by Marge Piercy
Laramie’s third-grade class attended, and one by one the students stood to say goodbye. The women in the office rose next and then my sister. Michelle sobbed through the entire service. Tommy sat a little apart from her, rubbing his nose as if it itched. Johnny Lynch wore a black pin-striped suit, a gray vest, and strode the stage like a bad Shakespearean actor. “Lamentation” and “mortal flesh” and “heartache” left his lips.
Beside me, my mother cried. “If only you had told her the truth …”
“A tragedy?” he intoned. “Or a tragic allegory?” He brought his hand to his heart. “A young mother wandering in the darkness, searching for help for her child.”
Why did I feel Johnny’s hand in Crystal’s death? Why had Johnny left with her that night? Ten people told me Crystal had gone off with him. Where did they go? What did he tell her? I had no concrete reason to suspect him. Maybe I just needed someone else to blame. But Johnny Lynch had sent her across that bridge.
I delayed dealing with my house for a week, until I could not put it off. An open cookbook on the kitchen counter; a stack of folded laundry. Everything seemed to wait for them to return: Laramie’s marking pens, Crystal’s clothes. Crystal had astonishingly few clothes. Four dresses in the closet, five skirts, five pairs of pants. One drawer of underpants and socks. Another of sweaters and shirts. Laramie’s closet was crammed with jeans she had ironed, flannel-lined khakis, corduroys; plaid shirts and plain. There were two winter coats. A little blue blazer. He had one drawer for underwear, another for socks, one more for sweaters. I counted three pairs of sneakers, six pairs of shoes, a new pair of winter boots. I had never noticed how very well dressed she had kept him; how little she spent on herself. Really, the only thing she wanted was a father for her child.
I spent the weekend in the house, sitting mostly, walking from room to room. I wrote a letter to Crystal’s mother, whose address her father gave me. I attempted to read: minutes of meetings; the Baseball Almanac; Robert’s Rules; a tide chart—anything that promised some semblance of order. Saturday night I wrote to Liam. Sunday morning I just stared at Laramie’s drawings on the refrigerator. The faded ones showed three figures in a house; in the newer ones they were replaced by flames.
Crystal had dragged an old student desk from my garage to use as a vanity. There she sat every morning applying her eye makeup when she came in fresh from the shower, wrapped in a towel. Laramie would be calling for chocolate milk, the TV screaming cartoons, the dryer would buzz or a bowl would break, while Crystal outlined her eyes with the concentration of a master jeweler. Laramie and I lived all over the house. I had weights in the living room, books over the toilet, piles of mail and magazines on the kitchen table. Laramie’s space rangers and action toys were on every shelf and chair. But Crystal had one yellow desk in front of a mirror. I never approached it until she was dead, and then, cautiously, as if she’d appear any minute, as if I was spying.
Twenty perfumes, all samples, all recalling the way she used her middle finger to daub a drop between her thighs. Lipsticks, liners, nail polish, deodorant, lotions, face creams, depilatory; boxes of pins; of tweezers. I was ashamed to think this: they’re still half full. What a waste to throw them out. Of course I did, quickly into a plastic bag.
In the bottom drawer, blond hair dye and a hair dryer. Tampons and pads and birth control pills. A box of sewing supplies. Some prescription painkillers from Las Vegas. I emptied the drawer and moved on. The next drawer was full of photos and postcards. I recognized a very young Crystal in jeans and tee-shirt with, yes, Billy Lynch, Johnny’s second son. I remembered him, all right. A bully, but once I started playing baseball, he left me alone. Crystal in a prom dress in front of a saguaro cactus, a grinning Mexican-looking guy with his arm around her. Crystal with a blond lady who must be her mother. I’m sure I never met her. The woman was wearing a suit a little too tight and a big corsage. Crystal was dressed as a bridesmaid and beside her mother stood the bride, also blond. On the back, Crystal had written “Didi’s Wedding” and dated it eight years ago. There was nothing to suggest Crystal had ever seen her mother or her sister since. What had happened at that wedding?
