Becoming Lin

by Tricia Dower

  She should’ve had the beef Wellington.

  The curvy, gilded headboard looks right out of a French museum. She drapes her peignoir over a ritzy bowlegged chair and slides onto the thick mattress. The cool, silky sheets send a violent shiver through her. Ron goes up on his right elbow and pulls a soft champagne-colored blanket around her shoulders.

  “At the woods he turned off the engine,” she says to the fancy tin ceiling in a quiet voice. She’s calmer now, almost a bystander observing the girl in that car, curious and anxious to help but no longer in danger. “The top was down. Imagine kidnapping somebody with the top down and getting away with it. I stood on the seat to climb over the side. He yanked me back.”

  “Shh,” he says. “It’s over now. Don’t torture yourself. Try to sleep.”

  He turns out the lamp. The tin ceiling disappears.

  She’s not torturing herself. The memory has stalked her like a feral cat. This is the first time she’s stared it down with anyone beside her. Maybe some day she’ll tell him what haunts her most: that for months before the assault she’d obsessed over boys in school like a dog in heat. “Georgie Porgie” Jukes might’ve smelled it in the air and thought she was as much on the prowl as he was.

  She turns and loops an arm over Ron’s bare chest, sending her nightgown on the creep. Georgie Porgie shoved her dress to her waist, his breath on her face as sour as spoiled milk. She finds Ron’s mouth, tastes pepper. He pulls her to him and she meets his hardness. His heart thuds so strongly it might as well be hers. Georgie Porgie’s weight pressed the air from her lungs as he rose and fell against her. When she felt a sticky warmth on her leg she clamped her teeth onto his shoulder. He whipped out the knife, licked it against her throat and said, “Beg for your life.” She spit in his face instead. He took her home.

  “We don’t have to do this,” Ron whispers.

  “I want to.” She needs to end the anticipation, needs to know he wants to be inside her.

  His hands are gentler than Georgie’s, his fingers affectionate as he strokes her shuddering thighs and coaxes her open. Too late she remembers the towel Aunt Libby suggested. It’s sudden: the pain, his sweat, a slickness between her legs and a smell evoking that day, a smell she scrubbed off so hard her skin bled. A sharp cry escapes her throat. He says something panicky in a voice thick as fog to her faraway ears.

  He pads to the bathroom and back, stuffs tissues between her legs, clicks on the lamp. Light bites her eyes, spills onto her crotch. She tugs her nightgown down. Staring at the tissue he’s used to clean himself, he asks in halting words if it’s that time of the month. She tells him bleeding is normal the first time and he says, “But I thought…” She inches over on her back and bottom, peers at where she’s been lying. Not a wide spot but embarrassing all the same. She creeps farther and drops her feet to the floor, squeezing the tissues between her thighs, asks him to help her take the sheet off. “They won’t be happy if we stain the mattress.” She tries standing and her legs give out. He dashes around, lifts her up and back onto the bed, kneels beside her, his nakedness startling in the light, his eyes anguished. “Roger said you were raped. I thought that meant…I must have misunderstood. What can I do?”

  Help me forget. Turn back time. Love me forever. “Feed me.”

  Room service is closed. She’ll take anything, even a hot dog from a street vendor. He asks what if the bleeding gets worse while he’s gone? She assures him she’ll be fine. After he leaves, she tests her legs. They ferry her to the bathroom where she pees at a stinging price and washes. Mascara has given her two black eyes. She scrubs the mattress, covers it with a towel, lies down and mulls over what she was too astonished to respond to earlier, that Daddy told him she was raped. Is that how he defines ejaculating on a girl’s leg? Her testimony was clear: there’d been no penetration, another humiliation so deeply buried she can barely exhume it. Why didn’t he want her that way? Mother believed her testimony. So did Aunt Libby. Yet the jury didn’t find Eldon Jukes guilty of doing anything at all to her.

  Does Daddy believe he did more than she testified he did? Surely he doesn’t think she’d lie under oath. Wouldn’t suggest to her new husband she did.

  8

  “Hey, lady, you look splashy. I should’ve changed too.” Angel is still in smock and leggings, still barefoot.

