Winner of the National Book Award: A Novel of Fame, Honor, and Really Bad Weather

by Jincy Willett

  I spent my next hour reshelving, and the next thirty minutes straightening out the Mc’s and Mac’s. Nobody on God’s earth understands the Mc/Mac principle anymore. In order to do that, you have to be willing to think about something other than your genitals for a full minute. Nobody appreciates the horror of a good book dying on the wrong shelf. We have limited space here. We have to discard books that haven’t been checked out in four years. Four years!

  What I was really doing, of course, was avoiding the new books, piled on the floor next to my desk. If T. R. hadn’t stampeded, along with the rest of the sheep—if she had catalogued the goddamn thing and put it on the new book shelf—I would have managed to avoid looking at it, until, dog-eared and shabby, it had been relegated to the 600 stacks and duly misshelved and swallowed whole.

  Because then I could have looked away forever. Christ knows I am a disciplined person.

  But today Pandora is toying with us, and so here I am, behind my desk, and in front of me is the world’s saltiest sandwich, a Styrofoam cup full of spiked coffee, and a brand-new copy of In the Driver’s Seat: The Abigail Mather Story, by Hilda DeVilbiss and Abigail Mather. Wrapped in fresh thick plastic, bordered in Squanto Brown.

  My sister’s book is no longer a threat. It’s an object, with weight and color. Like my sister.

  The cover is a ludicrous, unimaginative collage: the front grille of what looks like an Edsel, a pair of smashed glasses, the lower half of a screaming face belonging to a woman who bears no resemblance to my sister, and a “Police Report” of which only the first line (Comments: battered wife) is legible, although, having stared at it now for some time, I swear I can make out the first sketchy report of a Japanese sneak attack on our naval forces at Pearl Harbor.

  The back cover confronts me, not with a snapshot of my sister’s big face, but with a list of advance raves from log-rollers in the wife abuse exposé biz. Here is a truly squalid practice for you, but it will work. It’ll sell, and not just locally, although God knows it’ll do good business here. In hardback even.

  I was up all night reading this, literally riveted to the page. A true-life shocker which grabs you and never lets you go. Abigail Mather is a heroine for our times.

  —Marj Wysocki, author of Black Eye

  …you will weep, you will tremble, you will cheer, and yes, you will laugh…incredible, horrifying, nauseating, and, ultimately, life-affirming and empowering. Abby Mather’s triumph is our triumph.

  —Victoria Fracas, author of Rape, Rape, Rape

  Abigail’s story is by no means atypical. The only special thing about her marital horror is that she did something about it. This book should be required reading for every bride….

  —June Bessette

  Would you like to know who June Bessette is? June Bessette is nobody. June Bessette is Abigail’s therapist. The only reason her credentials aren’t listed is that she only has a bachelor’s degree.

  Move over, Joan of Arc! Step aside, Charlotte Corday! There is a newcomer to our pantheon of world-class heroines, and she is

  I believe I’ll have a drink.

  I don’t have the guts to read the blurb on the inside cover. The L of C cataloguing is mildly interesting: First of all, no index, since that’s the kind of slob Hilda DeVilbiss really is. Then:

  1. DeVilbiss, Hilda. 2. Conjugal abuse. 3. True-life crime. 4. Biography—Lowe, Abigail Mather. 5. Regional—Frome, R.I. 6. Title.

  I sort of like that. Regional—Frome, R.I.

  Then we get the author’s modest encomium thanking everyone in Frome and New York City for enabling her to blah blah blah, especially my courageous, wonderful, funny sister. “Working closely with Abigail this past year,” Hilda gushes, “has been the most fulfilling learning experience I could possibly have had.” This I can believe.

  There are three hundred and seventy-six pages here, which I will not read.

  Yes I will.

  There are sixteen pages of photographs, half in the front, half in the middle. There is our mother, recognizable only to us until this shameful moment, standing in the deep shade of the porch of the New Bedford house. You can see peeling paint, dusty ground. It looks like a slum. Whereas it’s really just an ordinary amateur snapshot of an ordinary house which was never intended for mass ogling goddamn you Abigail you rotten old babyfat bitch!

