by Joy Fielding
The scene was moving too quickly, Donna thought from her position across the room. Would the projectionist please stop the film for a few minutes, roll it back, start it again from the top? I missed the opening credits. I don’t know who these people are, what this boy is doing in this woman’s room. Why does she look so confused? I’m the one who doesn’t have a clue as to what’s going on here. I always hated coming in in the middle of a picture. Would the projectionist please start the film again? Tell me who these people are?
“A little old for this sort of thing, aren’t you?” she heard a woman’s voice ask. He was hanging upside down from the top of the jungle gym, the knees of his black jeans wrapped around the bright green bar, his black T-shirt falling up and away from his pants, the button in the middle of his belly almost smiling at her. He quickly scrambled to his feet, turning right side up and facing her. He looked like John Travolta, she thought.
“You a park superintendent?” he asked, chewing furiously on a stick of gum.
She shook her head. “No. No. I just come here sometimes.”
“Yeah?” he asked disinterestedly. “You got kids here?”
“No,” she answered, shaking her head.
He nodded and looked around. There were a few kids playing nearby. When he looked back at the woman, she was still staring at him.
“So, uh, you just come here, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah. I know how it is.”
“How what is?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know.” He looked back at the jungle gym.
“My name is Donna.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
He smiled guardedly. “Nice to meet you, Donna.”
“What day is it?”
“What day? Uh, Friday. It’s Friday.”
“Friday the what?”
The smile started to fade. “Friday, December thirty-first. New Year’s Eve.”
“Now?”
“What do you mean, now? It’s only a little after three o’clock in the afternoon. Later. In a few hours, it’ll be New Year’s Eve. You want to know what year?” The voice was a mixture of sarcasm and bewilderment.
She shook her head. The year was unimportant. She continued to stare at the young man.
“Look, I gotta go. Got a big date tonight. You know how it is.”
“How what is?”
He started to move away from her. “Well, Happy New Year.” He turned and started to walk away.
The woman took a few tentative steps in his direction. “Wait!” she called.
“I really can’t stay,” he said, turning.
“Would you like to go to bed with me?”
My, my, but this woman was bold, Donna thought, watching the scene replay.
“Is this some sort of joke?” Walking back toward her.
“No joke. Would you like to go to bed with me? I’m living over on Belvedere.”
“Freaky chick,” he said, starting to laugh. “Sure, I’ll give you a tumble. But I can’t stay long.”
“You have a car?”
“Down the street.”
Donna watched the boy’s hand fall across the woman’s rear end as they walked together out of the park.”
“Don’t you think you should take this off?” he was asking, pulling at the woman’s blue velour top. They were back in the motel room. Donna watched as the woman lifted her arms into the air like a child and the young man—the youth—pulled the top over her head. “Hey, a bra!” he said, laughing. “I haven’t seen one of these things in years.” He studied it as if it were material from another planet, moving his hands across her back to undo the clasp.
“It unclasps from the front,” she muttered.
“Yeah? How about that? Told you it’s been a long time since I’ve been around one of these.” He found the hook and undid it effortlessly. “Haven’t lost the touch though,” he said, his tongue twisting the gum in his mouth. He pulled her bra off, letting it fall to the floor. “I guess this is like one of those zipless fuck fantasies, huh?” he asked, pushing her down on the bed and pulling off both her shorts and her panties in one adept motion.
“I gave up on fantasies a long time ago,” the woman’s voice said. Donna squirmed from her position across the room. The voice had sounded just a bit too familiar on that last utterance. “I was on an airplane once,” the voice continued, “a long time ago. A nun took the seat I’d been saving for Warren Beatty. So much for fantasies.”
Donna laughed. The youth didn’t. He stopped chewing his gum and straightened up his body, which had been bending over the woman. He was staring down hard at her, examining her with an almost clinical eye. Donna noticed his erection was diminishing.
“Something wrong?”
“What’s this?” he asked.
“What?”
“This. Looks like some sort of scar.” His fingers traced the vertical line which ran from her navel to her pubic hair.
Donna felt the woman pulling her toward the bed. “My babies,” the voice said, haltingly.
“Babies? You got babies?”
“Two of them,” she said slowly. “They had to come out by Caesarian.”
The youth sat back away from the woman. “That’s too bad. Nothing you can do about the scar, huh?”
Donna was back inside the woman’s body. It didn’t quite fit. She wanted to get out, to get away from this place, this boy, whoever he was, and this ridiculous conversation, but she seemed stuck inside this strange woman’s skin, a virtual prisoner of a less-than-perfect, noticeably scarred body. “I never thought much about it,” she said. Her own voice. It was true. Victor had always treated her scar as some sort of badge; Mel had never mentioned it except to comment that it was nicely done and to plant kisses up and down it. She stopped. She would not think about Mel. She looked back at the boy, the distaste he felt obvious in his eyes. “You don’t like scars. I take it.”
He shook his head. “Don’t exactly turn me on. But I guess things like that don’t bother you ‘new women’—”
“New women?” What on earth was he talking about?
