I had no idea.
“Bad Mommy,” he said. “Bad Mommy.”
There was on his face a slack and tortured look. He seemed utterly vulnerable. The sight so confused me that I looked away and off to the side, where a child of perhaps eighteen months, a wide-mouthed little girl with a purple bow on her wispy topknot, was handling her scoop of ice cream as though it were a lump of clay, and I was the only adult to see her look around, spot the large sacklike leather pocketbook of a stout woman seated at the adjoining table, and deposit the dripping blob inside with a bull’s-eye drop from the height of her baby chair. Her attention remained fixed on the interior of the pocketbook for about three seconds, at which point she forgot what she was doing and looked up at her parents with a sweet, loving expression, which was seen, and instantly rewarded.
The idea of this or any other small child saying “Bad Mommy” or bad anything was all too ludicrous, and I laughed freely with derision and, I must admit, relief. Every child born, monster and human alike, recognizes injustice when it is visited upon him. Conrad Lowe never universalized the experience. Now he comforted himself with the memory of outrage. Whereas the only persuasive evidence for his humanity would be a memory of remorse; an experience which I very much doubted he ever had.
Knowing all this about him, seeing his weakness at last, relaxed me as the sherry had not. I leaned back and placed my forearms on the table. I said, “What do you want from me? What are you up to?”
He was still distracted, his eyes fixed on some inner vision. The two rapidly consumed drinks (he was to put away one more before dinner) had effected a change in his manner, in his appearance. Drinking was bad for him. It robbed him of total control. I was very surprised that he drank at all. He thought about my question now, slowly closing one eye, staring idly with the other at his empty glass, his slender fingertips. Just then he reminded me of something, but I couldn’t get exactly what it was. “What do I want from you, Dorcas? Companionship. Fellow feeling. Entertainment.” Each word rolled out without inflection, or conviction. He was trying these ideas on for size. He looked shrewdly up at me then, one eye still shut, the fine dark lashes delicate upon his cheek. “Maybe I want a challenge,” he said. “Maybe I plan to seduce you.”
“And why would you do that?”
“Because I could.”
“Just to prove that you could?”
“I don’t need to prove anything. That would mean I was unsure of myself. Which I’m not.”
“Of course.”
“You don’t believe me.”
“I believe that you’re sure of yourself, yes.”
“You don’t understand,” he said. “You’re my type.”
“That’s too bad, because you’re not mine. I don’t have a type. Any fool could see that.”
He smiled, in a lazy, profoundly unpleasant way.
“I’m an old maid, Mr. Lowe. I was born to it. When I was twelve I took a long, slow look around and said, ‘Nope. Not for me.’”
“With your sister there, you didn’t have to look far.”
“With my sister there, I didn’t have to do anything.”
“You must have resented her.”
“I was never jealous. She had nothing I wanted.” Was this true? “Abigail and I divided up the world. Sacred and profane. Spiritual and physical. Mind and body.” It couldn’t have been the sherry. Something was getting to me, though, making me reckless.
“Male and female?”
“No. Certainly not.”
“Girl and woman? Artemis and Aphrodite?”
Polyphemus, I thought, confronting his one-eyed stare. Like the cyclops, he should not have drunk so much. Polyphemus was not civilized, and neither was my sister, and neither, despite his disguise, was this man. Sitting there across from him, and thinking these things through calmly, made me happy in a way I had rarely experienced. “Abigail and I,” I told him, “were both born naked. We each came into the world with longings and needs. I am not some mutant. Mine is not some third sex. I could tell you things….” I smiled, despite myself, thinking of Abigail and me at twelve, and the games she made everybody play, boys and girls, the delicate operations under the gazebo, with the afternoon sun slipping through the latticework in orange diamonds, and the spiders and shovels and rakes and mousetraps.
“What things, Dorcas?” he whispered.
I laughed at him. “Do you think that nuns and spinsters are all hormone cases? Can’t you imagine for a moment that at least some of us know what we’re missing? Exactly what we’re giving up? And that we sign on the dotted line fully informed of our rights, and sign happily, and consider that we got the best of the bargain?”