  Fearing she’s committed a social faux pas by dressing for dinner, Lin fibs about having gotten grimy during the move, trots out a variation of “this old thing’’ by confessing she got her outfit at a rummage sale for a buck-fifty: black capris and a long-sleeved harlequin top in traffic-light colors, a lurid, stupid choice it occurs to her now. She looks like a court jester.

  “Don’t you just love a bargain?” Angel says. “Come in, come in.”

  Lin and Tavis jettison their shoes in the entry beside two pairs of Lilliputian sneakers. They could’ve gotten a ground floor with a patio like Angel’s but Ron claimed it would be too easy to break into. Could be in a two-bedroom like Angel’s if Lin didn’t have to budget for a garage—the aging Fury can’t face a winter outside. Except for the bedlam of GI Joes, mail and magazines, the living room is a little girl’s fantasy: white wicker furniture with rose and beige cushions, prints of nautilus and scallop shells on the walls, a gold-saddled white horse that could have danced off the carousel in Central Park, gauzy white shears across the sliding glass door.

  Angel swings Tavis up on the horse and he grips its braided brass rod. Anthony and Matty sprawl on the floor, Anthony lost in a comic book, Matty coloring. They look up eventually and squint-eye the Matchbox case Lin holds for Tavis. She doesn’t offer them a look lest Tavis throw an “It’s mine” fit. Warm creamy light streams through the patio door while a spasm of envy convulses through Lin. How long does it take to create such a homey place? She hasn’t seen a palm tree since her honeymoon, as improbable in Minnesota now as it was in New York then. She asks Angel if it’s real.

  “You’d think so, yah? It’s silk, a gift from my friend Charles. He sends me stuff I wouldn’t in a million years buy, like the horse.” She bounces as if on springs to the six-foot tree beside the patio door, strokes its deep green fronds. “I’ve been trying to figure out who you look like and it’s Mia Farrow. The wide-spaced eyes, the pixie cut. Did you see Rosemary’s Baby?”

  Lin couldn’t have been seen attending a movie about devil worship. “No, I just wanted an easy hairdo.” It ended up shorter than she’d wanted, made her look unfinished, which, the longer she thought about it, felt right. She joins Angel at the palm, touches the uncannily realistic trunk. “My place could use something living besides us.” She already misses the Christmas cactus and jade spilling over their pots in the parsonage kitchen. “I wonder how a real tree would do inside.”

  “We can haul this one up tomorrow so you can at least see how it looks. It’s surprisingly light. I had to try it in several places before it worked.”

  “Before it looked right?”

  “Before I felt little bubbles, like carbonation, of Charles’s consciousness. Have you ever noticed a gift carries the electromagnetic energy of the person who gave it to you?”

  Lin says, “Can’t say that I have.” Angel might be a little “out there” but right now she seems more fun than dangerous.

  Anthony switches on the TV and Tavis says, “Tavis wants down.” Lin lifts him off the horse, hopes Anthony hasn’t selected a program she wouldn’t allow.

  “Does he often speak of himself in third person?” Angel asks.

  “Yeah, I don’t know why.”

  “Maybe you speak of yourself that way. Easy to do. Mommy this, Mommy that.”

  Her face goes hot. How embarrassing a stranger has to point it out. She feels a gust of anger at Ron and his mother for not catching it, a belated twinge of self-reproach. All those books she’s read.

  Tavis takes the Matchbox case from her and holds it out to t
he other boys as if in supplication. Anthony and Matty remove every tiny vehicle from it. Tavis hangs back, fascinated or intimidated. He’s played with kids in Sunday school but rarely in their homes. Lin has avoided getting chummy with women in church lest she say something that reflects badly on Ron. The closest to a best friend she’s had as an adult is Helen, wife of Ron’s prison farm cellmate and best man. Helen and Carl took off two years ago to parts unknown. Helen’s grin arrives in Lin’s memory like a luminous hug she didn’t appreciate enough.

  Angel waves her into the kitchen where she’s making what she calls Screwy Spaghetti. She asks if Lin is putting Tavis into Tree House Kids, says Matty’s there all day, Anthony before and after school, claims they like it. “So far the staff hasn’t beat them to a pulp or left them out in the rain.” She snickers. “Look at your face. That’s a joke. You’ll get used to me.” She plops a frozen chunk of sauce into a pan. “If our idiot president hadn’t vetoed childcare last year, it would cost less. We’re terribly behind other countries. Mind making a salad?” She points Lin to a teak bowl, knife and cutting board, calls Anthony to set the table, starts filling an enameled pot with water. The TV drones on behind little boy vroom-vroom and car-crashing sounds. Lin finds lettuce, tomatoes and celery in the fridge, clears a space on the chaotic counter, asks where Angel works as a nurse.

