Leave us alone, Mad Mildred. Worry about yourself for a change.
I was worried. I worried about all of us.
My father noted my despair. He liked to remind me, “Ma Ingrid was the same way as you, Mildred. Wahrsager, she called herself. Fortune-teller. As you grow older, you’ll learn to hold your tongue.”
Mother, hearing such a statement, would look up from her embroidery, frowning. “Ingrid was always difficult. The whole town called her Hexe. Some were afraid of her. I always found her too domineering and foolish.”
I remembered Grandma Ingrid, that tall, ursine creature, who didn’t seem silly to me at all, but awesome, terrifying. She spoke only German. Her lone companion was an Okanagan woman, a Syilx Indian. They walked every morning to each other’s shacks to play cards, gin rummy, and Canadian rummy, and they spoke in brief grunts of German and Salish. They seemed to understand each other perfectly well. I almost never saw Grandma smile, except when she won at cards, and then she gloated to her friend, lifting ceremoniously from her chair to dance a slow, clumsy schuhplattler, clapping and striking her thighs with those ferocious palms, stomping her big feet on the pine floor. The Syilx woman, Nicky, pretended to frown at this behavior, but when our glance met I could see the twinkling merriment in her eyes. They drank small cups of beer as they played and I liked to pour the beer for them. It was the color of gold and I made a show of recoiling from its dank smell even though I secretly found it warm and comforting.
One day as I poured Nicky’s beer, she told me in English that her daughter was getting married the coming weekend.
I asked if Grandma Ingrid was going to the wedding.
“Not invited,” Nicky said, and I laughed in surprise.
I thought she was joking.
Grandma said something in German and shrugged. She understood every word even if she refused to speak the language.
“But you’re good friends,” I protested.
“We’re good at cards,” Nicky replied, shuffling the deck. “But Ingrid’s settler blood. Like you. You are the uninvited.”
Grandma Ingrid drank her beer and dealt the cards, impassive. She was an outcast, a reluctant immigrant. It was fine with her if she was an outsider.
But I was troubled by it. I had been born here but my birth was a presumption. My home was in a region that my grandparents and great-grandparents had misshaped and bullied, that my parents and peers continued to bludgeon and disrespect. When I walked, I began to hear the very earth groan beneath my feet. What did it mean to be born white in this country, to speak a language germinated not here but overseas? To infest and control but to never belong or care for, like a parasite? What horrors had we committed, what horrors did we continue to commit, to the original inhabitants, Nicky and her kin? What have we done to their children, small and scared, like me? My skin itched. I scratched self-consciously at my elbow. Nicky watched my face and read the confusion and unwillingness floating there and turned away from me. I stewed in my discomfort. She flicked a card to Grandma Ingrid, one to herself, back and forth. They played long into the evening, and I fell asleep on the floor near the stove, only to wake later when Grandma Ingrid dropped a heavy blanket over me.
Usually if we stayed the night, Grandma tucked me into the big bed with her, while my father slept on a pallet on the floor. On her lumpy mattress, I lay on my side, facing the wall. She spoke to me in German and stroked my hair. I fell asleep listening to those sharp whispered words, the sound of her fingers against my skull like distant slicing blades. I dreamt of dark forests, wild dogs, long-clawed hags, cottages with candy-coated exteriors belying menacing contents: cages, skeletal remains, a hot stove reeking of burnt flesh, cutting boards strewed with bloodied fingers. I awoke once from such a dream to the sounds of the coyotes screaming, an accusatory ululation that reminded me of the faceless howls in my nightmares. I burrowed into the solid heat of my grandmother’s bulk, her blood warming my blood. Those girl-like screams held secrets in them, and if I listened carefully, I could harness their power.
One day in the middle of winter, when I was eight years old, Grandma Ingrid fell on the ice on her way to the hair parlor. A boy who witnessed it said the sound of her head hitting the sidewalk was like an axe splitting wood. He marveled over how she had convulsed for a few moments before going completely still. Father told me it was a blessing, her quick death. On the way to her modest service at Our Presbyterian, Mother muttered again about “Ma” Ingrid’s “foolishness,” as though foolishness had anything to do with dying.
