by Jeffrey Lent
Katey lifted her beer, reminded herself to go slow, all ways, sipped and said, “I guess. I don’t really know.”
“You will. Kevin’s a great guy. And he’s—we’re worried about the draft, the new bill they’re writing this summer. A bunch of deferments will be changed. But, also, next year he turns twenty-six and it looks like that won’t change. So if we can make it until then he might be safe. My dad thinks he’s a pussy, thinks he ought to sign up. Like he did. Thinks this is the same war he fought.”
“My dad was in the war, also.”
“Sure. What’s he think about Vietnam?”
“I don’t know.”
Laurie looked at her. “No brothers?”
“Nope. Just me.”
Laurie nodded. Then she said, “You can crash as long as you want. I mean that.”
“I might stay another day. I’m awful tired.” Thinking she’d drive out in the morning and buy some groceries, not much but enough. Maybe take Luna along and try to figure out what would be a nice treat. Cautiously. Ice cream, for certain.
Then Laurie said, “Harriet’s staying on through the summer. She’ll go back to New Hampshire when the fall semester starts, but not until then. She got a job today. There’s a bookstore in South Hadley. She always was a reader.”
They sat silent then, that message out between them. Katey was feeling a bit fuzzy, pleasantly so, but unsure of what words to offer.
Laurie stood and said, “I’m going in. He often falls asleep easy and then pops back up in about ten minutes and when he does that it can take a while to get him down again. But once he’s really down, he’s lights out until dawn. I’ve got some weed, Jamaican. We can all smoke a jay, listen to some records, just hang out.”
Katey looked at her. She said, “I smoked some last night. So maybe I’ll just sit with you two, if you don’t mind. I may go to bed soon. I’m still kind of worn out.”
“Sure. That’s cool. It’s a good thing except when it isn’t.” She pointed down and said, “Bring that last beer, if you want it. Or not. That’s cool, too. Whatever you want.”
“Thanks. I think I will.”
Laurie said, “Solid.” And turned toward the house and then turned back. She said, “Katey?”
“What?”
“Harriet? What is it she calls herself, these days?”
“Uh … Luna? I think?” Wondering if she was someway betraying.
But Laurie only said, “Luna. The moon sister. That figures.”
And turned and walked to the house.
She made it halfway through the last beer and was abruptly, absolutely done. She was slung down in a beanbag chair where she pondered how she might stand out of it without falling out, or down upon the floor. Music was playing low, but entered through her nonetheless, a stabbing soaring electric guitar and deep bass, shimmering cymbals, a voice unlike anything she’d ever heard, a man that stabbed again it seemed directly to her groin. The pot smoke was thickly aromatic, smelling a bit of skunk, a bit of spruce needles. Laurie and Luna huddled close on the couch. Smoking and talking low, laughing. Katey felt forgotten and again the waves of exhaustion overcame her and she recalled the fright upon the rocks above the ocean in Maine. The bottomless, unfathomable dark, roiling heedless for her. Then she was up, legs liquid from thighs to knees and she spoke but her tongue was thickened to fill her mouth and Luna uncoiled quickly from the couch and embraced her, then guided her to the office with the twin bed. Or perhaps she imagined that. But certainly when she woke some countless hours later she was back within the bed, the covers pulled tight over her, in her underwear and the same T-shirt she’d worn that afternoon. And her heart was beating against her ribcage as if it would burrow free of her. As if it would leave a fouled home. She pushed up and back into the corner where the head of the bed met the wall, gasping, again sorting out where she was. In panic so acute she didn’t understand it was panic—a state of being, a doorway not walked but pitched through.
The room was dark but for a faint bar of light at the bottom of the door. She settled her eyes on that narrow low rectangle of light. Pictured the room beyond and then knew for certain where she was. Doing this, the booming of her pulse in her ears also did not subside but she now understood what it was. What? Her heartbeats had overtaken her, attacking, forcing her to hear them: This is you stupid girl. The sound of the pump that keeps you living. And for what?
