Falling Angels

by Barbara Gowdy

  “I know,” he says. “I’m sorry. God.”

  A red bump is on the back of the baby’s head. “Good lord,” the man says, then stands and hurries off.

  “It’s okay, honey, it’s okay,” Lou says to the baby. She touches the bump. He cries louder. Gently she lifts him and rests him against her legs so that she can take off his jacket.

  The man returns. “Wrap it in this,” he says, holding out a trench coat. “I’ll drive it to the hospital.”

  “He’s okay,” she says. But she snatches the coat and folds it up to lay the baby on. Now she can pulls his pants off.

  “That bump looks bad,” the man says.

  “It’s not soft,” Lou says. She’s got some idea that soft means internal bleeding.

  More people are around now. A couple of kids and a woman wearing red-checkered oven mitts. “They came out of nowhere,” the man says to the woman.

  “Should I call an ambulance?” the woman asks.

  “No!” Lou snaps. In a calmer voice she adds,“It’s only a bump.”

  “Why are you taking all his clothes off?” the woman asks.

  Because she is searching for another wound. The fatal one. She realizes she’s gone too far, removing his socks and diaper. “I’ve got to wrap him in this coat,” she answers firmly, as if it’s obvious he needs to be undressed for that. Although she takes care not to touch the back of his head, he struggles and begins to cry in long, shivery squeals. The weirdest sound. Lou feels like laughing. Pressing him to her chest, pressing where laughter will erupt from, she comes to her feet and orders one of the kids to pick up his clothes.

  The man has turned the carriage upright. A wheel is bent. “I can put this in the trunk and drive you both to the hospital,” the man says, sounding a little reluctant, sounding worried now that she’ll say okay. Well, she’s way ahead of him. The minute he mentioned the word hospital, she saw some smart doctor, a Dr. Kildare type, bringing in the police.

  “You better have him checked out just in case,” the woman says.

  “I will,” Lou lies. “My father can drive him.” The little boy she told to pick up the clothes hands them to her, looking extremely concerned. “I once caught a bullfrog for fishing,” he confides. “And when I put the hook in it, it cried just like that.”

  Before they reach his house, the baby stops crying. Inside, on the front hall floor, Lou unwraps the trench coat to check him for injuries again. Other than the bump, there is nothing. This strikes her as miraculous. The bump is huge and purple now, but she can touch it now without him squawking. She gets his bottle and moves it around in front of his face. His eyes follow it like radar, and since this is the only sign of intelligence she’s ever witnessed in him, she decides he hasn’t suffered brain damage.

  Her story will be that she was out walking him when she slipped on a patch of ice and pulled over the carriage as she fell. She’ll say that she should never have been asked to walk him in the first place, in these treacherous conditions. She’ll ask for an hourly raise. She’ll tie some gauze around her wrist.

  He cries when she leaves him to heat his milk but stops on a dime when she puts the bottle in his hands. Wrapping him back up, she wonders where she can unload the trench coat for a few bucks. She carries him into the living room, sits on the chesterfield and starts to cry.

  Until he’s finished the bottle, she cries and tells him she’s sorry. She wants to mean it. She wants to love him. She wants to love him and for him to know that she loves him. He’s just a little baby, she tells herself. But all she can feel is how heavy he is in her arms.

  On the way there Norma pulls the car over three times to wipe fog from the windshield and from her glasses. When she finally figures out that the heater is sending out blasts of cold steam, she tries to turn it off. Their father won’t let her. He will I never admit that anything is the matter with his car.

  She’s only wearing a thin spring jacket. That’s what he tossed at her on the way out the door. He made her hurry, as if they were late for an important appointment. As if this parking spot on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere would be taken.

  She’s tired of these drives. Fed up, and that’s the truth. Keeping him company, thinking pure thoughts, praying and praying for him … none of it’s doing him any good. In fact, he seems more depressed than ever. As for learning how to drive, she’s sure she could have sailed through her test a month ago, but he won’t let her take the car to an exam centre. It’s nuts. What do you expect from a psychotic alcoholic? Lou asks.

