by Lynne Hugo
By eight-thirty, I was relaxing into the sofa back as though it were Evan’s arms, at ease for the first time in months. By nine, Evan and Mother were discussing how the tenor of the country had changed since King and Kennedy were assassinated, and she was nodding her approval of his opinion. She didn’t seek mine, nor did I volunteer it. Evan fielded Mother’s certainty that Carter would be the nominee, but Ford would beat him in November. They agreed the Viking I landing on Mars wasn’t as important as the moon landing had been. They thought the Bicentennial had been disgustingly commercialized (but effectively marketed, Evan added). I sat next to Mother on the old blue couch, silently breathing out thank you, thank you, thank you, as Evan did the impossible: passed first muster. Part of me resented that he had to, part of me was simply, purely grateful that he was willing. Once during the evening I’d wondered if he’d done this before. Could he be this unerring with a girl’s unbalanced mother just on good instincts? I decided I didn’t care.
AFTER THAT FIRST DINNER, Evan came up two more times, on the tail of July and again in early August, when I had weekends off. Mother was much more tolerant if he came to be with us, us being the operative word, than when I went to be with him, which I did once in between those two weekends. She claimed she was afraid I’d catch that mystery disease the American Legionnaires were dying of, that it could spread city to city any old time. But the two days I spent with Evan in New York—having assured Mother that Columbia had overnight housing available for me in a dorm that remained open for summer students—changed me utterly, because I hadn’t stayed at Columbia. I’d stayed with him.
As I’d grown comfortable with being kissed, to my own surprise, I wanted more. Evan’s hands on my back seemed electrified, so visceral was my body’s response, and when one strayed lower than my waist, I didn’t want him to move it back up. (The first time he had held me to him tightly enough that his arms wrapped all the way around and ended almost on the sides of my breasts, I pushed closer to him. Mother had come out of the bathroom then, and we separated before she got into the living room; if she hadn’t, I wonder if I might not have taken one of his hands and cupped it around a breast myself.) Twice, I’d felt him harden as he held me, and there was an ache between my legs then that I didn’t recognize, couldn’t name. But I wanted to feel it again, and wanted to feel his hardness push toward me.
Mother had, of course, been as adamant about sex as she was about God’s other direct instructions to her. No Proper Young Woman Allows A Man To Touch Her. Men are to be Forgiven The Attempt, due to their Uncontrollable Hormones prior to Marriage. After Marriage, a Wife Accepts what a Man Must Do, to Fulfill Her Destiny. Virginity is a Holy State. Once sullied, a woman could never be a Bride of Christ, but she might be a lesser bride of a mortal man, do his laundry and bear his children.
What can I say? There I was, resonating like a plucked violin string because Evan’s hand had brushed my rear when he reached to pick up my train case at Grand Central. There was moisture in my underwear, and longings of my body that seemed to focus themselves like a fine camera lens when I looked at Evan. How naive it sounds, now, unbelievable almost, yet this is the truth: even if I could have, I wouldn’t have put words to the fiery desire awakening in me, how irresistible it was about to become. In Mother’s words, I would have been a Cheap Little Hussy.
When I went to visit Evan after the first weekend he’d spent with Mother and me—Evan had slept at the nearest motel, two towns away—I went into his apartment more eager than anxious.
“Finally! You’re all mine,” he said, circling me with his arms, kissing the top of my head, and then, when I looked up at him, kissing me long and fully on the mouth. He took me to the couch, above which hung the print I’d picked out at the museum, newly matted and framed. It was the first time we’d been really alone since I’d come into the city in response to the first note he’d sent for Mother’s benefit. We’d kissed then, but spent hours talking and laughing and plotting, before I had to catch the train home that night. Since that day, our conversations had continued regularly, still unknown to Mother as I continued to use the day supervisor’s office where he called me ten minutes after my shift ended or during my dinner break. All this is to say that we’d not been simply marking time. Marriage had been mentioned, not in the sense of a Down On His Knees Proposal—the only kind Mother would have considered remotely proper, but in a more natural sense, as flower of what was taking root and greenly emerging between us.