To be fair, Mother disliked her own parents, too. Although Mother refused to speak of it, my father said her parents were harsh disciplinarians, religious to a fault. They had believed the world was in peril, on the verge of destruction. Mother found their endless discussions about Revelation and the battlefield of Megiddo tedious. She noted the flexing end-time predictions halfheartedly, while secretly certain they would never directly affect her.
One night, when she was sixteen, a boy my mother loved invited her to her first dance. For weeks she prepared for the event: buying a pretty red and maroon calico fabric, sewing her own dress, polishing her church shoes, buttering up her parents so that they finally allowed her to go. They agreed only on the condition that her mother would chaperone. On the night before the dance, she pinned her hair up in curlers and slept excitably with the pins stabbing her repeatedly in the skull.
I loved the details in this story and would always ask my father to repeat it. It was mythical, a creation story about my mother’s singular joylessness.
Finally the afternoon of the dance arrived. Mother combed out her beautiful chestnut curls and slipped into her pretty dress. It accentuated her waist and bust. She twirled in front of her brothers and sisters. They applauded, in awe of her transformation. She daydreamed about the boy she loved and imagined his expression when he first saw her. She supposed he would want to marry her on the spot.
Just as she was about to leave, someone knocked on the door. Her parents opened it with their usual modest hesitancy.
It was their preacher.
“It’s today,” he said gravely. “Gather your children. You won’t need any belongings. We’ll meet at the top of Golden Hill. I don’t need to remind you about the speed required.”
Her parents turned to their children with proud, eager faces. “Today,” they rejoiced. “Today, finally!”
The children tried to mirror their parents’ happiness, all of them except for my mother.
“Come now, come, get your shoes.”
My mother’s face reddened. “I’ll meet you after the dance, then.”
The blow her father gave her—hard across one ear—disturbed her hearing and balance for days following.
So she went and sat with them on the hillside in her good dress with her pretty curls, watching the sun go down over the little town and wishing savagely for the world to end the way the preacher said it would, but it didn’t, it only ended a little for my mother and for the boy she loved, who wouldn’t speak to her again after she stood him up. Hours went by and finally the preacher said, “God is good. He’s allowed the weak and evil to remain for now, in an attempt to save them. We will continue our work.” And just like that, they were dismissed. Her parents continued to worship as if nothing had happened, and they returned to the hill again and again and if they were disappointed with the absence of Armageddon, they never admitted it.
As all girls did, I wanted my mother to be happy. I tried to please her by being obedient. I helped with chores, anticipating her needs before they were spoken. I prepared meals and mended my own clothes. Talk of my visions upset her, so while I might burden Martha with them, I never mentioned them to Mother. Martha, not as dutiful or good of a daughter as I was, enjoyed lording over me what she saw as her superior sanity. She encouraged me to record my visions, and even went so far as to buy me a notebook from the drugstore. I wrote them down for her until I found out that she relished showing my words to her fri
ends. Everyone loved to gossip about Mad Mildred, even my sister. On certain nights when I awoke in the creek bed, having sleepwalked there with the zoetrope of my mind swirling, I returned home as silently as I could and dried myself off in the bathroom. Then I slid under the blankets, shivering with both the extent of my powers and of my loneliness. By my sixteenth birthday, I knew how to keep my mouth shut.
Then high school ended. Unlike the other girls, I didn’t get married straightaway or attend a vocational school. Not long after Father’s sudden death, I pushed Mother into the river. She survived, but her health was shaky. I became her caretaker. The dreams loosened their grip. Alone with Mother, my brain quieted. Even the passage of time froze, and every night when I slept, an empty blackness swallowed me whole. I aged without aging. It was a relief at first, to no longer upset people, to no longer see their life peeling away from them, but when I turned twenty I began to wonder if I’d lost myself entirely, as though my own potential had in some way been tied up in the vividness of those waking dreams and nightly pictures. The death of all dreams is what it felt like, both the good dreams and the bad. This was the reason I attended secretarial school, to try to jostle that part of me back to life. I stared into the faces of the other pupils, straining to read their future, but the trick no longer worked. The women blinked back at me, curious, unafraid. They were kind to me if indifferent. Maturity, responsibility, whatever you wanted to call it, had stopped up all of our fire.
