by Mary Gordon
It wasn’t only Ellen, she believes, whom she’d weakened and made old. Six months after she and Dan moved in together, Jack Morrisey retired. For thirty years, he’d kept up a correspondence with a Paracletist missionary who’d spent his priesthood in the Philippines. Jack had never met him, but when the priest retired to a small parish in South Carolina, where his family had settled, Jack joined him and bought a house nearby.
Sharon knows that Jack left because the direction in which Cam moved the practice didn’t please him. He lost his bearings in Cam’s wave of feminist energy; he never wanted to handle divorce, wife battering, difficult custody cases; now these made up the bulk of the firm’s cases. That was true, Sharon knew that, but it wasn’t all the truth. The truth, she felt, was that seeing what had happened with her and Dan made Jack Morrisey want to give up:
She will not go to Vincent and Ellen’s house; she sees Cam, rarely, at the house she and Dan built in Quogue; she likes serving Cam meals, but she can’t be at ease with her. She carries the shame of what she did to Dan and to his family, a weakening disease. She lives her life always a bit under the weather; like a patient getting over pneumonia. Her employers encourage her to go to law school, but she refuses. She and Dan live quietly, devotedly, but she is not his wife, she won’t allow herself to be. She took him from his wife, and she insists they both remember.
Approaching middle age, they understand that they will be together, now, for life. But they have never said this to each other; they feel they have no right to promise. Their house is half a mile from the Long Island Sound; they walk, each morning, by the water; they see friends from Sharon’s office, they collect antiques. But they are never lighthearted; sadness hangs over them, a cloud everyone can sense, so they aren’t popular with other couples. Dan will never get over the loss of his children; she can’t give up her shame that it was through her this loss came about.
Every year, the girls come for August and life is different. Sharon accepts her displacement in the situation; Dan cooks for them: hamburgers, Kraft macaroni and cheese, Chef-Boy-Ar-Dee ravioli, coral-colored in the pot. Her attempts with the girls have always been hobbled by her sense of shame in their presence: naturalness is impossible, and she knows what takes its place. Darci despises her, she’s glad not to be living with Sharon, but with Cam. And Staci uses her. Sharon is not deceived that the presents she buys Staci earn anything for her but contempt; still, she’s afraid to stop; at least the pretense of connection is better than the freezing look in Staci’s eyes when she isn’t being distracted by a new acquisition. The girls stay for a month; Dan speaks a new vocabulary: their friends’ names, the names of the songs they like, their favorite movie stars, their jokes. Then, cruelly, the thread is cut, and in September, she and Dan go back to being what they were: modest, melancholy, and responsible.
“I’ve got to go,” Sharon says. “We’re so shorthanded. Lisa and Joanne are away.”
“Where’d they go?”
“Lisa went to Paris with her mother; Joanne is in the Islands with God knows who.”
Dan realizes that it’s been three years since he and Sharon have gone away on a vacation. A damp spot of guilt spreads underneath his ribs.
“Let’s go to Paris in the fall,” he says. “Or to some beach.”
“What beach? It’s hurricane season in the Islands.”
“It’s not hurricane season in Paris.”
“Oh, Dan, for heaven’s sake,” she says. He doesn’t know what she means. He knows that any movement—forward or out—makes her a little anxious. But he thinks he hears in her voice her willingness for him to lead her out. He thinks of them on a plane together. The thought arouses him. After all this time, whatever else has happened, they have not lost that pleasure.
“Come on, Irish,” he says, “a plane is a very sexy place.”
“Dan,” she says, “everyone can hear you in the hall.”
“Only my aunt Theresa,” he says, and they both laugh.
But it isn’t Theresa who hears them, it’s Sheilah. She hears Dan’s words and understands what’s behind them: the easy life of men and women, the playful life that starts in bed and moves into the world. Love-play. She’s never been a player. She has watched, always outside it, both yearning to be of it and taking her pride and sense of safety from being apart. The sense of apartness has marked her life.
