by Chris Cander
“Come on, Eagan, help me. Get this off and go upstairs. What’s the matter with you?”
The edge in her voice pulled him out of his thoughts, and he twisted his upper body quickly, a bull shrugging off a fly. “Nothing’sa matter with me,” he said. His voice sounded too small for his bearded mouth. His eyes looked too weary for his youthful face.
“Okay, then. Come on.”
Dutifully he followed her up the carpeted stairs that creaked under his weight with each step. She was already bent over the edge of the claw-foot bathtub, plugging in the stopper and filling it with hot water when he made it to the bathroom. She stood up and blew a few strands of hair off her face and wiped her hands again on her apron, a practiced move for someone so young. At the sight of him standing limp in the doorway, she put her hands on her hips.
“Eagan, take off your jacket, please, and get into the bath.”
“Sam called me a retard.”
“What?” she asked, only mildly surprised. She stepped forward to help him undress. “When did he say that?”
“Today. Underground. He said I was too stupid to join the army.”
“Oh, Eagan. I’m sure he didn’t mean it.” She lifted his left arm and pulled it out of his sleeve, then his right, then folded the jacket in half and laid it over the edge of the sink.
“He did. He said I was stupid.”
“You’re not stupid.” Starting at the top, she unbuttoned his flannel shirt. “You’re just … different.” She patted him on the chest, then knelt down to check the water temperature. Too cold. She twisted the tap with the H on its porcelain button and dragged her hand through the tub in figure eights to blend the rush of hot water. He was silent as he finally stripped off his coal-stained work clothes, dropping them item by item in a heap on the floor.
“Get in.”
Stepping inside, he shuffled one foot, watched the wake it created. She sighed at the pile of clothes, then gathered it up.
He was barely audible over the water. “I don’t want to be different.”
“There’s nothing wrong with being different,” she said in a matter-of-fact tone. With her free hand, she pulled a clean towel off the hook by the door and laid it across the toilet seat. “I’m going to get your breakfast ready so don’t dilly-dally up here. I have to get going or I’m going to be late.”
He kicked once at the water, sending an arc of it out of the tub and onto the tile grid of the floor. “I can get my own breakfast. I’m not a baby. You don’t have to treat me like a baby. I’m a grown-up man.”
“Yes, Eagan, I know you’re a grown man. Now I’m going on downstairs. Hurry up.”
“Don’t tell me what to do!” The pitch of his voice went up. “I’m a grown-up man! You don’t believe me? Look.” He pointed to his exposed male parts, as if she hadn’t seen them a thousand times before, and kicked another spray of water onto the floor.
“Eagan, stop it! Look what you’re doing!” Lidia grabbed the towel off the seat and was about to toss it down to absorb the puddle when Eagan reached out to take it from her. But being twice her size and standing at an even greater height inside the bathtub, he pulled her off balance and sent her sprawling backward instead. She landed on her backside, her feet splayed, her apron and the nightgown she still had on underneath it hiked up. She stared at him with her mouth open like a doll propped up by rigid arms.
“You don’t think I’m a man!” His normally docile face went red and wrinkled with anger, his big hands clenching into white-edged fists, his chest heaving up and down with every breath.
Lidia remained where she fell, mouth still open and eyes wide, until she saw the undeniable and increasing evidence of Eagan’s manhood. Pointing first at the floor in front of her, it quickly aimed itself like an accusing finger up her uncovered legs and her lap and then at her own heaving chest.
“Eagan, no.” She kept her eyes on his, pushed herself a foot or so backward toward the door. A hot rip of pain across her tailbone made her cry out. “No!”
He stepped out of the tub and moved toward her, but there was no compassion in his approach. His eyes went black, sharp and dull at the same time. He lunged down, collapsing on her as she fell back again under his weight.
“Stop! Stop!” But he did not. He grabbed the top hem of her white panties and yanked them down, not all the way, but far enough, the tiny pink satin bow mashed into her thigh. She kicked and twisted under him, but he was too big and too angry. “No!”
