The End of Always: A Novel

by Randi Davenport

  I had the voile and the shears and the needles and the thread so I set about making curtains. That summer, each house in our neighborhood was a square with windows shaded against the heat, each lawn a rectangle trimmed within an inch of its life. I wanted our house to look like the houses around us. If every house on the block had white curtains that blew at the windows, we would have white curtains that blew at the windows, too.

  I had forgotten to buy a tape measure, so I had to improvise. I walked in the woods until I found a long, straight stick. I laid the stick against our window casements and marked the width and length of each on the bark. I spread the voile out on the floor and measured the fabric against the markings on the stick. I added the length of my thumb to make room for the hem and a very narrow pocket for the rod. I cut each panel and marked the fold and then doubled that and turned the hem under. I threaded a needle and sat and sewed each curtain by hand. It took me three days to finish but eventually I had six panels. I walked from room to room and held the curtains to the windows, imagining how nice they would look once they were hung.

  I looked out over the yard and watched Bertha drag a fruit tree on a piece of burlap sack over her grass. A man walked along behind the tree with a shovel over his shoulder. She stopped near the front walk and fished a handkerchief from her pocket. She blotted her forehead and gestured at a piece of ground. The man used the blade of the shovel to mark out a place in the grass, where he began to dig.

  My stomach growled. I was hungry but there was nothing in the house to eat. This was the way of things. At first, I thought that August had merely forgotten to give me money for food and he would remember and I would not have to ask. I thought it was his job to take care of me. I thought I should not have to put my hand out like a beggar with a tin cup. In those first days, hunger had even been exhilarating, filling me with a strange lightness, convincing me that I would be pared to bone and in that disappearance I would become the bone that August would always want. But as time went on and still he gave me nothing, or sometimes just a dollar or two, when all we kept in the house might be a bag of oatmeal so I could cook his breakfast, I saw that August meant for me to live on very little. I could tell that he would rather sit on the edge of our bed at night, counting the cash in his wallet, than hand any money over to me. That was when hunger became painful. Without food, my belly was a gnawing jaw and I walked hunched over, as if the rings of my spine were ready to unlatch. When I could get one, I ate an apple, core and all. Once I ate a peach that Bertha gave me and sucked on the pit for the rest of the day. I sucked on pebbles I picked up from our drive, to make myself think that I was eating. That I was full.

  But I could not bring myself to believe that August would put his regard for money ahead of me. I told myself that he loved me. That he had promised to take care of me. That he had only forgotten. That my hunger must be some kind of mistake and I just had to wait for him to fix it. Even now, I am amazed at the things I told myself so I would not have to look at him and the way he really was.

  Outside, the air was soft and hot. Bees hummed in Bertha’s raspberry patch. She saw me and called my name but I just smiled and waved and walked down the driveway. She looked perfect in her perfect yard, as if she had never once been manhandled or turned by the desires of men, taken from herself and turned into something they wanted. It did not seem possible that a girl could walk through life the way that Bertha did, but here was Bertha, doing just that. It was hard to understand.

  When I went to her house, she served cake and tea. She never talked about my unraveling dress. She never mentioned my poor shoes. She did not pry about my family. She just sat me down on her porch or in her kitchen and gave me something to eat, a wedge of pie, a slice of strudel. She said they had too much but I knew she thought that I did not have enough. I believe she had taken it upon herself to worry about me, about my shrinking belly, my droopy clothes.

  Say what you want, she always said. Don’t say what August wants. Say what you want. Above all else.

  Her voice was very tender when she spoke. She fed me and told me things that felt like riddles, so surprising to me were they, so filled with ideas that made me blink.

  I found a footpath that rose uphill under the pines. No wind moved but the air seemed cooler in the shade. I carried my hunger like an empty bucket. I thought if I kept moving it would not echo and I could ignore the aching bite, the whirlpool that sucked at me no matter what I did.

  The trees thinned out near the top. A shallow slope spread out below me. A lone turkey vulture circled slowly and evenly on the updrafts, riding down and then up. I sat under an oak. I drew in the dirt with a stick. I batted flies away from my hair. I collected pine needles and twigs and acorn caps and old burrs and a few small stones—granite, quartz glinting. I lay on my stomach and built a little house and then another. Finally I had a fairy village just like the fairy villages that Martha and I built when we were little.

  The turkey vulture disappeared. I rolled over on my side and pillowed my head on my arms. I lay very still. I let myself believe that the emptiness I felt was only a way to get ready for August, who would come home and lie down with me in the dark. I closed my eyes. I let the emptiness be August. I let the dark close over me. After a time, I fell asleep. If birds flew overhead or deer passed behind me on the silent traces in the woods or bears came up from the river or dwarves came out of the ground, I saw none of them.

  I dreamt of a ship on the water that came through a silvery mist from a land I could not see and sailed over open water toward a land I could not identify. As the ship sailed, it cast a black shadow on the dark blue water. All around me was the sound of creaking wood and the rippling shudder of the sails. Then there were smokestacks and open decks and no sails at all and the ship was entirely different but in the manner of dreams was still the same and still carried the same cargo. I saw a woman in a dark red dress at the forward rail but it could not be a woman in a dark red dress for the dress was white and the red had come from her and then she and the ship disappeared. I woke with my heart pounding and my breath gone and a sense that I was in danger but of course I was not.

