Father Bork puts the Host away. “Salome, my dear, may I speak to you in the hall?”
She allows him to take her arm. After they are gone, Ellen sits in Salome’s chair, not knowing what to do. Mary-Margaret is taking short sharp breaths; she reaches for Ellen, her nails biting into Ellen’s wrist. “It’s my time,” she says.
“But you’ll be fine,” Ellen says. “Doctor says you’ll be home in a week.”
“Go get Mama. I need Mama.”
When Father Bork comes back into the room, he puts his lips to Ellen’s ear. “I sent the sister to the chapel,” he says, whispering again. “I hate to separate them, but if she’s upsetting Mary-May, the nurse will make her leave.”
“She wants her mother,” Ellen says.
Mary-Margaret’s eyes close; sweat shines on her forehead. Father Bork sighs deeply. “Her mother, rest her soul, filled Mary-May’s head with girlish dreams, and after that she wasn’t satisfied with anything. God blessed Mary-Margaret with a husband, two beautiful sons, a home—” He waves Mary-Margaret’s life away with his hand. Ellen is aware of his smell; soap and talcum powder, like Bert after his bath. She flinches when he lowers his hand to her shoulder. “It’s been hard for you, living with her,” he says. “Your sisters are concerned. I understand you’ve been having doubts about your marriage.”
Julia, Ellen thinks. Her face burns; she doesn’t move.
“Sometimes God speaks to us through a tragedy, because that’s the only way we’ll listen. Perhaps this is God’s way of showing you how much your family needs you. Families forget to say that sometimes; husbands forget.” He smiles. “What you’re doing here is a good thing, a Christian thing.”
He pats her shoulder and leaves, his long skirt rustling. Mind your own damn business. That’s what she should have told him—why didn’t she? What has she got to lose? She imagines herself sitting by this bed for many years, growing thinner, grayer, brittle, the good Christian wife, the good Christian mother. Salome slips back into the room. “We don’t need your help about anything,” she says, her chin nodding sharply like the beak of a bird. She sits at the foot of Mary-Margaret’s bed and begins to pray the Rosary.
By late afternoon, Mary-Margaret clutches her sides and wails with pain. The nurse has been in twice, an older woman with a kind, practical face. “I’ll give her another sedative,” she says on her second visit. “I don’t know what else to do for her until Doctor stops by tonight.”
“Can he come any sooner?” Ellen asks.
“There’s no need,” the nurse says. “Doctor was here just before you came.”
“We don’t need no doctor,” Salome says. “Birth is a natural thing in a woman. It is death, you know, that’s unnatural.”
Ellen and the nurse exchange looks; the nurse shrugs and leaves. Salome opens her big black purse and takes out a bag of corn chips. She slits the plastic with a pin from her hair, puts a chip in her mouth, and sucks noisily. At home, they must be sitting down to dinner: Miriam, James, Amy and Bert, perhaps Fritz too, for by now he must be hungry. James will be quiet from having slept all day, his eyes glazed, his face still wrinkled from the dingy sheets Ellen hasn’t washed in weeks. She sighs, opens the paperback she bought at the gift shop, but her mind spins the words in dizzy circles and she puts it back in her purse. Suddenly her chest feels heavy. She tries to breathe but can’t. Anxiety builds in her throat like a taste, and she goes down the hall to the water fountain, where she swallows a pill, another, one more, then leans against the wall to wait for the feeling to pass. Her eyes close; she can sleep right here, and no one will notice because she is becoming invisible. Soon no one will be able to see her no matter how hard they try. When she opens her eyes she sees only her shoes many miles beneath her, and as she watches, even they disappear, front to back, as though they are being erased by a child’s eraser. Father Bork is beside her; he grabs for her feet, catches only air. What is happening to you? he shouts.
Sacrifice is never easy, the aqua lady explains. Her aqua body fills the space where Ellen’s body once stood.
And Amy says, Women are devils. I am a devil. Her eyes bulge red in her face; Ellen opens her mouth to scream.
