There was a moment while Mary continued simply to look at him and pull her fingers through her blond hair, her eyes gradually losing him as she remembered, casting back into her story.
“Oh, I must have known it from the beginning,” she said, as if she were answering a question. “From that first night in the pool when she sat with her legs in the water, smiling at me across the turquoise water, her silly red lips parted from her bright, white teeth.
“I must have known it the night he first put his buttered fingers into me while we watched television. She was there, sitting a little to one side in an armchair. Her hair was fixed, sprayed and coiffed as though she was ready to go out. She was never sloppy. And he did it, and I was petrified. My eyes were glued to the woman advertising refrigerators who was smiling at America like she had smiled at me across the turquoise water, white teeth and red lips. But I didn’t look at her, though I wanted to more than anything, to see if she was seeing what he was doing to me. But I didn’t.”
Margaret sensed a change of mood, feeling the insides of Mary’s thighs against his hips, her buttocks resting just below his navel.
“Because I was afraid.”
Margaret opened his eyes to see her more clearly.
“I was dying, him doing that to me,” Mary continued. “I was ignoring everything but the woman and the refrigerator on television. I was ignoring the fact that she would have had to be blind, or unconscious, not to have seen what he was doing. I was ignoring the fact that she wasn’t doing anything about it—that she was probably even watching him.”
Mary was motionless.
“She didn’t come and kiss me goodnight that night. In fact, she never did it again. I noticed that. I noticed that she stopped coming to kiss me goodnight after he put his buttered fingers…”
She stirred on his stomach, shifted her weight a little and seemed to collect her thoughts, to gather her resolve.
“It wasn’t long afterward that he began coming to my bed late at nights to put his hands all over me…and into me…and to teach me how to masturbate him. I managed to convince myself that she didn’t know about his visits either, because he was coming in so late that he was obviously waiting until she was asleep. I attached my sanity to that little bit of deductive reasoning, told myself he was the only aberration among us, the only betrayer. It sustained me for a while, all too brief a while, as it turned out. Before long he was coming to me earlier in the night, early enough so that I knew she still had to be awake, had to feel him slipping out of bed, if he even bothered to ‘slip’ at all. He came earlier and stayed longer. And she knew. When she went shopping and left us at home on Saturday afternoons, she knew. When the two of us were missing for half an hour or so in the evenings, she never asked where we’d been. She knew.
“As time went on we settled into a routine in which I essentially supplanted her role as wife. She read magazines and watched television and manicured her nails and pampered her hair. She gradually became more alienated from me. She never touched me anymore, never spoke kindly to me, if she even spoke at all. There were times when just the two of us would be in a room together, and she would act as if I wasn’t there. I became invisible to her. She didn’t even see me.
“And that was when I began the lying I told you about. I lied to her, too. I lied to her most of all.”
Margaret looked at Mary’s face. She was staring at him but her eyes did not make contact with his, and her voice had the flat inflection of one hypnotized.
“I never told her how I felt,” Mary said. “I couldn’t. How could I? I no longer knew how to act around her.” She paused. “I started spying on her,” she said matter-of-factly. “I don’t remember why, or how I got the idea, but it was after I had started lying. One afternoon when she went out to the pool to sunbathe, and I knew she would be gone a while, I went into her bedroom. She always had made it clear to me that her bedroom was out of bounds, so I had rarely been there, and when I went in it was like entering a stranger’s room, and immediately I felt the excitement, the giddiness of offending the boundaries of a sanctum, of breaking taboo. The room was lush with the uninspired furnishings of a self-indulgent woman, the fuzzy fripperies of poor taste. But I was a child, and I thought it was a wonderfully beautiful place. I looked through all her clothes drawers and closets, looked through her folded underwear, touched all of it. It was while doing that that I felt a strange intimacy with her that surprised me, something I had never experienced before. It struck me as peculiar in the extreme, even then, as a child, to feel closer to her when I handled her underwear than I felt when I was physically near her. I remember thinking—and this was childlike, without insight—that maybe I would find something there among all those trifles of her tacky Sybaritism that would explain things to me.”