  Norma glances over at him. He’s staring at her arm with that sleepy expression he gets by the end of the six pack. But she thinks he’s had more than six, she thinks he was drinking at home before they left. She leans against the steering wheel and wipes the windshield. Black clouds tumble up from the horizon, just as if a line of fires burns there. It makes her uncomfortable how his eyes fall on her after he’s been drinking. At least it means they can leave soon, though.

  “Looks like a snowstorm’s coming,” she says so that he’ll say,“Let’s go.”

  “Are you cold?” he asks in a sudden way.

  “Yeah, freezing.”

  He holds up a finger to wait and opens his door. Skidding on the ice, banging the hood for support, he makes it to the trunk and is a long time searching his pockets for his extra set of keys. She knows that he’s getting the blanket and that saying she doesn’t need it is useless. She is about to give him the keys in the ignition, when she hears his set drop on the ground and in a few seconds drop again. The simplest thing would be for her to open the trunk herself, but she can’t imagine taking over from him like that. She thinks of something else Lou said. The other night. They were in the kitchen, and their mother was calling from the t? room for some more “coffee,” and Lou, taking the whisky bottle out of the cupboard, said,“Considering our upbringing, it’s amazing one of us is normal.” There was no question she was referring to herself.

  Their father opens the passenger door. His face is triumphant. “This’ll warm you up,” he says thickly, climbing in.

  She sighs.

  “Shhh,” he says.

  He tosses the blanket over her legs and smooths it out.

  She stiffens. And is instantly worried about offending him. But he goes on smoothing, very slowly and intently and ineffectively. His thoughts seem to have drifted. She looks out her window.

  When his hand slips under the blanket, he continues to make smoothing motions, as though he doesn’t realize where he’s strayed. His breathing quivers. She has stopped breathing.

  He smooths her leg. Up her legs, up to her stomach.

  Under her sweater.

  She lets out her breath.

  His hand is ice.

  His head drops to her breasts.

  “Don’t,” she whispers.

  His hand roves all over her.

  “Please,” she whispers. “Dad.”

  His surprised, waking-up face lifts. She smells his beer breath. She shoves him away, and he flops back against his door.

  She opens her door, climbs out. The blanket is wrapped around her left leg, and it hangs on as she runs. She can’t kick it off. She has to yank it free with both hands.

  At the end of the road she stops running and looks back. The blanket, halfway between her and the car, has an animal’s shape. Something run-over. The car leans into the ditch. There is the blanket and the car and the fields.

  Her heart beats in her ears, clangs like bells. Where their father touched her, she burns. She thinks that she must tear off her jacket and sweater and lay her flaming skin on the frozen ground. She covers her face with her hands and is lost for several minutes in a dark profoundness of disgust and incomprehension.

  “Jimmy,” she says into her hands.

  What is their father doing? Crying. She has an image in her mind of him crying, of his remorse. She feels a pang and feels it blow out like a match in this wind. Then she feels the cold. She walks back to the car and sees
the suggestion of him through the fogged-up glass. He appears to be smoking.

  After she opens the door, she stands there for a minute. His hand draws out the ashtray and extinguishes his cigarette. By the time she gets in, he is turned away, resting his head on his arm. She doesn’t believe he is asleep.

  She switches off the heater and drives away without wiping the windshield. Guessing where the road is.

  Dance to the Music 1968

  The next morning Norma looks back at who she’s been and winces at her prayers and appeals to their dead brother. No wonder Lou makes fun of her.

  She feels rescued by the person she used to be, a person that for a long time has been waiting in the wings. Driving home from the country, she glanced at herself in the rearview mirror and saw strength. Not divine or physical strength. But her old common sense. And something more—a toughness. She knew two things for certain then. One was that she wasn’t their mother, she wasn’t going to cave in and have Lou and Sandy take over. The other was that her new strength would scald his hand.

  She keeps him out of her line of vision. He’s a shadow with a foot that drags. To his face Lou accuses him of playing up his limp for sympathy.

