“What happened?” I asked.
“All he said was, ‘Oh, brother.’” She sobbed. “You’d think he could have been a little nicer. You’d think he would have known I was just trying to be … uh … be, uh … oh, I don’t know.”
“Romantic?”
“Yeah. Romantic.” Her nose was red and her jowls sagged like old pants. “You’d think getting all those long distance calls, and as poor as we are, he would have known I was just trying to be romantic.”
I tried to think of a quote that would help but all I could come up with was, “‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all,” and I knew that wouldn’t be right. I just sat and watched my mom stare at the phone with such desperation the air in the apartment seemed to smell of it. I hated her for being so helpless. I hated Eddie for not being there when she called. I hated Uncle Walt for driving Eddie away. I had plenty of hate to go around.
But that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst happened five minutes later when I had to call a kid about a homework assignment. I picked up the phone and heard two women on the party line.
“It’s shameful,” one was saying. I recognized the voice. Mrs. Resh. I pictured Mrs. Resh at church with her henna red hair that was thin near the skin so the pink of her scalp showed through. She had pouchy cheeks and a hundred chins. She reminded me of Winston Churchill.
“Tying up the phone, making a fool of herself over a man,” the voice went on. “She’s a hussy. That’s what she is. It makes you ashamed to be a woman.”
I wanted to yell, “It’s none of your business, you gossipy old bats,” but I knew they’d turn that into gossip, too. I set the phone back onto the hook as though it was a baby bird.
Whenever Eddie went away, Reverend Mackey came around. Usually he came on Tuesdays at seven o’clock after we’d had our dinner, but every once in a while he came at 5:30 just about the time my mom got home from work. I usually hotfooted it out to the library when he showed up. I didn’t like Reverend Mackey but I was polite to him on account of my mother. He seemed to cheer her up and calm her nerves. I worried about my mom’s nerves. From the time I was a little kid I worried she’d someday start to bounce and not be able to stop. She’d be like one of those people you read about who get hiccups that last for years except she’d bounce. Year in and year out. The thought of it scared me to death.
She wasn’t the only one I worried about. I was getting pretty odd myself. Before I went to school, before I went out anywhere, I had to read over my lists of insults and quotations. I’d get panicky if I couldn’t remember all the words to a quotation. I kept the lists stashed in my bookbag as though they were stolen treasure. Another thing, I’d lie in bed at night and worry about Uncle Walt and his shell shock. How you could go along acting like a normal person, and then all of a sudden you’re having episodes, trying to punch everybody out. I wondered if there were other kinds of episodes, if all of a sudden you went hysterical thinking you had bugs in your hair or you thought you could fly and jumped off a viaduct into cold black churning water. I wondered if you could get shell shock from someone else. If you could, I figured with our luck, my mom and I would get it from my uncle.
One Tuesday in August, Reverend Mackey came around at 5:15 when I was home alone.
“So, tell me, how are you doing, Nancy?” he asked. “I don’t believe I’ve seen you in church lately.”
“Oh? Well, I’ve been there.”
“You have?” He raised his dark eyebrows and stared at me through his splotchy glasses. I knew he knew I was lying but I didn’t care. Then I got nervous, wondering if it was more of a sin to lie to a preacher.
“Well, one week I had a cold,” I mumbled.
“I see. Well, I’m sorry to hear that. Did you soak your feet in hot water?”
I shook my head. There seemed to be soot in the air, as though it had blown in with him.
“Too bad. Best thing for a cold, pulls it right out.” He headed for the sofa.
“May I sit down? I’ll just wait for Georgia. And while we’re waiting, here, let me show you a new device I invented.”
I perked up, remembering the gizmo he’d brought around before that sucked the poisons out of you. We’d all got a good laugh out of that one.
He opened a paper bag. “This is a muscle massager,” he said. “Relieves your tension.” He pulled out something that looked like the claw the guy wore in The Best Years of Our Lives, the guy whose arms were shot off, except this one was wood and had five curled-up fingers.
“Here.” The Reverend patted the worn blue velour sofa. “Sit down and I’ll demonstrate for you.”
