She saw the complexity in his smile, the slightest shadow crossing it. But then his expression changed again, and he indicated the entrance to the store. “Is this where you were headed?”
“I was going to buy a dress,” she said. “I didn’t have a specific place in mind.”
“After you, kiddo.”
She walked into the little opening that led to the entrance, and he casually put his arm around her.
“Still pals?” he said.
She said, “Oh, Dominic. Always and all our lives.”
“Promise never to tell anybody I was your first—well, half of your first—the failed first.”
“Stop it,” she told him. “You’re demeaning it. Don’t, Dominic. Nothing that ever happened between us was bad, except that I didn’t see you for how many days.”
“A little self-deprecating humor,” he told her. “All the books say it’s charming.”
“It’s not funny, Dom. I thought I’d done something to upset you.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Jesus, really. I told you I wasn’t upset with you.”
She moved from him to a row of dresses on a rack, and began looking through them. He stood at her side. She held one up. “What do you think?”
He shook his head, and she put it back. She held another up, and he shook his head again. She took out still another. “It steenks,” he said.
She laughed, and then hugged him again. “Let’s go. I don’t see anything you like.”
They went out into the sunlight, and walked along the street. He had taken her hand, but then dropped it and hung back a little, just at her shoulder. It was as if he were worried about how it would look. At the corner they stopped, and he put his hands deep in his pockets, looking off. Finally he turned to her. After a slight pause, he said, “I guess you’ve figured out that I’m queer.”
“It’s none of my business, is it?” she said.
“Of course it is. You’re my closest friend—Lily, of course.”
“Okay.” She put her arms around him and held tight, and they remained that way for a few moments.
“An enormous weight has been lifted. As they say.”
“I’m glad,” Lily told him. “Me, too.”
“My parents are making plans to leave for foreign shores. I think my father wants to see about volunteering for the next space shuttle.”
She laughed, and put both hands on his chest. “Dom.”
He reached into his jacket pocket and brought out a folded piece of paper. “This has my address, and my parents’ address. I can always be reached through them if this one changes. Or you can send it to my father, care of NASA.”
7
THAT EVENING her mother called and wanted to know who she was bringing north with her. “Is this a woman friend or a man friend, Lily? And I hope it won’t upset you if I say that I think it’s a little rude not to let me know even that much about it.”
“I’m sorry, Doris. A man friend.”
“A boyfriend man friend?”
Lily paused. “We’re getting married, Mother.”
Doris coughed, and cleared her throat. “This is serious, if you’re calling me Mother.”
After a pause, which she filled with a very long sigh, she said, “When?”
“We just decided about it, this week. Oh, Doris—I’m so happy.”
“When are you getting married?”
“This week. We don’t want any to-do about it. No ceremony. We’re just going to a justice of the peace. It’s my idea, too.” Lily told her the rest of it—moving South, the job in Mississippi, Tyler’s peculiar history with that side of his family—and then waited for a response. She had spoken into a profound silence, and for a second she thought her mother might’ve broken the connection.
“You’re bringing your fiancé north, with twenty-four hours’ notice.”
“Well, I know it’s happening fast,” she said. “I never would’ve believed it. I won’t be hurt if you—I mean, I’d understand if you needed more time.”
Silence.
“Doris, do you want us not to come?”
“Don’t be absurd. I would’ve liked a little more notice that my daughter is making such a decision. And it wouldn’t have hurt if I’d been given some time to prepare for such a visit, either. This place is a wreck. I don’t even know that I can get hold of your father.”
“You don’t have to—don’t—don’t do that. Don’t call him, Doris—please.”
“He’s your father. Of course I’m going to call him. You haven’t called him?”
“I called you.”
“I’ll see what I can arrange,” Doris said with another sigh. “And you’ll have to live with whatever it is. This is getting married, sweetie. This isn’t choosing not to graduate. I know you’re all excited and everything, but there are matters—social aspects of it that you can’t ignore without seriously hurting people you love. You don’t want to do that—surely that’s not what you have in mind. Do you know how much it would hurt your father if you just went ahead and did this without telling him?”
Lily felt a rush near her heart. “I was going to tell him.”
There was another long pause. “I wanted him to leave, Lily. Okay?”
Outside her window, the dark had come. She saw the moon above the lovely stirring of the trees in the soft breeze that blew. You could see the other side of the quad almost as clear as in daylight.
“Did you hear me? I was relieved.”
Another pause, and then her mother’s voice again, level and low. “The end of love hurts more terribly inside than anything I can name. That was what hurt us both. I’m not being philosophical, Lily. I was angry with him, yes. But when he had been out of the house for a few weeks I felt for the first time in years that I could be myself. Really let everything out and relax. Do you understand me?”
“There’s nothing vague about that, Doris,” Lily said. “I do understand.”
“I’m sorry it hurt you, sweetie.”
She didn’t want to talk about what hurt, now. She kept still.
“It hurts everybody,” her mother went on. “I wish there was something for it.”
Then there wasn’t any sound at all for a time, not even of their breathing. The line was emptiness, the farthest reaches of space.
