Grace
15
Amy stands in the driveway watching the cherry lights of the ambulance reflecting off her bare arms. How she wishes her skin could stay this color, flushed warm and pink, like the skin of a girl in a magazine. Two stout men lift the stretcher and slip it between the open double doors; Amy strains for a glimpse of her grandmother’s face but it is covered by a plastic mask. Mary-Margaret’s blue curls are frizzed around her head, and they are the last thing Amy sees before the men climb in and pull the heavy doors to themselves. Briefly, Amy wants to cry, but she does not; she is a magazine girl with magazine skin, cool and detached, slumped against the garage door in her pink tube top and pink short shorts as the ambulance warbles once, twice, glides out of the driveway.
All the way up and down Vinegar Hill, people are standing on their porches in the feeble afternoon sunshine, carrying babies to the edges of their driveways, peering out of their windows. A morning of tornado warnings kept them in their cellars, and now they move stiffly, hands cupped to shade their eyes. Who is it? someone calls to Ellen as she gets into Fritz and Mary-Margaret’s car to follow the ambulance. Who is it? they call to Amy, their eyes inquisitive and bright. Chipmunk eyes. Their noses work, sniffing the air for secrets. James isn’t due home until later this afternoon, but they will keep watch for him, eager to be the first to tell what they know, what they suspect.
Is it the grandmother? Is it the grandfather? Is it the little boy?
Without the red pulse of the ambulance, Amy’s skin is ugly and gray. She tosses her hair like a magazine girl, but she feels stupid now, too many people watching, and that hurting feeling at the back of her throat as if—but she won’t—she might cry. She is glad Bert is away, staying with Auntie Miriam and Uncle Darby for the weekend, helping Uncle Darby fence a new pasture. Bert would throw back his head and howl if he were here. Bert would allow the neighbor women to wrap him in their arms, push crumpled tissues against his nose, usher him back to their houses for lemonade and cake.
Is it the grandmother? Is it the grandfather? Is it the little boy?
But Amy will not be bought. When she sees Mrs. Mueller, long-legged as a doe, step over the ditch separating the yards, Amy ducks inside and closes the door behind her. She pulls the drapes and sits down on the couch, listening to the clear chime of the doorbell, the scuffle of footsteps on the braided twine mat where she and Herbert have to wipe their feet. She touches her newly pierced ears, fingering each pale green stone like it’s a charm. The lobes are still tender; Kimmy did them with a blackened needle as Amy sat on the toilet seat in the Geibs’ tiny bathroom, trying not to jump.
“What some people need is a good dose of buckshot,” Fritz says, coming down the hall from the bedroom, and Amy does not breathe, imagining Mrs. Mueller galloping across the front lawn, wide-eyed, skirt flapping like a tail as Fritz squints down the barrel of the shotgun he keeps on a rack in the hall closet. But Fritz just sits on the couch beside Amy, and soon the doorbell stops ringing. By now Mrs. Mueller must be on her way back to her yard, speaking with the other neighbors, who are also eager for answers. By now the ambulance must be at Saint John’s Hospital in Cedarton, the stretcher unloaded, Ellen trotting behind it, disappearing into a room marked QUIET or KEEP OUT or ADULTS ONLY, a room where Amy would not be allowed to go.
She is eleven now, old enough to shave her legs, to wear musk-scented deodorant, to step into the closet each morning and, hidden from her brother’s curious eyes, slip her arms through the straps of a crisp cotton bra, elbows jangling the hangers. She is old enough to carry a purse, to smear Plum Passion or Very Cherry lip gloss on her lips and not lick it off. She is old enough to read friends’ copies of Seventeen and Mademoiselle, magazines her mother throws into the trash if Amy forgets to hide them. And she is old enough to know all about boys. But still, her mother has left her behind. Stay near the house and be good, she said. Amy rubs her smooth smooth legs and imagines herself in a hospital waiting room, inhaling the mentholated smoke from a cigarette, ankles coolly crossed. Her hair is thick and wavy; her full breasts rest on the shelf of her arms. She wears a low-cut black satin dress. The nurses look in on her now and then, whispering to one another.
It’s her grandmother, you know. They were very close. Look how strong she is. Look how well she’s taking it.
