The Angry Woman Suite

by Lee Fullbright

  “Persuasive?” Papa suggested.

  “Maybe that’s it. Grayson House is the biggest house ever, but Bean and I stayed outside a lot, if it was nice, in Stella’s garden—”

  “And Stella is?”

  “Our new aunt. She has a harelip, she can’t talk right.”

  Papa then asked Bean her opinion of Stella, but Bean stared at Papa, silent.

  “But, Papa,” I protested. “Bean doesn’t—” Papa put a finger to my lips. After several minutes of silence, wherein Papa looked at Bean, waiting, and Bean looked back at him saying nothing, Papa told me he would put Bean down for a nap, but I was to stay put. Papa took me back on his lap when he returned. “Bean talks to you, though?”

  “Bean usually talks only to me—but she did talk to Stella.”

  “And Bean sounds right as rain when she does talk?”

  “Right as rain.”

  “Bean doesn’t even talk to your mother?” Papa pressed.

  “I do the talking for Bean,” I explained again. “Bean’s very shy. That’s what Mother says about Bean not talking. Bean is just plain shy.”

  “That so?” Papa murmured—but I raced ahead, telling Papa stories about Daddy’s one-armed brother, Earl, who’d stayed drunk the whole time we’d been at Grayson House, and Aidan Madsen and his wonderful museum loaded with old guns and swords and clothes, and letters and coins stored under glass. I purposely left out the murdering women—a subject that had yet to play well with my primary audience: Bean. But I did tell Papa how nice Aidan had been to me and Bean and Aunt Rose.

  “Especially to Aunt Rose?” Papa asked, which I understood because men always liked Aunt Rose best.

  Except Aidan. He liked Grandmother Magdalene best.

  “She doesn’t holler like we do,” I prattled. “Grandmother Magdalene hollers with her eyes. One time I heard her tell Aidan that Aunt Rose is common, and Aidan told her it took someone common to recognize common in someone else. Grandmother Magdalene hollered and laughed with her eyes at Aidan all through dinner that night.”

  “That so,” Papa said again, but this time it wasn’t a question. This time Papa wasn’t even paying attention to me—but I now understand that my grandfather, who saw all things before most people were even off the train, had gotten distracted pondering what it was that had traumatized Bean into near total silence.

  And yet I never once seriously considered telling Papa about Daddy punching me, and Bean watching him do it, scared to death he’d hit her, too. Not once. Not ever. Too scared myself. Too scared Papa might think I got hit because of some terrible flaw in me that he’d somehow miraculously missed.

  Daddy came home for lunch, bushed. Papa took Bean with him outside, so Daddy sat at the kitchen table chewing his lower lip, looking at me with sad eyes. He hadn’t found a good-paying job yet, and I could see Daddy watching himself adrift in an ocean of pointy rocks, looking for just the right one to grab onto that wouldn’t puncture him full of more holes. Hopelessness was something I gravitated to, so I impulsively crawled into Daddy’s lap; unexpected kindred spirits.

  “You’re too big for laps, Elyse,” Daddy said wearily. His sadness pierced my heart, inspiring pictures of Daddy making music with Mother in happier days. I told Daddy it would be nice if we could have a little music again, saying music was pretty much a God thing in my opinion. Daddy looked at me.

  “You know. When you make something nice, it’s like you’re being God, and that makes everything so much better when you get to be God.” Daddy said nothing. “Like when Bean draws pictures,” I tried again. “That’s a God thing, and when Papa pastes paper roses on stuff, making everything so pretty, he’s being God, too—” Daddy dumped me from his lap.

  “Get a sweater,” he ordered.

  “But I’m not cold,” I protested. Daddy said it might be cold where we were going.

  I’d never been inside a church before and when I asked Daddy if he’d been, he said he wouldn’t have had to drive around looking for one if he’d known exactly where to go, now would he have?

  Daddy steered me to a pew and told me to sit quietly. I looked at my shoes because I didn’t want to look at the man hanging on the wall, blood dripping from his hands and feet. But the bleeding man didn’t seem to bother Daddy, and after a while Daddy even took me over to a bank of candles beneath the man, handing me a penny and showing me how to light a candle.

  “Say a prayer,” Daddy instructed. “But keep it to yourself.”

