“Where will you go?” I asked.
“North,” she said. “I want to see if it’s really as horrible as everyone says.” She smiled. “I have a cousin in New Jersey.”
“What will you do?” I asked. She shrugged.
“I have some sympathy money left,” she said. “Lucy and Joe won’t want to help me. I think I’m the most interesting thing that ever happened to them; they want to keep me around to weep on. I’ll miss Daddy though,” she said. “I figure I’ll careen around, see the world a little.”
“New Jersey,” I said.
“Oh, I won’t stay there,” she said. “I don’t think I’ll ever stay anywhere again. You know I wouldn’t have stayed here this long—” and she stopped.
“Except for Amanda,” I supplied.
The evening seemed to settle around the word, and it seemed to me that the world suddenly became a little harsher, more rock, less grass. The wind swept across the porch: winter was indeed on its way.
“I resented her from the beginning,” she said. She bounced her fist against a knee. “I have hated myself for feeling that way.” She looked at me. “Is that horrible?” she asked. “Are you disgusted?”
“No,” I said. “Of course not.”
“Joan is,” she said. “She could tell, right away. The way she looked at me sometimes.”
“I thought you all were friends,” I said, surprised.
“Of course,” said Beth. “That doesn’t mean we can’t hate each other a little.” She frowned. “Don’t get mad, okay?” she asked. “I mean, I hate to talk against your wife.”
“It’s okay,” I told her, and oddly it was. It seemed as though the world itself was different, temporary, all rules broken. Beth and I were lovers; here the bond between us was the oldest and most primitive possible.
“I had the feeling she was glad about Amanda,” she said. “Now see how terrible I am.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Well, like she thought it served me right. I don’t know,” said Beth, turning away. “It’s crazy.”
“She has changed,” I said, carefully.
“We all have,” said Beth. “She’s colder, but weaker. Or maybe she’s only like that with me. Sometimes it’s almost like she’s afraid of me,” she said. “I remind her.” She added in a low voice, “She reminds me.”
“That’s only natural, I guess,” I said, the sweat crawling down my back, but my voice firm and even.
“It’s terrible to say,” she said. “But I think I can get over Amanda.” She looked thoughtful. “There was a time I couldn’t speak her name.”
“I know,” I said.
“You know how it is,” she said. “Losing a child. It breaks your heart in two. Before, and after.”
“Yes,” I said.
“How can one life hold so much sadness? I used to wonder how I’d survive it. I can’t imagine what it must have been like for Joan. I lost one child. She lost two.”
“Yes,” I said.
“For her it was like losing Emily all over again. For me,” she said, and paused. “It was like a chapter closing.”
“Which chapter?” I asked.
“The Jack chapter,” she said, raising her eyes to mine slowly.
“Jack,” I said.
“You really don’t know,” she said. “Jack told me that you didn’t, but I couldn’t believe it.”
“Didn’t know what?” but I was beginning to suspect, seven years late.
“Amanda was Jack’s child,” she said, simply. “Couldn’t you really tell?”
“Of course,” I said. “Of course.” In the silence that followed, I put it all together: Jack’s reluctance to bring his girlfriends around, Beth’s absence during the time I had suspected Joan of being unfaithful. No wonder she had been so convinced I was mistaken. It had been a lengthy love affair, then, not just the schoolboy romance I had thought.
“It’s not that I didn’t want to be a mother,” she said. “Maybe later on. But I didn’t want her to die either,” she said.
“Of course not,” I said.
“I feel guilty anyway,” she said. “Maybe that’s part of what I’m leaving.”
She pulled a cigarette from the pocket of my robe, and I lit it for her, shielding the match flame from the breeze.
“How do you men do that?” she asked, laughing, drawing on the filter. “It’s funny, all the men I know can do that, even if they don’t smoke.”
“We learn it at our mothers’ knees,” I said, and then was serious. “Actually, I learned it from Jack.”
“See, he’s not so bad,” said Beth. “I never have understood the two of you.”
“How different we are?” I asked.
