Marry or Burn

by Valerie Trueblood

  And the house took up all of her time.

  We talked about her high school days in Florida. Her husband was from the same area, a swampy part of the state, out in the middle of nowhere. She told about a friend who drove into the swamp when his girlfriend broke up with him, and I told about the pills my roommate took in college when her boyfriend called to say he was getting married. We picked up the fruits of love and pressed their skins: abortions and silent warts that turned to tumors, and in vitro fertilizations and adoptions that went awry and the bisexual triangle marriage of a woman she knew, whose husband’s lover finally shot her, which led us into crimes of passion, and pleas of insanity and diminished capacity. We stranded men and women we had known or heard of on a sea of custody kidnappings and restraining orders and breakdowns leading to charges of shoplifting and DUI, with infuriated children stealing cars, and voyeurs in the guestroom, and physical jeopardy: floods and mudslides and the San Francisco earthquake. The stories rolled from us: the man she knew who crawled in under the collapsed freeway to look for his ex-wife, the couple I knew who died in their tent in an avalanche. The more we told the hungrier we got. We barely took turns; if one of us paused the other leapt in with a guess, as to the most awful, the most cruelly inevitable detail. We tossed them out faster and faster like bones with the meat still on them. I began to make them up. Kristen’s was a purer nature and she kept, I think, to the factual.

  She told of a sorority sister of hers (they had sororities in high school, in that part of Florida) who broke down after being levitated at a slumber party, and had to be taken to an institute where she underwent shock treatments for years. The truth was that she had been sleeping with the boy who was her parents’ foster child, who lived in the house as her brother. She was fourteen at the time. It wasn’t sex at all, it was love: some years later she got out and married him, in a church wedding put on by his birth mother, whom he had searched for and found. In the interim her own family had made a strange choice: they had sued the family of the girl who held the slumber party where the levitation took place.

  We talked as if there had been a great deal of choosing done by us and by everyone else in our stories, and little of it regretted, despite the absurd details we laughed about until we choked on our tea.

  I didn’t want to come to a stop but finally I told her I had to, my friend from work would be coming for me any minute. I said my friend was taking time off that she couldn’t afford, to drive me over to the lake and walk with me. She didn’t want me to pick her up at work because I had had several little accidents in the car. I said that for some reason I listened to this friend’s advice when the subject was love, though she was divorced herself and had written a book, more or less, that was no good.

  That reminded Kristen of her cousin, who had entered a contest for a part in an opera but had not won. The cousin’s first baby had lived two days. She had been born with an undeveloped twin inside her body. Fetus in fetu was the Latin for it. The cruel wonder of this, indeed of everything, set us off again.

  Now Kristen was pregnant herself. She said that shyly, pausing at the front door and balancing the tea tray on one hand while she stroked her flat stomach. Then her whole face drew down. She got the pale-eyed stare of a wolf. She said if he was ever rough with a child of hers, she would kill him.

  Sometimes when Kristen Riley is on her deck we have smiled at each other through the leaves, but as for friendship, that was it, that was the talk we had. It was the only one. She was not free to repeat it, and I had decided to say no more.

  I told Lynnette a little of Kristen’s story in the car. To keep names out of it I said I had just hung up from talking to a friend long distance. That had the ring of a lie, and made Lynnette think it was my own situation that I was trying to trick her into commenting on. “Is that so? Hmm. Physical violence is the last thing I would have expected of Cy,” she said shrewdly. When we got that straightened out Lynnette said her mother had had at least two friends in Classic who had married men like that and who would die before they let anybody see them in a bathing suit. “That was a thing with some of those boys,” she said. “You got laid off, you slapped her around a little, let off steam.” She eyed me sharply. “Travis was as gentle as a lamb.”

  “Well, don’t let him do it, that’s all!” That’s what Lynnette said, stubbing out her cigarette in the car ashtray as the tape went into its final admonitions. “Get rid of superfluous information. Don’t get hung up on . . .” I wish I could remember what that one was, that impediment. We’d been talking loudly over the woman’s voice, which no longer commanded Lynnette’s full attention.

