Falling Angels

by Barbara Gowdy

“What is it?” Lou asked.

  “Kidney,” he said. “An organ. Also a bean.”

  “But kidney’s got an e!” she cried.

  He scowled at the board. “No, it doesn’t.”

  “Well, it does,” their mother said. “K-i-d-n-e-y.”

  He laughed. “That’s the British spelling. I’m using the American.”

  Their mother shook her head. “I think there’s only the one way to spell it, Jim.”

  “Daddy, you can’t spell,” Sandy said tenderly. She couldn’t spell either.

  “Hey!” Lou cried, rearranging his letters. “You can make dinky!”

  “Dinky!” Norma cried. They all three burst out laughing.

  He hit Lou with a backhand across the face. She fell sideways. Norma and Sandy jumped up and ran to the wall, Sandy crying. Their mother leaned over to grab the whisky bottle. He stood wearily, as if it was all over, but then he kicked the Scrabble board. It went shooting straight up, scattering letters, bent at the crease down the middle as if it would fly, and fell back to the floor, flat.

  Lou, on her feet now, was making leaps at the roof, trying to grab the stairs, which you pulled down.

  “The hatch is locked,” their father said matter-of-factly. He looked at his watch. “Nap time,” he said and began putting out the lights.

  Lou threw herself back on the floor. “I’m never going to get up,” she said in a passionate voice that persuaded her sisters. Their father stepped over her.

  The others went to the bunks. There were two bunks, Lou’s and Norma’s, on the end wall; one, Sandy’s, along the same wall as the toilet was; and two more, their mother’s and father’s, on the wall across from the toilet. Their father climbed up to his bunk carrying a candle, which he held between his knees while he set the alarm clock, then blew it out.

  Black. And then that stench. This time all three girls smelled it. Lou imagined it was coming from under the shelter, beneath where she was lying. She started to shiver. The floor was cold and hard and bumpy with Scrabble letters. Her ear throbbed; it seemed huge, a Mouseketeer ear. In Disneyland, with her three bucks, she would have bought Mouseketeer ears.

  She got up on her knees and crawled over to where her bunk was, knowing the direction from their father’s snores. When she bumped into the bottom bunk, she dropped her head on the edge. She was too tired to climb to the top, or even to climb in with Norma.

  “Hey,” Norma whispered, but Lou was sound asleep. Norma laid her hand on her sister’s face. She thought she felt the hot imprint of their father’s hand. If she got up now to change her rag, he’d probably hit her, too, but he’d kill her if she leaked all over the bed. She had meant to put on a new rag after the games. “Please, God,” she prayed, imploring her flow to stop. Would boys smell the blood? Boys stared at her chest. No matter how smart or nice they were otherwise, they looked stupid and shifty when they stared at her chest. Even on hot days she wore two undershirts and a sweater. She slept on her stomach, but her breasts kept on growing anyway. When would they stop? Sometimes she thought of her breasts as intelligent life with insane, disgusting ambitions.

  She wondered if the awful rotting smell was her period.

  For some reason the alarm went off at ten after four instead of four o’clock, cutting into their exercise hour. He gave them only a minute each to use the toilet, Norma two minutes to change her rag. The blood hadn’t leaked onto her sheets, but it had gone through to her underpants and made a spot on her blue corduroy pants. She would have to wear them like that all week. There was no laundry detergent down here, let alone extra water or time in The Regime for doing a wash, and they had only been allowed to bring down one change of clothing, which they weren’t supposed to put on until next Saturday.

  Sandy begged for a drink of water, and he let her have a sip. When he was peeing, Lou drank a whole glass. She said she had a headache, and Sandy said,“Same here.”

  “Have another sip,” their mother whispered, tendering the mug.

  Afternoon exercises in the dark were next. By admitting that her stomach still hurt, Norma was exempted. Lou and Sandy weren’t, pressure headaches being natural down here, their father maintained. No big deal—with the lights out, Lou didn’t have any intention of straining herself. She let Sandy hold her hand (“Or I feel like I’m in the Wizard of Oz house,” Sandy whispered), and the two of them only pretended to lift their knees as they marched. During touching toes and push-ups they just lay there making grunting noises, while their father’s sweat rained on them.