  I came down the hillside in the late afternoon, the sun still well above the horizon. I carried acorns in my pocket and a handful of pure white stones. When I got to the road, a man saw me and stopped dead in his tracks. He had a length of rope coiled over his shoulder and a hatchet tucked into his belt. He put his hand to his mouth and backed away and then turned and ran down the road. I looked around and saw nothing. I realized he was afraid of me.

  I touched my hair and smoothed the front of my dress. I knew why he ran. But I was no spirit of the woods, no sylph or sprite, no bewitching girl with her hands full of spells. I was a married woman. Still, my dress was soiled and wrinkled and rank. My shoes were dirty. My hair had come undone. I shed pine needles and twigs as I walked. He must have thought I was no good, come to haunt him, the terrible girl who took men into the woods.

  But I was not that girl and never had been. I was only myself, hungry and tired and hot and alone.

  When I got home, I sat on the back steps and took my shoes off. I heard the sound of creaking bedsprings and then August stood in the doorway. He wore his work clothes. He held his hand out to me, his fingers knotted into a fist. “I have something for you,” he said.

  He turned his hand over and I pried his fingers open, one by one. A plain gold band rested in his palm.

  “Put it on,” he said. He smiled. “It is not going to bite you.” When I did, a light came into his eyes. He kissed the band on my finger. He said he wanted to prove to me that he could be a good husband. He wanted to show me that he could do the right thing. “Now,” he said. “I am going to take care of your bath.”

  He had already started the water on the stove. He lifted the pot and carried it over to the washtub and filled the tub. He tested the temperature with his hand. He told me to get in.

  My hunger disappeared as his words moved through me. I
left my dress in a heap and walked naked in the bare end of daylight. I let him watch me, his gaze as if the touch of his hand, as if he had already reached for me. I stepped into the tub and lowered myself into the water. He soaped a washrag. He began to suds my back. I turned to take the rag from him but he laughed and said, “Let me.” His voice soft and low and full of wonderment, as if I was something he could not believe he was permitted to touch. Water sloshed onto the floor and he laughed again but his hand stilled on my hip. I heard his breath catch. I knew what would come next. He touched my breasts with his soapy rag and told me to turn and face him. “So I can wash you,” he said. I turned.

  He took me to a restaurant near the courthouse where the tables were laid with white tablecloths and thick glass goblets and heavy silverware. He liked to hold forth and tell stories about the escapades he and his brother had survived when they were children. He had jumped off a roof on a dare and had broken his arm but that did not matter. What mattered was that he had done it. He had jumped when everyone said he could not. This kind of thing had set him up to be the man he was. He saw himself as fearless and in charge. I saw him that way, too. As we had walked along the street toward the restaurant, we had passed a flower vendor and August had leaned over the crocks of blossoms until he found a tiny bunch of soft pink roses. He told the flower girl to fix them with a pin so he could pin the flowers to my dress. She did not have a pin but he just stood there, staring at her, until she fashioned something with a hairpin she took from her head. She clipped the flowers to my dress. He was not entirely satisfied but she had done what he had asked and so he agreed that it was fine. He paid her a little bit less than the price she suggested and she did not argue with him. I could feel her eyes on our backs as we went up the street. August had taken something from her and it was not just the flowers. It was not just that business with the pin. He had made her feel his power. At dinner he eyed me and said he thought I needed some new clothes. But then he let it go, as if he was determined to have a good time. He took my hand in his and turned it this way and that. He smiled and appreciated the ring he had purchased. He held his left hand out to me and showed me that our rings matched. He told me that the rings were the best he could afford. Even if they were not the absolute best, they were better than the prize that came in a box of Cracker Jack. He smiled again and I smiled at him. I loved our rings. I loved the way they let the world know that I belonged to him.

  He had ordered steaks for us and he made sure we had chocolate cake for dessert. A man in a plain blue jacket and black pants sat at an upright piano. He played some soft small song. August pressed his knee against mine under the table and told me I was beautiful. “I can see that others would think you are not so pretty,” he said. “But to me, you are.” He smiled. I felt tears sharp in my eyes.

  Some nights he hit me for no reason. Other nights I seemed to be the cause. One morning he took a razor from his kit and stropped it and then held it next to my face. One night he flicked a knife at me. Afterward, he always said he was wrong. He always said it was his fault. He always said he wanted to do the right thing. I often thought that if August were president, he could enact a hundred laws against the things he did, but still, he would do them. A hundred years from now, a thousand years from now, I would read newspaper stories about girls who disappeared at the hand of some man. And August would be the same. Law or no law. This I believed to be love.

  In the morning he left before breakfast. I opened the sack of oatmeal and saw black things moving. I closed the bag and carried it outside and threw it in the trash barrel in the yard.