Rape. The very sound of the word not spoken but felt, like a chainsaw. Within her. The apple tree that died two years ago was felled for firewood and then the stump left—her father used a chainsaw to whittle it away, a great spewing of chunks and splinters and a boil of sawdust behind the saw as he moved around the dwindling trunk as it disappeared under the high whine of the saw. Then gone. The year before that at the river end of summer with Charlie Hebard, the school year coming, the two of them alone in their bathing suits and sitting on the hot rocks, then kissing and swimming again and then out, prickled skin and kissing again and she wanted, wanted. She did not know, unsure and sucking her breathing in as she tasted his delicious tongue and he’d told her he wanted her and she told him to rape her because she didn’t have words for what she did want and neither did he. And they stopped. But not before he slipped a finger under the edge of her suit and touched her pubic hair and her breath caught. A snap between loins and chest, a thick swelling in her throat, then gone. But they stopped.
Perhaps it was the word. Likely that neither knew how to proceed. But the word, out between them. She’d said it because she’d read it and it seemed the thing she wanted, until she said it. Not that other word she couldn’t imagine saying although she’d soon enough be whispering it to herself, certain times. Because it was ugly, was what she knew. Rape just seemed what happened. Until she said it.
Sometimes you know what you do not know you do.
She stood from the bed, her heart still a ratchet, and fumbled on the floor for the lump of her jeans and got into them, roughly swerving to sit on the bed again and work them up her legs and hitching up to pull them over her waist. She stood again and eased open the door. Luna was in a sleeping bag on the couch. The light came from a small fluorescent tube over the sink. Katey padded across and ran water, found a jelly jar in the dish drain and drank a glass quickly, then two more slowly. The water had a taste to it—not chemical but slightly smudgy. Not the water she was used to that tasted like nothing but fresh and cold. But water, still.
She was awake and calmer and miles from sleep. The clock face on the stove showed 2:20 in the morning. On the table was an open pack of Parliament cigarettes and she slid one out and made way gently over the linoleum and eased through the door, down into the yard. The sky held a light cloud cover, some few stars. Barefoot, she went to the truck and cracked open the door and let herself in. Sat behind the wheel and dug along the top of the dash and found the book of matches there, tore one out and scraped and the interior lit up orange and she drew smoke and blew out the match, rolled down the window and sat, smoking. Her bare feet in the skim of grit on the floorboards. When she inhaled there was just enough flare to see a reflection of herself in the windshield.
Again, she wanted to go home. Again, she couldn’t go home. She smoked and in a quiet voice said aloud, “God damn. I guess I’m going to Virginia.” She felt the wriggle of excitement married atop fear. She threw the butt out the window and again, as she had the night before, wondered if her mother had been raped. It seemed so possible. She knew nothing about how she’d come to be, beyond the ugly night in February. It seemed possible. It seemed unlikely. Or very likely—her mother was a woman who could not resist such an event. But then, neither, it appeared, was she. And she then thought I will know when I meet him. I’ll see it in his face. Even bland and smooth, it was clear to her, a thing impossible to hide. There would be a twitch, a sudden sideways glance. A moment. And she’d be watching for that, knowing to be looking.
Again, the writhe of excitement. Not even sure for what beyond forw
ard motion. On her way. A catapult from that March night, her trajectory. Inevitable. As if she’d been born to do this, to make this journey. As it seemed, she had.
It hadn’t snowed for a week and afternoons walking home from school the sun was high enough so the roadside had trickles of water, just starting to refreeze as the temperatures fell toward night. She was heavy, tired and bloated and had Calculus homework that she didn’t want to do. And the laundry basket of contention was full, in her room. And because it was an alternating Tuesday and her mother had a faculty meeting, she was expected to start dinner. Which, because it was Tuesday, faculty meeting or not, meant browning a pound of ground beef in one pan while cooking an onion and a green pepper in another, then mixing them together and adding a quart jar of tomato sauce canned from last summer’s garden, a can of tomato paste, a packet of seasoning spices from her grandparents’ store while also boiling water for noodles and tearing apart a head of iceberg lettuce from the same store, into a bowl. Setting out the bottle of Italian salad dressing and the tin of grated Parmesan cheese. And setting the table. To eat spaghetti and salad for supper.
