by Minrose Gwin
She’d been my last chance. Now she was the fucking bride of Christ.
When I got to the mill that morning the first thing I did was go storming into the outer office where that Lumpkin woman worked in the typing pool. She took one look at me bearing down on her and her hands froze on the keyboard of her typewriter.
“Don’t lay it on me,” she blurted out before I could say a word. “She just jumped up and went running down that aisle like the devil hisself was after her, like she was on fire. I tried to snatch at her dress, but she slipped right past me and Hilary both. You could have bowled us over with a feather. Don’t blame me. It’s hard enough to raise one girl all by myself, much less keep up with them two. I could tell you things.”
I noticed then how pointed her face was and how stricken. She looked like a duck my dad had felled once. It was still alive when it went down. We found it lying on its side in the bushes, a whirlwind of ruffled feathers when we went to pick it up, its little chest heaving. Whatever things this duck-faced woman had to tell me, I didn’t want to know, then or ever. I turned and stalked off, not even bothering to answer.
That night when I got home, June, who obviously hadn’t taken me seriously when I said don’t come back, had left some canned soup in a pot on the stove and was in her room with the door shut. I stood at the counter and ate the cold soup right out of the pot, then took some Bufferin for my hand. I started on the day’s puzzle but the words wouldn’t come; I turned on the news but started to doze off, so I got up and went to bed.
I fell into a deep sleep, but woke up with a start. It was dark as pitch and down the hall June was crying out for me, her voice thin and hopeless.
Was I dreaming? It went on and on, though, and after a while, I realized I was awake. When I got out of the bed and opened the door to my room, I heard her more clearly. Dad, she was crying, Dad. A trickle of sound, pitched high.
I charged down the hall to her room and threw open the door. She was on the floor on her knees in the dark. I turned on her lamp. She was bent over, holding her arms to her chest like she was hiding some small object from me. Up against the wall, her form cast the shadow of a hunched rabbit, frozen in fear.
“What? What?” I knelt down, pulling at her, trying to pry her arms apart, get her up from there. Then I saw her hands were covered in blood. There was a large stain on the front of her pajamas, which made my heart stop until I saw she’d held her hands to her chest. I was so preoccupied with the blood that I didn’t see the manicure scissors at first. I pried them from her fingers, grabbed a blanket from her bed. I put a piece of the blanket between her hands and pressed her hands together with mine, trying to stop the flow. Then I opened one of her hands, wiped it off and saw what she’d done. There was a hole in the palm where she’d stuck the point of the scissors. I opened the other hand, and there was the other hole.
I looked down at her hands, the puncture wounds in both palms. Last week the Sunday puzzle had asked for an eight-letter word for marks resembling the wounds of Jesus Christ, synonym shame. I’d had to cheat, look it up in the thesaurus. Stigmata, which I’d never heard of, plural of stigma, meaning shame, disgrace, dishonor.
“For god’s sake, June, stop screaming in my ear,” I said.
“Dad,” she said, “are you still mad at me?”
“Oh, honey,” I said, and gathered her up.
She cried harder, great wrenching sobs that shook her whole body. Then I started up too and was shocked at the sounds that came out of my mouth, sounds a man should never have to make.
It was the first time I’d cried for my wife and son.
We didn’t let up for a good long time. When June subsided into sniffles, I pulled the blanket out from between her hands. I wanted to make sure the cuts didn’t need stitches. Just needed to get that part of it behind us. The blood had mostly subsided. I noticed how small her hands were, how delicate the fingers. Without thinking, I leaned down and kissed her palms, the way I used to kiss her little hurts when she was a baby. I could taste the metal in her blood.
“Sweetheart,” I said, remembering the name Olivia had used to call the girls in from playing on summer nights, “you’re still a girl. You and me, we got a long row to hoe before you’re anybody’s bride.” I said it in kindness, but firmly, like a father, like the good father I am.
She looked up at me, her hands still out, palms up. Her eyelids flickered, I could tell she was just plain worn out. Then she lifted her head. “I hate your stupid puzzles,” she said.
