Marry or Burn

by Valerie Trueblood

  Thomas, it had turned out, was exceptional. At four he could read the Lego instructions, by five he had discarded them. His castle won a prize at the state fair and remained on exhibit in the center court of a mall.

  When he was little more than a baby, fifteen months to be exact, Thomas had begun to ask questions. “Where moon?” “What him?”—pointing at the crucifix Dale wore. Other than that, there was no mention of God in this life of Thomas. Dale did not call on God to approve her account of her son, which she seemed in fairness to recognize was bragging.

  That a fifteen-month-old might have an idea of the word where did not seem like a miracle to Francie. How was one word any different from another? Who, what, when, where, why. She had written them down, sitting behind her boyfriend, the one who was going to jump into the lake. It was a remedial class because they had both skipped so much school.

  The story went on. Thomas had a particular liking for buildings—already he had gone beyond Legos to wood and nails—but he didn’t like the ones he was told were schools. Why did people have to go to school if they didn’t want to? “I had to say I honestly don’t know,” Dale said. It didn’t matter; in a year Thomas had made the decision on his own that he would, after all, go to school.

  Francie looked at the other faces in disbelief. Nobody was sneering at the thought of Dale’s show-off kid. “Paloma?” said Dale. By the door where she lurked, Paloma had raised her hand. She said Child Protection had taken her baby Rafael away because of her girlfriend. She had him back now, but she had to live by herself.

  Nobody said, “What does that have to do with it?” This was one of the things that had come gradually to Francie’s notice. Nobody ever worried about what the subject was, they all went with whatever you put in front of them.

  Everyone comforted Paloma. More than half of them had children. “My kids.” They said that all the time. “My kids.” For years Francie had been hearing about, even seeing, their children. If you woke up at night after a visiting day, you heard the moans and sobs, the aftermath.

  HER MOTHER WENT into the hospital. She went by ambulance to the county hospital, the same one where they had taken Sharla’s little girl, and there she too died. Francie did not learn of this for three days, until her brother, who had joined the army, made a sobbing phone call from the base. No use in trying to get a pass because there wasn’t going to be a funeral. Their father had seen to that. She was already in the ground.

  “I don’t know, I don’t know, Francie,” her brother kept saying after he broke the news. He kept covering the phone with his hand because his buddies were talking to him, trying to settle him down. “He never said she was sick. He never said.”

  “Never told me neither,” Francie said. She had not heard her father’s voice in eight years. “But I figured she might be.”

  Around then the warden had her see the counselor. Not because she kept having the same dream; the warden didn’t know that. She sent her because of fainting, from holding her breath in the cell. The warden said that was what she was up to.

  The dream would wake her in the flicker of the tube lights that stayed on, a dream of a baby—or a kind of abbreviated baby, the weight of a cat in her arms. But it had a flat-out helplessness a cat would never give off. It had to be hidden, in a curved hollow not unlike the eggshell ornaments her mother had made for the nurses’ tree when she was a transporter at the hospital. Francie had to be in the hollow with it, where despite its lack of any muscles, gradually it would begin to thrash like a maggot until she couldn’t hold on to it. Things would go on from there.

  Francie didn’t believe in broadcasting what showed up in your dreams or visited your mind in a cell, but the counselor got the story out of her by asking for two positive memories. Her first thought was of Sharla—in the mirror, with her black bangs and her mascara, her smiling cheeks in a coat of her special foundation. Francie could almost smell the ammonia as the plump fingers snapped the roller. She had to shut her mind against those fingers, some with Band-Aids on them for a rash, dabbing to get an endpaper off the stack. She got away from that and told about Sharla’s refusal to testify for the prosecution. Then, because the counselor just sat there waiting for the second positive memory, she came up with the egg ornaments.

