The Tattooed Girl

by Joyce Carol Oates

  The TV didn’t work right, she’d tried it. But she couldn’t bring herself to complain to Mr. Seigl.

  (Why not? Just couldn’t.)

  Let me know if there’s anything you need, Alma.

  Shit. Just couldn’t.

  “Yeah, mister. I need some loving. But not you.”

  Oh Christ she was wanting it. Her lover. Or just held by him, touched. So she knew she was here. She dreamed of him kissing her.

  A man like Dmitri wasn’t one for kissing, much. He’d make a face if she tried. And now he seemed never to want her the way he’d used to. (She couldn’t figure it: she was looking much better now, a hell of a lot better than she’d looked then.) She was ashamed, he mostly passed her along to his asshole friends.

  Hey babe, sure I love you. Crazy about you. But I’m busy, see?

  (Not too busy to take money from her. Not too busy to ask when there’d be more.)

  “Thou Shalt Not Suffer a Witch to Live” fell open to pages of illustrations at the center. Immediately Alma’s eye moved upon a crude drawing of a girl with long tattered dark hair and a pure Madonna face, half-naked, bleeding, kneeling on the floor of a dungeon and praying with doomed eyes cast heavenward. This was Jehane de Brigue. She’d been accused of witchcraft in 1390, in Paris. She was locally known as a “healer” and jealous persons accused her of “having intercourse” with the Devil in exchange for her powers. Hers was the “first secular witchcraft trial” in France. Like all the others, through the centuries of witchcraft persecution, Jehane de Brigue had been tortured by the religious authorities, made to confess, and executed.

  Once you were accused, there could be no escape. For you would be tortured until you confessed, and when you confessed you would be executed. And anyone could accuse you. And you could accuse anyone.

  “ ‘Jehane de Brigue.’ ” The Tattooed Girl whispered the long-ago name. She had no idea how it was meant to be pronounced.

  Reading the witch-book late at night made the Tattooed Girl’s skin crawl. Especially the tattoos. A scared shivery sensation. But sometimes it made her feel sexy, too.

  Kind of angry-sexy. Like she was being cheated of something she deserved. Between her legs the throbbing, and a swollen feeling. And she knew that even if she touched herself hard, and sweated to make herself come, the sensation wouldn’t go away, really. It was like Dmitri was off somewhere jeering at her.

  Quickly she turned the page. But all the illustrations were ugly, and familiar to her. As if it was a child’s book she’d grown up with. Drawings of (male) witch-hunters torturing their (mostly female) victims: needles driven up beneath fingernails, crushing by weights, thumbscrews, cutting off hands, tearing off female breasts with red-hot pincers. There was the “rack.” There was the “press.” The “strappado.” (The victim was hoisted high by a rope beneath the arms, then let to fall the length of the rope. Eventually, the arms were disjointed from the body. That was the strappado.)

  “Why’d God let it be done? In His name?”

  The Tattooed Girl really wanted to know. Except for shyness she’d have asked her employer.

  Say what you would about him, the Jew knew everything.

  Not that Alma Busch and God were on close terms exactly. She guessed that Jesus had given up on her, at least for now. She went to church, though. Sometimes. Seigl knew, he’d dropped her off in town. Maybe he was amused by her but he was respectful. (As a Jew, Seigl never went to church, that Alma knew. Unless he kept it secret from her.) She’d gone to Wednesday evening services at Trinity Church in the square because it was closest. And at the Presbyterian church a few blocks away, and the Lutheran church. Alma in her showy new clothes and her face glamorously made up would sit alone in a rear pew and try to keep her thoughts focused on what the minister was saying and not distracted thinking how the ceiling of the church might collapse or a bomb might explode and these rich people would be screaming in agony and terror, and it would serve them right . . . She never joined in the singing knowing herself not welcome. In Akron Valley she’d gone to the Church of God with her friend Emmeline and she’d liked that. People like herself, she’d felt OK. There, Alma hadn’t been afraid to sing. Emmie wasn’t much better than she was. Make a joyful noise unto the Lord the minister was always urging. It’s the spirit that counts with the Lord.