  He loved me but he hit me. He touched me as if driven by something he could not control. Then he said I was not pretty. He bought me flowers and criticized my clothes. I knew my clothes were shabby. He did not need to point this out to me. I thought that everyone could see how bad they were whenever I left the house. If I caught a glimpse of myself in a store window, I saw a thin girl with clothes that hung on her like sacks.

  I swallowed hard. My hunger knew no end and August gave me very little and the more often he hit me, the more afraid I became to ask for what I should have been rightly given. There was no way to ease the hollow or allay the ache and now nausea rose unbidden. I believed that hunger would make you sick and it seemed I was sick every morning, as if my body had chosen to feel queasy rather than empty. And now there was only one thing left to do.

  I walked quickly. Two blocks over, a band of boys in short pants and white shirts played stickball on an open lot. Two small girls, no older than eight or nine and dressed in lemon-yellow dresses and red leather boots, pushed past me, followed by their mother, who wore a gray skirt and a gray blouse and a straw boater trimmed with gray silk ribbon. She dropped her gaze as she passed me. I said good morning but she did not reply.

  Street traffic picked up. I heard the clattering of the interurban and its distant bell and saw its glassy cars and flickering blue sparks. Another wave of nausea moved through me and washed away and then swelled again. After that I was in the center of town. I turned up the road to my father’s house. I passed the springhouse and watched the summer women in their white clothes rest on iron benches while they waited for the cure. No water in the world could heal them of what ailed them, if they lived in the same world I did. Four young men on bicycles wobbled along the gravel path and then sped away down the street. I had known this neighborhood as long as I had been alive but now it was unfamiliar, the way that something well known appears in a dream and no longer looks as it did when you knew it in real life.

  I stood at the back steps and licked my lips. Then I climbed the stairs and knocked on the door. When no one came I knocked again. This time Martha appeared, frail in her white shirtwaist. When she saw me she fell back. Then she opened the door. She put her arms around me and whispered my name. She was no more substantial than a bony cage.

  We sat on the open ground in the middle of the trees between my father’s house and our neighbor’s place. Insects hummed in the long grass. I told her I was married. I told her about the ceremony at the courthouse and the house that August had arranged for us, its three rooms and the curtains I had sewn using a stick and a spool of thread. I told her about Bertha, who did not have to do anything except play with her flowers and her dishes and her fan. I told her about the dinner at the restaurant and about the roses August had pinned to my dress. I showed her my gold band.

  Martha pulled a length of rattling hollow reed from the ground and split it in half with her thumbnail while I talked. She broke the halved pieces into smaller pieces and let the pieces fall onto the grass.

  “What,” I said. “What?”

  “Are you all right?” She lifted my hand and then let it fall back onto the grass. She stroked my fingers. “You look thin.”

  I shrugged. “You are one to talk,” I said, but she looked stricken. “I am all right,” I said. I batted flies from my hair and slapped a mosquito on my forearm.

  “It is so hot,” she said. She dabbed at her face with the back of her hand. “Let’s go under the trees.”

  We found a place at the base of an old maple where roots heaved up out of the ground and the dirt was cool. I lay down and Martha sat cross-legged beside me. After a short time she straightened her legs and rolled onto one hip and leaned on one elbow. She told me that Hattie had been sent out to work at a neighbor’s house, to help with the children. “They have a new baby and two others under three. It will be just for the summer,” she said. “In the fall she will go back to school.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Are you working?” she asked. Then she shook her head. “No,” she said. “Of course not. You could not be here if you were.” Dappled light fell around her. She frowned. “William Oliver came to the house. He was looking for you.”

  “August told me to quit,” I said.

  “It was about something else,” she said. “He stood on the front steps and recited something. I think it was poetry but I did not know the p
oem. Or maybe it came from the Bible.”

  “The Bible,” I said. “I am surprised you recognized it.”

  I thought of my mother’s Bible, printed in Old High German, where someone had recorded the dates and places of our births next to our names and which she kept on a table in the living room and from which she sometimes read aloud, translating the stories as she went, but whose words seemed like nothing to me but distant things that had nothing to do with me.

  Martha sat up. “The Bible has always seemed to be a great deal beside the point,” she said. “As it has been for you. As it has been for all of us. Suffer the little lambs and all of that.” She snorted and picked at the grass. I had no idea Martha felt this way and I looked at her with interest. But she just pulled grass out of the ground and threw it into the yard. Finally she said, “He did not believe me when I said you were gone. He kept asking where you were. He stood on our steps like a man possessed. He was driving the laundry cart and it ended up blocking the street. No one could get by. I told him over and over again that you were not here. Finally he left.”

  “He is full of ideas,” I said. “None of them good.”

  “Could you have married him?”

  The grass was scratchy and I kept feeling insects crawl up my legs. Her question was irritating and beside the point. I sighed. “I do not know, Martha. Maybe.”

  “Maybe?” She touched the back of my hand. “Did he make an offer?”

  An ant marched along a long blade of grass under the tree and came to the end and turned and marched back along the grass in just the way that it had come. I wondered how I might describe William Oliver’s offer. It hardly seemed real anymore but of course it had been very real when it came to me.