by Mary Gordon
She stands, watching her mother laughing at her, remembering the moment in her life she had thought would be great.
But it wasn’t great. She thought she’d planned it right, keeping quiet, not allowing people to observe her being pious. She had not been pious. No one had asked, but if they’d asked the watchful child with her white columns of legs, the mortification of dark hair on her white forearms, if they’d asked her: “Do you think there’s a God?” she might have said “Who?” Losing interest. Her interest was in the moment, the announcement dropped like the first news of war in a rapt, crowded theatre: “I have a vocation; I’m going to be a nun.”
What she hadn’t understood was that for the announcement to have been of interest, to have shocked, the one making the announcement would have to have earned the interest of the audience by something in her prior life: She had been so long the person people preferred not to regard, her stare had been so well understood as fault-finding and contemptuous that people had grown relieved not to attend to her. So that when, in the last months of her senior year in high school, she announced to everyone that it had become clear to her that she had a vocation, no one was particularly interested. It was no different than if she had told them she was going off to business school or to study dental hygiene. She was leaving the family, she was leaving the world, and no one mustered up the interest to express amazement, reverence, or even horror or alarm. Her grandfather seemed moderately pleased. He said it was a hard life, but a lovely one, and had its own rewards. Her father asked had she thought of the sacrifices. Blushing, he mentioned a normal life. Children, he said, a family. Then he took away even that comfort by saying, “But I guess none of that meant very much to you.” And he too turned away his eyes.
Sister Hilda, who had been her confidante, had told her that a nature such as hers, demanding, with a tendency to finding fault, might find communal life a special challenge. Convents are not peopled with saints, she had told Sheilah, only sinners trying to be. Some have a long way to go, she had said, laughing the laugh that nuns did when they gave information to the outside world which revealed, in fact, nothing, but seemed to be opening a window to a secret life. Sheilah felt that Sister Hilda had lost interest in the middle of a sentence: she saw her eyes wander behind her glasses to some girls making noise in the corridor. And Sheilah realized that Sister Hilda would have preferred a vocation in any of fifty other girls.
She couldn’t remember if her mother had said anything directly to her. She couldn’t call back her mother’s face the night of the announcement. She remembered the date. July 11, 1965. But not her mother’s face. Had she, even at that great moment, feared the white, empty center in her mother’s glance, when it fell on her, the vacancy that said: For me your, existence is nothing. You are no one. Your life has never been worthy of my regard. She remembers her father looking frightened, her grandmother saying “Nonsense,” her grandfather trying to create a distraction so that she wouldn’t hear what Ellen said, trying to steer them all away from expressing their wrong feelings: Marilyn’s embarrassment, John’s scorn. When she calls back her mother’s face she sees only the outline of a face. What she remembers is another time, soon after the announcement, her mother’s voice, answering her father. Her father is saying he’s worried. “It’s a hard life,” he says, “they give up so much.” Her mother’s voice, bored at even this much attention to the subject, says: “Cut your losses.” And her father, her weak father, says nothing. Not “How dare you say such a thing. How dare you speak that way of my beloved child.” He says nothing. “Cut your losses,” she says. Turning back to her reading: giving the subject no more time.
And in the end even the drama Sheilah’d believed would electrify the family never took hold of their imagination. It withered before it rooted or became quite real. They allowed it to wither, mercifully, because it so quickly turned into comedy, the worst, most common sort of farce. There was the circle of events: her novitiate, profession, her teaching history in the high school, her education in civil disobedience, her political activism. Closing with the snap of the photographers’ cameras as she stood at the motel door with Steve.
So why shouldn’t she be cruel now? Why shouldn’t she get back at Dan for sitting on the couch so happily with Darci, not thinking of her, not remembering that he let her down. She sees the other daughter is with them. Staci. She recognizes the malignant vengefulness of the less favored child. She sees in the avidly law-abiding girl her own taste for punishment. Futile, she would like to tell her: it is the thirst that never can be quenched. She sees Dan looking at Staci as her father looks at her. Saying with his look: Forgive me, I cannot give you the one place of honor. There is no room for you at the center. I would give you the real thing if I could. Don’t think it’s your fault.
Who else’s? The trick, the precious trick of the beloved object. To do nothing and earn everything. To try for nothing, and by not trying, to win.
She wants to say to Staci: For people like us, outside this circle of favor, forced as we are to punish, to draw blood, how could there even be forgiveness?
Sheilah sees Staci has inherited the luck of her mother’s severe good looks. Valerie. Remarried now. So she will have this. Staci will have the power to make men suffer. Starting with her father. She is frightened by the furious child, leaving childhood. Staci forces her to stand back.
6
STACI WON’T LOOK AT Sheilah. She knows she can make something come onto her face that makes people afraid to come near her. Her eyes fall on her aunt Theresa. She doesn’t know if she can make her afraid, but she knows it’s important. She has to keep her back. She looks into Theresa’s eyes and sees her own eyes, those eyes that make people want to look away from them, as if they were a spot of heat people couldn’t bear to fix on. But what people see isn’t heat, Staci knows, but coldness, coldness that makes them scared. Most of the time no one can stand up to her. Maybe her aunt Theresa can. But she won’t let her. Not today.
