by Mary Gordon
“You OK, sweetheart?” he says.
She shrugs. “I’m a little upset.”
His heart quickens: She’s opened the door. Perhaps now he can comfort her. He can be of some help to her in her life. He puts his hand on the top of her head.
“What is it, sweetie?”
“Sharon,” she says. “I think she’s hurt that you won’t let her come here. It makes her feel just terrible, like you think she’s a leper, not good enough to be with your family at a time like this.”
Theresa does not look up. She is pleased at this justice. The adulterer is shamed. The threatening child does damage. All in their places, in the nature of the truth. Theresa hears her mother cry out. “I’ll go to her,” she says, rising, full of the power she has always known is hers, rising from the brown corduroy chair.
She walks into her mother’s room and sits down in the chair beside her. She takes her mother’s hand. She prays to the spirit. But before she calls the spirit in to heal, she says to her mother, silently, what she has always wanted her to hear.
“Mother,” she says, “there were some times when I was happy. Not because of you. You never made me happy; nothing about you was for my good.
“You were distracted. You felt you lost the world for us. For me. It was our fault. Later, when you didn’t mind being in the house, it wasn’t for us you didn’t mind. It was your mother. I watched your mother; she became an animal, a man. Even now I fear her fate. You tended us but thought only of her. The stone mother you served, the mother without language, secret, kept apart.
“I saw my father’s eye move from me whenever you came into the room. He could make you not distracted: I could not. I saw him feel your pull and move towards it. Towards you, away from me. There was nothing I could have from him that he couldn’t at any time take back and give to you. You taught me I could count on nothing. The pull between the two of you was like the current that made electricity. I knew if I got too near it it could throw me out of my life, and it was nothing I could help.
“So I decided to want nothing. I would hide everything I had. Open fondness for an object of love brought out my hate.
“I decided, Mother, to punish the crime of revealing desire, joy. I decided to bring down my fist. I decided I would hold my knife against the stretched, vulnerable throat. I would shed blood, loving justice. Only then would I be at peace. I want to tell people what you always told me: you are nothing, there is nothing that is yours.”
She leans over the bed, and kisses her mother on the forehead, on the eyes, the ears. She asks the spirit to come there, where she has kissed, to cleanse, to bring light to the darkness. She presses her mother’s hand. She prays: Come, Holy Spirit, come.
Ellen opens her eyes. She begins shouting, cursing from the throat. Communicating nothing. Useless language, living only in the throat. Only horror. But the eyes do not mirror the horror. They mirror nothing. Only her refusal to cease to be.
She curses everything. Everything falls under her malediction for the crime of continuing to be. She curses, not to change the state of anything, or even to punish, but to name.
Theresa tells herself she will not fear the eyes that are no longer human. She will say to the unclean spirit in those eyes: Rise up. Her mother will live out her days a model patient in the serenity appropriate to the approach of death. Theresa lays on her hands.
The mother rises up. She will not allow herself to be approached. Theresa tries to keep her down, to hold her by the arms, the torso, the shoulder. Ellen screams louder. The words can be made out. Help. Help. Theresa will not pray aloud, but silently. With all her strength, she urges the approach of the strong spirit.
The mother will not give up resisting. Her body is nearly all bone; it serves her still; it allows her to resist. She will not soften herself in compliance. Theresa stiffens her fingers, grips the shoulders, which are bone, pushes down. She knows her mother is putting all her strength into the effort to be against her. The mother strains and pushes. Theresa holds her down; she won’t allow this thing, this rising up. In her mind, the words of the spirit drown her mother’s words. Help. Help.
But no one else can hear the spirit. Someone comes in, thinking they can help Ellen as she, Theresa, obviously cannot. Someone is behind her. It’s over. She’s failed. She knows this. She must let go. She must loosen her grip. She must pretend that she has not laid hands on her mother.
“It’s all right, Mom,” says Marilyn. “Don’t be upset. She seems to have become agitated for some reason. No one knows why she does. It just happens. Don’t be upset.”
