Marry or Burn

by Valerie Trueblood

  Those were the elements. All of it happened in the space of those few years around the age of twenty, when one is barely out of childhood. All three, the wife Annette, the husband Alonzo, and the lover, still had parents helping them with checks and advice, parents who had come through a world war themselves and carefully planned that the children born after it would live unscathed and happy. The three, themselves wanting to be happy, went through these events while another world war was raging.

  In time Annette married again, and the three children she had with this husband would find bits and pieces of these old events in themselves, like tea leaves.

  The first child, Michele, inherited her mother’s looks, olive skin with pale eyes and pronounced dark eyebrows, round placid cheeks in a narrow face, lips full and crinkled like sunned grapes, her father said, lying back with her, his first baby, on his chest.

  He was forty years old, a surgeon. He had been a poor boy and now he had plenty of money—though never as much as Annette’s first husband Alonzo would have come into—but he didn’t care for money, he cared only for the wife and the child who dogged his steps, learning the fruits and plants, minerals and sea creatures and geographical formations that gave their names to parts of the body.

  The child was impatient with books, though she liked to turn the pages of his surgical atlas with him and let him show her the cherries and mulberries and bulbs, islets and pillars and spindles. The body is old, older than the mind, he told her, and she got ready for a boring fairy tale. Because the body is volume, it is stubborn, he said. Its rules are those of water. Most of medicine is keeping water in or out. And for the most part the body, in its ancient way—here the child began rolling her eyes and banging her heels on the chair rungs—goes about its own business disguised from the mind and without consulting it. She gave a haughty laugh and ran away from him, out of the house.

  But waiting for her in high school was a certain boy. He was a boy with a grudge: as a small child he had had polio. Although he recovered, and suffered very few of what her father called “the sequelae,” he had a limp, and having been one of the last to get the disease, just at the time the vaccine appeared and saved so many others, he was bitter. When he got well he was wild, ahead of the boys his age instead of behind, known in the high school for his outbursts in the classroom, his stormy liaisons with older girls, even women, clerks or waitresses in their twenties, in places where the high school kids hung out.

  MICHELE WAS SUNBATHING with her parents. Her little brothers played in the coppery foam of low tide while the three of them lay talking about her mother’s marriage. Her first marriage.

  Michele said, “It’s funny, when you first told me about Alonzo, I remembered him!” Indeed she could remember the conversation, the slowly arriving, affronted surprise, at first, of the discovery that her mother had had another husband, and then a funny feeling coming over her, a recognition of the man they were talking about, as if he had come around a corner into view. “I remembered him!”

  “You did?” her mother said musingly. She rarely contradicted her children or imposed an attitude on them that might be from another era, her own era.

  “I know I couldn’t have,” Michele said, sitting up and leaning on her mother’s legs. Her mother lay back, slightly overflowing the top of her bathing suit with the straps down, in her low beach chair. She had lost the narrow, bony shape that was her daughter’s, except in the face. She was one of those women who keep a thin face. Men who passed glanced at her, the breasts, the plump tanned legs, tight-skinned and gleaming with oil. Michele looked down the legs to her mother’s long, reaching toes; elegant and indefinably pitiful they seemed to her, the very keys of her mother’s self. She leaned across and moved the pliant middle ones back and forth.

  Michele was on the towel; her father had a hammock that separated him from the sand by just a few inches. He lay on his stomach on a yellow towel, idly running his fingers along the sand. They were all obliged to cover themselves and each other heavily in oil every hour because he feared skin cancer. He brought oranges to the beach to protect them from dehydration. He would cut them in half with his Swiss army knife and expertly squeeze the halves into his mouth and theirs, from above, the way people drink from a wineskin. Then he would eat the pulp, because it was good for you, and urge them to do the same. Once he had it on his hands, the bags and towels and sandwiches, even the skin of their own arms and shoulders, had the smell of oranges.

  “So tell me what he looked like,” Michele said. “Alonzo. Didn’t he have thick brown hair?”