  “Don’t let him.” She repeated it as we walked. “You don’t have to let him go.”

  How did Lynnette know this? She didn’t seem to know much of anything—this was the year before she threw out the novel and embarked on her real art—and yet I listened to her. You don’t have to let him go.

  “And never hinge a story on a dream.”

  THAT WAS A resolution I didn’t keep: not to go on about Cy. To be, instead, the way Lynnette’s mother had been with her father. To do whatever I might have to do but not to complain. Because at the time I didn’t see how I could take it back if I did complain. Later I changed my mind, or maybe the firm hand of conviction just opened and dropped me. It was nothing anyway but an old half-tormenting idea that there had to be a thread in life that never broke. Right then I didn’t see how I could keep saying, “Oh, that. It was nothing in the long run. It blew over,” even if that was how it might seem to me on some future day.

  Tom Thumb Wedding

  IT MUST HAVE been not too long after the war—we still say “the war,” even now—that we went to the Tom Thumb wedding in which my sister Gaby was the groom.

  These little pageants began in another war, the Civil War, when the whole country burst out in “fairy weddings” after the Lincolns received the real Tom Thumb and his bride Lavinia at the White House. In the 1940s, mock weddings of children had a revival; they seem to have raised money for the churches and schools that sponsored them. Perhaps they made for a distracting occasion in wartime.

  The Vietnam War does not appear to have triggered them, but today if you look around you can find reports of them again here and there. It may be they skipped a generation, to revive in our new series of wars.

  The wedding in which Gaby—the tallest in her kindergarten class—was the groom was held in someone’s garden, and in the pictures my younger sister Lizzie and I are small enough to sit on the same chair, our faces pious and sullen. Two and four, we’re shoving each other with our shoulders. I think I remember the garden, or have arranged it since in my mind with trellises, and sweet peas crawling along the borders, and a gazebo under a load of wisteria. The gazebo is in the pictures. I know I remember the bride, with her trembling nosegay, and the collapse of the folding chair Lizzie and I were sitting on, at the end when everybody stood up. No one took a picture of that, as they would today.

  Gaby has the pictures they did take, in a scrapbook with the old black photo corners peeling off. No real groom would have on the outfit they had found and starched for her, consisting of a white shirt, white duck pants, a tie of unknown color (the pictures are black-and-white), and a black flower that must be a red carnation.

  There she stands at the gazebo facing the portly, displeased boy in a minister’s collar, with her straight back and her straight eyebrows, her sad face with features still childishly small on someone of that height—though she is not sad, she says when we look at these pictures, and why do people say that? “It’s because I’m too tall,” she says. “It’s because you’re sweet,” I tell her. “Sweet and sad, same thing,” says our sister Lizzie, who is a feminist. Was, she says. The word has been usurped. Words, she tells us as the editor she is, have fates just like people. Words stand there in their ignorance for a while like telephone poles when the wires have been tied up and sunk underground, until somebody comes and topples them, the poles
, and throws them into those heaps you see from the train window.

  In the next picture a ring bearer has arrived. Now bridesmaids, Gaby still patient in her place of honor. A kind of humble honor, belonging to grooms before the arrival of the bride who is the whole point of the thing.

  And there she is: the bride, the one they have dressed in exact miniature and sent down the paper runner to enchant us. In her trailing dress she passes between the rows of chairs on the arm of a little boy pretending with glasses on to be her father. She is tiny. She must have been chosen for that and for her hair, which I remember as golden—Lizzie says so too—falling down over the many buttons of her dress like ribbon just curled on the scissor blade. Through the veil we can just see her pink lipstick and tiny chin. In lace gloves, the only thing too big for her, she carries those shaking flowers. Lizzie and I stop pushing each other to gaze at her. She is like something that is almost ours to snatch up and comb and button and smooth—and yes, if we had to, throw against the wall.

