Stranger Here Below

by Joyce Hinnefeld

  At her big, ramshackle house near the university, Octavia was known to throw noisy dinner parties for her friends and a few of her favorite students. Rumor had it that she’d been married three times, once to a white man, and now her sometime lover was a man ten years younger than she, a jazz drummer named Marcus Dyer who was one of several boarders living in her house.

  By December Mary Elizabeth was living there too, rent-free in exchange for feeding Octavia’s innumerable cats and taking care of her plants whenever she was away. She planned to be away during the Christmas holidays that month, right after Mary Elizabeth moved in, and Mary Elizabeth said she would be glad to stay in the house.

  Throughout the fall she had received letters from her father, filled with passages from the Bible and admonishments, which she certainly didn’t need, to work hard and do her best. And also with repeated references to one particular widow from his church, Iris Jones—Iris had been by to wash the front-room curtains; Iris took care of most of the laundry; Iris had baked him a cake on his birthday. When Mary Elizabeth read her father’s letters, she felt the long-gone pain between her shoulders return.

  She wrote back to him dutifully, and every week she also sent a brief letter to her mother, mailed in care of Clarisa Pool. Occasionally Clarisa wrote back (“Your mama has a nice, sunny room now. She doesn’t really need any new clothes. She sends you her love”), but her mama never wrote herself. She wouldn’t even notice her absence at Christmas, Mary Elizabeth told herself.

  Maze wrote to her, too, long, rambling letters that seemed to veer from happiness to sorrow to fear and all the way back again. They’d had a reasonable harvest and canned lots of tomatoes. Sister Georgia seemed weaker than ever but refused to see a doctor. November was cold, and the Shaker Inn was hard to heat, but they’d managed to keep the Sisters’ Shop warm for her. What did Mary Elizabeth think about this war in Asia? She was worried for Harris and Daniel and Phil. Vista had split up with her divorcé boyfriend and bought her own house in Harrodsburg—how about that!

  All of Maze’s letters to Mary Elizabeth ended the same way: “Still wishing you’d come back.”

  In January Mary Elizabeth received an oddly terse note from Maze. She and Harris Whitman would be getting married, it said. Then, “Still wishing you could join us here at Pleasant Hill.”

  Mary Elizabeth seldom wrote back to Maze. She found it difficult to start those letters, and the ones she started she was seldom able to finish. The practiced, formal voice she used in her letters to her daddy and her mama would never work with Maze, she knew. Maze would be insulted.

  Now, though, she would have to respond. But everything had changed, and she didn’t know where to begin. Congratulations, Maze! she thought of writing. And congratulations to me—I am no longer Sister Georgia’s one pure girl! Because since December, besides feeding her cats and watering her plants, Mary Elizabeth had been having sex with Octavia Price’s sometime lover, Marcus Dyer.

  It had started while Octavia was away at Christmastime but then continued after her return, every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon when she left to teach her classes. On those days Mary Elizabeth would race home from her own classes, and before Octavia had even packed her satchel and breezed out the door in a stream of silk scarves and perfume, she’d have begun to scrub the tub in the second-floor bathroom and run a deep bath, scented with Octavia’s own silky bath salts. When she was sure Octavia was gone, Mary Elizabeth would sink down deep in that bath and sigh, and so begin the ritual of readying herself for the hungry eyes and muscled arms and probing tongue and cock of Marcus Dyer.

  She would step out of that bath and powder herself carefully, but she was fighting a losing battle—her body was nothing but a pool of liquid need. Even its slickness and its smell could excite her. She’d wrap up in the kimono Marcus had brought her, purchased nearby, in Chinatown. It was how he had first seduced her, bringing her the package when Octavia left on Christmas day. “Merry Christmas,” he said and put it in front of her. She was sitting at Octavia’s big, messy dining table, working on a paper.

  “Open it up and put it on,” he said then, leaning over her. “You need to wear something that’s gonna let that soft skin breathe.” His breath was warm at the back of her neck, and her hand shook as she put down her pencil and craned her neck to look back at him looking at her.

