“No!” she says. None of this has to do with her father. The thought disgusts her. She presses closer to Saint. “Let’s find a place to sit down, okay?”
He glowers. “I also want to know what fucked you up this afternoon. Something happened.”
She puts her hands over her eyes. Feels pain somewhere. Too much light? “Do me a favor,” she says. “Go in and get me some ice. Please?”
While he’s gone she walks to the edge of the pavement. There’s a wood fence and beyond it a field of soybeans, softly swaying against the dark. She puts her forehead to the top of a post. He returns with the ice, and they sit on the warm asphalt, backs to the fence. He takes off his T-shirt and wraps up some of the ice chips, holds the bundle to her eye. “Thanks, Doc,” she says.
He doesn’t smile, though. He’s pressing with his questions. He has a right to know! She takes a piece of ice in her mouth, presses her cold lips to the back of his hand. “Saint, be nice to me.”
“All you think about is you.”
“That’s all anyone thinks about,” she replies, and mulls for a moment the problem of selfishness. She wouldn’t have to think about herself so much if someone else were thinking about her. This is a notion she has had before, more than once, but she wonders now if it’s true. She asks him if he called their friends, he nods yes, and she doesn’t know if her concern shows her to be selfish or not completely selfish. When all the ice is gone they climb the fence and sit on the top rail looking out over the field, side by side but not touching. “I think about you,” she says. “More than I want to.” If it wasn’t true before, it seems now to have become true.
They scarcely breathe for a moment while her words enter and spread through him. Then he takes her hand. Holding on to each other, they slide down onto the field, into a trough between two raised rows. Ordinarily it would be uncomfortable in the dirt, if not disgusting. Mulch pokes into her back. Her hair is filthy. But there’s no cell of her skin that doesn’t want to be right up against his skin. They nuzzle. “It’s crazy,” he breathes, in the same cadence as “I love you.” She pulls him on top of her, wraps her legs around him. “If I had sex all the time,” she says, “I could make it through life.”
“That’s kind of scary, Vera.”
She beats her joyful heels on the ground, unsnaps her pants and his.
“Shit. Vera, what does this mean to you?”
She licks his neck. “No talking during sex. It’s a rule.”
He pushes a little away. “I know you’ve been with a lot of people.”
“So have you.”
“Name one.”
It’s ridiculous and irritating. He had girls in Detroit. And when he moved to Lourdes, for a few months there was Cathy Kirk, who starred in school plays and was a Future Teacher of America. Vera will not think about Cathy Kirk. “Saint, dear. I have a huge amount of respect for you.”
He shrugs, but it doesn’t matter; she is pressed against him. Little tickling waves in her body become bigger, slower. She wriggles out of her cutoffs and top and flattens them under his head. “You too,” she says. “Give me my pillow.”
He sighs. “Vera, I feel…used.”
“So let’s use each other.” She passes her good hand over his fly. His torso bucks. “I can see you hate this.”
He seems to give up then, or give in. He kisses her all over her face, then on her forehead, like a blessing. His eyes are closed. For some reason she wants to weep, but her vagina pulses with the prospect of pleasure. Some guys can hold her on this brink indefinitely, especially older ones, and afterward, light and airy, she feels like dancing. His jeans are off and she moves slowly with him, trying not to mess things up. He wants to put on a condom, but what’s the point, right? Given the Pledge? Then he is inside her and there is no trying or thinking.
Afterward, she lies beside him looking up at the sky, which has fogged over. Night is a smoky cave around them. Her hand strokes his hip, unreflectingly grateful. There is no need to move.
“You’re so confusing,” he says. “I still want to know….”
“No, you don’t.” She strokes his leg, stroking him silent.
“Listen,” he says. “Do you ever get these black holes in your mind? I don’t mean in a dream. Sometimes I’m walking along or, just, I’m talking to someone, and all of a sudden I don’t know anything. It’s like my electricity shuts off. It’s pitch-black in my brain. Like, if I take a step I’ll fall into a pit.”
This is new information. She isn’t sure what to do with it.
“It might have started when my dad walked out, but I was so young I hardly remember. Maybe I’ve always had it.”
