by T. Greenwood
I must have stood there for nearly an hour. The hot water ran out, and I was shivering. I carried the handful of everything that was left and sat down, naked, on the toilet. I didn’t know what to do with the remains. I couldn’t seem to bring myself to put them in the bowl.
Eva knocked on the door again. I reached for a towel with my free hand and covered myself the best I could. She came in, and I uncurled my fist and started to cry again. She took a deep breath. “Would you like me to take care of that?” she asked.
I nodded, and she took a tissue from the box behind the toilet. She waited for me, for instructions.
“Just throw it away,” I said. “Please. Outside. And there are some pills. From Frankie’s surgery.” Frankie had had some kidney stones removed the year before. I could picture the bottle of pills in the medicine cabinet. “In the downstairs bathroom.”
The pain returned as she left, and I sat on the toilet as my body expelled everything that remained. This time, I didn’t look. I simply closed the lid and flushed.
When the pain subsided, I made my way to the bedroom and lay down. She returned only a few moments later.
“Do you want me to call him?” she asked softly, handing me the pill and a cold glass of water.
I shook my head. I thought of Frankie’s face every other time this had happened. I couldn’t do that to him again. To myself.
She nodded. “What time will he be home?”
“Six,” I said. “What time is it now?”
“One thirty.”
After I had fallen asleep, she took care of the children, even put together the dinner I had planned for that night. She got all of our suitcases gathered, and at five thirty she came and woke me up. “Frankie will probably be here in a little bit. Are you sure you’re going to be okay to travel tomorrow?”
I nodded. “Thank you.”
She sat down next to me on the bed. “I’ll miss you in Vermont,” she said, frowning. “Will you send me a postcard?”
“Of course,” I said, sitting up, feeling woozy.
“Lie down,” she said, and I obeyed.
I reached for her hand. “And you need to write me, as soon as the baby comes.” The word baby caught in my throat and felt like a cotton ball in my mouth. My stomach cramped as if in response.
She kissed her index finger and touched it to my forehead. And something about that simple gesture made me feel soft inside, as if the pain were loosening its grip, if only for a moment. I didn’t want her to leave, and I could feel that place where she had touched me long after she was gone.
The pain pill had softened the edges of things. It was just a dull ache now. I felt hollow. Emptied out. I knew I was still bleeding, would continue bleeding for a while. I also knew that Frankie would expect that we have sex that night; it would be weeks before we’d see each other again. I tried to remember the last time I’d told him I was menstruating, hoping he’d believe me again.
That night I made supper, though I could barely eat. I took another pill and sat at the dinner table feeling separated from my pain; I could still feel it, but it was not a part of me. It’s as though the cramping and backache and agony were somehow outside of my body.
Frankie was accustomed to being turned away, and I expected he would deal with my rejection the way he usually did. But when I said I wasn’t feeling well, mouthing female troubles, instead of muttering under his breath and walking away, he stayed and leaned in so close to my face that I could smell the wine on his breath, see the way it discolored his teeth.
“Female troubles, huh?” he hissed.
He was drunker than I had thought. Sometimes this happened; he’d seem fine and then something would shift, and I’d realize that he was actually loaded. Like a gun. All the chambers empty except for one. Our conversations like games of Russian roulette.
“Frankie, please,” I said, forcing a smile, trying hard to keep the peace.
“Seems more like I’m the one with female troubles,” he said, pointing his callused fingertip into my chest. I couldn’t help but think of Eva, of the tender way she had kissed her finger before pressing it to my forehead. But this was not tenderness. He pushed, and his finger felt like something sharp against my sternum. “Nothing but troubles out of this one. Nothing but grief. I’ll tell you about female troubles. You’re nothing but un pesce morto.” A dead fish.