She must appear now to have wanted nothing, to feel nothing, to be free to leave. She looks at Marilyn and thinks, My daughter. And she is enveloped in contempt.
She will not heal her mother. Her mother will resist her to the death. She prays for her deliverance from the sin of pride, but really she is praying for another chance at punishment so she can be again at peace.
Her husband sees her. He recognizes in her eyes the fresh desire to humiliate. And he thinks: Long ago, when I first recognized this look, I should have taken the children from her. In the middle of the night, we should have gone, lived in our car, driving by night across the country to a new place, where we would have had new names and she would not have found us.
He hears the back door close quietly. Theresa has gone to sit on the back porch. Then Marilyn comes from Ellen’s room. Ellen is quiet. Marilyn has given her an injection to bring on this quiet. Will it bring her death? Ray Dooley sees that his daughter Marilyn is frightened that her mother will go into Ellen’s room again and disturb Ellen once more. He wants to say to his daughter, I can’t lift my hand to help you. I never could.
7
CAM’S EYE FALLS ON HER WATCH, ONE MINUTE, SHE thinks, just let me have one more minute with him. She makes her body flat against him. They are face to face. His sex is hard against her. He could enter once more and he starts to. “No,” she says. She refuses him. Things have to begin being over. He doesn’t listen. She gives up wanting to refuse.
There is a shelf, painted black wood, above his bed. Before they make love, he pushes the stacks of books to one side and brings glasses of cold water there and little dishes of salty foods. Today there are cashew nuts and Japanese crackers in the shapes of other foods. Vegetables, fish, peas green as jewels. He gives her water, he holds her head to drink as if she were an invalid. He hands her the small pieces of food, piece by piece. So that, when the dishes are empty, she has already left him. He does this for her, lets her leave him first. It’s his house, she has all that life she must go back to. He can stay in the place where she was present after she leaves him. So to let her leave him while she is still there is, he feels, the least that he can do.
He hears her in the shower, her impatient dressing, her cruel brushing of her hair.
He hears her on the phone:
“All right, Mother, if you’re that weak, lie down. Just make yourself some soup. I have to go now. I’m late. I had to do some things for work….No, I’m not at the office. Have some cheese, then, if you’re too hot for soup. You can have one of those new frozen dinners I got you for supper. Ask Bob to help you with the microwave. Maybe you could eat with him.”
And then another call. “Theresa, this is Cam. No, I’m not really late, not at all, no. They’re not expecting me out there till four. I’m sorry you were inconvenienced. I’m about to leave. We’ll be back at six, six-thirty at the latest. He’s been all packed for days. He’s chomping at the bit. I don’t know where you got the idea of two o’clock, Theresa. I’m sure I never said it. Just tell Dan I’m about to leave, will you. Or is he there? No? Well, tell him I called. Thanks a lot.”
Ira suggested that she bring Dan with her to get their grandfather. For Dan’s sake and for hers. He knows Dan doesn’t like him. He understands the brotherly mistrust, the rudeness, the clipped address considered right for the defiler, the avoiding glances, the cynical, fractured half-sentences of a ma
n who has no talent for withdrawal or half-truth. Cam said she’d ask Dan, but it was only to appease Ira. He saw that; he understood that she wanted the job to herself. She wanted her mission. He hears the relief in his beloved’s voice when she hears that Dan is out—she couldn’t have asked him anyway, there was no way he could have come.
She bangs the phone, clicks shut her pocketbook, her motions furious. She furiously jangles her keys.
“Poison,” she says, “the two of them, their voices make me feel like I’ve been poisoned.”
She kisses him on the mouth but he knows she has left him. Long ago, when he gave her the final bit of food.
8
BEFORE SHE GETS HER GRANDFATHER, SHE DECIDES TO visit the house left to her by her old teacher Edith Blake. Her house. Her property. For two years, since Edith’s death, she’s left it empty, a scandal to the neighbors, an untenanted house. It is as if she is reproaching them with Edith’s death. Her deadness. As if she were blaming them.