One photo taken in an arcade showed Crystal and a redheaded guy mugging. Another showed pregnant Crystal with a bald biker. Crystal, a baby (Laramie?), and a middle-aged guy. An uncle? Crystal in Disneyland with Laramie, now three or four. Crystal in western gear posed in front of the Mirage volcano in Las Vegas, her boot up on the fence to show her leg. A studio portrait of Laramie looking serious and hopeful. Crystal with her arms around two guys, in a black bat-girl Halloween costume. A page from a magazine: “Six Ways to Firm Your Breasts.” Crystal in a nightie, pouting for the camera. Crystal without a shirt on, palms across her nipples. Always her eyes seemed to be asking the camera, am I okay? Am I doing it right? Is this enough?
The one photo I kept was of Crystal holding Laramie, perhaps two, in her lap. For once, she was not looking at the camera at all, but at him with an expression so intense, it almost frightened me. The men in these photos, they appeared and disappeared, but at the center was her son.
A flattened sprig of lavender crumbled in my hand. A wine label. A black elastic garter wrapped around a matchbook: “Congratulations, Robert and Katherine Ann!” Were they good friends or relatives? Who had she gone to their wedding with? Were they still married? I had a hundred questions about every item in the drawer, an almost physical yearning to know her. I had been afraid to probe, to know too much, to be drawn too far in. Now I felt afraid even to turn around. Crystal was in that room with me; over my shoulder; touching my ear, whispering, “Why couldn’t you love me enough to ask?”
I had no words to describe the turmoil I felt. Nor was anyone able to say a thing that made sense to me, except, oddly enough, Liam, whose response to my letter arrived with surprising speed.
I’d written him because I thought he should know; because I’d wish to know if a son of mine, however unwanted, had died. Liam was guilty; Liam was innocent. I felt I understood him in a way I never expected anyone to understand me.
Dear David,
I have to admit I was reluctant to reply. I never really knew the boy. I can’t say I feel responsible, except for fooling around with his mother, but no one, least of all the innocent himself, deserves a fate such as this. I can’t be sending you any money toward the funeral, if that’s what you’d be wanting, only my sincere regrets. It was a tragedy for the mother and son, for us all. What you tell me happened doesn’t make sense, but I guess there’s no understanding something so sad. What can I say but that Crystal was a troubled girl and I was an idiot. May all my sins be forgiven.
At that I said, Amen.
I sat with Liam’s note for almost an hour, reading it over and over in the post office parking lot. A single phrase repeated itself to me then and for hours after. “What you tell me happened doesn’t make sense …”
Later that day, I called the chief of police and asked to see the autopsy report.
JUDITH
Gordon died in her arms exactly two weeks after Rosh Hashanah at 3:35 A.M. The last forty-eight hours had been very bad. He went into convulsions, then slipped into unconsciousness. Occasionally he came to, briefly. His breathing was hoarse and loud, then almost inaudible. He moaned and gasped out nonsense. She sat behind him in bed holding him and stroking him, sometimes singing to him, sometimes just talking in a soothing voice about how much she loved him. His agony was protracted and she was torn between wanting him to stay with her and recognizing he could not endure more and must let go. The strength of his will was keeping him alive by the barest thread. Then she felt it snap. His eyes flew open and his body grew rigid, then limp. His eyes were glazed. She could find no pulse.
It was a quiet night and she could hear the surf after she could no longer hear his halting breath. The surf was up because a tropical storm had passed far out to sea, only the waves and the occasional lost pelagic bird marking its power. Almost at once his body be
gan to cool. Entropy. The end of her life as she had known it. Portnoy remained on the bed, and she allowed him to sniff Gordon’s face. He knew. He jumped off the bed, his fur on edge, and went straight to the door demanding to go out. She was afraid he would somehow commit feline suicide, get caught by a coyote, fall in the marsh mud. “No,” she said quietly. She would keep him in all week, until he had adjusted to Gordon’s absence. She was alone here with the animals, and they would need her. And she would need them.
