Marry or Burn

by Valerie Trueblood

  Once when I was lying in the upstairs hall dangling my Slinky through the banisters, into my ear on the floorboards came her voice calling up the stairs: “John?” When I told Shelley, she said the sound was not a voice, and if a voice, not our mother’s. But she got down and put her ear on the spot.

  When I was four it is said that I would demand the commune story. “Talk about meat!” I saw them all laughing and I couldn’t figure out why the person who had singled herself out, the best and fastest cook—why the one who had known they all wanted meat was the one who died.

  Also, at that age I couldn’t figure out where our father was, in the house story. I didn’t have the concept of marriage getting started in a specific place and time, with separate lives leading into it, and some choice involved. At the same time, I knew there were weddings. When the obligation was laid on the bride and groom I wasn’t sure.

  Even today I find myself thinking something of the sort, about Karen and Cal and others. People their age. Nobody our age. Maybe this is what everybody feels about the previous generation, and it isn’t that something has changed.

  Straight out of the commune they had their kids, so that by the time Shelley and I were in the house, our cousins were in high school. No one would have expected Dylan and Ricky to sit down at the kitchen table in the afternoon and talk about bombs and kidnappings and hikers lost in whiteouts. And at home, although he would hear us out on the news of ill-treated dogs who partially ate the baby when some infernal relative left them alone with it, our father gave no sign that these things held even enough interest to make somebody want to dispute them.

  In time Shelley too no longer sat and listened. “Oh, dear, I’ve done it again,” Karen would say when Shelley backed away from the table. I could tell she worried about Shelley, whose report card said that while she read at a tenth-grade level in the second grade, she took no part in the majority of activities and picked her hangnails until they bled. We knew some of this to be true, but Karen said, “This makes me mad.” She called the teacher. “I’m her aunt,” Karen said, making a face at the word for our benefit. She held the phone away from her ear so we could hear the pitch of the teacher’s high explaining voice. “Well, I wondered,” Karen answered her. “I wondered if you were familiar with that.”

  The day came when we both had an interest to take us out of reach of the phone cord. Our cousins gave us their old Donkey Kong, one of the early versions that froze on the screen and had to be shaken and blown on until you spat, which Shelley played so much she could see the little geometric gorilla running up ladders in her sleep.

  “In a dream,” she told me, “you play a whole lot better. I can get him to do stuff. I can get him up a ladder”—her eyes narrowed over the control pad—“that keeps going.” Her mouth stayed open with the lips bound over the teeth, which was a sign that she wouldn’t stop when it was time to feed the dogs—that was our job after school, because although he lived mostly at Karen’s now, one of them, Ben, was our dog—and she wouldn’t stop to read me Wonder Woman in the fort under the table, where we would have spent every afternoon if the choice had been mine. There I had sworn that once, at the edge of the blanket that hid us as she read, two bare feet had come to stand, with toenails the color in the bottle of polish that still sat on a mirror tray in our bathroom at home.

  “They did not.”

  “They did so. I saw.”

  Then I felt bad, because while I had not made up the voice in the floorboards, I had made up the feet, and into Shelley’s eyes as she tried to force some proof of the vision came the blank look I hated. The day was over. Now she wouldn’t do anything except advance through the levels of Donkey Kong until our father came from the clinic to take us home, where she could go to sleep and follow the ladder up to wherever it went.

  “He’s not supposed to get away,” I reminded her. By this time I too was in school, finally I knew something. “Mario’s supposed to catch him.” There was a hammer in the game that I could hardly ever pick up, though Shelley could, every time. Mario was supposed to use it to save the girl from Donkey Kong.

  “This ladder just keeps on going,” Shelley said. “I’m going to see.”

  Even awake she was good enough that our cousins, coming and going with their quick feints as if to sock us, their grins, their loud soccer cleats, would stop to watch her play. Up the ladder the gorilla went, clasping the girl. When they were watching, Shelley played so fast that our dog Ben would look up and whine, and I would have to get up off the rug and hook her sweaty hair behind her ears.

