by Truddi Chase
“I’m afraid there isn’t,” Stanley said.
“Well, I won’t accept that,” Sewer Mouth told him grimly. “I hate this life. I hate everything. Ask me,” her voice was a low growl, “what I don’t hate. It might be easier for me to tell you what I don’t hate.”
* * *
In the gallery that night, the woman stared at the debris. The manuscript, through three rough drafts in a sea of white paper crumpled, stacked, stapled, and pinned to the walls, stared back.
Hurry up, bitch. You’re wasting our time.
“I’m hurrying!” she screamed, convinced that if she replied as her mother had always insisted, the voice would go away. It didn’t. Neither did the sudden smell of her mother’s body. The odour was something she’d loathed as a child. It had stuck in her nose periodically, ever since the second farmhouse. Each time it returned, the woman experienced, as now, an extreme aversion and the desire to simply be dead.
“I’m hurrying!” she screamed again.
If you can’t keep up, get out of the way completely!
It was not her mother’s voice. That much became clear. It was one of her selves with a voice that sounded the same. How one of her selves could have such a voice, perhaps be like the mother . . . the idea terrified her.
She looked, dumbfounded, at the glass of milk she held to her mouth. The impression came that someone else was drinking the milk and remembering a tin cup on the farms. That person wanted a tin cup full of milk now; not from a carton, but fresh from the cow. The woman set the empty glass on the desk, very carefully, as if that other person’s hand had just touched hers.
NINETEEN
FROM the woman’s upraised right hand dangled a flimsy bit of nylon and skin-coloured lace. Happy-hour patrons undulated like a shifting sea of sardines in the long, narrow barroom, more intent on their two-for-one purchases than on her underwear. On her left, seated in full sight of the dangling bra, Ben Purceval, an architect she’d known for years, paused and looked away. He was a nice man, a trifle confused right now, but apparently determined to finish his discussion. The woman had no idea what the discussion had been. He wanted to know if she intended to go off with someone named Thornton, as soon as he returned from the men’s room.
“Who?” the woman asked from a great distance, trying to count the empty glasses on the bar in front of her. She had obviously been there for some time consuming a boatload of scotch, yet she felt nothing. The neat paisley blouse she had put on this morning was still partially buttoned and a memory of outrageous laughter sat in her head along with the notion that she must at some point have taken the bra off beneath the blouse by pulling the straps down through the sleeves. Why? And who was Thornton?
What god-awful things had she done in front of Ben and in front of the faceless Thornton while downing a quart of scotch? More than three of her selves fought to speak, to turn over the evidence. There in her head, someone was wryly amused; someone else was not amused at all. There was one who did not speak; it was as if he sat in the shadows of her mind in the depths of the longest, blackest tunnel ever created. Shaking, the woman gathered up her purse and lighter and cigarettes with hands that couldn’t stuff everything out of sight fast enough.
“I’m going to get cigarettes,” she lied to Ben and beat it through the crowd and out the door.
It had to be late afternoon or early evening by the sun’s position in the sky. She finally found the car at the far side of the parking lot. A bag of groceries was on the front seat, sodden with defrosting foods. Guilty over the careless waste of money, it never registered that she had grocery shopped just before lunch that day. She dumped the contents of her purse on the hood of the car, heard the keys rattle, and took a deep breath. Admiring herself for a calmness she had little to do with, she avoided her reflection in the rearview mirror and drove home double-quick.
Elvira smiled all the way and played the car radio with a vengeance.
It was not until the woman removed the paisley blouse at home and saw in the mirror a pair of naked breasts that she went wild with fright and a curious, cold, panic. It was only then that she really began to believe that in a public bar she might have acted like a whore, actually undressing, exposing herself. What else had she done? What kind of woman was she to do these things? Why couldn’t she remember taking the bra off?
She remembered other items of personal clothing that seemed to come off in odd public places for no reason. It had always been possible, she realised suddenly, to remember afterward the particular garment, but not the act of taking it off. The sense of having been in those odd public places was vague. Somehow she got the feeling that there were more of them than she knew.
