Knock Knock

by S. P. Miskowski

  Beverly would also think carefully about what she and her friends had done, and how their oath in the woods had failed. Maybe it was her fault because she had lied to Ethel and Marietta, but they had been little girls back then. She had never believed in the oath, not with her whole heart. She knew Ethel believed, and Marietta entered into the ceremony so gravely that Beverly had almost laughed out loud while listening to her say the words.

  They were silly, both of them, but they were her only friends. Throughout her pregnancy they had gone on trying to get past her mother, if only for a brief visit. Finally they had started taping cards and notes to her window. Beverly had retrieved and read them at night when her mother slept. She thought of so many replies, so many things she wanted to tell them. Yet she kept these thoughts to herself, maybe because they were the only things she could command in her parents' house, once she had disappointed them forever by "ruining" herself.

  Naively she had thought only people who made love all the time had babies. Not a girl like herself. Not because of one afternoon in the woods. She was ashamed, but not because of the baby. She was ashamed to find that she was so gullible, so ignorant, so much her parents' daughter.

  She had heard of other girls her age, teenagers who had to leave school because of mono. There had always been stories and rumors. Now she could only think of those young women like herself, hiding in their bedrooms. Pretending to be asleep to avoid another conversation about consequences. Being assaulted with questions they would rather die than answer. Plotting impossible escapes by night, plotting murder and other forms of spite while their fat, stupid families slept and snored throughout the house.

  Marietta

  Marietta was seventeen, almost eighteen. Ever since she started high school she had been responsible for more and more of Delphine's clients and their needs. Now Delphine was slowing down, aging fast and frequently ill with arthritis. Marietta was capable of taking over her aunt's business, but she wasn't sure she wanted to. She felt more than ever at the mercy of her erratic visions, or "intuitions" as Delphine called them to make them seem less frightening to the women who visited with various ailments.

  Often nowadays Marietta wondered what it would be like to be an ordinary young woman. The more she learned from Delphine the more she felt burdened by the old woman's ancient profession. In particular she wished not to carry the weight of what she knew about Delphine's past.

  "Back then."

  Delphine began her stories this way. As though she were telling a fairy tale, or the events she was about to recount happened so long ago that they were shrouded in mystery and the people involved could be forgiven for their backwardness because they were not as educated or evolved as modern people. In truth the individuals Delphine named were intelligent enough to know what they were doing, and the events took place only a few years before Marietta was born. The proximity made all of it that much worse.

  Marietta's only option was to tolerate what she knew. To damn Delphine would be to damn herself and her home. Over the years, as she learned more, she also learned to accept more.

  "Back then, being poor in Skillute didn't mean getting by. It meant starving and watching your children starve. This idea people have nowadays about community, there was nothing like that in Skillute. People looked out for their own, and no one else."

  "You said yourself," Marietta reminded her aunt, whose thoughts seemed to fade a bit each day. "What's dead and gone doesn't come back, if you're careful. It's over and done."

  "No. I said: As it was," Delphine corrected her. "Nothing that was real can be real as it was. An injured spirit sheds life but not the craving. It still wants to live."

  "How?" Marietta asked.

  "As something else. We break down into the smallest bits of dust and become whatever is around us. If that's purely good, we become part of the good."

  "Then there's nothing to be afraid of."

  Delphine shook her head.

  "There's no pure good in anybody I've met. People wrestle with themselves and good doesn't always win, even in a person who wants to be good. Wickedness comes looking for a home. It's a cancer you've got to avoid, Marietta. Keep yourself clean and keep your house clean. Say your incantations every day. Once you let it in, all that's craving life in the shadows will find you. If things want to live, they find their way to the wicked."

  John Colquitt was thirty-five, twice divorced, and unemployed most of the year. Why Marietta chose him she couldn't explain. All he owned was an old Chevy pickup, bleach-white, sagging in the middle where the frame had bent when he rolled it in a ditch during a four-day binge. He had worked here and there, in a factory line, planting trees, picking strawberries and wild ginger and selling it on the road in summer, any odd job that paid.

  He had lined up a three-day chore clearing blackberry bushes for Delphine. It wasn't an arrangement the old woman liked. But given another season the blackberries would overwhelm the herb garden and the house and the beehive, and every square foot of Delphine's already limited property. Doing away with the pernicious plant was a job for a man. She hired the first one who came along offering his services. She told him if he wanted to be paid he had to finish up in less than a week and be gone.

  It was a sweaty job and John Colquitt went shirtless a couple of times. Each time Delphine went hobbling out to the yard to speak with him. Marietta heard their voices raised and saw John make a show of putting his perspiration-soaked work shirt back on. As soon as Delphine's back was turned he made a bowing motion with a tiny flourish, like he was saying goodbye to a queen.

  Delphine had been ill for a few years. She was often in pain, but she got by with her remedies and with help from Marietta. As far as the girl knew, her aunt's only real complaint was arthritis. She was dumbfounded when Delphine died in her sleep, leaving her the rundown house and its contents.