I thought of the baby then, of what was left, swirling down the drain. Grief and anger overwhelmed me. His ignorance of everything that happened that day made me hate him. I knew it was illogical; he didn’t even know. But his obliviousness still infuriated me. His cruelty. I even thought for a moment about telling him what had happened, making him experience at least a bit of the pain I was feeling. But instead, I just silently listened to his venomous words and, finally, his angry shuffling down the stairs. I strained to hear the sound of the cupboard door opening and closing. The slosh into the glass. I worried only a little that he’d be even drunker and angrier when he returned. After a few tumblers of wine, he had a temper and could snap. Had snapped. But after half a jug, he usually just fell asleep. When he came up an hour later and sat down on the bed, unable to even undo his belt, I knew I was finally safe. And within seconds, he was snoring.
But I did not sleep, could not sleep. Even with the pills. My brain felt muddy, my emotions confused. Sorrow and relief and anger and guilt all swirled together, mixing with the pain, floating above me like a storm cloud. And the tears that drenched my face, the blood that continued to seep and seep from my body, could have been simply the dampness of rain.
Gussy knew something was wrong, of course, when she picked me and the girls up the next day from the train station in Two Rivers. As we piled into Frank’s station wagon, our girls climbing all over each other in the backseat, bickering over who got to sit next to the window, Gussy looked at me in that way she had: that big-sister way that made me feel both loved to death and patronized. I ached to tell her about the miscarriage, but I also dreaded revealing yet another one of my many disappointments. I wanted her compassion but not her pity.
“What happened?” she asked. “Is it Frankie? What did he do this time?”
I had the terrible habit of only talking to Gussy about Frankie after he did something stupid or hurtful. In Gussy’s eyes, Frankie was a caricature, a foolish man who drank too much and whose tongue was too loose. I always had to remind myself to share not only Frankie’s foibles with her but his kindness as well.
“He wasn’t out stealing trees again, was he?” she asked, laughing a little, and I had to resist my own laughter.
The last time I’d had a conversation with Gussy about Frankie was when he’d come home one night with three saplings, pulled up by their roots. He’d gone out for a couple of drinks with the guys after his shift and got the bright idea on his way home that he could take some of those pretty red maples he saw growing on the side of the road near Spot Pond and plant them in our backyard. Convinced that the police weren’t far behind, ready to arrest him for theft or vandalism or whatever crime pulling trees up by the roots and putting them in the back of your Studebaker constituted, he’d pulled into our driveway so fast he’d left tread marks on the pavement.
“No.” I shook my head. I glanced at the girls in the backseat, who were eavesdropping on us now, and said, “We’ll talk later.”
“Because, Billie,” she whispered, glancing in the rearview mirror at the girls. “I swear, if he does anything that stupid again, I’m going to come down there myself and talk some sense into him.” If Gussy had any idea about what really happened between Frankie and me, the words he used, the things he called me, she would be horrified.
Gussy liked to consider herself my protector, even though the opposite was almost always true. I was three years younger, but when a neighbor boy down the road took Gussy’s brand-new bicycle from her on the way to school and wouldn’t give it back, I was the one who wrestled him to the ground, bloodied his nose, and sent him crying home to h
is mother. When a different boy broke Gussy’s heart in the eighth grade, I was the one who left a nice, fresh cow patty from our pasture in his book bag. Now that we were grown, I simply protected her from the truth.
“No need for that, Gussy. Frankie’s been a good boy.”
And that was the truth, for the most part. Frankie drank too much. He could get angry, even cruel. But while he certainly raised his voice, he would never dare raise a hand to me, or to the children. His drinking usually manifested in foolish, impulsive behavior: stealing trees, setting off firecrackers in the front yard, juggling my best china in the kitchen. On the occasions when his jolly drunkenness turned into rage, I knew how to navigate the dangerous waters of his anger. First I made sure the girls were far, far away from him. Second, I knew what would make things worse and how to avoid them. I also knew that patience, above all else, was the antidote, because his storms were like tornadoes. They brewed, they touched down, and then they were gone. If you could just hunker down and find a safe place to hide, within no time at all it would pass and the air would be calm again. I’d witnessed the same storm pattern with his sisters’ husbands as well, though most of their wives hadn’t figured out that it’s best to stay in the eye of the storm. When his sisters visited, I watched them get berated and shoved around, and later, when they had gone back home, I worried for them and thanked my lucky stars that Frankie was, in comparison, so very tame.
