by Lorin Stein
And later, as I’ve said, I slept in the back seat while the Oldsmobile—the family from Marshalltown—splashed along through the rain. And yet I dreamed I was looking right through my eyelids, and my pulse marked off the seconds of time. The Interstate through western Missouri was, in that era, nothing more than a two-way road, most of it. When a semi truck came toward us and passed going the other way, we were lost in a blinding spray and a warfare of noises such as you get being towed through an automatic car wash. The wipers stood up and lay down across the windshield without much effect. I was exhausted, and after an hour I slept more deeply.
I’d known all along exactly what was going to happen. But the man and his wife woke me up later, denying it viciously.
“Oh—no!”
“NO!”
I was thrown against the back of their seat so hard that it broke. I commenced bouncing back and forth. A liquid which I knew right away was human blood flew around the car and rained down on my head. When it was over I was in the back seat again, just as I had been. I rose up and looked around. Our headlights had gone out. The radiator was hissing steadily. Beyond that, I didn’t hear a thing. As far as I could tell, I was the only one conscious. As my eyes adjusted I saw that the baby was lying on its back beside me as if nothing had happened. Its eyes were open and it was feeling its cheeks with its little hands.
In a minute the driver, who’d been slumped over the wheel sat up and peered at us. His face was smashed and dark with blood. It made my teeth hurt to look at him—but when he spoke, it didn’t sound as if any of his teeth were broken.
“What happened?”
“We had a wreck,” he said.
“The baby’s okay,” I said, although I had no idea how the baby was.
He turned to his wife.
“Janice,” he said. “Janice, Janice!”
“Is she okay?”
“She’s dead!” he said, shaking her angrily.
“No she’s not.” I was ready to deny everything myself now.
Their little girl was alive, but knocked out. She whimpered in her sleep. But the man went on shaking his wife.
“Janice!” he hollered.
His wife moaned.
“She’s not dead,” I said, clambering from the car and running away.
“She won’t wake up,” I heard him say.
I was standing out here in the night, with the baby, for some reason, in my arms. It must have still been raining, but I remember nothing about the weather. We’d collided with another car on what I now perceived was a two-lane bridge. The water beneath us was invisible in the dark.
Moving toward the other car I began to hear rasping, metallic snores. Somebody was flung halfway out the passenger door, which was open, in the posture of one hanging from a trapeze by his ankles. The car had been broadsided, smashed so flat that no room was left inside of it even for this person’s legs, to say nothing of a driver or any other passengers. I just walked right on past.
Headlights were coming from far off. I made for the head of the bridge, waving them to a stop with one arm and clutching the baby to my shoulder with the other.
It was a big semi, grinding its gears as it decelerated. The driver rolled down his window and I shouted up at him. “There’s a wreck. Go for help.”
“I can’t turn around here,” he said.
He let me and the baby up on the passenger side, and we just sat there in the cab, looking at the wreckage in his headlights.
“Is everybody dead?” he asked.
“I can’t tell who is and who isn’t,” I admitted.
He poured himself a cup of coffee from a thermos and switched off all but his parking lights.
“What time is it?”
“Oh, it’s around quarter after three,” he said.
By his manner he seemed to endorse the idea of not doing anything about this. I was relieved and tearful. I’d thought something was required of me, but I hadn’t wanted to find out what it was.
When another car showed, coming in the opposite direction, I thought I should talk to them. “Can you keep the baby?” I asked the truck driver.
“You’d better hang on to him,” the driver said. “It’s a boy, isn’t it?”
“Well, I think so,” I said.
The man hanging out of the wrecked car was still alive as I passed, and I stopped, grown a little more used to the idea now of how really badly broken he was, and made sure there was nothing I could do. He was snoring loudly and rudely. His blood bubbled out of his mouth with every breath. He wouldn’t be taking many more I knew that, but he didn’t, and therefore I looked down into the great pity of a person’s life on this earth. I don’t mean that we all end up dead, that’s not the great pity. I mean that he couldn’t tell me what he was dreaming, and I couldn’t tell him what was real.