I wasn’t sure I should but my curiosity won out.
He turned toward me. I could see the pores of his face. “Do you ever get tense in the shoulders, Nancy?”
Did I? I nodded.
“Well, just see how good this feels.” He put the mechanical hand on my shoulder and squeezed the wooden fingers. They dug into my shoulder muscles. A dull pain stretched across my upper back. He jiggled the wooden fingers around on one achy muscle and it really did feel good. Then he opened the hands again.
“Pretty clever, huh?”
I laughed. “Yeah. It felt funny.”
“Is that a new hairdo?” he asked, leaning closer. “You’re looking more grown up these days.”
“Uh … yeah.” I started moving away. He looked me up and down. “I can see you’re starting to fill out,” he said. “Starting to flower.”
Fill out? Flower? What kind of talk was that? I peeked down at my yellow cotton skirt and white eyelet blouse.
“Before you know it, the boys will be after you.” The reverend’s voice was low and full of breath. He picked up the mechanical hand and squeezed my left breast with it. “They’ll be after you like that.”
I jumped up and screamed. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“They’ll sweet-talk you and say, my, isn’t that a nice new hairdo, and before you know it they’ll have a hand on your breast. Then they’ll tug at your panties.” He waved the mechanical hand toward my crotch. It caught on my skirt and swooped up the hem of it.
I smacked the wooden hand away and stood. “Get out,” I screamed.
“Wait, wait.” The reverend was panting like when you run fast. “Calm down now. I’m just trying to warn you about the ways of the world.”
“You are not. You’re doing dirty, disgusting things.” I was shaking so much I felt like one of those blizzards in a paperweight.
His head snapped and he looked up to me. “Now, now,” he said, “sit down and we’ll pray together. We’ll ask the Lord to keep you pure. We’ll ask the Lord to help me. You. I mean you.” There was sweat above his upper lip. The mechanical hand hung down, limp in his fingers.
“No, I won’t sit down. How could you do such a filthy thing?” My voice sounded shrill.
He didn’t move, so I ran out.
10
NANCY
I raced down the stairs, my legs spinning like bicycle wheels, circled the pavement in nervous, jagged steps, and dashed toward Third Street. When my mom came around the corner, we crashed into one another.
I jerked back. “Do you know what that filthy Reverend Mackey did?” I screamed. “He grabbed me. Here.” I pointed to my chest, then quick crossed my arms as though my mother might grab for me herself. “And he reached for my crotch.”
My mom’s jaw dropped. “Grabbed you?” She looked at my arms clutched together in front of my eyelet blouse and then at my face. “Are you sure?”
“What do you mean am I sure? Of course I’m sure. With a mechanical hand.”
“A what?” My mom started to smile, then she realized I wasn’t joking and her face went white.
“We should call the police,” I yelled in a rusty voice. I threw my hands out in front of me in frantic spurts as though trying to fling dirt off them. “We should have him arrested.”
“Nancy, shhhh.” My mother pulled me into the doorw
ay of Sunny’s Just-Rite Appliances murmuring, “Shhh.”
“No, I won’t shhhhh,” I screamed.
“Nancy, don’t … don’t make a scene.” She put her hand over my mouth. It smelled like powdered doughnuts. “People are looking at you.”
I shoved her hand away. “I don’t care.” I turned toward the street and raised my voice. “We should yell it at them. Reverend Mackey is an evil old man.”
“No, no, no.” My mom looked panicky and clamped her hand over my mouth again, her fingers trembling. Or maybe it was my lips trembling. I closed my eyes, feeling like a prisoner in the doorway of Sunny’s Just-Rite Appliances. I thought I might suffocate, and for a minute I gave in to it, as though it would be the answer to all my problems. My mom took her hand away, and when I opened my eyes, her face was a watery blur, then it became two faces, then three all swimming in the late afternoon sun. I wanted to slap them, all three of them, wanted to knock them off and watch them roll like cantaloupes across South Market Street. For a minute I hated my mother so much it scared me.
She leaned forward and whispered, “You’re all upset. Let’s go back to the apartment. You have to calm down.” Her lipstick was just a ridge around the rim of her lips.