“Well now, missy,” Fritz says musingly. His thick glasses have slid down on his nose; sweat shines on his forehead and cheeks, and he gives off a sour cheese smell. Amy stares at his hands, which are folded on his knee like spiders embracing, or fighting to the death. Each hand squeezes the other in turn, ugly hands notched with warts and scars, the pinky finger missing from the right hand. A magazine girl wouldn’t have a grandfather with hands like these. A magazine girl wouldn’t be left alone with such hands, wondering what they will do. Lately she feels Fritz looking at her as if she is someone else, someone he doesn’t quite recognize—
Yet.
“Maybe we should pray,” Amy says, because that’s what Mary-Margaret would suggest at a time like this. Lord, help me to accept what I cannot change is Mary-Margaret’s favorite prayer; it is written on the prayer card that’s taped to the bathroom mirror with crumbling yellow tape, and Amy sometimes picks at it with her fingernail while she’s brushing her teeth. All week long, as twisters hopscotched across the state, Mary-Margaret said that prayer as she watched the sky, and Oh Jimmy, she sometimes said. Amy pictures her grandmother lying alone in a cold, white room, and wonders if she is praying now, or if she is already dead. Perhaps her ghost has freed itself and is rustling through the air like a leaf. Perhaps it will return to familiar places: the rocking chair in the kitchen, the parlor chair embroidered with roses that stands just several feet from the couch where Amy is sitting now. The back of her neck feels strange, and she wishes her mother would come home. Outside on the street, a child laughs shrilly, and Amy jumps, thinking it’s her grandmother’s voice she has heard.
“Pray for what?” Fritz says.
This morning in the basement, waiting for the siren at the top of the water tower to sound the all clear, Mary-Margaret had been oddly silent. The house rattled with wind, the floorboards creaking overhead as if a strange, gigantic creature were pacing in the kitchen, waiting to devour them as soon as they came upstairs. Amy and Ellen played cards while Mary-Margaret watched and Fritz slept, his snores like a dog’s warning growls.
“You go on and pray if you want to,” Fritz says and his voice is a sneer. “Me, when something goes wrong, I don’t wait on Jesus to fix it.”
“Me neither,” Amy says. She had noticed Mary-Margaret first, but she hadn’t said anything. Mary-Margaret’s lips and fingernails had turned the same dark purply blue as the sky; her eyes crossed so deeply that she seemed to be staring into her own self as she slid down in her chair. War! Amy shouted, slapping her cards on the table, and Mary-Margaret clattered to the floor, her rosary beads tangled in her fingers.
“I learned to do for myself,” Fritz says. “Nobody ever did nothing for me. From the time I can first remember, I worked to earn my keep. But you’re growing up soft, gal, soft as your grandma.” He pokes his blunt finger into Amy’s side, hard, harder, hurting her; when she gasps, he cuffs her cheek, almost affectionately. Amy tries not to inhale his sour cheese smell. She tries not to see Mary-Margaret thrashing her heels against the basement floor. The way Amy herself did nothing, shuffling the cards again and again while her mother ran upstairs to call the ambulance. The way she and Fritz looked at Mary-Margaret, and Mary-Margaret looked back at them, and no one said a word. She is frightened, she is shaking. She wants to be with her mother, tucked against her mother’s side like a bird. She wants to be a magazine girl in a black satin dress who is not afraid of anything. Fritz’s front teeth gleam yellow as the teeth of old horses: long teeth, mean. Amy starts to get up but it’s as if her legs are concrete; she cannot move, cannot twist away. He touches her newly pierced earlobes, twisting the small green stones until tea
rs form in her eyes. “What’s all this foolishness?” he says, and he sweeps his hand down the almost-flatness of her chest. “Putting on airs! Just like your grandma. Pretty soon the young bucks will come sniffing around, and next thing we know you’ll have a belly out to here.”
He stands up and stuffs one of the square satin couch pillows up under his shirt. “There,” he says, “now I’m a mama. Just like you’re going to be one someday. Right? Ain’t that so?”