She was the quiet girl in glasses with pastel rims, tortoiseshell barrettes held on to past their usefulness, their Tightness. She counted up the errors of the others moving out of childhood, out of the bones and flat muscles, the quick legs burnished by the heat of local games: red-rover, ring-a-levio, street games played to the point of death, faces flushed from the last sun of autumn, faces shocked by the quick curtainfall of night in late November. She watched those faces, those bodies; once they were faultless, but no more. She stood away from them, recording everything.
That’s what she’s always done, it’s who she’s always been, the one who watches and stands apart. She can never have what Dan and Sharon have. She’d stumbled into being joined to Stephen Gallagher; their coming together had the elements, not of romantic comedy, but of the most common sort of farce. When she met him, he’d been Father Gallagher, a Dominican; she’d been Sister Raymond Theresa. They met when they participated in a draft-card burning on the steps of the City Hall of Keene, New Hampshire, and became lovers while their vows were still in force.
The integrity of their political activities was called into question when they were found by the police in a motel. Just a routine check, Miss—or Sister, whatever it is. Their spiked hair, combed wet from the shower, made a joke of everything. The police had brought reporters along. The flash camera, the headlines that read “Nun and Priest Protesters Found in Love Nest.” The day before, they had been heroes, Steve leading the psalms in his workshirt and liturgical stole. Was that why Steve married her? Because they’d had their pictures in the paper, with their hair wet from the shower, in front of the Thunderbird Motel? He wasn’t interested in sex, not really, even at first. He was interested in being able to say that he, a priest, had had sex. Their marriage, even Diarmid’s birth, never made up to him for losing the distinction of his priesthood. For having become, once again, simply himself, her husband, rather than a priest of God. It hadn’t measured up.
She watches Dan; she is the child she’s always been with him, yearning, envious, vengeful. Putting down the phone, he turns to her, realizing that she’s overheard.
“Hi, there,” he says, self-consciously.
She sees that she’s made him uneasy. One of the few people in the world who like her, one of the few people whom she likes. She’s half sorry, half something else she doesn’t know the name of but recognizes as familiar, partly satisfying: right.
6
STACI ROUNDS THE CORNER of Linden Street and Roberts Avenue and begins to slow her pace. She has just run two and a half miles from the G. Michael Hobbs pool, where she is a lifeguard. Running, she is the person she wants to be, the person she admires herself for being. Now it’s all over: the fight she always wins against the heavy body, heavy in itself despite everything she does. She can’t make herself entirely weightless as she would like, and yet that isn’t really what she wants: she dreads insubstantialness; it would mean that she would have no force. She would like a body that is muscle and bone, dry, unneeding. Yet that isn’t what she wants either, because no one would look at her like that. Without this flesh—tan now, the way she likes it, the gold hairs on her arms shining like metal—no one would look at her. She couldn’t sit on the high seat of the lifeguard stand, move her leg an inch, a quarter of an inch and know that she has caused something to happen in the world, know that the boys who jackknife into the water to get a better look at her, who pull their hard white lifeguard hats over their noses to pretend they aren’t looking, are doing it for her. For her. A movement of hers, even the slightest, is a pull: the vector of the earth tilts. She is the equator, the pole. She is
in charge of gravity. When she runs, when she feels her heart like a knife pressing its blade against her and her lungs two spots, sharp and hot, she doesn’t succumb to them, she delights in them. She lifts herself above them, and she is lifted up, but moving, nothing can stop her; they can be looking at her or not looking, she is moving, she is all alone, she couldn’t possibly need anyone, no one could do her harm.
She slows herself down. She is about it lose it. At the first sight of her great-grandparents’ house, she will begin to succumb to its lowering, decelerating, darkening force. She won’t give herself up. She hardens herself, she makes herself a stone against the force of the house pressing down. When it presses down on her, she will press back. All her life she has been expert in resistance. It is her safety from harm and desire.