I pulled away, yelling, “I don’t have to calm down.” I put an extra screech into the word “don’t” to show I meant business. I’d never yelled at my mother before. A part of me liked it.
Her face crumbled. “Please … you’re embarrassing me.” Tears started up in her eyes.
That did it. I felt something blur and fade inside me, like the ink on a letter that’s been left out in the rain. “Of course,” I said to myself. “I’ve always embarrassed her. Just being alive I embarrass her.” I went limp and stared at a red and white sign in Sunny’s window that said, “You’ll be proud to have the neighbors talk when you wash with Maytag.”
We walked back, wiping our eyes, not talking except once when we passed Mrs. Stiles getting out of her Packard. There was a big black A on the window that told how many gallons of gas she could get in a week.
My mother flashed a bright smile and shook her head. “These summer colds. Sometimes they’re the worst, aren’t they?”
“Isn’t that the truth?” Mrs Stiles said back, looking at us as though she knew something was up.
At the apartment door, my mom fiddled in her purse for a long time searching for the key, then started up the stairs with draggy steps. I noticed her slip stuck out. She didn’t keep herself up as much when Eddie went away. At the top, she turned and looked down at me, her face blank as a paper doll’s.
“He’s gone,” she called out in a flat voice.
When I got upstairs, she lit a cigarette and put it down in the ashtray on the end table by the sofa. The smoke curled around the See No Evil monkeys. She brought two cold Cokes.
“Now, what’s this about a mechanical hand?” she asked, with a hint of a smile again. I realized myself how ridiculous it sounded and that made me feel even more furious.
“He said it was a muscle massager. But he grabbed my chest with it and then he reached toward my crotch.”
My mom frowned and put the Cokes on the scarred wood coffee table. She took a drag on her cigarette. “Nancy, I think your imagination is … uh … getting the best of you.” She gave me a look like you do at a pet that’s misbehaved.
My insides churned with a mix of rage and pity. My mom hardly ever got a chance to look superior. Everyone else knew more than she did, had more confidence, understood the world better, and everybody knew it. I was the only person my mother could look down on.
“It’s true.” I raised my voice to make up for the weakness I was starting to feel in my stomach and my toes. “I wouldn’t make up something like that. Why would I make it up?” My voice came out in harsh bursts. “He said the boys are going to start grabbing at me and we should pray to the Lord to keep me pure.”
“He said that?”
I nodded. My throat ached; my head throbbed.
My mom’s eyes flickered for a minute as though she remembered something, then she looked around at the walls and the ceiling. She plunked onto the sofa and started crying, not just tears, but real sobs.
I barely breathed, “I’m sorry,” without being sure what I was sorry about except that I knew it was going to be hopeless trying to talk to my mother.
The untouched Cokes sat fizzing and hissing as I slumped on a chair and stared at the shadow of a tree dancing on the wall. One leaf kept dipping toward my mom’s cheek and then away again. Up, down, up, down. It got close but never quite touched her.
11
CORA, 1944
Reverend Mackey hooted. “A mechanical hand. That girl! What will she think of next?” He looked at Cora and laughed so hard, tears steamed his glasses. He took them off, pulled a crumpled handkerchief out of his pocket and rubbed it in a circle on the lenses with a large thumb. “A mechanical hand. Wait until I tell Enid that one. That’s even better than the Foul Rift story. A mechanical hand.”
The telephone rang. The reverend stuffed the handkerchief back into his jacket pocket with a quick, sharp jab and picked up the receiver. Cora closed her eyes, listened to the rectory clock tick, and thought back.
It’s two days earlier. The phone call comes from Nancy, sobbing, “Oh, Aunt Cora, something terrible has happened.” “What?” Cora asks, and Nancy explains, talking in short, raggy bursts, saying that Georgia won’t believe her. Cora drives to Marysville right away, telling Walt Georgia is feeling under the weather, knowing she can’t tell Walt the truth. Walt would be too cruel about news like this, would taunt, “Well, what do you expect? Like mother, like daughter, right?”