  Marietta had lived with her aunt all of her life. She wasn't surprised at her meager inheritance, but she was confused by the prospect of living alone. She had her friends Ethel and Beverly, but because of the nature of her aunt's work she had never been allowed to bring people home after school. There was no one close by that she trusted completely.

  The morning after the burial John Colquitt paid Marietta a visit. She had brushed her hair for a long time at dawn, and made a wish against her better judgment.

  "I figure you could use a shoulder to cry on," John said, offering a rough handful of violets.

  Marietta looked him over through the screen door. She knew he'd pulled the flowers up nearby, maybe even from her back yard, but she thanked him. Nobody had ever given her flowers, and she had always wondered what it was like. She broke into a smile, and this was surprising to her. It felt good.

  She had to find a clean glass for the violets. John Colquitt followed her and stood nearby while she searched the kitchen cabinets for just the right one, a ruby red glass with a leaf pattern cut into it. When she tried to move past John to reach the sink, he gently touched her arm.

  "You're all by yourself now," he said, taking a look around the sparsely furnished house. His hair and face smelled of aftershave; it was strong and Marietta liked it. She remembered nothing about her father except the potent fragrance from a brown bottle of cologne, a rum-scented aftershave.

  "I've got coffee started, if you want some," Marietta told her future husband.

  She had finally stopped going to school altogether that year. Ethel was living with her aunt and getting ready to take a few design classes at the community college. Beverly was making the most of being on the cheerleading squad her senior year in high school. The three met for lunch once in a while. She said nothing about John.

  For all her friends knew, Marietta was living alone after Delphine died. They said they envied her. They said she had a nice house all to herself. Then they went home, and she was alone.

  The women who came to her aunt for remedies and advice were just as happy to visit Marietta as Delphine, but now Marietta began to turn the
m away. Still they kept stopping by offering a gift of chocolates, silver jewelry, canned ham, a roast chicken, or a bolt of fabric. She stopped answering the door. She was going to forget all of it, the spells and remedies, the shadows and visions. She would call her intuitions dreams. She would be like everyone else from this moment on. She was afraid of what John Colquitt would think if he knew the truth about her. She did all she could to bury the past with Delphine.

  She told herself this was just a natural step. After all, she had never referred to her intuitions as anything psychic. The person who knew the extent of Marietta's condition had been her aunt. It took some effort but over the years Delphine had helped her to appear normal. Marietta had learned to act as though her intuitions were simply bad moods brought on by cramps and migraine.

  She occasionally wished she could talk about what she knew, but she had discovered most people didn't want that. They might say that they did, but faced with the facts they would shy away, or run away. Even Ethel and Beverly believed that her intuitions were feverish nightmares that came true a little more often than most people's, by coincidence.

  People wanted to hope for silly things they probably didn't deserve. Hope was the balm they wanted to buy. They didn't want to know what could actually happen to them. Delphine had understood this. She accepted the donations women offered for harmless predictions, and she urged Marietta to keep her intuitions to herself unless they were good ones. The bad things, the terrible things, were a secret. When it became clear that Marietta's great gift was to see the terrible things, Delphine began to lie. From that point on, together they had mostly squandered the girl's gift promising homely women they would be loved by handsome men someday.

  "The secret is to say that what's coming won't happen right away," Delphine explained. "They've got to be patient. You say what they have their heart set on is only going to happen once they forget all about it."

  "But what if it never happens?" Marietta asked.

  "Doesn't matter," Delphine told her with a grin. "See, they'll never stop pining for that one thing. So they can only blame themselves."

  Marietta's problem was: whatever she saw clearly came true, and it was seldom about romance with a good-looking man. She once made the mistake of warning a teacher not to take a scheduled trip to Mexico. A week later, when a temblor demolished the hotel where the woman had reluctantly canceled her reservation, she didn't thank Marietta. She never spoke to her again, and never looked in her direction in class.

  After the winter break in her senior year Marietta had decided to leave school. She reasoned: if she felt alone in a roomful of people her age, she might as well have her freedom. Two good friends like Ethel and Beverly were enough. And Delphine had been enough of a family.

  Now her friends were busy with their last days of school. Delphine was gone, and Marietta was alone.

  Pretty soon John moved in. The house seemed to shrink around him. It was nothing but eight hundred square feet of oak and tin on two thousand square feet of land. There was no view, only thick woods out back and the road out front. The railroad tracks nearby were coated with rust and hadn't been used since the 1950s.

  Out back between the scrap of yard and the woods Marietta kept the beehive. She could never compete with the beekeepers that rented out their hives to pollinate trees and crops. She had nursed it along in hopes of earning a little cash from the honey and from beeswax candles. This, she decided, would be better than selling her intuitions. Above all, she would need some kind of income she could admit to ordinary people.

  The place needed repairs from time to time. There was running water but the electricity was dodgy, set up when the little house was built in the 1940s and never upgraded. To keep the refrigerator and freezer running all the time she had to take turns between the other appliances. Marietta had learned to wait.

  Part of the roof was duct taped into place. The bungalow had rugs nailed to two of the inside walls for insulation. In winter these remnants soaked up moisture and smelled of mildew. The furniture was ruined, ornate stuff Delphine had inherited from her grandmother. There was a TV set but it only worked about half the time.