  “Nowhere. I quit when my live-in sitter jilted me. I was on nights, couldn’t get decent shifts that would work with the boys.” She sets the pot of water on the stove, ignites the burner, doesn’t seem to mind that Anthony is placing the forks on the wrong side. “Pharma Labs was looking for former nurses. I’m a drug pusher now.”

  Lin laughs. “Another joke, yeah?” Ron says she has a frail sense of humor, takes everything too literally. She cuts a tomato, trying for eight identical wedges.

  Angel stabs at the frozen sauce with a knife as if she’s making an ice fishing hole. “Not really. I push drugs and med equipment to doctors and clinics. It pays better than nursing if I make quota and I don’t have to get intimately involved with the bodily fluids of strangers. Beating quota earns catalog points for stuff like that”—she waves her knife at the salad bowl. “How ’bout you?”

  “I start at Lutheran Protection a week from Monday writing letters to customers. Not sure what it involves.” She smells garlic, is surprised to feel hungry as a child. “This small enough?”

  Angel peers over at Lin’s chopped celery. “Perfect. Lutherans breed like mosquitos in Minnesota. Everybody, including me, has a policy with LP. How’d you get the job?”

  “A friend of a friend runs an employment agency on Fourth Avenue.” She tears lettuce into the bowl. “Older woman, kindly. She gave me an IQ test and said, ‘Do you type?’ They have an agreement with Lutheran Protection to refer promising people even if they don’t have a job opening to fill.”

  “Lucky break. What’d you have to promise?”

  Lin looks up, confused.

  Angel grins. “Joke. So do you type?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What were you doing before?”

  Lin hesitates, looks down. “It’s kind of complicated.”

  “Sorry.” The light goes out of Angel’s voice. “I didn’t mean to be nosy.”

  “It’s okay,” Lin says but Angel has pressed her lips together. Rotini rattles out of a box as she dumps it into boiling water. She steps back from the steam. Lin’s heart caves inside her chest. She wants to say, I’m not good at this friendship thing. She’d love to rewind the moment, find the courage to answer Angel’s question and waltz back into the easy feeling she’s had so far this evening. She dumbly watches the rotini cook for what feels like forever then touches Angel lightly on the arm, asks what she meant this afternoon about single moms acting out scripts.

  Angel sighs as if trying to decide whether to answer. Then, “That’s Rhonda-speak. She says we take on distinct roles in various scripts in multiple realities. Only because we focus on one particular script do we believe it’s all we are.” She pulls four chartreuse melamine bowls from a cupboard. “A single mom might be playing abandoned lover, struggling provider, helpless waif, that sort of idea.”

  Anticipation rises to Lin’s throat. “Is Rhonda a transactional analyst?” A year ago Lin took a workshop based on Eric Berne’s Transactional Analysis in Psychotherapy that introduced her to the idea that roles and scripts can rule your life. It transformed the way she saw herself.

  “I doubt it. She’s a disembodied spirit that comes through a medium named Jackie.” She drains the rotini and dumps it back into the pan, bloodies it with the sauce.

  “I’m lost.”

  “Yah, well, that’s complicated, too. Mind getting the boys to the table?”

  Angel spends all her attention on the boys during the meal, asking them questions, encouraging their awful knock-knock jokes. It’s as if the sun has turned its back on Lin. Garlic stings her tongue like a reprimand. She stares at Angel’s tulip-red toenails through the round glass table and misses Helen. “I was a minister’s wife before,” she whispers to Angel on the way out. “It was my decision to leave and I’m feeling stupid and small.”

  “Oh, sweetie,” Angel says and gives her the most forgiving hug.

  Back in 205, Lin trades contacts for glasses, the purple frames with rhinestones on the arms and swooping top edges hot stuff eons ago. Tavis, perching on the edge of the tub, cackles like Simon Bar Sinister and says “Catnip!”—Ron’s name for her when she wears the glasses. She didn’t bank on the little guy bringing so much of his father with him, gives him a tired smile.