  First you edged half a shell with rickrack, and then—Francie was eight and did this part—you glued in green felt, and onto that a plastic lamb, or a donkey, or a baby. Between them she and her mother had ruined a lot of eggs. It was a day when nothing they did had any consequences. Her father was doing a week in the county jail. Her mother could drink a bottle of Almadén and open the next one, they could smash so many eggs they had to go out and buy more, they could laugh so hard at the kitchen table, with the cat sitting on the green felt, that her mother tipped over in the chair and didn’t hurt herself. The day had a soundtrack of her mother’s high wandering laugh and her voice saying, “OK don’t get mad at me, Francie”—because when her mother was drunk Francie could get just as mad at her as her father did—“but there went another one!”

  The counselor had a lot of questions about Francie’s mother. She explained that the enclosure where Francie saw herself holding her “baby” in the dream was not a tree ornament but a jail cell.

  “Of course you know, Frances, that you could not keep a baby with you for very long, here,” she warned Francie, who rarely had a visitor, let alone somebody she could have had sex with during a supervised encounter.

  “It’s not Frances,” Francie said.

  Sometimes the baby was even smaller than a cat. Awake, she wondered what was normal. Exactly how heavy was a baby? Better not to stir up anybody on that subject. Sometimes the dream took a turn in which, to her horror, she had left the baby somewhere and time ticked away while she slogged over footbridges or through sewage.

  This was a common dream. Among new mothers, the counselor told her, practically a universal.

  Francie didn’t argue that she was not a mother and that every day she was leaving the chance of that behind. She didn’t come out with any of her usual remarks.

  Dale had a different attitude. No commenting in a disrespectful way on what anybody saw fit to bring up, no matter how stupid, boring, or plainly untrue. Just what you’d expect, Francie thought. Dale didn’t laugh. She smiled. A smile could be the opposite of a sense of humor. No room for humor, in Dale’s job of praying over their problems—which didn’t have to solve anything, because if you received a solution you wouldn’t need to pray any more. But on the other hand neither would Dale say “practically a universal.”

  Where dreams were concerned, the ones who had a problem—Francie had noticed this—were women from an island, just about any island on the map in the lounge, from Samoa to Haiti. They were the ones who wrestled with headless animals, ghosts with knives, man-birds that sucked out your intestines. Simone, for one, had a recurring dream in which the doorknobs were human heads. “I turn it, every time, the neck crack,” Simone said in her soft accent.

  “What do you think it means?” said Dale, as Francie was thinking of what size the heads would have to be to be grasped with a hand.

  “Maybe some neck she’d like to break,” Francie said.

  Dale gave her a look. “Lord,” Dale said, taking Simone’s hands and folding the pink palms together inside her own, “we don’t know why we do harm, but we do. Even in our sleep. That you would keep Simone in your care. We pray to the Lord.”

  AS SOON AS her brother said the word Safeway, Francie knew who it was. A bucktoothed woman, wrapping meat. Blond hair in a French twist, with a net over it.

  She could hear Sharla. “I’ve cut that hair and that’s naturally blond hair. And it’s long, down her back. What I’d give for that hair.” Sharla put a good amount of time into dyeing her own and teasing it to the height it was. Francie said, “What if you had to look like that to get it?”

  “Hey,” said Sharla. She had Francie working on her temper and her tongue.

  That
was the woman. She had been in the Safeway meat department for years.

  Their father had the house up for sale, her brother said, and he had moved in with her. When she went to kick him out, he turned around and married her. Quit drinking to do it. “All—those—years,” her brother said in a drunk voice. “Got my mom started drinking and here he goes and gets married and quits.” My mom. Francie didn’t call him on it. She didn’t say, “Hey, mine too.” He still called her, this decent brother. He would put a call in to her on his own birthday. But he had forgotten hers, he had forgotten her.

  BY BUS IT was going to take Francie an hour and a half each way, but she had it figured out so she could get back in time for the party. Or maybe she would let them see how they liked it if she wasn’t there. All of them.

  “I don’t know that I’d do that,” Patrick said when Francie said she was going to see Sharla in the home. She was living with Patrick and Dale, in the halfway house they managed. In recent months it had become three houses, the second and third a rundown duplex next door that they were rehabbing so that they could house six more.