The back of her shirt is cold with sweat. She gulps water, splashes it on her face, and her fingers seem huge to her, plump and sausage-pink. I am going crazy, she thinks. This is how a crazy person feels. She rinses her mouth, then walks unsteadily down the hall to Mary-Margaret’s room. Dim evening light filters between the blinds, and Ellen squints, trying to see. Everything seems to be moving very slowly. She hears Mary-Margaret cry out, a low whistle of air, and she pats the wall for the light switch.
“Shut the door,” Salome snaps. She holds her black sweater bundled in her arms, her body hunched around it as though Ellen might try to take it away.
“What’s wrong?” Ellen says, and Salome smiles a strange triumphant smile. Mary-Margaret’s gown is twisted up around her waist; her legs are bent awkwardly, her bony knees white as skulls. Ellen smooths her gown back into place, covers her with the sheet.
“Sh, sh,” Salome says, rocking the sweater bundle, stroking it, tucking it around itself even more securely. Watching her, Ellen shakes with a sudden, sick feeling, recognizing the way she rocked her own children.
“What do you have there?” she breathes.
“Them two Ma killed,” Salome says smugly. She tilts the bundle, showing Ellen its emptiness. “I was there the first time they was born, and I can tell you they’re the same ones now.”
Mary-Margaret begins to cry, the squalling voice of an infant.
“Nothing is there,” Ellen says. “There are no babies.”
“That’s what Ma said. She fixed him good for what he done to Mary-May. But a man has a right to his wife under God’s law.” Salome stares into Ellen’s face. “It is the will of God for babies to be born.”
“There are no babies.”
“The will of God ain’t for everyone to see.”
Amy’s words rise like a knot in Ellen’s throat. She turns to Mary-Margaret and realizes how very still she has become, her face milk white, her crying no more than a low, steady moan. “Wait here, just wait here,” Ellen says, and she runs out of the room, fighting her way through the sharp angles of the corridors, bumping her hip on a cleaning cart, catching her foot on a wheelchair. By the time she returns with a nurse, Salome is gone. Mary-Margaret’s face looks like it has been split in two and then put back together, one side lower than the other. The black sweater rests on her chest.
“She thinks she’s had a baby,” Ellen says thickly, but the nurse isn’t really listening. She checks the heart monitor, hits a button, and the hallway outside the room comes to life with footsteps. “What she’s had is some kind of seizure,” she says. “I’m afraid you’ll have to wait outside.”
At the end of the hallway, Ellen leans against a vending machine, trying to catch her breath, trying to understand. What kind of woman would kill two newborn babies? But she already knows the answer: a desperate woman. A woman who was trapped. A woman who was driven to do something, anything, to change the way things were. What might I be driven to? Ellen thinks, licking salty perspiration from her upper lip. She does not want to know. She takes a deep breath and feels her own blood moving inside her, spreading sweet life through her body. Suddenly, it’s as if Ann is with her in this cold gray hospital hall. At last, Ellen has found someone in her family who will understand what she must do, before it is too late, before her own rage grows into something she cannot control. Relief wells up in her, warmer than tears. When she tells her family she is leaving James, she will not be completely alone.
It is almost nine by the time she gets home. Miriam’s car straddles the driveway, so she parks the car on the street and walks up the lawn, the night air cool and private against her skin, damp grass lapping her ankles. Inside, James and Miriam are watching TV with the children, and their heads could be the heads of any couple sitting side by side. They could be ver
y much in love. They could be talking instead of watching TV, discussing the recent tornadoes, perhaps, or their next vacation, or the neighbors’ children.
Marv and Sally Gray’s son got another speeding ticket.
Does that make two or three?
Three, I think. Old Marv’s got his hands full with that one.
Or maybe they aren’t saying anything. Maybe they are watching the children, communicating only with pursed lips, a raised eyebrow. He slides low in his chair to poke her foot with his own; she pulls her foot away, edges it back, the children never suspecting their parents are involved in lives they do not yet understand. Ellen stands in the yard for a long time, watching them through the window the way she once stared through the windows of her sisters’ dollhouse. She wonders where her own doll would have been placed had Daddy lived to carve it for her.