“How much the same.”
“Why are you leaving him?” I asked.
“Because he won’t leave with me,” she said, and then, “No, I haven’t asked him to. I just know he won’t. Just like you,” she said, teasing now. “And yet you all carry on this ridiculous fight, each waiting for the other to give in. But you’re on the same side.”
“No, we’re not,” I said.
“Of course you are,” she said. “It’s like a whaddyacallit—a siege. Both of you digging in. It’s stupid.”
“I don’t see it that way,” I said.
“I know,” she told me. “But it’s true all the same.”
“I hate him,” I said, telling her in these last minutes what I hadn’t voiced before, making it a pact.
“Maybe a little,” she said. “And maybe he hates you a little, too.” She smiled. “That’s not so bad. It keeps things hopping.”
We were silent for a minute, and then she spoke again.
“So much has happened,” she said. “So much, and so little.” She lit another cigarette. “I don’t understand how it can be like this. It’s like the ocean, making all kinds of fuss, all that crashing and pounding and foam everywhere. But underneath nothing changes. Of course,” she said, with a little laugh, “how would I know? I’ve only seen it in movies.” She tapped her fingers against the porch railing. “I feel like the ocean inside out. The crash and the foam all inside me, and the little fishies swimming around outside like nothing’s happened at all.” She drew on her cigarette. “And in the end,” she said, “nothing has happened. Nothing at all.”
“Nothing?” I asked, hurt. She heard it, and looked at me.
“It’s been lovely,” she said. “It’s been perfect.”
“I love you,” I said, twenty years of adolescent yearning in my voice.
“I love you, too,” she said. “You know that.”
And then I did know: she did love me, in the way that she could love. I saw that love changed nothing for her; it killed nothing about the beast she struggled with. I was abruptly very sad.
“I wish,” I said.
“Oh, yes,” said Beth. “Me, too.” She put her cigarette out, and flicked ash from her fingertips. “Dear G.I.,” she said, and kissed me lightly, completely without passion, as though we had not been entangled on the living room sofa not so many minutes before. “Tell Joan good-bye for me,” she said. “Tell Jack, too.”
She stood up, and went away to dress. She had brought nothing with her, and would take nothing away. Fifteen minutes later, we stood in the doorway, facing one another.
“Well,” I said.
“Don’t make me say it,” she said, her voice straining a little behind the smile. “Don’t make me say it to you.”
And she was gone.
Joan came back two days later. She was looking rested and healthy; the haunted look was gone.
“I missed you,” she said, hugging me.
“I missed you, too,” I told her, and it was true.
Having her back settled things; the house seemed to sigh and assume its proper order around her, as though her absence had caused a temporary disturbance in the gravitational force. I noticed with relief the reduction of my own sensory perceptions: the porch light seemed normall
y dim again, the furniture solid and real. When Beth had moved among them, these things had risen up, floating in her wake. At Joan’s touch they rooted again, so that the whole house sat vast and solid on its land; home again. Food went back to being food, no longer ambrosia; and I found it nourished me better than the nectar past.
My guilt I tucked away into a corner of my mind; and when at last I dared to bring it out again, I saw that it was not truly guilt at all. Just a secret, without any implications. Something with no power to hurt; something pure and complete; a resolution. Something I would remember, and cherish, and never, ever tell.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Fireman’s Daughter
OF COURSE, I don’t live here all year round. When the first breath of summer comes, I fly just as far and as fast as I can. It’s hell in August here, you know. It’s hell in August everywhere, unless you’re on an island with a good stiff breeze. Or in Australia, I suppose. In Ireland, it rains all through August. Fifteen times a day. That’s the price they pay for all those shades of green. I spent two weeks in western Ireland once, at the height of the rainy season; some misguided travel agent had assured me of the advantages of travelling off-season. It was beautiful, anyway; even through a curtain of rain, the magic of Connemara cannot be denied. Joyce Country. When I was twenty I wanted nothing more than to write like he did. Now I’m—well, older—and I write what I like, and I don’t give a damn. I will confess that sometimes I take out old Dubliners and shed a tear or two, for what I will never have.