“Well, you don’t shave under your arms, you don’t shave your legs—”
Donna looked down at her legs, felt her underarms. He was right. How long had it been since she remembered to shave? She had no idea. “I guess I’m quite a sight.”
He laughed. “Look,” he said, getting up off the bed and walking back toward the mirror, “maybe we’ll do this some other time. It’s gettin’ kind of late. I have this date and all.”
Donna nodded wordlessly. So even a stray park pickup was turning her down,
“You divorced?” he asked, hopping into his pants.
“Yes.”
“Yeah, well—” He pulled his T-shirt down over his head. “Maybe the two of you will get back together one of these days.” Obviously no one else would be crazy enough—
“Maybe,” Donna said, her voice starting to sound comfortably strange again. “Maybe it wasn’t really as bad as I thought it was.” She looked slowly around the room. “Was it really that bad?” she asked herself. At least she’d have her children back again. When she looked back toward the dresser, the youth was gone. She fell asleep wondering if, in fact, there had been anyone there at all.
She woke up abruptly twenty minutes later and walked into the bathroom. She opened the medicine cabinet, removed her Lady Schick razor, threw out the old blade and replaced it with a new one. Then she soaped her underarms and shaved away any traces of the “new woman.” She nicked her skin in a few places, ignored the cuts, and moved on to her legs. She lifted one leg into the sink, ran a wet washcloth down it and then applied the soap. Then she steadied the razor and started to take gentle strokes down her legs.
The first cut was an accident; she had simply borne down too hard—the blade was new, there was no need to press. The second cut was careless. The third was deliberate. As were the fourth, fifth and sixth. She changed legs and r
epeated the process, watching as the small cuts released long rivers of blood which flowed into one another, tracing imaginary map lines across her legs, twisting and turning and stinging against the soap and water. Oddly enough, she thought, the pain felt good. Victor wouldn’t approve, of course, and he would be right. As he was usually right. About everything. If only she could find him and tell him. Maybe he would take her back. Think about it, Donna, she told herself, walking out of the bathroom and getting back into her blue shorts and top. It wasn’t really as bad as you made it out to be. Be truthful with yourself now, she said. Was it really that bad?
“My God, what happened to your legs?”
Donna looked from the face of the startled hairdresser to her own legs. “I cut them shaving.”
“What did you shave with, an ax?” the woman asked.
“When can you take me?”
The young woman with the purple streaks across the front of her hair looked around the busy shop. “I don’t know, Mrs. Cressy,” she said. “It’s New Year’s Eve. We’ve been booked solid for weeks.”
“Please—”
“All right, look, come back in an hour. I’ll see if I can fit you in.”
“Oh, thank you.”
“What is it exactly you want done?”
Donna looked hard at the woman whose shop she had frequented so often in the year following Sharon’s birth. The woman’s hair was short, very geometrical in shape and a sort of brassy red in color, with large purple streaks running across the front. “I kind of like yours,” Donna said.
She wasn’t sure what she was doing here except that she had an hour to kill before Lorraine could take her. But why here? She hadn’t been here since the funeral, never feeling that the cemetery, the actual tombstone, brought her any closer to her mother. Why did she choose to come here now?
Donna walked between the rows of white tombs, the fresh flowers—no artificial flowers, please, the sign said—spilling over the tops of the actual graves. So peaceful here. She remembered a joke from her childhood—look, there’s a new cemetery; people are just dying to get in there! She walked quickly through the rows of graves until she found the row and the headstone she was looking for.
SHARON EDMUNDS
1910–1963
Beloved Wife of Alan
Beloved Mother of Donna and Joan
“A gentle soul; a kind spirit”
Donna stood for several very long seconds in front of the tombstone. Slowly, her fingers worked themselves in and out of the lettering, as if she were reading in Braille. She traced each word several times over and then ran her hand across the rest of the smooth alabaster surface. I don’t know what to say, she thought. I don’t know how to talk to you. Then she let her knees give way, slowly falling to the ground beside the earth, sitting beside her mother’s grave, looking blankly at the headstone. I don’t know what to say to you, she repeated to herself, knowing that if there was any possible way, her mother would hear her, even without the spoken word. Please tell me what to do. Please tell me who I am. What have I done to my life? What have I thrown away? She stared deep into the carved lettering. Was my life with Victor really so bad? Please help me, Mother, I need some answers. I need you to tell me what to do!
There were no voices, no strange flutterings, no mysterious signs that spoke of supernatural forces. Nothing. Only stillness. Donna’s eyes drifted across the symmetrical rows. Nothing disturbed them. No ghosts rose from them. No slender, translucent figures in white flowing robes. Nothing. Suddenly, she heard Mel’s voice. “If there are ghosts anywhere in this room, Donna, they’re standing in your shoes.”
She pushed thoughts of Mel out of her head, as she did each time such thoughts intruded. This time, they stubbornly pushed themselves back in.
“Are you ready to leave?” Mel.
“I’ve been ready all evening.” Donna.
“So I noticed. About the only thing you didn’t do was dangle the car keys in my direction.”
Go away, Mel.
“You’re telling me you don’t want me around anymore?”