She was still on the floor. I was still on my knees. I looked down at her, square into her face. What I saw there made me step back. She wasn’t Olivia, not anymore. It was me, my own face, my own eyes, desperate and alone, staring back at me in terror and shame, saying the letters don’t line up, nothing fits the way it should, there is nothing, not a goddamn thing in this whole wide world that lines up right. June’s face, my face, looking back at me like that, made me more afraid than I’d ever been in my life, more afraid than when Charlie looked at me out of that one eye.
Then I saw that one of the puncture spots was beginning to flow again. “Wait a minute,” I said to my daughter. “Put the pressure back on that one. I’ll be right back.”
I went down the hall to the bathroom. I found the peroxide and bandages and tape and brought them back. She was still sitting there on the floor, her head down.
I put my hand under her chin and lifted her head. “Now this is what we’re going to do,” I said. “I’m going to clean out these wounds and bandage them up and give you some Bufferin, and you’re going to go back to bed and get some sleep so tomorrow you can go to school and I can go to work.”
Her eyes filled up again and her nose started running. I jumped up and hurried down the hall again and brought back some toilet paper from the bathroom. I held it to her nose and said “blow,” like I’d done hundreds of time when she was little. “Now get up,” I said. “You need to wash those hands. We need to clean them up and bandage them.”
I led her to the bathroom and she came like a dumb animal. I washed and bandaged her poor hands, gave her the aspirin, and then led her back to bed. I sat down on the edge of the bed and covered her and pulled her hair back from her face.
“Tomorrow night we’re not sitting in this stuffy old house, we’re going to head out to the Dairy Queen for hamburgers and ice cream cones. Then we’ll come home and watch Twilight Zone,” I said. “That’ll be something to look forward to.”
She nodded. I kissed her forehead and turned out the light.
I left her door open so I’d hear if she cried out again and it brought back what a colicky baby she’d been, how she’d cried all the time those first few weeks, how I was always the one who heard her first.
I headed back to my room, but then I stopped. Earlier that night, before June had come home, I’d been stumped by one whole corner in my puzzle, the upper left. Nothing had worked. I didn’t feel like sleeping so I went into the living room and picked up the puzzle I’d let slip to the floor.
I’d gotten into crossword puzzles right after I’d taken Grace to live with Frances and come back with a bellyache that wouldn’t go away. I’d gone to the doctor, and somebody had left a book of puzzles in his waiting room. I started one and found it calmed me. I liked the way the words lined up just so. Even if you couldn’t think it up, you knew there was the right word out there somewhere. You knew it would fit. Life, it goes every which way and never in a straight line, but a crossword puzzle, it won’t go haywire and misbehave, lie to you. You can trust it. Each letter fits into its own little box, snug and tight, and connects to the other boxes just perfect, the way life should but never does. So when the doctor said lay off the booze and get a hobby, I took up crosswords.
AS I WAITED for sunrise, I began to work on those few final words, the ones that would make the puzzle fit. I had folded my puzzle in a square the way I always did. I was racking my brain for the synonym for an object of worship. Six letters. It was some
thing I should’ve known but couldn’t for the life of me figure out. I stewed over that word and some others the rest of the night. When dawn came up, I still hadn’t squared the box.
Then I heard my daughter stir and I put my puzzle down.
17
Grace
I HADN’T PLANNED ON DISAPPEARING FROM THE FACE OF the earth, I’d planned on going back to high school and learning shorthand, not leaving my baby high and dry but on a temporary visit to Frances, just as my stay with her had been temporary. It happened in a flash, in the single instant when all of a sudden I felt so strangely alien to myself, so utterly removed from Grace, that I flung off my hospital gown, my heart pounding, and looked around for my clothes. My suitcase was nowhere to be found, but there was a knapsack they’d given me for the clothes I was wearing when I came in. I put the pants and top back on, even though they were still damp from labor sweat and heaven only knows what else. In the knapsack I stashed a box of Kotex from the bathroom and the pack of Nabs on my bedside table. I pocketed my wallet, which still contained, thank heavens, $120, and headed down the hall for the exit sign. It was late afternoon, around shift change. The nurses were busy exchanging charts so no one stopped me. I saw a sign pointing the way to the nursery and thought about my baby, down the long shiny hall, asleep in a bassinet, maybe sucking her thumb for the first time, hungry for the milk that was already leaking from me.