I grew up in a town just like this one. As like as two peas, as they say here. If someone slipped out in the middle of the night and changed the street signs and transported all of the inhabitants in a fair exchange, no one would ever know the difference. Whenever I go into town I deliberately leave off my glasses, and that extra bit of fuzziness makes everyone look familiar. We had the same grocers, I swear it; and the same florist and sheriff and firemen. My daddy was a fireman. It sounds so glamorous, but it wasn’t; we hadn’t many fires, and so all they did was sit around and play poker. And drink. In a fire, they’d have been in real trouble; all those men were highly flammable. My daddy actually died sliding down the fire pole. It was an extraordinary night. My sister was born, and Daddy broke his neck. They had to sponge him off the floor, he was so pickled.
I was thirteen when he died. A miserable age; they ought to ban it completely. Just skip from happy twelve to settled fourteen. I was all over freckles and elbows. My knees were bigger than my feet. My mother didn’t know what to do with me; I wouldn’t listen in class, and I wasn’t old enough to work. Finally, she left me alone, and a good thing, too; if I’d listened in class, I’d be something deadly now, a wife, or maybe a postmistress. Those schools squashed all the vim out of people. I saw it everywhere I looked. We learned everything from workbooks written a thousand years ago, by some person who’d never gone out of his house. Dick and Jane, stuff like that. No room at all for adventure. If I’d attended to my teacher—I don’t even want to think about it.
I was a lonely little girl. Imagine being ugly and stupid. And poor. I look back on that sad little fledgling and shudder. If I hadn’t been so stupid I might have given up on myself; but I didn’t know enough to know that I was hopeless and without future, and so I set myself for glory. Maybe I was rebelling against the Dick and Jane books, or maybe I was seeking to create a more palatable world for myself, an alternative version, but anyway I decided I wanted to write stories. To tell a deeper truth was what I told myself, only I went the other way around, and overcomplicated things. Life’s much simpler than we want to believe.
After I left school, I went to work in a bakery. It was a real old-fashioned kind, where we baked all night and opened early in the morning. Closed up shop at three, and came in again at midnight. The place smelled like heaven, and the night hours were so peaceful, just the other girl and me making buns and shaping loaves. The old woman Mrs. Mince, who did the fancy stuff, didn’t talk much, and didn’t like us talking. But she sang while she worked. Sad songs when she was blue, old spirituals and the more sentimental hymns. When she was angry, it was the bloodier hymns: “By the light of burning martyrs/Jesus’s bleeding feet I track,” that kind of thing. She was never really happy, but in her times of lighter gloom she’d bless us with Easter offerings, all that gladness and Festival Day stuff. My family wasn’t very religious; most of what I knew about God came from the old baker woman, and so my impression of Him was bizarre indeed.
I might have worked there forever, and missed my destiny entirely, if it hadn’t been for Mr. Walpole, Mrs. Mince’s nephew, who came along about two years after I’d started working there. He’d failed out of some college or other, and his father, exasperated with him, had sent him to our town to teach him some good old-fashioned values. He didn’t seem to have learned any, in the time that I knew him. He’d come into the shop and speak to us girls, who minded the place in the daytime; while he was standing there, he’d pinch all of the candied cherries out of the hot cross buns, leaving just the green pieces, and little gouges from his poking fingers. No one would buy them then, the way they looked.
The other girl and I disliked him, and we tried to keep out of his way when he came into the shop, but it was difficult. He’d come behind the counter, and follow us around, saying “Whoops!” when we turned around not knowing he was there, and bumped into him. He didn’t try anything with me; I guess I was too young and plain looking for his tastes. But the other girl, Patsy, was a couple of years older, and plump, with dimples in her cheeks and on the backs of her hands. She was very pretty, and I envied her her laugh, which sounded like sleigh bells. I used to copy it myself at home, until my mother pressed cough mixture on me. She thought I had the croup.