  “Why not?”

  “Well, this is somebody you haven’t seen in twenty years. You know Dale went and saw her that once. Even that was what, six, eight years ago. Quite some time. Before her stroke.”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “Well, Dale thinks it’s fine, it’s right, for you to go if you want to. But I don’t know if it will do you that much good.”

  “I want to.”

  “She’s been up there a couple of years, in the home. I don’t think she’s herself. But it’s up to you, of course.”

  “I’m going.”

  “Be sure you get back for the party.” They were celebrating the completion of the duplex.

  Dale and Patrick had let her set aside her tasks in the house, and her job hunt, to work on the remodeling. It turned out she was a natural. Their son Tom had gone to them and asked for her full time. He was the foreman. With his two best friends he had put together a construction business. While he finished up the duplex with his dad, his partners were getting a start on the first contract they had landed. One of the partners was a musician, Tom told Francie, and that was a problem. Chip, his friend since grade school, practiced late with his band, so he got up late, and when he got to work he turned on loud music, rap, disturbing the tenants who were already mad because it was a condo conversion and they had had to buy their own apartments. So Tom had to look in every couple of days to be sure Chip was on the job and make him turn the sound down. His work, however, did not have to be checked. Even hung over, he was good at what he did. The best at finish and trim.

  “As good as you?” Francie said.

  “Way ahead of me. Almost as good as Dad.” That was the way Tom was.

  Both Tom and Chip had learned most of what they knew from Patrick, who had gone down to Mexico to build houses every summer with a crew of kids from the parish. They did it in a particular village because Pentecostal missionaries had arrived in the area, in such numbers that the villagers hung little painted signs on their doors—Tom showed Francie one—saying ESTE HOGAR ES CATÓLICO. NO ACEPTAMOS PROPAGANDA PROTESTANTE. He let her figure out the Spanish. She didn’t know whether to laugh when the topic was religion, but Tom released her by laughing himself.

  Tom had his own ideas. He didn’t go in for all the disciplined refusals and dreamy hopes of his parents. He liked to sit on the floor, stretch out his long legs, and drink a beer with Francie at the end of the day. He worked hard but he liked his hours off. At those times he disappeared. If he had half a day off, she knew he biked to the condo or all the way to the university, which was how he got the leg muscles he had. He sat in on lectures if he felt like it. This worried Dale because it wasn’t honest and he could have been admitted as a paying student, but Francie knew a college boy was the last thing Tom wanted to be. She knew him. She could have reminded Dale, but she didn’t, about how they had raised him to do whatever he wanted.

  He had brown eyes with yellow in them and brown wavy hair—light golden brown, Sharla would have said, holding up one of her numbered swatches—in the short messy cut men were wearing. Young men. Not long, the way they had worn it in the ’70s when Francie had hers down her back and parted in the middle. Though not Gary; Gary made fun of long hair on a man.

  Women looked at Tom. Francie had seen one glance back and trip on the sidewalk.

  But Tom’s mind wasn’t on the attention of women. He was thinking. He was reading. At the duplex there were always paperbacks lying in the sawdust, with pencils stuck in them for writing in the margins at lunchtime. Modern Man in Search of a Soul. Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. Francie had opened these books. The Histories. Amerika.

  He taught her how to pull down a wall and how to pull up a floor. He taught her how to frame in a door and a window. The door was harder, but she mortised in the hinges and got them right. When she had finished her first one, his father came in and stroked the frame. “Would you look at this, Dale. Look what we’ve got here.”

  Francie liked Patrick. Everybody did. He was at least ten years older than Dale and maybe more; he could be pushing eighty. He went around in his plaid shirt and his hanging tool-belt, slowly unscrewing electrical plates and fiddling inside and putting them back on, humming to himself. Dale did all the back-and-forth with the jails and the going after funds, but Patrick grew zucchini in the back yard, made the soups, sat down with whoever wanted to spill out to him everything she had ever done. When one of the women went off her Prozac and tore up her room, he would propose some general agreement in the house that had nothing to do with the door slamming and shouting going on. And he had begun to skip the roundtables at which they said what they expected of each other and visualized their futures. His own expectation was for some of them to be more help than they were. Work. Take Tom as their example. His son he regarded as an angel who had briefly descended to be his on Earth.

