted that it would be a girl again this time, and Victoria hoped so too. Her parents had once again opted not to find out the sex for sure. Victoria’s mother was afraid of a bad surprise, clinging to the hope, for as long as she could, that it might be a boy this time.

Victoria wasn’t sure why, but her parents didn’t seem as excited about the baby as she was. Her mother complained a lot about how big she was, and her father teased Victoria and said he hoped it wouldn’t look like her. He never failed to remind her that she looked like his grandmother. There were few pictures of her, but those that Victoria had finally seen showed a large woman wearing an apron, with seemingly no waist, enormous hips, and a bulbous nose. She wasn’t sure which was worse, looking like her paternal great-grandmother, or like the ugly queen whose photograph she had seen posing with her dog. And after seeing the photographs of her great-grandmother, she had become obsessed with the size of her own nose. It was small and round, and she thought it looked like an onion planted in the middle of her face. She hoped for its sake that the new baby hadn’t inherited the same nose. But since the baby was an “accident,” there seemed to be far more serious things to worry about than its nose. Her parents had never explained the accident to her, but she hadn’t forgotten the conversation she’d overheard. It made Victoria all the more determined to dedicate herself to the new baby, and do whatever was needed to help with it. She hoped the damage from the accident it had experienced wasn’t too great. Maybe it was just a broken arm, or a bump on the head.

Christine’s C-section was planned this time, and Victoria’s parents had explained to her that her mother would be in the hospital for a week, and she wouldn’t be able to see her mother or the baby until they came home from the hospital. They said those were the rules, and she wondered if it was to give them time to fix whatever damage the baby had sustained in the mysterious event that no one seemed to want to discuss or explain.

The day the baby was born, her father came home at six o’clock when Victoria’s grandmother was preparing dinner for her. They looked at him expectantly, and his disappointment was evident when he told them it was a girl. And then he smiled and said the baby was beautiful and looked just like him and Christine this time. He seemed enormously relieved, even though it hadn’t been a boy. And he said they were calling her Grace, because she was so pretty. Grandmother Dawson smiled too then, proud of her ability to guess the baby’s sex. She had been sure it was a girl. Jim said she had dark hair, big brown eyes like both of them, the same white skin as her mother, and perfectly formed tiny pink lips. He said she was so pretty they could have used her for an ad for babies. Her beauty made up for her not being a boy. He made no mention of any injury to the baby, from the accident that Victoria had been worried about for the past eight months, and she was relieved too. She hoped the baby was okay, and she sounded very cute.

They called her mother at the hospital the next day, and she sounded very tired. It made Victoria even more determined to do everything she could to help when they got home.

Grace was even prettier than they’d said when Victoria saw her for the first time. She was absolutely exquisite and perfectly formed. She looked like a baby in a picture book, or an ad, as her father had said. Grandmother Dawson clucked over her immediately, and took the bundle from Christine’s arms as Jim helped her into a chair, and Victoria tried to get an even better look. She was aching to hold the baby, kiss her cheeks, coo over her, and touch her tiny toes. She wasn’t jealous of her for an instant, only happy and proud.