  “She told you that.” Her father’s voice was muffled against the towel.

  All of this was talked about in the family, not hidden.

  “Did you tell me?”

  “Oh, I probably did, Mish.”

  “Well, before you told me I knew. I knew what he looked like.”

  “Pictures,” growled her father, consenting to appear jealous.

  “I never saw one, did I, Mommy?” All her life she called her mother that.

  “I don’t know that you have,” her mother said. “Eddie, has she seen pictures of Alonzo?”

  “Bound to have.”

  “I have not!”

  “Well, they’re in the desk with everything else.”

  “Why was he named Alonzo? And did you know him, Daddy?”

  “It was a name in his family,” her mother said.

  “The rich dream up names like that,” her father said. They all knew he was proud to have been poor, himself, to have worked his way through college and sent money home to his mother. Yet he respected Alonzo, that was apparent to Michele. It was not Alonzo, it was the lover her father looked down on, the one who came on the scene and did all the harm. The man who had married somebody else after causing Alonzo’s death. That man had no name.

  “Anyway I knew he had brown hair, Alonzo,” Michele said, “thick and standing up, and growing down in a point in the middle of his forehead, right? Right?” she cried, excited, as her mother dreamily, frowningly watched the boys drag a tree branch to a deep hole they had dug in the sand, their trap. Her father sat up. “Somebody’s going to fall into that,” he said to nobody in particular.

  “Did he? Did he or not?” Michele arched her foot and flipped sand onto her mother’s legs.

  “He did.”

  “Like mine.”

  Her father said, “Annette, you don’t suppose—she’s his daughter by celestial insemination?”

  “She may be,” said her mother thoughtfully. “But actually I think she’s got your nice lips.” Though they all said her lips were her mother’s.

  “Really?” Her father lay down again on his back and pressed his moustache up with his fingers. “These?”

  Her mother leaned over and kissed him. “Oh, you’re burned. Your shoulders right at the neck,” she said, kissing him there.

  “Where’s the oil?” he cried, sitting up. “And the boys—! Tommy! Eddie! Come up here! Michele, where—?”

  “It’s in your bag, Dad. It’s right there. And he had one of those chins . . .”

  “I couldn’t say,” said her mother, becoming aloof as she poured oil into her palms.

  “My phantom father,” Michele said.

  Her father got to his feet, shook himself, and ran down to the water’s edge to oil the boys’ shoulders, fair like his own, not olive and immune to sunburn like Michele’s.

  Michele thought she did not just pity the stricken young husband with the rare, sad name Alonzo, but knew him as kin. Now she was only six years younger than he had been when he walked out of his family’s summer cottage in the early morning, got in the car, opened the windows, and drove to the end of the boat ramp where the bank fell off sharply into a cave of water that sent up a slow obscuring cloud of mud. No one had ever said precisely this; she had imagined it for herself.

  She felt she was like him, proud but easily defeated. She was more like him than she was like her own father, who had real power and
could not be defeated. She would have to be very careful that she did not love too single-mindedly (and that doing so she did not, as her mother had, destroy anybody) and that the life she might have to lead because of the intensity, the near uncontrollability of her feelings did not overwhelm her. She would have to be careful, and already she had not been careful.

  Just down the beach from the pit her brothers had been digging, a group of hippies lay on the beach. In a year or two Michele would be on a beach in Europe with just such a group, but at the time she was suspicious of them. They had stuck two poles in the sand and tied on a banner that kept coming loose, with a peace symbol on it.

  The war in Vietnam had worked its way into everything, lifting many of the restrictions on what people wore and how they talked, even bringing a draft resister up onto the stage of her high school to disrupt the assembly. The girls had their bathing suit tops off and the boys were stretched out on the sand without towels, letting the girls rub lotion onto their backs. One of the girls waved broadly at Michele’s father when he was loping down the beach, her dark-tipped breasts spreading apart and then flowing in the direction of her arm. He waved back with the same broad, lazy motion, and Michele could see that the girl had dropped her teasing face and was smiling as he got to the boys and scooped them up with their thin legs dangling. They clamored to show him their digging, so he put them down and fell to his knees in the sand.

