Now, I close my eyes and feel the night, the stillness of it. A few blocks from the bar is a diner. I eat eggs off a white paper plate and leave a ten-dollar tip. When I leave, I see a man’s arms covered in scales. On the way back to the Motel Tonopah, I see snakes, so many of them, but I know it’s my head playing tricks and I crouch down on the curb of a street and make myself lose all the eggs. I press down on my stomach as if it’s a part of my body that doesn’t belong; I’d give anything for a pair of scissors or a steak knife. The eggs are still there and I need them gutted out. I require a scalpel and a knife; I need things to be removed. We all go a little mad sometimes. A couple passes and the woman says, “Look at that, will you? Woman can’t even hold her drink.”
Woman can’t hold anything, it seems. But I did hold Kate, until I couldn’t, and two years later my husband pried the bleach out of my hands. They didn’t understand how I needed to undo all of her history. Take back the years. I tried to kill my daughter; I tried to save my daughter. I don’t know what to think. For some reason I can’t get the smell of bleach out of my skin. Is this my haunting? Forever made to wear the perfume that imprisoned me, the smell I now associate with shocks? They tell you that you won’t feel a thing, only a jolt and the taste of metal in your mouth, like you’re sucking on coins, but they’re lying.
When I open my eyes I see Annie, proprietor of the Motel Tonopah, wearer of muumuus, and she says, “You ignored the signs.” She sits on the curb alongside me eating fried onions out of a paper bag.
“What?”
“The room,” she says. “I heard the flushing. It was like Niagara Falls in there.”
“That wasn’t me,” I say.
“I figured as much. Your friend’s got sass to her.”
“That’s one way of putting it.”
“Where you from?”
“There are a lot of snakes in this town.” The eggs are still in me, multiplying.
“By the looks of it,” Annie says, raising her eyebrows, “your friend is about to get acquainted with two of them firsthand. They even got her pushing that old jukebox.” She points to Cassidy trailing the two men from the bar. From the sidewalk I can hear her grunting as she drags a dolly holding the jukebox along the concrete. The men pass a bottle between them, walking ahead, and I open my mouth, ready to shout Cassidy’s name, but I don’t. I watch my friend, who is a little drunk and a lot lost, getting her hands dirty.
“I’m from my father’s house, my husband’s house, and sometimes a hospital, which is to say I don’t really know where I’m from. It’s still Nevada but far from this town.” After a time I ask, “Why do you have all those signs in the rooms?”
Annie laughs. “It started as a joke in ’69, but now it’s something that passes the time. It seems to me that all we have is time—that’s the one thing that can’t be taken from us.”
“Speak for yourself. I lost nearly a year of my life in a hospital.”
“You sick or something?”
“Some might say so. But I don’t know. All I know is that there was a time when I had a lot of pain and I didn’t know where to put it. I was supposed to have a version of a life, and then I started seeing things that weren’t there but were there, and one day I stood over my daughter in a sink with a bottle of bleach and I don’t know, even now, even after all this time, how I got there. I don’t remember the bottle or putting her in the sink. It was as if I’d been sleeping and I woke up and there she was, cold and crying. There was a window of time when I thought I was happy . . .”
Annie’s eyes are red and wide. “Some women aren’t built for children.”
“What else is there? Should I take up dictation? Or should I be like Cass, feeding off the remains of her father’s money? There is no life that isn’t in service of a man. There is no time my grandfather or husband hasn’t accounted for. There is only what you can endure, what you can bear, and sometimes it feels good to lose time, to not be here for any of it.”
“One morning, years ago, my daughter packed a bag with her shirts and shorts and a few sandwiches and got as far as the highway. It was the cars that scared her—the fear that one would hit her—that drove her back. We didn’t even notice she’d been gone until she came back, face full of dust, and said she’d run away. She was five. You don’t see the boys running. It’s always the girls.” A kind of clarity registers on Annie’s face as if I am a puzzle she’s suddenly pieced together. It’s the opposite of Cassidy and her confusion, but it’s still exhausting. It occurs to me that I don’t know why I’m here, only that my head hurts. I should be home with my child. The pain colors everything white. I can make out the shape of things: trees, car parts on the sidewalk, and Annie—the lump of her, the mess of her hair. Why is she here? What is she telling me?