  Beside her there’s Jabez, our father, a nice picture, his college picture, taken before he even met our mother, and running underneath them both, yoking them nicely, an educational caption informing us that “Jabez, whose mother died of tuberculosis when he was only five, grew up in an all-male world. His wife, Mattie, produced only the twins, and so his own family was all-female. The inevitable tragic results are all too predictable.”

  The inevitable tragic results. I grow numb.

  There I am on the porch swing with Abigail. We are six and complementary, as always. Her hair was so light then that you couldn’t get a shot of us together without one of us being poorly exposed. This is the one where I am a wizened gypsy in a navy collar middy and shorts, and Abigail beside me a white nimbus with eyes and a wide, camera-mugging smile, and some sort of flouncy dress, though even the dress pales into a dream cloud. How eloquent I look. How terrible to see irony clearly in the gaze of a six-year-old. A gypsy indeed, I look out into the future and give surprising comfort to my middle-aged self. This was always going to happen, says the child. You’ve had a lifetime to get ready for it. Don’t whine. I won’t. Even when I read the caption.

  Dorcas remains a cipher. According to Abigail, “She knows me better than I know myself” but Dorcas refused, categorically, without explanation, to cooperate in the writing of this book.

  It’s not such a great trick to see into the future. Take the next eight hours. I shall sit here and torture myself with this wretched artifact, and methodically self-medicate, which medicine should run out around noon. Before that, at approximately ten thirty, I shall start to feel its effects, and by eleven I shall have reached that stage where everything seems absurdly delightful and I have sudden cause for cheer. The cheap olive wall-to-wall indoor-outdoor carpeting they put down here last month will become interesting in texture and the colors of all my books, new and old, will sharpen up and give out a welcoming heat. The wind outside will pick up and sing to me in an enchanting way, and the sky will darken, brightening my lamps and overhead lights and it will seem, for a time, so fortunate, so, well, wonderful, to be alone on this day of days, riding out the storm in my beautiful little library. The whole show will seem to have been arranged for me. And if a window breaks, why, how exciting that will be. And if I trip and stumble, or spill booze on my desk, how droll. And as for the Book, the Excrescence, the Abomination…well, really, what the hell. Good for you, old girl. Pretty amusing, when you look at it the right way. Ha ha ha.

  This ought to last for thirty minutes.

  After that, depression, nausea, disgust. The basement will flood, ruining the bottom shelves of the children’s books and stinking up the whole building for weeks, and I’ll be down there slogging through rank water rescuing what I can, with a pounding skull and a lucid wish to die.

  And Pandora! The promised apocalypse! Well, Pandora will send regrets, the sadistic bitch. Pandora’s just tasting us, like Mother’s lightning. Pandora will spin away laughing, leaving all of us, even me, especially secretly me, red-faced at having been duped yet again. There will be a big mess to clean up, that’s all. No one will die. No great big thing will be destroyed. Lives will not be blasted. Heads will not roll. Come the new dawn, the cleansing, life-renewing dawn, here we’ll be, every one of us in his assigned seat, eyes averted, smiles inappropriate, thumbs up our butts. Oh, hell.

  Dedications

  —for Guy DeVilbiss

  husband, genius, admirer of women, in whose robust imagination I dwell secure, and who could not imagine me ever failing

  —Hilda

  —for Dorcas

  who knows

  and won’t
tell

  —Abigail

  Chapter One

  An Ordinary Birth

  Chapter 1

  An Extraordinary Birth

  Abigail Mather was special from the very beginning.

  A fraternal twin, she had her birthday all to herself. Abigail was born, to Mathilda Wallace Mather, in the Providence Lying-In Hospital, on the thirty-first day of December, 1938. Six hours later, in the New Year, her twin, Dorcas, was born. Doctors and nurses exclaimed over this phenomenon, which had never before happened in the history of the hospital.

