Almost Famous Women

by Megan Mayhew Bergman

  There was a coroner’s report, and they asked me to identify the body. I remember looking down at her face in the morgue. It was a large face, moonlike, original except for the fact that it had already been around the block once before as her uncle. Her eyes were closed. I could see the track marks, her brittle hair. Gone was the socialite, the sexpot, the conversationalist. Here was an abused body.

  “Goddamnit, Dolly,” I said.

  At the end, I could no longer pretend she was good, or a valuable member of society. At the end, I could no longer watch what she was becoming. The decline was too disgusting, too steep.

  Perhaps the war had made us obsessed with honor and bravery.

  Perhaps I became impatient.

  When I was younger I wrote her a love letter. I told her that I wanted more from her. That she was beautiful and capable of becoming a great writer and a great human being, and that I could help her if she’d let me. She was twenty-two and just back from the war and I’d missed her so much my stomach hurt and I ran to greet her when she visited the house.

  She never responded to the letter, and acted as if she hadn’t received it. I was too embarrassed to ask, to force the issue.

  Now, reading her letters, I knew more about the woman I thought I loved. Or maybe I knew less. Maybe what I knew was that there was more mystery and hurt than I could have imagined. Maybe the world had been bad to its great and unusual women. Maybe there wasn’t a worthy place for the female hero to live out her golden years, to be celebrated as the men had been celebrated, to take from that celebration what she needed to survive.

  And then in the yellowed packet I found an unsent letter addressed to me, from the early days, when she’d first run away to France and I’d lost many nights of sleep worrying about her.

  What troubles me about our friendship, darling, is that you live in an alternate universe. You say you want to understand, that you wish you were here with me, so let me tell you about my day:

  I back my ambulance into the tent, and jump out of the driver’s seat and onto the hard earth, snow to my ankles. I open the rear doors. The putrid smell of gangrene and vomit rushes at me and I dry-heave, covering my mouth with my shoulder. There’s no time to clean the ambulance between loads.

  It’s six a.m., and the shelling has stopped, which means we have a chance to collect bodies. The capable survivors, draped like ghosts in foul wool blankets, hoist the injured out of the dugout with strange efficiency. There are bodies half-lodged in the rubble, arms cocked as if still ready to throw grenades.

  I kick my tires to check the air pressure; you don’t want to get stuck on the road here, because people die out on the roads. Good tires save lives. My tires are fine, so I wait for orders.

  Sixteen, one of the soldiers says, giving me my count. I nod my head, and log the figure with shaking hands in a small black notebook.

  Shit, I think.

  I will never understand how they decide which bodies are capable of living, but the first one they give me is no longer in human form. The flesh has been burned from his body, what’s left of his body. There’s no hair, no nose or mouth, just eyes. A face of fire. I could not tell if this man, this body, wished to live, or die.

  I hate them for making me see this, for knowing this state of being is possible, for knowing that if I’m in the wrong place at the wrong time and a flame is thrown—

  But I hold the soldier’s hand—the one he has—and sing to him as I help secure him in the back of my ambulance. I sing “Au Clair de la Lune,” and I do not wince, though I am terrified.

  Fifteen more are loaded. Trench foot. Lost arm. Legs full of shrapnel.

  I climb into the ambulance, start the engine, and pull away from the tent. I can hear a sound more animal than human coming from the back; I know it is the burned one. I drive as fast as I can, the roar of planes overhead, up the icy roads toward camp, knowing he will not be alive when I open the back doors.

  Years later, I still imagine how it feels to live inside that body, even for one moment.

  I’ve never heard of women feeling this way. After returning home from the War, am I expected to be beautiful again? I do not feel beautiful inside. I’m expected to respect those who serve, and I continue to tend to soldiers. But who will tend to me when I am home? Will you?

  How many times I’ve seen the eyes of the burned soldier in my sleep. How many times I’ve tried to look at the world through those eyes. I will never understand what lives are worth saving. I know now I will never understand life, and neither will you.