But I turned instead toward the sign marked EXIT.
When I stepped outside, my toes cramped up in shock from the cold. I’d worn my penny loafers to the hospital, but I’d been too flustered to think about socks. I waited a few minutes outside the emergency entrance, stomping my feet to stay warm, uncertain about what to do next. Then a cab pulled up and a man jumped out and ran inside. I got into the cab and asked the driver to take me to the Greyhound station downtown. On the way, my feet, warmed by the car heater, began to spark and burn.
In a bathroom stall at the station, I took off the maternity outfit and put on the faded sweat shirt and jeans I’d bought at a thrift shop next door. When I came out, I stuffed the maternity outfit into the bathroom trash bin, keeping the brown sweater to use as a pillow on the bus. The jeans cut into the loose skin of my belly flab, so I left them unsnapped.
After the clothes and cab, I had $114.12 left, money I’d saved from the allowance Dad sent each month for incidentals. I scanned the board at the ticket counter and decided on Indianapolis, for no good reason except that it was cheap and far. By now my ankles had turned blue, there being no socks in the thrift shop and no heat in the bus terminal waiting room; I wondered whether I might lose my toes to frostbite the way my father had in the war. Waiting for the bus to arrive, I wolfed down my small stash of food, then bought a bag of Fritos and a grape Nehi for the road. I boarded the bus at ten that night, noticing that the “Colored” signs had been removed from the seats since the last time I’d traveled on a bus, the last trip from Opelika to New Orleans I’d made with Mama and June to see Frances, which seemed like a million years ago, another life.
My breasts had begun to throb against the rough fabric of the sweat shirt. My nipples twitched and burned. It was like my whole chest had turned into a living creature, bound and determined to do what it was meant to do.
I climbed onto the bus without as much as a phone call to either my father or Frances. I figured when I got to Indy and got settled, I’d send Dad a postcard to tell him where I was, to say his slut of a daughter was managing just fine, thank you very much.
The bus was only a third filled. I took the first open set of seats, gobbled down the Fritos, drank the grape soda, which I knew would stain my lips a neon purple but who cared? It was cold on the bus, so I used the sweater to cover myself. The bus stopped at each and every country town on its route, letting people on and off to use the facilities or grab a cup of stale coffee. When I finally fell asleep, I slept hard; and when the driver pulled the bus into the station in Darcy, Indiana, about sixty miles south of Indianapolis, and called out the stop, I thought in my grogginess he’d said Indy instead, so I scrambled up and gathered my belongings and got off.
It was only around four in the afternoon, but the sky was dark and close to the ground, as if a giant blanket had been tossed over everything. Banks of grayish sludge had been pushed to the side of the road in dispirited clumps. I’d expected a large, bustling station along the lines of the one in New Orleans, but there was only a ramshackle depot the size of my father’s Rambler. The door was locked. A tattered, plaster-covered schedule, dangling from a bulletin board on the door, showed no buses at all until the next day at the same time, late afternoon.
It had begun to drizzle. I was hungry and my stitches stung. I needed a bathroom and a bath. I needed to attend to myself.
I wondered how my baby girl was getting on in the hospital nursery at that very same moment of this cold dark miserable afternoon. Was she hungry and fretful too, wet and dirty? Was she twisting her head back and forth blindly, like a newborn puppy looking for some small comfort, a taste of milk, a gentle hand, a finger to grab on to? Was she wondering where her mother was?
I shivered, drawing my sweater closer and looking up and down the highway for a place to eat. It was mid-February and the winter’s snow was still piled high in sad gray hills on the sides of the wet road. The desolation of it took my breath away. At home the azaleas would be ready to pop, birds would be settling into newly built nests.
