My mother stands, shaken, while I finger my dress and pull clips out of my hair. I hum a song Cassidy and I used to sing. Cassidy’s car is in the driveway, engine cooling.
“Don’t worry,” I say. “I’ll be a good girl; I won’t scream.”
I’m fine, really.
“Where will your children sleep? I know your mother well and I can’t imagine she’ll let you leave this house. She’ll find some way to ruin this day, keep you here.” Cassidy is nowhere to be found, but Minnie is here. She snuck into the house and speaks to me from behind a shower curtain. She’s in my bathroom, in my house, and I nearly scream.
“You need to leave now,” I say, opening the door. “If Tim sees you here, he’ll freak.”
“Oh, honey. These aren’t the movies. I’m not going to come at you with a wig and a butcher knife. This is the only way I could see you without your mother interrupting things. Your mother’s a handful, but I guess you already knew that. And Tim, he’s always been stubborn. He takes after his mother that way.”
“What do you want?”
“You make a pretty bride. I wish my Tim could see you as I do, all dolled up, all knocked up—yes, I know.”
“Why are you here?”
“I baked you a cake.”
A knock at the door. A distant cousin tells me that the car is outside. We’re ready to go to the church.
“I’ll be there in a minute,” I say, locking the bathroom door.
Minnie pulls the curtain to one side and hoists herself up. “My back is killing me. All this money and you’d think you’d have a more comfortable tub, something that pulls away from the wall. Anyway, I knew your father back when he was delivering papers and cutting lawns. He was a good man, decent, but not a match for your mother. He didn’t come from much, and you can imagine your grandfather was none too happy to have his only remaining daughter—the prized calf—marrying a man who would simply be another mouth to feed. But no one else would take her. She was a strange type, but I guess you already know that too, and many felt the money wasn’t worth the trouble. But your father loved her, and she loved him, and it was all going to be a fairy tale tied up with a bow, but it ended up being a noose.”
“You’re not telling me anything I don’t already know.”
“Is that right? Ever ask yourself why your aunts just up and disappeared? How your grandmother died in this house only a few months after? They knew,” Minnie says.
Aunts, what aunts?
“They knew what?”
“What was going on in this house between your grandfather and your mother. They knew each other in a way that a father should never know his daughter, and if the grief and rage didn’t kill your grandmother, I’m sure someone in that house did. And when your mother got it into her head to disobey her father’s orders, practically threatened to run away, well, money and the man had their way. Imagine what your father must have thought when he heard all of this—his wife, lying in her father’s bed.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“No? Ask anyone in this town on your family’s payroll. The people who clean your house, launder your linens, and take out your trash, the invisibles, hear things. Ask Tim. Everyone knew, including his mother. What your family was doing in this house wasn’t right. When your father said he’d bring this whole charade down, tell anyone who would listen—God rest his soul, he was too naive for his own good—your grandfather told him things.”
“Told him what?” I say, impatient, uneasy.
“Your grandfather told him that the child Norah was carrying wasn’t your father’s. It was his. At first your father stayed quiet because how could he ruin the woman he loved, but knowing something like that changes things. Your mother couldn’t handle the way he looked at her. And then one day he died in a car accident. Or maybe a camera hit him? Who’s to say? It was convenient that you were both there, to watch.”
I shook my head.
“You don’t believe me? Ask Tim. His mother told him everything. He felt sorry for you. You were rich, but broken like the rest of us. Why did you think he was marrying you? Everyone loves a happy ending. He’s got it in that head of his that your child is going to make it right. Don’t you understand, Ellie? You’re the do-over.”
It’s only now that I realize I’m naked, covered in hives. Red patches that burn and itch. My wedding dress is on the floor, little clumps of my hair are on the floor, and Minnie takes this all in and keeps talking. I interrupt. “Why are you telling me this? Now. Right before I’m about to get into a fucking car . . .”
“Because that’s exactly why, Ellie. I’m telling you this because I want you to run as fast as your legs will take you. I have never liked your family, they’re horrible people, and I hate to see another generation ruined by what they own.” Minnie hands me a towel, not for my body, she says, but for the tears. “If I found out what I’ve just told you, I’d cry buckets.”
