Falling Angels

by Barbara Gowdy

Weeks pass. Sometimes as she prays she feels her heart race. She feels that this is the spirit of the baby brother inside her exulting at the sight of the baby Jesus on the wall. At home she keeps her hair clean and brushed and returns to her study regime. She even wears the red sweater on its own once.

  When their father comes downstairs for a beer, one evening at about nine o’clock, she thinks that her prayers have been answered. As far as she knows, he hasn’t been in the basement since he stopped working with her. He seems tired but pent up. He opens the beer and comes over to where she is sawing.

  “I thought I’d finish off the panelling,” she says shyly. She notices that he needs to go to the barber’s. His brush cut is slanting like dead winter grass. When he looks a mess is when she loves him so much that she can hardly breathe.

  “Have you lost weight?” he asks, frowning at her.

  “A bit,” she says, in case that’s what he’s frowning about. In fact, she’s lost twenty-two pounds.

  He cocks his head and squints at her. “How old are you? Nineteen?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “How would you like me to teach you to drive?”

  She stares at him. “Really?”

  “Why not?” He takes a swig of beer. “Time you learned.”

  “But—” She lets out a breath. Where is his memory? He’s said that he’d never let any of them drive his car, that girls shouldn’t drive. “Well, okay,” she says. “Sure.”

  His lips tighten into a smile.

  “I’m pissed off,” Lou tells the baby. The baby kicks the tube out of her hand. “Can’t say I blame you,” Lou sighs and decides not to apply the cream today. It doesn’t seem to be doing any good; his penis is as red as the first time she babysat him. She feels a little sorry for him—a raw thumb between his legs, a mother too busy to get him a better prescription. Too busy to find him a nice babysitter.

  She repins his diaper and puts him in his Bathinette at one end of the dining-room table. Then she sits at the other end to do her homework. But she can’t concentrate, she’s too pissed off. This morning, while she was still sleeping, their father took Norma out for a driving lesson. Lou couldn’t believe it. She said she wanted to learn how to drive, too, but their father said,“Just Norma.” It didn’t matter what argument Lou presented, even the peerless one that she needed to drive to do the grocery shopping, he wouldn’t give in.

  “What if I learn from somebody else?” she asked at last. “Can I at least borrow the car sometimes?”

  He shook his head.

  “That’s not fair!” she screamed and kept screaming it, holding out her arms to block his way to the basement. The vein in his temple began to throb, but instead of backing off, Lou screamed louder.

  When he hit her across the side of the head, a look of recognition passed between them, the breaking point being their old rendezvous. Then he shoved past her. She marched down the hall to her and Norma’s bedroom.

  Norma was sitting at the vanity, brushing her hair. Her glasses were off, and Lou, her ear still ringing, was bothered by how grown-up and attractive Norma looked. Like a foreigner, with her brushed-back dark hair and round face. An Eastern European woman. Exotic and persecuted.

  Addressing Lou’s reflection in the mirror, Norma said, apologetically,“I’m the oldest.”

  “So?” Lou said. “I’m old enough to drive.”

  “You know how he is about girls driving,” Norma said, gathering her hair into a ponytail and pulling it through an elastic band. “It’s hard enough on him letting me drive.”

  “So why is he?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe because of all the work I’ve done on the basement.”

  “Bullshit.” Lou knew that Norma didn’t believe this either. When had their father ever handed out rewards? “Bull fucking shit,” Lou said.

  Norma gave her a long-suffering look.

  The baby is crying. He has somehow managed to twist the blanket around his neck.

  “If you’d just lie still,” Lou says, lifting his head to unwind the blanket,“nothing would happen to you.” He glares at her, then squeezes shut his eyes as if he can’t stand what he sees.

  They end up pulled over onto the shoulder, the car running to keep the heater on, him drinking a beer, both of them looking through barbed-wire fencing at snowy fields ringed with black, bare trees. The sky is always overcast on these days, which Norma imagines is heaven sympathizing with him. All sorts of ideas enter her mind as she and their father sit there. She thinks, who can say that everything you see isn’t a message from God? She grants their father the message of the whole sky, because she has prayed so hard for him and because she feels that the big things would be reserved for men who get as unhappy and as happy as he does.