“I’m not a baby! I’m a man and I’ll show you I’m a man, and you’ll never call me a retard again. You’ll never call me stupid ever ever again.” He shoved her down, kicking her legs apart and clamping them to the slippery tile floor with his own. He pushed himself into her. In that searing moment, she became still. Too shocked even to cry, she lay in submission for those few eternal seconds until he finished.
Another few seconds passed while he lay unmoving on top of her. She looked at the pipe snaking out from beneath the sink and entering the wall behind it. It seemed to be leaking. A sour-looking stain sweated through the wallpaper. She would have to call the plumber.
Eagan pushed himself off her. He brought his hands to his mouth and she could see that the ebony glaze in his hazel eyes was gone. Now it was his turn to stare wide-eyed at her as his face rearranged itself. He let go a piercing yelp, the sound a puppy would make if its tail had been crushed, and he bit into the back of one hand. His eyes filled with tears and he shook his head.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” he said, his voice quaking. He scrambled backward across the wet floor, dragging his limp-again weapon like a tail, and wedged himself in the too-small space between the bathtub and the toilet. He began to rock back and forth, back and forth, hitting the wall each time. “I’m sorry, Lidie. Please don’t tell? Please don’t tell?”
Lidia sat up, wincing at the pain from her initial fall and at the burning sensation between her legs. While Eagan begged her forgiveness, she peeled the ripped panties off and balled them up. She stood weakly but calmly up, and straightened her nightgown and the apron over it, the paisley one that had been her mother’s. Pushing her hair off her expressionless face, she looked down at the slick floor and saw a runnel of blood flowing to meet the spilled bathwater. Eagan’s plea was a run-on susurration: “Please don’t tell please don’t tell please don’t tell …”
“I won’t tell.”
He looked up, his eyes pleading. “Do you still love me?”
She looked down at him. “Yes, I love you,” she said, the weight of her whole short life pushing down on her.
“You do?”
“Of course I love you,” she said in a whisper.
“No matter what?”
“I’ll always love you, Eagan,” she said. “You’re my brother.”
Then she stuffed the wad of panties deep into the front pocket of her apron, took a deep breath, and said in her soft, clear voice, “Now dry yourself off. I’ll go down and get your breakfast.”
January 30, 1965
Lidia knew how girls got pregnant. Her mother had told her not long before she died, unexpectedly, just two weeks shy of Lidia’s fourteenth birthday. Girls grew up early in Verra. Her mother knew that fourteen was not too tender an age for that kind of information, and she didn’t want Lidia to have to find out about it on her own. From partially informed girls whispering behind cupped hands on the playground. From the steel-haired and disapproving physical education teacher at the school. From poorly written books. Her mother, from experience, knew that some of the most important facts were often omitted during that particularly delicate transfer of knowledge. But what her mother hadn’t known — could never have imagined — was how young her daughter would be when she would have to draw upon that education. When her cycle hadn’t started two weeks after her brother raped her, Lidia knew that what kept her from wanting to crawl out of bed wasn’t merely shame.
Her bleeding, like the rest of her, was regular from the very start. She
’d never had to run to the school nurse in the middle of the day as Peggy sometimes did, her face as red as the spot on her skirt. Peggy had eventually started keeping a change of clothes with her. Of course none of the girls would comment if she returned from a restroom break wearing a different skirt, but more than once the boys did, in their boorish, ignorant way. “What’s with the costume change, Peggy? You got so many outfits you have to wear two a day?” While they snickered and elbowed one another, she’d put her hand on one blooming hip and retort with a smile, “Oh I just wanted to give you a variety of things to look at, since you can’t seem to keep your eyes off me.” Then she’d saunter off as the other boys turned their laughter toward her flush-faced victim.