“Welcome to adulthood, little girl,” her mother said in a very small voice, from far, far away, beginning to cry. “Oh, Lily—your father and I were done, my darling, long before Peggy happened.”
“Don’t,” she said. “I don’t—you’re right, it’s none of my business.”
“Well, we’re on each other’s minds, who care about each other. I know that. I expect it.”
She told her mother she loved her, acceded to all her suggestions about a small family gathering—she and Tyler, Doris and Scott and Peggy—and got off the phone.
8
DRIVING NORTH in the misty, raining morning, she mentioned to Tyler that she had run into Dominic, and Tyler did not know whom she meant. “Dominic Martinez,” she said. “He told me he knew you slightly.”
“You mean Dom? The guy in my philosophy classes? Tall, skinny guy?”
“That’s him.”
They rode along in silence for a few minutes. You couldn’t see the mountains at all for the mist and ground fog, or much of the road ahead.
“How do you know Dom?”
“He’s been my best friend here. I met him when I was fourteen.”
Tyler drove in silence, and when she glanced at him she noted the fine shape of his jaw. His brow was creased, and he was concentrating on the road. She sat back and was happy. She saw the green hills rolling by in the grayness, the farmhouses under the lowering sky. It looked like March, not May. They drove past several trucks whose tires blurred the windshield. The speedometer was at seventy-five miles an hour.
“Aren’t you going a little fast?” she said.
He touched the brakes. “I’ve made this drive a thousand times, sorry.”
She patted his elbow.
A moment later, he said, “So you’ve known Dom all these years?”
“He was at my fourteenth birthday party. He offered me a puff off a cigarette and we talked. I didn’t see him again until last year.”
She stared at the dashboard, and at the shiny wheel with his hands gripping it, the smooth flesh of his wrists.
“Wish I could’ve met you when you were fourteen,” he said.
There was a smoldering look to the heavy sky ahead. The sun was trying to break through. By the time they got to Steel Run, they could see areas of blue beyond the breaking up of the cloud cover. The road was dry. They went through Steel Run, and he drove down a side street, past shops and an Episcopal church, to a redbrick Victorian with white trim on the porch and around the windows, and dormers in the roof. He slowed, then stopped.
“That’s where I grew up.” He made a small tsking sound with his tongue, shaking his head. “Some fun.”
She waited for him to go on, and when he didn’t, she said, “Tell me.”
He appeared to come to himself, out of the musing gaze. “Oh, hey, it—there isn’t a lot else to say.”
“Why does that sound not so good?”
He kept gazing at the house, shaking his head. “Toward the end there, we had some good times, I guess—we could talk a little without it being a life lesson. My father was interested in morality. He was very heavily into it. He didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, didn’t cuss. He was a straight-arrow who knew the woods and wilderness and hunting and fishing, and certain practical matters connected to that, and he worked thirty years for the census bureau. And he wanted me to be a doctor.”
The house looked empty. There was a jagged hole in the glass of one of the top windows, a shard of the sky showing in what was left. The tree next to the house was in full bloom, pink blossoms spreading along the side and on, over the broken fence that bordered the lawn.
“Developers are going to tear it down,” he said. “I sold it to some people who want to open a Kmart. That and my father’s small insurance benefit paid for my lengthy college career.” He shook his head, pulling away, and she turned in the seat to watch the house recede in the distance. That side of it, through the pink blossoms, was already broken, a part of the wall having been knocked out. Seeing this caused an inexplicable shiver to run through her, and she brought her gaze around to the road, the other houses they were passing. “Do you know anyone in these places?”
“Some. My dad moved to Miami a couple of years after I left home. That’s where he died, and where he’s buried. Miami. Christ.”
Toys lay in one yard—a bicycle and a doll, a play stove, a rocking horse. A small white dog was tied to the rocking horse, and was dragging it around in the yard. “Did you know these people?”
“No.”
They drove on. The houses gave way to fields again, and the road descended, crossed a bridge over the highway, then wound around and merged with it. Route 29 North. Point Royal was eight miles farther on. On one side of the road there was a new outlet mall, an ugly row of facades crowned with royal-blue signs, all of it so new that it shone. She read the names of the stores; it was something to occupy her mind. The closer they came to home, the more unsure she felt, as if her mother or father might discern a clearly mistaken aspect of the whole thing, and point it out in some incontrovertible way.
Her mother was nothing like this, of course, but now Lily could not erase the thought of some pathological eruption rising out of Doris’s conviction that this marriage was happening too fast.
“You seem a little nervous,” he said.
“I am, I guess. I’m worried about what everyone will say. I mean, we’re moving so fast.”
“Hey, I’m twenty-six. I’ve given it a lot of thought. And if you look at it, so have you.”
PART • 2
Mary and Lily
FIVE
1
February 8, 1876
Dear—
I name no one. I will not say “diary.” I imagine you. I create you somewhere far past the boundaries of my life. Lately I have been thinking about marriage. What marriage is ever quite rational? I will marry someone my father brings home, no doubt. The prospect of it disgusts me. I don’t want to think about it. Knowing a stranger and having that stranger know me. I have sought ways to explain to myself my father’s absences. But then the absences are all I have known….