Amy doesn’t answer. Her earlobes burn. She wants to touch them, to see if they’re bleeding, the way she checks between her legs whenever she feels wetness, but it never is blood down there, just sweat or a little pee, she isn’t sure. Maybe blood is running down her neck and she doesn’t know it, like the woman she and Kimmy saw downtown with the dirt-red stain on her white shorts. Maybe Fritz can see the blood and he is secretly laughing at Amy the way Amy and Kimmy secretly laughed at the woman. Fritz paces back and forth in front of her, one hand holding the pillow in place, lifting his feet high so they fall to the floor with each step, boom, boom. She sees that he wants her to laugh, so she tries. He rips the pillow from his shirt, hurls it at the lamp, topples it along with a potted philodendron. Its long trailing vines thrash the air as it falls, arms searching for a grip.
“That’s what’ll happen to you someday when a man puts a baby inside you.”
He kicks her grandmother’s embroidered chair; it slides into the wall, unresisting. Her grandmother’s chair looks empty, braced against the wall, but her ghost might be sitting there, watching. Her ghost might pick up the fallen lamp and bring it down on Fritz’s head, or slip into the telephone wires and cause the phone to ring. It will be the police on the line, telling Fritz he is under arrest. He will be put in the electric chair and Amy will pull the switch. None of this can be happening, but if it is, something else will happen to stop it. Amy is not helpless. Amy is not alone.
“Your grandma had four of my babies,” Fritz says. “The last two was twins, and I went out to celebrate it. By the time I come home, there’s no sign of them. What babies? your grandma says to me. She and her mama.”
When he looks down at Amy, she knows he isn’t seeing her, but somebody else, a woman resting her breasts on the shelf of her arms, a woman wearing a black satin dress, a woman whose body swells like bread because of what she and men do together. She scuttles backward, her spine pressed into the wall of the couch, feeling the soreness of her ribs where he poked her. She isn’t a magazine girl. She isn’t who he thinks he recognizes.
“Folks said that night I got so drunk I thought I had twice the sons I did. What babies? her mama tells me. You never had any more babies but the two you already got.
He kneels down beside her. His face is a mountain, the tufted eyebrows like trees, the eyes pond-water gray and speckled with floating leaves. He blinks, and water runs down the slope of his nose, a clear stream that veers off to trace the deep lines beside his mouth.
“You tell me,” he says, his voice almost kind, “what kind of devil is a woman who kills two little babies?”
Amy doesn’t know.
“You really are devils, all of you,” he says. “You are born with it in you, like a bull is born to meanness. Devils to the last.”
Amy sees herself with a forked tail and hooves, bald red skin, a pitchfork like a Halloween devil, even though she knows real devils can look like anything they want to: a pig or a fish. A girl. An old man. She swipes at her ears, feels wetness there. Her face burns with shame.
“You pray for your grandma, if that’s what you want. Me”—Fritz punches his chest—“I hope she rots in Hell with her ma.”
He gets up stiffly and goes down the hall to the bedroom, closes the door with a sound that is as soft as a kiss. Amy goes into the bathroom and turns on the overhead light. Her left ear is bleeding, the pierced hole ripped into a jagged oval. She works the earring free and washes the lobe with water and soap. Then she takes the other earring out and washes that lobe as well. She tosses the earrings into the trash beneath the sink and washes her hands and face and neck. New blood seeps from her torn ear and she blots it with toilet tissue, waits, then checks to see if it’s still bleeding. For months she has hoped for her bleeding to start, for the stain on her white cotton panties that means she’s a grown-up woman like Kimmy, like Kimmy’s friend Jennifer. Now it has happened, she is finally bleeding, and even though it’s different it means the same. She is a devil, just like Kimmy and Jennifer are devils, like her mother certainly must be. But she isn’t going to tell them that. Nobody ever has to know.
She goes back into the living room and finds her sweatshirt where she left it on top of the TV. She pulls it on over her pink tube top and picks up the knocked-over lamp. She straightens her grandmother’s chair. She takes out the vacuum cleaner and sucks up the dirt left by the philodendron, which she replants neatly, wrapping the long viny arms protectively around the pot. By the time she is finished, the room will look exactly as it did before. No one will be able to tell the difference.
Ellen doesn’t stay in the gray little room where she has been told to wait. Shivering in her shorts and T-shirt, she hooks her purse over her shoulder and walks down the long hallway, avoiding the nurses’ station, looking for a sunny window away from the air-conditioning. The hospital smells of coffee and disinfectant, and she wonders why every hospital she’s been in has smelled the same. It’s a smell that reminds her of having a cold, one that gets up into your head and stays there, making even your own skin smell strange.