  The lights came back on for “Pep Talk.” This turned out to be their father telling them about marching for three days on a broken ankle, living for weeks on cans of peaches and dragging a wounded buddy to safety under a barrage of Jerry fire—stories they’d heard a thousand times. Then there was “Inventory,” “Supper and Cleanup,” then two hours of “Free Time,” which was either playing games quietly or reading. The girls played hearts with their mother and sipped from her mug. Lou also sneaked puffs of her cigarette. After a few rounds Norma conked out on the floor. Their father lay on his bunk, smoking and reading his Life magazines. Anything about the Russians or about Negroes he read out loud in a sarcastic voice.

  At nine o’clock Norma had to wake up, and they all changed into their pyjamas. When they were in bed, their father said the soldier’s prayer: “Keep our hearts stout and our enemies baffled.” He listed their names for God’s blessing in the same strange order that they were supposed to use the toilet in. Then he blew out the candle and instantly started to snore. Sandy started to whimper.

  “What is it, honey?” their mother asked.

  “I smell worms eating Rapunzel.”

  “That’s Daddy.”

  “I don’t think it’s a person smell,” Norma said quickly, still unsure that it wasn’t her.

  “It only happens in the dark,” Sandy said.

  Their mother got up and lit the lantern in the corner by the toilet. “There,” she said. “It’s gone.” And it was. They all went to sleep. An hour or so later, when the alarm rang for their father to crank the blower, he wanted to know who the hell had lit the lantern. “I did, Jim,” their mother said. “I’ve had that nightmare.” He turned around and looked at her. What nightmare? the girls wondered. He went back to bed, leaving the lantern burning. Every few hours the alarm went off for him to crank the blower. One of the times, the lantern was out, and he poured in more fuel and lit it again.

  Years later the girls would refer to those two weeks not as “when we were in the fallout shelter” but as “when we almost died.”

  The threat of death was there from the start, given how hellbent their father was on keeping them all down there no matter what. As adults the girls agreed that if one of them had a burst appendix, he would have tried to treat her himself with his hunting knife and Bactine.

  But since nothing that drastic happened, and since they spent the whole two weeks drunk, how imperilled they were didn’t dawn on them until the last days, when there was no more water and when “Pep Talk” was stories of children such as Anne Frank and Little Eva, who faced death bravely.

  He marked off the days, scratching lines on the bottom corner of The Regime. By day four the girls and their mother were so attuned to the schedule that they could divine when it was time for the next event. In the middle of games, songs, in the middle of sentences, they would be startled by the thought of what time it was.

  Like their mother, the girls could hold their liquor, to the extent, anyway, that they could do what they had to do, but in the mornings they had hangovers, and Norma was usually sick to her stomach as well. At first Norma blamed her period, because she didn’t know that you could get drunk on intermittent sips and because she didn’t think that their parents would allow them to get drunk. Also because he blamed her period. How could he have missed those sips, which were hardly furtive by the second day? Maybe, the three girls thought later (in fact, they thought it was likely), he didn’t miss them; l
ikely he saw the advantages in keeping them half sedated.

  Day four was the best day. His pep talk that day was telling them what a smooth-running machine the five of them were, what a crack squad, what troopers.

  Day five, getting out of bed, he stepped on Norma’s glasses and shattered both lenses. When it became apparent that they couldn’t be fixed with Elmer’s glue and electrician’s tape, he spanked her for leaving them on the floor, then wrote a letter to the Minister of Health about the crooked optician who’d charged him fifteen bucks extra for unbreakable glass.

  All this took up half an hour. “Christ Almighty, eight-thirty-three!” he shouted, and he gave them only a minute each in the bathroom.

  Norma didn’t waste her minute peeing. She quickly unpinned her rag and felt on the shelf above the toilet for a clean one. She felt all around, knocking over a bottle.

  “Time’s up!” he yelled.

  She patted the ground, found the rag she’d just taken off, and squeezed it out in the toilet.

  “Time!” he yelled again.

  “Okay, okay.” Where had she put the pins?