  Here’s oral history for you. Here’s folk tradition. Hilda obviously didn’t bother with any pesky, prosaic research. Why go down to the actual hospital and rifle through moldy files when you can get it from the horse’s mouth?

  Well, our filly has a convenient memory. We got this story, about the two distinct birth dates and being a legend in our own time, from Mother. Mother lived in a magical world, where the unbearable was blinked away even if it was ululating and pointing and hopping up and down in front of you, and the past was always rosier than actual experience. There was nothing wrong with Mother’s mind, or her intellect, either. She was just, like her first daughter, remarkably good at fantasizing.

  Abigail and I were born within fifteen minutes of each other on the last day of 1938. It says so on the certificates. We learned this, at the age of twenty, after having bragged for years about our unusual debut. I suspect the story started with Mother amusing herself, in a relatively innocent way, with alternate, more exciting versions of the great event, imagining different ways it could have happened, eventually hitting on this one, the most dramatic. After that it was a simple trick for Mother to forget that the story wasn’t true.

  Doctors and nurses did not “exclaim” over you, Mother. I wish for your sake they had. You never did get enough attention in this world. You weren’t as good at it as some.

  There was, in fact, something rather special about our birth, but it won’t be reported in In the Driver’s Seat. Abigail came first all right, and she was a breech. They had to knock Mother out, so intense was her prolonged agony, and rummage around inside her like a cow, but no matter how often or how firmly they turned Abigail, she wiggled herself back into her preferred position.

  Ass first. That’s how she finally came out. My sister mooned the world for two hours while, behind her, I choked for air and sustenance. My sister blocked the light with her pinchable, Rubenesque behind while I groped, disoriented and blind, for the exit. All I wanted was to breathe and see. Just let me live.

  My sister emerged with a list of complicated, interdependent demands. They pried her loose, with infinite patience, a pair of strong, hairy, male hands gently cupping her loins and hindquarters, pulling, releasing, in a pleasing tidal rhythm. When they got her out she held her breath, deliberately I have no doubt, so that they held her upside down and spanked her and generally made such a fuss that when I, the afterthought, emerged (on my hands and knees, I picture it, like an old ragbag crawling across a cartoon desert), I was given only cursory attention. And they told Mother, who briefly fought her way through the ether to get the vital stats, that she had a child of either sex: “A beautiful little girl”—holding Tubbo aloft like the Wimbledon Cup—“and a boy”—smiling in a kindly, commiserating sort of way, giving her just a glimpse of my homely little face, swaddling me like a hideous burn victim.

  I was not a remarkably homely child. It was just the comparison. All things being relative.

  This story, the one about my being a boy for the first half hour of my life, is probably true, unlike the other old wheeze. Mother told it often, but not with cruelty, and certainly not to aggrandize herself. Years later she was still outraged about their carelessness. “I don’t want a boy,” she had told them. “Now, now,” they said. “I do not want a boy, and I have not made a boy, and that’s all there is to that.” The doctors, unwrapping me to prove their point, stared at her, she said, as though she were a witch and had changed my sex after the fact.

  Mother favored Abigail in character, and me in sympathy. Mother admired me. That was nice.

  Chapter Two

  Unadulterated Yankee Crap

  Hilda had two basic organizational choices open to her with respect to chronological events, both real and imagined. She could simply start at the beginning, wherever she decided that was—the Garden of Eden, say—and go through to the end. No one does that anymore. It’s unfashionable.

  Or she could take the low road, beginning with Abigail’s “savage act of assertive self-realization” and then segueing back to the Garden, or whatever. I think this is what she should have done, considering the vulgarity of her subject. So we could open with the killing itself. Something like

  February 13, 1979. The Eve of Valentine’s Day. Chopmist Hill, Rhode Island, on Route 6, east of the 102 intersection. Moonless night. 11:30 p.m. Conditions: snowing lightly, temperature barely 32º.