  Michele oiled her own legs. She shook her mother, whose eyes were shut and whose forehead would tan unevenly if she kept it soberly wrinkled the way it was. “I don’t know why but I’m not interested in the other guy,” Michele went on. “Your lovah. I’m interested in Alonzo. I mean you were married to him. He seems like part of the family.”

  “And the other one?”

  “He seems like the other one.”

  “And so he was,” said her mother. “If you think you might be pregnant we should go to the doctor rather than wait.”

  Michele lay back on her towel, slowly. “I don’t think so.”

  “But you love him. You say you’ve been sleeping with him.”

  “I love him. I love him. I love him.” She didn’t want her mother to have to picture the car, the friends’ cars, the logistics, so she said, “Just a few times.”

  “And so you’ll want to have the baby,” her mother said decisively.

  “I don’t think I’m pregnant. I’m thin.”

  “There’s something about you that makes me think you might be. My first pregnancy . . .”

  “With me! Or, no, I mean . . . no.”

  “No,” her mother said. No, the first pregnancy had been the miscarriage that set in motion all they had been recalling.

  “Here comes Daddy.”

  When her father had thrown his reddened body down again her mother began to speak thoughtfully with her eyes closed. “I was unfortunate. By that I mean I brought misfortune.”

  “Are we on that again?” Michele’s father muttered.

  “I learned my lesson very early, though I can’t say what it was exactly. You’ll find that. You can’t say what you’ve learned, exactly, and whoever does—well, don’t trust it absolutely. I learned too late for him, for Alonzo. It wasn’t ‘don’t play around,’ or anything like that,” she said, with dignity. “I wish I could tell you what it was.”

  “I’ll tell you what it was,” her father said. “It was, ‘Don’t play around.’An ironbound rule. If you’re married to a surgeon, especially. Because we are much more likely to do evil things to another than to ourselves.”

  Her mother said pensively, uninsistently, “It had something to do with life.”

  “Life is better than death, was that it?” her father said.

  Michele said, “Aha, you’re making Daddy jealous!”

  “He’s not jealous.”

  “I am too.”

  Her father had taken her mother’s ripped-apart life and sewn it back into a piece. Her father was able to do that, Michele always said when she told the story, because in the 1940s and ’50s men had the power to alter everything for women, or were thought to, and because life was better than death.

  Michele had a baby and gave it up for adoption because that was what happened then, in her own era, even though her parents were more free-thinking than most; they had lived in Europe, and her mother, in particular, thought anything could be accommodated within the family, any number of people and memories of people.

  Years later Michele would find herself telling her friends about the way her mother had suffered over the giving up of the baby, the son Michele had had at sixteen.

  On the day Michele “relinquished,” when she had gotten up out of the bed where they kept you for days at that time, and dressed herself in the clothes she had worn into the hospital, and they were signing her out, her mother had taken hold of the counter at the nurses’ station and then, almost gracefully, let go and folded onto the floor. She had fainted.

  When she came to, she got up clumsily, with all of them to help her, but she didn’t say she was sorry; she withdrew herself from any talk about it. The nurse who took her blood pressure while she was lying on the polished floor gave her face a little stroke. Then the nurse hugged Michele, who had not been able to kneel all the way down because she was sore, and she gave Michele the baby’s hospital bracelet.

  The nurses told everyone standing around that it happened now and again, a dead faint like that. Her father had seen it in a medical setting but Michele had never seen a faint. She had never known anyone who even said they had fainted. It was not an act of the time.

  MICHELE GAVE UP the baby because of the time she was living in and because the boy she loved believed it was the right thing to do. He was powerful in argument. His disease had confined him for more than a year, and made him the boy he would be when he got up again: unbending, peremptory, greedy for every satisfaction of his will. To her on the other hand the polio explained everything, gave his bare leg in the back seat of the car, almost undetectably thinner than the other, a paleness that hurt her, his angry voice an echo of supplication.