“You’d like to see my family miserable.”
“Are my motivations really relevant when you know the truth?”
The man I only remember from photographs, the man covered in wood and dirt, is not mine. My grandfather, my father. I clutch my stomach, my prison, and I collapse.
We sit like this for a few moments until my cousin knocks again. “Are you okay?” she asks.
“I’m okay,” I say. “A few more minutes.”
The cousin lingers. I hear her feet shift. “You can go.”
“I’d think twice about having that child. Listen to your friend. Make your own plans.”
“Get out of my house,” I hiss.
After the wedding, before I fall asleep in Tim’s arms, I palm my belly and whisper, “Kate. I think I’ll call you Kate.”
In the morning I tell Tim that we’re staying in Nevada. He says nothing and sits in my grandfather’s chair.
Later I slip into the basement. I cut the lights. I turn up the heat. I’m Ingrid again. Dangerous.
IN CASE OF AN EARTHQUAKE, REMAIN CALM
1977
“TELL ME THE story about the autistic girl lured into the men’s room in a gas station in Reno by a man with candy folded in his hand. When the men cover the girl’s body with a stained sheet, a reporter breaks down at the scene: her face is a tissue forever crumbling. The man, who cut the girl in two, wired flowers in her hair. ‘She smells like blood and old blankets,’ someone mutters. Or tell me that one about the couple who got crushed in an avalanche because they thought it romantic to picnic in a Sierra snowstorm. Open the door (slowly, slowly) to the bathroom to see a woman lying on the floor, her jaw broken in three places. Watch her husband crawl in and bite her toes in apology. The wife barely feels the peonies he hails over her swollen face. Show me the veil belonging to the girl pushed down the aisle to marry the man who stole her childhood from her. ‘Go,’ says the mother, who refuses to wince, even when the man puckers his fleshy lips, rubs his calloused hands. If I hold the lace between my fingers long enough, perhaps it will erase the shame we collectively carry. Perhaps it will undo the first and every hurt,” I say. I’m in the kitchen in the middle of the night, rearranging food in cabinets because this house. This fucking house. “I’m right here. Tell me all about it, Tim. Speak slowly. Convince me a love exists that isn’t a wound that never closes.”
“Ellie, you’re tired. Come back to bed,” says Tim.
“I’ve got a confession to make: sometimes I lie awake and imagine men burning. When I was small, I used to watch fires in the country. Back then we thought it smart to burn rather than rebuild.”
In the morning I shriek, “Why do you insist on hiding the matches from me?” I’m Ingrid in the basement again, and I’ve been robbed of light.
Later, a friend squeezes Tim’s arm and says, “Don’t you think it’s time you put her in some place?”
The women in white hats buckle me in and I yell, “Traitor.” “Snug like a bug in a rug, Ellie,” they pantomime. Everyone tells me that the shocks are fast, that I wo
n’t feel a thing. I laugh because I’ve been down this long road to the middle before, and I feel everything. My affection for metal becomes a hunger that the men with their clipboards and pens aren’t able to understand, much less diagnose. When I’m free to roam the halls, which I do as often as I can, I lick the undersides of tables. I bite down hard on metal carts and gnaw on lunch trays. As a result, I’ve been banned from silverware. Spoons are a delicacy and also my ruin. My world has been reduced to paper plates and plastic cutlery—for my protection, they say.
MORNING INVENTORY CHECKS:
—22 identical rooms in square footage and decor.
—44 blue sheets and white pillowcases with blue trim.
—88 towels, 2 for each of the wards, often restocked due to hangings, tears, and stains that can’t be bleached out.
—44 women, mostly girls, mostly brown-haired, wide-eyed, and moneyed. The girls are nervous, paranoid, angry, ambivalent, and fragile creatures. There are a few who refuse food or eliminate it. We only know of one—a winsome girl, barely out of her teens—who eliminated two children before they were born.