Mary stopped, emitted a jerky sigh, and once again started rolling her head on her neck, her hair falling around her head in ever looser canary waves until her face was lost in the tangling webs of it. She stopped and sat still, her arms hanging loose at her sides, long, pale fingers touching Margaret’s naked hips, her face obscured behind the veil of disordered hair.
“I found an electric dildo.”
Outside the tall windows behind her, nighthawks flitted like black fireworks against a cinder sky.
Then, slowly, she raised her arms and cleared her hair away from her face, and Margaret felt the beginning moisture of perspiration where Mary’s crotch rested across his stomach.
“What a thing for a child to find,” she said with bitter hoarseness. “It was a realistic instrument, not just a plastic tube, but ‘anatomically correct,’ of pliable, flesh-colored latex. By this time, I was only too familiar with the real thing, and it took me only a moment to understand the grotesque irony in what I had found. The difference between us, between what she was doing and what I was…doing.”
Margaret was still, his preoccupation with his own erotic stimulation suddenly arrested by the queer timbre of Mary’s voice and by his own sobering prescience.
Mary nodded slowly and rose a little on her knees so that Margaret felt air penetrate the moist band across his stomach where she had been sitting. But Mary was unaware of this delicate sensation, and the muscles in her thighs reacted to something unrelated to what was happening between them.
“Then…it was then that I finally admitted to myself that I hated her,” Mary said. “And I wanted her to know that I hated her. It was easy enough. At this time my father was wanting to have sex with me at every turn, and I spent a lot of time talking him out of it, pushing him away, making excuses. As time went on his approaches were often totally inappropriate…even within the context of the unreality that had become our status quo…when she was in the next room, or when we were out by the pool and he’d follow me into the house on the flimsiest of pretexts. It was just too obvious. How…how…what I did was, I just stopped fighting him off every time.”
She had to stop to swallow.
“So one night we’d been watching television. That damned television…we used it as a narcotic so we wouldn’t have to talk to each other. A program was coming on she didn’t want to watch, but her favorite show was scheduled right after it. I don’t even remember what it was.” She paused. “That’s interesting, my not remembering…what it was. Anyway, she decided to bathe and come back in half an hour for her show. As soon as she left, he started whimpering and pawing at me. It was just too much; I decided this was the time to do it.
“I fought him off for a long time because I knew if I let him go ahead he’d be through by the time she came back. I held him off and held him off, right there on the sofa in front of the damned television. Finally, he was really grunting for it, and it was about ten minutes before her program started. I let him start undressing me. I even let him take everything off like he always wanted to do at these times, but I’d never let him. I wanted him to commit himself so far that there couldn’t be any misunderstanding about what she found when she walked in.
; “I gave up, closed my eyes, and disassociated myself, just floated off into another world, but I heard her walking through the kitchen toward the family room, her shiny gold slippers flapping against the floor—slap-slap-slap-slap. And then they stopped. At this point he was really carried away, so crazy he wouldn’t have heard a gunshot in the room and wouldn’t have stopped if he had. I was out of my body, my eyes squeezed tight, aware only of her footsteps and the sudden silence, imagining her standing there. I wanted desperately to open my eyes to see her expression, to know that she was seeing him, but I was too afraid I’d see myself and him on top of me, and I dreaded that even more than I wanted to see her face. So I didn’t look. But suddenly I heard those quick slap-slap-slap-slaps fading into another part of the house, and just then he finished.
“I remember feeling sick to my stomach, and I honestly thought I was going to throw up on him. I didn’t know what this would mean, that I’d made her see, and I was full of dread for days.” She paused. “I was always full of dread.”
Margaret moved uneasily on the bare sheet, subtly testing the saffron knots, his mind’s eye widening at the possibilities that had begun to parade across the screen of his inner vision like the evolving creature-men in Escher’s Encounter. Reality was proving to be, and not to be, what it seemed. Responding to his movements, Mary lowered herself again onto his stomach, her flesh as warm as the summer night, her weight restricting him.