Every twenty-eight days for the past two years, Lidia had put on a Kotex pad and belt under her clothes. If she was going to school or into town, she put an extra into her purse. Usually by lunchtime it would have started. But this week, after nine straight days of wearing pads that never needed changing, she woke up from a dream in which she’d been trying to save a newborn bird that had fallen from its nest. She knew, even before she was fully awake, there would be no time-of-the-month in January.
After school that Friday, Danny met her as usual on the front steps to walk or drive her home. “Want to see My Fair Lady tomorrow night?” he asked as they shuffled down Main Street through the powder dusting of snow.
“Really? You want to see that again?”
“I don’t mind. I know you liked it.”
She had liked it. Danny had driven her all the way to Charleston to see it in the big theater there the week of Christmas break. She’d been enchanted by Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle, a poor East End flower girl with a Cockney accent, and found herself later trying to mimic the upper-class accent Eliza had acquired in the movie. “The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain,” she’d said to herself over and over, with elongated vowels.
That had been just a month — and a lifetime — ago.
“It’s just you seem a little down in the dumps lately,” Danny continued. “Thought it might perk you up. We don’t have to go, though. I don’t really care what we do, long as we’re together.” He reached over and held her mittened hand.
She looked at him and smiled. Under the wool, she could feel his class ring press into her middle and pinkie fingers. When he’d given it to her at the end of that previous summer, she’d wrapped it in adhesive tape until it fit. At night, after she lay down to sleep — Eagan gone for his hoot-owl shift — she would twist it around her wedding finger in the dark, imagining their future. They’d leave Verra and move to Charleston, or someplace else close enough to visit but far enough away to start a life of their own. Danny would become a lawyer like he wanted. Maybe she’d even go to law school, too.
“That sounds nice. Yes. I’d like to see it again.”
Danny held open the movie theater door and then skipped ahead of her on the pavement singing, “I’m getting married in the morning. Ding dong! The bells are gonna chime. Punch me and jail me, stamp me and mail me. But get me to the church on time!” His breath steamed into the cold air. He twirled and laughed as only a seventeen-year-old senior boy with a letter jacket and an infallible throwing arm could. Even in her distracted state of mind, Lidia laughed as he swung himself around a lamppost and tried to emulate Alfred Doolittle’s march-dance with knees and elbows akimbo.
When he grabbed her around the waist and picked her up, she stopped laughing. The baby.
“Down!”
“I’m just joshing you, silly.”
She put her thumb beneath her waistband and gave it a tiny tug. It would be months before she would need the slack, she knew. But the idea of him — in two days she’d already begun to think of it as him — being crushed made her uncomfortable. Protective.
Then she relaxed again. “I know,” she said. “I’m just cold. Let’s get to the car.”
It was more than an hour’s drive back to Verra. The interstate was quick, but the road up into the mountains was steep and tedious. They listened to the radio station until the static took over, then Danny reached over and snapped it off. For the next five or ten miles, they rode in comfortable silence, until Lidia pointed ahead to a scenic overview and said, “Pull off up there.”
“There? Why?”
“Just pull off.”
“It’s cold out. Can you wait? We’ll be home in a quarter hour.”
“I don’t need the restroom.”
He glanced at her. “Okay.”
On a wide lip of the mountain face, he slowed to a gravelly stop. If they were standing outside, they’d have had an unrestrained view of a river hundreds of feet below. He put the car in park.
“Cut the engine,” she said.
He did. Lidia closed her eyes to adjust to the blackness of the new moon, then looked up through the window. Snow fell from trillions of winking stars.
“You all right?”
She reached out with her left hand and felt for his, then pressed his ring, secure on her finger, into his large, warm hand, and exhaled. Peggy, with her womanly figure and cheeky bravado, acted like she knew so much. But Lidia knew that she’d only ever been kissed — and only once at that — by the younger brother of a classmate during a basement game of spin the bottle. Peggy had never had a steady, barely even went on dates. Before she got home after school, she wiped her lipstick off so her daddy wouldn’t see. Her mother wouldn’t notice her wearing makeup even if she hadn’t started drinking by then, but Peggy wouldn’t risk her daddy’s wrath.