  There is the matter of the last time I saw her, the afternoon when I turned back to her flat. When I threw my weight into the door until my hip was bruised and entered, locking it behind me, displacing the trunk she’d blocked it with, the object I’d had to move with sheer willpower. I barged into her bedroom. She rolled over to look at me, silent and shocked, eyes glazed.

  “You’re not taking care of yourself,” I said, raising my voice. “You’re crossing the line.”

  She groaned and went facedown into her pillow. “Tomorrow,” she mumbled, “I’m going to cheer up London’s children. The ones hiding in the country.”

  “You’re all talk,” I said. “You might have done that when you were younger, but not now. You’re wasting your life. You’re lazy and troubled and I can’t stand it! You have failed yourself!”

  “Shut up,” she said. “Shut up, shut up, shut up. Tais-toi!”

  Then she tried to get out of bed, as if she was coming after me, but she collapsed to the floor, first onto her knees and then she was passed out again, sprawled like a corpse.

  I dragged her to the bathtub; she was unaware, unhelpful, dead weight. She woke up naked in the cold water and reached out to slap my face.

  I slapped her back and it felt good, too good. And then she laughed.

  Dolly sang:

  The tiny fish enjoy themselves

  in the sea.

  Quick little splinters of life,

  their little lives are fun to them

  in the sea!

  “D. H. Lawrence, darling!” she said, cocking her head back. Don’t you love it? Don’t you remember?”

  She splashed my face, and I sat fuming. I left her there and began cleaning up bottles, wiping down the bathroom—there was blood.

  “Goddamnit, Dolly,” I said.

  “I need to sleep this off,” she interrupted, clumsily reaching for the paraldehyde on the bathroom counter.

  “You’ve already had enough!” She got it down before I could reach her.

  —Jesus Christ!

  And then I let it happen. Because it was the merciful thing to do. I couldn’t take it, seeing beautiful Dolly reduced to this.

  Killing her was easy; she wanted me to do it. Woman to woman. I’m not even sure she knew who I was, but she offered me her arm and then her thigh. There were needles on the counter.

  “More,” she said. “More!”

  All around me, killers. My brother. My neighbor. My countrymen. My enemies.

  Everyone has a saturation point.

  Everyone is capable of radical change. This is what the war has taught me: we kill each other and we kill ourselves. Even though we sleep in nice hotels on soft French linens. Even though we have dresses we never wear. Even though we drink champagne while others work in coal mines or the trenches of Vimy Ridge, smelling of gangrene. We have always been this way, killers inside. It is the human condition.

  The world folds in on itself in a ball of fire, and today I walk down Sloane Street, past the small flat near Belgrave Square, the ugly one with the good address. It is part of my wartime routine, how I assure myself I am an ordinary person, and still alive.

  And what of it?

  Beryl Markham, 1936.

  Photo reprinted from the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

  A HIGH-GRADE BITCH SITS DOWN FOR LUNCH

  KENYA, 1925

  But this girl, who is to my knowledge very unpleasant and we might even say a
high-grade bitch, can write rings around all of us.

  —Ernest Hemingway, on Beryl Markham

  The sun was setting over Lake Nakuru, peering through lavender clouds to leave a golden trail across the water.

  Beryl leaned against the brick wall of the stable to watch the lake. The horses were munching their hay, and later she’d groom the filly. Or maybe she’d ride the stallion out for the first time, the one she’d gotten for nothing at auction a few weeks ago, the one with the perfect bloodline. The one who’d killed a man with his hooves and teeth in the corner of a stall in Nairobi. If the filly was her favorite, the stallion was her hope.

  She ignored his name because she would give him a new one. She’d give him a new life. He would be reborn into glory on the track, and the customers would line up at her door.

  Why don’t you ride him already? she chided herself. You know you can do it. You’ll have to do it if you want to make your money back, and God knows you need money.

  Her servant and friend Kibii, whom she’d known all her life, told a client yesterday, “Memsahib is fearless. She’s been riding racehorses since she was eleven.” True, she’d been raised in Nairobi by a father who raced Thoroughbreds, managed a troubled farm, and forgot her birthday. True, a horse had picked her up in his mouth when she was seven and thrown her; she still had the purple scar on her neck.