  Then one Sunday she’d gotten it into her head, the minister felt sorry for her. Her family. Her old man Delray Busch who had a certain local reputation. Wanting to tell him Fuck you I don’t need you. Don’t need Jesus Fucking Christ either.

  In Carmel Heights where nobody knew her name the Tattooed Girl was made to feel unwanted and freaky. Nobody felt sorry for her here—that was for damned sure. If she went into a store, even the drugstore, sales clerks eyed her coolly like they were watching to see if she’d try to shoplift. In Banana Republic, Gap, Talbots she was approached and asked Can I help you, miss? in that tone of voice meaning You are not wanted here. They were reluctant to let her try on clothes as if fearing she would damage or contaminate anything that touched her skin and sometimes in her rage she made certain she smeared lipstick onto a collar, or jammed a zipper, or wiped a patch of material between her legs or in the crack of her ass, biting her lip to keep from laughing. And catching sight of her swollen-looking white face and defiant red mouth in the distending convex mirror above the cashier’s counter she would think, trembling with indignation, That isn’t me, that’s somebody they made me be.

  On the street it was worse. Right on Mount Carmel Avenue sometimes. At Trinity Square. Local high school kids stared at her and turned to watch her pass, grinned and laughed in her wake. The punk bastards! It was like these kids could discern she didn’t belong here like their sisters and mothers and the girls they went to school with, they saw no need to respect her. Older guys whistled and made sucking noises at her when there was no one to overhear. They behaved this way to the younger Hispanic, Guatemalan, Filipino women who worked in Carmel Heights and waited at Trinity Square for the bus to take them across the river. But why Alma was singled out among the white women, she didn’t know. She liked the attention (sort of) but not the rudeness of it, and the guys laughing among themselves like guys always do.

  Look: I am not a hooker.

  Know who I am? I am Joshua Seigl’s assistant. I have a room in his house.

  Alma’s eyelids were drooping. The heavy old book smelling of mildew tumbled onto the floor. It was too much effort to switch off the light. She was sprawled on her side facing the wall breathing harshly and trying not to cry. Her thick knees were drawn to her chest. She was doubled up hugging herself like she’d done as a little girl trying not to cry. She hated to cry in bed, the tears run hot down your face in all directions and wet the pillow. Feeling sorry for herself: she was so lonely. She missed home. She missed Akron Valley. The smoke lifting like white vapor from cracks in the earth, the way tall grasses and saplings were growing out of the broken pavement, there was a strange beauty in these things. Even the smell of the air that made your eyes sting. She missed the old hymns. Lift thine eyes. There is a better land awaiting. Help cometh from the Lord. She missed her mother. Though she’d taken no snapshots with her and the faces of even Mom and Daddy had become corroded with time. In dreams she could see them clearly, but not in wakeful life. Knowing they’d quarrel if ever Alma returned which Alma could not for she’d stolen from them, and they would never forgive her. And they’d never seen her freaky face and body and for sure if they did they’d be disgusted knowing the tattoos were a judgment on her.

  The first time she’d been with a boy. Eighth grade. The boy was older. Her mother sniffed her out. Her sweater her grandmother had knitted for her was torn and muddy, there were burdocks in her hair. She stank of sweat, beer, sex. She’d smoked what the guys called hemp till she was sick. Her mother screamed at her, slapped her and chased her from the house. It was like TV: you wanted to laugh but if it’s you, you can’t. Later she knew to steer clear of her mother even if it m
eant staying away overnight. There was a confused time of cutting classes. Drinking with the older guys in the high school parking lot. What the fuck let people talk about her. Alma Busch is a slut. There were plenty of sluts in Akron Valley. Mostly, the other girls were jealous of her. She was prettier, more mature for her age. At thirteen looking like sixteen, or older. She loved to dance. It wasn’t hard to get Alma drunk, she was warm and wild and funny when she’d had a few beers. Some of the senior guys had whiskey in flasks. They called her Firecracker. They would drive to the river, there was an urgency in their voices she loved. Not joking now, they needed her. Alma, OK? Alma? C’mon. She had a way of teasing them but not for too long. It was a mistake to tease any guy for too long. Sometimes there was another girl with Alma, in the backseat of the car, or Alma was in the backseat and the other girl in the front, but mostly Alma was the only girl, and there was more than one guy. Alma babe c’mon cut the crap.