“How do you think she reacted to what she saw?” Mary asked, looking at Margaret from her cowl of golden hair. She smiled at him, a sardonic and self-mocking smile. “How do you think?” It was a rhetorical question. She wasn’t expecting an answer, and he couldn’t bring himself to speak anyway.
“After lying still and panting a little while, he finally rolled off me,” she continued. “He pulled up his pants and walked away without a word, without looking at me, like always. It was pathetic. Him. Me. Her. All of us. What we were and what we were doing. I went to my own bathroom and cleaned up, and then forced myself to go back to the family room—Jesus, ‘family room’—just to see how she would handle it. She was already sitting in her usual armchair, watching her television show.” Mary leaned a little forward over Margaret’s face. “Eating ice cream,” she said in a stage whisper, and he felt her wine-heavy breath upon his eyes. She straightened up a little. “I remember. She had a big dish of it, three different kinds. I was stunned—I mean, three different kinds—that she even would think to do that, to get three different kinds of ice cream, after what she’d seen, was mind-boggling. She didn’t speak to me when I came in and sat down. She didn’t look at me. I know, because I never took my eyes off her.”
Mary sat back again, and tossed her hair out of her face. “And my father?” she asked, raising her eyebrows at Margaret as if he had asked the question. “Yes, he came back into the room, too…carrying a bowl of ice cream. I don’t remember how many kinds. It was just too bizarre. I mean, it was bizarre to me. Why wasn’t it bizarre to them? He asked me if I wanted some ice cream too. He said he’d get it for me. I just shook my head. I thought I would die right there, of hurt, or just from the sheer desolation of grief.”
Margaret looked at Mary. His heart hammered so fiercely he thought she would feel it where her inner thighs were spread against his stomach. He was perspiring and, for some reason, he didn’t want her to see it. It was running out of the edge of his wig and down the sides of his forehead. He didn’t move. He thought if he moved he would snap the fine strand of his life, that single gossamer filament by which he existed.
“I’ll never forget that night,” Mary continued. “Because that was when I realized…that I’d been bargained off. I was humiliated and frightened. All of a sudden I didn’t think there was going to be an end to it. I was afraid that it would all lead to something even more unimaginable. How far was it going to go? How far could it go? I felt like a fool for taking so long to catch on. I hurt so much. I didn’t think I’d live through it.” Mary stopped. “But I did, of course. After a while you learn that you live through everything. Nothing is too terrible for people to do to you, and if they don’t stop your heart, you can endure anything. Your spirit doesn’t die, so it can be tortured without end and you just go on and on and on. Nothing is so terrible that it simply stops of itself, because the sheer horror of it has reached the point of the unimaginable. It’s not that way at all.” She shook her head. “And that’s the secret of life: that suffering is infinite.”
Margaret looked down the length of his chest at the golden wool of Mary’s vulva resting over his navel. He thought of the vagina dentata that had haunted ancient man. What if, in the too brief space of one’s dying moment, all the laws of reality disintegrated and one passed through a world where such mythologies actually existed?
“At first…I was despondent,” Mary’s voice again resumed its flat inflection. “I was sick, stayed home from school a few days—four days. From that day on I lied to her as an established rule. I’ve never told her the truth about anything significant from that day to this. It seemed reasonable, lie for lie. The first two days I couldn’t keep any food on my stomach, couldn’t keep anything down. He took off from work and looked after me. Or tried to. I didn’t give him much cooperation. She never came into my room. By the second night I was holding down crackers, so the next day he went back to work.
“But, being home alone with her all day, well, I had the opportunity to spy on her in a way that I couldn’t do on Saturdays or after school. It was on the third day that I actually watched her use the dildo for the first time. She had a ritual with it that was…theatrical.” Margaret felt Mary’s thighs widen from his sides in an unconscious imitation of what she was seeing in her mind. “In front of the mirror.”
