Becoming Lin

by Tricia Dower

  “Blinders. So they don’t get spooked by cars or other carriages coming up their side.”

  “Would you like to go around like that? It’s mean. They shouldn’t have to pull us all over the place like slaves, either. I’d rather ride a merry-go-round.”

  He bows and kisses her hand. “Then so you shall, my queen.” He phones the concierge and learns Central Park’s carousel is closed until tomorrow morning.

  “Feel like dinner?” she says. “All I got at the reception was that revoltingly sweet cake you jammed in my mouth. My stomach will sound like a tuba soon.”

  “I thought I fed you quite delicately.”

  She senses a lighthearted difference in them already. Her husband. His wife.

  The dining room sizzles with chandeliers as big as boulders and sparkly as diamonds. It’s surprisingly hushed considering the crowd. They’re lucky to get a table at half past seven. She can’t recall ever eating dinner after six.

  He opens the heavy menu and says like a big shot, “Order anything you want.”

  Aunt Libby said to eat lightly so she wouldn’t be gassy later.

  She orders hearts of palm salad. He orders beef Wellington, well done.

  A bow-tied waiter delivers their meals on gold-rimmed plates. Hers shows off more gold with only a few green leafy flourishes, white slices of what she assumes is palm and strips of something red on it. The monogrammed silverware feels heavy as lead.

  “Is that enough for you?” he asks.

  “Oh, sure.” Assuming he doesn’t scarf down the whole basket of rolls.

  “I don’t recall meeting your friends at the reception,” he says. “Was I that out of it?”

  Her last so-called friend, the contemptuous Arlene Varga, wouldn’t have believed she could nab such a prize. “I don’t have any friends,” she says. Palm tastes crisp as a pickle.

  He looks baffled at first then laughs as if she’s joking. “I think the point of an intimate relationship is to see someone else and be seen, to understand deeply and be understood. It’s the nearest we get to God’s love on earth. Don’t you agree?”

  She can’t fathom what he means enough to agree or disagree. But she doesn’t want to be cracked open and dissected. If he were to see all she is, he wouldn’t be able to stand it. “Does there have to be a point?”

  The red stuff is pimiento.

  “I believe so. Carl and I didn’t plan to get as close as we did but it was either that or abandon each other to soul-destroying loneliness. I don’t want to go through life alone.”

  She strokes the flat back of his wrist, considers impaling one of his roasted potatoes. “Well, now you don’t have to. But there’s nothing special about me to understand.”

  “Au contraire. How you see the world, what you believe, what’s happened to you and how it’s affected you? I want to know all that.”

  Au contraire? He slays her. “I don’t have your high-class taste in music.” She reaches for a roll. “I still go dreamy over the Platters. That the sort of thing you want to know?”

  He grins as if the Tooth Fairy left him a dime instead of a nickel. “It’s a start.”

  6

  Tavis directs Bert and Ernie like a traffic cop.

  It doesn’t take them long to lug in the card table and four folding chairs Ron let her bring, the bentwood chair she rocks her little guy in when he looks defeated, a coffee table, Tavis’s toy box, the red dresser they’ll share and garage sale junk: a black metal TV tray, pine bookshelf, ironing board, one squat lamp to hide the TV tray’s gaudy roses, a Danish pole lamp for reading. A dozen or so boxes of kitchen stuff, books, clothes and that’s it. Ron wouldn’t let any furniture from Tavis’s room go except the toy box. He wants Tavis to feel at home when he stays with him, as at home as possible without his mommy to tuck him in. “You can’t blame Ron,” Daddy said. “This wasn’t his idea.” His temporary separation from Mother fifteen years ago still stings him. He loaned her the money for the movers, a new bed for Tavis and the hide-a-bed.

  Lest Bert and Ernie pity the ebb in her tide, she lifts her chin and says, “Did you notice the pool?” She roamed the parsonage like a phantom for weeks, taking leave of the few objects she coveted: the double sink, dark planked dining table, kaleidoscopic rag rug, ponderous oak desk, orange chenille bedspread, parrot lamp. She refuses to feel deprived. No church committee will rearrange the furniture here while she’s away.