Then, out of nowhere, I had my vision about Hanford, and the next day I applied for the Women’s Army Corps.
* * *
Now, on the bus, joggling toward my new life, my fire returned. My gaze flitted here and there like a dragonfly, and my line of sight shook just slightly at the corners, blessed with a renewed energy. I ground my teeth together with happiness. My jaw muscles ached.
Beth, my new friend, gave my forearm a squeeze and then withdrew her arm from mine. I was determined not to lose her friendship. I admired the dim bust of her profile against the white sky and sienna desert. The bus was hot, the windows thrown open. There was a good breeze but it was stitched with Central Washington’s dry heat. The underarms of my shirt dampened.
The bus accelerated and bounced over an enormous pothole. The woman ahead of me turned to face us. “I’ve bitten my damn tongue.”
“How wretched,” Beth cooed. “Not a smooth ride, is it?”
“You a nurse?” the woman asked. When Beth nodded, she said, “Me, too.” She put her hand out to us. “Katherine Berg. From Seattle. Just saw my mom in Ephrata. She thinks I’m a twit, leaving my job like I am, but I said, Look Ma, all the doctors are married in my ward, so it’s pointless to stay there.”
The girl laughed raucously. I didn’t like her. She was mean and coarse, not at all like Beth.
“Nice to meet you, Kathy,” Beth said. “I’m Beth and this is Mildred.”
Katherine narrowed her eyes at me. “You a nurse? You don’t look like a nurse.”
“I’m a typist,” I said. “I took a secretarial course in Omak. I was the fastest typist in the history of the course, teacher said.”
I hadn’t meant to gloat. It was fact, pure and simple.
Kathy sniggered. “You’re joking, right?” She looked to Beth, motioning to me with her thumb. “She’s bonkers, huh?”
Beth laughed her gay, ringing laugh and put an arm around my shoulders. “She’s perfect. She’s a doll.”
I thought of the dead sister, her ghost buzzing like a fly in her sister’s ear, the white noise of grief, and I didn’t mind her presence, so long as Beth’s affection toward me remained just as perpetual and constant.
Next to Kathy another girl shifted her shoulders and said, “Can you all pipe down? I’m trying to sleep here. I’ve got a horrible hangover.”
Kathy apologized loudly but then stuck her tongue out at the girl when she closed her eyes again.
“Look at these men,” she whispered to us. “We’re the only girls on board. Just the four of us.”
I could hear all of those men laughing and jostling around us, and I could smell them (wood, cigarettes, a raw muskiness). All of their conversations and attention pointed somehow at us.
“Look at you,” Kathy teased. “Blushing head to foot. Like you’ve never seen a man before!”
Beth patted my hand and said to Kathy, “Of course she has. Don’t be silly.”
“Of course I have,” I said dully, but the words were cement blocks in my mouth. “My father,” I began, but then I stopped, remembering my father’s effeminate shoulders and hands, the gentle way he carried himself. He was an outdoorsman, a hunter and a gardener, both, but Mother liked to say that she was more of a man than he was. A group of teenage ruffians in Omak had once bullied him about, and I’d seen that it would happen before it did, how they punched him around a circle they’d formed with their lean, tough bodies, and how he’d shrunk to his knees, shrieking for his life (and why didn’t I warn him? Was I mad at him that day? Was I too young and indifferent?). This event troubled him for years. He once asked me, deeply pained, “Why did they do that to me?” I’d said nothing; I was unsure. I worried he’d thought of it beneath the forsythia as he drew his last breaths. I hoped not.
“What about you,” Kathy said to Beth. “Husband hunting?”
“Not me,” Beth said. “I’m a widow. My husband died of influenza last January.”
I brought a hand to my mouth.