She pays a boy, one of the neighbors’ sons, to cut the grass in summertime, to shovel the snow in winter. If a windowpane is broken, she sees to it that it is fixed immediately. She has had a sump pump installed in the basement; she has had a painter repaint the blistered trim. All these attentions make the neighbors more uneasy. They can’t console themselves with the idea of a forgetful landlord, far away. They watch her visiting the house. They see her going in the door. They don’t know what she does inside.
Inside, the waste of living space, the uselessness of what was made, above all to be useful, the shelter that shelters nothing, only the air that it surrounds, the excess of emptiness, the wrong-ness of it, is voluptuous to Cam. She bathes herself in emptiness as if it were the sea. Eternal. Dependable Mare nostrum, she remembers. Our sea. Our air. Mine.
She wants to know this house, not as an enclosure for human need, but in itself. Not as a place for furniture and food. No sinks, couch, counter, furniture, picture, bathtub, bed. She wants to see the joists, the cornices, the woodwork unobstructed by softening object, the curtainless windows, the carpetless stairs, the kitchen without table, pot, or knife, the blank, blind walls. She wanders from room to room. She is in love with the angles of the door frames, with the hinges, with the sloping floor, the staircase that ends abruptly near the window looking out to the lush garden with its day lilies, its junipers, its holly—male and female—its hydrangeas—pink and blue.
Proprietorship soothes her. She looks up at the ceiling. There is a stain there, in the shape of a fat bird. She feels hopeful, breathing in the unclear air.
She thinks of Ira. Does she want to live here, in this house, with him? Women and men in houses. She’s grown to dislike the idea. It’s the source of all the problems, she thinks, sharing living quarters. She’s begun to think that any man who lived in a house with his mother shouldn’t live in one with a woman till they’re both almost dead. The stories he’s told her about his mother make her feel she’s right, that it’s the reason they remain happy together: they don’t share a house.
He told her about playing ball in the streets. It was the most important thing in life, he said, those games. Life and death. He was chosen first, he told her, not because he had talent, but because he was quick and he could pay attention. Nothing got in his way. All the windows, he told her, were always open on the street. He’d be in the middle of a play, something crucial to the game. He’d hear his mother’s voice, calling him to come in, to do something that minute for her, it couldn’t wait, take some soup up the block to his grandmother, go down to the drugstore, help her lift something, close something. When he heard his mother’s voice, he said, he felt like he was drowning. He felt she didn’t want him to live.
He told her about eating his mother’s food. He didn’t like to eat. He didn’t like desserts. Every day his mother made four desserts to coax him. He’d open the refrigerator when he came home from school and see four desserts. She threw away the ones he didn’t eat the night before, or gave them to his father. Every day he swore he wouldn’t touch one, even if it tempted him. He said he kept his vow.
“Didn’t you ever like life at home?” she asked him, jealous in some way of the attentive mother. “Didn’t your mother ever do anything right?”
He said he liked it when he was sick, a little sick, a little feverish, when he could really have gone to school, his mother knew it, but she decided to be indulgent. He liked sitting on a chair when she put fresh sheets on his bed. The cool sheets when you got back in them were like heaven. She’d come in after a while and play cards on the bed. He’d liked that, he remembered.
Cam looks around her empty house. She wishes she could forget the stories about Ira and his mother. She wishes she didn’t have to think about mothers and sons, men living in houses. She wishes she believed a man could live in a house with a woman and not feel he’s being drowned or starved.
She walks upstairs into the room that she would make the bedroom. She imagines waking beside him in the morning and thinks perhaps it’s worth anything for that. To wake beside him every morning. To be able to believe in that.
She walks back downstairs. She doesn’t know what’s worth what. The air, thick with the dust that travels down a ray of light as if it were a portent, an alphabet, seems to her an element that she must learn. Learn properly to be herself.
When she is herself, she’ll live here. She doesn’t know with whom.