  Her body was quicksand sliding away beneath her.

  Sometimes she woke as she began to gag, and puke. The hot acid vomit so strange, such a shock, the thought that vomit is inside you, only you can’t taste it till you begin to gag.

  Sometimes she woke and there was one of them straddling her.

  It was like being spaded, she thought: like she was soft soil, collapsing in their hands.

  There was a boy she was trying to remember his name she loved who’d been different from the others or she’d believed so, with him she had not thought I shouldn’t be here, they don’t care which one I am. This boy would kiss her while he was making love to her, as other guys never did. She knew they called her Pigface, sometimes Pig Tits. There was one who’d played at choking her. It was only play but she’d been scared as hell. The look in some boys’ eyes of anguish and fury. Her breasts were reddened and smarting, bruised afterward. Between her legs stinging like fire. There was a time in high school when sometimes they left her at the side of the access road by the river three miles from home and she felt the hurt as a child might feel desperate to be forgiven for whatever she must have done, to provoke such hurt.

  “Fuckers.”

  Lying on her side, she felt her heart beating uncomfortably but it was too much effort to move. And her bare feet were cold, where was the damned cover? She was laughing remembering how she’d brought a coil of wire one night. This was later, in high school. The boy had straddled her and pushed her thighs apart and pressed his eager penis against her and into her where she was dry as sand and hurting and when it was over he lifted himself from her and lay beside her panting. He had not told her he loved her. He had not told her even that she was pretty. She looped the wire around his penis and tightened it and when he began to scream and thrash and claw at her hands she tightened it more.

  AT ABOUT 3 A.M. there was a sound that woke her. Not any of the guys from Akron Valley, not the wind, but somebody urgently calling her name—Alma? At first the sound was at a distance, then close outside the window. Alma? Alma help me. She’d drawn the blind carelessly earlier in the evening and went now to peer through the slats seeing a man’s shadowy figure about ten feet away in the dense sinewy evergreen shrubs, too dark to make out the man’s face but of course Alma knew who it was.

  “Mr. Seigl . . .”

  She was thrilled: he needed her help.

  She called to him to tell him yes she was coming, she’d be right there. In a rush now, terribly excited.

  Something must have happened to him. More than just losing his house key. He’d sounded stricken, desperate. Maybe he couldn’t get up the steps. (Not even the back steps? That would be serious.) Alma guessed it was his legs again. He’d lost his energy, his strange strength she’d known would not last. Outside he would lean heavily upon her. He would be panting, his hot breath in her face. Very likely he’d been drinking. He’d been with a woman. Now he needed help from Alma Busch. Just getting back into his house, he needed help from Alma Busch. In fact, Alma would bring his cane for him: she knew exactly where it was, tossed onto the floor of a closet as if Seigl had believed he would never need it again.

  He would say something like There’s nothing wrong with me, it’s just my legs.

  The Tattooed Girl hurried to put on her coat, her boots. She laughed to herself. She was excited, nervous. She guessed the remission had ended.

  III

  Nemesis

  1

  THAT WAS IT: “remission.”

  Somber and chastised, Seigl listened. The neurologist was explaining in detail what was known of the phenomenon as it occurred in nerve diseases. He learned that it wasn’t uncommon that feelings of “euphoria”—“hypomania”—accompanied such interludes which could last as briefly as a few hours or as long as several weeks. As in bipolar disorder—formerly known as manic-depression—interludes of remission sometimes alternate with disease symptoms. The disease itself might show signs of “progressing” when remission ends.

  Feeling the need to say something witty, for otherwise he couldn’t speak at all, Seigl murmured, “I feel like the prodigal son, Doctor. Limping back home.”

  He’d limped into the neurologist’s office. He was serious, clean-shaven. He comported himself with the dignity of the mildly depressed. His exuberant high spirits and energy had been exposed as mere mania, gone now like air escaped from a helium balloon.

  His sexual energy, too. Gone.

