by T. Greenwood
I took a bus from Boston to Two Rivers right after Christmas. I planned to spend the rest of my holiday break with Betsy. Her father had agreed to let me stay at their house as long as I slept on the couch and kept the woodstove stoked throughout the night. Getting up and putting wood on the fire was a small price to pay to be close to Betsy again.
Betsy’s father spent most of his time in a rented hospital bed now, which Betsy had set up in the dining room. She had single-handedly dismantled the elaborate mahogany table her mother had once used to entertain and put it away in the garage. This allowed her father, who now used a wheelchair, to easily navigate from his bed to the kitchen and downstairs bathroom. It also gave him a perfect view of the living room, where I was supposed to spend my nights. Fortunately, her father was a sleep-talker, and I had become quite skilled at determining the exact moment at which he had fallen into a sleep deep enough that the sound of my sneaking upstairs to Betsy’s room would not disturb him.
It usually took a half an hour or so after he turned out the lights, but eventually he’d begin mumbling. The first few times I heard him, it sounded like nonsense. But after a few nights, I realized that it was only garbled because the stroke had paralyzed half of his mouth. If you listened closely, you could hear him singing. Beatles songs. It was as if the music that had poured out of Betsy’s room in the years before had somehow become a part of her father’s subconscious. And these nightly serenades were my signal that I could safely make the long trek up the stairs to Betsy’s room.
The first night that I spent with Betsy, I noticed right away that something was different about her. After Mr. Parker started humming the first few bars of “Paperback Writer,” and I made my way up the stairs to her door, she pulled me into her room and quietly started to undress me. She seemed to be scrutinizing me, studying me with her fingers, as if she were memorizing every inch of my skin. It made me nervous. She didn’t smile, or tickle me, or whisper silly things in my ear. She unbuttoned my shirt quietly, tracing a line down the center of my body, and when I started to speak, she pressed her finger to my lips. When we crawled under the covers of her childhood bed, she clung to me in a way she never had before. Even after I felt the familiar shudder that seemed to ripple through her body like an electric current, she held on. Even as the light in her room began to change, from absolute darkness to the glow of early dawn, she wouldn’t let go.
“I’ve got to get downstairs before your dad wakes up,” I whispered. I was lying on my side, and she was pressed against my back.
“Not yet,” she whispered back, and then slowly lifted her arm, which had enclosed me for hours. I could feel her eyelashes, wet flutters against my skin.
Every year there was a big New Year’s Eve black-tie party thrown at Madame Tuesday’s. There was typically some sort of band brought in from out of town, and the whole place was decked out. At midnight, from the second-story balcony, a giant pinecone made from a bunch of small pinecones was lowered in Two Rivers’s version of Times Square’s ball drop. It was the social function of the season. Neither Betsy nor I had ever attended the event before. In high school, we usually spent New Year’s Eve shivering around a bonfire at an outdoor party. But this year, Betsy insisted that we go. She had gotten tickets, bought a new dress. I rented a tuxedo from Moore & Johnson’s again, vowing that this would be the very last time. I felt awkward and uncomfortable. I dressed in the downstairs bathroom, and came out when I couldn’t get my bow tie tied straight.
“God, you need a haircut,” Betsy said, shaking her head.
My hair was well past my shoulders now (more a result of my laziness when it came to grooming than any sort of radical fashion or political statement).
“Come on,” she said, pulling me by the hand. “Let’s run down to the shop real quick.”
“Can’t you just trim it up here?”
“I haven’t got any good scissors or clippers here,” she said.
It was snowing like crazy outside. The sun was just starting to set, and the streetlights on Depot Street illuminated the falling snow in a way that made me feel more merry than I had so far during the holidays.
“Stop,” I said, as Betsy trudged toward the barbershop, single-minded and purposeful in her floor-length evening dress and winter boots.
“What?” she asked, unable to hide the irritation in her voice.
“Look,” I said, motioning toward the sky. “Look at the snow.”
She sighed and stood with me on the steps of the shop, looking toward the black sky as snow fell down around us. I reached for her hand, pulled off her mitten, and stroked her fingers.
“You need a haircut,” she said again, blinking hard when a large snowflake landed on her eyelid.
Inside the cold barbershop, I sat down in one of the barber chairs. Betsy made me get up and take off my jacket and then she carefully secured an apron around my neck. She turned me to face the mirror and started to cut.
“Just clean it up a bit,” I said. “I want to keep it long, but maybe just get it out of my eyes.”
She didn’t answer. But in the mirror I could see her nod as she worked. I could also see the poster hanging on the opposite wall, the one that had hung there since we were kids, OFFICIAL HAIR STYLES FOR BOYS AND MEN , the one with the black and white drawings that illustrated a variety of haircuts: butch , crew cut , flat top , flat top with fender , brush back , forward brush , professional , ivy league , businessmen’s. Below this was a guide to acceptable haircuts for the various branches of the military.
