The Fainting Room

by Sarah Pemberton Strong

  She whirled on him. “That’s what you think of me, isn’t it?”

  It was a childish thing to say, she knew, so without waiting for an answer she hurried down the drive, nearly tripping on the gravel in her haste to get to the car.

  But he was right, she thought later, sitting in the parking lot. He was exactly right. I was out of my mind. Because she’d run out of the house, gotten in her car and turned on the engine. Then sat there in the driveway and thought, Even this car is too nice for me. And it wasn’t even that nice a car, not like Ray’s Saab with its real leather seats and racy engine; her car was a ten-year-old Oldsmobile Cutlass, a huge boat of a car that had belonged to Ray’s mother until she died. Evelyn got out of the Olds again and stood in the driveway, not knowing what to do next. She didn’t want to go back in the house. She wandered around to the dark backyard, breaking off bits of hedge and throwing them away. The house stood quietly over her, warm yellow light illuminating one upstairs window like a storybook drawing. The house was perfect too, and she was like some bad guest, moving through it and messing things up. She stooped down, picked up two of the rocks at the border of Ray’s herb garden. She wished she had learned to juggle one of those days back in her life before she knew him: she would have liked to see those rocks arc in rainbow-shaped trails in front of her face, would have liked to feel them falling, hard, into her palms with a little sting.

  Idiot, idiot, idiot, she thought, the words in her brain a tune she could not get rid of, and then she found herself turning and throwing one of those round rocks as hard as she could toward the room with a light in it, as if that yellow glow were a target. There was a crash, a faint thud and then silence.

  For a second she wasn’t even sure what had happened. The first thing she became aware of was that the punishing voice in her head had stopped. She took a deep breath; the air was soft, full of spring dampness. The silent backyard opened out around her, dark and full of peace.

  And then she noticed there were spring peepers starting up again, and then Ray was calling her name from somewhere in the house. His voice sounded bland, mildly curious, as if he were wondering whether she’d accidentally dropped a dish. She looked up. In the big window on the second floor, the fancy curved one, there was a horrible jagged space.

  She ran around to the front of the house with no clear idea besides getting away, jumped in the Olds and drove. Ray was probably still down in the kitchen, and perhaps he would interpret the sound of breaking glass as just some curious night noise. If he didn’t go upstairs before she got back with the milk, she could get him to bed without him discovering the broken window, and then after he fell asleep she’d assess the damage. Maybe she could even keep him out of the study over the weekend, maybe she could get the glass fixed Monday while he was at work and he’d never have to know.

  Fine. But Evie Lynne, you threw a rock through your own window.

  In the supermarket she bought a gallon of milk and paid for it without noticing. She got in the car and drove home again. When she passed the police car on Old Adams Road, it didn’t register. Not until she pulled into the driveway and saw the lights on all over the house and yard did she catch her breath, her chest squeezing into a fist as she ran inside. Only when she found Ray standing dumbly in the study with a cup of tea in his hand and dried blood on his face and blood-soaked gauze taped over his eyebrow did she realize: he’d been in the room. She might have killed him.

  “Oh, God,” she whispered.

  Ray was gesturing with his bloodstained hand at the rock on the carpet, the shattered window, the smashed lamp.

  “The cops think it must have been some kids from town who threw it,” he said, and sat down on the edge of the desk.

  Did he really believe this? Did he really think she hadn’t done it?

  “That could have killed you,” she said. She was shaking. She went to him, glass gritty beneath her shoes. She touched his cheek. There was glass in his hair. She lifted free the tiny glinting slivers, and gently touched her husband’s head. There was a streak of dirt on her palm.

  Ray didn’t notice. She kissed his cheeks, lifted his hands and kissed his fingers as if she were kissing the petals of flowers. He, too, was something fragile. She unbuttoned the buttons of his shirt and marveled at his chest, at how seamlessly and wonderfully something so easily broken as a body could be made. She kissed the curling hair across his ribcage; she kissed the circle of his navel. She loosened his belt and he sat very still and let her. She undid the button, the zipper, and opened his trousers so gently he felt the lightest touch of her fingers on him like breath. And instead of speaking, she took him in her mouth as if he were as delicate as a hummingbird’s egg, and the only place in the universe safe enough, soft enough, was inside her mouth on the bed of her tongue.