A quarter moon rises above the house, silver back arching, graceful as a fish. Somewhere down the street a dog barks. In the house, James gets up and turns off the TV, paces in front of the window, and Ellen knows she should go inside, but within those walls she is the piece that doesn’t fit, the doll without a task. Here on the lawn with the sky stretching wide above her, the pinpoints of stars glowing billions of possibilities, she is whole and strong. Perhaps Mary-Margaret once stood beneath a night sky like this one, but she stood in one place so long that even Ann could not save her. For a moment, James stares out the window; Ellen’s heart skips, even now, thinking he has seen her. But James sees nothing but darkness, and he turns out the light and pulls the drapes tightly closed.
By the time she lets herself into the house, everyone is asleep. She closes the door softly behind her, listening to the sound of Miriam’s breathing, which reminds her of Mom and the sweet warm nights they slept together like spoons. She savors the memory of that closeness, something she cannot imagine she’ll ever experience again. Then she creeps past the couch, down the hall toward the bathroom, closing the door before she turns on the light.
The pills fill the belly of the ballerina; Ellen unscrews her slender neck and tips them into the toilet. They float like water bugs, bumping noses. She flushes, wincing at the sound. Some of them do not go down, and she has to flush twice more before the last one disappears. Then she puts the head back on, careful so the ballerina’s chin ends up pointing forward. She curves the soft folds of her skirt into her transparent hands before placing her, high out of sight, on the shelf. Mary-Margaret’s doll.
She will tell James now, in the quiet darkness, the lamp beside the bed casting a rosy calm over what she must say. I am afraid to go, but I am more afraid to stay. I have to take care of myself for a while. James will be confused, coming slowly up out of his sleep, perhaps thinking this is all a dream until he feels Ellen’s hand clasp his. Or maybe he will be angry; he will call her names, he will take off his ring and throw it at her feet. She turns off the light and goes out into the hallway, groping her way until her fingers brush the door to James’s room at the end of the hall. The wood is cool beneath her hand; she moves her palm along its smooth surface. Only this piece of wood separates them. Ellen presses her forehead against it, feeling James breathing on the other side, content in his sleep, contained, complete, and she does not open the door because she knows that if she wakes him he will not be angry. He will not think it’s a dream. You’re not going anywhere, he will say, and he’ll roll over onto his stomach with his head pushed deep into his pillow. Or worse, he will look at her as if she hasn’t spoken, as if she isn’t even there. And if that were to happen, she would not know what to do, because tonight, for the first time in months, she is certain that she is there, she is someone, a person whose life is of value, and if James failed to recognize that now, she would never be able to forgive him.
The children’s voices register gradually; first Amy’s whisper, then Bert’s frustrated whine. A slender line of light winks beneath their bedroom door. Ellen turns away from James and slips into their room. They are playing cards on the floor, a flashlight glowing between them. When Ellen turns on the light, Bert sweeps up the cards defiantly and deals another hand, his small plump fingers amazingly agile.
“You want me to tuck you in?” she says, blinking against the brightness. Her eyes feel hot and sore, as if she has been crying, but when she puts her hands to her face, her cheeks are dry.
“I’m too old for that,” Amy says.
“Me, too,” Bert says quickly.
“Well, okay,” Ellen says. “But I think you should get to bed soon. I’m driving to Schulesville early in the morning, and I’d like you to go with me.”
“What for?” Amy says
“To pick out an apartment.”
This gets their attention, but they don’t say anything for a while.
“Will we live there?” Amy finally says.
“You and Bert and me.”
“What about Dad?” Bert says.
“Not right now. Maybe someday.”
Bert deals another hand. “Will he be angry?”
“He might be,” Ellen says, “but not with you. I think he already knows that we can’t go on living here. Grandma’s going to need lots of quiet when she comes home.”
“Who will take care of her?” Amy says meanly. “Isn’t that your job?”
Ellen holds her voice steady. “I’ve done the best I can, but it’s hurting us all to be living here. We’ll still visit as often as we can.”
