by David Rhodes
“Do you cook?” she asked, staring at Sarah’s breasts, thinking in horror that such a natural shape could only mean she used no supports; but, forcing herself to be more composed, she realized it was only her imagination which saw the details, and the outline of the straps could be seen across Sarah’s back, though there seemed a kind of indecency in that as well. No, it wasn’t indecency. But something it was.
“Yes, I cook,” said Sarah, and smiled.
“What do you cook?”
“A little of this and a little of that.” She laughed.
They seated themselves, John and Sarah on the chairs and Wilson and Della in the swing. John’s gaze wandered frequently to his father, who looked to have aged eight years since he had gone away, and who said no more than four words the whole evening. Della saw sadness creep into her son’s eyes then, and thought to herself, He doesn’t understand that it’s not so bad to be old. Then she was drawn back to Sarah by her voice, and wondered why no one else had thought she was very strange. There had been a whole yard full of people talking about having seen her, and not one had said, “There’s something a little odd about her, attractive and frightening.” I must be mistaken about this, she thought. Feelings can be wrong. And to prove it she bombarded Sarah with countless questions to prove or disprove her normalcy, looking for her to either betray herself and confirm the suspicions or absolve them.
“How old are you?”
“Thirty-two.”
“How old is your mother?”
“Sixty-three. How old is yours?”
“My mother’s in heaven. Did you grow up in a city?”
“Well, yes and no. We lived in Mosstown when I was about twelve or thirteen.”
“Is this the first time you’ve been married?”
“Mother! What a question. Believe me, Sarah, usually my mother’s quite nice, keeps to herself. . . isn’t nosy. . . .”
“I don’t mind, John. I’ve been married before, Mrs. Montgomery.”
“Has Mom been feeling all right lately, Dad?”
“Yes,” said Wilson, smiling and looking at Sarah. “She has.”
“Two times,” said Sarah.
“Two times!” exclaimed Della, not wanting to show surprise, but unable to hide it. Two previous marriages seemed to pretty much confirm her suspicions, in some way not altogether clear.
“I know it seems like that,” said Sarah. “It strikes me like that too sometimes. But, believe me, it all sneaks up on you so slowly that the numbers have nothing to do with it.”
“Three husbands,” said Della, this time more in personal wonder than in surprise.
“Mother! What’s the matter with you?”
“No, John,” said Sarah, touching his arm. “Listen, Mrs. Montgomery,” and she looked intently into her eyes. Della tried to look away, but felt as though she couldn’t. “I was married when I was sixteen. I had a baby. The doctor said I would probably have no more. My husband was a roofer and worked early in the mornings before the heat of the afternoon but when the surface would be more dangerous because of the dew. We lived together a year and a half. Then he fell and was dead. That’s the way they told me: ‘He fell and he’s dead.’ That was all. Naturally, I couldn’t believe it at first. Even after I took everything out of the house that reminded me—his clothes, his guns—I sold his tools from the basement and cleaned up the piles of lumber he had taken off our old garage to make a boat with. Still it seemed he wouldn’t go away, but was always just in the next room, walking around, fooling with his harmonica or thinking about buying an automobile.”
Wilson began to fall asleep, and his rocking swing stopped.
“I thought it was more than I could bear. Then my baby died, and without reason. Just one morning when I went over to lift her from her crib, she was dead. We lived on the edge of town then and I ran in to our doctor and brought him, and he told me, ‘She’s dead.’ It was a fact then. Dead. Now she could be buried. Dead; that meant she was no longer. That meant that something that had been wasn’t any longer, come and gone. And I told myself that, and tried to keep eating, and tried to sleep, and found a job in a factory, and gave the house back to the bank and rented a room from an old lady, and lived for several years like I was dreaming. Several years, Mrs. Montgomery. One year, then two, then three. Month after month, never going out, having no friends, waiting quietly with Mrs. Wokey, and sitting in my room listening to her, peaceful until she went to bed and her footsteps carried by my door, because then it seemed like I would be alone. The sound of that old woman’s footsteps was the most precious thing I had. So I always tried to be asleep before that. Many nights I would try to calm myself with self-imposed peaceful thoughts, then her terrible mounting of the staircase would begin and I would listen to the living, last sounds carrying by my door, wide awake. My light burned all night.”