As Mary-Margaret was being rushed from the ambulance into the hospital, she cried out for her mother, her voice muffled and thick behind the plastic mask. Now Ellen cannot shake the sound from her mind. She wonders if James has come home from his trip yet, if perhaps he has arrived at the hospital and is sitting in another cold gray waiting room that smells of coffee and disinfectant. She imagines him with his knees spread wide, his feet pointing away from each other, listening for the sound of Mary-Margaret’s voice the way Ellen has been listening, as if those thin cries could filter like smoke through unseen cracks in the walls, Mama, Mama.
She turns the corner and almost walks into a man lying on a stretcher. His feet are uncovered, and his tapering yellow toenails are both beautiful and grotesque. She has heard that after people die their hair and toenails continue to grow, but she can’t remember if this is really true or just something kids tell each other at school. This man is in his forties, big-bellied, his face grizzled with beard. He stares at the ceiling without seeing it, and Ellen wonders what he was doing when he first realized, however vaguely, that something intricate inside him had failed. Perhaps he was at work, soldering one meaningless piece of metal to another, or lecturing a new employee on protocol, rules he once believed in which mean very little now. He might have been with his family, sitting down to supper. He might have been playing with his dog, or thinking thoughts that made him stare at the ground and smile soft, secret smiles.
Mary-Margaret had been watching Ellen play cards with Amy, her hands clasped over her stomach, her rosary braided between her fingers. She had fallen from her chair without a word, her thin legs treading air as if there were somewhere important she had to go. Ellen imagines Mary-Margaret lying on a stretcher just like this one, her toenails just as yellow, just as thick, and growing. Farther down the hall, a woman in white bursts through a set of double doors. Ellen turns away, but the brisk squeak squeak of the woman’s white shoes is close behind. She has the feeling that even if she broke into a run, the woman would follow at exactly the same distance, businesslike, efficient.
“Ma’am, I must insist you stay in the waiting room,” the woman whispers loudly.
“I’m sorry,” Ellen says, whispering too. “It’s just that I’m so cold. Isn’t there a warmer place to wait?”
“Try the chapel, second floor.”
“Thanks,” Ellen says, but the woman is already gone, sucked between another pair of double doors that seal themselves ne
atly after her.
She leaves a message for James at the nurses’ station, then takes the elevator, trying not to look too closely at the couple riding with her because she’s afraid that if she does she’ll grab them by the collars or clutch at their sleeves. My mother-in-law had a heart attack and all I could do was watch, she’ll say. She fell on the floor. She couldn’t breathe. I saw it happen. But that won’t be what she means, what she wants to say. She feels disconnected, as if she’s looking at everything from behind a thick lens. In the basement, she had held Mary-Margaret’s hands, talking to her softly while Amy stared and Fritz stood over her with the look of a farmer assessing a sick animal. “Here, you sit with her too,” Ellen said, but Fritz turned away. Soon she heard him clumping up the stairs, and by the time the ambulance came he had locked himself in the bedroom.
“Keep an eye on Amy, at least,” she shouted at him, drumming her fists on the door. “If that isn’t too much to ask while I take your wife to the hospital.”
Then she saw Amy looking up at her.
“I want to come along,” Amy said. She had changed out of the sweatshirt she’d been wearing into a skimpy pink top; she held her purse in one hand. Ellen knew if she opened up that purse she would find lipsticks hidden inside the innocent tissue packs, a slim mascara worked into the lining. Amy put her hands on her hips, small and fierce, defiant and frightened, and Ellen could not look at her. She ran past her down the hall, calling over her shoulder, “Stay near the house and be good,” as if this could somehow keep her from growing older and more fierce and more afraid until one day she too would be clutching her heart on the cold concrete floor of a basement, the lipsticks and skimpy pink tops long forgotten, blue-veined legs thrashing air.
The chapel is empty; a dozen narrow pews, an altar the size of a picnic table. Ellen walks to the front and kneels before the metal trays filled with candles. Most have been lit, some recently, some burned down into a flat, shiny pool, the dark wick at each center like the pupil of an eye. Ellen digs through her purse for a quarter and slips it into the donation box. Then she lights one of the few remaining candles, holding the match against it until her fingers sting.
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