  Afterwards she washed and bandaged his forehead, then retaped her own cut thumb. They left the glass shards on the floor and went to bed. Ray fell asleep at once. Evelyn lay awake, gazing at the bandage over Ray’s eyebrow. She thought of all the bandages she’d worn during her years with Joe. Bandages and dark glasses. She’d fought back at times, and once she gave him a black eye; the next morning Joe had examined his blue iris swimming in a pool of red, the skin beneath it dark purple, and said, “See? You’re no better than I am.”

  “I would never hit you first,” she’d retorted, and been sure of it. For a while.

  Now she curled her body against Ray’s sleeping one, tried to let the easy rhythm of his lungs enter her own shallow breaths, but when she finally fell asleep, it was with the ghost of Joe Cullen standing in the shadows beside the bed and laughing at her. Leaning over her, until she felt his hot breath on her face as he whispered in her ear that the question was not, Why tonight. The question was, Why wasn’t it sooner?

  There were bad things inside her; things Ray knew nothing about. Evelyn slipped out of bed and stood at the window. It was a few hours before dawn, and somewhere along the Springtime Route the members of the Jones and Wallace Big Top and Sideshow were in motion. When the convoy of trailers and trucks pulled in to the next empty field on the outskirts of somewhere, they’d fall into their beds in the Airstreams or Winnebagos or truck cabs and sleep until it was time to drag themselves out for the matinee. Would they be in Virginia this week? North Carolina? Evelyn thought of what that woman from the boarding school, Liz Luce, had said: “Her folks have disappeared.” It happened—people could be there one minute and then gone the next. It had happened to Joe: one minute he was there, her big, violent, noisy, alive first husband, and then poof—like a sleight-of-hand, like a special effect, he was gone.

  Now look at your new husband, sleeping there in the big bed, his arm curled around the empty space where you lay. That man with the bandage on his head where you hurt him—he loves you. Loves you, Evie Lynne. Oh, she was lucky, she knew it. She had gone from a drunk sword swallower who hit her to a successful architect who loved her. Gone from a man who drank himself blind and passed out behind the animal cages to a man who lay on the rug to listen to classical music. It was as miraculous as anything her sister Alice Marie could do on the high wire. At times it seemed a hoodwinking worthy of Barnum himself that Ray had made her his wife, but he had—tattoos and all. He loved her and he didn’t ask much. Tonight, he’d only wanted her to relax and have fun, and what had she done instead? Been sulky and furious and acted like a freak at his stupid party, and then thrown a rock at his head and nearly killed him. Oh, the ghost of Joe Cullen was having a field day with that one. The ghost of Joe Cullen was laughing so hard he was doubled over on the floor beside this queen size bed, his big voice booming through Evelyn’s heart as if her heart were a canyon. It made her feel cold.

  In the circus, whenever something went wrong during a performance, only one rule applied: create a diversion. The band would start up, the five-piece orchestra playing “Stars and Stripes” too fast, and a clown honking a huge brass horn would ride out on a tiny bicycle so that no one would notice whateve
r had gone wrong—a tiger wandering around the perimeter of the tent, or a fire that started on a light whose gel had melted over the bulb and ignited.

  Send in the clowns—that song on the radio, and nobody but circus folk knew what it really meant.

  “Evelyn?”

  She turned from the bedroom window. Ray had opened his eyes and was looking at her.

  “What are you doing over there?” he asked.

  “Nothing. Go to sleep.”

  He closed his eyes, then opened them again, pulled back the sheet and patted the mattress beside him. “Come on—I’ll help you get back to sleep.”

  She understood this was an invitation to reciprocate the sex he’d received earlier, but she ignored it.