Della began to shake her head.
“No,” Sarah continued. “The more despairingly I tell it, the more accurate. I lived for years like that. At first I tried to withstand the temptation of talking to myself, but gave in when my thoughts became much like talking themselves and the only way I could keep from saying little things endlessly to myself, like ‘What are you going to do tonight?’ was to say them out loud. So I conversed with myself about the daily routines of my life. Then two months after starting this the bus driver of the bus I took to work in the morning asked me while handing back my change if I wouldn’t go to a movie with him that weekend. I looked at him and he smiled. I was frightened, but, looking into his face while he smiled, I felt like I had never seen what a smile was before, or what it meant. It meant simply, I am happy, and wish you to be.’ It’s a wonderful thing to smile—showing one’s teeth. It’s a guarantee that the world is what we make it, and not by definition ugly. He saw that I was frightened. . . . I’d never looked at him before. That will show you how I was those years. Three years of riding that bus and I’d never looked at the driver. He said I could tell him the next morning and his mustache twitched. So all that night I thought about nothing else. I talked it over with myself after Mrs. Wokey went to bed. I didn’t go to work the rest of the week, so that I wouldn’t have to answer.
“Sometime after my twenty-first birthday (birthdays have always been important to me) I did go out with him. He owned his own automobile, and after the movie (which made me laugh and picture myself as the heroine) we drove out into the country, and the wind came in the windows, and I could put my head out and watch the night reel by, my hair blowing back against the rear window. I was nearly delirious with private joy, and I was afraid he would see it on my face and would think it meant something. It seemed like we were flying. I know at one time he said we were going fifty miles an hour. That seems slow now, but nothing will ever be so fast. My mind was secretly racing. I imagined myself flying recklessly, casting all caution to the wind, putting my life on the line for a few moments of mad, frantic thrills. I had never felt like that before. I thought if Mrs. Wokey were to see me she would be shocked and scold me and tell me to get out of her house, though that would hurt her very much because she loved me and desperately wanted to keep me close to her old, quiet ways. I felt they were evil thoughts. Cecil drove me home and I rushed inside, ran upstairs to my room and watched him drive away. I sat by my little table until I was sure I had my pounding heart under control, and went downstairs. Mrs. Wokey was reading one of her magazines and I went out and got a bowl of ice cream and ate the whole thing. I thought what it would be for me to flip out a cigarette and light it—what she would think.
“ ‘Thing’s are mighty quiet around here tonight,’ I said to Mrs. Wokey.
“ ‘Well, yes they are,’ she returned and looked at me from over her magazine.
“ ‘Very quiet,’ I said. ‘Of course there’s no reason for anything to be really jumping.’ And I ran upstairs, feeling her eyes following me, went into my room and looked at my merry self in the mirror. But the next night, Sunday, I could not fall asleep before the foots
teps came by the door, and the fear returned.
“Two years later—two years of falling back into my old fears and dreaming ways, and rising up above them for moments of happiness, only to fall back again, and finally leveling out—Cecil and I were married.
“The first several weeks of living with him, I remembered Bill and wondered if I shouldn’t run away. But that was mostly when I was alone, and when Cecil came home I felt better, and then I didn’t remember Bill any more.
“Cecil had a terrible temper, and though he was never violent around me, and tried to hide it, I could tell when he would bump his head or see something he didn’t like that his true reactions, if he didn’t keep them hidden and falsify them, would be abnormally brutal. Sometimes he would even look at me like an animal when I’d done something he didn’t like. Yet those times were very rare. . . . It’s just that he lived in sort of a set way. He always sat in the same chair, slept on the same side, approached any problems with the same attitude, wouldn’t eat certain foods that he had decided long ago were distasteful regardless of the way they were fixed, listened to the same programs on the radio, went to bed within a half-hour of the same time every night and generally planned out every waking hour according to a long schedule.