“How? Tell me.”
“You see, I know what an appetite is. I know what it feels like. I know, as well as Abigail, as well as you, what it feels like to want. To experience desire.”
“Yes.”
“Yes, but because I lived with Abigail, I also knew what it looks like.”
“Ugly? Disgusting? Ruttish?”
“Ridiculous! That’s all. Ridiculous.”
“Silly?”
“Exactly. My sister has great power, but no dignity.”
“Ah.”
We were both quiet for a while, listening to my reverberating pronouncement. Seafood platters were placed before us, upon which we each ravenously fell. Conrad Lowe with, I suppose, that indiscriminate, senseless hunger that comes from too many drinks, and I from what? I don’t know.
The food was terrible, the breading orange and tasteless and soaked with old grease, the scallops distinguishable from the shrimp only in shape. I ate everything—fried food, cole slaw, tartar sauce, corn bread; chomping and breathing to the accompaniment of power and dignity: the sounds. Eventually, when my plate was clean, I could no longer avoid the thought I had been pushing away. That these two were just words, just alphabet pieces and noise. This was a foolish thought, but I couldn’t shake it, or shake off their echo.
Conrad Lowe put down his fork and leaned back. “Name something with power and dignity.” He said this in a companionable way, as though we were playing “Botti-celli.” Logy with bad food, I had the awful bloated thought that he could read my mind, hear with my inner ear. “Okay, name something with dignity and no power.” He picked up the fork and played with his fried fish. He shoveled a big piece into his mouth. Grease ran down the middle of his chin. “A hurricane, say, or the sea. Do they have dignity and power? Or—”
“Only people can have dignity,” I said, trying to clean my fingers with a red cloth napkin that would not absorb anything. They make napkins now out of shiny, handsome material that won’t even pick up water.
“My mother,” he said, chewing his fish, “now she had power. No dignity, though. Except on screen. My father. No power, no dignity, no nothing. This is interesting.” He looked up at me and pointed at my nose. “Now, you. Now, you have tons of dignity! But no—”
“Go to hell.”
“When I was a kid we had this Great Dane. Cromwell, his name was. Big as a pony. He was Mom’s pet, really, and I’ll spare you the grisly details, but you know I’m pretty sure Cromwell had power and dignity, both.” He put down his napkin. “When Father died I took Cromwell out behind the stables and blew his brains out.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“You don’t believe what? That I could kill a dog?” Conrad Lowe threw back his head and laughed, suddenly sober, suddenly happy. “That’s the twentieth century for you. It’s significant now when a man kills a dog. It means something about his character. I mean, not just anybody can kill a dog.”
I have always had a strong stomach, and this is the only thing that kept me from bolting across the room with my hand over my mouth, like a squeamish child in frog-dissecting class.
“Look, honey. Power, dignity, bullshit. You looked at your sister and saw an amoral, rotten, monstrous ball of fat. You knew evil when you saw it. You are a mutant, Dorcas. You’re a woman with a consc
ience. I’d like to believe you’re a hint of things to come, an evolutionary feeler, so to speak, but I’m afraid you’re just one of nature’s oddballs. You have a sense of honor. Shame on you. No real woman knows the meaning of the word.”
“You’re insane.” I started fumbling with my purse, trying to fish out ten dollars and change.
“You’re so honorable that you’re going to pay for your half of this grotesque meal. Not for boring feminist reasons, either. Not to prove anything. Just because it’s the right thing to do.”
“You’re very good,” I said, standing. “You study people and think about them and make clever inferences, and you’re very, very good. You’re a gifted psychologist. But the fact that you do it for fun…” I was shaking so badly that I couldn’t continue.
“Yes?”
“Ought to scare you to death. It certainly does me. Mr. Lowe, you are a bad man.” Conrad Lowe blinked at that, actually blinked, and paled. “Stay away from us.” Carefully I turned from him and made my way across the bustling room, every movement slow and deliberate, for I was light-headed and my heartbeat was shallow and if I did anything too quickly I would lose my balance, stumble, fall. I didn’t look around until I was in the parking lot and opening my car door.