  Setting up Tavis’s frame and headboard isn’t in the price. Bert and Ernie do it anyway, apologizing again for the grease stain they’ve managed to lift off the hide-a-bed with a magic potion. Lin chose the black and white houndstooth fabric because a dozen or so years ago Sandra Dee modeled a houndstooth coat in Seventeen, symbolizing all that was out of reach for a fat Linda Wise. A McCall’s article urged making a bold statement when decorating. Stark houndstooth against gold carpeting makes such a statement, she thinks, trying to judge with an unbiased eye. Is the coffee table too bold? She bought it unfinished and painted it and the dresser red in the basement, grabbing moments when Ron was away, trying not to let him see her excitement about leaving.

  A rat-a-tat-tat on her open door. A voice as jarring as a needle scraping a record. “Everything okay?” Lenny has arrived with his clipboard and inspection sheet.

  “So far,” she says in a breezy tone masking her resentment at having to let him in. When Bert and Ernie make a move to leave, she shifts her eyebrows up and down in a desperate SOS, asks them to hang on a few more minutes. On the pretext she needs his help, she rousts Tavis from his room where he’s installing a Matchbox parking lot. The movers grab a smoke on the balcony. She hustles Lenny along, encourages Tavis to point out scratches on the walls.

  In the two hours since she last saw him, Lenny has adopted a swagger and doused himself with cologne that nearly gags her. Smiling too much, he tests the air-conditioning wall units in the living room and Tavis’s bedroom, flushes the toilet, turns on the taps and opens the fridge. “Light works. Aces.” He straightens the stove with a wooden shim from his back pocket. “You’ve got the new fancy-pants model,” he says. “That and the fridge. Harvest Gold they call the color. Did I tell you that already?”

  “Yeah.” More than once when she and Ron toured the place.

  He plants a business card on the fridge under a magnet listing emergency numbers. “Call day or night if you need me. The office number rings into my unit.” His eyes, so pale a gray they appear colorless, stare at her long enough to make her squirm.

  After Lenny and the movers leave, Tavis retreats to his parking lot. Lin plunks herself down on the hide-a-bed, forlorn and barefoot, and stares into alien air, the place more warehouse than home, boxes harum-scarum, nothing in its proper place. It’s as if she’s left her whole identity behind. Lenny’s cologne lingers, like the scent of a dog marking his territory. She cracks open the balcony door to let it out. Hoping books will snug up the room, she unpacks her dictionary, thesaurus and college texts, her Dr. Spock, Tavis’s Ping, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, The Lorax, Saint George and the Dragon and other books she’s read to him so often the pages are worn. One box holds the journal she started a week after her wedding and has concealed from Ron all these years, her childish, loopy writing filling fourteen composition notebooks, each black with a marble design on the cover like the ones she used in grade school. She hasn’t read them in ages, afraid she’ll find them puerile. She plucks out a notebook at random and riffles through it, lands on “Watched the election results last nite in stupefied silence. That bigot Wallace carried 5 states.”

  Tavis’s hand on her shoulder startles her. “Mommy, Tavis is hungry.”

  “Of course he is.”

  She unearths dishes, fixes him a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, fills his neon green Underdog cup with apple juice, dumps half a can of lima beans into a bowl for herself and sits with him: their first meal in their
new home. A cloth over the phony leather tabletop would make it fancier but she doesn’t have one. She slowly sucks the salt off the lima beans. He gobbles his sandwich like a starving refugee. “Tavis wants to go home.”

  “No talking with food in your mouth, okay? This is home for a while. It’ll look better when everything’s put away.” She wants to say, I’m your home no matter where we are.

  He slides off his chair. “Tavis wants to play with the boys.”

  “Later, snicker doodle.” She’s glad he’s found playmates but doesn’t want to lose him to them so fast. “Let’s fix up your room.”

  “Tavis first,” he says and leads the way. She whispers a hooray for short attention spans.