“I don’t understand.”
“Sounds like you’ve had a rough time. Like somebody took you by the hair and rubbed your face into the world until you got the taste and feel of how things are. Why else would you be out here, alone, puking your guts out onto the street, and not over there with your friend?”
“What are you doing here?” I ask. The words, as they leave me, are sharper than I intended.
Annie points to the house across the street and says, “I live over there. Twenty-seven years in that house with two dead husbands, a father seeing his life at the end of a dribble cup, and four kids who know this town is as good as it’ll ever get. All I’ve got left are boxes in the attic, a life spread out across pages of a photo album, and a rundown, shit-bag motel where I get to practice my sadness and watch it play out like an old movie. Maybe you need to ask yourself, What movie I got playing in my head?”
“But this is real.”
“No, it ain’t. Let me give you a piece of advice, speaking from personal experience. Don’t betray your kin. Now I’m not talking about your husband—fuck your husband because they all run around on you or lie about it. I’m talking about your kids. Don’t do wrong by them, because it has a way of coming back to you.”
I heave on the sidewalk.
Annie shakes her head and sighs, “Go on home, girl. It’s about time we all go on home.”
Back in the room, Cassidy’s alone and she slurs, “Where the fuck have you been?”
“Out,” I say. “With Annie.”
“Who’s Annie?”
I point to the television that’s airing nothing but snow and say, “Front desk lady.”
Cassidy sits up; hair clings to her face. “I’ll tell you how my night went. Two men and me load a jukebox onto a truck. We drive to another bar outside of town. One of them buys me a drink, and they keep buying drinks until I black out, and then I wake up here in this room. They carry me in. They wrap my stomach with your Saran Wrap and they fuck me until my smoke burns down to the filter. They put on their pants, one pisses in the toilet, and then they go back to where it is that they’ve come from. And I’ll tell you about tomorrow. I’ll wake up and vomit into the toilet he didn’t flush while you play the rebellious Stepford wife who tries to forget that she almost bleached her kid. One of us will have a breakdown and then we’ll go home. Want to place a bet on which one of us will crack first?”
“You don’t know me,” I say.
“That’s the rub, Ellie. I know your kind. I know you.”
The next morning, Cassidy vomits and we pack without speaking. I return the keys to the office while Cassidy packs the car. When I reach for her she says, “Don’t.”
Behind the desk is a man that’s not Annie, not even close. “Where’s Annie?”
“Room number,” he grunts, and I realize it’s fat Fred from the bar.
“Where’s Annie?”
“Annie’s dead. Shot up her four kids last night and then turned the gun on herself.”
“That’s impossible,” I say. My hands start shaking. “I saw her last night, in the street, in front of her house. I talked to her.”
“Then you might want to talk to the police, lady. Room number?�
��
“Wait. What are you even doing here?” I shout. Shhh, sweet Kate. This won’t hurt one bit.
Fred laughs. “What am I doing here? What am I doing here? Well, little lady, this is a bit awkward, you see, on account of Annie being my wife.”
“Your wife?”
“I think you better go now,” Fred says.
I stand in front of the car. Cassidy’s inside. The engine runs. She leans over to the passenger side and says, “Get in.”
“Annie’s dead.”
For a moment Cassidy’s quiet. Then she gives me the blank stare, again. “What did you do?”
CONSTANT LAND MOVEMENT
1977
“STOP THE CAR,” I say. I gather my things from the back seat and lay them on top of my lap. I am not crazy. I didn’t kill Annie, proprietor of the Motel Tonopah. I’m just a sad woman who never wanted to be a wife, shouldn’t have been a mother, but now I have this child and Kate is what I will inevitably go home to. There’s one more trip I have to take before I make my reparations, before I take my pills and sleep through my waking life. This is the end of the line for Cassidy and me. “I’m leaving.”
“Quit the drama, Ellie. I’ll take you where you need to go,” she says, gripping the steering wheel.