  One of the bridesmaids was Susan, who would be Gaby’s own bridesmaid fifteen years later.

  No one worried about confusing Gaby sexually or traumatizing her by making her the groom. It does not seem to have mattered that there were plenty of boys in the kindergarten class and Gaby had been chosen in their stead. And she didn’t find being the groom any more confusing than being the horse. When you play horse—and we all did that, little girls, except for an occasional visitor too prissy to snort and canter and whip her own legs—you are horse and rider. Sometimes, in those days, you were sheriff and outlaw. Certainly you were never the woman.

  We thought back on that time when we got together, all three of us and Susan, who was part of the family. For years after she moved away, Susan came back on the train to stay with us, remaining Gaby’s best friend. Back from the North the first time, though, she refused to play horse, and we said she had turned into a Northerner. When Lizzie and I moved away in our turn, Gaby thought the same thing about us.

  I flew in from San Diego the night before Susan and Lizzie came down on the train from New York, talking all the way because they both worked for publishers but in the city they had a hard time running into each other. Susan had the most to tell because her husband Trey had moved out. She was divorcing him. If he came back one more time to pick something up she was going to push him down the elevator shaft. “Where’s Wes?” she said as soon as she came in. “I want to cry on his shoulder and smack him at the same time. Because he’s a man.”

  “Wait a while, he’ll be home, you can smack him then,” Gaby said.

  Susan’s husband Trey had found himself a girl of thirty-two. “You would never guess, with Trey,” she said, “but he’s as bad as Binney Ward.”

  “Binney Ward!” said Gaby. “What a thought.” It was Gaby’s conviction that Trey had only lost his head, and would come home. When she said this Lizzie looked at me and snorted, but it was exactly what we would have expected from Gaby. And indeed the next year Trey did come home; he had the doorman announce him like a stranger to be let in or sent away, and ten floors up, Susan opened the door.

  The four of us fell onto the flowered couch and Gaby’s soft armchairs and talked all afternoon about the past—the Tom Thumb wedding and our own, old boyfriends and teachers and certain contested report cards that could have been written by witches, so uncannily had they predicted what would actually happen to us—with an occasional note from the present coming in like those tests of the emergency broadcast system in the middle of a song.

  Gaby and Wes lived a mile from where we had grown up. Wes owned a store in town and off and on he had served as the mayor while they raised five children. They had lost the first one, a boy, and after that Gaby kept going, as if she could get him back. They still had the one born late, when they were in their forties, at home with them. Janna. Janna was fourteen. She had not come home for dinner; she was at a sleepover at her friend’s house.

  We had just taken up the subject of Janna when Wes came home, and then after dinner when he had left us to ourselves—making his getaway, he said, before Susan could smack him any more—we started in again.

  “I don’t know what to do,” Gaby said. “What to do with her.” We had never heard Gaby say that about a child of hers, or speak disparagingly of anyone else’s, or indeed concentrate any of her attention on what the younger generation might be contributing to the general insidious sadness of the world as represented in the papers and on TV. Each of her six children she had regarded with a little bit of the wonder of the blind man who saw, and saw trees walking. She stayed away from the news if she could, and even her books she chose carefully; she liked books about animals. She didn’t read anything timely, nothing published by Lizzie’s company or Susan’s—and she didn’t tell people her e-mail address for fear they would circulate pictures of people or animals that somebody had done harm to.

  Did Wes know what the trouble was, the latest trouble? “Oh a man can’t. Not this part. Not a father. Lizzie, you may never—”

  “Oh, Gaby.” Lizzie didn’t have any kids of her own, or even a husband, but she liked children much the same way she liked men—she always had men around her and she could surprise you with her knowledge of their habits. Despite her sharp tongue she had a friendly view of them, men and children; she doubted their dark powers. “Just because I joke around with Wes,” she said, “just because, let’s face it, Gaby, I tell jokes to men, doesn’t mean I’d be crude. Not that I’m saying this is crude.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, honey,” Gaby said. “I’m not thinking. Oh, I had a secret I told people, that this child was the sweetest one of all. I know you can’t pick one. But this one—she cried when another child cried! Remember how she tried to give her cousins her toys? She—her brothers adored her. She sang in her sleep.”