Stanley would only laugh if she told him. He would explain that taking a bra off under one’s blouse did not constitute undressing in public. Stanley was too lenient. Her mother would have gone on for hours, days, weeks, the harangue would have been endless.
The odour of her mother’s body was suddenly there in the bathroom. The woman shook as she found the skin-coloured bra in the bottom of her purse. Without looking, she flung it into the clothes hamper and slammed the door shut. The smell of her mother’s body would not go away.
The woman fled down the stairs to the foyer powder room and scrubbed her hands and face in hot water and strong yellow soap. Clean, spotless, freshly pressed no matter how long or hard she worked in the house or fields, her mother had not been careless about hygiene, so where would the smell come from? Anger, fright, and disgust, all self-directed, lay just at the edge of the woman’s awareness. She wanted to feel them for herself this time, not secondhand, as she was beginning to suspect was the case. She tried. Nothing happened.
She put in a call to Stanley, trying to stop shaking. She lit a cigarette, forgot its existence, and immediately lit another; tried to make the stereo work, and when the static began, kicked it and played “Smoke on the Water” in spite of the crackling sounds. Never had she wanted anyone to return a call so badly.
“I can’t go out,” she told Stanley when the phone rang twenty minutes later. “I never knew why I couldn’t. People invited me; I didn’t have the time; I was so busy. I’ve lived my whole life this way. Well, after today, I know why!”
Stanley pointed out firmly that she had to break that hiding habit a little at a time.
“You’re not the one left sitting in a public place with your bra in your hand!” she screamed.
“Don’t wear one,” Stanley told her.
In the gallery an hour later with the gooseneck light trained on the manuscript, the ache in her ears had reached an unbearable state. In the last two days she’d consumed three-fourths of a large bottle of Extra-Strength Tylenol. The medication didn’t dull the ache in the least; it only left a residue of grit in her brain and slowed down her reaction time. Regardless, ten seemingly disembodied fingers were flailing the keyboard. In no time at all she’d caught up on the pile of notes. By staring at the clock for a long time, she estimated another two hours before meeting Page; just enough time to tape the memories that had been captured in the last five days. She pressed the recorder button. Once she caught on to what was happening she couldn’t stop it. Smells. In towering waves they hit her: the perfume of flowers, all the myriad kinds her mother had grown, along with the heady odour of wild pink primroses, followed by the rich, thick stench of manure from the area where the barn had once stood at the second farmhouse.
Suddenly, as if she’d been given a brand-new palate, her tongue was assaulted with the taste of her mother’s cooking, her Irish mother whose hand with seasoning had been expert and creative. The woman sat in her own gallery over thirty years later, tasting a long-simmered corned beef brisket, braised onions and new potatoes fresh out of the field, sweet corn and wild pheasant done to a turn, fried rabbit and squirrel. Yes, squirrel. Her grandfather had cooked squirrel one day as a treat for her, and she’d loved the gamey taste, the fact that he’d
taken the trouble to fry up a special dish just for her. How old had she been? The image of tiny fat hands flew into her mind. The woman smiled. But not for long.
Flick. The image of the old barn; why had it burned down? Why could she never picture the outside of it, much less herself inside the weather-beaten structure that had certainly been there when they’d moved into the second farmhouse? How old had she been when it burned? She didn’t know.
The confetti grew in volume and gathered momentum; it became a hailstorm, and each tiny shred made that flicking sensation against her mind. The flicks did not halt long enough to peer inside them, when suddenly there was the musty-smelling pantry at the first farmhouse. The first farmhouse had no electricity, no refrigerator. Mice lived cosily in the pantry, dashing out for the bread and cereal stashed in the kitchen and the other foods that were kept cold down in the dirt cellar. The door from the pantry had led directly down to the dirt cellar.