“If you don’t stop the car I’ll jump out,” I say.
“And do what? Walk? It’s over 110 degrees out there. You’ll get burned.” Cassidy pulls onto the side of the road and cuts the engine. “This is about those guys last night, right? Why don’t we just get your judgment all out in the open so we can keep going like nothing happened.”
“You don’t like me very much, do you?”
“I never gave the matter much thought.”
“Why did you come for me? On my wedding day, at the hospital.”
“Because you’re the kind of woman who needs saving.”
“And you’re the one to do it.” I open the door and get my suitcase out of the trunk. The heat bears down on my back and I can feel my skin grow hot. I stand there, sleepless, with dust on my shoes. I’m ready to walk away. For a moment I think of Charlie Manson and his family. Is this where they went? Crawled back to a ranch in the desert, living among rusted railway cars, blackbirds, diamondback snakes, and prostitutes named Candy? Was it Cassidy singing off-key next to a beautiful ex-con, whose calloused fingers strummed Beach Boy songs on an old guitar? His eyes were the world she orphaned herself to. After bleaching her hair, did Cassidy tell him she was the sun? If I stand still long enough I can feel Cassidy trembling in the car.
Cassidy rolls down the window. “So that’s it? We have one argument and you take off? Where are you gonna go? Back to Tim, back to playing wet nurse? I’m all you have. I’m hope, Ellie.”
“You know, the day of my wedding I had a visitor, Minnie.”
“That crazy cake baker?”
“Oh, I think you know her better than that. She told me that I should listen to you. That I should make my plans.”
“What are you talking about?”
“So I’m making my plans.” I slam the passenger door hard, wheel my luggage to the gas station, and hitch a ride to the bus station, leaving Cassidy standing in front of her car, one hand shielding her eyes from the sun. Who knew this would be the last time we’d see one another? Who knew that in a few years’ time cancer would breed in Cassidy’s body, annihilating everything in its wake? Tim will tell me that she weighed seventy pounds when she died; she’d become a bag of rattled bones. All that beauty, unrecognizable, and all that hope stolen by cancer. I lie. I will see her one last time when my daughter is older and I lay wildflowers on Cassidy’s grave. The bunch is messy, prickly, and riddled with weeds—exactly what she would have wanted. I will see Minnie standing at a distance.
When I am old and gray with eyes drowning of sleep, I will finally feel the weight of Annie’s words hurtling back to me. I will lie in a bed and see my daughter standing over me. I will see her pry the bottle of pills from my hands. She will smell of butter and burned bread. I will see her hold a pillow over my face. I will hear her say, I’ve always loved watching you sleep.
Not yet.
It takes nearly three hundred and fifty miles to get to Bakersfield, and I’m awake the whole way. The bus rolls along Route 6, through the desert, past pickup trucks and men who chew tobacco in ten-gallon hats, and all I can see is the stretch of road ahead. Truckers honk as they race by, and the woman beside me occupies herself by knitting pink wool booties.
“It’s a bit warm for socks,” I say, by way of conversation, and the woman looks at me, looks at her socks, and resumes the needle clink.
“I have a daughter,” I say.
The woman glares at me and says, “What do you want, a medal? Can I get back to my business now?” Startled, I press my face against the glass for the remainder of the ride. When we leave Barstow, I see a hand-painted sign that reads, Everyone Who Passes through Here Gets Pulled Under. Cassidy used to tell me about her nightmares, how she dreamed of Indians in the desert.
We arrive in Bakersfield in the evening when the air has cooled down to hot. It’s quiet save for the sound of cicadas and the row of old men at the bus station spitting into tin cans. Inside, I ask the man who takes the tickets where I can find the nearest motel. Without looking up from his magazine, he points to a building across the road. “That’s the Bakersfield Inn,” he says. “Rooms are eight fifty a night. You go there and ask for Marla, and she’ll fix you up.” When I thank him he says, “You’re a long way from home.” And in this, we agree.