  “I may lose the leg,” he replies with dignity.

  Norma deflects that plea. Since she doesn’t think of him, she doesn’t think of forgiving him.

  She gets her driver’s licence, cuts her hair short and gives Sandy the red angora sweater again. She goes off her diet and gains twenty-five pounds in two months.

  Her friends praise her for not trying to be somebody she isn’t. But they fret over her independence, calling it dangerous, whereas when she was slimmer, they called it snobbery.

  “We’ve got to stick together,” they warn her. They say,“What did we tell you?” when she walks downs the halls by herself and is mooed at.

  “It doesn’t bother me,” Norma says truthfully. All her former fears are gone. She undresses for Phys. Ed. with the other girls in her class and doesn’t care if they gawk. She writes her exams as coolly as if she were in a room by herself. She applies for and gets a summer job at the hardware store and is commended by the owner for her know-how and unflappability. On Sunday she cleans the house. In the evenings she walks to the ravine and waits under the trestle bridge for trains to pass over.

  The basement is only half finished, but she doesn’t work on it. Except to do the laundry, she doesn’t go down there anymore.

  Their father doesn’t go down to the basement, either. He’s stopped drinking, so he doesn’t make trips down to the fridge. He couldn’t manage the stairs anyway, on account of his bad foot.

  In July he goes into the hospital, to have his leg amputated, he announces, but it’s only to have his foot put back together the way it should have been when he shot it years ago.

  The operation is a failure, and the instant he learns this, his fury returns. While still in the hospital, he takes out a lawsuit against the place and against the doctors who did the bad job to begin with. He writes letters to the daily papers, calling for a government inquiry. “Give him a lobotomy,” is Lou’s advice to his doctor. What the doctors give him is a big cheque, settling the matter out of court. With part of the money he buys a new car from where he works. A white Oldsmobile. “A whore lure,” Lou calls it, although he doesn’t seem to be pining for a Lovergirl. He’s his old self—foul-tempered, laying down the law. But he doesn’t hit Lou or Norma, even at the peak of his most lunatic rages. It seems he’s gone off hitting.

  Lou doesn’t believe the restraint will last. But it better, for his sake. After the last time he backhanded her, that day he took Norma out for her first driving lesson, she told herself she’d kill him if he ever laid a finger on her again. When he was in the hospital, she went down to the bomb shelter, took his World War II gun off the wall and pointed it at where his head would be if he were sleeping on his bunk. She couldn’t actually imagine pulling the trigger, but it felt like a step forward that she at least had the nerve to aim.

  Now that he’s out of the hospital, bawling her out every time he lays eyes on her, she thinks of aiming his gun and doesn’t lose control. Sometimes she ignores him, and that really drives him up the wall. She walks a fine line between insolence and the showdown.

  With her sisters it’s another story. One day, partly to explain her behaviour since birth, partly to get the three of them talking again, she says,“This house is like a dangerous country that is ruled by a despot and founded on an historical calamity.”

  The calamity is their mother, if Norma and Sandy care to ask. They don’t. Oh, Lou knows why not. All the abuse she’s handed out, especially to Norma. She’s not so bad these days, though. She controls herself. She keeps thinking that nobody loves her, and it worries her that she’s even concerned enough to have the thought. She helps Norma with the dishes, but Norma doesn’t exactly fall on her knees with gratitude. In fact, Norma doesn’t seem to realize that the last time Lou picked up a dishtowel was a year ago. Lou used to find Norma as easy to read and confide in as a diary. Now Norma, and Sandy, too, are both closed books. Or foreign books. Untranslatable.

  Their father obviously finds their isolation threatening. At supper time he actually tries to stir up arguments between them: “Lou, if what Sandy just said bothers you, say so. Speak freely.” In his better moods he starts up singsongs and suggests family projects, such as collecting bottles for the church. “Where’s your get-up-and-go?” he bellows. Lou smirks at her sisters, who don’t look at her. Even in dashing their father’s hopes, there’s no confederacy. Eventually, Lou loses heart. “Fuck them,” she tells herself with less conviction than she’d like. She begins to wish for a boyfriend. Someone to be madly in love with.

