by Marlene Lee
“You’re out in the sun a lot.”
“Can’t avoid it on the canal.” The deep blue eyes were steady and still. “Why did you decide to come?”
“We’re married, aren’t we? I don’t belong with Thorberg and Haberman.”
“Haberman got on your nerves, I bet,” Ernest said. His slight Swedish accent colored the Americanism.
Agnes ran her fingers through her hair, squinted, and exclaimed in Rumanian-English, “Ze system! Vee got to tchange ze system!” She clowned until Ernest loosened up and laughed, but then she didn’t know how to wind down without exposing them both to awkward silence. It was a relief when the door opened and three East Indians in white turbans entered the restaurant. Agnes’ Rumanian-English faded as she watched the tallest of the three move into the lunchroom, cautious and threatening at the same time. The restaurant owner, a heavy man with a soiled dishcloth tied around his waist, came out from behind the counter where he’d been keeping an eye on both the cook and the cash register.
The Indian glanced toward the back of the restaurant. Aiming for the first seat at the lunch counter, he moved without hurry, like a river. Like the Ganges, Agnes thought, proud of knowing the river’s name. When he reached the cash register, the owner moved his feet apart, leaned forward, and slowly rotated his shoulders as if to activate a fighting instrument that hadn’t been used in a while.
“Get out,” he said. The other two Indians stepped forward, not to fight, but to talk to their friend. After a few minutes of nervous persuasion, the tall Indian allowed himself to be led away and the three stepped out into the hot sun again. The restaurant door closed behind them.
“Hindoos!” the owner snorted. He tied the dishtowel tighter around his waist. “Rag heads!” The diners turned back to their plates.
“Actually,” Ernest said to Agnes, “they’re not Hindus. They’re Sikhs.”
“He didn’t have a right to turn them away!” Agnes said, her face flushed. “They weren’t hurting anyone!” He touched her arm to quiet her but she jumped to her feet. “I won’t eat my lunch here!”
Ernest looked around at the other diners who were watching. His face brightened with embarrassment.
“Cancel the chicken!” Agnes flung over her shoulder as she marched past the owner. “If you don’t serve Indians, you don’t serve me.”
Ernest picked up the cookie box and followed. Outside on the boardwalk she stood with her head high, arms akimbo. Her ankle-length cotton dress was limp from the heat. Her short hair had lost its curl. But she looked up at Ernest with triumph in her blue-gray eyes. “We showed them!” she exclaimed.
They began walking. Ernest took the planking in long, silent strides, but Agnes’ boot heels shook the two-by-fours.
“Let’s go out to the canal,” she said abruptly.
But Ernest didn’t want to go to the canal. “We’ll drive into the desert later, when it cools down,” he said. At the car he knew better than to walk around and open Agnes’ door for her. He seated himself behind the wheel. “Don’t you want lunch?”
“We can eat Thorberg’s cookies,” she said. She opened the box and ate freely as Ernest drove. He turned a corner and pulled up in front of a rambling, two-story wood house. Carpenters were framing an added-on wing in back, and their hammer blows pierced the dry, hot air.
“On the train ride down, I saw lots of Indians working in the fields,” Agnes said. She closed the cookie box but made no move to see her new home.
“They come from the north of India,” said Ernest, absently adjusting the rear-view mirror. “They pick cotton and cantaloupe. Some of them own their own farms. They live communally and share their wages.”
“Where?”
“In encampments out in the fields. They leave their wives and children back in India until they’re established.”
Agnes thought of the miners in Colorado who didn’t have a union and didn’t share wages. She thought of Mother and herself and her sister and brothers following Father from one mining camp to another. She would have told Ernest about the camps, but he was already out of the car. Besides, shame and anger silenced her. The Brundins and that idiot Haberman would be surprised if they knew how primitive she’d grown up.
She opened the passenger door, hesitated, then followed Ernest toward the front entrance. He carried her carpetbag for her. Her mind was on other things: on turbaned Indians, on Colorado coal camps, on the boarding house bedroom ahead of her.