And certainly, Peggy had never pulled off the side of the road on a makeshift lovers’ lane in the dead cold of winter.
Lidia squeezed Danny’s hand, and then turned to face him. She moved slowly to the center of the bench seat, until she was so close she could feel his heartbeat quicken. Then she moved closer.
During the countless kisses before this, she’d always closed her eyes. She never knew what Danny’s face looked like when their lips touched, because it always seemed natural to keep them closed. Tonight, she kept them open. Tonight, she kissed him with more purpose than longing.
She put her hand inside his collar, and felt the warmth of his neck. Without moving her lips from his, she twisted her body so that she was facing him, sliding between his lap and the steering wheel, moving astride.
“Whoa,” he said, breaking contact. “What’s gotten into you, Lid?”
“I think it’s time.”
“Time for what?”
“To go all the way.”
He blinked several times in the darkness. “No.”
“Yes.”
“We said we were going to wait.”
She held up her ring finger. “We’re going to get married eventually, aren’t we?”
“Jeez, Lid. I haven’t even asked for your hand.”
“It’s obvious, isn’t it? How things are going? Even Daddy knows your intentions.”
Danny pressed himself back into the leather seat. “Yes, but …”
“But, nothing,” she said. “I’m here, I love you. Why wait?”
“You ain’t never said ‘I love you’ before.”
“It’s not an easy thing to say.”
“I love you, Liddie.”
She nodded.
“Are you sure you want to?” he asked.
She answered by taking his hand and holding it firm as she climbed over the bench into the backseat. He hesitated.
“Come here,” she said.
He swung one long, muscular leg over the top of the seat and then the other, holding himself up by straight-arming the front and back seats. Lidia scooted down until she was horizontal, resting her head on the armrest in the door. She moved her hair away from the ashtray embedded there. “Come here,” she said again.
“Lid, I don’t know about this.”
“I do.”
“I … I’ve never done it before.”
She closed her eyes. Then she inhaled deeply, filling her ches
t with air and pressing her tiny breasts upward. “I haven’t either.”
In the darkness, he couldn’t see her. Couldn’t see if her expression matched her voice. By then, as she pulled him down on top of her, kissing his neck and untucking his button-down shirt from his slacks, he was losing his ability to discern anything, anyway.
They fumbled in the narrow span of seat, bumping into the backrest and armrest and window. Took turns apologizing and sighing. Danny moaned as he found his tentative way inside her. Lidia, pretending virginity, cried out when he first entered her. This time, at least, she was ready. Nonetheless, her tears were real.
He finished quickly, and immediately apologized. “Are you all right? Did I hurt you?”
“No.” She shook her head. “No.”
He moved to sitting, and shimmied his slacks up from around his ankles. “Do you feel okay? Do you need anything?” Danny buckled his belt, slid the rawhide leather into the loop.
She shook her head. “I’m fine.”
“I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
Before he climbed into the driver’s seat, he looked at her, bewildered and happy. He held out his hand for her to follow, and she did.
Soon he had started the engine, flipped on the headlights, and backed away from the mountain edge. He looked at her again just before he pulled back onto the hairpin road that would take them into Verra. “You may have just made me the happiest guy on the planet.”
She smiled back. “I hope so,” she said, then buttoned her blouse and climbed back into his letterman sweater. She ran her hand across her belly once more, under the cloak of starlit darkness, and thought of a name: Gabriel. Archangel, spirit of truth. It wasn’t his fault his origins would be a lie.
As they descended the long stretch of snow-covered mountain road into their hometown, Lidia began to sing in a voice so low it was nearly a whisper: “I’m getting married in the morning. Ding dong! The bells are gonna chime. Punch me and jail me, stamp me and mail me. But get me to the church on time.”