Dear Digby

by Carol Muske-Dukes

  “Dad?”

  He glanced up at me—his eyes were surprisingly clear—but his words were slurred. “It’s okay, Willis, it’s all okay. It’s all taken care of. Go to bed now.”

  I remember asking what, what had been taken care of.

  He turned away from me.

  “Eleanor,” he said, “tell her to get to bed now. Shut the door.”

  She came to the door and looked down at me for a minute.

  “Go to sleep now, Willis,” she said. “You need to sleep.” She shut the door in my face.

  I wondered if she was remembering this too. “You’re not crazy,” she said again. “You’re thinking about that Matthew Kallam thing, aren’t you? Well, I can tell you my feeling about that. Your father whisked it all away at the time; he forbade me to mention it to you ever again. So we just let it go. But there it is, still on your mind, after all these years, of course. As I told him it would be.”

  She laughed ruefully and shook her head. “It was an accident, that’s all. A tragic, tragic happening, but an accident all the same. And the way your father raised you, Willis, to be a kind of … smart-ass—that was an accident too. All wrong. He needed a son to make a smart-ass of.”

  “So that’s what’s wrong with me? I’m a smart-ass?”

  I saw her again in her satin dressing gown, the fear in her face as she looked at me. Then I saw myself rushing in the door, sixth grade; we were stationed at Schofield that year: we had a gorgeous tacky house with a lanai covered with vines, a vine roof, those tiny geckos crawling on the walls, ceiling fans—I was in heaven. I ran in with my report card, straight A’s! I called—and she hugged me. She was brown from the sun, and she had my favorite perfume on, La De, and when I hugged her tighter (I couldn’t stop myself, I just couldn’t let her go), she pulled away. I held on grimly. It was almost a polite struggle. She laughed nervously and pulled away with force, smiling at me.

  Now she winked and got up to adjust the color. I watched her kneel in front of the set. She turned and showed me her profile, pouty, full-lipped, pixieish in her sixty-first year, framed by the twenty-one-inch head of Dan Rather. A gold scalloped earring flashed.

  She threw the comment over her shoulder: “You just don’t let people love you.”

  It was a cold sunny day; the breeze batted fountain water on us.

  “I’m not crazy,” I said, echoing my mother.

  Terence didn’t look convinced.

  “Who were all those old ladies last night? Friends of your mom’s?”

  I asked him to forget about the night before. I’d bigger troubles than that, I told him. I gave him a capsule description of The Watcher. I asked him to accompany me down to my apartment. I was scared, I told him. What I didn’t say was that I wanted to be with him again.

  He put his arms around me. “Willis, if you’re in trouble, I’m here.”

  For once I said nothing, though I had to K.O. and straitjacket my tongue. We sat a long time holding each other. Then we got up, hailed a cab, and sped down Fifth.

  In my apartment the sun was blinding. We sat having coffee in the tiny kitchen. Nothing that had happened yesterday seemed real: The Watcher, W.I.T.C.H., the .38 still smoldering in my book bag. Sunlight leaped from the chrome pots and pans hanging from a metal hoop and dazzled a row of glass spice jars. My neighbor, the would-be opera singer, fractured his scales. Ti do ti.

  I found that I could not refer to our separation and impending divorce. Terence seemed reluctant to bring the subject up too. Before long we were holding each other again and walking to the bedroom. My platform bed waited, a low altar.

  No bogeyman in there. Just whatever we had to fear from each other, after we pulled the shades, which turned out at the moment to be nothing. At the moment it turned out that we wished each other well; in fact, wished each other intense joy and pleasure. We seemed to want to forgive each other, if that’s what the sobbing and caressing, the cries to God, and the long very specific silences were all about. We made love and then we lay quietly, listening to the opera singer.

  “I don’t know how to say this. …” he began, thereby saying everything.

  “You want to tell me that you’re sorry about the miscarriage.”

  He looked at me, worriedly. “Yes. Couldn’t you let me say it? I never got a chance to really tell you how I felt until now.”