She has been holding her breath. She thinks of Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum,” the prisoner feeling his way around the torture chamber, in whose center, unbeknownst to him, lies the thicker, deeper blackness of the beckoning pit. What a terrible image. She wants to erase it from both of their minds. Up in the sky a bright patch of cloud is hiding the moon. She slides down his chest, takes him in her mouth.
“Wait.”
She doesn’t believe in waiting, doesn’t believe he wants her to wait, how can he?
“Oh God, Vera! It’s like you’re sucking my brains out.”
“I’m a nympho,” she murmurs. “Take advantage.”
“Vee, I don’t know if I’m—”
“You can think about Cathy if you want. Go ahead, if it turns you on. I don’t care.”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
“I don’t give a shit about that stupid cunt.”
“Okay. Forget it.”
She believes him about Cathy. She’s pissed at herself for even bringing it up. She licks the crease between his leg and groin. She kisses up and down his stomach, trying to shoo away his bad feeling.
“Slow down a little, could you? I’m not, you know, completely…”
She tries to slow down. When her mouth and her good hand prove insufficient, she adds whatever erotic impetus her weak hand will provide. It does its assigned job, cupping his balls while her good hand caresses. Her jaw starts to ache. But his dick, incredibly, has shrunk away from her. Her shame is toppled by fury so fast that she feels no shame, and why should she? She wants to squeeze harder, hear him shriek. She lets go, jerks herself to sitting. “Fuck it, St. John. Are you some kind of homo?”
He doesn’t speak, of course. In a moment her clothes are back on. She’s over the fence, across the parking lot, racing across the highway away from him—his deadening silences, his body’s disgust with her.
She walks quickly toward town while everything liquid in her dries rough and hard like slag. She has what’s left of Saint’s pack of cigarettes and she smokes one after another, blotting out the erratic swing of her arms, the shape of her hands, whose asymmetry offends anyone with eyes. In the light of the streetlamp at Lake and Main she sees clear as day: her fetal hand, finger nubs white and boneless.
With her good hand she slaps the bad one as hard as she can. There’s a small, sharp sound but very little sensation. Swiveling for momentum, she swings her bad hand out from her body like a tetherball. Whap. The back of her hand strikes the pole of a streetlamp. Tears spring to her eyes, a burnt-orange flash. This is her quest—for pain focused enough to draw the ugliness from every part of her mind and body.
Then she’s home, on her front porch, inhaling the damp cool of the summer night while her hand throbs, unrelenting. She leans against the railing. That was crazy. That was the acid. She will do no more acid. In a minute or so, she’ll unlock the door, tiptoe into the kitchen for ice. There are pills in her mother’s drawer. More tiptoeing, but her mother won’t mind. Already seeing herself in her bedroom, her bed, hand wrapped, burrowing into the thicket of sleep, she nearly falls asleep standing. It’s only when her mouth opens in the tight-jawed yawn of the end-of-LSD that she remembers that along with her purse she has lost her key.
5
My One True Mother
&nbs
p; When I was eleven, my mother killed herself. Elizabeth Campion—Betty—my first and only mother, who tended the garden but not the sprawling house we lived in, whose blackened pots and frayed furniture our cleaning women shook their heads over. Like everyone, she had her problems. She yelled when she was frustrated (she was easily frustrated), and until the last year of her life she was substantially overweight. But she sang in the church choir with a voice that rose up to the angels, and she had a way of looking at me, her only child, that made me feel embraced.
We lived in Evanston then, on the northern edge of Chicago, with the beach a walkable distance away and the luminous city spreading south from the Evanston Express, a train I would be allowed to take downtown by myself when I turned thirteen. But at thirteen I moved with my father and stepfamily to the other side of the lake, to Lourdes, Michigan, where we had a cleaner but less accessible beach and a new house in a woodsy development three miles inland—white paint, blond wood, tall sheets of glass. This Lourdes promised no miracle healings. No one believed in the spring-fed fountain. But away from reminders of our catastrophe, my father thought we’d learn to look forward instead of back. I had a new mother and sister. I would be happy again.