Patsy had a young man to whom she was engaged; but I noticed after a while that he wasn’t coming round the shop so much anymore. And it had been a while since I’d heard the sleigh bells.
“What’s happened to Ted?” I asked her. “Have you had a fight?”
“Oh, Deenie,” she said. (That’s what I was called then.) “I don’t think I can talk about it.”
But I wormed it out of her. It seemed Ted had come to meet her at the shop one afternoon when she wasn’t expecting him, and he’d looked in the window and seen Mr. Walpole and Patsy, kissing.
“Ugh,” I said.
“That’s not all,” wailed Patsy into the gingermen. “He’s broken off with me, and I think—I think—”
What she thought would be obvious to any reader of dime romances. She thought she was pregnant.
“Oh, Patsy,” I said. I was more upset by the image of Mr. Walpole’s long white fingers poking into Patsy than I was by her condition.
“Gin and hot baths,” I told her, briskly. My knowledge was gleaned from overheard scraps of conversation between my mother and aunt. “Try jumping down a flight of stairs.”
“I’ve jumped from just about everything in this town except the bell tower,” she said. “I’ll try the gin.”
The gin made her sick, she reported the next day. The hot baths left her scalded, but no less pregnant.
“We’ll go see my Aunt Maisie,” I said.
Maisie lived in the middle of town, a block away from my mother and sister and me. Her respectable-looking house sheltered a secret apothecary. Patsy and I went up the steps together, and knocked on the door.
“Aha,” said Maisie, through the screen. “Come in.”
She hadn’t expected our call, but she took one look at Patsy and hustled her into a chair. “Wait here,” she said, and went off into the kitchen.
“It’s okay,” I said, patting Patsy’s hand absentmindedly, peeling after Maisie.
She returned in a few minutes with a bottle, sealed with a cork, dripped around with wax.
“This’ll do it,” she said. Giving the bottle to me, she instructed, “Once in the morning, once at night.”
“It’s Patsy who needs it,” I said, confused.
&nb
sp; “Ah, but you’ll give it to her,” said Maisie. “And you’ll set by her. She’ll need someone with her.”
We waited until the weekend, when Patsy’s mother went to visit her own mother, and I gave Patsy the first dose on Saturday morning.
“I don’t feel anything,” she said.
“I think it takes a while,” I told her, self-important, Maisie’s deputy.
We played card games all day, and then at dusk I gave her the second dose. “I hope this works,” said Patsy, drinking the brown stuff down, and making a face.
She started to cramp up around eight o’clock; the rest of the night passed in a wretched blur of fear for both of us. She was delirious, and I could not make her lie down in one place. She kept getting up and walking, all hunched over, and then she’d sit down suddenly and start to moan again. I mopped her forehead, and talked to her, unsure what else to do. In the course of the night, she told me everything—how dearly she loved Ted, and why she’d gone with Walpole.
“He was different,” she babbled. “He doesn’t come from here. My mama married a man from here, and my sister, and my aunt. They’ve never been anywhere else, seen anything else. I knew I’d marry Ted, and start having babies. And they’d grow up here, too, and never leave.”
I soothed her, and freshened the cloth for her forehead, and followed her about when she started her wandering again.
Around two in the morning, the blood came. I hadn’t expected so much of it. I used all of the towels I could find, and most of the dishcloths from the kitchen, before it stopped coming.
In the morning, Patsy was asleep. I tucked her into bed, and cleaned up the kitchen floor; I washed out the towels as best I could. When I held my arms up before me, they were crusted with blood to the elbows; I’d used up all the water I’d boiled, and so I scrubbed myself with cold, using my fingernails. Then I dragged myself home; my mother thought I’d been at the bakery, and she let me sleep.
The next month, Patsy married Ted, and I went to New York. I told myself I’d always meant to go, but really it was on account of Patsy, whose terrific yearning for something unfamiliar had led her into such misery. I vowed I’d never try to get out that way; I took my savings and bought a one-way bus ticket.
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