Before too long there were cars backed up for a ways at either end of the bridge, and headlights giving a night-game atmosphere to the steaming rubble, and ambulances and cop cars nudging through so that the air pulsed with color. I didn’t talk to anyone. My secret was that in this short while I had gone from being the president of this tragedy to being a faceless onlooker at a gory wreck. At some point an officer learned that I was one of the passengers, and took my statement. I don’t remember any of this, except that he told me, “Put out your cigarette.” We paused in our conversation to watch the dying man being loaded into the ambulance. He was still alive, still dreaming obscenely. The blood ran off him in strings. His knees jerked and his head rattled.
There was nothing wrong with me, and I hadn’t seen anything, but the policeman had to question me and take me to the hospital anyway. The word came over his car radio that the man was now dead, just as we came under the awning of the emergency-room entrance.
I stood in a tiled corridor with my wet sleeping bag bunched against the wall beside me, talking to a man from the local funeral home.
The doctor stopped to tell me I’d better have an X-ray.
“No.”
“Now would be the time. If something turns up later…”
“There’s nothing wrong with me.”
Down the hall came the wife. She was glorious, burning. She didn’t know yet that her husband was dead. We knew. That’s what gave her such power over us. The doctor took her into a room with a desk at the end of the hall, and from under the closed door a slab of brilliance radiated as if, by some stupendous process, diamonds were being incinerated in there. What a pair of lungs! She shrieked as I imagined an eagle would shriek. It felt wonderful to be alive to hear it! I’ve gone looking for that feeling everywhere.
“There’s nothing wrong with me”—I’m surprised I let those words out. But it’s always been my tendency to lie to doctors, as if good health consisted only of the ability to fool them.
Some years later, one time when I was admitted to the Detox at Seattle General Hospital, I took the same tack.
“Are you hearing unusual sounds or voices?” the doctor asked.
“Help us, oh God, it hurts,” the boxes of cotton screamed.
“Not exactly,” I said.
“Not exactly,” he said. “Now, what does that mean?”
“I’m not ready to go into all that,” I said. A yellow bird fluttered close to my face, and my muscles grabbed. Now I was flopping like a fish. When I squeezed shut my eyes, hot tears exploded from the sockets. When I opened them, I was on my stomach.
“How did the room get so white?” I asked.
A beautiful nurse was touching my skin. “These are vitamins,” she said, and drove the needle in.
It was raining. Gigantic ferns leaned over us. The forest drifted down a hill. I could hear a creek rushing down among rocks. And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.
Issue 110, 1989
Mary Gaitskill
on
Mary-Beth Hughes’s Pelican Song
“Pelican Song” is horrendously sad. Its sadness is accentuated by the ridiculousness sugge
sted in the title; a malevolent ridiculousness that has been put over the story’s heroine like a suffocating bag that, in the name of familial duty, she must wear as if it is an elegant gown. And so, as a naturally dutiful person, wear it she does, politely, uncomplainingly, and blindly, crashing into the feverishly appointed marble-tabled, pinwheel wallpapered, green glassed tiki-torched obstacle course that has been created for her by her near-mad family.
It does not help that she happens to live in a cultural moment that allows people in their thirties to believe that they are artists even if they produce no actual art. It does not help that her parents are able to send a giant check to the person choreographing their daughter’s final dance performance before her transition into writing—the Pelican Song of the title, as it is sarcastically dubbed by her step-grandfather—in lieu of attending said performance.
Step-grandfather may or may not be aware of the pelican’s Christlike iconography, according to which mother pelicans will cut open their own breasts to nourish their young; certainly a great deal of cutting and rending goes on in this story, and some of it purports to be nurturing. But in this story all nurture is limned with poison, and the elegant abundance of the character’s world is more than equaled by its emotional perversity. “Pelican Song” is one of the most convincing depictions of the horrors that only the wealthy can inflict upon their own that I have ever read. That the heroine wants to believe in love and goodness even as she walks through these horrors is more than convincing. It is heartbreaking.