In Evanston at age ten and before, I was reasonably happy. We were Episcopalian but I went to a Catholic grammar school, where I was an above-average student, shy with rare, reckless bouts of extroversion, chubby, maybe, but not fat (that would come later). My presence incited no special mockery. I had a best friend, a Chinese girl named Cynthia, who had a large wardrobe of clothes for her Ginny doll. I had a mother with a pretty singing voice who loved me more than anything on earth (she said once, on the way home from a doctor’s appointment) and who cooked wonderful dinners for me and my father. My father worked long hours and paid us fairly superficial attention, but he was exuberant about the things he enjoyed—golf and making money—and he laughed at people’s jokes: a man who made good company. I myself did not make particularly good company. I was thin-skinned; so Dad had announced at my Uncle Ted’s Christmas party to excuse my tears at something my cousin said, and I examined the skin of my arms, which seemed, in fact, fragile as tissue paper. Desperately inarticulate, I would cry when angry. But until my mother killed herself, I walked through my days in a fuzzy, warm cloak of dream and routine.
For a few days after her death, my dreamy chrysalis remained intact. During the wake and the funeral, amid the tears and pat-patting of my parents’ friends and the relatives who’d flown in to shudder and mourn, I was commended for my maturity and self-control. In fact, though, while I accepted embraces, I focused on my science project due the following week, the two bean plants on my windowsill, one growing in sand, the other in potting soil, and about playing jacks during recess with Cynthia. I was good at jacks. Eventually the consolers dispersed and I went back to school. Cynthia was glad to see me. But there was a hush, a dead space between me and the other kids. “I’m sorry about your mother,” they’d say, as if they’d practiced it in my absence. As if there was something about me that scared them. As if they knew what my mother had done, though my father had said not to talk about it, it was nobody’s business. As if someone had poked his head between the shrubs behind our house and peered through our basement window.
My so-called self-control persisted until my counseling session at the end of the week. Sister Mary Pat reached across the neat piles of paper on her desk and took my hand. “No matter what she did, you must remember she loved you,” she said, and I forgot the dictum I was trying to live by, not to embarrass myself. I snatched my hand back and covered my mouth, but a crazy laugh pushed up through my throat. “I’m sorry,” I said, but I couldn’t stop the freakish sounds—at the words “no matter what she did” and at the image I had been trying to quash, to expel from memory, because a girl can’t live with that in her head.
The day my mother died, I’d brought my pajamas and toothbrush to school in a little bag because afterward I was taking Cynthia’s bus to her house for a sleepover. But I’d forgotten my oil pastels and I went home to retrieve them, thinking my mother could drive me to Cynthia’s; she was always there when I came home from school. And I was even glad to be seeing her, because something had happened that afternoon. A girl in my class, Therese Agostino, had started to “menstruate.” She’d announced it to all of us girls in the gym line using that exact word, a word I could never have released into the air of a room: Was it brave of her or shameless, and what was wrong with me? But already in our front hall I felt my balance returning, because, in the midst of cooking or TV-watching or resting in bed (which, on her new strict diet, she’d been doing more of lately), Mom would make fun of Therese Agostino, and I would laugh. In fact, walking through the house in search of my mother, I was smiling at the prospect of her familiar face in a familiar room. I checked the kitchen, bedrooms, bathrooms, enclosed porch, paneled basement, and garage out back. And after a number of passes, in which I perused the same rooms stupidly two and three times (had she dieted herself down to nothing, as Dad was predicting?), I found her by the workbench in the unfinished part of the basement. That is (there is no good way to say this), I found her alongside my father’s seldom-used woodworking bench, hanging from a pipe by a length of yellow clothesline.