  She is pretty sure that he’s teaching her to drive without wanting to, that God put the plan in his head to throw them back into each other’s company and to patch up any misunderstandings.

  But their father is fighting the setup. It’s obvious he’d rather be driving around with his last Lovergirl. He gazes out the passenger window and sighs. He hardly gives Norma any instructions except to tell her which way to turn. He doesn’t pay attention to her at all, really, unless she takes a corner too fast or hits the brakes too hard, and then he says, a little annoyed but as if it doesn’t matter,“Easy,” or “Slow down,” or he leans over and steers for a few seconds himself.

  She hasn’t understood until these drives just how depressed he is. Drinking too much isn’t nearly as explicit a sign as not worrying about his car, or—this is probably even more explicit—not worrying about breaking the law.

  “Naw, we’ll stick to the back roads,” he says when she mentions going to get her learner’s permit.

  Another sign: he doesn’t talk. When they were working on the basement, he talked all the time, until he started drinking. In the car, though, he’s the same as he is upstairs in the house. Taking his silence as her challenge, Norma tries to start conversations, but he closes his eyes and says “Shhh,” as if she’s interrupted some complicated or precious thought. He has her drive way out into the country and park on a concession road while he goes through at least a six pack.

  In the cafeteria at school Sandy hears a girl say that Lou’s friend Sherry is a nymphomaniac for sleeping with guys she doesn’t know.

  “That’s not what a nymphomaniac is,” another girl says. “A nymphomaniac is someone who never has a climax.”

  Either definition fits Sandy. She almost bursts into tears right there. She runs into the washroom and makes a promise to herself to ignore any man who flirts with her.

  Eventually she feels clean. Not white clean, but no longer black. She’s really lonely, though. She couldn’t say for sure that Reg was in love with her, and she knows that Bob wasn’t, but when they wanted her so badly that they couldn’t wait to get her clothes off, she sure felt loved.

  To avoid running into Reg, she has started taking her coffee breaks in a greasy spoon across the street from the fabric store. There’s a man who always seems to come into the restaurant the same time she does, and whenever she looks up from her fashion magazine he’s smiling at her. He has grey hair at the temples, wears expensive suits, and laughs and jokes with the waitresses.

  One day he saunters over to her table.

  “I’m trying to read,” she says. He sits down across from her anyway. She looks into his rugged, friendly face and gets a whiff of his manly aftershave.

  His name is Rob. The cross between “Reg” and “Bob” doesn’t escape her. After work that evening they go to the Nap-a-Wile motel, which she recommends for its vibrating beds. He sticks breath mints up her vagina and fishes them out with his tongue. He tickles her and tells her jokes. Everything strikes him as funny, even intercourse. “I’m having a hell of a good time,” he laughs as he enters her.

  So is she.

  Since he’s a travelling salesman for an aluminum company, he can see her pretty well whenever he wants. That’s two or t
hree times a week. From the towns he visits during the day he brings her postcards with dirty jokes on them. Sandy is flattered to be treated like a grown woman.

  In March he and his wife go to Florida for ten days, and Sandy misses him like crazy. The night he returns, they make love three times. Afterward, in the car, he asks her what she thinks of swinging.

  It sounds familiar. She thinks it has to do with sex, but she’s not sure what. “I don’t know,” she answers.

  “I’ve got a twin brother,” he says. “He wants to meet you.”

  She figures he’s changing the subject. “An identical twin?” she asks.

  He laughs. “You prefer that?”

  When he picks her up for their next date, two of him are in the car. The one in the passenger seat gets out. “Hi, I’m Ron,” he says in Rob’s voice, throwing an arm around her. He points to a purple peanut-shaped birthmark on his chin. “The only difference,” he says.

  But she notices another difference—Ron isn’t wearing a wedding band.