He had not followed me. I was safe.
When I let myself into the house Abigail was asleep, passed out on the wet couch, her face still swollen in misery. I hated to leave her like that, all damp, but it seemed a worse cruelty to wake her, and I went straight to bed, exhausted myself, without bathing.
Sometime later I had a nightmare, the only part of which I ever remembered being a great wooden door exploding inward into lethal splinters, the explosion being the occasion for my sudden waking, and when I came to, which I did all of a sudden, disoriented, I was staring at my own closed bedroom door. I lay for a few minutes, frightened, listening, wondering, but there were no noises in the real world. And I was too tired to ponder the mysteries. Dreams are always banal anyway. I went back to sleep and slept straight until morning.
When I rose to use the toilet I could see, from the light in the hall, that the door to Abigail’s room was open, but I was just shuffling, still waking, my eyes on the floor, and did not pause to wonder or look in. I started coffee and picked up the living room. I was going to have to take the couch outside on this sunny day and dry it out. There was a man’s herringbone jacket folded over the rocker. I saw it and did not take it in. There was an alarming scent in the air, half horribly familiar, like the smell of rotting roses, half horribly unfamiliar, like the lather of a mutant horse, and I smelled this and took note of it and set it aside for later. There was a strange old car out front, parked badly, its right front wheel up over the curb and dug into the grass, and I stared out the window at it, interested but not really curious. I was handling myself like an invalid on her first day up. I was emphasizing the positive. How delicious, I thought, sipping my coffee; and, What a beautiful day.
(While in the next room my other selves, the rest of me, the part that notices and the part that analyzes and the part that takes care, conferred in anxious whispers. “Should we let her know?” “No, no, no!” “Look, she’s going to find out sooner or later. Why not now?” “Too soon! Let her wake up first! Let her get her strength!”)
I padded back down the sun-drenched hall to my room to get dressed and from this angle could not miss looking into Abigail’s room on the way. I made my bed and got myself into jeans and sweatshirt. I drew the curtains. I leaned against the glass. I closed my eyes then and only then and saw what I had just seen, when I passed my sister’s open door. That morning it was as though I could not see anything directly. In high school biology they always compare the eye to a camera, and now the analogy was exact. My eyes had functioned independent of my brain. I had not been able to register anything until the picture developed. And then I could see, from every angle
my sister naked, pink and enormous, inert, unconscious and perhaps dead, perhaps sleeping, cast up on her own rumpled bed like some sea creature on an alien beach, a sight at once hypnotic and deeply frightening, because you’re so afraid you’ll see something awful, a human resemblance, a human being, a dead human being, deformed forever by the appetites of cold-blooded predators, and scuttling, clicking spiders of the deep. And behind her, just visible beyond the rolling pink hills, the narrow head of Conrad Lowe, eyes open, mouth grinning wide, nodding good morning to me.
I ran out of the house that morning as though it were on fire, pausing only to scrawl a note to Abigail. “GET OUT OF HEAR,” it said. That’s how distraught I was. I didn’t even catch the mistake. And “NOT ONE MORE NIGHT UNDER MY ROOF.” I taped it to the bathroom mirror and fled.
When I returned very late that night they were gone, and her closets cleaned out, except for cobwebs and enough dust cotton to make a human being and a couple of filthy cardigans abandoned in the far corner. She took no furniture, although half of it was hers. She left most of her toiletries behind: dusty bottles of drug store cologne, puffs of matching talcum. I don’t know why she bothered to take her clothes. She left everything else, including her scent, which filled the abandoned bedroom like a mournful and corpulent ghost. Her bedding was left on the dusty floor, tightly wadded and tied into a perfectly circular hassock shape, the two sheet corners sticking out like rabbit ears. This was not Abigail’s style, and it had not been her doing.
My note remained on the bathroom mirror, with Abigail’s additions, printed like my own. Our handwriting had always been similar.