  She could throw a spear like the Nandi. She could hunt. She rode a half-broken motorcycle over the vacant, muddy road from Nakuru to Nairobi when she got lonely, after dark, when you could hear the lions. Once, when she had to pee, an elephant rose from the dark brush and startled her; she ran back to the motorcycle with her wet pants not entirely up.

  “You didn’t stand down the elephant?” Kibii asked when she told him, feigning disbelief.

  “I’m brave,” she said. “Not an imbecile.”

  She poured herself a glass of wine, measuring it because the bottle had to last a week. A week without guests.

  She went back to leaning against the stable. She sipped the wine and watched enormous, salmon-colored clouds of flamingos drag their overturned heads across the muddy shallows of Nakuru. Deafening birdlife meant a constant stream of shit on the racetrack, but her horses were too well trained to stop and smell it, or lick at it the way her dogs did.

  I want to be alone when I turn the stallion out, she thought, looking for his proud head over the stall door. I want him to know me as his master, his alpha and omega.

  She drank more wine, eyes back on the sunset. She could see the silhouettes of water buffalo grazing by the lake, followed, she knew, by clouds of blackflies and the threat of river blindness. She knew a stable boy who’d poured boiling water down his back to relieve itching caused by the flies. One bite from a fly like that on the stallion’s belly and she’d be thrown and broken, left for dead in the ring.

  Have I had lunch? she wondered, touching her flat stomach.

  No, she had not. Might as well do it now and call it dinner.

  Recently divorced and broke, she lived alone in a small white canvas tent underneath the racetrack stands. Her bed was covered in zebra skin. She kept tins of beans next to bottles of wine and boxes of biscuits in a trunk that had once belonged to her father.

  She never ate much. Meager eating was good for keeping her figure, and her figure was an asset, on a horse and in the bedroom. She wanted to look good in clothes and out of them.

  Cross-legged on the ground, she speared the beans with her fork and took increasingly quick bites.

  Today is the day to ride the stallion, she thought, and the light won’t last forever.

  She stood up and brushed off her legs. She locked up the dogs. She pulled her hair away from her face. She took her riding crop from the corner of the tent.

  She’d always been a cruel person, she knew that, and today it was in her favor. Savage practicality and courage had been bred into her, and facing down a beast of a horse in the last hour of light, she could use that.

  “Beryl is easily bored,” people said. It was true. She was hungry to feel something every day, and fear is what she felt pulling open the stall door. She relished the feeling, the goose pimples on her arms, her heightened sense of awareness. Her singular focus.

  I will have you, she thought, locking eyes with the regal horse.

  The stallion was enormous, seventeen hands high. She could sense the energy he’d built up behind the stall door. She led him to the crossties and put on his tack, carefully, firmly. He swung his head toward her, and she met his face with her elbow. He did it again, and again she met him with her elbow. He balked at the bit and began to pull back, but she waited him out, pressing her thumb into the corner of his mouth, and got it in.

  She led him to the ring, careful not to look back, not to show fear. She was the leader and he should follow. She walked the ring, then had him canter, and trot. His muscles excited her. They showed potential. They would make her a winner. Holding on to his lead line, she walked closer to his face.

  “Back up,” she said.

  He didn’t. She pressed his broad chest until he moved. “Back up.” She leaned into his back legs to make one cross over the other, the way his mother would have done in the paddock when he was young.

  “You’re stronger than I am,” she said calmly. “But I’m more determined than you. Throw me and I’ll get back on. I’ll whip you raw.”

  They could say what they wanted to about her in town. They could say she was a bad wife, too young. They could say she was cruel. She had a stable all to herself in the evenings, and wasn’t that better than watching your sad sack of a husband drink himself stupid, fighting him off because you didn’t want to sleep with a flaccid, unshowered maniac? Yes. The empty stable was better, even if it meant being unable to buy new clothes. Even if it meant buying your own horses, the dangerous ones you could afford. The ones who’d been passed over, written off.

