Child Bride

by Jennifer Smith Turner

  “Yes.”

  “Are you blushing?”

  “No,” I said. But I could feel heat stinging my cheeks and looked away.

  He lifted my chin and said, “It’s a beautiful story. Did you know at one time the book was banned in England? It was considered obscene because of the explicit love scenes. The publisher was even sued, but they won the case, which propelled the book to record sales around the world. Most people think the story is only about great sex, but it’s about much more than that. It explores class issues and marriage and relationships. All the things men and women face. But I must admit the sex scenes are amazing. Did you find the scenes—engrossing?” He traced my chin with his finger, then continued traveling down the center of my neck to the soft spot between my collar bones. My body trembled as Charles made circular motions, moved to the other side of my jaw, and placed his palm on my cheek. I rested my face against his soft hand and let him brush my lips with his thumb.

  “You’re lovely, Nell. Would you like to be my Lady?”

  “Charles, I …”

  “Shush, don’t say anything.” He stood and hovered over me, his legs still astride mine. Then he bent and kissed on my forehead. “I have to go.”

  “But we just got here,” I said.

  “I have things I need to do. But I’ll see you next Wednesday.”

  I watched as he strode away and was aware of the rising and falling of my chest, the sound of my heart beating erratically, and the beads of sweat on my nose.

  HENRY PACED THE kitchen. “What’s wrong with you? Don’t you hear the babies crying?”

  He wanted me to stop cooking and take care of the children while he cleaned his shoes, but I didn’t hear them, not the way I usually do. My mind wandered back to the look in Charles’s eyes, the musky smell on his shirt collar, the sensation of his hands stroking my face, the feeling that something in my body was awakening. I didn’t want to lose the images that caused my breathing to race and made me remember what it felt like to dream about loving a man the way I had when Henry and I first met. But I wondered what it would be like to be Charles’s Lady.

  “I was just thinking about church.”

  “You need to be thinking about your family. How long before supper is ready?”

  “If I stop, it’ll take longer to finish cooking. Why don’t you look after your children?”

  “That’s your job.”

  I turned the heat down under the pots and went over to the children. Teddy needed a clean diaper, and Junior and April were tussling over a toy. I took care of their needs and finished preparing supper, but my mind was elsewhere.

  Once the children were down for the night, I joined Henry in bed. He pretended to be asleep. I slid to his side and curled against his back, rubbed my legs against his, draped my arm around his waist, and reached for his private parts. He grasped my hand and pushed it away.

  “Just thought we could have some loving,” I said.

  “Not doing that for a while, I told you.”

  “But …”

  “Go to sleep. I need my rest.”

  I rolled over so that there was ample space between our bodies. Sleep came, and with it images on the insides of my eyelids began to form. Charles and I were in a field of wheat and wildflowers on a warm spring day. Birds were chirping, and a gentle breeze rustled through the grasses that provided harmonious background sounds for the singing birds. Charles reached for me and pulled me against him. He wrapped his arms around me. I leaned back and stretched, rested my head against his shoulder, encircled his arms with mine. The sun felt warm on my face as his lips moved up and down my neck. Suddenly we were on the ground, our bodies lost in the tall grasses that tickled my back and the exposed flesh of my thighs. He gently pushed my dress up around my waist. I held his face in my hands, tried to control my heavy breathing. My body was tense and arched with anticipation …

  “Stop thrashing around,” Henry grunted. “You sick or something?”

  His voice shocked me back to my life. “Just feeling unsettled,” I said, shaking the reverie away.

  “Take something so I can sleep.”

  I got out of bed, pulled at the damp nightgown stuck to my chest and legs, and staggered to the bathroom. Resting against the sink, I stared at myself in the mirror. My legs were weak, and my dark skin had taken on a pinkish glow.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “I THINK I’M IN LOVE,” I BLURTED OUT AS SOON AS Charles took me in his arms and placed a gentle kiss on my lips.