Mary Henrietta Kingsley wakes one morning to feel a hard, sharp pain, low in her abdomen, and thinks of her mother’s lingering illness. It is starting for her, she thinks, whatever it is that keeps her mother lying down through the days. But she makes herself get up, and then remembers what she has read about the female body and its changes. That is happening. She goes and locks her door and examines herself. Uses the chamber pot and sees blood. Her heart clamors in her chest. There are the narratives of the habits and customs of the tribes of Africa and the Americas, letters from her father describing the way the women behave, and the powerful lure of flesh, and she knows enough already, even at this young age, to understand in some nonverbal way that every custom of the primitive tribes is aimed at controlling this force, this very creaturely thing that is happening inside her. She’s horrified. And fascinated, too. She attends to the problem, the mess of her own body and its demands. She looks out the window in the sound of the church bells and sees men passing on the street. A dog barks nearby. Her own gamecocks set up a racket. For the rest of the day she works in a daze, and when she tries to read she can’t concentrate. Her mother is unusually demanding, and there’s no letter from her father. In the night, she sits in the light of her bedside candle and thinks of the natural process taking place in her. She takes off her nightdress and lies back in the flickering light and tries to appreciate her own almost womanly shape—but she’s too thin: the bones of her hips jut out; her breastbone is visible. Her breasts are small, as they should be, but her arms are too long. Stretched out at her sides they reach to below her hips. She thinks of herself in a detached way, oddly more so than ever before in her life.
—I am strange, she says, low. I am strange. I am not like anyone else.
She begins a search through the books for all those passages about sex and sexual practices. She reads about a tribe of Africans whose custom, upon the birth of a child, is to have the father of that child hung upside down in a tree. He hangs there as long as his wife is in labor, and when the child is delivered, if the child is delivered, he is cut down. If the child dies, or the mother dies—if the delivery can’t take place, for whatever reason—the man is left to die in the tree. She reads about the custom of sex with brothers and sisters in some tribes of the South Pacific.
At dinner she watches her brother’s face, a ten-year-old boy interested in American dime novels. There is really no one she can speak to about any of this. She depends on the books, which are disturbingly silent about it where they ought to be eloquent. She begins to put on the attitude of someone for whom these passions and night-sweating urges have no reality or pull. She takes two months reading only novels and romances, and it seems that there’s nothing but strife and pain in the worldly love that comes of sex. She cares for her mother, and feels the uncomplicated nature of this love; she senses that the other love, the love that had produced her and Charley, is the reason for her mother’s lingering sorrow and illness.
And now she sees, without wanting to, how her mother is periodically swaddled in that particular way, something she had never quite noted before. She believes, horribly, that she can smell it. And there is something about the monthly rhythm of it that makes all her mother’s symptoms worse, each month—the recurring weakness and ongoing pain seems related to this event in her mother’s body, the older woman’s very femininity: something is wrong with the process in her mother. Mary’s own periods make her vaguely queasy—a sick fascination rises in her, and she moves through her duties in a frantic daze, growing more efficient in the care of t
he invalid: her purpose, she begins to feel. Surely something other than the awful commotion of bodies in contact. And could it have been the birth of two children that made the continual physical frailty and suffering she sees in her mother? She retreats entirely into the books, now, in this eerie solitude of her physical nature.
2
July 1876
I have decided to keep this journal in the hope that one day someone might find use in it—even, as it may indeed be, some later version of myself, as I like to think. I will soon be fourteen. I have no formal education, and will have none. That is as I guess it should be. Charley, at ten years old, can decipher things and parse sentences and write practically and he has even learned some Latin and Greek or is learning them and he’s begun correcting me—making me sound my h’s, and I still feel that a lot of everything else is unfair.
I shall not mention this other matter, which has so concerned me of late. It is a female matter.
I would like to have a friend that I can be my utter self with, my bumpy, scared, terrible self. Someone I can enjoy the freedom of not having to be charming with all the time. I sometimes lie awake in the nights and imagine someone, another girl, perhaps someone slightly older than I, who understands me. You.
She remarks the changes in her body. She keeps the little notebook, like a diary. It is secreted away in her things, for a privacy she craves, even as so many of the days go by in solitude.
My life that I live in secret. I offer it to you, in your world, wherever you are.
Yesterday there was a letter from her father, from America, where he is traveling with Lord Dunraven—the wild, wide spaces of that continent, with its wonderful names, made of the Indian languages: Colorado, Dakota, Salt Lake, Yellowstone, Wyoming. In his letters, he has spoken of the depredations the U.S. government is visiting upon the native tribes, the systematic slaughter and displacement. The railroad has come, is being laid across Indian lands, hunting grounds: one cannot be surprised at the poor wretches fighting; they depend wholly on the buffalo for food, and the railway and its consequent settlers will soon drive them away for ever. Quite lately these grand rolling plains were black with buffalo and the Indians lived in abundance, now we are considered lucky to have killed two!
Hello to the Cannibals Page 13