  “Sweetheart?” Ray asked then. “What’s wrong?”

  She sat down on the edge of the bed. The mattress gave slightly beneath her in a solid, pleasing way. The first good mattress she’d ever slept on. She touched Ray’s cheek. Darling, I could have killed you.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked again.

  Create a diversion: “Actually,” Evelyn said, “I was thinking about that girl.”

  “What girl?”

  “The one Liz Luce was talking about at the party. The Newell Academy girl with no place to go.”

  “So what about her?”

  “We could take her.”

  “What?”

  Evelyn took a deep breath. “I was just thinking. We have plenty of room here. Plenty of rooms. I mean, if she doesn’t have anywhere to go—”

  “I don’t think a teenage girl would want to come stay the whole summer in Randall with a couple of boring grownups.”

  “Are we boring grownups?”

  “From her point of view, I meant.” Ray put his arm around her belly and kissed her cheek. “Come here.”

  “Why don’t we just meet her?”

  “The girl from Newell? Why?”

  Because I could have killed you. Aloud she said, “I just think—I think it would be nice to have someone stay for the summer. It’s not exactly thrilling around here while you’re at work, you know. Maybe it’d be fun.”

  Ray leaned over and switched on the light. He was fully awake now, and there wasn’t going to be any more sex. He thought about what Evelyn was asking. It had been obvious at the party last night that despite all his reassurances, she still felt she had to prove herself in the eyes of his friends. If only she were content to be herself, things would go better all around: she would be happier, and they would see why he’d married her in the first place. But she couldn’t relax, and as a result, she made things hard for everyone. Maybe having a young person around, someone she wasn’t so intimidated by, would help. But a girl who’d been suspended from school? He touched the bandage on his head, which was beginning to itch. Hadn’t he had enough trouble with juvenile delinquents this weekend already?

  “Ray.”

  He looked at his wife. The skin under her blue eyes was bruise-colored from lack of sleep. She didn’t ask him for much. If she wanted this, well, why not?

  “I suppose we could meet her,” he said.

  Evelyn leaned over him, brushed her cheek along the side of his face, his mouth. Then noses touching. Then her warm lips were all over him. Kissing.

  4.

  It was 2:25 p.m. when I opened my eyes, and Mister, I wasn’t too happy about it. My head felt like it had been stomped on by castanet dancers all night long. But I had to get up. I had to go meet a client.

  Ingrid carried her bicycle up out of the dorm basement and coasted down Academy Road through a light drizzle. When she’d asked if she could go meet the Shepards by herself, she hadn’t really expected Ms. Luce to say yes. But the dean, harassed with pending graduation duties and unaware that it had started raining again, had let her go.

  As soon as Ingrid was off campus she started to feel better. The light rain on her face felt good, and the slick green of new leaves on the trees was almost fluorescent. Ingrid shifted into high gear and pedaled down the next hill so fast the handlebars shook. Speeding like this—the wind hard on her face, the tires skidding dangerously over sandy patches of wet asphalt—the ride seemed to clean away the poisonous residue of having talked to her father’s girlfriend Linda the night before.

  “Are you surprised you were suspended?” Linda had asked. “You’re such a bright girl, I can’t believe it hasn’t crossed your mind that dressing like one of those punk rockers—”

  “I wasn’t suspended for wearing a Black Flag T-shirt,” Ingrid said.

  “But you know what I’m trying to say. It’s your attitude. Now I realize spending the summer with me and Melanie isn’t your first choice—”

  “You’re right about that,” Ingrid said. Melanie was Linda’s daughter. She was two years younger than Ingrid and wore plaid hair bands that matched her plaid skirts. She plastered her bedroom walls with posters of boy pop stars. Ingrid kicked her toe against the wall beneath the pay phone. There were a lot of dark scuff marks there where other students had kicked before her. Kicking the marks made her feel slightly better. She knew arguing with Linda was futile, but arguing seemed to be the only way Ingrid could keep from having some vital part of her sucked away, out through the phone lines and into the vortex of Melvin, California, where she would never get it back again.