  She did not flinch or look away. She was as hungry as he was—hungrier. She had waited, it suddenly seemed, all her life to feel that way. For all the shame and sneaking, Mary Elizabeth felt like she’d found her way home to something. What she’d found were Marcus Dyer’s sleepy brown eyes and strong drummer’s arms, his wide, callused hands and the slow, sure way he slipped her clothes off that first night, and the way he touched her all the other times after that—the smooth, perfect rhythm of the way he improvised on every eager part of her body.

  When he left, to get ready to go out and play a gig, Mary Elizabeth would lie in her bed, smoking cigarette after cigarette. Eventually she would go back downstairs and fill the tub again, and this time she’d scrub and scrub, knowing full well she could never get clean. After that she’d go back to her little room and rip the sheets off her bed, and she’d pull out the muslin bag. One by one she’d take out the bag’s contents and place each item on her bed: her daddy’s cuff links, Clarisa Pole’s tarnished cross, Sister Daphna’s bonnet, Maze’s draft for a baby’s blanket, her mama’s moldy notebook.

  After she counted them all and returned them to the bag, she would go back downstairs to resume her studying at the dining room table. That was where Octavia always found her when she blew back into the house on a Tuesday or Thursday night.

  She wasn’t the old Mary Elizabeth, who Maze still wished would come join them at Pleasant Hill. That was what she wanted to tell Maze, but couldn’t, in answer to her letter. So “Congratulations, Maze!” she wrote at the top of a piece of notebook paper. Then, “I wish you and Harris all the best.” She folded it and addressed an envelope and mailed it the next day.

  Pilgrim and Stranger

  1964

  In March Mary Elizabeth got another piece of mail she couldn’t ignore—this time a telegram from her daddy, telling her that her mama was dead.

  Somehow Sarah had gotten her hands on a bottle of phenobarbital tablets, Reverend Cox told Mary Elizabeth when he met her bus, and that was how she had managed to end her solitary suffering once and for all. Other than Mary Elizabeth, Reverend Cox, and Clarisa Pool, the only people at the quiet funeral service in Stanford were the head administrator of the Colored Home, two distant cousins of Mary Elizabeth’s daddy—both older women that Mary Elizabeth had never before met and never saw again after the funeral—and Iris Jones.

  Mary Elizabeth hated her daddy that day—hated what she saw as his rehearsed sadness, his excessive courtesy toward his two cousins, his smug paternalism toward the young preacher from the Baptist church in Stanford who led the service. The service, in particular, left a bitter taste on her tongue. What good had all those words of scripture ever done her mama? What good were they likely to do now?

  At the cemetery, while her daddy wiped his seeping eyes and Clarisa Pool blew her nose repeatedly, Mary Elizabeth did not shed a tear. When her daddy returned to Richmond after hugging her tight and pressing several dollars into her palm, she collapsed on the sofa in Clarisa Pool’s front room. And she stayed there for the next two days, staring at Clarisa’s tiny black-and-white television and never even changing out of her pajamas. But still she did not cry.

  Finally, on the day her daddy was to come to take her to breakfast and then to the bus station, Clarisa came to her with a small paper bag of her mother’s things—a few lacey handkerchiefs, a pair of ruby earrings, some photographs of Mary Elizabeth as a baby and of her mama and daddy on their wedding day. Mary Elizabeth stared at the photographs, trying to find, in her blank baby eyes, or in her father’s serious ones and her mother’s shy, unreadable ones, some sense in it all.

  Clarisa watche
d her closely. “They were happy for a time, Mary Elizabeth,” she said, pulling off the quilt that was still wrapped around the girl’s legs and starting to fold it. “Your daddy was good to her. He loved her the best way he could, and so did you. And now you aren’t doin’ anyone a lick of good spendin’ your days here in my living room staring at the television set.”

  She took Mary Elizabeth’s hands in hers and pulled her up to sit on the sofa, then sat down beside her. “She’d want you to get on with things now, you know that,” she said. “You need to go ahead and get on with all you want to do.”