Later, revisiting the image, I understood that I wasn’t meant to see it. What she had done was for my father, her response to something that he had done or said, the last word, so to speak, in their marital dialogue. Later still, I understood something about the point that my mother had only one way to make to her backslapping, exuberant, unreflecting husband, who let dust collect on his workbench and took phone calls in the middle of dinner. Who wept at his wife’s funeral but fourteen months later married his accountant, a thin, pretty, energetic, divorced Jewish woman with whom he may have been having an affair. You can bet your life on it! said Aunt Natalie. But is that any reason to kill yourself? said Aunt Shirley. Not to me directly. But this sort of commentary filled the air around Evanston, which may have been what prompted my father to sell his three sporting goods stores and move us away from everything that had to do with the craziness, as he called it, to devote himself to his new family, his golf game, and buying and selling Michigan real estate. What had my mother wanted to tell him? Do you see me? Take a look now! Or: Why did you buy yourself all those fancy carpenter tools if you weren’t planning to use them?
But at eleven, in the walled garden of my shyness, I had no context for what lay before me. Emotionally unclothed, thin of skin, as my father said, I registered the outside world like a burn victim; even the lightest touch could cause pain. And what I saw at that moment cut so deeply into my awareness that five years later I’d wake up in the night with my knuckles pressed into my eye sockets—against the image of Mom’s bare feet dangling, thin-ankled, below the hem of her light rayon dress, recently purchased at Marshall Field’s downtown for the pretty new self she was shrinking into. I was there when she bought it—navy blue with little white flowers, belted waist, flared skirt. For dancing, she said to the lady who rang her up. She wore it out of the store, patting her flattening stomach: Like a model, right?
If she and Dad went out dancing in the two or three weeks between the purchase and her death, I have no memory of it. As far as I know, the dress hung in the closet till that final day. But it still afflicts me, the first thought that came to me in the cinder-block room in our Evanston basement where I found her. There is a disturbed kinship for me between being thin, being pretty, and being dead. She had been dieting strenuously and was unquestionably thin, the dark flowered rayon even looser on her hips and stomach than it had been at Field’s. And she was wearing makeup. She had lipsticked lips, blush-rosy cheeks, silvery-blue-shadowed eyes. Under the blush her skin was the color of skim milk, which I used to call skin milk. I stared up at her dead face while the thought hardened into words: She is so beautiful.
At the funeral people hugged me, murmuring to one another, “It seems so unfair,” and wi
th an intake of breath, “Poor thing. She was the one who found her!” Wiping their eyes, shaking their heads at what they imagined I’d seen—while my eyes were dry. For Sister Mary Pat’s sake I tried to give my grieving heart over to Jesus, though there was nothing in me, it seemed, to be given over. Counseling concluded at the end of the year. We moved. But afterward, nearly every day for years, I cried over something—a news broadcast about a fire in which a child was lost or saved, an insult to my pride or someone else’s, the death of a celebrity I’d never heard of before.
—
My eyes were dry, though, the night of the day my friends and I pledged our lives to one another. Confined to my quarters, I called CJ, then Vera, to see what was going on with Saint; no one answered at either house. I sat at my desk drawing cartoons of my family: Dad’s peace-at-any-price grin, Arlyn’s big, capped horse teeth, Elise years later on her psychiatrist’s couch: It was hard for me being smart and pretty! But even then I knew that Elise meant more or less well and that whatever evil I attributed to Arlyn and my father wasn’t that dark. I took the Pledge out of my pocket and tried to recall the afternoon’s grand euphoria, but nada. I started sketching out a logo for the group, number and letters tight against each other—
4EVER
—and then the bedside phone rang. It was CJ, with an explanation for the change of plan: Vera was big-time messed up and needed to talk to Saint. He sounded amused in a brittle, irritated way. “What if we need to talk to Saint? And what’s the matter with our advice?”
It was the kind of social upset that adults often encounter and learn to overlook, but it hit my sixteen-year-old heart like a fist. We four were different from other high school cliques in that we had no secrets from one another. What you told one, you told everyone. And now Saint and Vera seemed to have paired off, made their own pact from which we were excluded. My head clogged with every social shaming I had ever received. Do you realize you walk with your arms bent up? Instead of a straight skirt maybe you could wear an A-line? You’re always smiling; it seems kind of phony. This was four years ago when I was new at Lourdes Junior-Senior High School, and now I was back there, too diminished even to say how I felt. “It doesn’t matter, since I’m grounded,” I said to CJ, and recapped my sorry brawl with Arlyn. He commended my courage.
Once, in Lourdes Page 6