The landlady who answered the door introduced herself as Mrs. McCutcheon. She had a Scottish name, she said, because her husband was Scottish. She herself was Irish, as they might guess from her red hair.
“I wouldn’t have guessed it,” Agnes said. “It’s not very red.”
“Oh, it’s red all right,” she insisted. “Isn’t it ironic,” Mrs. McCutcheon continued, folding her hands over her soft stomach, “that with my fair skin I should end up in the desert with the sun beating down on me mercilessly. That’s what Mr. McCutcheon says. ‘It’s ironic, Margaret,’ he says, ‘that with your fair skin …’” She brushed away the end of the sentence with a gesture of her white, plump hand and picked up a ledger book from the hall table. “Let’s see. Mr. and Mrs. Brundin. You’re paid up to the end of the month.” She looked at Agnes. “We have high standards here.”
Agnes looked back, level-eyed.
“Second floor, west end.”
Mrs. McCutcheon didn’t fool Agnes. Under all the talk about high standards was a woman who’d fought her way up from a poor family and landed in a boarding house. Agnes intended to land higher. Ernest was a finer man by far, she was willing to bet, than Mr. McCutcheon. Ernest was a finer man than most. Agnes knew that. But she must not depend on it. She must rise on her own. She must never be stuck like Mrs. McCutcheon, running a boarding house and quoting her husband.
The bedroom on the second floor at the end of the hall was the same size as the bedroom she’d left behind in San Francisco. Even the furniture looked the same: a bed, a gate-legged table in the corner, one straight chair, and one bureau.
She dropped her carpetbag onto the bed. “It’s awful hot,” she said. Ernest opened the transom above the door and crossed the room in four steps to lift the window higher. He sat down on the sill while Agnes took a blouse and skirt from her bag.
“I need to wash up,” she said, self-conscious. The bathroom was all the way down the hall, on the right near the stairs. It wasn’t half as nice as Tillie’s bathroom in Denver. There wasn’t any window and there wasn’t any air. The light bulb above the sink gave her face a pasty look. She washed under her arms with soap and held her face under the faucet. But when she was finished she felt just as sticky as she had before the wash. In fact, she felt worse.
Maybe it was the train trip, or all those cookies she’d eaten. As she walked toward her room, the end of the hall seemed to recede. She grew short of breath and began to sweat. She might as well not have washed at all.
Pushing open the door to the room, she saw Ernest stretched out on the bed, her bed, in her rented room, paid for, she had to admit, by him. When she saw him there, she could scarcely have said his name or her name or where she was. A strangeness overtook her. She’d come to the wrong room. She belonged somewhere else but couldn’t remember where. Mechanically she gathered up her clean blouse and skirt and started out to the bathroom again.
“You can change in here,” Ernest said, his eyes still closed. He turned toward the wall. “After all, I have a sister.”
Agnes stood where she was, struck dumb with disgust and dread. She could not possibly undress with him in the room. She lowered her arms until the clean skirt and blouse she held dragged on the floor. She stared at Ernest’s back. It was long and slender and came to a V at the waist. His shirt had pulled out above his belt when he turned over. Always so well dressed, he now looked disheveled. His collar was rumpled, and there was a sweat stain that spread from under his arm into a wide semi-circle. The back of his neck glistened and
she could hear his breathing. He looked so solidly present. To undress in this room with Ernest on the bed, even if he had turned to the wall, was unthinkable.
Her blood rushed in her ears when it dawned on her that undressing here, now, was much easier than what she would have to do later. She turned her back on him. Trembling, she unbuttoned her dress. Tears of humiliation dropped onto her chest and ran down between her breasts. She was surprised at how hot tears are. She stepped into the closet and tried to close the door, but the closet was shallow and the door wouldn’t close with her in it. She heard the bedsprings creak.
Throwing herself around the closet door, hiding between it and the wall, Agnes removed one arm from its soiled sleeve and quickly drew the clean blouse over her shoulder. She repeated the movement with the other arm and buttoned up the clean blouse. The bodice of her soiled dress hung down over her hips.