Oh, joy.
Her father was in his workshop. She could’ve talked to him but all he would’ve said was Do what your mother tells you. Likely pausing to rub her shoulders a moment, perhaps lift her chin with his large calloused finger and admonishing her to cheer up, that it wasn’t as bad as she thought. So she bypassed that possibility. And once in the house skipped all the rest of it, also. She turned the radio loud and lay on the couch and listened to rock and roll for a while and then the news came on and that just pissed her off even more. She took the key off the hook and went out and climbed in his truck and headed down to the village, passing her mother on the way. At the Dot she stepped in the back door into the kitchen and waited until the night cook, Denny, a long tall stooped drink of a man with a purple birthmark across the side of his face looked up from where he’d been grilling a heap of onions on the flattop and asked her what she wanted and when she told him supper for her family he responded he had liver and onions or shepherd’s pie made fresh that afternoon or anything off the regular menu and she asked if there was bacon to go with the liver also, because she knew her father liked that. There was, and baked potatoes in foil wraps just coming out of the oven. She asked for enough to feed three at least and he piled up portions in waxed containers and she told him she’d settle with Merle out of her next check. And back up the hill she went.
Her mother would eat beef liver but was not fond of it.
Ruth was working over the stove, draining fat from the beef, adding the meat to the sauce as well as a drained can of sliced mushrooms. Katey had forgotten about the mushrooms. Ruth had an apron on over her school clothes, her sleeves pushed up. She glanced over her shoulder as Katey came in and said, “What’s that?”
“Dinner.”
Ruth’s hair was simple, a shoulder-length bob with the ends curled forward. She said, “In a box?”
“From the Double Dot. Liver and onions and baked potatoes in their jackets.”
“Potatoes have skins, not articles of clothing.” Then, “Why?”
“I didn’t feel like cooking. I’ll make a salad, though.”
“You will?”
“I said I would.”
“You said you didn’t feel like cooking.”
“It’s making a salad, not cooking.”
“And what am I to do with this?” Ruth indicated the sauce. Katey noticed there wasn’t a pot of water on the stove for noodles. But she’d already recognized the battle joined. Katey said, “Save it for tomorrow night. We can have it then. I just didn’t want spaghetti tonight. I didn’t feel like cooking.”
“Twice a month I ask you to fix supper. Do you have any idea how many days I come home and don’t feel like cooking? We have to eat, a fact that hasn’t escaped you. Three meals a day, every day of the year.”
“I eat cereal for breakfast almost every morning. And fix my own lunches. Peanut butter and jelly. Do you even care that I hate peanut butter and jelly?” This was not true; she liked the combination as long as the jelly was not raspberry with seeds, which lodged in her teeth. This was about the failure to be allowed to eat the hot lunch at school. Which, mostly, was disgusting. Although there were days she wanted tater tots and sloppy joes. And while saying and thinking this she was moving around her mother, laying out the liver in another pan, spooning the onions over it, setting bacon strips on top, covering the pan but not yet turning it on. The food still warm to the touch. The three giant potatoes brilliant in their shiny wraps in the oven.
“For four years now you’ve made your lunch. And even then, many days your father does it for you. Don’t think I don’t know that.”
“And why not? He enjoys it, often while I’m eating breakfast. We chat about our days. You’re already gone.”
Then Ruth turned to the fridge and lifted out the head of lettuce and tore the wrapper free, pulled a bowl from the shelf and with a great whomp brought the iceberg down upon the counter and pulled free the core, stripped off the outer leaves and began to shred it into the bowl. As she said, “Yes. Well, it’s a paycheck. And if you want to waste your money hard-earned as it is, that’s your business. Although next year when you’re at college you may regret it. But that’s your business. I suppose you need to go put your laundry in the dryer.”