  I had a little newsreel I ran in my head. It featured me and my unborn child. The newsreel was the old Movietone variety; the voice-over quavered with mock portentousness. It seemed I was in the news, because I was a medical aberration—the child in my womb could talk to me.

  I demonstrated this phenomenon for the camera by placing a microphone on my huge belly.

  “Are you there?” I asked in a soft voice. “Are you there?”

  “Yes,” answered an eerie, flutelike voice. “Take that thing away.”

  The miracle was, my kid and I had long dialogues about life as I lay in bed, touching my belly. I made the cameras disappear from my reverie, but the grainy newsreel background remained. I saw myself, lying there, talking with my child.

  “It’s a very strange world,” I told her. “You might not like it when you come out.”

  There was a pause. Then the eerie flutevoice. “I have to come out?”

  I looked over at Terence. This was not the kind of imagery one could easily paint, postcoitus. But the daydream had been around for some time—came and went, got longer and more complex. The unborn child, Lily, said wondrous things to me. Like Tracy St. Martin, the woman I’d called up that night, I talked to my womb.

  I began to cry. And Terence, as the script demanded, was tender, compassionate, comforting. He put his arms around me, he held my head against his heart. But did I believe he knew what I felt, what shadows I saw moving on the shade? He was a man who’d just made love to a woman, soon to be smoothing his mussed hair and checking his Rolex. Deep inside he thought the tears were flattering; he thought the tears were for him.

  I sat up. “Terence, I have a sort of fantasy. I fantasize that I am still carrying a child, that she has a name and I can talk to her. I mean—I talk to her and she answers me. Her name is Lily. She tells me all kinds of things: what a heartbeat sounds like on the inside, how she can tell if I’m deep asleep or when I wake up. … I tell her about life outside, what the subway is, why it’s so noisy, what happens when I’m startled, what sunlight looks like, and I’ve tried to explain touch. You see, that’s a hard one for someone in the womb to follow. …” I began to cry again.

  Terence, who had been looking at me in astonishment, then did a wonderful thing. He slid down my body and put his mouth against my belly.

  “Lily,” he said. “Lily, Willis. Lily. Do you feel this? Do you both feel this? This is touch.” And he kissed my stomach.

  After a long time we got up. He checked the door locks and secured all the windows. I didn’t mind any of this show of male protectiveness. For one thing, though it made me nervous, it had a short shelf life (who can be protective all the time?) and I knew it made him feel good. Why shouldn’t one of us feel good? I personally felt that an attack dog and twelve precinct alarms couldn’t keep this guy out. And I knew I had to face this on my own. But I didn’t say that.

  We put in a call to Detective Blair, who was out, but whose secretary swore he’d call back. Terence even offered to talk to Whizzer the doorman, impress on him the need for vigilance.

  He asked to see the .38, turned it solemnly over and over in his hands.

  “I don’t like you carrying this,” he said. “It makes me very nervous.”

  “It makes me a lot more nervous that this guy wants to cut me up in tiny pieces and serve me at Benihana.”

  He handed the gun back.

  “Your letters column has become a personal ad for your self-destructiveness. An ‘I dare you’ to the world.”

  “That’s what I need right now. A little armchair psychology. It may interest you to know, Herr Doktor, that I am, even as we
speak, late for an interview with someone from the Mirror who thinks that my letters column recently did a great deal of social good. Self-destructive as it may be.”

  Terence stopped me at the door. “It would be great if we didn’t ruin things now.” He kissed me. I believed suddenly that he cared about me. It happened just like that. And it was not due to his careful lack of theatricality or my own nostalgia for our shared past. It was simply that when I looked at him, he looked straight back at me. He looked exhausted suddenly and ordinary, somebody concerned and pained. His appropriation of my suffering was familial: I recognized the feeling and returned it. It was as if everything about our relationship had acquired a weariness that was good, almost languorous, surprising in its sexual and familial irony. We had been hurt together.