  She sits in the front seat, between them. She feels like a mirror. “You’re even going grey the same,” she says, looking back and forth. On either side of her there is roaring laughter.

  They drive to the Nap-a-Wile. Out of the trunk Ron produces a case of beer and a bottle of sherry with a white ribbon on it,“for the lady,” leaving her with no choice but to accept the glass he pours when they are in the motel room. She has never drunk sherry before, or wine, or even beer, which Rob knows. It’s gentlemanly of him, she thinks, not to give her away. He sits beside her on the edge of the bed, and Ron stands across from them, leaning against the desk. The two brothers tell jokes, supplying each other’s punch lines and laughing the same rip-roaring, head-thrown-back laugh. She laughs at the amazingness of being with two Robs.

  Is she the only one drinking sherry? The bottle is half empty, but she can’t remember filling her glass. Sherry tastes like Lou’s friend who is named after it. It tastes way better than what she remembers whisky tasting like.

  That reminds her. “Tell Ron the joke—” She giggles. “Tell him the joke about the drunk lady who thinks the naked man is a cigarette machine.”

  “Hey, free hand lotion,” Ron says.

  “You know it!” she cries, laughing. It’s her joke, one Reg told her, and she only told Rob a couple of days ago.

  “‘Fraid he knows them all,” Rob says, putting his arm around her.

  She laughs into his shoulder. “Free hand lotion,” she says. She can’t stop laughing.

  Rob pulls her down onto the bed and starts kissing her all over her face.

  “Rob,” she laughs. She attempts to sit up.

  “It’s okay,” he says. He pins her down by the shoulders. She stops laughing. “We’re going to have a great time,” he says, undoing the top button of her blouse.

  He undoes all her buttons. She lies perfectly still, chained to his smiling eyes. Then he begins rubbing her breasts, and she comes to and rolls away from him. He catches her arm. “Your brother’s watching,” she whispers.

  His brother laughs. “Hey, go right ahead,” he says. “Don’t mind me.”

  “Come on, baby,” Rob pleads. Baby—that’s new, from him. She sinks into the bed and lets him kiss her on the mouth, and almost forgets that they aren’t alone, until his hand slides up her leg.

  “I can’t,” she says, turning her face away.

  “Don’t do this to me,” he says. He sounds so strange and unfriendly that she has an alarming thought.

  “Are you Ron?” she whispers.

  “What if I was?”

  She draws away from him.

  “Hey, hey, relax. You know your Uncle Rob, don’t you?” He strokes her cheek with the backs of his fingers. She feels the wedding band.

  He kisses her again. And because the whole point of being with him is to make him happy, she gives up. “Can we turn off the light?” she asks.

  Ron immediately switches off the overhead. There’s still some light, though, coming from the parking lot. She sees the whites of Rob’s eyes. She sees his silhouette like any man’s. He begins to undress her.

  Under the covers she is able to stop worrying about Ron. For once, Rob is quiet. No laughing or fooling around. It seems possible that in the dark Ron won’t realize what she and Rob are up to.

  She is aware, obscurely, when there is bulk and movement on both sides of her. She is aware of skin pressed against her skin, back and front, of four hands on her.

  But it takes a sound—a moan from one man and then from the other, as if an echo has passed through her—for her to get the picture.

  “Oh, my God,” she says.

  They try to hold on to her. She punches at them and pulls free and runs to the bathroom.

  “Hey, come on. What’s the matter? Goddamnit, Sandy!”

  She locks the door. Shaking, crying, she sits on the toilet.

  The door handle rattles. One of them—how is she supposed to know which one?—tells her to open up. “I want to talk to you,” he says. She doesn’t answer. “Baby?” It must be Rob. “What’s the matter? Weren’t we having a great time? Come on. There’s nothing wrong if you’re all having a great time.”

  “Go away!” she screams. She pulls off yards of toilet paper and weeps into it.