Mary-Beth Hughes
Pelican Song
I was the kind of thirty year old who had only recently left adolescence behind. I was mostly a modern dancer. I rehearsed, I went to class. I worked the concession stand in an art-movie theater where actors and filmmakers ushered. A novelist with strong powers of concentration manned the ticket booth. I had a studio apartment in Gramercy Park that looked out on an ivied brick wall. When I wanted to get out of the city I would take the bus to visit my mother in central Jersey. My mother was far along into her second marriage. She and her husband had built a house in an abandoned peach orchard with the proceeds from the sale of my childhood home and his antique-car-supply boutique. They acted as their own general contractors and saved a lot of money. Now that the house was finished they had their collective eye open for an investment scheme.
Like the ticket taker, the man my mother married was really a novelist. My mother created an author’s den for him in the upper portion of their beautiful new house. She decorated it with my lost father’s old desk, very attractive and manly with brass inlays, and his leather chair. Everything faced out over the in-ground swimming pool and the putting green, and beyond that to the old orchard and then the woods. Couldn’t be more inspiring, everyone said.
My mother, always interested in words, took seriously, in a way lost to the world of my generation, the role of helpmate. She typed her husband’s manuscripts, judiciously editing them as she went along. She served lunch on a tray, left atop a small marble pedestal outside of the den door. And she checked the mailbox at the end of the long drive for the latest news from his literary agent. If there was another rejection waiting, she prepared the gentlest delivery.
At the art-movie theater in the West Village we took failure for granted. In the house in the orchard the stakes were much higher. Each time a rejection letter came, though often flattering, even encouraging, it represented an enormous blow to the whole enterprise. Even so, I decided to try my own hand at writing fiction. I joined a group. I wrote one-paragraph stories that I liked to read out loud to my mother over her kitchen speakerphone while she was preparing the meals that went upstairs. For Christmas that year, my mother’s husband gave me a lovely, quite serious pen, with a kind note folded inside the box. But at the movie theater no one allowed my mini-stories any more importance than my modern dance performances. My biggest obstacle to respect, however, had to do with men.
I had an odd figure for a modern dancer. Rubenesque, my composer boyfriend called my body when pressed for compliments. This was long before I found the tiny crimson panties tucked beneath his buckwheat pillow. I also heard him say Rembrandt. My mother, it’s worth noting, took figures very seriously. I often felt this was another feature of her generation, like the typing and the meals on trays. In my time, I believed, a body could be different and still be okay. But when the composer mentioned Botero, I lost confidence.
After the panty disclosure, I started seeing a painting student. He ushered part-time and still lived with his parents on the Upper East Side. His beard had developed only under his mouth and nose so far, and though born at New York Hospital he spoke with an English accent. Some days I’d meet him after class at Cooper Union. He was a freshman. I felt like his nanny waiting at the curb. But he was understanding, in a way I think was more intense because he was still living at home, when I began getting the late-night phone calls from my mother.
The calls started some time after the Christmas I received the pen. I’d come by myself for the holiday; the painter had his own plans with his mother and father. I stayed Christmas night in the guest suite next to the writing den. My presents made a nice pile at the foot of the bed, and I must have slept late, because the sun was high over the snow-covered putting green and I could smell coffee long past its first perc wafting from the room next door. My mother’s husband tended to stay all day in the writing den so I didn’t change out of my pajamas, just went downstairs to find my mother and scare up some breakfast.
At the foot of the stair I heard a loud bang. My mother was a big redecorator, so I assumed she was moving a sofa, and then I heard a louder bang, more like a chest of drawers against a wall. Voices like growls could only be the television tuned to a low volume, so as not to disturb the writing process.
