On day twelve he dropped the last jug, and all the water spilled onto the floor.
“You idiot!” Lou screamed, but he was too stunned to respond. Yanking off her mask, Lou fell to her knees and lapped at the water. That was it for unadulterated fluid. For the next sixty-one hours it was whisky or nothing.
Those hours were a sweet, sewery dream. It helped that their father was plastered. He still made an attempt to announce some of the Regime events on the button, but whether or not the events happened, he didn’t notice.
“A cheap drunk,” Lou said, as he lay passed out on the floor during “Inventory” and she was unclipping the can opener from his boxer shorts.
Now they could eat what they liked when they liked. But they weren’t that hungry. Cans with juice in them—the vegetable and fruit cans—were the only ones that interested them, although for some reason they weren’t that thirsty anymore either.
Why didn’t Lou search for the key to the hatch one of those times when he was dead to the world? She asked herself this the day after they were out of the shelter, and she wondered about it for the rest of her life. Why didn’t she escape? She was drunk, there was that, but no more so than when she marked off a day on The Regime. As a matter of fact, she was clearheaded enough to realize that she was drunk and that she wasn’t a cheap drunk.
Their mother took over “Singsong” and “Pep Talk.” Instead of singing soldier songs, they sang television-show theme songs and songs from old musicals. Instead of hearing stories about the war and the Great Depression, they heard old TV-show episodes and stories about their mother growing up on a farm, an only daughter who worshipped the ground her two older brothers walked on, who always wore white and was the model for the Dutch Cleanser girl.
Even after her fever was gone, Sandy continued to sleep with their mother. The two of them spent most of the day in bed, napping or gazing at the ceiling (Sandy had picked up their mother’s serene gaze). Looking at them lying there, golden and the same, Lou could imagine they were either corpses or angels. Sometimes Lou thought they were from outer space, spying Martians in human form who figured that to do a daughter disguise, you just made a smaller mother.
Lou spent her free time practicing how to deal from the bottom of the deck, reading the Life magazines now that their father wasn’t, and working on her lists, alphabetizing and adding to her list of swear words and extending her hit list to include famous people, such as the Avon lady and Kathy from Father Knows Best.
Norma drank from her own whisky bottle, which she held to her chest like a cross, a ticket to heaven. Without her glasses on she felt as if she were in heaven already, as if she were in a cloud surrounded by the dear, featureless faces of her family. Never had she known such tranquillity. She was tranquil every minute of those final hours except once—when she went to the bathroom to change her rag, and their father was already there, standing in front of the toilet.
“Oh, are you going to use it?” she asked, supposing that he wasn’t, because he’d left the door open and hadn’t told her to go away.
And then she realized, from the blur of skin colour, that his pants were already down.
She turned, stumbled out the door. “I can’t see,” she cried.
But she had seen. She’d seen his penis, the purple, fuzzy shape of it, sticking out.
She thought, panicking,“He knows I saw.” She took a sip of whisky. “He’s just drunk,” she told herself. “He doesn’t know what he’s doing.” She stared at the glow of the lantern, its everlasting, godly glow, and remembered a hymn: “Above the clear, blue sky, in heaven’s bright abode.” She could hardly wait.
At five o’clock on the morning of the final day their father emptied the remaining three whisky bottles onto the floor.
“We’re leaving here sober, goddamnit,” he said.
Their mother excluded, of course. Before emptying the bottles, he filled her mug, but she wouldn’t share.
The previous night they’d eaten a can of tomatoes, the last can of food that contained liquid, leaving only five-day-old dishwater to drink. It seemed better than nothing.
By noon all three girls had the worst headaches they’d ever had in their lives. There were still six hours to go.
“I’m dying,” Lou said. “Now I really am dying.”
Sandy cried. Norma felt like crying, too. She was aware again of how the place smelled, how she smelled. She was tormented by having presumed that someone as smelly and blind and hungover as she was could go to heaven.