She sees her father sitting on the front porch steps beside her cousin Marilyn. She would never let anything happen to her like what happened to Marilyn. Like what keeps happening over and over, though she’s old now, she ought to be finished with that, but it will never be over for her, and Staci doesn’t know how she could stand to live like that, just waiting for a man to come and do something to her. Staci can tell by the way she sits.
Staci doesn’t want to talk to them. Her father lifts his heavy shoulders. She can tell how he’s dying to talk to her, dying for her to come over to him. She won’t. Every time she sees him everything about him is always telling her something depressing: how much he misses her, he loves her, how sorry he is that he left, he wishes he could love her as much as Darci. Why would she want to be around that? She always wants to kick her father over, like one of those bottom-heavy clown toys that you can tip over, but they just come up again and again, asking for it, asking for it, over and over. She won’t give him what he wants. “Oh, Daddy, I adore you,” Darci is always saying to him. She’d like to kick the both of them over, running off, just on her way somewhere, one flick of the foot, the two of them. They’re disgustingly fat. She doesn’t know how they can let themselves get that way. Neither of them says no to themselves for one minute.
Pointing to her watch, and then grabbing hold of her wrist, she pantomimes to her father and Marilyn that she can’t talk, she’s trying to take her pulse. They wave and smile at her and go on talking.
“You look terrific,” her father shouts out.
That’s just the kind of thing she hates, he knows that. Why doesn’t he just shut up? At least her mother never does anything like that. At least she leaves her alone. That’s all she wants from people, and they can’t seem to get it. It’s because they’re always needing something; they can’t believe that other people don’t.
Opening the latch of the backyard fence she sees her cousin John walking with a hammer in his hand. He scares her. He never says anything to her, just looks at her with those eyes that mean he wants to do something to her, hurt her or punish her. He looks at her in that way that’s already taking something from her. She won’t let him do that. He looks disgusting. He’s the most disgusting one of them all. He’s always smoking and his teeth are brown, but it’s not just that. Some of them are missing, like he got into a fight. She knows it’s not impossible that he could hit her with that hammer, make the blood come out of her head, and just walk away, leave her there, not look at what he’d done, not even remember it. And her father wouldn’t be able to stop him. She can see her father kneeling over her, crying. “Staci, baby, how did this happen?” Letting that pig get away. Forgetting to do what he was supposed to do: revenge her. She’s never seen hair as horrible as her cousin John’s. He probably doesn’t wash it, ever.
She’s opened the gate now, and she won’t let John know that seeing him makes her want to walk away. She’s got to make him know that he could never make her do anything she didn’t want to do. Anything she would do would be because she wanted it. She walks around the backyard, pretending to cool down. To return her pulse to normal. But her pulse is faster than it was when she was running.
She’s afraid of him, but he’ll never make her do anything she doesn’t want. He sits down on the step and lights a cigarette, but she knows he’s sitting there to watch her as she walks around the backyard. His eyes are half closed as he looks at her. His legs are open; he lets his hands, one holding a cigarette, dangle between his knees. Something about his looking at her makes her feel he’s locked her in somewhere. She keeps walking around, not ever getting closer to him, but not wanting him to stop looking at her either. The circles she makes are getting smaller. It’s making her dizzy to keep walking around like that. But she can’t stop. She turns her back to him and stares at one of the hydrangea bushes. She hates those flowers. She doesn’t know why anyone would want flowers like that. She lifts the front of her shirt to wipe the sweat off her face. She knows he can probably see her.
She’s sick of it, she wants to take a shower. Even the shower in her great-grandparents’ house is disgusting. She loves her shower at home. Her own shower in her own bathroom: white tiles, chrome, as much hot water as she wants any time, coming out of the shiny metal shower head. This one is greenish on the bottom, where the holes are that the water shoots from. She likes the water in the Hobbs pool: bluish, sharp, like it was never near anything dirty. No one ever uses this shower; her father said that when he lived here he was the only one in the house that ever did. That’s exactly the kind of thing he’s always saying. So that you have to think of him in the shower, and his grandparents taking baths. That’s the kind of thing he’s always making you think about.