  He asked the movers to set up his bed beside the window so he could kneel on it and look outside. One wall holds the red dresser, another the toy box Ron painted a tender blue. While she unpacks clothes, Tavis hunts for a carton on which he claims his daddy drew a big black star. He finds it with a great yippee and she snips the tape. He digs out two small pictures in pewter frames, sets them on the dresser. One is a photo she snapped last year: Ron straddling a long sled, grinning, an apple-cheeked Tavis between his rangy legs, both ready to scream down St. Olaf’s Old Main Hill. If she took it out of the frame, she’d find “my boys” penciled on the back.

  The other is a print of Jesus surrounded by children who look more like WASPs from Iowa than Jews in Galilee. “Jesus loves me, right, Mommy?” Given all the dead Vietnamese children, she hates indulging such a fantasy but lets it go this time.

  “Why wouldn’t he?” she says and wrestles him squealing to the floor, just to get her arms around his precious little body.

  7

  Aunt Libby said don’t make matters more challenging with panties.

  In a bathroom big enough to waltz in, Linda slips into the flimsy white nightgown and peignoir she received at a mortifying affair at which she had to wear a hat made from a paper plate and bows. The nightgown covers the wormlike corset grooves on her torso and the purple stretch marks from gaining and losing so much weight. It holds her inflamed breasts like a compassionate sling. She brushes her teeth in a gold-plated sink with a swan-necked faucet, pops out her contact lenses but leaves her make-up on. She isn’t ready for Ron to see her naked eyebrows and lashes. There’s no lying down on a French twist, though. She yanks out a dozen bobby pins and brushes her spray-fried hair as best she can, cups her hand against her mouth to test her breath. Her heart thumps so fiercely it aches.

  When she emerges, he’s facing the window. His reflection and that of the only lit lamp in the room float in a pool of black. “Come here, darling,” he says without turning. He’s never called her that before and it feels ominous. The thick white carpet whispers under her bare feet. When she gets close enough to see him well without her contacts, he’s all shoulders and elbows, tan pajama bottoms riding low on his skinny hips. His face is solemn, his chest not as furry as she dreaded. He brings her hand to his lips, says, “You must’ve worried yourself sick about how to tell me. The good news is you don’t have to. Roger did after the reception.”

  “Told you what?”

  “How that goon molested you.” He says molested as if repressing a shudder. “How courageous you were to testify against him.”

  His words sweep over her like a cold wind. She pulls her hand away, steps back. “That wasn’t his story to tell.”

  He reaches out to stroke her face. She steps farther away.

  “Sweetheart, he was being kind. Far better I know now than to hear from some parishioner stumbling across it some day. It’s a matter of public record. He showed me newspaper clippings, was surprised someone at church hadn’t already told me.”

  “He kept clippings?” A bitter taste, like tea steeped too long, backs up and sears her throat.

  “I understand your not volunteering it, I do. But we can’t have secrets from each other.”

  “Are you scolding me for holding on to my dignity?” Her reservoir of anger is deeper than she thought possible, the distance between them suddenly impassable.

  “No, no. I’m saying this all wrong if that’s what you think. I only want you to know you don’t have to hide anything from me.”

  “What if I want to hide it from me?”

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “I got into a stranger’s car because I was hot and tired, had never been in a convertible and thought it would be rude to say no when he offered me a ride. Why would I haul out the memory of my stupidity and stare at it? He said his name was Georgie Porgie and I believed him.” The courtroom erupted into laughter when she identified the defendant as Georgie Porgie. The judge had to bang his gavel.

  “Darling, you were fifteen.”

  “A month shy of it, actually, if we’re going for accuracy.” Emotions attack her like quick strikes of lightning. If she had Mother’s three-pronged fork she’d hurl it. “He ignored my directions home. I tried to escape at a red light. The handle on my side was missing. He reached over and crushed me to him. His arms were like Popeye’s. I screamed for help but the wind must’ve taken my voice.” He looked harmless as could be in the courtroom in a navy blue suit, white shirt and striped tie, gave her a sweet smile when she pointed him out.

  Ron blinks rapidly. “You don’t have to go through this again.”

  “What did the clippings say?”