  Over the past month, Henry had gotten used to me leaving the house on Wednesday evenings. He’d actually accepted it, as though he realized it would give him a moment without me in the house. Soon it became a routine, with little need for us to discuss the whys of it. I’d just leave right after dinner, a free woman fleeing to another life. Once in the church kitchen, Charles and I would sit close to one another, touch, stare into each other’s eyes. During each visit the touching became more and more intimate. His hands explored every inch of my body, and I learned about all of his muscles and his manhood.

  “What do you mean?” Charles said as he ran his hands down my back, under my dress, tickling the soft insides of my thighs.

  “You’re in my head all the time, Charles. If I’m walking with the children, cooking, or cleaning the house, I’m tripping over images of you. The sound of your voice echoes through my head like a cool breeze on a hot day. I’m restless at night with thoughts of you. I lie down beside Henry, but my body betrays the feelings stirring for you. Henry’s beginning to wonder what’s wrong with me.”

  “We’re just visiting, Nell, enjoying each other’s company, sharing stories about what we read. No harm in that.” He rubbed my shoulders. I closed my eyes and let the warmth from his hands soothe the questions stirring my soul.

  “Is that all this is for you? Reading and talking?” I asked.

  He took my hands and gently kissed one palm and then the other. I moved my upturned hand and stroked his cheek. His lips moved down my wrist to the inside of my elbow and then my face, where he lingered. He whispered, “The time we spend together is more special to me than the morning sun, more sensuous than a gentle rain brushing against a springtime bud, teasing it to full bloom. I cherish every second we have together. From the moment I met you, I knew that being near you was important for my soul.”

  He pulled me close. Our lips locked, moist and hungry. His tongue searched my mouth. I began to float, as though the dream-state from the night before had entered this space with us. Just as I felt myself give in to the ecstasy, I pushed Charles away and said, “I need some water.” Then I made my way to the kitchen sink, where I stood just as I had last night in the bathroom, trying to slow my breathing and stop my heart from racing.

  “Nell, I need to hold you. All this meeting, talking about books, sharing our deepest thoughts, and touching—I want to be closer to you.” His body was within inches of mine, but I didn’t turn around. He didn’t touch me.

  “This is wrong. We both know that.” My words lived in one place, but my body was in another, and I eased back against his chest, closing the physical gap between us. My hands went from gripping the side of the sink to the fabric of my dress, then to the cloth of his pants. I dug my fingers into his thighs, felt his manhood grow, guided his hands to my breasts. My mind kept wanting to interrupt, to stop me and flee. But my body melted deeper and deeper against him.

  “Just once, Nell. I want to make love and truly feel you.” He began kissing the back of my neck.

  The coolness of the large stainless-steel countertop heated up quickly from the temperature of our bodies pressed against the surface. Pots crashed to the floor. Water drenched us when we pushed against the faucet. We fell, and I bumped my head against the side of the cabinet.

  “Are you all right?” Charles breathlessly asked.

  “Yes, don’t stop.”

  Spent, we sat on the floor in a puddle of water, our chests rising up and down in unison. I thought
about my family, Phyllis’s words of warning, nights of not being touched, and I almost felt ashamed. Then Charles kissed my exposed breast, and I stroked him; we rolled on the floor in a twisted knot. I cuddled against his chest, dozing on and off, reveling in my new-found feeling of euphoria.

  “I have to tell you something,” Charles whispered.

  “I’ve never felt this—luxurious. Yes, that’s how I feel right now,” I said.

  “I need to say something,” he said. I could feel his body stiffen.

  “What is it?”

  “Nell, I’m leaving.”

  “I need to go too. But I don’t want to move from this position.”

  “You don’t understand. I’m leaving, moving away,” he said.

  I sat up, buttoned the front of my dress, pushed the hem down over my legs. “What’re you saying?”

  “This is my last night here. I’m going back to school. Now that everything is settled with my family, I need to get my life back on track.”