When I glimpsed a neon light through the fog, I started off walking toward it. I picked my way along the side of the road, next to the snowbanks, my back aching from the jouncing of the bus. Each time a car went by, it sprayed me with dirty water mixed with salt. I was barely visible as I walked along, causing drivers to swerve and stare when I came up in their headlights, as if I were a derelict, a drunk.
I walked slowly, trying not to slip on the ice, bending forward like an old woman, trying to see the pavement. My belly felt hollow and not just from lack of food. Was my baby girl missing the ebb and flow of my insides, the sloshing of my intestines, the thrum of my heart?
As I walked on, I became deeply thirsty, the way I’d been thirsty afterward at the hospital, my throat one long thin line of sandpaper. Where was the town?
The sign in the distance now seemed to recede and change color as I moved toward it. I figured I’d walked more than a mile, my still sockless feet gone numb in the soaked penny loafers. At one point I thought I saw a city rise up in the far reaches: skyscrapers and church steeples, cathedrals and basilicas, like New Orleans. Maybe I was walking from Darcy to Indy, which, I didn’t know then, was impossible. Just as I was posing the question in my mind, the city melted and there were only trees, cedars, spindly and straight, and the outline of a farmhouse and barn in the gray, weary distance. It was oddly tiring not to be able to see the sky. It felt as if I might be walking upside down and not knowing it.
A little stray dog, its wet fur flattened to its scrawny body, appeared out of the fog and drizzle and trotted a few paces behind me. When I stopped to look, it dropped back and disappeared into the gray.
As I drew closer to the neon sign, I saw it said “Best Western.” When I finally dragged myself in, I skirted the front desk, where the girl with red spiky hair behind the counter was talking on the phone, and went straight into the lobby bathroom. I cleaned myself as best I could and wiped the salty grime off my shoes. Then I came out and followed my nose into the restaurant, which was empty except for one man. I stood for a while, waiting for someone to come show me a seat, but when no one did, I sat down at the first table I saw and picked up a menu, too pricy, but I was so famished I decided to ask if I could wash dishes for my supper. I’d need all my money to pay for a place to stay and buy a new bus ticket to Indy the next day. I didn’t think about what might come next.
In a minute or two, a tall, large-breasted woman with forearms the size of small hams came out from the kitchen to bring the man his check. She apologized for making me wait, saying sh
e was both cooking and serving that night. As she talked, she took in my soaked shoes first, then my hair, which hadn’t been washed since the night before I’d gone into labor and was plastered to my head. I tried to say something about doing dishes, but she cut me off with a wave of her hand and told me to go sit in a back booth and she’d bring me something good and hot to eat, not to worry about ordering off the menu. So I dragged myself to the back of the restaurant and sank down in a red booth with a broken spring and waited, shifting my weight so the spring didn’t hurt so much, trying to stay awake. In a bit the woman came back with a heaping plate of creamed corn and mashed potatoes and meatloaf and two hot rolls and a glass of milk. “Leftovers,” she said.
I thanked her. I was surprised by how much effort it took to pick up the fork, how leaden my arms felt, how weary and helpless this unexpected act of generosity made me feel. My mouth watered, but when I leaned over the plate to eat, I couldn’t eat for crying, big hiccupping sobs. Over the past months, I’d grown unaccustomed to any form of generosity. The girls at Our Lady were scrappy and belongings kept tight. Frances had seen to my basic needs and taught me things I wouldn’t have known otherwise, which, I was beginning to realize, I should be thankful for. But there was something of a tightness, a reserve, about Frances. I can understand it now: there she was, a woman in her early forties; not once had she ever been with a man I suspected, and there I was, then a mere sixteen, to her eyes marked for life by one boy and, though she didn’t know it, two. It was a breach, and she approached me the way you’d approach a stray dog, regardless how benign and helpless it might seem, with caution and a certain amount of suspicion. In the long, lonely months at her house, I’d withered under her downcast eyes, her pursed mouth.