—44 men are to blame: fathers, sons, husbands, uncles, and brothers, who have signed us over. One Saturday a month they’ll bring us lilies (death flowers) and books we’ll never read. As if we need more propaganda.
Sometimes we trail the nurses as they make their counts. Some of us will shout out numbers to mess with them, but the nurses are unfazed by us and go on with their clipboards, pens, and endless boxes that require ticking. At night, they peer into our rooms with flashlights to make sure that we’re alive, that we’re still here. It’s funny, if you think about it. No one entertains the notion of escape because where would we go? We would be the nuisances on our families’ doorsteps, a nudge in the passenger seat, an elbow gripped and gently ushered back into our rooms where the sheets have barely cooled. The men are good at this, we realize, escorting women from one cold home to another.
Tim tells me that I’m here to rest. My family and friends repeat the word cure as if incanting a prayer, and I ask, “What’s my disease?” Shaking their heads, they don’t want to talk about a disease, per se; they just want me to rest. As if I’m a piece of china that could shatter and break.
“Well, then. Give me my fucking spoon and let me go to bed.”
The next day, a doctor says, “Let’s talk about your daughter. Kate.”
I haven’t told them about the incident with the bleach, but I suspect they already know. “Is this about the bleach? I assure you the burn was minor. Nothing more than a mild irritation.”
The doctor inquires whether I think it’s normal to bathe a child in bleach. “Get your story straight; I didn’t douse her in fucking Clorox. What do you think I am, crazy? What mother would bathe her child in bleach? Where I come from, they put you in the chair for hurting a child. Even in here, we despise women who eliminate.”
“Your husband found you cleaning your child in a sink, with the windows closed and the room smelling of bleach, Eleanor.”
“It’s Ellie, and my husband is dead in the head. Maybe I’ll send you an invitation to the exhuming.” I pause and consider my words. “It’s perfectly normal for a mother to clean her child. Perhaps we differ in our methods, but don’t judge the intent.”
“Do you consider yourself a good mother?”
“What does that even mean? A good mother,” I say. My laugh is a series of hiccups and snorts. “Does wiring me up like a car that won’t start make you a good doctor? Have you ever considered that the car doesn’t want to start? That all it wants is to be covered up and rolled into a garage?”
“Cars aren’t capable of emotion, Eleanor.”
I light a cigarette. I’m in custody. “Jesus Christ, how many times do I have to tell you? It’s Ellie. My name is Ellie. Ellie. Ellie.”
A nurse shakes me. It’s time for shocks again. My body is ravaged with sweat; everything clings in all the wrong places. My sheets are soiled, and next thing I know they lift me up (easy, easy, you got her too high). They strap me in, adjust the dials and read meters, and they tell me to bite down hard.
“Why should I bother telling you that my body and my name are mine, when you refuse to listen? When you laugh and say that I will always come from, and be delivered to, a man; my name is part of a male lineage, and my body a receipt of the transaction. My hair done up in the shape of a bow.” I say this to the nurses who chat among themselves, the women in white who ignore me so completely. I’m the mother who bathed her child in bleach. I am an inbred, daughter of a mother and her father. I’ve been put in this place—Isn’t it time you put her in some place?—by my husband, for my betterment, so that the doctors can scrub away the bleach and the inbreeding.
Tell me, do you think they’ve been successful? Am I clean?
What I hear, in the dark, after the shocks: The dreams I had. I dreamed someone was raping me. I think it was someone inhuman.
In the morning, I tell the doctors that they’ve got it all wrong; I don’t hate my daughter. There will come a day when I will have to hand her over, when she will emigrate from my husband’s house to her husband’s house, and her name will change and her body will breed, and on it goes. The incident with the bleach was my attempt to scrub the man out of her. Wipe the slate clean.
“Don’t you see?” I say. “The thing with the bleach. What I’m trying to tell you. What you need to know is this: I’m trying to get my daughter back to zero, but I ended up burning her. No one gets it; no one wants to.”
“You clean a child with soap and water.”
“Water,” I say. “Water. I’ll keep that in mind.”
How could I know that years later my daughter would cling to water and play with fire?