Betsy saw me studying them. “I guess I should be grateful,” she said. I could feel the cold touch of her scissors on my ears as they expertly snipped and clipped. I listened to the click-clack of their blades.
“Why’s that?”
“This war, this fucking war, at least it’s keeping me in business.”
Since the March on the Pentagon, Betsy’s antiwar sentiments had become less idealistic and more anguished. She grew red in the face whenever she talked about the war. At night, when we watched the news, she wrung her hands together. Muttered and fumed. I had no idea how I would tell her about my decision to join the Reserves.
“Hold still ,” she said, putting her hands on my ears and steadying my head. We watched each other in the mirror.
I was too afraid to speak.
“I just want it to be perfect,” she said softly.
“What’s that?”
“Tonight,” she said, exasperated. “Everything.”
At Madame Tuesday’s, we danced to every song, even though the band ended up being just four high school boys playing mostly Beach Boys covers. But even when my feet started to hurt, Betsy kept pulling me out onto the dance floor. She was manic, beautiful. She danced so hard during the fast songs, she collapsed into me during the slow ones. It was hard not to get caught up in her fervor. If it hadn’t felt so desperate, so urgent, it would have been sort of sexy. She was sweating, delirious when the MC announced that it was nearing midnight, and asked everyone to put on their coats and go outside to watch the pinecone drop.
Betsy shook her head when I offered to get her coat. “The cold air will feel good,” she said, smiling and wiping her brow with the back of her wrist. She pulled me by the hand through the front doors. It cou
ldn’t have been more than ten degrees out. My feet, inside a pair of thin socks and rented shoes, were numb within minutes. Betsy’s hair was plastered with sweat to her neck and cheeks. I pulled at a strand that ran across her face to her mouth and tucked it behind her ear. There must have been a hundred people in the crowd, counting down as the pinecone glittered above us. She smiled weakly at me, let me enclose her in my arms, and we stood like this, anxiously waiting for midnight to come.
“Ten, nine, eight,” Betsy whispered in my ear. “Seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.”
When she kissed me, she tasted like the ocean. Salty from sweat. Salty from tears. She trembled in my arms, not with the cold but with something that seemed to be wracking her whole body. And in that single moment, as 1967 became 1968, I felt terror for the first time. It passed from her into me, infected me.
We stood there embracing long after everyone had returned inside the building. After the band started to play “Auld Lang Syne.” After I could no longer feel where my arms ended and her body began.
Betsy noticed him first.
“Harper, someone’s watching us,” she said, without pulling away. Her breath was hot against my cold skin.
“Where?”
“Over there, by that car.”
In the parking lot, I could see a dark figure leaning against a car, the orange glow of a cigarette and the white trail of smoke rising into the dark sky. I pulled away from Betsy and raised my arm up in a ridiculous wave. “Hello!”
Betsy grabbed my arm as the figure dropped the cigarette and started moving toward us. As the porch lights began to illuminate his face, I thought I was hallucinating. This was the monster who lived in my closet as a child, the disfigured demon who invaded my dreams.
“Great party,” he said as he came closer.
Familiar. And real. Betsy squeezed my hand. He was fully illuminated then. When he took off his hat, I tried not to gasp. And because I couldn’t speak, instead I reached to shake his hand and leaned into him, patting his back in an awkward embrace. “Brooder.”
“Montgomery,” he said.
I pulled away and looked at him, knowing that I had to look at him. That I owed him this.
“Pretty fucked up, huh?” He laughed, jutting his chin out, turning his face right, then left. Half of his face looked like melted wax, one eyelid drooping, one side of his nose and mouth pulled downward toward his chin. The skin was puckered and purple: the scars on his neck disappearing into his collar. But the other half of his face was exactly as I remembered it, untouched. “Ruined my pretty face.” He laughed again and slapped me on the back. I laughed awkwardly, but Betsy said nothing.
“Welcome home,” I said.
“Quite the party they’re throwing for me,” he said, motioning toward Madame Tuesday’s. “Nothing like a hero’s welcome. Must’ve known it was my birthday.”
That night, Betsy disappeared quietly into her room, leaving me with her father downstairs. He had waited up, afraid that we’d wrecked the car in the snowstorm that was in full force by the time we left the party. He was eating a bowl of graham crackers soaked in milk, a nightly ritual.
“How was the party?” he asked, his speech slow and labored.
“Fine,” I said. “Cold night though.”
“Thanks for getting her home safe.” He nodded and set his bowl aside. At least Betsy’s father still saw me as the hero I once imagined myself to be. She hadn’t told him what happened in Washington, and I was grateful. I knew he would have blamed me. He trusted me to take care of her, since he couldn’t. I almost felt guilty later, after he’d gone to bed, when he started singing the opening bars of “She Loves You,” and I made my way slowly up the stairs.