  Seigl had to concede, he did rather resemble a partly deflated balloon. During the wonderful manic interlude of nearly three weeks he’d lost over twenty pounds. His face was thinner, and wiser. But his skin was sallow and loose at his waist and torso, like elephant skin he thought it, repulsive. He would hardly have wished any woman to embrace him. When he’d had to strip for Friedman’s examination he’d felt ashamed and wanted to cover himself with his arms.

  “It was all an illusion, then? A delusion?”

  Friedman, examining Seigl’s heart, declined to reply.

  Seigl hadn’t yet looked through the hundreds of pages he’d written in his manic zeal. Poetry, play, novel . . . Hadn’t dared look.

  Friedman told him that there was sometimes a “considerable strain” on the heart during such bouts of hyperactivity and sleeplessness, and that he was referring Seigl to a cardiologist for a stress test. Seigl stood taciturn, detaching himself from the scene. Damned if he would tell Friedman that his rapidly beating heart had kept him awake sometimes even after the symptoms of euphoria and mania had passed. He didn’t want to complicate matters. He didn’t want to seem always to be complaining.

  “I’ve never been a hypochondriac, Doctor. So this is hard for me.”

  What sort of a boast was that? Ridiculous.

  Friedman said tactfully that such things were hard for everyone.

  Friedman said that he, Seigl, was not a hypochondriac. More likely he was the reverse: a man unable to comprehend that he was ill.

  Seigl laughed. The need to be witty was overwhelming as the need to sneeze.

  “The very paradigm of our civilization, Doctor! I see.”

  Friedman wrote out a new prescription for Seigl. When the men shook hands as Seigl prepared to leave, Seigl had to resist the impulse to squeeze the neurologist’s hand tightly. He said, deeply moved, “Thank you for taking me back as a patient, Doctor. Evidently I was”—searching for the precise word, needing to have the last word—“in the grip of hubris. Denial.”

  AFTERWARD SEIGL WOULD think, He knew I’d be back all along.

  THERE WAS HIS assistant Alma Busch waiting for him in the outer office. Like a gaudy brightly hued butterfly amid ordinary moths. Seigl was both bemused and annoyed by the way others looked at her. Alma was gripping a magazine titled Allure—ridiculous title!—close to her face, creasing her forehead with the effort of concentration. The glamour-face on the magazine cover mimicked and mocked her own.

  For this visit to the neurologist’s Alma was wearing a grape-colored jacket and trousers in an aggressively shiny synthetic material meant to approximate lea
ther. Her boots were simulated cowhide, brassy hoop earrings swung at her ears. Her ash-blond hair was stiffened by static electricity and cascaded like a mane onto her shoulders. Her full, round face was eerily white and the blemish on her cheek was prominent. And her mouth that cheap luscious red. In his distraught mood Seigl stared at her—his assistant!—as if he’d never seen her before. Sometimes, Alma annoyed the hell out of him. She was absurdly dressed for the occasion, and, moreover, chewing a large wad of gum. Gum! Across her shiny grape-colored knees was Seigl’s ivory-handled cane, like a cheerleader’s baton.

  Seigl had declined to use the cane, limping into Friedman’s office. It had been humbling enough to his pride simply to return.

  Alma’s eyelids fluttered, guiltily she tossed aside Allure.

  “Mr. S-Seigl? It’s time to—leave?”

  Seigl grunted impatiently, heading for the door. Alma snatched up their coats and hurried in his wake.

  In the elevator Seigl said stonily, not looking at her, “Alma. That gum. It’s repulsive.”

  Alma flinched as if Seigl had struck her. She mumbled she was sorry. Trying to be unobtrusive, with childlike haste she detached the gum from her mouth and wrapped it into a tissue.

  When the elevator door opened, Seigl took the cane from Alma, and stalked off.

  SEIGL DROVE. For as long as it was humanly possible Seigl intended to drive his car. But he wanted his assistant beside him, just in case.

  They stopped at Seigl’s drugstore in Carmel Heights to fill the prescription. Waiting for it, leaning on his cane, Seigl examined wheelchairs, firing questions at a salesclerk. These were repulsive objects, too, but only if you were in a state of denial. Otherwise they were wonderfully practical, the power-driven chairs were brilliant inventions. The salesclerk inquired tactfully: to rent or to purchase?