  I prayed to escape that church as soon as humanly possible, intact; and then Daddy put a penny in the slot to pay for a candle of his own. But the funny thing was, as soon as that coin clinked into the receptacle, the worry lines on Daddy’s forehead smoothed clean away, similar to what always happened when Papa smoothed wet wallpaper with his bare hands, flattening the air bubbles beneath and making yellow roses bloom.

  And that was Daddy’s first miracle.

  Daddy got his trumpet out when we got home. “We’re going to play,” he told Mother. “We’re going to play for Elyse.”

  “But I’m barely in the door from work,” Mother objected. The look she shot my way was a million miles short of loving.

  “For Elyse,” Daddy said firmly. I moved in closer to Papa and Bean on the couch, savoring my new-found power for making Daddy happy. The first note from Daddy’s horn made me tremble. Daddy was so handsome, and so kind to want to light candles with me.

  “Ah,‘Moonlight Serenade,’” Papa said.

  “Our song,” Mother said, looking up from the piano at Daddy, mood improved. Those were the words that coincided with the telephone ringing and Daddy’s exclamation that it was Uncle Buster calling from San Diego, and that Uncle Buster had found jobs for both of them if Daddy was interested, in San Diego.

  “Elyse Liebling,” Papa murmured, watching me watch Mother and Daddy forget me.

  ***

  “Elyse Liebling,” Papa repeated two weeks later as Daddy, ignoring my pleas to let me stay in Sacramento with Papa, packed the car up again.

  “No, Elyse,” Daddy said firmly. “Family stays together.”

  “But Papa’s family!”

  “No,” Daddy said, eyes on his packing. “It’s not the same.”

  I clung to Papa. He said San Diego was not far, just six hundred miles, and that he would visit at Christmas, and I could come see him and Grandma and Aunt Rose every summer.

  “Praise God,” Daddy agreed.

  Scant comfort—and suddenly I hated Daddy again. Six hundred miles was the other side of the universe, like Biloxi, and Daddy had been horrible in Biloxi. Daddy would be horrible in San Diego, too. He’d be horrible anywhere Papa wasn’t. Or Aidan wasn’t. Daddy would be unmanageable.

  Papa whispered something in my ear, but I couldn’t hear it because in a split-second of momentous lucidity I was able to look right through Papa’s skin onto the fear sparking at his core, and it took my breath away. Papa was afraid for me.

  I felt sick. “Papa?”

  His lips brushed my cheek. “Play from the center,” he coached, offering me this sole tip for surviving Daddy. “Liebling.”

  I didn’t play anything. Daddy was completely in charge of my new world, so there was no time for strategy. I nurtured resentment instead. I nurtured my truth that Daddy shouldn’t have yanked me from my old world again, and that Mother shouldn’t have let him. He had no right. I belonged to Papa and Grandma, and then Mother, and then Aunt Rose, not Daddy.

  Never Daddy.

  The first thing we did in San Diego was buy a house. The second thing was we went to church to thank God for dropping a job in Daddy’s lap. With the exception of Daddy’s job at a big aeronautical company called Convair, everything else—the newly built Catholic church and the market at the top of a hill, and my school, all six rooms of it, at the bottom of the same hill—was within walking distance of our house in a new development of 6,000 cookie-cutter homes called Pacific Gardens, miles from downtown San Diego. Miles from anywhere.
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  Unlike Sacramento, there were no magnificent trees in Pacific Gardens. No shrubbery, no flowers, no anything of interest or beauty; just block after block of small houses set at precise angles on a dung-colored crust; we didn’t even have grass. Yet, despite the lack of amenities—a movie theater, restaurant, even a library—Pacific Garden’s claim to fame was “Town and Country, One Location,” town being an exuberant ad man’s hyperbole, and country being dairy farm and tumbleweed that stretched for miles, straddling a thin river that ran perpendicular to Ajax Road, one of the two thoroughfares connecting Pacific Gardens to the outside world. Ajax branched off Highway 80, the two-laner that dissected Mission Valley, the river, and farms that stretched five miles west of the sea, east to the mountains. Our new house, a three-bedroom, one-bath, with a mortgage payment of seventy-three dollars per month, was on Morningstar Street, off Ajax, thirteen miles northeast of downtown San Diego, fourteen blocks down from the church and the market, and a mere block up from the edge of a dairy farm. Mother’s crystal and china, the remains of her marriage to Stephen Eric, were shipped from Sacramento, as were the range and clothes washer bought with the money my grandparents paid Mother for our old Sacramento house.