  After a while she stops crying and looks at herself in the mirror above the sink. Nymphomaniac, she thinks leadenly. In the other room it is quiet. She lathers a washcloth and rubs at the streaks of mascara running down her face, wishing she’d grabbed her purse for the tube of cold cream she keeps in her makeup bag. She combs her hair with her fingers, wraps a towel around herself, and with the intention of getting dressed in silence and taking a taxi home, opens the door.

  They are sitting side by side on the bed, drinking beer. All over again she is astonished at how alike they are. The same hunch of the shoulders, the same pot bellies. The same blue bikini underwear. The one closest to her stands and starts walking over.

  “I’m not coming out,” she says uncertainly, stepping back, glancing at his left hand and seeing the wedding band.

  “Okay, I’ll come in,” he says. He closes the door, sits on the toilet and pulls her onto his lap.

  “It’s just so disgusting,” she murmurs.

  “Says who?”

  “It just is.”

  “You were having a great time.”

  She pushes away from him. “No, I wasn’t.”

  “Hey, I was there,” he laughs, holding her tightly. “Listen, it’s okay. There’s nothing to be ashamed of. Everybody’s into swinging. Movie stars have been into it for years. Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Jill St. John? The three of them get it on together all the time.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Everybody knows. It’s in the papers.”

  She curls the grey hair behind his ear around her finger. She feels childish and on the verge of losing him.

  “Ron thinks you’re a knockout,” he says.

  She looks into his eyes. “Really?”

  “Said you’re the cutest thing he’d ever seen.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  She slumps against him. “Is there any sherry left?” she asks.

  That night she keeps turning on the light, climbing out of bed and staring at herself in the dresser mirror. Over the next two days she feels like she’s going to faint every time she thinks about what she has done and wants to do again. She looks up nymphomania in Lou’s dictionary. “Excessive sexual desire by a female,” it says. She looks up swinger. “A lively, up-to-date person.”

  On Wednesday night Rob is by himself. “Where’s Ron?” she asks.

  “Aren’t I enough for you?” Rob laughs.

  It turns out he isn’t. When they’re in bed, she feels a loss more overwhelming than the shame of feeling that loss, and she whispers,“I liked your brother.”

  On Sunday, there his brother is, in the passenger seat. He has another bottle of sherry. Sh
e finds that faced with both brothers, out of bed, she needs it. In bed, however, lying between them, she is transported. One ejaculates in her vagina, and the other in the crook of her neck. Then they all polish off the sherry and fall asleep. She dreams that their father smells the semen in her hair, knows it means she’s a nymphomaniac and throws her down a snake pit. She wakes up in a sweat. And promptly falls back into a light sleep, in which she thinks she’s at home, lying in bed between her sisters like the three of them used to do when they were little. A heavenly peace settles over her. Then she wakes up again, realizes where she actually is and bursts into tears.

  The man on her left wakes up and says,“Oh, for Pete’s sake.”

  The man on the right says,“What’s the matter?”

  She tries to tell them part of it, about not being a nymphomaniac after all, but they don’t understand what she’s talking about, so she gives up. With relief and for old times, and after a few minutes for everything that feels like a loss—Rapunzel, Jimmy, the Santa Claus man, their mother’s hair before it went white—she cries her heart out.

  At the top of the street Lou has let the baby carriage go. She always does; it’s not much of a hill. But this time the carriage has raced too far ahead of her. And a car is coming.

  “Stop!” she screams. She runs as hard as she can. She waves her arms. She can’t believe that the driver doesn’t see her or the carriage. The carriage is speeding up, heading for the intersection. Heading straight and stupid as an arrow.

  Lou knows that the carriage and the car will reach the middle of the intersection at exactly the same instant. She screams. The car screams, braking. It hits the carriage, sends it flying. The baby pops out and lands near the curb.

  Lou falls beside him. He’s on his back, crying. His face is as red as blood but not bleeding. She pulls off his hood and wool toque.

  The driver comes rushing over. “Is it all right?” he says. He kneels down. “Jesus Christ, I didn’t even see you.”

  You? Does he think that Lou was holding on to the carriage? She glances at him. A guy their father’s age. “You should watch where you’re going,” she says angrily.