All that the three of them wanted to do was sleep, but their father made them fold the bedding and reassemble and pack the boxes. He chain-smoked. Checked his watch every two minutes. He kept threatening to give Lou a fat lip if she didn’t shut up. His hands shook. Stuck to his face were bits of toilet paper from where he’d cut himself shaving. He looked a wreck. They all did.
At five o’clock he had them sit on the edges of their bunks holding what they would carry up. They fixed their eyes on the hatch as though it would open by itself, as though, if it didn’t, they were trapped forever.
The sun was blinding. The house was still there. The grass was there under their feet, in need of a cut. A neighbour’s dog barked. Between their house and the house next door a blue car skimmed past. They all gaped at it. They stood close together, squinting.
“Home sweet home,” their father said, which is what he said after a long car ride or a holiday. His eyes were triumphant, crazy, miserable.
White Overnight 1963
Their father begins sleeping in the living room, stashing his blankets, pillow and pyjamas behind the chesterfield each morning. Their mother looks stupefied at breakfast. In September she goes into the hospital. The girls come home to find their father sitting at the kitchen table, stabbing a cigarette butt into a salad bowl heaped with butts.
“Your mother’s having her appendix out,” he says.
“She’s already had it out,” Lou says. They saw the scar when she had the flu, that time when they had to take her to the toilet.
He glances at them, goes on stabbing the butt. “No, she hasn’t,” he mutters. “That was something else.”
“What?”
“An operation. A complication.” He looks straight at Lou. “When you were born, as a matter of fact.”
Their mother is gone for two weeks. In the evenings their father drives to see her with a bottle of whisky in his briefcase. When she returns home, her hair is white. She has gone white overnight.
A reaction to the anaesthetic, their father explains. But the sag of her small shoulders, the grey around her eyes, the whole deleted look of her says she’s suffered more than that. The girls don’t ask. They don’t want to know. Sandy can’t look at her without thinking of the white-haired Santa Claus man who died on them. She can’t comb her own gold hair without worrying about being their mother’s image and turning into an old lady at thirty-six.
Several weeks later Aunt Betty delivers Mary Jane’s last winter’s wardrobe for their mother to refashion into wardrobes for them. Every day after school the girls open the front door expecting to hear the sewing machine. Instead they see the unopened boxes, still there in the hall. Eventually Norma selects what she wants (she is the only one who can wear the clothes unaltered) and their father stores the rest under the stairs.
Sandy cries to see the boxes go. Down in the basement she takes the party dresses and blouses and jumpers out and strokes the expensive material.
Then one day, one Saturday morning, she goes down with scissors and the portable sewing machine. By dinner she has a skirt—a tight blue wool with yellow buttons up one side, made from a jumper. By Sunday afternoon she has a matching vest. She wears the outfit to school on Monday, and everyone thinks it came from a store.
For the rest of the week and all the next week, after school, before school, she sews. At lunch time she draws patterns and runs over in her mind what piece of clothing she’ll rip apart and work with next. The whole time she
has a feeling of learning a skill already mastered. She makes a puff-sleeved, scallop-collared blouse out of a dress. She unravels and reknits a sweater.
Only Norma appreciates that for Sandy to be making the kinds of clothes she is without being shown how, and at her age, is amazing. Although she doesn’t praise Sandy (she has a feeling these days that nothing her sisters do is any of her business), she does keep her in material by returning most of the clothes she took out of the boxes. It occurs to her that she should write up a will and bequeath Sandy her wardrobe—all except for the outfit that she’ll be buried in.
Norma devotes a lot of thought to what this outfit will be. Lately she finds herself worrying about her funeral, as if it’s a school project she hardly has any time to complete. Something she keeps meaning to find out is whether the mortician puts your glasses on you. She worries about enough people showing up. She wonders if even their mother will. Lou will have to—their father will force Lou to go—but will Lou cry? It bothers Norma that she can’t picture Lou crying. Lou almost never cries, but why Norma can’t picture it, and would like to, is that all of a sudden Lou seems to hate her. Porko, Lou calls her, or Lard Ass—nothing else. For no reason at all she’ll say,“This is what’s wrong with you. Mud-brown hair, pudgy red cheeks, Coke-bottle glasses, basketball tits, big fat ass.”