The woman remembered now how cool it had been there, even in the heat of summer. How the black earth of that dirt basement had crept between her bare toes as she’d stood fascinated by grey drifts of spider web. Sometimes when it rained, the door from the cellar on the side of the house would be left open. Occasionally a raindrop would hit the spider webs and fascinate her all over again. All the colours dancing in a tiny raindrop, caught undisturbed for a moment. It would occur to her then to wonder if somebody could go away in a raindrop—except that by being in a tiny drop of water, one was trapped there for any predator. Just as the little bugs were trapped for the big spiders.
Right after a rainstorm, the mother duck and her four young ones trooped in a loud formation past the cellar door at the side of the house, snatching drinks from the puddles as they went. Somehow the ducks, of all the farm animals in the world, never frightened her. Except when she watched their long necks and was reminded of snakes. Then she hated ducks, too.
At this moment, however, more than thirty years later, what she hated most was the door that led from the pantry down into the cellar. The confetti was no longer whirling about, it was standing still, and the cellar door with it. Flick. The image didn’t go away and in her mind, with a childlike curiosity that the woman had just become aware of, she dared to go forward, down the darkened, creaking, wooden staircase. Cobwebs drifted at the corners of the low-ceilinged, stone-walled room. Dust coated the stones and rafters. Once at the bottom, feeling the hard-packed dirt between her toes, she waited.
The misty grey giant stood silhouetted against dim, mote-laden light from a small dirty window set high in the stone wall behind him. His hands were big on her tiny thighs, slipping inside her cotton pants, stroking her flesh.
Three. She was three years old.
“Sssh,” he said. “She mustn’t see us. Isn’t this nice?”
And his hands took her own two hands and ran them over the pink thing protruding from its nest of black, wiry, bush. In the darkness of the cellar, with the feel of those hands sweeping over her, the woman, caught up in the ancient memory, cursed and swore; but the recall, once started, wouldn’t stop. Sexually aroused, painfully, erotically stimulated in her own gallery with the gooseneck lamp casting ugly thin shadows on the walls, she felt the stepfather’s hands over and over again.
The curse words Sewer Mouth lent her, a thousand of them, were being spewed in anger at the sexual arousal. They flooded the inner recesses of the woman’s protesting mind and were as vile, as rotten as the woman had always believed herself to be.
The woman sat there in the gallery, little more than a baby; she dared to peer into the flick no longer. The desk tilted as she pushed her chair away from it and papers went sliding to the floor along with the gooseneck lamp. She stumbled as she ran on tiny, small-boned feet, with baby tears a translucent shimmer before her eyes. She kicked open the foyer closets and grabbed for a sweater, desperate to run; this time for good. Even flying out the front door she knew: this was why incest victims stood mute, why they hid themselves away in terror and why, with few exceptions if they appeared at all, it was from shadows as dark as the knowledge that followed them.
Somewhere in the back of her brain she must have known all along that there had been pleasure along with the pain.
Yes, dummy.
Along with the voice in her head came a thought that was bound firmly to it; they sat together in her mind, separate from her. Then they weren’t separate anymore, they were one and she was a part of both voice and thought: Kill him, kill the bastard. The sexual arousal was not, it seemed, only a thing of childhood past but a thing of the present. This minute the arousal gripped her—recalled by what she’d forgotten too long ago or by what one of her people had experienced for her? It didn’t matter. She herself was the whore the stepfather had called her in the kitchen that day. This was what he smirked at all those years.
The woman wanted to put her two hands between her legs and tear the offending flesh away. Kill it, too.
Once born, of course, the notion wouldn’t leave. An hour later, it had just become more appealing. Kill him. It sat in the woman’s head as she tried to note the time on the dashboard clock. But then she remembered and referred instead to the small travel alarm clock that now went in her purse, everywhere she did. The dashboard clock no longer worked and neither did any of the wristwatches, from Timex to Piaget. Once repaired, they all promptly went haywire again and now lay useless in a dresser drawer, useless as this car’s electrical system. The fuses blew constantly although no mechanic could ever point out a reason. Lately she hadn’t bothered to replace the fuses and now the cigarette lighter, the dome light, the seat belt warning buzzer, the door locks, and the dashboard clock were all inoperable. In addition, the engine refused to turn over several times after stopping at 7-Eleven on the way to the video studio and she’d been forced to walk across the campus to meet Stanley. No mechanic had been able to point out the problem there either, and always after several hours the engine ran properly anyway.