She doesn’t look at John as she walks by him to get into the house. She can walk through the house the back way, through the kitchen, which is empty, and up the stairs, without having to talk to anyone. She opens the bathroom door. She can’t stand that the floor is old linoleum, not tiles or a rug or anything like an ordinary bathroom. She goes over to the window to close the curtain. Then she sees that he’s up on a ladder, forty feet away, right across from her, pretending to fix the gutter on the garage, pretending to nail something tight, but she knows it’s not that, she knows he’s there to look at her.
If he sees her closing the curtain, he’ll know she did it because of him. And she won’t let him have that. She walks away from the window, leaving the curtain open.
All the time she’s taking off her clothes, she’s telling herself that he’s not making her do anything. She gets into the shower. She can smell the dust in the water; even the water doesn’t seem clean. The shampoo on the side of the tub must have been there for a million years. Prell. She wonders who bought it. She smoothes it on her hair, taking a long time, making him stand on that ladder. She hopes he’ll fall off. She hopes he’ll fall off and break his neck. She’d love to see him on the ground with his head snapped to one side and his eyes open and his mouth open showing his disgusting teeth. She soaps herself as slowly as she can, but it starts to bore her.
She takes the towel off the rack and begins to dry herself. She makes sure she does it the way she always would, no special way for him. She bends down and shakes her hair out, then wraps a towel around her wet hair. She reaches for another towel, then walks to the window, stands there for a second and wraps the towel around herself. She stands there staring at him so he knows she knows. She tries to make him get down off the ladder, but she can’t. She pulls the curtains shut.
7
CAM IS ON THE FRONT PORCH, SITTING ON THE BLUE CORDUROY glider. Theresa walks out and sits beside her. Cam stiffens; she doesn’t encourage Theresa to relax, to stay. Theresa looks down at her peach-colored nails.
“Have you talked to your mother today, Camille?” What is between them—hate—flourishes at the sound of Theresa’s first word. It unfolds, like a paper flower in water. It exfoliates, intricately, as if touched by some seasonal impulse. It unrolls and throws itself out like a bolt of cloth. It grows in its extent: familiar, useful, interesting. This hate began for Cam in childhood. Theresa attached her hate to a still-growing child. Ancestral, it would go on, and it would
be passed down. There would be no end to it.
“She wasn’t at all well this morning,” Cam says. “I’m not sure if she’ll make it today.”
Cam says this, knowing her enemy, therefore unable to look in her eye. She knows she’s the weak one in this encounter. Her sense of her weakness makes her angry at her mother. She’d like to shout at her mother: “Why do you always make me lie?”
8
MAGDALENE IS IN HER room, wondering what she’ll do. She is still focused on what she’ll wear, as if, after finding the perfect outfit, she’ll be fine. Her life is largely the body’s, more particularly the eye’s. It’s not that she’s observant; she has always missed the most obvious, the grossest or most clearly impressive aspect of any scene. Even her interest in clothes is limited largely to those she wears herself.
She walks into her closet, a small purple room. A sense of peace comes over her at the abundance of her clothes. She doesn’t get rid of clothes once they’ve gone out of fashion. She pretends that this is done from thrift—things always come back, she says, and then you’re glad you have them. But actually it’s that she can’t bear to betray her clothes. Having touched her body, they became loving relatives. How could she put them out, expose them in their old age, in their marginality, to the cruel world whose cruelty they kept her from?
She gave her clothes the tenderness she never gave a lover. Her clothes had given her something: her clothes had added to what she was. But sex only took away. She would gladly have kept herself a virgin had there been a way for her to do it and still leave the family house. Every act of sex to her was an ablation and a loss, total because it took place in private, and she could gain no recognition for what she had given up. But she had to marry to leave the house. And she had to leave the house.