“Mind if I smoke?” I asked. The scent of cigarettes, particularly my own, had been intolerable during the last few months. But now that this pregnancy, like every pregnancy, had ended, I found myself hungry for them again.
“Put your window down then,” she said, rolling her eyes.
Gussy always complained when she rode with Frankie and me in the car, both of us puffing like dragons, the windows rolled up to keep out the cold, the children complaining of upset stomachs in the backseat. Gussy had never even taken a puff of a cigarette, not one puff. I lit my cigarette and rolled down the window. I took a deep drag and allowed the smoke to fill all those empty places inside of me. I imagined myself filled with vapors, the ghosts of all those babies that had once resided inside me.
The air outside was cooler than it had been at home. As we drove through Quimby and then away from town and into the woods toward the lake, I felt like everything was suddenly cleaner, brighter, greener. There is something about going home, like water always wanting to rise to its own level again. This was my level. Here was my water.
The kids opened the car doors before we even pulled to a stop. Mouse tore off her clothes, stripped down to her panties, and ran toward the lake. I smiled at her abandon, her freedom.
“Now will you tell me?” Gussy asked.
“Let’s just swim,” I said, tossing my cigarette into the bushes.
I followed Mouse’s invisible path down to the water’s edge where I took off my own shirt, leaving my shorts on, and swam. I was still bleeding, would still be bleeding off and on for the rest of our time here, but somehow being in the water, being surrounded by water, made it seem not so violent a thing.
I told her about the miscarriage later that night after the children had gone to sleep. I tried to pass it off as though it had been expected (it had been expected) and that I was fine. That was the pretense I have always had with my sister: that nothing could harm me, my hide as thick as an elephant’s. But she knew; she always knew. And so she just held my hand as I told her what happened. For some reason, though, when she asked me later, on a lighter note, what else was new that summer, I didn’t mention the Wilsons. I didn’t tell her about Ted and his wide face and giant hands and big, red Cadillac. I didn’t tell her about how nice it was to have a friend so close to home. And I didn’t tell her about everything that Eva had done for me that day. Maybe I didn’t want her to be jealous, to feel like someone was stepping on her big-sister toes. Or maybe I just didn’t have the words to articulate the wonderful sense of contentment I had knowing that, despite everything, I wasn’t alone anymore: that just across the street was someone warm and kind. Or maybe it was more selfish than that, and I just didn’t, for once, want to share.
Gussy helped me unpack that night, lingering longer than she needed to. Finally, as the sun went down and the exhaustion of the trip, of the whole summer, descended upon me, she kissed my head and said, “I’m here. If you need anything at all. Love you, Gingersnap,” and drove away, leaving us alone at the lake.
Gussy calls tonight as I am getting out of the tub. I can hear my phone vibrating in the other room, and I consider letting it go to voice mail, but know it’s unfair to make her worry. I am careful not to stand up too quickly though. The last time I rose out of a hot bath for the telephone, I saw stars and almost went down, crashing into the porcelain bowl of the tub. This is how little old ladies break hips, I’d thought. This is how bones crumble. The world is a treacherous place at this age.
“Hi, Gus, what’s the news?” I say.
“I just got off the phone with Johnny,” she says. “He called to see if I’d convinced you to come home yet.”
Feeling a little woozy, I sit down on the bed so that I don’t accidentally fall to the floor. I had stupidly hoped she would just let this go. Forget about Johnny.
“Billie?”
“That’s what they call me,” I say, and wrap my towel around me. My hair is dripping wet and cold on my shoulders. Outside, a foghorn lows.