Months later, the doctors tell me I have a visitor. When I tell them that no, I don’t want to see my husband, and no, I will stab someone with a fork if they put me in a room with my mother (You know you’re no longer allowed access to utensils, Ellie, they remind me in a childish, singsong voice I’ve grown to hate), they interrupt my long list of refusals to tell me that my visitor isn’t a member of my family.
It’s Minnie.
“Jesus, kid. This is straight out of Cuckoo’s Nest. What the hell did you do to yourself? Why are you in this place?”
“I’m taking a rest,” I say, smoking a cigarette.
“People got beds in their homes for that. No one just checks into an asylum.”
“It was suggested that I needed some time apart from my family so that I could rest.” I’m starting to notice that my wrist twitches every so often. It’s replaced the way I used to pull at my hair.
“I remember your wedding.”
“Ah, yes. The day you ruined my life.”
“Your mother had a flair for the melodrama. You chose to stay in that house.”
“Why can’t you leave me alone?” I say. A bitterness edges into the spaces between the words.
“Because you won’t leave my family alone. Know that I am patient. I will wait. And know that no one in your family will be spared.”
Minnie watches me take my medicine. I smile and wave at her body gliding out of the door as I fall quickly to sleep.
This means goodbye.
MY PREGNANCY WAS nine months of torment. When Kate wasn’t practicing her in-utero karate, I could be found on the bathroom floor, sore and raw because my body had grown accustomed to expelling everything that entered it save the one thing that mattered, the one thing that needed to make the journey out. She was smart, this one, hurting from the inside.
I marked the time between breaths using a diamond watch that my husband wound around my wrist. “A little something,” Tim said, blushing, “for becoming a mother.” Confused, I wondered if the watch was a down payment for a life-long vocation of braiding hair, ironing dresses, packing lunches, and sitting through games, recitals, and minor victories that bored me to tears. Was I wrong for not wanting this? Was I cruel for desiring to hoard the on
e thing over which I had dominion: my time? I wasn’t ready to let it all go. Part of me wanted to hold on to my daughter for as long as I could, for I knew that her inevitable gushing out would also be my drowning.
Branded like cattle, I thought. They’re all waiting for me to push out the prized calf.
After Kate was born, Cassidy visited only once. Since high school Cassidy had been forever chasing smoke and dodging rabbits. Rolling a cigarette and licking it, she asked, “What’s it like?”
“What’s what like?”
“Being a wife, a mother. You’ve got all this love. Where does it come from?”
“How do you mean?”
Cassidy laid down her cigarette, let it ash all over the Formica. I noticed her hands, how small they were, how her nails had been gnawed to the quick. How they lunged for the cigarette and how her fingers curled and withdrew. I don’t smoke, never saw the glamour in it, only the rot, but I was fond of watching my best friend tangled up in her addiction. I didn’t tell her this.
“I always thought you got a finite set of feelings, you know? Like we have two hands and ten toes, maybe we just have the capacity to love, really love—over, under, and between the sheets, and under the skin—only a set number of people. It’s not the same for each person. It couldn’t be. Like my mother only having room enough in her heart to fill it with my father and herself. So by the time I came along, she was all tapped out. Drained, no refills, and I realized that was the kind of life I was likely to get. But it seems to me that you hit the lotto, Ellie. All these people and you somehow love them. Aren’t you ever terrified that you’ll hit your limit? That maybe the next kid you push out will have to fend for itself?”
Cassidy would live her whole life not knowing about me and my mother, about my time in the cellar, and her lying down, willingly, on her father’s bed.
Something within me rattled. In the other room, my newborn daughter was swaddled, sound asleep. If I strained, if I listened hard enough, I could hear her breathing—the steady calm of her inhales and exhales that reminded me of a metronome. A clock reminding me of the time she gains and the moments I lose, an exchange of possessive pronouns: mine, yours, mine, and yours. At night I lean over her crib and watch her sleep. And while I love this innocent, beautiful thing, I can’t help but look at her and think of her only as my subtraction. Me: a firmament no longer part of the sky. She: the eclipse.
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