She told everyone she called they did not have to come. Gordon had insisted on cremation, which she regretted. She would be buried, and she had hoped they would have side-by-side graves. She had not been raised to believe in cremation and could not suddenly embrace it. But Gordon had been insistent, and she would honor his wishes. It had all been arranged. It would be done immediately. There would be a brief Jewish service. She would dig the ashes into the patio of the compound, as he had requested, and in spring she would plant a low growing tree the winds would not injure. A dwarf conifer, perhaps. They had discussed everything, endlessly. Nonetheless she experienced a deep shock as the two undertaker’s men carried him out to their hearse in a body bag.
There would be a memorial in the spring, but as she told people, Gordon’s goodbye had been the dinner. Nonetheless, Ben and his family came and, of course, Natasha. She made the calls, she made the arrangements, she went through with the cremation and brought the ashes home, half dead herself. She put food on the table and prepared to sit shiva. Natasha took Ben and his family to the plane the next day and remained with her for the next three days.
It was not until she woke on the fifth day after the funeral, alone in the house, that she began to weep uncontrollably. She wept on and off all day. She had canceled her appointments, of course, pulled the phone from the wall. Now she wandered the house, lost, without will or hope. It was a large house and a huge compound around her. Never had it felt so big and so desolate, like an abandoned village. She was out to sea, isolated amidst the wind and the rising surf, alone and desperately lonely. If it had not been for the animals in her care, she would have fled anyplace, into Boston, to New York. Portnoy was miserable and mourned with her, looking for Gordon and then asking to go out, then lying with his head on his paws, eyes half closed, not sleeping and not moving. He seemed her grief clad in gray fur.
She thought that in Gordon’s long dying, she had practiced at missing him. She had grown used to being celibate over the last few months. She had grown used to not bothering him with problems and details. She had taken over fixing things he had always done, ordering wood and stacking it or getting help with what she could not manage alone. She had thought she was almost prepared for widowhood, but she had been wrong. His presence, however diminished, was nothing like his total absence.
She did not think she could endure it, but there was nothing to do but endure it. It would not go away; she could not go away. She continued. The following Monday she returned to work. She had Mattie reschedule appointments she had canceled and began working a ten-hour day. She could not sleep. She ate little. But she could work. She could write briefs, she could make deals on the phone, she could probe, she could litigate. While she was engaged in the law, her pain was distant: never gone but no longer overwhelming. However, like a visitor hanging around outside the door waiting to catch her alone, the moment she put down her work or turned aside, pain was back with her. At night she could not escape it. She fell asleep after midnight and woke at three. She was always exhausted, her nerves abraded raw, her eyes sore.
The second Friday in October, Natasha came home for the weekend. She drove straight through from Cornell, arriving just after midnight. They had omelets and the last garden tomatoes. They drank Beaujolais, and Natasha told her stories of her fellow students, her professors and the animals they were learning to treat. That night, Judith slept. She slept and slept. When she woke, it was nine-fifteen—she, who always was up by six. She felt groggy but well. If only she could keep a piece of Natasha with her. They picked grasses and sea lavender in the marsh to make arrangements with chrysanthemums, golden and bronze and musky pink, from her garden. They dug the potatoes she had forgotten.
“I’m so glad you’re here.” She tried to tell Natasha how she felt, but words were feeble. “I’ve been lost, except for work.”
“Maybe you need a roommate.”
“Oh, Natasha, I’m too bossy. Who could I stand to live with?”
They walked by the bay past closed-up houses, some boarded against winter storms. The tide was receding and bits of seaweed, scallop and slipper shells washed up at their feet, rocks and pebbles vivid in color because they were still wet: gold, greenish, slate-gray, pink, shiny black. They saw footprints of a man and a dog, but no people except far, far in the distance two figures like themselves walked. Across the curve of the bay, a distant town glittered in the afternoon sun like a mirage of paradise. Terns were diving into the gentle ebbing waves. An emerging sandbar was studded with gulls resting.
“So, did anyone give you trouble about that woman drowning?”
“Mattie tells me there was talk in town that she committed suicide. Or that David or I plotted her death. It just seems so long ago. Everything before Gordon’s death feels that way.”
“But why did she have her kid with her? That’s so tragic.”