  Ten hours later, riding through northern Indiana on a flat and endless highway, Mary Elizabeth lurched to the back of the Greyhound bus, dumped the contents of the paper bag Clarisa had given her onto an empty seat, and vomited into the bag. When she got to Octavia’s house at nine o’clock that night, no one seemed to be home.

  Hours later she woke, in total darkness, to Marcus Dyer stroking her thighs and belly. “Shhh,” he said when she jumped, and he reached between her legs. She pulled him to her then and reached for him desperately, telling him “Now,” and then more urgently “Now!” until he was inside her at last and she could close her eyes and bite his shoulder so she wouldn’t scream and only wish she could be like that, as lost to everything else as that, forever.

  In the morning she took a bath, and then, back in her room, she pulled out the muslin bag and emptied it onto her bed, lining up the items one by one, counting them, touching each one in order. Then she put all of them back in the bag except for two: Maze’s draft for a baby blanket and her mama’s notebook. These she put into the tin waste can she kept below the sink in her room, and she lit a match and watched them burn.

  Never once did her studies suffer. That was how adept she was, she thought, at fooling them, at appearing to be the same old Mary Elizabeth, the good and strong girl she’d been for Aunt Paulie and her parents. The one who was going to make a life for herself just like Octavia’s. In the morning she rose early and left for the library. It was getting harder and harder for her to face Octavia, so she spent entire days on campus, returning only when she knew Octavia would be out. Not long after she returned from her mama’s funeral, she began avoiding Marcus, too.

  Later Mary Elizabeth would see how obvious it must have been to Octavia. She guessed, too, that Marcus might even have told her. Their relationship was like that, she knew; Octavia had other lovers, too. But when Mary Elizabeth realized she was pregnant, she couldn’t imagine, at first, turning to Octavia for help.

  When she knew for sure, she told Marcus, and when he pulled out his wallet and tried to hand her some money, she turned her back so he wouldn’t see her tears. All she said was “I’ll take care of it.” That night she wrote a letter to Maze, asking her to get Sister Georgia to mix some of that nightshade tea, the one “For Sisters who have erred,” and send it to her. That was how desperate she was, she would think only a week later, laughing bitterly to herself. Desperate and hysterical enough to believe in some kind of old Shaker voodoo, some backwoods abortifacient.

  She mailed the letter the next morning, and when she returned from classes a week later, barely noticing the pale green buds that shimmered on the branches of the big old trees lining Olivia’s block, there, on the front porch of Octavia’s house, was someone Mary Elizabeth had never expected to see on the south side of Chicago. She knew it was Maze immediately, though her back was turned to Mary Elizabeth. She wore an old raincoat and muddy boots and held one of the cheap cardboard suitcases she’d brought to Berea, and she was standing on her toes to peer through the beveled glass of Octavia’s front door.

  “Maze!” Mary Elizabeth called up to her. “I never expected you to come all the way here yourself.…”

  Maze turned around then, smiling, her face tired. And then, hurrying to the front steps, Mary Elizabeth got a better look and saw immediately that her friend was pregnant.

  That woman—Mary Elizabeth’s professor, the owner of the house where she lived—frightened Maze. Too big, too loud, too confident. She hadn’t known any professors like that at Berea, not that she’d been overly fond of any of them, either.

  “You said she reminded you of your Aunt Paulie, but I never pictured her lookin’ anything like that,” she said to Mary Elizabeth after dinner. They were up in her room, the evening Maze arrived with her nearly empty suitcase and the faintest hope that she might change Mary Elizabeth’s mind.

  “I didn’t mean she looked like her,” Mary Elizabeth said. She was lying in her bed with a cold cloth on her forehead. Maze sat next to her, barely fitting on the narrow space left on the bed. “I don’t know why I said she reminded me of Aunt Paulie.” Mary Elizabeth’s lips were pale at the edges, and she looked like death, tossing fitfully on the bed and trying to find a comfortable way to lie.