Norma doesn’t defend herself. How can she, when it’s all true? And she doesn’t strike back with a list of what’s wrong with the way Lou looks, because she can only think of one thing and because she’s afraid that if she starts being cruel, she won’t be able to stop—she’ll go all the way to murderer—and because, with their brother being dead, it’s up to her to be the strong one.
And because she can take it. Nothing Lou could ever say could be as bad as school, and if Norma can take school, she can take anything. She’s in her first year of high school. All of her old friends are in another class. She eats lunch with an adenoidal girl who calls her Norba and who is always saying “Who cares?”
But it beats eating alone. When Norma walks down the corridors alone, boys moo at her and call her Enorma. A rumour is going around that she has three breasts. In the gym change-room she catches girls trying to get a look. Finally she starts changing in one of the toilet cubicles, going through the whole act of tearing off a piece of toilet paper and flushing.
She lives for three-fifteen, when she can go home and down to their father’s workroom. There, except for the companionable hum of the sewing machine in the next room, there is quietness. If she doesn’t have laundry to do, she has a full two hours to herself.
The sight of the tools hanging above the workbench in their logical rows always stirs her. She wishes she could build a whole room again, she and their father. She thinks of when they built the fallout shelter together as when she was young and carefree. Then she worked with eight-foot-long two-by-fours. Now she works with pieces from the scrap pile. This is one of their father’s conditions, the other being that whatever she makes has to serve a useful function.
The first thing she makes is a knick-knack holder. She is finished it and looking for a place to hang it before she realizes that they don’t have knick-knacks (or needlepoint pictures, or plastic fishes on the wall). She ends up hanging it beside her bed to put her glasses and drink of water on at night.
Next she makes a bread box. Then a jewellery box, then a toolbox. She knows that she isn’t as skillful at carpentry as Sandy is at sewing, but she comes up with good ideas, such as adding hooks to the toolbox so that it can hang on a ladder. In their father’s workroom her brain flowers with so many ideas that she stops dwelling on her funeral.
One day she discovers an accordion file under the workbench. It’s all dusty and tied up with a long black shoelace. She is reminded of the newspaper cutting that Uncle Eugene hid in his workroom. As she opens the file and takes out what’s inside—a black-and-white photograph—that cutting about their brother, Jimmy, is at the front of her mind, and yet she thinks the photograph is her. In one of the albums there’s a picture of her at six months, and she looks exactly like this: black hair, eyes at a Chinese slant, even wearing the same lace nightgown.
Why is their father hiding the picture down here? she wonders. Her little baby hands are palms up in a “Who, me?” gesture. Did he get a kick out of that? Maybe he really loved her when she was a baby.
She turns the picture over. “Jimmy,” she reads out loud,“March second, nineteen forty-eight.”
She turns the picture back round. “Jimmy Field,” she says softly, formally.
He could have been her identical twin. When she was born, their mother and father must have wondered if she was him, back from the bottom of Niagara Falls. She looks at the writing. Small, tidy letters. Their mother’s.
“Poor baby, poor little baby,” she says to the face. Now that she knows it’s Jimmy’s, she thinks it’s darling. “Mommy loved you. Did she ever. When you drowned, she turned to drink.”
She kisses the picture, slips it back in the file, ties up the shoelace and puts the file where she found it under the bench. For the rest of that afternoon she is aware of the picture at thigh level, like a beam of warm light hitting her, a comfort.
About a week later she’s standing there at the workbench, and she finds herself saying out loud: “What would you do if you were a girl, and boys mooed at you?” She imagines the answer formulating in Jimmy’s head, beaming out to her thighs and then travelling up through her body to her brain. She imagines a voice like Jesus’: “Pretend you are Daniel in the lion’s den.”
From that day on she asks Jimmy all of her pressing questions. She spaces them out and restricts them to important issues, feeling that she should show respect. To every question that she asks, she receives an answer that she knows is right. “Why not see what needs repairing around the house?” “Our father is in a great mood these days—ask if you can use some of his good pieces of wood.”