But not with her mother. Her mother has never seen this house. And she promises: I will never bring my mother here. Then she modifies: My mother can come sometimes if she likes, but only as a visitor, a guest. My mother will never live in this house.
9
SHE IS DRIVING ON THE HIGHWAY, DRIVING EAST, THINKING of her mother. She’s begun to worry about her. She keeps thinking about her, lying with her arm over her face, her feet puffy when she took her shoes off. Her ankles might have been swollen too; Cam doesn’t remember exactly, but she thinks they might have been. Magdalene never exercises and only eats processed food. Sixty percent of her calories at least come to her in the form of liquor. At her last checkup, the doctor said her blood pressure was high, that she should watch her sodium. But all the things Magdalene puts into the microwave are sky-high in salt. Cam’s tried to tell her to eat fresh foods; she bought her unsalted sunflower seeds and whole-wheat crackers. Magdalene just left them in the cabinet. Cam knows that in the summer old people who have a tendency to high blood pressure are more prone to strokes. Her mother said she saw spots in front of her eyes. It could be nothing; her mother is always inventing symptoms, or exaggerating them, but Cam remembers hearing somewhere that people see spots in front of their eyes before they have strokes.
She pulls into a 7-Eleven and dials Maggi’s. Tiffany, who works at the desk, gets Kevin for her.
“I know it’s Saturday, I know it’s busy, but pretend you’re glad to talk to me.”
“I’m pretending,” Kevin says.
“She decided not to go,” Cam says.
“You know what I love about you, Camille? You know what my favorite quality in you is? Your ability to be surprised. Like you believed, you actually believed for one minute that your mother might go out of the house. I know you: you thought it actually might happen.”
“All right, so I’m an asshole. I’m well known for it.”
“Luckily, you have other gifts. You just come from Ira?”
“How did you know?”
“I can always tell it in your voice. For about five minutes you sound like you’re not headed across the Donner Pass.”
“So if I’m so terrible how come you hang around with me?”
“You’re a good customer. I live for the day when you come in, every six months, for a trim.”
“Will you go over there?”
“My last appointment’s five o’clock. I’ll go then.”
“I’m on my way to get Vincent. Otile thinks I should leave him there. What do you think?”
“I think it doesn
’t matter what I think. I think you all hear some whistle outside ordinary human register, like dogs, that other people don’t hear.”
“Tell me, Kevin, I need to know what you think.”
“I think Mrs. Sullivan should definitely go for the cellophane. It’ll bring out her hidden highlights. I’m about to tell her that now.”
“Otile is such a goddamn nun, you know? I feel like I’m going to the principal’s.”
“Call me when he’s settled in. I’ll go eat something with your mother, but we’re going out after that. So call me late.”
“Where are you going? Someplace nice?”
“Of course. If it’s good I’ll take you next week.”
“Promise?”
“Promise. Mrs. Sullivan’s beginning to fidget in her chair. You know what that can mean.”
“Call me tonight. Wish me luck.”
“Just bring Otile a holy picture. That’ll calm her down.”
She gets back into the car. The traffic is beginning to be heavy. She wishes she didn’t have to be at odds with Otile, who is one of her best friends, whose opinion she respects.
She admires Otile’s love of movement, a longing to strip down her life and the life around her, as if all the years in coifs and wing sleeves had made her wild for action and change. She and Otile share a sense that they’re responsible for other lives, weaker lives, and they take their place in the world with the knowledge of this, ornamenting them like epaulets. Oddly, Cam chose Otile as one of her few confidantes about Ira. After she had, she was partly sorry; she wondered if she’d wanted some sort of clerical sanction for adultery: the sacred personage who’d bless her in her sin and tell her to go on. She told Otile at least partly because Otile was so practical. She had a strange idea that Otile could come up with a plan that would make everybody happy: She’d be with Ira. Her mother, Bob, her grandparents would somehow prosper by the move. Everyone would be grateful for this new breath of fresh life.