“I’m telling you that I love Donna Cressy. But I can’t live with who she’s letting herself become.” Donna leaned her body against her mother’s headstone. Mel’s voice was right behind her.
“You were married to Victor for six years, Donna. I figure that’s enough for both of us.”
Donna’s mind began racing like a film gone amuck, backward and at more than triple its normal speed through six years of life with Victor. Words. More words. Endless series of words. Corrections. Suggestions. Orders. Half-truths. Just enough truths. Enough truth to snare the fish. Turn her from an adult to a child. Send her sprawling through the looking glass. Make her small again.
A poem by Margaret Atwood suddenly raced before her eyes and froze. More words.
you fit into me
like a hook into an eye
a fish hook
an open eye
The right words. She thought suddenly of Victor’s mother, saw the waste of almost a decade. His ex-wife. Three years on the couch because of that creep, the woman had said. Still angry after all these years. And herself? The melody of Paul Simon’s song wafted past her ears. Still crazy? What was she letting Victor do?
SHARON EDMUNDS
Donna stared at her mother’s name. “Yes,” she said aloud, the last images of her life with Victor sticking on the reel and scratching to a sudden halt. “It was that bad.”
She stood up. A vision of Mel was beside her. “Are you saying your behavior tonight was my fault?” Donna. The night she had slapped him and walked out on their life together.
“I’m saying it was my fault. You can’t be responsible for my actions.” Mel. Can’t you understand what I’m trying to say?
She understood. Why were the simplest truths always the hardest to understand?
Victor was no longer responsible for her life. She would get no answers from anyone else. Could get no answers from anyone else. Only from inside herself. She was the only one responsible for her life, for whatever she chose to do with it. For the stranger in her motel room, for the cuts on her legs, for what she, herself—no one else—was letting happen.
Donna gazed around the cemetery. “There’s just a lot of dead people here,” she said aloud, feeling her mother quickly agree.
There are no answers, she thought, looking over the rows of death. There’s only life.
The point is learning to live with it.
Mel was working late so that he could take off the holiday the next day.
Donna felt her heart racing as she climbed the stairs up to his office. Like a kid, she thought, aware of the increased palpitations, recognizing that there was a good chance that he might not want her back, that too much time had elapsed, that she had put him through too much. She stopped midway up the steps, feeling a shortage of air, taking several deep breaths. If he didn’t want her back, what then? More endless walks to nowhere? More strangers in children’s playgrounds? More blood in her bathroom sink? No, she said silently, resuming her climb. She had punished herself enough. No more blisters. No more blood. She’d already paid.
“Be with you in a minute,” he called from inside his inner office when she had entered the waiting room. The receptionist was gone. “I’m just finishing off something for the lab. I’ll be right there.”
Donna stood in the middle of the room and waited. I will survive, she said to herself. If you send me away, I will still survive. You are not responsible for me. I am the only one who can do that particular job.
“Sorry, I didn’t realize I had any more appointments—” He stopped the minute he saw her. Donna saw the tears immediately come to his eyes, felt her own tears forming.
Her voice was clear and very much her own. “Please let me say everything I came here to say before you say anything.” He nodded silently. “I’ve been a real jerk and whatever else you can think of to call me,” she began. “I’ve wasted the last nine months of my li
fe trying to force that damned rock over the top of the hill when we all know it can’t be done. It just rolls back over me and anyone else who happens to be standing around me.” He said nothing, knowing there was more she wanted to say.
“I’ve had quite a day today,” she continued. “I picked up some kid in the park, I nearly amputated my legs. I almost dyed my hair purple.” She stopped. “I went to see my mother.” She stopped again. “I’ve been thinking about that book all the way over here. The book about Sisyphus. And I think that that’s the way I have to be. That the only way I’m going to survive what Victor has done is if I recognize and accept the fact that there’s just no hope I’ll ever get my kids back again. The more I hope, the more I despair. I have no more room for despair.”
They were both openly crying now. “I don’t know how you still feel about me. I do know that I love you, that I want very much to be with you, to be your wife and a mother to Annie. I also know that I will not fall to pieces if you say it’s too late.” She laughed through her tears. “I’ll be as upset as hell,” she said, “but I won’t fall apart. I promise you.” She paused. “That’s all I have to say. It’s your turn.”
He smiled sadly. There was a long silence before he spoke. “Purple hair?”
She shrugged. “Does that mean you love me?”
“It means I love you right out of my mind.”
In the next instant, the space between them disappeared and there was no more need for words.
TWENTY
Donna sat over a large stack of receipts and unpaid bills, trying to arrange them into alphabetical order. Whoever the last girl had been, she’d certainly made a fine mess of everything. No wonder they had asked Kelly Girl to replace her.
The phone chimed some barely recognizable tune. Why couldn’t they have a phone that rang like everybody else’s? She picked it up. “Household Finance,” she said clearly. “His line is busy. Could you hold for a minute? Fine, I’ll connect you as soon as I can.” She pressed the appropriate buttons and went back to the stack of receipts and unpaid bills. Another set of chimes. This time the door. A tall, well-dressed, deeply tanned gentleman of about forty-five approached her.