  He drums his heels against the tub. “Tavis wants to say goodnight to Daddy.”

  “Not tonight, pumpkin. After our phone goes in.”

  “When is that?”

  “The day after tomorrow.”

  He stands and crosses his arms. His tears come, quick and angry. “Tavis wants a TV. Daddy has one. Anthony and Matty, too.”

  She sits on the toilet lid and opens her arms. “Come here, peanut.” He climbs onto her lap. She kisses his head. “We can’t afford a TV.” She’d lecture him about envy but he’s had a tough day and she isn’t on the firmest moral ground. Even if they could afford a TV, she doesn’t want one, doesn’t want to come across helicopters blowing up in Munich or soldiers having their legs amputated in a battlefield hospital. Years of war news have saturated her with grisly images.

  She runs a bath for him in the seasick-green tub, hypnotized for a moment by the play of the overhead light on the water, drained by the tension her body has carried around all day. They climb into the hide-a-bed together. If she were to ask what bedtime story he wants, he might say Just Only John or Curious George. For selfish purposes she chooses Are You My Mother? As usual he finds it a riot that a baby bird supposes a kitten, chicken, dog or cow could be his mom. He likes being smarter, enjoys snorting along with the steam shovel, too. There’s a bad moment when the baby bird says he wants to go home. She forgot that was in there. But then he nestles into her and reads her favorite line out loud by himself. “I want my mother!” When he falls asleep, she decides not to carry him to his bed. She’s as daunted as when she brought him home from the hospital, has to keep him safe by herself now.

  Lying beside him, she twists her wedding ring and wonders if Ron is practicing tomorrow’s sermon in the cracked leather chair in their bedroom, wearing the navy robe with tan piping that makes him look like he’s stepped out of a thirties movie. A train sends its rumble into her spine and panic into her lungs. She’ll have to locate the tracks tomorrow and warn Tavis. He whimpers in his sleep. She holds him, amazed by the heat from such a small body and his innocent, clean smell. She wakes in the morning to clammy sheets and the stink of his pee, disoriented and stunned by what she’s done to them.

  9

  The train zips them away from New York’s boisterous, lit-up excitement and dumps them off in mi
serable little Stony River on a cool, clear morning, the third day of their marriage. The hike from the station to the parsonage is easy but he asks how she is every other minute and if his pace is “too brisk.” He insists on carrying her overnight bag as well as his, shuffles sideways, his eyes on her like a sentry’s. Since the wedding night, he has fussed over her, rubbing her cheek and cupping her elbow as if it were bone china. It was sweet at first.

  River Street is poorly lit, a magnet for vandals. The flat-faced parsonage confronts the street with not so much as a porch for defense. Thank heavens the car is where Ron parked it. He looks amused as she checks the tires and windows. “Let’s not hang around too long,” she says.

  “No argument from me. I’d like to make Beaver Falls tonight.”

  Winnie Judge, the pastor’s wife, opens the parsonage door, tells them the pastor is out on calls. Grace stands in the hallway with her suitcase. She looks classy in a jade green wool skirt and sweater. She also looks ready to go. She’ll trek to Minnesota with them, Ron’s idea, so she and Linda can get to know each other better. Her house is just minutes from where Ron and Linda will live. “Hello, young lovers,” she sings in a rich alto then laughs. “No Deborah Kerr, am I?”

  “Neither was Deborah Kerr,” Ron says. “Her voice was dubbed in The King and I.”

  “I’m shattered,” Grace says, looking not the least bit so. She and Ron exude the same easy confidence. There may be something to this genes business. Linda often sees herself in Mother’s anxious face.

  Into the trunk go luggage and wedding gifts they left with the Judges. She and Grace each insist the other ride in the front first. Linda wins the backseat because she’s seen the early part of the route umpteen times to Kansas. She’s grateful for the distance from Ron, not used to spending day and night with someone, relieved she won’t have to read the map, often a sore point during the summer trips, Daddy wanting to make a specific town by a certain time, Mother missing a vital turnoff. Thinking of Daddy riles her up again. Ron asked if she wanted to see her folks before heading out. Nosiree. She doesn’t trust herself not to say something rash. That Daddy might think she’d lie under oath has opened a chasm in her heart.