“What was she supposed to do with him at nine-thirty at night? Leave him home alone? That’s neglect. When she decided to drive out to the island and confront David, she had to bring the boy. It’s too bad she didn’t get through. She would have found thirty-two people cleaning up a big meal and singing off key. Hardly cause for a jealous rage. I didn’t exchange twenty words with David all night. It was desperation pure and simple, the desperation that drives so many women. That’s one reason I bailed out.”
“David had already moved out on her, right? And you weren’t seeing him. So how can anybody blame you?”
“People can always blame a woman who’s seen as strong. No matter how weak as a rag I feel. Anyhow, it was a two-week wonder. Then they had Gordon’s death to talk about. Now there’s a new scandal. Michelle, Crystal’s friend, is accusing Tommy Shalhoub of molesting her daughter. Tommy has been calling me, so I have to decide if I’m willing to take on his case.”
“It might keep you busy.”
“I’m busy already, Natasha. It doesn’t seem to help much. I’m alone, and I’m not used to it. The worst thing about a good marriage is after it ends.” She sighed.
“I miss him terribly. I keep thinking of things I want to tell him, stories he’d enjoy.” Natasha threw up her hands in a gesture of scattering. “Then I realize I can’t tell him. I’ll never be able to share anything with him again. He’s gone, and I can never, never talk to him.”
“I think that’s what I miss most too. Talking with him. Our life was so examined, Natasha, examined together. It feels incomplete now. Nothing seems important to me. I don’t really care about the gossip and it’s hard to make myself care about town at all. I feel too sorry for myself. I’m no role model these days.”
“Oh, you think you were my role model? Nonsense, Judith. Dr. Doolittle was. The man who talked to the animals.”
“Well, you better get busy talking to them. They’re like me, they’re all lonely and a little crazy.”
DAVID
Abel Smalley didn’t have to say where, just when. Noon always meant the Binnacle. As I approached his table, I noticed his hand drop over a thin manila envelope. “You sure you want to see this?”
“It’s more a question of need, to tell you the truth.”
He sighed, “It was a terrible accident. There was marsh grass on the bridge. The surface was slippery, the visibility poor—”
“I was there.”
“Suit yourself.” He pushed the envelope across the table.
He wasn’t required by law to provide me with an autopsy report. I could have made a written request of the medical examiner. But since I’d been
elected, Abel had offered me any number of courtesies I’d never dreamed of receiving from the police. A license to carry firearms; a permit to park anywhere in town. If I wanted the autopsy of some dead girl I’d been screwing, his practical smile said, Sure. No problem. You sick fuck.
Commonwealth of Massachusetts
Office of the Chief Medical Examiner
Autopsy Report
CAUSE OF DEATH: Drowning
MANNER OF DEATH: ___ Natural Causes
x Accident
___ Suicide
___ Homicide
___ Undetermined
HISTORY OF TERMINAL EVENT:
The history as known at the time was provided by the Medical Examiner.
Crystal Lee Sinclair was a thirty-two-year-old white female, living in Saltash, Massachusetts. On the evening of September 22 the car in which she was the driver veered off the Squeer Island bridge, overturned, and sank below the surface of the water. The driver’s side window smashed on impact. It is presumed Ms. Sinclair climbed out of the window and in a disoriented state wandered in search of help. On Sept. 23 her body was found by State Police helicopter and recovered from the inner breakwater of Squeer Island Cove. Body was removed and taken to the Josiah Squeer landing in Saltash where it was viewed by this M.E. at 7:10 A.M. She was pronounced dead at 7:13 A.M. on Sept. 23.
AUTOPSY:
The autopsy was performed in the Medical Examiner’s Office between the hours of 10:00 A.M. and 1:00 P.M.
Present at Autopsy: Medical Examiner and Office Technician.
Clothing: The clothing is wet and consists of a denim jacket, brown western boots, brown belt, blue jeans, a white blouse, black socks, black bra, black underpants.
EXTERNAL EXAMINATION:
The nude body is that of a white female who is five feet six inches and weighs approximately 140 pounds. Scalp shows silver-blond hair about nine inches in length. In the center of the scalp in the parietal region there is a red contusion measuring up to one inch in greatest dimension. The eyes are blue-hazel. The pupils are equal. The conjunctivae are injected. The teeth of both upper and lower jaws are in excellent repair.