“On the fourth day, I devised another part of my retaliation. She decided to go shopping and left me at home alone. When I was sure she was gone, I went into her bedroom. Her dresser was covered with perfume bottles, every kind imaginable, lined up like votive fragrances. I had brought a little plastic pitcher with me from the kitchen. I put it in the middle of her bathroom floor, lowered my panties, squatted over it, and urinated until I was empty. Then I spent the next half hour opening every perfume bottle that I could get the top off without its being detected and pouring some of my urine into each bottle. Not enough that she could tell, but enough for me to know that every time she sprayed some of it on her she was spraying herself with my urine, too. On her face and neck, at her hairline, on her arms, behind her knees. She was soaked in my urine every day for months and months. She used a lot of I perfume. I was so despicable to her that she wouldn’t even look at me, refused to see what she had done. But I was with her anyway, intimately, every day. I was in her pores. She breathed me. I was all over her, in private places and in private ways. And the lies and regrets stacked up between us like a high, thick wall, solid and impenetrable.”
Margaret could feel Mary’s thighs trembling against his sides. Her voice had grown hoarse, as if she had screamed all of this from the bottom of her lungs, as if these words of malice had scoured the cords of her throat like a real and brutal acid. The construction of Margaret’s thoughts began to discompose, his ideas failing to comprise intelligible relationships. A fatal mistake. The fragments of Mary’s disintegrated personality tumbled out of his mind like tiny naked and crippled creatures, distorted and aborted little things that plummeted toward him out of a blood-black void, made for revenge, furious at him for their deformities, the stubs and clefts and malformed orifices of which they thrust at him in lewd predictions of the coming horror of his own last moments.
“It was humiliating, you know, not having your mother love you.” Mary turned her head and looked out to the large, hollow night. “I thought there was a reason, that there was something wrong with me that made me unlovable. That was what I honestly believed. Years passed before it occurred to me that maybe it wasn’t my fault. Even when I started hating her for withholding her affection—I was so messed
up—I thought, Well, it’s my fault, but still, unreasonably (I thought) I wanted her to love me in spite of myself, because I was a child. I gave myself some benefit of the doubt, you see; I knew that I couldn’t be expected to think and act like an adult, yet at the same time, I held myself to adult responsibilities. But I wanted desperately to be a child, to be carefree, as other children seemed to be. And I wanted her to tell me it was all right to be that way, that I shouldn’t worry myself about anything at all, that I should just go out and play. But she never did that. She never told me I didn’t have to worry.”
Mary fell silent, her face still turned toward the tall windows, toward the phosphorescing city in the humid belly of the night. Unaware of what she was doing, she had dropped her hands to Margaret’s stomach and was twining her fingers in the kinky hair that grew there. In rigid stupefaction, Margaret fixed his unblinking eyes on Mary’s profile as if he believed, against all reason, that salvation lay in absolute immobility.
“At the same time…I felt protective of her,” Mary continued, turning back to Margaret. “I felt responsible. That’s why I went along with his whining demands from the beginning. I couldn’t forget the itinerant life we’d led in those shabby rooming houses all across Dixie, those long, hot nights when I listened to her cry herself to sleep and nursed my own fears as best I could by comforting a doll with a porcelain face. So I let him have what he wanted, and we didn’t have to go back to that kind of life again. And she knew.”
Mary paused, and her two manicured fists began kneading Margaret’s stomach, kneading and twisting, then pinching, pulling at it fiercely until Margaret’s eyes burned with tears that ran black with mascara.
Margaret was catatonic. Unable either to blink or swallow, saliva suddenly and inexplicably sprang into the pockets of his jaws in such astonishing volume that his gaping, painted lips instantly overflowed with limpid, viscous ropes of it that draped his powdered neck and festooned the blond tresses of his wig. But he was oblivious of this glandular effusion. He saw and knew only Mary, and her ineffable and lethal beauty.
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