  Sandy doesn’t miss Rob. Or his twin brother. Or any older men. She is afraid that after a few weeks she’ll start to, that she has an addiction. But while she sometimes aches with an indefinite longing, she has no longing for the old remedy. She is too aware now of the reasons why it isn’t a good idea: all the lying and sneaking around; the tightrope walking; their father’s sarcastic “Off to some sleazy motel?” because of her short skirts, because he has no idea that she’s really off to some sleazy motel; her friends’ suspicion about why she never goes out on dates anymore. One of her friends says,“I thought I should tell you. A rumour’s going around that you’ve turned into a lesbian.” Horrified, Sandy phones a guy she’s been out with a few times, a giant he-man, and asks him to take her bowling.

  After she breaks up with Rob, she starts dating this guy regularly. His name is Dave. He’s two years older than her and twice as tall. A football player who failed grade nine or ten.

  Anything you plug in, he knows how to fix. At his father’s appliance store, where he works after school, he’s the service department. Just like Sandy, he shines in a store, and when she learns this about him, she lets him undo her bra.

  “Thanks,” he says.

  She’s led him to believe that no guy has ever touched her bare breasts. “She’s not a lesbian, but she’s not a slut,” is the message she intends for him to broadcast. But as his huge hand cups her breast with devout gentleness, she realizes that this will be his message even if she sleeps with him.

  Still, when he asks a few days later if he can please feel her “down there,” she says no.

  “Okay,” he says. Polite, no hard feelings. She knows that she can’t hold him off forever, but she likes this new sensation of feeling loved without making love.

  Dave insists on picking Sandy up at her house. He says it doesn’t sit right with him, parking down the street, or meeting in a restaurant (her next suggestion). “I know about your mother’s drinking problem,” he offers gallantly.

  Maybe. But he doesn’t know about their father. For several months, on the evenings she and Dave have a date, she waits in the front hall and runs out as soon as his car pulls up in the driveway. Then one night he shows up half an hour early, while she’s still in her bedroom getting dressed, an
d before she can do anything about it, their father answers the door.

  “What is it?” he asks threateningly.

  “Good evening, sir,” Dave says. “I’m here for Sandy.”

  “I see!” their father shouts.

  Silence. Sandy pictures their father’s speechless surprise. All her life she has discouraged friends, girls and boys, from calling on her. It’s her surest instinct. She opens her bedroom door, about to call “I’ll meet you in the car!” when their father shouts,“Come in!”

  “Thank you,” Dave says. “I’m afraid I’m early. Sorry about that.”

  “I didn’t catch the name!” their father says, still shouting.

  Dave shouts his name, bellows it, and Sandy thinks “Oh, my God,” but their father only shouts,“We have a Dave at work.” Sandy shuts her door and starts tearing the rollers out of her hair.

  When she comes running down the hall, their father looks relieved and still surprised. “All set?” he shouts.

  She sits on the bench to pull on her boots. There across from her is the hole in the wall where years ago their father hurled the vacuum cleaner right through. What will she tell Dave caused it? Their father trims the lawn with scissors, but he hasn’t fixed that hole yet.

  “Okay,” she says, standing. “Bye.”

  Their father slaps Dave on the shoulder. “Have fun at the orgy!” he says. Dave laughs.

  “Stay away from the dope fiends!” their father jokes.

  Sandy laughs at this one. She can’t believe how nice their father is being. Maybe it’s because Dave also has a brush cut. She gives their father a look. She thinks, this is how he must have been—funny, friendly—when their mother met him, during the war.

  Lou dreams she is standing at the edge of what somebody has informed her are the White Cliffs of Dover. She is with a boy who has an English accent and rings on every finger. It’s a half sleeping, half waking dream. The rings are how she knows she’s drifted off. She supposes that the boy is Tom and that she’s mixed him up with Ringo Starr instead of with John Lennon.