Whenever she considered what it all meant, the question arose immediately as to what was wrong with the stereo, the radios, the television set, and every light bulb in her house. Next she had to question why, if she were in anyone else’s house too long, their lights began to flicker, their stereo started to crackle.
Someone slid it into the woman’s mind for her: 9:00 P.M. By midnight, Page would be back from a school field trip, packed and waiting by her father’s door. The planned weekend of “potting around,” as she and Page called it, free of appointments and business phone calls, held little allure. Much as she wanted to see Page, the recall in the gallery had stripped the woman bare. She could not look forward to Page’s youthful exuberance, the long jog through the shopping malls, and worse, sitting in a public restaurant, while attempting to ignore the cellar recall and the pulse that had started to beat between her legs. Shouldn’t she be able to enjoy Page without the intrusion of such garbage? The barrage of thoughts grew by one more: the woman felt cheated.
Sewer Mouth’s rage burst, and she slammed the steering wheel with a doubled-up fist. The horn did not blare; it was not working either. Elvira reached over and turned on the car radio. Manfred Mann began to wail.
Would there ever be enough time with Page? One day—and she felt the decision come from nowhere and watched her fingers beat out a heavy rhythm on the dashboard—therapy would be finished and life back on an even keel. Much as she wanted to see no one, to hide and work on the manuscript this weekend, the idea of Page waiting with a crestfallen face by her father’s door negated the urge to hide. But the cheated feeling welled up again . . . and Sewer Mouth promptly bludgeoned it. Sewer Mouth batted people away like bugs on a hot summer night and zeroed in on workloads. Sewer Mouth had focus and a mind that could stop all other emotion while she produced. The woman experienced the guilt that eighteen-hour workdays created to the exclusion of all else. Page had been an exclusion all these years.
For now, in lieu of a whol
e weekend’s solitude, the woman pulled into the 7-Eleven parking lot. Before picking up Page, she’d settle for taking a cup of coffee home and drinking it, alone. Someone laughed at the word “alone,” but the laughter was far back in the woman’s mind. Streetlights cast long shadows through the car windows and she added “car wash” to the ever-present list of things to do. The windows were filthy with fingerprints and stained with nicotine; they let in only a grey, fogged light.
The better not to see us by. This time both laugh and voice were closer but the woman heard neither. She was trying to get up the nerve and the energy to get out of the car. “Junkyard Dog” played on. Through Elvira’s mind, the song made the woman smile. What could be meaner than a junkyard dog? The words had a protective ring, warning away the bad guys. Once she’d heard herself tell Norman that it was her favourite song, replete with the finest expression ever coined. Norman had told her that she had a twisted mind. She’d tried after that to keep the radio volume down and not mention parts of any song to him. He had been serious and even angry and she had not been successful. The volume, it seemed, was always too high and the catch words of everything from Tom Wait’s wailings to the Fifth of Beethoven sprang out of her mouth at will. Norman had retreated into a silence that grew almost poisonous over the years.
The woman observed, as she dragged herself across the parking lot and into the store, that one foot seemed to be going nicely ahead of the other, no matter how lethargic she felt or how she cringed when anyone looked at her. But as she poured coffee into a paper cup, the movements were rigid and quick. Desperate, almost.
The stepfather and the cellar recall of twenty short minutes ago had not died down. It hit her again as she spilled steaming black coffee on the dashboard in her haste to start the engine. A biker holding a bag of Half-Smokes and a giant Pepsi yelled out to her and then he whistled. The woman froze. Was he crazy? That went for Norman and Morgan, too. What did they see in her? What was wrong with them that they’d find her worthy of time or attention? Even with all the hot coffee on the way home, there was no warmth. The stepfather hung in her mind: the cellar recall had made him real. Until the Weaver wove the recall right out of her head.