  “And she’s so pretty,” Susan said with her fine irrelevance.

  “Some days she doesn’t have a word to say to either one of us. And the language, when she does. It would break your heart to see Wes try with her. And now she’s going to fail the eighth grade. I can’t believe this is the same child.”

  Janna. She had renamed herself; her real name was Jean. Our mother was romantic, and had given us the names Gabriele, Christina, and Eliza, with the result that we had all taken nicknames and seen to it that our kids got one syllable each. When our mother died we felt sorry; we remembered her wistful printing of our full names on birthday cards. What would our mother, with her memories of cotillion, have thought of this grandchild? Cotillion. Another of those telephone poles of Lizzie’s.

  That summer Wes was supervising a group of high school kids who were learning upholstery for shop credit. They came in after summer school and worked until dinnertime. They were all boys.

  Janna too went right over after summer school—she had failed algebra—and spent time in the store attracting the attention of whoever was still there tacking a sofa arm or sweeping up. She didn’t have a boyfriend. That wasn’t the problem, having or not having a boyfriend.

  The principal had sent out a letter about drugs in the school saying the eighth grade, Janna’s class, was ground zero. But even that wasn’t the problem.

  It was the year of rumored blowjobs. That is, girls all over the country were said to be giving them right and left. Girls in middle school, high school. Maybe even grade school. They were said to feel that this was nothing.

  “What’s something, then?” Gaby said. She didn’t say so, but we got the feeling somebody had caught or reported Janna in this regard.

  “Well, they’ve seen a lot since 9/11. It has to have left some mark. They’re hurting,” Susan began.

  “Hmm, 9/11 . . . blowjobs,” said Lizzie. “Good solution.”

  “But look at them, the kids Janna’s age.” Susan’s own two were married and she said all the time that she wasn’t going to worry about them any more. “What do they have to look forward to?”

  “Everything,” Gaby said.

 
“It’s not like she died,” Lizzie said. “What exactly are you afraid of?”

  “What do you mean, what?”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Lizzie, she’s afraid her child’s life will be ruined,” Susan said with an operatic sweep of her arm that knocked her coffee cup off the table and broke it.

  It was after midnight and we were on the back porch, listening to the peepers. Back home my husband had had to go out and buy me a CD, Symphony of Nature, because some evenings on the West Coast I got so desperate for the sound of peepers, and the sight of Gaby’s porch, that I was ready to drive to the airport without even a suitcase.

  “And actually I don’t think it’s really true, what you’re saying,” Susan added.

  “It is, though,” Gaby said.

  “They just line up at parties? I’d need some proof. I don’t want to say my girls weren’t just as . . . I’d be the last to say anything did not happen. I’ve learned. But Gaby, I think you read this, like we all did. Everybody was talking about this for a while. This and anal sex. How kids—”

  “No. I didn’t read it.”

  We had the scrapbook out there with us, and I thought I would bring us back to the Tom Thumb pictures. I went and got a candle out of the sideboard so we could see in the dark.

  “But look at Mary Pat, wasn’t she the prettiest thing,” Gaby said, trying to recover herself.

  “Oh dear,” Susan said from down on the floor where she was still picking up pieces of her cup. “You know what happened to Mary Pat.”

  No, we didn’t know. Lizzie and I didn’t. Gaby didn’t either, it turned out.

  “Last winter. I know I told you, Gaby.”

  “No,” said Gaby.

  “Oh, Lord. Well, you know how she was. You remember she married Binney right out of high school. Then in the ’70s she married Tom Armitage. And his kids walked all over her.”