  We were the outskirts of town, Daddy said with pride. Suburbia. The Promised Land.

  We were scrub, that was my assessment. We were sagebrush.

  Forty kids lived on Morningstar Street. I was the oldest. All the mothers stayed at home—it was rare for mothers to have outside jobs back then—and all the fathers worked at Convair. Daddy implored Mother to not go out looking for work. Think how it would reflect on him as a provider, he said, and Mother acquiesced, but only after stipulating that the monthly Social Security benefit on behalf of the minor children of Stephen Eric Bowden be made a part of the household fund—an amount fortuitously the same as the new Grayson house payment. In turn, Daddy insisted on officially adopting me and Bean. He said we were turning over a new leaf, a phrase that practically made Mother fall all over herself, loving Daddy for turning Bean and me into legitimate Graysons. And once Bean and I were legal Graysons, the next thing Daddy did was make us official Roman Catholics, something he implemented with as much fervor as he had in taking us away from Papa.

  There were two Baptist families on Morningstar, and two families that were nothing at all. The other families were Catholic, and Daddy, touched by the hand of God as he’d been, yet nonetheless praying steadily to Saint Philomena, Daddy’s patron saint for steady nerves, “for insurance,” was elected president of the Holy Name Society. He volunteered to wrest the ten percent tithe from parishioners less pious than himself, and our second year in San Diego he won the Knights of Columbus award for Catholic Layman of the Year. Mostly, though, Daddy was head denigrator of the two Baptist families and the other “un-Godlies” (the nothing-at-all’s) on Morningstar. Still, we were called upon to remember that Baptists were not bad people, he said; they were merely misled. We were called upon to be loving and kind neighbors.

  And so it came to pass that Daddy and Mother became the kindest, most loving of neighbors, the backbone of Morningstar Street, the high priest and prioress of good works: Diana Grayson, beautiful and charming, the quintessential wife, mother and housekeeper; and her handsome husband, Francis, a man who’d give you the shirt off his back. The Graysons, everybody said, were the class act. And talent! Mr. and Mrs. Grayson had more talent than they knew what to do with, playing the trumpet and piano together, doors and windows wide open: built-in entertainment for those neighbors congregating on front porches on summer nights. Even the Grayson offspring were immaculate and well-behaved, although the youngest was a bit too quiet. Had anyone ever actually heard her speak? And the eldest, the one with her nose always in a book, although polite and well-spoken, had a snotty air about her. But other than that, perfect.

  Our neighbors couldn’t know about the things Daddy said about them behind their backs, and while I never gave Daddy too many passes in life, I was sure he meant none of it meanly, because his nerves, bolstered by Mother Church, had become sturdy as bricks. Daddy was mostly benevolent, then. And Mother had evened out after moving to Morningstar too, focusing on the role all the mothers seemed to set so much store by: being good housewives. But my mother didn’t look at all like the other mothers in Pacific Gardens, who wore muu-muus and Keds, and curlers in public. My mother wore capri pants, shiny black flats, and bright scarves around her neck even while scrubbing the toilet. Her hairdo varied according to the day of the week: bouffant flips, pageboys, French twists. For church she pulled out all the stops in linen sheaths, stockings and heels, gloves and hat, and three strands of pearls. Always three strands. Mother was like a movie star, and I watched, disdainful and envious, at the way everyone’s eyes followed her walking up that church aisle.

  I was plain by contrast, and Bean was plainer. But everybody was plain next to my mother, and I told myself I didn’t mind being plain. Being a beneficiary of the absence of nerves stretched to a breaking point, with life settling into a predictable pattern, my anger and resentment had started curling up inside me, into a soft, closed circle where they slept and stayed asleep, undisturbed for several years, not wanting anything to do with appearances or change ever again.