I took a quick look at the manger display my mother set out in the foyer—sweet, a big part of my childhood. Even the hay was arranged nicely and all the ceramic farm animals had pleasant shapes. I heard the word cunt quite distinctly from the kitchen and turned my head. The chest of drawers banged against a wall one more time. My mother had painted an old heavy cabinet with white enamel, and I thought—without really thinking—she might be wrestling it into place.
But then I felt a strange fear that buckled my legs as I rounded the corner into the kitchen and found my mother backed against the wall, her husband pressed up hard against her, face purple. I wasn’t sure what I was seeing, and when they both turned to look at me, my mother laughed but with an odd kind of disdain. She pushed her husband off of her. He said something about coffee and left the room through the dining room door.
I didn’t know what to ask, and my head hurt as if it were my skull that had been bounced. My mother attended to her hair. She coughed and smiled. Lifted a hand and her eyebrows as if to curtail the next obvious thing I might say, and walked past me through the door I’d entered to meet her husband at the manger. But he’d beaten her to the foyer and was already walking slowly—I could hear him above me—down the long book-lined hallway to the writing den.
My mother’s husband didn’t just want to write novels, he wanted to write best-sellers. At the art-movie theater we understood what he would never believe, which was that no one—we liked to talk in terms of multiple lightning strikes; we weren’t entirely original in this—got the recognition they deserved. We tended to read, perform, and scrutinize, often with devastating candor, the work of each other. We were envious, backbiting, and deeply critical, even scathing and destructive during lag-time discussions in our polyester smocks. We were lucky though. We had a context, and we had an audience, and there were more than two of us. When things got too painful we switched our shifts. My mother and her husband only had each other in a house that they’d built to be so graceful and accommodating they’d never have to leave it.
When my mother called me on Valentine’s eve from the local Hilton, which she said was perfectly charming, two towns away from their home, I was surprised, but not entir
ely. She just wanted me to know where she was in case I needed her. She was fine. Her husband was working very hard and wanted a little privacy. Did I think cranberry velvet seat cushions would be pretty in the bay window of the dining room? I had no opinion on this, and wrote down her room number at the Hilton. The next afternoon she called to say she was home and sending me something special. A beautiful dictionary arrived in a day or so inscribed with love from the two of them.
I was a little worried about my mother, but I had romantic problems of my own. I may have underestimated the maturity level of the painting student because he was such a fine kisser, and his drawings were intricate and intelligent. For Valentine’s Day he wrote my name in pink rose petals on the covered stoop of my apartment building, and then lay down naked there, in the cold, but not snowy, night, and waited for me to come home from the art-movie theater. He was very slender, and the chill he caught kept him out of classes for two full months. His parents didn’t appreciate my sick-room visits. The housekeeper looked genuinely alarmed to see a robust thirty year old teetering at the end of his trundle bed, so we communicated by late-night phone calls, which his mother listened to, breathing with complete audibility, on the extension. He couldn’t wait until he’d gotten through art school so that he could just make his own money and leave. It was oppressive and he had the courage to say so.
My painter friend was still malingering when my mother’s husband’s father died. An old bear, someone who felt cruelty was power. And in a way it was. No holiday was ever complete until old Sven had dialed in to ridicule the hopes of his aging son. Novelist-smovelist, his voice boomed through the kitchen over the speakerphone like he was actually making sense.
Just unplug the bastard, I suggested. And though my mother cast me a weary eye when I said such things, her husband ignored me. He did this in a noble way that suggested strong men listen to the ravings of their fathers.
But it turned out I was a prophet. Old Sven’s brain blew a gasket early in the new year. My mother’s husband, who had power-of-attorney, pulled the plug in record time. And so during the first big holiday gathering without Sven, the Easter egg hunt, there was a peculiar silence. And everyone, I could sense, believed this was somehow my fault.