“After a year they put him on night shift. He was very angry about that, and said there were plenty of other drivers with less seniority, and that there were only two night buses. So he had to work Saturday nights, which was his bowling night, and there was no end to the pain that caused him. I tried to get him to quit driving, and even offered to go back to the factory while he found another job, because after two months he still resented it as much as he had when he’d first been notified of his shift change. But he said he wouldn’t let me work, and for some reason refused to look for another job in the afternoon after he had gotten up. It became frustrating, because he seemed so miserable, yet didn’t seem to want to do anything about it. . . .
“Maybe I better stop.”
“No, no,” said Della, “go on. I can’t tell you how interested I am.”
“You’re so kind. I knew she would be wonderful,” she said to John, and put out her arm. He turned to her, away from watching his sleeping father, and smiled as though he’d been listening. On the horizon, an exhausted rim of pink was all that remained of the daylight, which stretched, yawned and finally slid unannounced below the dark line of the ground.
“Then after leaving home on a Saturday night at a little before eleven so that he could be at work at a quarter after and have a cup of coffee at the station before beginning the eleven-thirty run, he didn’t come home. I waited clear through Sunday, Sunday night and Monday morning. Monday afternoon I became frantic and telephoned Bart Lewis, a bowling friend of his. But he hadn’t seen him, and sounded like he resented being called—as though my husband’s business shouldn’t concern him. At eleven thirty I called the station. The man from the bus company, in a voice like a radio announcer, told me that Cecil had not driven a bus since over six months ago. He elaborated to say, ‘It was December and Cecil was upset about the shift change. We explained to him that it was only for a reorganizational period of two weeks while the new drivers and new routes were worked out. He got angry, demanded his money for the last week and quit, so soon that he never learned that because of so much protest the reorganization plan had been discontinued and the company agreed to have the training period of the new drivers be completed on the night buses. But he’d got his money and left, and never came back. Who did you say was calling?’
“I set the phone down into its cradle and looked at the floor. The green specks in the linoleum swirled around. I felt like I was drowning. December. For over three months Cecil’d been leaving home every night at ten minutes to eleven and coming home at seven thirty in the morning, sometimes as late as eight, but never as late as eight thirty. Every week he gave me money for the groceries, my own allowance, and paid the bills. Nearly every night he would complain about having to go to work just as the rest of the folks were beginning to have a good time.
“It was more than a betrayal or a lie. It had no explanation that I could discover. It was like someone saying to you, ‘What you know isn’t true.’ And when, in indignation, you turn to your storehouse of undeniable facts to prove yourself, you find they’ve shifted just enough to make you out to be a fool.
“Then the shame: trying to find out what one’s husband has been doing every night of the week, and Saturdays too, for three months. The bowling was a ruse as well, and alleged friendships . . . everything. His mother’s address in St. Louis belonged to a trucking company. The high-school ring in his drawer turned out to be authentic, but the few years he’d spent there twenty-five years ago were gone from the memory of the teachers and only dimly remembered by others, who were able, however, to point out where he had lived with his parents. So I stood there and looked at the house, and realized how foolish I must have seemed to them, and to the people inside looking out the windows.
“I did everything in my power to discover the long circumstances that brought about the disappearance of my husband, and everything failed. Some mornings, on their way to work, neighbors reported to have seen him driving home, sometimes from the west, on Sutherland Drive, sometimes from the north from East Fourteenth Street and sometimes down the back alleys of Woodville. The matter was turned over to the police and they went about for several weeks with pictures in their shirt pockets, asking, ‘Have you seen this man, this Cecil Baynard? He’s disappeared from his wife.’ And ‘When did you last see him? Did he have any friends? Did he have a girlfriend that you might know of or have heard mentioned?’ Simply nothing.