  SHELLEY GAVE UP the advantage of having learned to read at three, and quit high school. For a while she groomed trails in a couple of state parks and then she got a job with the Highway Department, driving a survey van. Then suddenly she was so thin she had to hold up her jeans with a belt, and talkative, always scratching her head and revising some plan. On weekends she helped out at our father’s clinic. She was good with the dogs in particular, but she had developed a theory that people should not own them. An animal should not have to live indoors with people, doing their will. Where should it go? my father asked gently, the way he talked to owners when they were distraught. She didn’t know where it should go. Because the wild dog had been changed by us, so that it was no longer safe without us. “You’re putting too much energy into this, honey,” said Karen, who had taught us to think about these very things. She tried to hold Shelley’s hands to keep her from scratching her head, where you could see scabs in the part.

  Then Shelley was going to learn to play the drums. She drove all the way to Portland to buy a set of drums you could get anywhere, and soon after that she fell prey to something.

  We got a call from her survey team. The guy on the phone said they were in an emergency room in the suburbs and Shelley was with a nurse, describing for the third time the scrambling legs and thumping tail of a dog they had found run over beside the road. It was not as if this was the first dog they had come upon on the state highways. In the background I could hear Shelley’s voice raised over another, quieter voice. “It wouldn’t be a bad idea for you to get over here,” her co-worker said.

  After that she gave up talking and spent six months curled up in a facility where I went with my father and Karen to see her whenever they would let us.

  A label might have contained what was wrong with her within two borders, and made it clear that others had had the same thing happen, but nobody provided one. As it was, the thing wrong seemed unlimited, and hers alone. A private effort, a tiring, unnecessary pioneering, fiendish in a quiet way, like hiding while people searched for you, or going to bed to dream about a ladder.

  And then, as the doctors had said she would, she got better. She woke up, left the low, quiet building, went for her GED, and applied to college because she had to do that before she could go to vet school. And she did learn to play the drums, and played in a serious band made up of surveyors, the ones who had taken her to the emergency room.

  Once she was out, she got back the energy she had had for doing a thing without stopping. Only now she was practical; she was going to get her hands on the severed paws and the crushed spines.

  I was more like my mother—or like the woman Karen told me had been my mother, who although she had wanted, with Karen, to consider the worst that can happen, had never for a minute wanted to be on intimate terms with it. “You girls are both like her, in your ways,” Karen said. “She felt things. She was not at peace. But who says we’re supposed to be, in this life?”

  If we were not, still Karen liked to go over the past at enough length that it lost the force of secrets and misery and diffused itself in words, like the words that spiraled protectively around the frog. “Your father was an awful mess. I didn’t know what he might do. A poor old guy had just been in the paper, driving off the floating bridge into the lake. You don’t remember.”

  I was always saying I didn’t. I said those days were a blank, but I did have a couple of memories. One w
as of Shelley at the bathroom keyhole. “Go away,” she said in a harsh whisper.

  “I can look too.”

  “He’s in there. Go play.”

  “I don’t have to.”

  “He’s crying.”

  He must have heard us and backed up against the wall by the toilet because when she let me look I couldn’t see him. Finally he came out, rubbing his face with a towel as if he had been in there washing.

  FOR OUR FATHER’S wedding, Shelley and her partner Diana flew in from Chicago two days ahead of time. They stayed with me in the apartment I had shared with my boyfriend Eddie before he moved out. My ex-boyfriend. When she got up the first morning Diana sat down at his piano in her silk pajamas and began to play, with a few wrong notes but a flowing style. After a bit you could tell it was “Stairway to Heaven” she was playing. When I laughed, Shelley said, “She taught herself.”

  “No, no, I was just thinking of that sign in the guitar store, NO “STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN.” And backwards, remember Ricky told us, it was satanic? And we didn’t know who Satan was?”

  “Yeah . . . she just now got the sheet music,” Shelley said, scanning the few CDs Eddie had left on the shelves.