“Tragic,” Kathy said admiringly.
“This is a much-needed adventure,” Beth said.
That Beth had already gained and lost a husband was extraordinary. It mystified me, the intimacy of being married, of sharing a bed with a man, holding him, kissing him, feeling accustomed to all of his angularity and brawn. I grew a little nauseous, thinking about it. Maybe I was carsick. I’d never even seen my own parents touch. They slept in separate rooms all of my girlhood. I closed my eyes and breathed deeply.
“I’m serious,” the girl next to Kathy complained loudly. “Please. This headache.”
Kathy rolled her eyes dramatically and then blew us a little kiss and settled back into her seat.
“I’m not bonkers,” I whispered to Beth. “She smells like a whiskey barrel.”
Beth laughed. “She’s probably hungover, too. Don’t you worry about old Kathy. I won’t let anyone bother you. We’re going to have a golden time, you and I, Milly. Can I call you Milly?”
She’d already called me Milly half a dozen times. “Of course.”
“I’m going to make sure we’re assigned to the same barracks,” she said, growing very serious. “It’s so hard to meet sincere people these days. I won’t let them break us up.”
Gratitude tasted sweet on my tongue, extravagant like hard candy. I wanted to tell her how long it had been since I’d had a true friend, but, no, it was unnecessary. The friendship shocked me in its immediate affection. I gave myself over to her fully.
We curled up together like two cats, my head on her shoulder, her head on my head, and we rested, half-dozing, half-dreaming. I thought of my sister and my mother together, how worked up they must both be by now, and I stifled a sad little laugh.
“I’m so happy,” I told Beth. “This is the greatest day of my life.”
“I’m glad for you, Milly,” she said.
I was only slightly disappointed that she didn’t say it was the greatest day of her life, too.
Overhead the ghost of the dead sister dipped and danced, threaded to Beth’s throat by a fine fishing line of grief.
Beth nodded against my skull and our heads melded together, our brains seeping one into the other, lava flowing from ear to ear. I dreamt we became the perfect woman in just this way.
GLASS BOOTH
In Kennewick, I placed a call to Mother.
For a few moments she wailed incoherently into the phone.
I chewed on my cuticles and let her cry. Beth eyed me from afar, standing with Kathy at the bus terminal. Even stately
Beth looked small and fragile surrounded by the shoulders of a hundred men.
“Look what you’ve done,” Mother said. “You’ve gone and killed me. I can hardly breathe. I’m mid–heart attack as we speak.”
“I’m in Kennewick, Mother. I’m taking the bus to Hanford in thirty minutes. I called to remind you to do your exercises.”
“I won’t lift a finger for the rest of my life. I’m grieving, Mildred. I want to die. And you’ve gone and left me with Martha and her husband. He’s no better than a stiff at the morgue.”
“Be nice to Walter. You know how sensitive he is.”
“He’s a turd with legs.”
A man peeled away from a wall of bodies and approached the phone booth, grinning widely like he’d just heard a lewd joke. He was broad-shouldered and handsome. He reminded me of Susan Peters’s husband, Richard Quine. I’d seen Richard Quine in Jane Eyre. I thought he and Susan Peters made the most attractive couple. The tall man looked me up and down, leaning against the doorway of the booth as though he owned it. I flushed hot and tried to turn my body away from him, but the phone booth was tiny, and I smelled the man’s exhalation, mint and cigarettes.
“Almost done?” he said. “I’ve got my own people to call.”
I held a finger up at him, mouthing, One moment.
“Your sister wants to speak with you,” Mother said. “But I won’t let her, because she’ll just scare you away with her harpy’s voice.”
“I left a letter for Martha with instructions. I’m sure she’s already found it, because I put it with your aspirin, Mother. Please remind her about the calisthenics.”
My voice shook. The tall man half-smiled at me from the phone booth doorway. If he leaned in much farther, his lips would brush my forehead. I was an ant in his shadow. Behind him, Beth and Kathy watched us. Mean Kathy snickered and kind Beth’s brow furrowed with concern.
The Cassandra Page 3