“By then I was twenty-three. I suppose many of my neighbors thought that I went into shock, because for a long time I didn’t venture outside my house except for the barest necessities, and even then at the checkout lines I would ignore their eyes. But it wasn’t that. I was simply making up my mind. I knew how much money I had, how long I could keep paying the bills, how long the creditors would take after I quit paying before they would refuse to absorb any more loss at the request of their conscience, turn off the electricity, snip off my heat supply and demand the three keys which allowed free, unobstructed coming and going from the house. I knew that when this time came I would have to be prepared to move and go on, but I didn’t intend to be fooled into picking out a direction before I’d made up my mind how I was going to feel about what’d happened to me. I refused, in other words, to let the experience have any direct control over my life for the worse, and sat down to decide, practically speaking, just how things were with me.
“There were two things which struck me with particular force. First: the lunch pail. He never went to work without a packed lunch pail. I always filled it after the news and I couldn’t remember a time when he’d forgotten to take it. And every time I’d arrive at an explanation for his disappearance and secret activities, I was reminded of the lunch pail.” She stopped talking.
“Go on,” said Della.
“He never forgot his lunch pail. The second thing was when after the police sounded the river—I believe that’s the term—anyway, with hooks and such they brought up a body from the mud bottom, a man with pockets filled with sand and small rocks. He had no identification on him and they wanted me to see if he held any resemblance to my husband. So I went down to the morgue with them, but when we arrived and before we were inside, an inspector stepped out, helping a middle-aged woman by supporting her arm. She was in tears, and he quietly told the policeman who had brought me that they already had positive identification and that I could go home. It wasn’t my husband. It was then, looking at that other woman, that I was reminded that I knew what it felt like to have someone dead: Cecil was not, and could not be, dead. Because I knew what that felt like. I knew that feeling too well, and if Cecil had been dead though outside my immediate knowledge, I would have known. That night he’d left his lunch pail. Something had been in his mind.
“
So with these two things—the knowledge of his living, and the knowledge of him and lunch pails—I did the only thing to save my own pride. I quit caring and divorced him. I moved again, and lived by myself, working at a button factory. I expected to never have anything to do with marriage or men for as long as I lived.”
John reached out and touched her, imposing silence. Wilson’s breathing was heavy. Every once in a while he would jerk, moving in some faraway dream, keeping ahead of the foxes. Della looked at Sarah in the smoky night light and thought, There’s still something not revealed—something that you’ve kept from me. You’ve not explained it all.
What happened in Della’s mind was unusual. She took it upon herself to get to the bottom of Sarah’s strangeness, and spent the next several years visiting her and watching her closely. She talked to her friends incessantly about how Sarah did this and Sarah did that, as though trying to prove by a lengthy induction that her son’s wife was completely human. And they listened to her, half out of not wanting to be unkind and half out of interest in hearing some passing clue that would solve the mystery in everyone else’s mind: What was she like when the shades were pulled and she turned her attention to her senses? It was many, many years before this idea even dawned upon Della—that the secret could be in the flesh, in Sarah’s hips and thighs and arms and hands, and not inside. She looked for something beneath the skin, something in Sarah’s personality to explain it, not thinking for a moment that there was personality and something else, different and completely made up of senses. Her discovery of this came much later. Her neighbors in town never took it upon themselves to invite her over to their houses on Saturday night, or any other night that it might start, to listen to the joyous moaning, screaming cat howls that came from John’s house and went on for as long as several hours, each wavering note cutting through the stillness. Nor did they explain to her that they’d gotten to enjoy lying in bed, listening and wondering. On infrequent Sunday afternoons when the air would be full, their children would ask, “Mommy, why does she make those noises? They frighten me.” “There’s no reason to be frightened. It’s all very natural.” But the only thing they could promise was that it didn’t have to be frightening, if you kept your wits about you when you heard it come ripping through the quick evening air.