I was supposed to stay at Columbia that night. I didn’t. Standing next to his single bed, in one sweet, brief motion like a note in a dance, he took my nylon gown off, sliding it gently over my upraised arms. We held and caressed each other, and Evan took my breasts, then my rear in his big hands to which I’d been attracted from the beginning. When I lay beside him with my head in the hollow of his shoulder, his chest was big enough that when I laid my arm across it, I could not reach the bed on the other side of him and I loved the sinewy height and breadth of him, the hard muscles that rested easy beneath his skin.
The ache between my legs intensified when Evan touched me there. “Ruthie, are you sure? Is this what you want?” I hesitated as Mother’s voice, the image of her face came condemning then, and so, you see, I have to take responsibility. Even though it dried me up and blunted the edge of my desire, I made a choice. I chose Evan.
“I’m not…” on the Pill is what I was going to say, but Evan interrupted. He knew that. “I have a condom. Is this what you want, though, Ruthie? Are you sure?” He took my chin in his hand and lifted my face to make me look at him.
Maybe I was ready. Maybe I wasn’t. I believed in waiting for marriage—and been positive I would. But here I was, the living moment eclipsing words, thought, belief, promises. Maybe I thought a man like Evan was losable, a man who had a condom and knew how to put it on. I wanted him, I wanted my own life. I wanted us. “Yes,” I whispered because those wants were stronger than what else I wanted and I had to decide. “Yes.”
He took my hand and we both guided him inside me. There was a searing, sudden pain, out of all proportion to what I’d understood might come, but I reminded myself I wanted this, I chose this, and pushed my own resistance back at him. When he finished and rolled over and off, to gather me in his arms, there was blood all around Evan’s and my thighs. “My God, my God, I’ve hurt you, I never meant to hurt you,” he said, propelled up from the bed. The sheet had a large stain, like a great amaryllis blooming beneath me.
EVAN’S PARENTS INVITED us for Labor Day weekend, and Mother agreed once she heard they had a separate guest room and bathroom and that Evan’s parents assuredly would be present all weekend. Before then, though, Evan was to come up the second weekend of August, when I had Saturday and Sunday off.
Mother seemed to be more and more herself with Evan, but I do not mean that in the positive sense with which one usually uses those words. She was often either giggling, or leaning over deeply, revealing the long line of cleavage between the twin mountains of her breasts, or, just as embarrassing, speaking in sharp, contemptuous tones as she instructed me about whatever she wanted done. “Now, Ruth,” she barked once, and I saw Evan’s head jerk around in surprise, saw him suppress an instinct to intervene. Later, he tried to talk to me about her. “You need to stand up to her,” he said later. “Or I may…”
“No!” I said immediately. “Absolutely not. I have to do this my way. Look, anyway, it’s working, she’s accepting us.”
“While treating you like shit,” he said, angry.
She preached her opinions, weighing them down with the Authority of God’s Direct-To-Her Revelations, to make them unassailable. “Mark my words. Nothing good will come of this détente business with Russia. Jesus didn’t compromise with unbelievers. He didn’t call sin a difference of opinion. Coexistence isn’t one of the options God offers the righteous.” Occasionally she would seem confused or moodily silent, and even her pointy chin would go slack, sliding into the folds of her n
eck. Then the lines etched on either side of her mouth looked deep as the parentheses around a marionette’s mouth, and sadness for her took my heart again. How could I not see her through his eyes (knowing, too, how much he wasn’t seeing). Once she was sitting on the porch with her skirt hiked up because of the heat. She had her legs spread and I caught glimpses of her white cotton underpants. She stretched out her exposed legs and, thanks to the sunlight which threw the individual hairs into relief, I could see it had been months since she had shaved her legs. Evan either accidentally or on purpose had positioned himself so that he couldn’t see how she’d arranged her skirt; I was often grateful to him for small acts of grace like that.