“Do we have to?” Bert says, just as Amy says, “I don’t want to visit.” They look old, sitting together, flipping the cards between them. They keep their bodies turned toward each other, away from Ellen, and she realizes they don’t trust her any more than they trust James or his parents. It will take time before she is able to be their mother again, before she feels close to them the way she used to.
“Well,” Ellen says. “I’m not really tired, so I guess I’ll go for a walk.”
“A walk?” Bert says. “In the dark?”
“Let me tuck you in first,” Ellen says, and Bert drops the cards, suddenly young again, and hops up into his bed.
“What if you don’t come back?” he says. “What if you die?”
“I’m not going to die,” Ellen says, and she means it. Tonight she can’t imagine not being alive in the world.
He looks at her suspiciously. “How do you know?”
“I can just feel it,” Ellen says. “I am certain of it.”
“But how can you be certain?”
“It’s like with guardian angels,” Amy says to him. “You just have to know.”
Ellen listens to Bert say his prayers, tucks the covers around him, and then she and Amy sit in silence until the sound of his breathing grows slow and deep. She watches Amy, the curve of her neck, the high cheekbones that hollow her face as if she were a woman Ellen’s age.
“Do you want to walk with me?” Ellen whispers once she’s sure Bert is asleep. “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
“I won’t be afraid,” Amy says.
They follow the cracked gray sidewalk along Vinegar Hill, turn down toward the harbor, their feet making scraping sounds against the concrete. The business district is still out of power from the tornado, and the steeple of Saint Michael’s is invisible tonight, the wide eye of the clock closed and dark. Ellen and Amy do not speak. They do not look at each other. But they reach the flat coin of the lake holding hands.
P. S. Insights, Interviews & More…
About the author
Meet A. Manette Ansay
About the book
Hazy Memories: The Inspiration Behind Vinegar Hill
A Conversation with A. Manette Ansay
About the author
Meet A. Manette Ansay
A. MANETTE ANSAY was born in Lapeer, Michigan. Her family moved to Port Washington, Wisconsin, when she was four. Among her few remaining memories of Michigan are “the sound of the piggyback trucks going by on the highway” and the looming presence of a Mr. Bert. (“Mr. Bert was our l
andlord—whenever I did something wrong I thought he somehow knew about it.”)
Her father was a traveling salesman. Her mother was a grade-school teacher. “Eventually,” she says, “they started a real estate company.”
Manette shared Wisconsin with sixty-seven first cousins (and over two hundred second cousins). Port Washington, she says, is “known throughout the Midwest for its annual festival—Fish Day. It’s billed as the ‘World’s Largest Fish Fry.’”
She especially enjoyed family gatherings on the one-hundred-and-twenty-acre farm of her maternal grandmother. “When the house got full,” she recalls, “the kids were sent to the basement—where we played in the root cellar and behind the ancient furnace. When the basement got full we were sent out to the barn. Ninety-nine percent of my childhood memories involve subzero weather, but the barn was always warm.”
Summers on the farm were sweet indeed. “My grandmother would send us to the garden with mason jars of sugar to cut rhubarb—we’d climb up into apple trees in the orchard to dip and eat. Sugar, I suppose (as much as snow), figures large in my memories. Someone was always baking something sweet. I suppose it offset the strictness of our religious faith. We were Catholic, and there was a long list of Thou Shalt Nots that everybody lived with, but you could always eat a batch of chocolate chip cookies.”
Manette first experienced great literature after sneaking into her mother’s hope chest—from which she produced a good many musty paperbacks. “I choked on Daisy Miller,” she wrote in her memoir Limbo, “but relished Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and (especially) An American Tragedy. I lingered over the word disrobe, which I’d had to look up in the dictionary, and then read the scene again and again.”
She studied piano at Johns Hopkins University’s Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore. This pursuit, however, came to an unfortunate end. “At the age of nineteen,” she says, “I developed an MS-like illness that began with pain and weakness in my arms and legs. It became harder and harder to play the piano. Eventually, I realized I’d have to do something else with my life that was less physically demanding.”
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