  Lou opened the door and shoved by her to use the toilet. “For God’s sake,” she said. Norma was standing there with her pyjama bottoms down, holding the bloody rag.

  “Can you see where my pins are?” Norma whispered.

  Lou sat on the toilet and scanned the floor. “Here,” she said, picking them up.

  “I’m out of rags,” Norma said quietly, her voice shaking, her fingers shaking as she took the pins.

  Usually after their turns on the toilet they washed in the same order and in the same basin of water that he’d used for shaving. This morning, though, he told them to proceed directly to “Getting Dressed,” and to save himself a few seconds, he didn’t go with his clothes into the bathroom.

  The light stayed on for “Getting Dressed,” as this category included shaving and washing. With their father right there, the girls had to cover themselves in their blankets and face the wall to change. Norma, who would have covered herself and faced the wall anyway, even though her sisters and mother had stopped bothering, was close to tears that he was undressing in the same room. Nothing he had ever done seemed so lawless.

  “Move it!” he shouted at her, and then her tears did fall because she was holding everyone up and couldn’t see, and she was bursting from not having gone to the bathroom, and she felt sick to her stomach, and her rag was leaking.

  She couldn’t eat. On top of everything else he had made the worst smell ever in the toilet, and he had b.o. from not washing or using deodorant. She sat there stirring her Frosted Flakes, trying to work up the courage to ask if he would rip apart another sheet.

  But it was Lou who mentioned that the rags were used up.

  He looked at Norma. “Are you still bleeding?” he asked, his tone implying that a real trooper would have stopped by now.

  “Like a stuck pig,” Lou answered.

  “So, take some rags out of the garbage and wash them,” he said to Norma. “String up clothesline. Waste not, want not.”

  Norma retrieved every last rag, in case she went on bleeding for the whole two weeks. Crouched in the bathroom, out of the way, she washed them with dish detergent in the big pot. She couldn’t get all the blood out—brownish-red streaked the green cloth. When she tied rope between the upper bunks and hung the rags to dry, their mother said,“Don’t they look festive!”

  “They look like gas-station flags,” Lou said.

  What they looked like to Norma were her filth and shame. She would never get over the shame.

  How the rest of the day deteriorated:

  Their father lost at crazy eights, accused Lou of cheating (she had), spanked her and burned the deck of cards on the stove.

  After “Nap Time” Sandy noticed that she was covered in a rash. Their mother diagnosed it as chicken pox.

  While perusing the “Pioneers of Self-Defence” pamphlet, their father discovered that when he had been calculating how much water they would need, he had referred to the “For Three Persons” column instead of the “For Five Persons.”

  The dishwater had to last three days. They could only wash and brush their teeth on the even days: eight, ten, and so on. There would be no beverage with lunch.

  On the same morning that their father announced these new water-rationing rules, the temperature in the shelter shot up about ten degrees. Their father decided that there must be a heat wave outside and declared it a stroke of luck, a closer temperature to what they could expect from nuclear incineration. He stripped to his boxer shorts and began speaking in his Mexican accent.

  After a few hours their mother also stripped, down to her slip, bra and underpants, and she took off Sandy’s slacks and sweater. Lou undressed then, too. But Norma, with breasts and bloodstained underpants to hide, kept all her clothes on. To cool herself down she leaned against the concrete walls and wet one of her clean rags with some Canadian Club and wiped her skin. That was what their mother was doing for Sandy’s chicken pox, bathing it with a whisky-soaked dishcloth.

  Their mother was as worried and as ferocious as the girls had ever seen her. Defying their father’s order to keep Sandy quarantined behind a polyethylene curtain, she let Sandy lie with her. She took her temperature every hour and held the mug of whisky to her lips. Over and over Sandy pulled the string on her beatnik doll, which was stuck saying,“Hey, cool cat, let’s jive.” Sandy didn’t like a doll to have straight black hair. The only reason she brought this doll down was that their father said she could, and she thought that meant she had to. She pulled the string so that she wouldn’t scratch her chicken pox. Their mother kept saying,“I know you feel just terrible,” but Sandy didn’t, really, other than that she was itchy. Maybe her fever was fooling her, though. Maybe she was dying. Whenever she thought this, she cried.