  “I didn’t have time to do more than skim them while Roger and I changed our suits.”

  How dare Daddy? Her fury is a burning coal she can’t let go of. “I’ll tell you what they probably said. That the defense attorney argued it was hard to imagine such a heavy girl going through the gyrations in the front seat of a car Miss Wise described in her testimony.”

  She was blind with humiliation at the trial, tears bleeding down her face onto the coal-black pity tent of a dress Mother had made for her. Then seeing her for the first time in five years, that stupid, slutty girl Eldon Jukes had apparently married as some cruel joke on Linda. Tereza, who’d lived across the street from her for a few months when they were kids, grown-up at the trial, her tiny body in a tweed suit, her arms holding a baby, and Linda, fat, ungainly and alone. Even now the injustice and indignity of it fill her with murderous rage.

  “His wife lied about him being with her that night,” she says. “The jury believed her and his lawyer and let him go free. I wasn’t fat when I got in his car. I ate myself into a blob after that.” She’s crying now, fist in mouth, warm tears spilling down her knuckles. He reaches out a hand and she backs farther away, doesn’t want him to hold her shaking body. Damn Daddy for making her a victim in Ron’s eyes.

  He runs his hands through his hair. “We need to pray about this.”

  She hugs her chest. “And you know what?” She’s back in a windowless, stuffy room in a police station staring at a knife glinting under a fluorescent light, feeling hemmed in by expectations, her legs trembling, Daddy’s arm around her shoulders,

  “What, darling?” Ron says. “Do I know what?”

  She looks up and, for a moment, is almost surprised to see him there. “The trial came too late for a girl they found in the woods he took me to. The police figured she was killed with the same knife he pulled on me.” She studied the weapon on the table but couldn’t remember if Georgie Porgie’s knife had been single bladed like the one in front of her or double bladed, if it had been shorter or longer. She couldn’t identify it with any certainty. Couldn’t even do that. “She had twenty stab wounds.”

  “How awful,” Ron says.

  She shakes her head. “I did everything wrong and didn’t die. What right do I have to be alive?”

  “It’s obvious, my love. God was watching over you.”

  She slams her palm against the wall so hard he recoils. “What god saves one girl over another? Help me understand that, please.”

  He sh
akes his head. “I’ve made a mess of this.” He closes his eyes, folds his hands. “Dear God who heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds, heal your daughter, Linda Marie Brunson, so she’ll stop punishing herself and joyfully accept your gift of life.”

  Who does he think he is? She hasn’t asked for his prayers. She turns from him, seeking a hiding place and, in the window’s mirror, glimpses a pitiful, seething wretch who has exposed too much neediness. She crumples to the floor like tinfoil, slumps against the flocked wallpaper. How foolish to assume she could escape her past, to think dishonor wouldn’t follow her into marriage.

  He’s still talking. “Thank you for preserving her from a violent man with evil in his heart.” She recognizes the words then. Ones he whispered on the train. He must’ve been talking about Eldon Jukes. An emotion shifts inside her, a longing to leave this pain behind.

  A violent man. Yes, but he didn’t kill Tereza. And their child must’ve roused some tenderness in him. With evil in his heart. She doesn’t want to believe in evil, despite what the Bible says. Doesn’t want to believe even one child she knew at the home for delinquent boys could’ve had evil in his heart.

  “Grant me the wisdom to be your instrument in her healing.”

  Ron’s long, bony feet are inches from her, black hair curling on the toes. She hasn’t seen them bare before, stares at them stupidly. The pinky toes turn in as if a genetic code went awry. They move her for some reason. She wants to comfort them. She wants to be a healing instrument, too. The muscles in her jaw soften, surrender. Her heart pleads: Look at this brilliant, holy man who loves you. How lucky you are to be alive. A gift, yes, of course it was.

  She releases the burning coal, struggles to her feet and covers his hands with hers.

  His eyes when he opens them are wet. “You must be exhausted,” he says.

  “Yes.” So tired she could melt. And hungry, any fuel from the paltry salad depleted.

  “Me too. Let’s just lie quietly together, okay?”