  I scurried away from him on my bum, like a small child escaping from danger. I grabbed my panties and frantically pulled them up my legs. He reached for me, but I slapped his hand away. “What have you done!” I shouted.

  “Nell, I wanted one last special moment with you.”

  “Get away from me!” I screamed. A guttural sound flew out of me that was so loud it seemed to make the walls vibrate, sending the noise up the stairs to the altar.

  “We both wanted this. Now we’ll always have something to remember each other by.” He stood, gathered his things to head out, and said, “You take care, Nell.” With that he was gone.

  “YOU PUTTING ON weight?” Henry asked one morning, weeks later.

  The dish I was holding shattered on the kitchen floor. I told the children to keep their feet off the floor while I cleaned up the mess of broken glass. What have I done? I thought. What have I done?

  “No, don’t think so,” I said. But I quickly turned my back to him and continued cleaning.

  He walked into our bedroom while I was dressing. Long ago he had stopped watching me lotion my body, pull my underthings on, help me with a zipper or buttons running down the back of a dress. I was looking at my profile in the mirror—the growing bulge in my stomach and the full, rounder breasts—thinking about Charles and our love-child.

  Suddenly Henry rushed at me, grabbed me by the shoulders. His grip was so tight it felt as though my shoulders were about to pop out of their sockets. “What—have—you—done?” he hissed at me.

  “Henry—I—”

  “Get rid of it.”

  “I can’t, Henry, I just can’t!”

  “How dare you bring that into my home, to live among my children!”

  “Henry!”

  “You listen to me.” He bent down and yanked my hair, bringing my face within inches of his. “You don’t want to get rid of it—fine. You carry it for as long as you can, until the miscarriage happens. You tell everyone how we decided to have another baby. And when you get sick, you’re on your own. You hear me? You’ll be on your own.”

  He pushed my head to the floor and turned his back to me.

  THERE WASN’T A particular day when everyone understood the baby wasn’t Henry’s. “We decided to have one more, before I’m too old—we want another girl,” I said over and over, once my belly was too large for me to wear regular clothes. That was what Henry made me say, except the baby-girl part; that was my addition. I figured this time I could say what I wanted. But I could never make eye contact when I spoke that sentence; I could only look down at the tips of my shoes, the way I’d seen Daddy do years ago in the store. Most people found my reaction odd. They couldn’t figure out why Henry and I didn’t look happy about another child coming into the world. Henry had made such a commotion when Teddy was born. “My son, another son!” he’d pronounced to the congregation and run from man to man, grabbing their hands and slapping each one on the shoulder. His face shone with pride. But not this time.

  However, there was a specific moment when the entire congregation knew that the life growing inside of me belonged to Charles. I thought I was alone in the children’s room, where I’d escaped from the sermon that was making my head spin and my stomach churn. The Reverend was preaching about the virtue of honesty, how all of life’s ills could be avoided if we all lived according to the moral standard of the Ten Commandments. He especially referenced the one about not committing adultery. Henry looked at me over the heads of the children, who were positioned between us in the pew. My cheeks stung so badly I had to get up and excuse myself. “Need the bathroom,” I mouthed to him, and left.

  I leaned against the wall to ease the lower-back pain that lived there daily and rubbed my stomach in circular motions. I began to imagine how beautiful this baby would be; somehow I knew it was a girl. Just the thought of her made me smile and think about Charles. “I want you to know about your daddy. But he’d probably want you to call him Dad—it’s more Northern. He’s an educated man, tall and handsome. He’s a reader like me. We spent time talking about books, and you’ll be a reader too. He had to go away, but I know he’ll love you with all of his heart.”

  Suddenly I heard a gasp. There in the doorway was Phyllis. She glared at me, examined my face, ran her eyes down the length of my body, raised them back to my eyes, and held her hand in my face, like a crossing guard stopping traffic for school children. I opened my mouth to speak, but she shook her hand and said “No!” between clenched teeth.

  “But—” I said.