  Don’t let your mind wander, she reminded herself. Not even for a second.

  She led the stallion to the mounting block. He shifted as she gripped his mane and swung her leg over him. What man would ever be more exciting than this? she thought, squeezing the horse between her strong thighs.

  “You will respect me,” she said, as he began to turn without her cue. His body stiffened and his head began to dip. He was going to try to throw her, she could feel it.

  This battle of wills was real and she would win. She would give herself fully. This moment was falling in love.

  At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tattooed on the arm.

  —An extract from the diary of Lieutenant Colonel Mervin Willett Gonin, DSO, who was among the first British soldiers to liberate Bergen-Belsen in 1945

  THE INTERNEES

  BERGEN-BELSEN, 1945

  We would be famous in an ugly way. We would be black-and-white pictures in textbooks. We would be clavicles and cheekbones and bald heads to learn from.

  We could smell the bodies of our own kind.

  We were sitting on lice-infested beds when the British soldiers came. The liberators. The heroes that shuttled us through hastily assembled outdoor showers. They hung sheets on the barbed wire to give us privacy, but modesty was something we’d lost. We walked slowly to and from the showers in striped bathrobes, a pattern none of us could look at later in life without pause, without bile rising. Without fear.

  They made swings for the children and pushed them into the sky. They deloused us with DDT, spraying it into our hair and underneath our skirts.

  We sat next to each other on the floor, covered in sores. Some of us were dying of typhus. Some of us were just dying. Some of us drank water and picked through tin cans of food, though we couldn’t eat as much as we wanted. Our bodies couldn’t take it. We vomited. We sorted through discarded clothes and disintegrating shoes. We made fires. We looked at the five-digit tattoos on our forearms.

  There was a box of expired lipstick that
came off the truck. The British soldiers opened the box and threw tubes of lipstick at the crowd, and we wanted it—we were surprised how badly we wanted it—and we walked the halls, some of us still without adequate clothing, some of us with piss-drenched blankets tossed over our shoulders like shawls, with scarlet lips. We rubbed the lipstick over our mouths. Over and over. We had pink wax on our rotten teeth. We were human again. We were women.

  Everything that makes the world like it is now will be gone.

  —Shirley Jackson, “The Lottery”

  THE LOTTERY, REDUX

  The morning of July 27 was clear to the horizon on all sides of the main island of Timothy, once a large chunk of land but now a series of marshy islets overrun by dragonflies, which moved across town in black, buzzing swarms. The people of Timothy, descendants of men and women exiled from America fifty years ago for crimes against the environment, were gathering by the empty fountain in the square, a place that might have been a village green elsewhere but on Timothy was sand and rock, the brick paths and buildings calcified. The fountain used to flow with seawater, but they’d given up on piping it in. There were more pressing matters, like the afternoon’s lottery.

  The sounds of morning were the same on any given day: the roar of waves gnawing at the shoreline, the scream of the occasional heron passing overhead, children laughing on the beach, men throwing sandbags or tinkering with the artificial reefs, and Clare Smith leading the women’s fishing co-op back from their daily expedition. They walked up from the sea to the picking house, where they broke open crabs with their fingers and skinned fish with rusted bowie knives, gossiping only a little as their eyes were on the fish; they wasted nothing. Today was no exception, and the women were sure to get back on time, as Clare and her fifteen-year-old daughter, June, were in charge of civic duties, including the lottery administration.

  The children always followed Clare and the women from the beach up to the picking house to see what the catch looked like, peering into the handwoven baskets at the flopping fish not quite dead and the burlap sacks of freshly dredged oysters. But today the kids—there were only seven of them—were dutifully assembling piles of driftwood on the beach, and mounds of large conchs and shells. Clare, wearing a leather hat with fishhooks slipped over the brim, nodded at them as she and the women walked by. The children waved back to the women, who were still dripping with seawater after braving the rough currents and riptides. They carried spears and rods and threw nets over their browned shoulders like shawls made of old, threadbare lace.