  He put on his jacket and followed me into the elevator. As I stepped out into the street, he remained in the lobby, talking earnestly to Whizzer the doorman, one hand on the older guy’s gold-braided shoulder.

  “But why would you believe the things said in a letter from an inmate of an insane asylum?”

  My interviewer was trying to get me to admit something. I wasn’t sure what. She was up against a real deadline: She’d been told she had to deliver my interview for a half-page inset for the following day. She was a tough cookie and I work at the tough cookie bakery. This one was a mean macaroon. Not only that, she was actually wearing a pink mohair suit, an article of clothing I had previously thought existed only in “Benny and the Jets.”

  I smiled back at her. I explained to her how I had come to answer the crazy mail, how I had come to take it seriously. I showed her the rabbit ears. She looked at them, then looked at me awhile, then started scribbling furiously.

  “I’ve also been feeling a bit ‘out of sync’ myself,” I said. “If you feel vulnerable, you’re more open to the vulnerable. I always loved the idea Richard Brautigan had, of a library where rejected manuscripts could be cherished. Iris Moss’s letter was strange, there’s no doubt about that, but it was still a letter from someone, a message, in this case a plea for help.”

  “When you wear those … ears, you feel closer to your correspondents?”

  I put the ears on and the photographer who’d accompanied her started shooting. I saw Page, out of the corner of my eye, holding an imaginary gun to her head.

  “I feel like a radio tower. … I pull everybody in.”

  That night as I lay in bed at Page’s, listening to her singing Springsteen in the shower, Lily spoke to me again.

  “I liked that dream you had last night” she said, “the one where we’re in the beautiful warm place?”

  “Oh yeah … the South Seas,” I said. “I remember that dream now, it was heavenly. We were in Tahiti; I was carrying you inside me, with a gigantic belly, walking on warm white sand at sunset. The water was orchid-colored. The sky was orchid-colored.”

  “Heavenly,” she said. Then, after a while, primly: “But there were boats, bad boats on the water.”

  “Warships. But they didn’t hurt us—they just floated there. They didn’t hurt us.”

  “You walked away down the beach. I could feel you looking toward the light. You were not afraid.”

  “The sun was setting. Turning the water blood-colored. But nothing could hurt us.”

  “We were safe” said Lily. “Safe.”

  Thirteen

  DEAR LETTERS EDITOR,

  Well! I’m Bea Plotkin and I have some socko news that I know you’ll be interested in. I’ve written to you many times before from my residence here in Utah, but apparently my letters did not get through to you.

  You are absolutely right, gals, when you say you gals are equal to the guys. I’m rootin’ for you! You see, I am the Light of the World and I am a gal. I’m the Savior, I’m god. The reason I didn’t put any caps there on god, you see, gals, is because she is now equal to he—and to everyone else in the whole cotton-pickin’ human race! Isn’t that a scorch?

  I know that this is a bit hard to take in, but if you care about the women’s lib movement enough, CHECK IT OUT! Because here’s the clincher: Can you believe that they have me in a hospital here in Skyhigh, Utah, because they are in awe of me, they can’t quite believe that I am who I say I am?! Oh, the tiny, tiny little minnow-minds of them—of wee little faith! god said if you read Chapter 23 of Jeremiah in the King James version of the Bible—he was going to send down another lord. Well, change that he to she, then the lord is me, Lordess of All Light: Bea! Think about it—three letters in god, three in Bea! Please send someone now to assist in my release, so we can get this dog-and-pony show on the road here!

  Blessings on ya, gals!

  Bea

  I scribbled on a SIS pad. There were six letters in Willis … and seven in “eggroll.” I put Bea’s tenth letter aside.

  A handwritten note, no stamp, stuck in with the rest. I recognized the script at once.

  Willis,

  I missed you last night. I wanted so much to see you. I wanted to explain everything to you. I know when you meet me you’ll listen to me. Zero hour is coming, Willis. Please don’t be afraid.