  Because of this humility of his, Francie didn’t listen to Patrick. With Dale, you never knew if she might let you have it. Not meanly, not, sometimes, even in words, but so you knew she noticed, knew she waited for you to be disappointed in yourself.

  Their son was somewhere in between. He would watch you. He wasn’t going to judge you, but he was right there, paying attention to how you did a thing. Even, Francie thought, to how you looked as you did it.

  He taught her to use a chop saw and a router and how to glue boards and clamp them; he said she was about ready to take over the kitchen counters and then go on to the cupboards and drawers.

  Pretty soon they had traded enough information that they could laugh at what Dale had led them to expect about each other. “You know, when we first heard about you,” Francie said loudly, when their ears were ringing from the scream of the table saw, “I thought, that has gotta be a creepy kid. I’m sorry! Because I mean—good grief.” Around Tom she didn’t swear. “Because wait a minute”—he was laughing his collapsing, boy’s laugh, his take-off-the-goggles laugh—“you have to see it, somebody telling us about this little kid, in that circle we sat in, in jail.” She put on a mincing voice. “‘He’s only thirteen and he’s in high school!’ And then, ‘Guess what, he quit high school!’ How would we know you were normal? We would never know it was—this kid, you, she was referring to. We would see some kinda . . .” She stopped laughing. No way to say what she was thinking. Wait a minute, what about her? Do you ever think about how the person she found to marry was a priest? About what went on? With a priest? Do you think she was always good? Think you can just make amends and then you’re good?

  One afternoon she came up behind Tom at the drafting table and put an arm loosely on his shoulders. She had done something like that before, laid her hand on his back when they were bending over his scale drawings. When he reached for the straightedge, muscle slid over the ribs. In twenty years you could forget the shape of a back, the thrust of it under cloth.

  After a while he said, “Is that a hel
lo, or is that something else?” She didn’t answer. He turned around with a kind of tiredness. “Francie,” he said. He would never start talking like somebody else would, just to have spoken. He was close enough that she could put her arms around him and she was almost going to do it, and then she did it. Did a second pass before he took her by the shoulders and stood her away from him? And then they both laughed. Thank God they did, at that moment, or she might have—what might she have done, with the fire to surround him in her, in her legs and arms?

  THE AIDE TOOK her down a hall with a smell she had to shut out, not because it was strong but because it was familiar. A group smell. The smell of a house where activity divided itself between bedroom and bathroom. On either side of the door to each double room were framed photographs of the residents at an earlier time in their lives. It was midmorning and many of the doors were open. Sharla’s was shut. There was her picture, with a lettered card: SHARLA MADDEN AND FAMILY.

  It was the picture from the mantel in her living room, with a backdrop of rail fence and red and yellow maple trees. There was Sharla: black bangs, red nails. Band-Aid. Wedding ring she couldn’t get off. She sat on a bench at the fence, with her knees to one side and her hair teased, the smaller boys on either side of her. Behind them in his football uniform, with a hand on her shoulder and his helmet under his arm, stood Gary.

  Francie raised her eyes to his. It was before the school changed the uniforms, so he was a junior. She was in the ninth grade. Already she waited through football practice every day. Already they were planning to get married, already down in the back seat of Sharla’s car.

  Why did she never get pregnant? And now—impossible now? A quick pain ran through her head behind the eyes. She got these. The prison nurse had said to stay away from cheese.

  To the right of the door the picture was of a fat cheerful couple standing beside a truck. The aide pointed her back. “There she is. That’s Sharla,” in a warning tone, as though Francie might not know which woman was which. “Sharla? Muriel?” The aide turned the knob and Francie stepped in.