She won’t let Theresa force her to go in to look at Ellen. Her great-grandmother makes her angry. It’s important to Staci to be in control. Most of the time she is. No one can take her by surprise; no one can make her do anything she doesn’t want to do. If other people do things they don’t want to do, she knows it’s their fault. She thinks there is a cover you can put around yourself, surround yourself with if you’re careful, if you’re smart. She knows that there are things around, everywhere, wanting to break in, to steal, poison, contaminate, take over. But if you keep the cover tight around you, if you look around you at all times, you can keep things back. Her great-grandmother has lost the cover; she has given it up. Anything can go into her or come out of her. Staci hates that; she hates her great-grandmother for making her think about it.
Staci knows she can make herself not think about it. She can think about her life, the way she wants her life, the way she’s made it and will keep it, if she doesn’t see Ellen’s eyes again. She can think about the high jump: the hurdle she knows she can clear, again and again, if she wants to enough. She always wants to. She can think about the sound of her computer: even, safe. She wishes her great-grandmother would die so that she wouldn’t have to see her anymore.
But she can’t make that happen. She’ll try instead the other thing: she’ll keep her aunt Theresa back. She’ll make her know that there is nothing she can do to her: nothing in Staci is within her reach.
“Has anybody heard from Cam?” Theresa asks.
“She might have gone to work,” Marilyn says. “Or shopping.”
“At a time like this?” Theresa says.
“I’ll try the office,” Dan says. “She had her briefcase with her. Maybe something came up.”
When Dan leaves the room, Theresa comes up behind Staci. She puts her hand on Staci’s shoulder.
“I’m sure you want to see your great-gran, don’t you, Staci. While she’s peaceful and asleep?”
A sheet of metal is shaken out between them. The sound i
s alarming, thunder, the flapping of metal wings.
Staci knows that Theresa can only come up to her like that, say things to her, touch her, because her father left the room. He always leaves her. He can’t think about her long enough to remember there are some things he could stop if he would just stay near her. When he comes back, she’ll make him believe that not for one moment of her life has she wanted him to be close. But it will be too late. Because the thing he could have stopped will have happened already. While he wasn’t there.
She has to prove to Theresa that she can’t be touched, that it doesn’t matter, she can do anything or nothing, it’s all the same. She shrugs her shoulders in a way she knows will infuriate Theresa. She shrugs her shoulders so Theresa will think she could do this or that, or anything, be anywhere, doing what anybody wants, any person in the whole world, something Theresa would think was horrible, disgusting, and it wouldn’t matter, Staci could do it. She won’t look at Theresa so Theresa will know Staci doesn’t think she’s worth looking at, saying yes to, or no.
She walks into her great-grandmother’s room. She sees her great-grandmother sleeping. The cover around her life loosens a little; seeing her great-grandmother, she knows that she is still a child. In silence she implores the sleeping woman: Stay asleep. Don’t look at me with those eyes that have already seen the things I guess at but don’t have to name if you don’t say them, those eyes that see nothing, everything. You don’t need the sight of me. And I need not to see you. I need you not to look at me.
She squints so that before her eyes is not a woman, but the idea of what she can bear Ellen to be. She makes the shape of Ellen circular and unalive. Unchangeable and closed. Undecipherable. She makes Ellen round and indistinct. She makes of Ellen nothing she has to recognize and therefore fear.
But she’s still frightened. Ellen may move; Staci can’t help that; she can’t prevent that movement, and in the movement Ellen may grow distinct. Distinct, she will become the thing that Staci fears. She begs her great-grandmother: “Don’t open your eyes. Remember, I am still a child. You are dying but are still adult. You have power over me, duties towards me. It’s your duty to not become the thing I fear.”
She counts the seconds: twenty, twenty-seven, thirty-one. To make Theresa understand that all this is nothing to her, she has to approach the bed. But not touch her. She won’t do that.
She hears Theresa come behind her. She can hear her breath. Theresa is nervous; she doesn’t know if what she wants will come about. Theresa wants Ellen to look up, curse, see Staci, make Staci see her. Staci is praying to the sleeping woman: Don’t.
Theresa puts her hand on Staci’s shoulders, the shoulders Staci shrugged to make her furious. Lightly, she squeezes Staci’s shoulders, as if she wanted to encourage Staci to relax. But Staci won’t relax; she knows she doesn’t dare to.
“See how peaceful she is,” Theresa says. “Why don’t you bend down and kiss her. On the cheek. You’ll remember it all your life.”
Underneath the hands that mean her harm Staci can’t stop her shoulders stiffening. There’s no choice now. She is walking into it, she has no choice. At any moment it could happen: the terrible eyes. She prays to her great-grandmother: Don’t.
She forces herself to put her lips on the damp forehead underneath the hairline. She puts her lips to her great-grandmother’s skull.
It is over. She can walk away now. Ellen is still asleep. Her eyes never opened.
Now that she’s safe and there is room for it, Staci’s anger rises up. Where is her father? How can she hurt him now?
She wants to say: “I shouldn’t have had to do these things alone. You’ve always made me.” But she can’t say it. That would leave him something to say. She wants to leave him nothing.