  The bathroom was peeling, rusting outward from the tub drain to the walls. The yellow tiles were nearly brown, and cracked in a hundred places.

  "Why don't you use some caulking on that?" John would ask after a couple of beers. "Then paint it. That'd look a lot better, and people wouldn't take you for a hick!"

  He laughed when he said these things. At first Marietta laughed too. He told her she laughed too loud. He told her not to wear shorts.

  Pretty soon John was taking little digs at her for the way she walked. Then it was her hair, and why didn't she wear makeup? But if John wandered into the bathroom and caught Marietta brushing her hair or looking in the mirror, he would bump her aside on his way to the toilet.

  After six months, she had to admit to herself that this bully was not the family she had hoped for when she let him kiss her and undress her and spend the night. All of that had been interesting at first, and then mostly a letdown.

  Washing his clothes and cooking his meals just so he could brag that he'd had better made her aware that she was biding her time. Yet she didn't know exactly what she was waiting for. She had lived poorly with her aunt. She didn't mind that, but every day it seemed like this gruff, angry man came closer to doing her real harm. She knew it was only a matter of time.

  "We ought to paint this place and sell it," he said one day.

  "This house is all I've got," she reminded him.

  "Start by burning that beehive."

  He hated everything about the place, but especially the bees. He called them a nuisance because he wouldn't admit he was afraid. He would burn the hive. She knew it. He would have burned the house down if she'd had insurance on it.

  Marietta was loath to admit the bitterness of her disappointment. All of her life she had seen women who had chosen poorly, who accepted their fate because they were too embarrassed to say they were wrong. Finally she had to own up to a lapse in judgment. John had looked like a change, but nothing had changed for the better.

  Marietta had weakened after her aunt died. She had spent her nights staring at the kitchen table, lost in her thoughts. When John Colquitt had come to her door that day, he had seemed like a lifeline back to the world. Now she was paying the price for weakness.

  Aunt Delphine told her never to let a man take care of her. She said there was no cure for loneliness. It was a fact of life. And the only cure for boredom was to get up and do something you want to do. She said a lot of things. Like: Always keep your money stashed in a safe place. And: A smart girl would have nothing to do with men and all that mess. From the moment a man walked in, she said, the light would start to go out of you, every minute of every day, until there was none left.

  The day Marietta came home after swearing that childish oath Delphine began to tell her about the girl, and the woman who bought the girl. She told the story in bits and pieces at first. She told more as Marietta was able to comprehend more. The point was to know, and to be wary, not to feel sympathy but to be armed in advance. If Marietta ever encountered what was lying in wait, she would recognize it.

  Her aunt's strategy didn't work when Marietta was a child. Although she learned to be cautious, to keep at bay the darkness in the woods, the story haunted her. She felt the sorrow of the girl who had been wronged. She couldn't help it.

  By the time she decided she had to get away from John Colquitt, it was too late. She was expecting a child.

  At the beginning of her pregnancy Marietta would stand in front of her house late at night, while John slept off a pint of whiskey. The fruit trees were etched in shadow and the beehive was quiet. She could see stars arcing overhead. The earth turned with her on board, like a carnival ride. The rush made her dizzy. Clouds moved so quickly she could barely catch sight of them. She imagined her mouth full of sticky, sweet cotton candy. She watched constellations expanding in
the endless, deep darkness: Orion, Perseus, Andromeda. Light and light and black shining light.

  She knew she had been changed. Her body had been tricked into doing this work, making this baby. She knew it. She had let down her guard. Each night she lay on the bed next to her sweating husband. Every snore from John sent a wave of sour whiskey breath over her.

  She let her head drop onto the pillow and heard a rusty squeak from the mattress springs. Then she entered a silence as deep as the center of the earth. There it was like a cocoon surrounding her, and she did not dream. Nothing appeared to her in this silent sleep. She lay wrapped in the quiet of death until six in the morning, when she awoke and her misery started all over again: Pregnant, living alone with John, with no place to go from here. Her intuitions were gone.

  Marietta said nothing about this when she went out with her friends. They sat in a booth at Jessup's and talked about the old days of a year ago, when they were still in high school together. By this time Ethel was enrolled in two classes at community college. Beverly had finally given in to her mother's wishes and was taking an accounting course by correspondence.

  Marietta kept her troubles to herself. She didn't say that she was afraid, because she couldn't tell the other women what she feared. They might not believe her, and that would be worse than facing it alone.

  She felt something moving, taking her over and trying to occupy every corner of her house. Nothing was hers any more. Nothing looked or smelled like Delphine any more. Nearly every inch of her world had been touched and tainted by John Colquitt.

  She saw the whole outline of her life before her. Even without an intuition, she knew everything that would ever happen if she stayed with John.

  Years later, these were the things she would remember. She would tell herself that what happened was part of the natural course. She would tell her friends too, that everything had taken its rightful path. No one would question her when she said this, but that was because she would forever keep two secrets from everyone she knew.