Betsy was already naked when I crawled into the bed. It startled me, to feel all of that skin so suddenly. She pulled at my clothes, and I took them off as fast as I could. She pulled me against her, pressing every square inch of that glorious skin against mine. She didn’t speak. And she moved quickly, touching me in the places, and in the ways, she knew I was powerless to resist. And then she put me inside her and pressed harder against my body until there could not have been a single molecule of air between us. She didn’t make any moves to open the drawer where she kept the condoms I’d bought just for Christmas break (red and green ones that I thought might contribute to a festive ambiance). But when I tried to speak, to remind her, to protest, there wasn’t even enough room between our bodies for words. Not for a single one.
Home Remedy
S helly fell asleep waiting for Maggie to come back from Mrs. Marigold’s. I found her in the living room, sprawled out unconscious on the couch. Her hair was tangled, covering most of her face. I thought for a moment about lifting her up, carrying her to her room like I used to when she was little. My arms would remember how to cradle her. But she wasn’t little anymore. One long, skinny leg was stretched out, resting on an armrest. The other was dangling to the floor. When did this happen? Her hands were like water spiders, her fingers thin and long. Besides, she looked peaceful like this: her lips making a bow, her eyelashes dark against the tops of her cheeks.
After she was born, when they sent her home from the hospital with me, I spent exactly one night alone with her before I went to Hanna for help. That night, I remember the sky outside our small rented house was the color of plums. Starless. Afraid that too much light would wake her, I sat perched at the edge of my bed, in complete darkness, as she slept like a new kitten in a cardboard banana box at my feet. Every few minutes I bent over her, pressing my palm across the tiny expanse of her chest, terrified that she’d stopped breathing. I remember the house was so cold. The rain that had been incessant for nearly a month had suddenly stopped, and was replaced with a dry and bitter chill. I dressed her in the warmest newborn pajamas I could find from the bags Betsy had piled in the closet. And then I swaddled her in not one, but three receiving blankets. I kept the hat I’d been given for her at the hospital pulled down over her ears. There was little of her exposed except for her tiny squinty eyes and cold, red nose. But while sleep was impossible for me, Shelly’s slumber was remarkable. She woke only once (and I thrilled at the cries, at the company). I brought her with me to the kitchen, sat the box on the kitchen table, and heated the bottle as the nurses at the hospital had instructed me. But only moments after her lips closed around the nipple, she fell asleep again, leaving me alone.
“It’s not right for her to be sleeping in a box, you know,” Hanna said when I arrived at their house just before dawn, carrying her cardboard bed like a fragile basket of eggs.
I didn’t argue. I only handed her the box and said, “Hanna, I don’t know what to do.” It was so cold, my words were like wispy white ghosts lingering in the air between us after I spoke.
And Shelly was right. Hanna did save my life that morning. It couldn’t have been more than twenty degrees, but after Hanna brought Shelly inside, she stood in that doorway in her nightclothes, hugging me, holding onto me until my legs stopped trembling enough for me to climb the three steps to their house. She took me in. She took us in. Without a single hesitation.
“How are you feeling?” I whispered to Maggie when she came back.
“I’m okay,” she said. A rosy color bloomed beneath the coffee color of her face. She was still wrapped in a blanket Mrs. Marigold had loaned her. It reminded me of when I used to give Shelly baths, wrapping her up in an oversized towel to kee
p the chill out.
“Want some pie?” I asked.
She nodded and sat down at the kitchen table. I cut two slices from the tin on top of the stove and smothered them both with ice cream. The pie was still warm.
“She told me those pains you have been feeling are normal,” I said, nodding like some awful bobblehead doll.
She nodded too.
I looked down at my fork, at the chipped yard sale plate beneath my pie.
“Shelly sleepin’ already?” she asked brightly.
“Uh-huh.”
Maggie yawned.
“You should hit the hay too,” I said.
“Sorry about all the fuss,” Maggie apologized.
“Shelly was really worried about you,” I said. “We were both worried about you.”
“Y’all worry too much,” she said, putting the blanket back up over her shoulders.
I thought about the train ticket still in my coat pocket. I tried to imagine bringing Maggie to the station, the way she might look standing on the platform, holding her suitcase. It was nearly impossible now.
She looked at me, willed me to look into those crazy eyes. “Mrs. Marigold did say that travel by train wouldn’t be wise. Not with the baby coming so soon, and me havin’ practice contractions already. It’d be a long, bumpy ride home; it could even make the baby come early.”
I swallowed hard, the ice cream freezing my throat. “What makes you think I was planning to put you on a train?”
“Maybe that train ticket in your pocket?”
“What were you doing going through my pockets?” I asked, feeling both angry and guilty.
“I was emptying your pockets so I could bring that nasty old coat of yours to the cleaners. You know it smells like somebody up and died in it.”