  “I was sick like this, too, at first,” Maze said. “Sick as a dog, all day long. I kept thinkin’, Why in God’s name do they call it morning sickness? It’s sickness all the damned day long.”

  She took the cloth from Mary Elizabeth’s head, dipped it in a bowl of ice water she’d put on the table by the bed, wrung it out, and put it on her head again. “It gets better, though,” she said, “eventually.” Then she stopped herself.

  Mary Elizabeth had opened her eyes and was staring at her like a caged animal. “I can’t have a baby, Maze,” she said. “You know I can’t.”

  Maze could have kicked herself. She couldn’t put off talking about the tea forever, but somehow she seemed to think that if she kept on making small talk, maybe she could. But small talk kept on ending up at the same place. Look at the two of them, she thought. What else did they have to talk about?

  The bus ride up from Lexington had been miserable. Endless and miserable. By the time she got to Indianapolis, she had a sharp, stabbing pain that ran up her right side, from her ankle to her armpit, and no matter how she shifted in the crowded seat, she couldn’t get comfortable. Sciatica. Vista’d had it, too, she’d said, when she was pregnant. But Maze wouldn’t touch any of the herbal remedies Vista or Georgia tried to get down her. She didn’t trust either of those disappointed women.

  Now, at nearly eight months, she felt strong again most of the time, healthy and strong and ready for this baby. That was how she felt when she stepped off the bus; she willed herself to feel that way. She walked, wide-eyed, through the streets of Chicago until the sciatica went away. At one busy corner she found a policeman and asked him how to get to the University of Chicago. He took one look at her and told her to get into his car. He dropped her right at Octavia Price’s front door.

  Mary Elizabeth shook her head in wonder when Maze told her. Then she pointed at Maze’s giant belly and said, “How’d Sister Georgia and your mama take this news?”

  “About the way you’d expect,” Maze said, though that wasn’t entirely true.

  Vista wanted Maze to move into her place in Harrodsburg right away. She was convinced Harris Whitman would be gone before long. But they knew what they were doing, Maze told her. They got married by the county judge, and they listed Maze and their baby-to-be as dependents on Harris’s updated Selective Service papers. Suddenly he was 3A, and deferred.

  They also listed Sister Georgia. That had been Georgia’s idea. She surprised Maze with that one, but then, it had been one surprise after another with Sister Georgia ever since Maze had moved back to Pleasant Hill.

  No, there was no deed, Georgia had told Maze, not to her knowledge. Neither the land nor any of the buildings were hers to offer Maze and her friends. The Shakers didn’t own things; they signed away all their earthly belongings when they joined. There was nothing she could do to ensure that they could stay. Unless, she said, they wanted to sign the covenant and live as members of the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, as she had done. Maze shook her head at that; these friends weren’t exactly the covenant-signing kind, she said. She didn’t add, because she sensed she didn’t need to, that four of t
he five of them were already breaking one of that society’s cardinal rules.

  Still, when she announced her pregnancy, Sister Georgia seemed surprised. “What’d she think you all were doin’ over there in the Shaker Inn, buildin’ chairs?” Vista said with her bitter laugh. But then, all of a sudden, Sister Georgia turned happy about the news—far happier, and far faster, than Vista. Once Maze and Harris were married, they could move into the Sisters’ Shop with her, she said. She read the paper every day. She’d been worrying about those boys, about Harris and Daniel and Phil.

  Maze told Mary Elizabeth all this and more when she arrived that afternoon, as they sat in Octavia’s comfortable living room. She talked and talked and didn’t stop, filling every pause, every quiet moment, with the sound of her own voice.

  All to keep Mary Elizabeth from asking her about the tea. Because of course she had it, there in her suitcase. When Mary Elizabeth’s letter came she’d gone right to Sister Georgia with the Sisters’ ledger book in her hands, opened to the page they’d seen two years before. Georgia had a bit of everything drying up in the attic of the Sisters’ Shop, Maze knew, probably including whatever part of the nightshade plant this unreadable recipe was calling for.