  Shelley was driving us over the pass because we had Eddie’s car and it was a stick shift. I didn’t like to drive it in the mountains. The wedding was taking place at a bed-and-breakfast in the Cascades, on the east side. The car was a hatchback with room for three of us, luggage, flowers, presents, a cooler of champagne and the cake. “I’d trust Shelley with it before I’d trust you anyway,” Eddie said. In our laughing days, he had laughed at the way I popped the clutch on the hills of Seattle.

  Since then he had been rethinking things. My driving wasn’t funny any more and maybe I myself wasn’t as entertaining as I thought I was. At one time my interests had had a comic flavor, for him. He would tell our friends, “We used to get the New York Times but they didn’t have enough obituaries.”

  Eddie taught music and language arts in middle school and at night he played the piano in a bar where I went with my friend Kitty from work. We were both at the paper condensing stuff off the wires into those two-inch-long items Karen used to read to people on the phone. Fillers, they were called.

  If we stayed far enough into the evening, Eddie arrived, sat down, put a brandy glass on the piano for tips, and played for two hours without looking up or asking for requests, so hardly anybody put anything in the glass. He did smile to himself, once or twice in a set. The first night we saw him, I thought about him later when I was at home in bed. I thought he was a man who smiled privately, a man whose eyebrows would go up in pained transport during certain passages, like Glenn Gould’s. A man with thick black eyelashes.

  His hands stayed low over the keys, no flourishes. They looked lazy but the sound was crisp. Up close, when Kitty and I invited him to join us the first time, he looked more like a boy, grinning and making jokes, quoting movies. It turned out he had graduated a year after we did. Still, there on the table were the large-jointed hands from the keyboard, lying at rest as the talk went on, as if what came out of his mouth were no concern of theirs. I don’t know why I liked to look at them, and to hear his laugh-choked voice, when he really wasn’t saying anything, only repeating stories and quoting Comedy Central, or why I waited for Kitty to go to the bathroom and leave me alone with him, when what I wanted was an established grown-up, not solemn but on the melancholy side, with a few creases in his forehead, and convictions.

  Eddie avoided convictions. He came from a big Catholic family, with priests in it. I said he should be proud, the Catholic bishops had come out against the war. Furthermore he should be glad he was raised with a religion to comfort him. He laughed at that, but every so often he would sneak off early on a Sunday morning to go to Mass. He didn’t offer to take me with him. “You’d give me a hard time,” he said.

  That summer I had been to his brother’s wedding, a big Catholic affair with Eddie playing the organ at Mass and making funny toasts at the reception. The brothers took turns dancing with their mother. When she walked out onto the floor on Eddie’s arm, taking small steps in her long girdle, I thought, He is a kind of prince. That was my last good thought about him for a while, because we had a lot more of the Signature Cocktail and then a fight on the way home, as I’m sure a lot of people do, shut in cars after the odd brevity and letdown of the ceremony and then all the waiting in line and the tense, antique presenting of this person to that one, and the pouring and toasting and clapping, and the mothers with eyes red and smudged because, they said, they were so happy.

  Two people agree to lock themselves in together, in defiance of reason and the Dissolutions column, and we celebrate it every time. I said something to that effect. Eddie said his brother’s new wife, far from being stupefied, as I had suggested, by the ornate event she herself had planned in every detail, was simply a girl who knew how to be happy. “Is that right?” I said. “How?” He thought it was just another question like the ones I had asked about the Mass. Why did we clap after they kissed? Did people always clap in church? In movies I had never seen such a thing. Why didn’t we kneel? Weren’t you supposed to kneel, in the Catholic Church? Where were the statues and the candles? Why was marriage a sacrament?

  The second phase began when the narrow space of my apartment—a place I had chosen for the tight shelter of its room-and-a-half—had made room for his piano and skis and kayak. If I woke up at night I would see his two bikes, the front wheel of the city one facing its horns in on us from the balcony like a rained-on, aggrieved animal, and he, awake or asleep, would have moved onto my side of the bed, against my back. In the hot room his body steamed under the layers of covers he had to have.