There are two lamps in the hotel room, and I turn them both on before I call Tim. Sobbing, he says he can’t do this on his own. He’s not built for it. A child needs its mother, not a grandmother who’s out to lunch and not taking any calls. “Your mother calls her Ingrid,” my husband says. “Who the hell is Ingrid?”
“Someone we used to know.” Delilah Martin: I’m scared that she’s going to make you crazy.
“When your mother’s not acting like Greta Garbo, she plays it like she’s got a bad case of amnesia. I swear, Kate and I will be in the room with Norah and she’ll act as if we’re goddamn strangers. Twice I had to call the doctor to sedate her. And this morning, she up and disappeared. Do I call the police? What the fuck do I do? I can’t take another day of this. Not another second. You have to come home,” Tim says, in a way that’s less of an order and more of a plea. He doesn’t mention the hospital and my jailhouse break, fearing, perhaps, that I’d never come home. I know what awaits me, what I’ll have to return to eventually—imprisonment: my daughter, that hospital, my life. But not yet.
“Call my grandfather. He’ll take care of it.” We are so far from that home Tim had made for us in Carmel. I need California; I need to see this through.
My husband sighs and speaks slowly, the way he used to right before the hospital. “Your grandfather has been dead for six months. I held your hand at the funeral. I don’t know what ideas Cassidy’s put in your head . . .”
“She’s gone,” I interrupt, but he’s not listening.
“But you have an obligation. You took a vow.”
“You know what they did. The things they put in my mouth. I can’t go back there.”
“Okay, no more hospitals,” Tim says. He’s crying. I can hear his halting breath over the telephone line. “Just come home, Ellie.”
“I’ve just got to do this one thing and I’ll be back tomorrow night.”
“Tell me where you are. I’ll get you on a plane.”
“I’ll call you when I’m done,” I say, and put down the phone. It’s only then that I realize I haven’t once asked about my daughter. The thing with the bleach, well, maybe it’s not as horrible as I thought.
After I’ve covered the bathtub with cling film, I step in, lie down, turn on the shower, and feel the waterfall cool on my back. I fall asleep to the sound of water. That night I dream about a man standing in front of a refrigerator; the light illuminates his body blue. He re
moves his belt and coils it in his hands. Outside there are horses. We are in Ireland, on a farm where the sheep and lambs are painted red. A fat woman punches her daughter in the stomach, yanks out her hair in clumps. The daughter whistles in my ear. I wake to the sound of my mother’s voice: We used to have another girl, but she died. We didn’t want to upset you.
I wake to a man shaking my shoulders. The room is a river. “What the hell is wrong with you, letting the water run like that? You could’ve died. You could’ve drowned.”
When I wake, I feel restless. I am the wound my mother keeps dressing.
HOW TO GRIEVE THE TERMINALLY ILL
2013
I ONCE PLUCKED out the eyes of all the dolls I owned because I couldn’t bear to have them as witnesses. I might have been ten, twenty-five, or thirty-two—at this point, does it really matter? I couldn’t allow the dolls to see me being driven away from my home when I was ten. They can’t see the years I spent baking cakes in my home because I found it difficult to make friends. And the dolls could never bear witness to my mother’s steady, heartbreaking decline: the thirty pounds skinned from Ellie’s already slender frame because cancer booked passage into her body and proceeded to breed.
Sometimes one needs to remove things.
I watch an interview with Charles Manson where he calls Ted Bundy a mama’s boy, not fit to roll with his tribe, because Manson can only stand people who can stand to be with themselves. Manson shouts: Who do you think I am, girl? If you can pick all the words of the vocabulary that your mother told you, who do you think I am? This is only a couple of hours. Can you imagine a couple of days with me? Manson pleads for more time.
Experts think Ted Bundy hated his mother. Reports say his mother was a prim, modest department-store clerk who bore Bundy out of wedlock. He grew up in a home where he’d sometimes see women tossed down flights of stairs if they overslept. As a child he was horrified. As an adult who had been betrayed by his mother and first love, robbed of his identity and manhood, he understood hate. Women needed to be taken, possessed. Women required instruction.
Follow Me into the Dark Page 15