Suddenly their father is a pal, a big spender. He arrives home with gifts of chocolate bars. He increases their allowance. One Saturday in October he shows up from work at noon, raving about the gorgeous fall colours, and makes them drive with him to the country to see the trees. They haven’t gone on a drive to the country in years, not since their mother stopped leaving the house. For about two hours, without him once complaining about what the pot holes are doing to his shocks, they drive up and down rough roads. He smiles ecstatically, whistles, starts up singsongs. Then he drives back into the city, right downtown, though he says it means skipping an important meeting at work. Every ethnic neighbourhood they enter he announces, letting go of the steering wheel for a second and shouting through cupped hands. “Now entering Wopville!” “Now entering Humpadonia!” The girls are glad the car windows are shut. On the way home he stops at a restaurant and buys them deluxe sundaes. “What the hell,” he laughs when he sees the bill.
Where’s his bad temper? Lou can even swear in front of him, and if he doesn’t ignore her, all he says is something like “What a character,” or “You slay me.”
At first Lou thinks,“This is great,” but after about a week he gets on her nerves.
Like everybody else these days. These days everybody makes her want to throw up. With one exception—Sherry, her new friend. Sherry is from Chicago. She moved up to live with an aunt because her mother had a nervous breakdown after her father fell in love with “a piece of black tail.” Lou is the only girl in her class who knows that this isn’t an animal.
Sherry can’t get over how innocent the girls up north are. “No girl in Chicago would be caught dead without makeup,” she says. Whenever Lou calls on her, no matter what time it is, she has on orange pancake, pink lipstick and black eyeliner. At school she always wears a tight cardigan sweater buttoned up backward. She and Lou smoke cigarettes behind the portables and talk to each other in Southern accents like Sandra Dee’s in Tammy Tell Me True. “I’m feeling all funny peculiar,” they say. “I’m feeling all cotched in a tree.” When
a high-school boy comes along and wants Sherry to neck with him, Lou goes around to the front of the portables to keep a lookout. “I’m feeling all pleasured for sure,” Sherry says afterward.
Despite appearances, Lou knows that between the two of them she’s the bad influence. Sherry necks with boys, smokes the cigarettes Lou steals and dresses like a sex maniac. That’s it. Underneath she’s as nice as a Sunday-school teacher. “She’s not so bad,” she’ll say, or “She can’t help it,” when Lou gets carried away lambasting somebody. She always looks on the bright side. “Beats living with a mental mother,” is what she says about having to leave Chicago. Anyway, she says, in a few years she’s going to start marrying old, rich men, having sex with them until they die of heart attacks and then go spend all their loot.
“Why don’t you marry rich, young men and murder them?” Lou suggests. Sherry tells her she has a big mean streak.
Lou has an even bigger angry streak. Sometimes she gets so angry that she goes out after dark and throws stones at windows and streetlights. One night she writes “FUCK OFF” in white chalk all down the road and on people’s fences.
In her dreams she is another person, gentle and innocent, often still a little girl. She has a recurring dream in which she and her sisters live peacefully by themselves in the white mansion where the old man died on them.
In real life she hates living with her sisters, especially with Norma. Norma drives her crazy—eating like a pig, fat as a pig, letting boys get away with calling her names. Lou can’t stand anyone being mean to Norma. She throws a full bottle of Coke at a boy who moos at Norma when she and Norma are coming out of the smoke shop. Whenever she sees Norma from far away, at the end of the street, for instance, walking home from school (always alone), her throat tightens. She wants Norma never to hurt again. She wants to save Norma’s life! Instead, she yells at her. She can’t help it. Every time she turns around, it seems, Norma is stuffing herself with cookies. Or doing one of Lou’s jobs. Washing the dishes. Making the lunches. “What are you trying to prove!” Lou rages, tears welling in her eyes. One day, she’s had enough. She says,“Okay, you want to do everything around here, go ahead. I quit.”
Falling Angels Page 8