GET OUT OF HEAR
SORRY ABOUT THE SHEETS
BE HAPPY FOR ME
NOT ONE MORE NIGHT UNDER MY ROOF
Chapter Twelve
The Gift of Health
Chapter 12
Her Daemon Lover
The time has come, the walrus said…
Abby gnaws her fingertips. She will not look at me.
…to talk of many things…
“No,” whispers Abby, eyes downcast.
“Abby,” I say to my old friend, as gently as I can, “the time really has come.”
“I can’t do it. Please don’t ask me. I’m so ashamed.”
“Let it go. You must. The time has come.”
She sobs and sobs as if her great heart would break. As if one unbroken shard, until now miraculously intact, has finally shattered. At last, she nods.
And so, yes, the time has come, as that terrible old walrus said, to talk of how this sadist caught her, held her in thrall, bound her without chains, silenced her cries, unmanned—unwomanned—this powerful, lusty Wife of Bath—Wife of Frome! What was his weapon? [Gosh.] What was her window of vulnerability? [And did she clean it with vinegar or ammonia?]
The time has come. To talk. Of sex.
Oh, let’s not. Let’s talk about Abigail’s bridal shower.
Everybody was there, or rather here, in the reference roomette. The whole damn town crammed in with the Encyclopedia Judaica and Famous Crimes A–Z. T. R. Corrow, Heimlich maneuver enthusiast and police horse stompee, whose brilliant idea this had been, festooned the stacks with burgundy velvet ribbons. Abigail’s coworkers at the post office contributed a dot matrix banner wondering HOW LOWE CAN YOU GO? which was funny despite itself, owing to the clucking embarrassment of Guy’s literary circle, who had for months pretended that Abigail was one of them and were now squarely confronted with the working-class truth.
Guy handled it by zeroing in on Ob Minurka, the most rough-hewn of the lot, and a dwarf to boot, and engaging him in political debate, to show off his egalitarian principles. He pantomimed a blue collar stiff, planting his legs wide apart, pushing up his sleeves, clamping his chubby hands on his hips. Ob played him beautifully, deliberately making increasingly Neanderthal statements about the death penalty and the fuckin’ A-rabs, but he couldn’t shake off Guy’s camaraderie. With Guy, who’d bring out the bully in Mother Teresa, the school playground is never far away.
I nudged Abigail, to get
her to check out Guy. I said he looked like an amateur-night Petruchio from Kiss Me Kate. She looked up from unwrapping her booty, gave him one shrewd glance, shook her head. “Mary Martin,” she said, “as Whozit, in green tights. What the hell am I going to do with a DustBuster?”
She was surrounded by bridal plunder and crumpled wrapping paper and kneeling women from all walks of life. Hilda kept the list of who gave what, Anna passed gifts around for inspection, Gloria Gomes, my children’s librarian, stuffed trash into plastic leaf bags, and some motormouth from the post office took down every single remark Abigail made, so that she could later read aloud the list of exclamations as “What Abigail Said to Conrad on Their Wedding Night.” Is this a strictly Rhode Island custom? I hope so.
“Bust dust,” I said. “For that matter, what are you going to do with a Hot Dogger? Never mind, spare me.”
She was paying me no attention. Her eyes scanned the crowd in a worried way.
“You don’t really expect him to come, do you?” I asked.
“He said he’d try to make it.”
“Ha. He said he’d rather chew off his legs.”
“He was joking.”
“He said, and I quote, ‘My dumpling, I would rather chew off my right leg than go to one of those goddamn pussy-klatsches.” And so would your sister, he added, accurately, thus forcing me to announce that I wouldn’t miss it for the world. “He advised you to, and I quote again, ‘shut your hole’ on the subject of the shower.”
“Thank you,” said Abigail, “for reminding me.”
Anna set a square silver-wrapped box on her mother’s lap. “This one’s from Rudy and Sylvia Fusco,” she whispered. Rudy and Sylvia were DeVilbiss people.
Abigail tore viciously at the black satin ribbon, muttering at me under her breath. “You could at least pretend, you bitch, you could at least be happy for me. You could at the very least lay the fuck off.”
Winner of the National Book Award: A Novel of Fame, Honor, and Really Bad Weather Page 12