  She never forgot the absorbent force in this boy, shocking her with its drag, the wick—that was what it was—that had transferred her to him. If she were to see him again, it would still be there, she knew, if she saw him on some street ahead of her with his limp, or in a crowd, as she persistently imagined she would, out of which one of them would follow the other into a dark room—a room briefly illuminated and then lowered like a bucket into a well—and shut the door, and feel for a bed or lean back against a wall, and draw the weight of the other down.

  Polio was a neurological disease but as far as she could see it had not affected his nervous system, which was tuned high, to gradations of pleasure not familiar to very many men she was to meet, men twice his age, and to pleasure given as well as taken, pleasure that seemed to have to do with the body her father had told her about, that was all dammed water.

  How would this boy, for all his harsh charm, his casual domination of her and others, know what the right thing to do was? How would he know what she should do? Why would she, so independent all her sixteen years, brought up to be, submit to his opinion?

  You would have to be wiser than most of them were in high school, or for many years after that, to know what to do.

  A year and a half after that, she was lying facedown on a beach in France. With her were a little group of hitchhikers who were translating for each other across her, one of them tracing letters on her steaming back. They were talking about their parents, the ways of parents in the various countries they came from. One of the French boys was already twenty, and the others teased him for calling his parents every week. Their packs were spread out on the hot sand all around them and one or two of them were rummaging for pictures.

  Michele didn’t have any. She had come away without finishing high school, carrying nothing that might hold her back. While they were talking on the beach she thought of her father’s face, with the su
ntan oil on it defining all the wrinkles of the smile he had had, the day they were talking about her mother’s past and he had said he was jealous.

  She had not written to her parents in months. She had put them, too, out of her mind. She did not join the conversation; she had withdrawn herself. She was just beginning to see how she was going to have to labor to find the way back. This was the period she had been warned about, nearing the end of the first year after the birth, nearing the anniversary.

  She was not even sure she was going to live. Sometimes at night in a hostel bathroom she would think she wanted to be annihilated, the way the birth had been. The baby existed; his birth did not. His birthdays would come; his birth would lie farther and farther behind him, unclaimed. And she who had never seen him, never been shown him: unclaimed.

  It would have been impossible to open her mouth on this hot, anesthetic, foreign sand and tell what had happened, and no one pressed her. But she had begun to think about her parents. She thought, My father is a man who cuts into people if they make a move to leave life. To capture them and bring them back into life. Life was better than death.

  He was no kin of the phantom father.

  There must have been a picture of that man, the first husband, Alonzo, and she must have seen it, to give her the vivid idea she had of him. Turning over to get the sun on her face, and then letting the others pull her up by the arms so she could smear more cocoa butter on her thighs, she saw with a detached, sad approval how dark and taut the months of backpacking in shorts had made her skin. It had taken on a textured sheen like tent nylon.

  She wondered, scratching white lines on it with her nails, why she had no idea of the other one, the lover, the one who had come into her mother’s young life and then defected, like a driver swerving out of the way of a crash he had caused: the one who so suddenly, shockingly, ordinarily, after setting off the chain of events that was to color her mother’s life, had gotten married. And yet that man was nothing but the precursor of her father, probably even like her father in some way. Probably in reality she was, herself, more like those two who went on living than like the phantom father. Ordinary. Likely, after all, simply to marry and have children as her mother had done, and as her son would do—she bore down on herself to imagine it—her son, a child just now setting his foot down on the ground somewhere and taking a step. If that was when babies walked. Didn’t they walk when they were a year old? And then they fell down, they got up, they went to school, they went to high school; they fell in love and nothing mattered that had come before. That was what they thought, as they married and had children of their own. As he would do in his time, her son, having no conscious idea that somewhere in him were the boy’s limp, the girl’s ardor, the grandmother’s body falling to the hospital floor.