But I don’t mean to imply that it was gratitude drawing me to him like metal to a magnet, though gratitude was certainly an ingredient, just as was my hunger to fill the vacuum Roger had left. The awakening of the sexual self is a powerful, powerful force, as is the illusion that one can merge with another person to escape a separate destiny. After the first night we made love, when I got up to clean away the blood in the bathroom, I noticed Evan’s subtle cologne, the scent he always wore, emanating from me; I thought yes, he is in me now, we are one. The pull of Evan’s body to mine was like an undertow that took away breath and control. Certainly it had that effect on me, and I believe I had the same effect on Evan. What I didn’t see was how the wave pulled Mother in, too, how it ate away the sand on which she stood from beneath her feet.
I had the last Wednesday of August off. Evan borrowed his parents’ car to come spend the evening with me and then take my belongings back to Sandy’s and my room at Columbia. I was to return to the city on Friday, after my final shift at the nursing home.
Mother was still with the last of her students for the day when Evan arrived, at three-thirty in the afternoon. I flew out the back door and virtually threw myself at him before he even made it onto the porch.
“How did you get here so early?”
“Easy. I took the afternoon off.”
“Evan! Won’t that cause a problem with your boss?”
“Who cares? I have my priorities straight. Well, and part of my anatomy, too.” He grinned, that warm, wide grin that went right through me and added, “But it just happens that I’m the one who worked last weekend on the storyboard for the new campaign. He gave me the afternoon off.”
I gave him another hug and he pulled me in close, holding me against him for a long minute. “We have to walk outside or we’re confined to the kitchen,” I said. “Mother’s still got a student.”
“Okay by me,” he said and, holding my hand, he headed for the road doing an imitation of a clumsy soft shoe and singing, “Oh we ain’t got a barrel of money, maybe we’re ragged and funny, but we’ll travel along, singing our song, side by side.”
“Oh, we don’t know what’s coming tomorrow. Maybe it’s trouble and sorrow….” I could tell he was surprised I knew the words, let alone the old tune, but it was one Mother used to sing to Roger and me on our camping expeditions.
“But we’ll travel along, singing our song, side by side.” This last was a duet, the effect of which was spoiled by our competing to add dramatic vibrato to our voices and breaking into laughter before the last note.
“How do you know that?” he asked.
I thumbed toward the window from which a halting D major scale was being played with too much breath and several overblows. “She’s a music teacher, silly. And every now and then, she used to sing something other than ‘Amazing Grace’ or the ‘Alleluia Chorus’. Not often, I admit. How do you know it?”
“My dad sings all that old stuff around the house. Drives everyone nuts. If you give him a giant basket and put handles on both sides, he couldn’t carry a tune in it.”
We walked for fifteen minutes, but then headed back when the afternoon’s accumulated heat got to us. Mother’s student was still puffing away, so we stuck to the kitchen. Evan pulled out a chair and plunked himself down on it. Then he reached for my hand, and when I extended it, he pulled me onto his lap.
“I’ve missed you so much,” I said, sniffing his neck to take in his cologne.
“Likewise, ma’am.”
“It will be a lot easier in a couple of days, you know. At least we’ll be in the same city.”
“In the same room, in the same bed, too, as often as possible,” he murmured, and kissed me.
I have no idea what Mother actually saw. I’d not heard her dismiss the student, nor the front door open and close. And I hadn’t heard her normally heavy footsteps approach the kitchen. Had she heard the reference to the same bed? Did she see Evan’s one hand welcomed beneath my shirt, the other curving itself around my rear where it met his thigh, while I alternately lifted my head to receive his kiss and replaced it on his shoulder? Nothing of that instant is clear to me except the burning flush that spread up my neck and face, the internal cringe as I sensed her presence and nearly jumped from his lap.
“What’s the mat…?” he asked. Then he saw her, too. At the time, she didn’t say a thing, but acted as though nothing had happened. Evan, too, acted as if nothing had happened, but because he didn’t know what really had. I busied myself with getting a glass of water while Evan said, “Hi, Mrs. Kenley. It’s good to see you. I hope my getting here early didn’t disturb your teaching.”
“Not at all,” she said. To an outsider, she would have seemed fine. Long attuned to her, though, I felt the disturbance in the field and spent the evening trying to make up to her. But what Evan and I had let happen in the kitchen was the first mistake from which there would be no return.