  Then he started taking my glasses off to look at me. I couldn’t see him. He said, “I’m sorry, it’s your eyes when you take off your glasses.”

  “Maybe I should get contacts.”

  “No, no, it’s what I like. I like that sweet, bleary look.”

  “Shall I take off my shoes and get pregnant?” That’s what I said, instead of saying I liked his eyes too, the black eyelashes that cast an openwork shadow when he played the piano or read under a lamp. I don’t know why I did that. I don’t know why I said one thing rather than the other, and kept trying to break something down in him, some resolute optimism, which had soothed me in the early weeks.

  “OK, I won’t do that any more.”

  “I can’t see shit without my glasses.”

  “Are you trying to see shit?” Then to be nicer or to get away from the table he moved over to the piano and played a few bars of something.

  “What’s that?”

  “Hovhaness. It’s called ‘Beloved, You Looked into Space.’”

  That beloved did it for a few days. Then he said something. He said despair was learned. Look at Shelley’s problems—surely they had something to do with seeing John, our father, deal with things in the way he had, with his protracted mourning.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” I said. “Protracted. Quit talking to Karen.”

  If, Eddie said, he had had some struggles himself, he didn’t intend to bring anybody down about them. What he wanted at this point was to ride his mountain bike or go hiking on weekends—by himself if I chose not to enjoy such things—and yes, maintain a good mood. Play music. Get married when the time came. Sure. Have children.

  Children. Did he have any idea what that meant? Children. How every minute of life, children were in your power and you in theirs? How if you were no good at it, how if you disappeared—

  “Let’s say I wouldn’t.”

  “Wouldn’t what?”

  “Disappear. Say I luck out and get a full lifespan.”

  “There’s no point. There’s no point in arguing this.”

  “I’m not arguing, Jenny. Anybody see any kids here for me to run out on?” Finally he grinned, not so much at me as out the window at his bikes. He shook his head and said, “I’ve had some tough roommates, but we
always worked it out, we always—”

  “Go find them,” I said. “Have a beer.” His expression didn’t change but he kept looking out the window. I said I was sorry, because his face, if I looked at it and forgot what he was saying, had that effect on me. I was sorry and I wasn’t. I could see that we had fallen into a routine combat but I wasn’t sure which one of us I wanted to win.

  When we finally decided he would move out, he came back every week to practice. It was too expensive to move the piano a second time. He came at the end of the school day, when I was still at work, but I could tell when he had been there because the radiators would be hissing. I could turn them down, I could turn them off if I wanted to. No more deadweight comforter on the bed, steamed windows, jokes from movies, trips to look at bigger places because our two incomes made one decent one and a piano could have its own room. No more schoolboy analysis of Shelley and me.

  All this was in the second phase. It was in the first phase, right after he had moved in, that I was in Chicago to share with Shelley my good spirits, my change of fortune, my repudiation of doubt, and to meet Diana.

  They had just bought a condo. If I had had to guess, I would have said Diana would be messy, but the place was spare and chastely neat. With the mirrors, the tall windows, the trees in pots, it had a sneaky luxury, somewhere between a good hotel and a chapel. It had an air of being held in readiness for something other than just sitting around. Some visit not mine, some visitation. I thought of what Eddie would say about it. He would like it. He had not been raised by Karen; he saw nothing wrong with luxury. “Hey, a vet and a lawyer,” he would say. “Why not?”

  Right up to the day her law school loans came through, Diana had been poor. That’s why she had Norfolk pines in the bay windows and hushed lithographs of winter branches on the walls: in the part of town she came from all they had was tree of heaven, which grew in empty lots and stank. Every year, the school nurse sent notes home saying Diana came to school in shoes that were too small. Karen knew about the trees and the shoes from Shelley. Karen could always get things out of you. Karen said if they opened Diana’s closet when they were showing me the place, I should not comment on the shoe racks.