“Agnes?” Ernest said. The bed springs creaked again. Crying out loud now, unable to stop herself, she stepped into the clean skirt, pulled it up under the low-riding dress, buttoned up the placket by feel, and dropped the old dress in a heap around her feet. She leaned against the wall behind the closet door and slid to the floor.
“Agnes!” Ernest got off the bed. In his stockinged feet he crossed to the closet door and closed it, then crouched down in front of her and touched her hair. She seemed not to know he was there.
“Agnes. Agnes. You musn’t. There’s nothing to be afraid of.” She quieted. “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he repeated. But his face showed strain as he removed the soiled dress from around her ankles, folded it, and dabbed at her tears with the hem of the skirt. Then he sat down on the floor beside her, leaned his back against the wall, and put one arm around her. He cradled her head on his chest and rested his own against the flowered wallpaper. Much later he stood and asked her to stand with him. She complied, wiping her face and hugging the soiled dress to herself as Ernest guided her to the bed.
She lay on top of the spread and he removed her shoes. “Rest,” he said. He pulled the window shades down. Through swollen eyes Agnes watched him grasp the stiffened edge of the shade and draw it up, down, up until the tension on the roller allowed it to stay.
It was late afternoon. The desert was beginning to cool. Light through the paper shades was pink now instead of yellow. Ernest came around the bed and lay down carefully beside her.
“I don’t know how to be married,” Agnes said in a flat voice. Ernest turned toward her. He started to pull back the spread.
“Don’t,” she said.
“Just for a pillow,” he offered. But he gave up the attempt. Agnes wadded the dirty striped dress and put it under her head. It seemed to her that she was floating above the boarding house, watching herself and a man try to do something difficult. Beside her, Ernest’s breathing was uneasy. He rubbed his eyes with the thumb and forefinger of one hand. Rubbing his eyes made him seem normal again. She struggled to hold onto the Ernest she knew, the quiet, gallant escort, the fellow worker. She tried to calm herself by picturing a young man and young woman working late, studying, making plans. She saw the woman marching at the head of some parade, she didn’t know what or where. The man walked beside her and a little behind. Farther back a brass band matched their stride, and behind the band marched an army of people, all working for the same thing—she couldn’t tell what—and moving to the beat.
That was what she wanted. Work. Parades. Music. Marching together. She did not want a double bed. She did not want the darkness of babies growing inside her; of putting things in herself so babies wouldn’t grow inside her. She didn’t want anything inside her; she would not be invaded; she would never be penetrated the way Mother was penetrated by Father.
She realized with alarm that Ernest was crying. He wasn’t crying out loud. It was his moist, congested breathing that gave him away.
“Ernest?”
He turned his face full toward her, unashamed of his misery. Agnes touched his cheek and came away with a shiny finger. It stunned her that a man should cry.
“Ernest,” she said. Looking into his eyes, she saw her own fright mirrored. He kissed her on the lips. She kissed him back at first, until his tongue was inside her mouth. She tried to draw away, but this time he insisted, and this time she could not control him. She leaned into him once and felt, for a wisp of a moment, the receptive power of being a woman to a man’s thrust.
At the verge of enjoying his body near hers—for he was very close to her now, over on her side of the bed, all around her, his breathing heavy—she pulled back, terrified of losing herself. His tears stopped and a drama began. She had a part to play, a part that was necessary, essential, and she could not play it. He didn’t bother to talk to her now or soothe her.
Once she whispered, “Ernest,” into his hair while he kissed her neck and started to move down toward her throat, but he seemed not to hear her. He was shaking, she was shaking, and she wanted nothing more than to jump up from the bed and run to—to somewhere she could not remember well. She was ashamed as Ernest touched her blouse and fumbled at her breast. He tried to kiss her there. Horrified, she understood what it meant to nurse a baby. She tried to squirm to one side, out of his range, yet still not leave the bed altogether. Because, crying, moaning in terror and humiliation, she somehow must do what women do. After all, Aunt Tilly did it every day for money. Agnes felt a rush of pity for Tillie, for Mother, for her sister Nellie who had died in childbirth.