THURSDAY, THE NEXT DAY, I arrived home tired from being up late with Evan the night before, then working the seven to three shift at the nursing home. Mother was waiting for me.
“Where’s Carrie?” I asked. Mother should have been teaching.
“I didn’t feel up to it today,” she answered crisply, not at all like someone who was sick.
Privately I moaned. She had canceled a number of lessons lately, which meant her checkbook wouldn’t have enough to cover the bills. I’d have to put in extra from my small check again. “I’m so sorry. Can I get you anything? Why don’t you lie down, and I’ll get you some dinner.”
“No.” Then I saw she was holding a leather belt in one hand, doubled, the way she used to hold it when she was getting ready to whip me. “Here. I want you to use this,” she said extending it to me.
“What?” I had no idea what she meant. It had flashed through my mind she intended to whip me for what she’d seen the day before, in spite of the fact I was bearing down on twenty-one years old, but why was she handing me the belt?
“Don’t act stupid. I want you to use this.” With that, she picked up the dead weight of my right hand and forced the belt into it. Then she began to take off her shorts. In a moment she stood, flesh rolling above and below the elastic barriers of white underpants and bra, and turned her back to me.
“Wait. What? I don’t know what you mean?” I was stammering and panicky.
She turned around to face me. Impatiently, angrily, she said, “All right, if I have to spell it out. I’ve had some urges. Impure urges. This is what monks and nuns do to cleanse themselves.”
I still didn’t understand. She grew furious. “Beat me. You are to beat me. This is how I will be cleansed.”
Horrified, I began backing up. “I can’t do that, Mother.”
“Oh. I see. All the years I’ve loved you enough to cleanse you, to give you what you needed to be good, and when I ask you to do the same for me, the answer is no? You will do it. I will not be made to live with unholiness or impurity. I will not be thinking about men or filth. Now do it,” she ordered, and turned and bent, bracing herself against the old blue couch.
I stood as though paralyzed. “Please, I…no, you don’t deserve it, I can’t,” I begged.
She stood and grabbed the belt from me, shouting, “You will do it, you will,” flailing at me with the belt. “I will wh
ip you until you obey me.”
“Mother,” I cried. “Mother, no.” It did no good. She had completely lost control. The belt was landing hard across my back and thighs, where it lost momentum in the gathers of my uniform skirt. “Take it off.” She was sobbing.
“All right. I’ll do it.” I was sobbing, too. She brought the belt down on me one more time, from close enough that it wrapped itself across my back, and around my chest, the very end snapping against my cheek. Then she thrust the belt at me again and turned to brace herself against the sofa.
“Do it,” she screamed, as I hesitated. “Say this—you will not be impure. You will not be filthy.”
“You will not be impure. You will not be filthy,” I said, hitting her lightly with the belt, beginning to shudder as I did.
With a roar of rage, she turned, grabbed the belt and pushed me across the couch. “This is how you cleanse someone of filthy thoughts,” she said, lashing with a force she’d pent-up forever. “This is how, this is how, this is how.” With each repetition, the belt screamed down. She yanked the skirt of my uniform up to expose the flesh of my legs and thighs. “This is how, this is how.” Finally I screamed, then Mother’s scream mixed with mine and the belt’s in a room empty of all but noise and fire. She threw the belt at me again. “Do it. Do it right. Say it. Say it right.”
And I did. I said it and more. “You will not be impure.” The belt rose and fell. Rose and fell to a feverish, furied shout in my mind. I believe it was only in my mind, but I think she must have heard. You will tell me who my father is. The belt rose and fell. You will not drag me around place to place ever again. Rose and fell. You will not ever hit me, kick me, again. Rose and fell. You will not take away my chance for a life. Rose and fell. I hate you. Rose and fell. Rose on I hate…and fell on you.
I STOPPED WHEN SHE screamed “Stop.” Later, while she ran her tub, I controlled my trembling and used the cover of the open faucet to call Evan to say Mother was sick and I had to stay long enough to get her over the worst of it. “Don’t catch what she has,” he said.