“I’ve got Calculus and also the second act of Hamlet to read tonight. I’ll do my laundry then.”
“I see. And all done and dried and folded by nine o’clock.”
“I might stay up until ten, Mother.”
And as this is occurring, both women are seething, but each believing themselves clinical and cool, and so thinking on a second level that feeds the first outer, vocal level. As large trout feed upon a hatch of insects. These underwater thoughts.
She thinks her mother is a pinched angry woman who has settled for a life where she is a small god among children, with a quiet distant husband, whom she has allocated to a realm of some version of childhood, a shambling amiable and largely ineffective creature against her own starched efficiency. All those novels she reads—who was she kidding? Besides, of course, herself. She fussed about Vietnam but worried about the communists—look what we walked away from in Korea and how that turned out? And she’d loved Kennedy, or perhaps had loved Jackie, and so distrusted LBJ and worried that the whole Civil Rights business was necessary but perhaps just maybe a wee bit rushed? If you pushed people too hard, too fast, wasn’t it human nature to push back? Well, the woman was old and maddening and didn’t understand how the world was changing and that was her right but not her right to force her moribund wretched small-town views upon her daughter. Who was an adult. Practically an adult. And while thinking this she pushed around her mother just gently enough to not be reprimanded and turned the heat to low under the pan of liver and onions and lifted the lid and ate a piece of bacon because she wanted to and what was wrong with that, anyway? When she served it onto plates she planned to skip the bacon altogether, just onions for her and more bacon for her dad. But her mother didn’t say anything to that. Fine.
She was thinking, Fine then but I won’t do her laundry if she doesn’t, she can live in a sty if that’s how she wants it and felt herself curdle a bit at the thought of what then the girl would wear to school. God knows it was hard enough just getting her, all of them, to adhere to the dress code, as if somehow they all knew someone, somewhere, was instructing them they didn’t have to. And of course there were multiple someones, those voices over the radio, through the television, just barely a bit older than these children who walked through the halls of her school daily, strange and alien except for those few who weren’t and even she had to admit that those had always been the ones to plod, clopping along until freed back to the farm or their father’s garage; to get pregnant and leave school before graduating, setting up house and thus also proving the waste of all those years the town, the state, the country, had l
avished upon them, attempting to offer a step up and out, and this galled her even as she knew it had always been this way and even needed, for those few, to be this way. But also how daily she walked through the funk, the odors, the eyes-turned, as these children that her daughter yet walked among turned their eyes upon each other, their jutting breasts and nyloned legs in very short skirts, the boys with their hair popping around their ears, the tumescence in their trousers, some few who wore jeans or striped bell-bottom pants, lounging back in their chairs, openly doodling on their tests or quiz sheets while they ran eyes over the girl in the row beside them, that same girl with a second blouse button opened and how did they not know that she saw all this? The reek of sex hung about them as a fume. And yet she knew, damn it she certainly did know that it had always been this way and always would be and yet—the music from their transistors was ribald and held nothing of romance about it, the urging voices to Get it on, to Do it, to be feeling groovy and she had a pretty good idea what groovy meant. Turn on, tune in, drop out. Good God. The sheer wrongness of it all took her breath away.
Thus, together, they jostled the kitchen. Bristling and silent to each other. Both knowing someway the other’s pique.
Then Ruth said, “I will not.” Her teeth were clenched. “I will not wash your clothes. Do you understand?”
“Jesus Christ, Mom,” Katey said. “I already told you I’d do them later.”
“Don’t you Jesus Christ me!”
“What is wrong with you?” Hearing herself, knowing she was pitched too high and angry with herself for it, but more angry with her mother for provoking this way.
“What’s wrong with who? My girls.” Oliver had opened the door and came in. Shaking his head as if to dislodge snow, not against the temper of the room. He fooled neither of them. But they allowed him to think so.
Ruth said, “Nothing’s wrong with anybody, honey. Do you want a beer before we eat?”
His head swung back and forth between them. “No, thanks. I don’t believe I do.”