Then there was no time to think. She clamped her jaws together as Ernest, usually so refined, so modest, so gentle, disregarded polite behavior and began to take his trousers off in daylight. She struggled up on her elbows and began scrabbling motions to get under the bedclothes.
“Loosen the covers,” she managed to say. Red-faced, they both peeled back the bedspread, thin blanket and sheet, bumping heads. Ernest drew his legs up. They were hairy and sinewy. Above his thighs, his pelvis had a much different look than her own. Her eye followed the rope-like muscle and bone around and down, down to an alarming mass of dark hair and a large, rigid organ which he tried to cover with the sheet, but which seemed to have a life of its own and rose up under the bedclothes. She could not imagine anything so unlike her little brothers’ harmless bodies. This organ was so conspicuous, the dark hair ruffling all about it, and under it more organs and meaty tissue, that it looked as if it should be inside his body instead of out.
Ernest pressed against her and she felt the hardness of the swollen organ, and her mind went blank until Ernest’s awkward jabbing between her legs turned into piercing, shrieking pain and she, like the pain, was shrieking. Ernest threw himself off her, covered her mouth with a sticky hand that smelled like bleach, and said he was sorry. He rolled onto his back and pulled his trousers up, bracing himself on his heels. Half-dressed, he lay beside her, then turned and sat up on the edge of the bed, his head in his hands.
Agnes lay under the sheet with her eyes closed. Something warm and liquid was spreading along her inner thighs. She was afraid she had wet the bed. Her bottom was a dark cavern filled with pain. She had been mauled. The mattress moved. When she opened her eyes, the man standing with one hand on the bedpost didn’t seem familiar to her. She had married someone she didn’t know. Beneath his trousers was undreamed of danger. She felt sick to her stomach. She sat up on the edge of the bed, then moved to the door and down the hall to the bathroom where she vomited. She dared not empty her bladder; her female parts were so raw that urine must not sting them. There was nothing to do but return to the room. She stayed close to the wall, for she needed something to steady her. When she re-entered the room Ernest was standing by the bed, his face white, while there on the sheet was a circle of blood. Agnes forgot about him and lifted her skirt to her waist. She bent down and saw that her drawers were stained, her thighs red and smeared.
She tried to call out, but no one heard.
She woke in the bed. The landlady sat on a straight chair beside her. Ernest stood at the
window as if he were looking out, except that the shades were still drawn. The room, immobilized in dying light, floated and Agnes floated with it.
14
San Diego 1913
Ernest got off the streetcar at El Cajon and Normal, the car stop Agnes said was near her house. Even after his train ride from El Centro had ended, he felt as if he were still swerving, going upgrade and downgrade on a narrow pair of rails. Two blocks beyond the San Diego Normal, he stopped in front of a white frame bungalow, set his grip on the sidewalk, and took a slip of paper from his wallet. He studied the street number, replaced the wallet in his back pocket, and climbed the steps to the porch. The paint was peeling, and the windows needed putty. He peered into the front room. One sofa and one straight chair. The porch, with its pots of red geraniums, looked more livable than the room inside.
He knocked twice. No answer. He walked around the side of the house, a strip of stubby grass that no one watered. In back was a screened-in porch. Only when he saw the large garden was he sure this was the place: row upon row of lettuce and green onions, cauliflower, tomato plants tied up on stakes, squash with its trailing leaves. Agnes had written him about her vegetables. He sat down on the back porch steps to light a cigarette.
Full-time student. Full-time gardener. Part-time wife.
Down the block, children played through the last weeks of summer. For them, being promoted to the next grade was just another step in an endless childhood. He smoked thoughtfully. The flame threatened to go out once. It was a doubtful cigarette, a doubtful smoke, and it tasted bitter. In any case, to use his sister’s expression, he was here. Thorberg had tried to dissuade him. She was angry with him for buying Agnes’ train ticket to San Diego, paying her enrollment fees at the Normal, renting this house. She was angry with Agnes. “She’ll leave you again and again, Ernest. Listen to me. She is not going to be anyone’s wife.”