Nancy is waiting, pacing on the sidewalk outside the apartment, running her fingers through disheveled hair.
Cora parks the Packard, says, “Let’s walk,” and they start up Broadway. The air is chilly and dusty. “I’ve heard stories about the reverend,” Cora tells Nancy as they pass a dry cleaner’s with a dying rubber plant and a “Remember Pearl Harbor” sign in the window. “But more that he’s a voyeur.”
“A what?” Nancy’s lips tremble and droop at the corners, as if little invisible weights were pulling on them.
“A voyeur. He likes to peek into people’s lives, listen to them confess their sins.” Cora laughs bitterly. “Especially their sins of the flesh.”
Hank Bailey waves from his stool behind the ancient counter of his News and Cigar Shop. Balding now, Hank has sat in the same dusty window for as long as Cora can remember, watching the world go by. Cora wonders what Hank knows about the reverend.
She nods to him as she continues talking to Nancy. “I always figured if Georgia felt better for confessing, what was the harm? Georgia is so…” Cora stops walking, looks at Nancy and her expression softens “… so Georgia.” She laughs a forced husky laugh, then grabs Nancy’s hand. “But taking advantage of a child. We can’t allow this.” She promises Nancy she’ll go to talk to the reverend.
Now, as she sat in the rectory, however, Cora was nonplussed. She’d expected a denial, had even planned a response: “Well, of course, we expected you to say it wasn’t true, but you should know there’ve been rumors, Reverend Mackey. We all know about your so-called private confessions. But this. An improper advance to a child. This is serious business.”
The reverend hung up the phone, looked at Cora and said, “Now where were we? Oh, yes, a mechanical hand.” He roared again, a loud, forceful laugh that filled the room. Suddenly Cora felt weak and confused. Walt could do the same thing to her, use his deep, strong voice as a weapon, loud and cruel, knowing the words didn’t matter, it was the hugeness of the sound that intimidated her. Beads of sweat dampened her forehead. She felt a little ridiculous, but pulled herself erect.
“It’s no laughing matter, Reverend,” she said quietly. She kept her eyes on him. She’d be damned if she was going to let him get the better of her.
The reverend dropped his head for a second, then look
ed up with a pious expression. “You’re right. I shouldn’t laugh at one of my flock.” His voice quieted and took on an apologetic tone. “Tell Georgia she shouldn’t punish the girl, just pray for her soul. Tell her I’ll come to the apartment and we’ll pray together.”
“I don’t think you should do that, Reverend Mackey.” Cora realized the reverend would overwhelm Georgia with his phony piousness. “You can deny whatever you want, but there’s a child at that apartment who is shocked and suffering.” She noticed a quick frown come and go on the reverend’s face as she spoke. Mama would be proud of her. “And I don’t want you frightening her more.”
She got up resolutely. “And another thing,” she said, picking up confidence as she rose, knowing she had a model’s poise. “You haven’t heard the last of this.” She grasped the polished brass doorknob of the rectory with sweaty palms but a sure steady pressure, opened the door, and marched out.
But later at the apartment when Cora told Georgia what she’d done, Georgia lit up a Raleigh, waved the match back and forth. “Look,” she said, “I don’t want to … uh … stir up trouble. You know, Nancy has told a lot of tall tales.” The match flame quivered in the late afternoon light, like a tiny warning signal. Georgia looked haggard and her short blond lashes looked wet. “After all, we don’t know what … happened. We weren’t there.”
12
NANCY, 1944
I wouldn’t drop it. The hate in me was too big. On the Monday after Aunt Cora’s visit, I told bigmouth Florence Butz about it just before gym class, knowing Florence would tell everybody else. I sat down next to her on a bench in the locker room and almost gagged on the words. “Reverend Mackey squeezed my bosom … with a mechanical hand,” I said. “Last week.” Blood pounded at my ears. “And he grabbed at me down there.” Describing it was almost as bad as when it happened, in some ways worse, as though admitting it was like saying I’d agreed to it. I forced myself anyway. I was determined not to let the reverend get away with it.
Rhonda the Rubber Woman Page 9