  Unrealistic, of course. What’s life without change?—but it was just a slight tremor that signaled our next one. Hardly noticeable. In fact, it was only in thinking back that I even recalled the tremor, and let me make this clear: I’ll maintain to the death that this shift was not related to the over-predicted bitchiness due to descend on my pre-pubescent personality (as Daddy would have you believe), as it was to the changes happening within Daddy’s church. Meaning things were moving out of Daddy’s sphere of comfort.

  The Second Vatican Council had begun, and it would run three years, “ripping asunder” Daddy’s precious liturgy. The oft-quoted phrase, “empowerment of laity,” set Daddy’s teeth on edge, but the big kicker would be the Council’s declaration that “all justified by faith in baptism” were members of the Body of Christ, with the right to be called Christian and brothers of Catholics—an edict that would pretty much blow Daddy’s judgment of Baptists as “un-Godlies” out of the water. And no one, not even Mother Church, could expect to abandon Daddy and not have to dodge some kind of fallout.

  Daddy took to having a second large glass of wine at dinner, and then a third and a fourth, all the while loudly proclaiming the Council a sham, a submission, masterminded by Masonic infiltrates, and when Mother began sighing, conveying her indignation, Daddy, by then thick-tongued and interpreting those sighs as signs to hold forth further, slurred his hatred for rock and roll, sassy-mouths, fatheads, Baptists, windbags, politicians, people with money, Masons—naturally—and all points of view other than his own.

  Mother and Daddy stopped making music together. A very big sign. Could hardly be missed.

  But because I’d been living underground for so long, sleepily burrowing out a semblance of comfort, I didn’t bear the full brunt of Daddy’s wrath right away. And it really was so slow, our family’s transition back to upheaval—and to tell the truth, it was just easier not to put stock in “signs.” Eventually, though, my slumber was arrested by Daddy’s wine-fueled diatribes, and although dull with laziness and wobbly at my awakening, I stretched out to my full height: tall, like Papa. And I listened carefully, cataloguing everything Daddy said, trust draining from reopened wounds. My Biloxi wounds.

  Daddy began noticing the looks I gave him. And that’s when our old paradigm roared back to life.

  “You,” he accused one Saturday night at dinner. We’d just returned from church, from offering up our weekly confessions. Daddy was looking at Bean, but he was talking at me. He’d had way too much wine, and Bean’s silence seemed to goad him—but it was really all about me and the looks I shot his way.

  “Miss Highandmighty. Miss Too-good-for-this-family. Yes, you Elyse, I’m talking to you. Look at me when I’m talking to you.” The wine was a propellant
, attempting to suck me into his rage, and I couldn’t help remembering the way he’d kicked my fingers off the edge of the bathtub in Biloxi, trying to drown my soul. I shivered glancing at Bean: she was ashen. Mother’s lips puckered with disapproval.

  “I’m looking, Daddy,” I said, trying to sound unafraid.

  He looked at me as if I were vomit. “Piss! You’re looking like a sassy-mouth!”

  Mother got up from the table, deserting me, taking plates and slamming them down on the drain board—a move Daddy mistakenly took as a go-ahead.

  “Wasn’t much of a penance tonight,” he said. “You spat it out and ran.”

  I’d said a quick Our Father at the altar rail, followed by three Acts of Contrition; head bowed, the subservient penitent, outwardly anyway. Truth was I’d long ago given up categorizing sins, deeming it an unproductive task, taking me away from my books and solitary walks in the fields behind our house. I felt Papa there in those fields, and I felt his religion, unnamed and joyful.

  “The penance was what Father Dickey gave me.”

  Daddy’s lower lip quivered. It had been quivering quite a lot lately, a sure sign his nerves were worn down to nubs.

  “Think you don’t sin?” he suddenly shouted. “That you can just waltz into that confessional and tell the priest any goddamn thing you want? That five minutes of penance is going to do the trick? That it will save you?”

  I bowed my head—but not before Daddy’s hand went up.

  “Nothing will save you, Miss Sassy-mouth! I’m all over you, Miss Sassy-mouth!”

  And then his hand came down hard against my cheek, whipping my head to the side—and then again. “I’ll save you,” he muttered as he battered me. “I’ll save you. I’ll save you from being like them … from being like the women, those murdering whores …”

  I tap-danced away from him, dodging blows, gasping, “Daddy, it’s okay, calm down, it’s okay, Daddy, stop—”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, the neighbors,” Mother said.