  She didn’t blink, just moved her head from side to side, then abruptly turned her back, the way a disgusted actress would while breaking up with an unfaithful lover, and walked away.

  Chapter Eighteen

  I DON’T REMEMBER HOW I GOT TO THE HOSPITAL. One day pain gripped my insides, and I gave in to the anguish as if hoping it was the signal of an end to the terror my life had become.

  Once there I imagined Henry standing over me, wiping my forehead with a towel, moistening my lips with a wet sponge, and whispering, “I need you.” Or was it Charles’s voice? Silky and faraway, coaxing me back to reality. His lips brushing against my steaming hot forehead, his fingers stroking my cheeks, his manhood stirring inside me.

  Then I felt the nurse trying to wake me. “You need to take some water and swallow these pills.”

  “My skin hurts. Don’t touch me,” I protested.

  “You’re going to be all right,” she said.

  For an instant I could see Henry standing in the doorway. Then my eyelids fluttered, and I imagined Charles kissing me, brushing my hair, wiping sweat from my forehead, and staring into my eyes. Was it Junior lifting Teddy so he could reach me to place a kiss on my cheek and wrap his arms around my neck? Or was it April who wanted to linger by my side? Did Junior push the other children toward the door? What was Momma doing here, and why did she look away from me? Why was Daddy shaking his head? The sheets felt cold and clammy around my legs as I twisted and turned on the unfamiliar mattress.

  “I love you all,” I said. “I love you.”

  My head kept spinning as though hot Louisiana heat were consuming me. I had visions—livestock milling around a barn that reeked of waste and rotten food, dust kicked up from arid fields as Daddy slowly took stock of what would no longer grow. My brothers’ wives grieved the lives that weren’t to be. Nieces and nephews, foreigners to me, squatted on the front steps, thankful for the reprieve from fieldwork, anxious about how much food would be on the table for dinner. My momma worked in the kitchen, pretending not to notice the devastation of her universe. The fields shimmered with hot emptiness.

  Sudden cold enveloped me—I was freezing in a lonely house with no heat or hot water, in the dead of winter, frozen in a marriage bed where only sheets and blankets felt the touch of human flesh, chilled from the knowing eyes of a child watching, the coldness of unbearable shame.

  Between my fits of unconsciousness I begged Henry for forgiveness. I called for Charles while
clutching a gift from Teddy, my prized perennial from the backyard garden. The lily should have been beautiful; this was its time to be in full bloom, welcoming the world with its soft elegant petals, rich pink color, and delicately dusted interior stems. But it was handed to a mother wild with fever. It decayed before its time.

  The doctors said I needed at least a week in the hospital. Baby Lilly was premature, and I was sickly. Henry begrudgingly brought the children to visit me. He sat in the car or the lobby, waiting for their visits to end. Teddy always asked, “Why isn’t Daddy with us?” Teddy wanted to see Lilly during the visits. But I didn’t want the children to see her in the little container with tubes attached to her mouth and nose. Teddy clung by my side and held my hand. The other children kept their distance. They huddled at the foot of my bed until it was time to leave.

  The nurses took turns rolling Lilly into my room for me to bond with her. And then came days, once I was strong enough, when I’d make my way to intensive care and sit by Lilly’s assigned tube, watching her breathe, reaching my hand inside and touching her, or blowing into the hole so she could feel my breath gently glide against her skin. Her fingers and toes curled as I touched her forehead. Lilly was a little dollop of an infant, barely bigger than a small sack of lemons in the produce section of the supermarket. She never made a sound, as though she instinctively knew her presence wasn’t welcomed in the universe. One of the nurses told me that babies feel better when their mothers talk or sing to them. But I didn’t know what to say to her. I hummed a church hymn and kept stroking her body.

  “Hello, Nell.”

  I spun around when I heard his voice. “Charles!” I wanted to rush to him and wrap my arms around his body, to feel him against my chest. But then I thought about how he’d left me. I turned my back and said, “This is our child.”