  One of the times that she cried, their mother said,“This child’s temperature only has to rise one more degree, and I am taking her out of here, Jim, even if I have to shoot you for the key to the hatch.”

  “Please God,” Lou thought,“let Sandy’s temperature go up one degree.”

  But their mother kept it down with the Canadian Club baths. At least the whisky cut the toilet smell. The toilet smell was the worst part. That and thirst. From day six (they couldn’t understand this, because they were sipping whisky all day) the girls were parched.

  One morning, on day nine, Norma took a drink of the two-day-old dishwater. Poison, probably, but that was fine with her. She was dying anyway. Bleeding to death, and nobody cared. She didn’t care. To prepare herself for heaven, she had enumerated her sins and asked God’s forgiveness. She had conceived a love for Jesus so profound that often during the day she hallucinated harp music and saw the Star of Bethlehem blazing clear. She got the idea that their dead brother sat on the right hand of Jesus, and she carried on long, one-sided conversations with him. From where he sat, he could see the whole world, she imagined. He could even see underground. If they had gone to Disneyland, he’d have watched the tiny dot of their trailer moving across the prairies. Not getting to go to Frontierland is what Norma regretted most. Not seeing the horses. She liked to think that there were horses in heaven—the coloured kind with wings. Well, she’d find out soon enough. Every hour that passed and she wasn’t dead yet seemed miraculous but illegal. Here she was, eating nothing and losing gallons of blood. A nine-day period so far! Why wasn’t she withering away?

  The one withering away was Lou, or so Lou thought. Her arms and legs scandalized her. “Look! Look!” she said, holding her arms out. “Sticks!”

  There was no argument.

  “I need more food!” she cried. “I’m starving!”

  “Tauro guano,” their father said. “Bullshit.”

  And because it was true that Lou was eating as much as she ever had, she began to suspect that what was really causing her to lose weight was his bad breath. He was breathing out some kind of D D T gas.

  Us
ing one of Norma’s washed rags and some string, she made a mask to cover her mouth and nose. In her underwear and the mask, with her hair hanging loose and uncombed, she looked like a nightmare nurse, their father said.

  He laughed snidely. He didn’t trust her an inch. He wore the can opener tied to the waistband of his boxer shorts in case she tried to sneak food while he was sleeping, and he moved the two remaining jugs of water up to the foot of his bunk.

  He called her “the gringo.” “Look at the gringo,” he said, as though she were out of earshot. “Look at her conniving. If the gringo had her way, she’d undermine the whole exercise.”

  She already had. Staying down there for fourteen and a half days, for the three hundred and forty-eight hours that the pamphlet recommended, was the test, the goal, all that finally counted. It wasn’t going to happen. On the morning of the ninth day, before he woke up, Lou added a line to the bottom corner of The Regime where he marked off the days, and he didn’t notice.

  “Day ten,” he announced on his way to the toilet, scratching a horizontal line through the four vertical ones.

  That walk to the toilet, including the pause to mark off the day, took six seconds. The day before, he had clocked every one of his functions, noting how long it took to pee, drink a glass of orange juice, play Parcheesi, sing “Easter Parade”—whatever he did. He switched to military time. “Oh eight-hundred,” he said. Time obsessed him. There were no more deviations from The Regime, no more lengthening or shortening of events. Even though a lot of the events didn’t really happen. “Exercises” had dwindled into Lou and Norma standing on the hopscotch squares, Lou reading comics, Norma staring at blur. The getting dressed part of “Getting Dressed” had stopped altogether, as none of them could be bothered changing into their pyjamas at night. He couldn’t be bothered washing, brushing his teeth and shaving, either, by day ten. He looked like a hobo, like the men who wandered out of the ravine to pull down their pants in public. From thirst he had started in on the whisky.

  Alcohol made him clumsy and made him cry. During nap time on day eleven, which was really day ten, Lou tried to mark off another day on The Regime, but this time he caught her, and when he spanked her, he and Sandy were the ones who burst into tears.