  “I know you miss your father,” Linda was saying. “I understand that what you really want is to stay with him—”

  “What I really want,” Ingrid interrupted, “is to stay here at Newell and go to Summer Intensive.”

  “—But your father’s in a position of great responsibility at the lab, and given your history of acting out, he has no choice but to have you come to our house.”

  “What history of acting out?” Ingrid said. She wasn’t trying to bait Linda. But everything Linda said was a little barbed hook.

  “Melanie and I will give it a try if you will,” Linda said. “And Ingrid, you may not believe me now, but once you get here I know you’re going to see how much fun a family can really be. When everyone’s willing to give it their best shot, everything just has a way of—”

  Ingrid didn’t hang up. She just let the receiver dangle gently against the scuff marks and walked down the hall.

  Did she miss her father? The question fell into the category of things she didn’t think about, things that wouldn’t matter anyway if Reagan started a nuclear war. It was true that she had loved spending time with her dad when she was younger. He’d taught her to identify constellations, to read a compass, and which desert plants were safe to eat and which were poisonous. When he was too busy to play with her, she’d even tagged along with him to work sometimes, wandering around the lab at his old job at the University of California, Irvine. But that was years ago, back before he disappeared into his über-secret, high security clearance job for the Department of Defense.

  Once, when Ingrid was seven, her father brought her a piece of uranium ore. She was watching television in the house they lived in then, a split-level they had moved into when her father married his second wife, Cathy. He came into the den with a metal box in one hand and a surprise something in the other.

  “Hold out your hand,” he said, and dropped a small rock into her palm.

  “Huh,” said Ingrid, unimpressed. Except for some yellow, lichenous crusts on one side, it looked like any rock you might pick up on the playground at school. She turned back to Gilligan’s Island.

  “Now watch this,” her father said, and set the metal box on the coffee table. It was about the size of Ingrid’s lunch box, and had a circular gauge on one side and a silver tube on the other. “This is a Geiger counter,” he said. He held the tube against the rock in Ingrid’s hand and the needle on the gauge jumped. Ingrid heard a ticking like a sped-up clock.

  She looked up at her father in surprise.

  “That,” he said, pleased with her reaction, “is a measurement of the power inside that rock.”

  “Inside it?” Ingrid watched the n
eedle jump on the meter.

  “The electricity that lets you watch TV and run the air conditioner begins right inside this rock.”

  “You’re telling me electricity is in this rock.” Ingrid frowned. She knew perfectly well electricity was in the electrical outlets in the wall.

  “Energy is in the rock. Or to be exact, potential energy.” David Slade didn’t believe in talking down to children. “Right now it’s just a rock, but a very special one: it has in it what we need to make nuclear fission possible, and with that, the potential energy becomes real, usable energy. Through science.”

  Science. The way her father pronounced the word made her love it, too. There was nothing science could not do, and all of it was wonderful: cure disease, turn on the television in every kid’s living room, and help the entire nation by—as the inscription on a coffee mug her father got from Sandia Lab boasted—“Securing a free and peaceful world through nuclear technology.”

  The day after Ingrid’s thirteenth birthday, the zirconium cladding in the Number Two unit at Three Mile Island ruptured and the fuel pellets inside began to melt. By then, Ingrid understood better than most adults what had actually happened, and listening to reports on the shortwave radio set her father had helped her build the summer before, she felt not only terrified but personally betrayed—her interest in the beauty and power of nuclear fission had never extended to its biological consequences. Now, with the rise of the No Nukes movement, she learned the darker history of splitting the atom. She worried that she would get cancer from all the nights she’d taken her uranium rock under the covers with her to watch it glow, and she became convinced that the bone cancer her mother had died of when she was four was the result of their having lived downwind from the Nevada test site when Ingrid was a baby. Then in August she watched a special on PBS about a Japanese girl who got leukemia from radiation poisoning in Hiroshima. The girl tried to fold a thousand paper cranes to cure herself and died anyway.