She sighs. “You know Ted passed away?”
I bristle at the mention of Ted. “How would I know that?”
“Suicide,” she says.
This is startling to me. I would have been less surprised to hear that he’d been murdered. “How?” I ask, not really wanting the grisly details but needing an image, something to make the suicide real. To make his death real.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I didn’t ask.”
“When did he . . . ?” I say. How is it, after all this time, this news comes as a relief? As though I have been waiting for this for the last five decades?
“This summer. I think it’s when Johnny really went off the deep end. He said he’s struggled for years now, he’s been in and out of trouble. But his father’s suicide sent him into a tailspin.”
“I really don’t know what he expects of me,” I say. And I don’t. I am an eighty-year-old woman living on the other side of Johnny’s world. The ties that bind us are frayed with age, weakened by time and distance. Barely a thread anymore.
Gussy coughs. “All of this is, um, more complicated than I thought.”
It is my turn to sigh. I don’t know why she’s being so elusive. “What’s going on, Gus?”
There is silence on the other end of the line, a terrifying abyss growing between us.
“Gus?”
“Please just come home,” she says softly. “We can talk about it when you get here.”
“Talk about what, Gus? There isn’t anything you can tell me about Ted Wilson that’s going to upset me. Seriously.”
There is that silence again, that gulf, and when she finally speaks, there’s a tumbling sense of urgency to her words. “I found a flight that gets into Burlington at three o’clock this Friday. I can pick you up and then we can have supper here, get some sleep. In the morning we can head up to the lake to see Effie and the girls. Johnny said he could come up on Sunday. Would Sunday be too soon?”
“This weekend?” I say, feeling suddenly too hot, my skin prickly. “I don’t know. This seems crazy.”
“Of course, he has to work on Monday, so it would be a short visit. I can ask Francesca about coming up too. If you stay a couple of weeks, maybe she could visit the next weekend.”
I can feel a breeze come off the ocean and through the cracks of my window.
“Would chicken and dumplings be okay?”
“Chicken and dumplings?”
“For supper. When you get here.”
My sister has always been the one to take control, the one to grab hold of the unive
rse, my universe, when it begins spinning out of control. I am grateful to her. But I am also powerless when she is this determined.
“I already bought the ticket,” she says. “You just need to get to the airport.”
Later, as I lie in bed waiting for sleep, I try not to think of Ted and all the possible ways he might have taken his own life. I try not to think of Johnny and whatever bottom he hit after his father’s death. I try not to think of that tenuous bridge between us, the deep water beneath, the memories and years below. I try only to think of seeing my sister again. It’s been two years, and we may not have that many years left. Either one of us.
At the end of that summer, when the girls and I returned to Hollyville from Vermont, the entire pregnancy and miscarriage seemed far away, like a gauzy dream. Going home after being away for so long always felt a bit dreamlike; it would take a few days before I felt as though I was in a real place rather than on a stage, the furniture and appliances all out of proportion to the ones in my memory, the colors too bright. Frankie looked strange to me too, like an actor playing Frankie. The touch of his hand felt foreign and papery at first, though he’d just been to visit us a couple of weeks before.
Even Eva seemed like some fabrication of my mind, a story I made up to entertain myself, to pass the time. We didn’t have a phone at the lake yet then, but I had sent her a postcard from Vermont, taking nearly a half hour at the Rexall in Quimby selecting one that would somehow entice her to join us there the following summer. But I hadn’t heard back. And Frankie had been useless. He said he hadn’t seen Eva at all while he was home, that his encounters with Ted had also been few and far between. I half expected when we pulled onto Beechtree Street that Mrs. Macadam would still be sitting on her porch, or that the FOR SALE sign might still be stuck beneath the lilac bush. But instead, there was Eva. Eva with a tiny little bundle in her arms. I felt my cheeks flush, my blood quicken in my veins. She rushed down her porch steps when she saw our car, Donna and Sally and Johnny all close behind.