She walks to her sister, who is looking through a Reader’s Digest.
“Where’s Daddy?”
“On the telephone,” says Darci, knowing from her sister’s voice that she plans to hurt her and not wanting to meet the eyes that will enjoy the hurt.
Staci sets her lips. She sits beside her sister.
“Who’s he talking to?”
“I don’t know. He’s trying to find Cam. It might be Magdalene.”
On the telephone, she thinks, talking to someone, helping someone, when I was the one who needed him, only he didn’t notice.
In the hall, fearing for his daughter, Dan listens while Magdalene begins to cry.
“Where is she, Dan? What could have happened to her? Do you think she’s been in an accident? She’s not at the office, I’ve tried there. What could have happened to her, Dan?”
He’d like to turn his back on the whole lot of them. He tries to think of a place where he could be happy. He thinks of a modern house, open, looking out on a bay or among trees. He thinks it would be nice if Darci could come often, feeling free to leave whenever she wants. He sees each object in the house: tools on the wall, a white dish, cup, and bowl. Blue or green cloth napkins. Books about migratory birds. He wonders if it would be possible to live a life where he didn’t feel an obligation all the time to lie. A life that wasn’t a semblance of another thing. He wonders if he could ever live without feeling it was his job to comfort or shore up with lies. He wishes he could say to people: I can’t help you. There is nothing I can do for you.
He feels angry with Cam. Off with her lover while she should be here. Forgetting everything to be in bed with some man who doesn’t love her, doesn’t appreciate her, is grateful because she makes so few demands, doesn’t ask to be the name on his next set of alimony checks. Dan doesn’t want to have a picture of it. Cam’s white arms and legs that he has known since childhood, her large buttocks pressed down, comic Ira, white and fat, sweating above her.
When she should be here.
“Maybe she went on a walk, Magdalene. Was she upset when she last saw you? Maybe she went on one of her walks so she’d be calm to pick up Granddaddy. I’m sure that’s what she did.”
“How would I know if she’s upset, the way she treats me? You should have seen how she was to me. I was desperate. I threw up every bit of lunch I had, not that I have a big lunch, ever, but every shred went into the toilet. Then I was so weak, I saw these things in front of my eyes, circles, one inside the other, what do you call them. Concentric. Luckily I lay down just in time. I got to my bed just in the nick of time. A minute later, I’d have been sprawled out, right on the rug. God knows. I could have hit my head. I just thank God I lay down when I did. God takes care of me, you know that, Dan. We’re all in God’s hands, from the minute we’re born to the second we die. Young or old, the tiniest baby to the oldest person in the world. That’s where we sit, right in the hands of God. Of course my daughter doesn’t believe it. She thinks we do everything ourselves. Especially herself. Upset? When isn’t she upset with me? I can’t do one blessed thing right for her. You’d think I had that spell on purpose, when I almost passed out on the floor, the way she acted.”
“I think she was really hoping you’d get over here in time for Granddaddy’s homecoming,” Dan says.
“How could I, in that condition? You’d think with her brains she’d see that. I couldn’t put one foot in front of the other, no less sit up in this heat. The whole afternoon. What I thought, what I was about to tell her, was that if I had a little time to rest, to pull myself together, she could come and get me later. But then she ran out of the house so fast. God only knows where she went, and believe me, I’m not asking. And where is she now? I’m ready to be picked up. I’m ready for it now, and where is she?”
“I’ll come and get you, Magdalene.”
Magdalene is silent for a moment. Dan can hear her take a breath.
“Oh, Danny, I’ll tell you, it’s too late. She’s done it to me now. I just can’t do it, knowing what she thinks of me. You know how nervous I get when Cam starts criticizing. Everything I do she jumps on. I don’t have to tell you that. You know how she can be. You know, Dan, I’ll tell you this because I kno
w you’ll understand. I wouldn’t tell another living soul. Do you know what the tragedy of my life is? The tragedy of my life is she’s my worst enemy. My own daughter is my worst enemy.”
“Oh, Magdalene, you don’t mean that,” Dan says.
“The way she looks at me, Dan, of course I make mistakes. I’m afraid to make the first move, she jumps on any little thing. Do you know what it’s like to feel you can’t do anything right for a person, Dan? You’d think my sickness was my fault and not my curse. No, Danny, you’re as sweet as ever to me, but I couldn’t make it now. Not in the mood she’s in. I’d be humiliated the whole time. Just let me stay here, out of the way. That’s the way she wants it. You see what she’s done to her poor husband. The two of us, we might as well be in prison, and her with the key.”
Dan thinks of Cam. Go off with him, he wants to say, go off with this man if he makes you happy. Leave the lot of us. Go off and don’t tell anybody where you went.
“Just lie down, Magdalene, and take a rest. Tell Cam if she comes home to call here just so everybody knows when to expect Granddaddy home.”
He walks into the living room to see Staci. He sees that she has suffered and that she wants to hurt him. He sees her intelligent, effective will to hurt. She won’t look at him: not yet. She’ll make him hunger for the look that she won’t give until she knows that it can hurt him.