  The Watcher

  I ran, with the note in my hand, to Minnie W-W-G’s reception desk.

  “How did this get in my mail, Minnie? Did you see anybody putting something in one of the bags?”

  “Noooo … listen, Willis, my fiancé and I are thinking of baby names!! Do you still have that list I gave you before you had that … miscarriage? I know it’s jumping the gun a little, but with our hyphen problems—”

  “Minnie. Shut up. Concentrate. Did you see anyone hanging around the lobby, my desk, the elevators? This is important!”

  “Willis, I told you—I haven’t seen anyone. Please don’t take that tone with me. I have a job to do here, you know.”

  She turned away, pouting.

  I asked the elevator operator—he remembered nothing. Either this guy was Mr. Wallpaper or he was dressed up as a janitor—or a mailman. I considered briefly the idea that Nathan Grapes, the 210-pound mailman, was The Watcher, but discarded it.

  Page looked at The Watcher’s note. Her round sweet face looked distressed. “If you take those goddamn ears off, you can come and stay with me tonight.”

  I started to say no, then I thought of my apartment, of trying to sleep in my bed alone.

  “Thanks, Page.”

  Lupé strolled over. She looked like herself again in her overalls and black lipstick and Afro.

  “Don’t worry, Willis,” she said. “One of the Witches lives near your apartment—she walks her pit bull right in front of your building. She’ll let our network know if some bozo is hangin’ around.”

  The next morning Page and I picked up papers at the 72nd Street newsstand on our way to SIS.

  I was featured in both the News and the Mirror. In the News there was the piece, as promised, on Bob Hargill—a photograph with the caption:

  GUN-TOTING GRANNIES “SCALP” HARGILL

  “I’m 72 and I look better than him,” wrinkled “rug” robber retorts!

  There was a large photograph of Hargill’s hair hijack, and there I was, looking stupid in the background; the rabbit ears sticking up like bright ideas. One had only to glance to the front page of the other paper, “Exclusive to the New York Mirror,” an inset box with a photograph of me, again with the rabbit ears on, to make a basic connection.

  “Jesus,” said Page, making the connection, “what are you doing to Bob Hargill here? And look at those ridiculous rabbit ears again! Aren’t you embarrassed by this stuff?”

  I was not, in fact, embarrassed. I was terrified that I would be charged with Forcible Hair Removal or something, but not embarrassed. The News made mention of a “young (compared to the others) blond terrorist in Bugs Bunny ears, who seemed, except for carrying a firearm, to be along for the ride.” The Mirror interview, as I sped-read through it, simply made me sound like an asshole. In fact, Penny Wall, the Mirror reporter, had with unexpected
clemency made me sound like a somewhat charming asshole.

  Under the headline:

  SIS EDITOR WITH “CRAZY” SPIRIT CHANGES THE “LETTER” OF THE LAW

  she had written the following:

  Sitting at her bright red desk piled high with mail from all over the U.S. and Canada and everywhere SISTERHOOD magazine is sold is Letters Editor Willis Jane Digby. Ms. Digby is wearing (besides a pixilated gleam in her large green eyes) a tuxedo jacket and jeans and a pair of rabbit ears on her head. Her bizarre attire underscores her recent personal campaign to redefine what people mean by “crazy.”

  Not long ago Ms. Digby began using her bimonthly column to print (often insulting) personal responses to selected correspondents—in a kind of mean-ingenuous, feminist-Will Rogers style. On the other hand, she began to pay closer attention to what her more unlikely correspondents were actually saying.

  Last week Editor Digby tipped the Mirror off to apparently widespread sexual abuse of patients of Brookheart State Hospital by staff members. She received information about the situation at Brookheart from a letter that would have been tossed into the “circular file” by most editors, after a bemused reading. The letter, from a patient at Brookheart, read, in effect, like a communication from a “crazy person.” The letter’s style was verbose and wandering, with insistent, recurring accusations about “hypnosis” and “seminal fluid.”