  No one happening to spot the ancient ’56 Plymouth plowing west at a sedate pace could have guessed that inside a man and woman were playing out a primal struggle for survival which could only end in death for one of them. Emotionally the temperature inside the car was 211 and climbing.

  The woman was softly crying, her gentle, defenseless body shaking. Somehow she had enraged him. Somehow she had set him off again. If only she could understand how. Maybe, she thought, if we get home in one piece, he’ll go right to sleep. Dear God, let him sleep. The man’s right hand left the steering wheel and backhanded her savagely, without warning, across the face. “I’m going to kill you, Abigail,” he said, in a terrifying new voice, a low silky purr. “I’m finally going to kill you.”

  And so on. Nice and junky. And then, after…again and again, forward, reverse, forward, reverse, and all the time screaming, with every sickening thump, “No more! No more!”…we could cut to the beatific birth, and all the attendant ironic contrast.

  Here’s my guess: Hilda’s editors pleaded with her to do it this way, but our Hilda would never pander to the baser instincts. Guy would never forgive her for it. What we get, instead, is careful, plodding evidence for Abigail’s ultimate canonization. Hilda starts, of course, with what she thinks is the beginning: the pedigree.

  Chapter 2

  Solid Yankee Stock

  So we learn that Abigail’s first American ancestor was one of the “First Americans”! See, this is the thing about Abigail. She has just as much contempt for Hilda as I do, if not more. My sister is not stupid.

  …descended not, as might be supposed, from Cotton Mather, but instead from one J. Herkimer, of Bristol, England, who booked passage on the Mayflower in 1620. Though there is no further record of Herkimer in the colonies, he does not appear on the list of the dead, and apparently, in 1625, he married one Mary Willett…

  Mother paid a cut-rate genealogist to come up with a Mayflower ancestor, and he obliged, but all he would tell her was that Herkimer disappeared from view upon his arrival at Plymouth. Mother made up that stuff about Mary Willett, probably to amuse herself and us. Mother was not a snob. She just liked a good story.

  We believed in J. Herkimer, First American, for about the same length of time we believed in our different birth dates. As I recall, accidentally discovering the truth about our birth led us, or rather me, to look into the other matter. After a great deal of correspondence, much of it transatlantic, I learned that J. Herkimer, who really was our ancestor, was also the only passenger on the Mayflower to return to Southampton with her crew in the spring of 1621.

  If you ask me, here’s what happened. Herkimer, my Herkimer, a threadbare, desperate, misanthropic little loser, uneducated and unfit for any aspect of life, arrived in the New World, took one good look around, announced, to an empty hall (people had stopped listening to him weeks ago), “This place isn’t worth the powder it would take to blow it to hell,” turned on his heel, and stalked off.

  Of course, the ship had to wait for winter to pass before leaving
for England, so that while he didn’t have the opportunity for just this dramatic crispness, he did have plenty of time in which to harangue the miserable settlers with variations on his prophecy of doom. J. (for Jeremiah) Herkimer had quite a time for himself that winter harassing the frostbitten, alarming the exhausted. For a few months he managed to preserve, just, the fiction of compassionate concern, confronting the beleaguered pilgrims with looks of such elaborate pity that they could not stand to look at his face, and many a good man turned to his goodwife as Jeremiah glided out the door and muttered, “Jesus, I hate that guy.”

  Eventually he dropped all pretense, and while Squanto patiently explained to the ragged circle of survivors the principles of corn-planting, Herkimer rolled on his back on the soggy spring ground, hooting and slapping his thighs, and if he hadn’t been about to sail away he would have been beaten to death.

  He got off one parting shot—“So long, suckers!”—as the stiff sea breeze mussed his thinning hair, and the creaking tub carried him toward the eastern horizon and the one sure thing which lay beyond.

  He died penurious and bitter, or at the very least confused, in 1635, in Cheddar, England (twenty miles west of the original Frome), leaving a wife and ten living children. I have no idea how he had supported himself or them, but I like to imagine him as a speculator, in futures of some kind.