Had she said those words aloud? Or kept them to herself, biting her lips until they bled?
Now there was talk of Ashton: getting in a fight all the way up to Yewville, arrested with three other men in a tavern, dragged to the county jail where he spent the night. “Blacked out,” he claimed. “Didn’t remember a thing.” They fined him fifty dollars and let him go, and the talk was of him bringing shame too onto the family—bringing shame too, Elsa overheard one of the relatives say to Mrs. Vickery. Words not meant for her to hear. But she heard. She heard everything. Hiding in her room at the top of the house, secret as an animal in its winter lair, she had grown cunning that past winter—the winter of her great distended puffed-up belly—the winter of her disgrace. Something took root and grew in her, inside her; but it was not hers. It was not hers. Think of that! It lay coiled up inside her, a bit of stubborn flesh that grew a head, an enormous head, and eyes, and a mouth, and fingers with webs between them, and a jawbone, and a nose, and even a tail!—so the picture book said. (Dr. Vickery had given her several books to read but Elsa found herself unable to concentrate on the printed words. Her eye just jumped all over, from line to line; it was worse than trying to read in school when she was called on by the teacher—and usually made a fool of herself, faltering and giggling. It was worse by far! It was so hard! But she forced herself at least to study the pictures, her lips moving to shape the words in the captions, for she knew it was important, all this was important, her father wished her to have knowledge in her mind as well as the creature growing in her belly.) And then, and then gradually the eyes were formed in the bulging head, so it would not be a sightless beast like a creature of the deep, and the tail dissolved, and the webs between the fingers and toes dissolved, and the lifebeat was strong, very strong . . . “It’s too late,” Mrs. Vickery had said back in November of that year, sighing heavily, walking heavily about the house. “It’s too late: we’ll have to live with it,” she had said, pausing at about the tenth step going upstairs, always the same step, so that the boards creaked under her weight.
In the night Elsa heard her parents shouting at each other. Or did they shout at Ashton? Or was it the men by the river, she wondered drowsily, had they returned, had the one with the knotted scarf returned, come to claim her . . . ? Always in the morning her room looked the same: the lilies-of-the-valley wallpaper that was discolored, especially near the window (the window frame was warped and rain got in, and Dr. Vickery kept saying he’d call Lyle McCord to do a little carpentering work one of these days, but he forgot and Elsa had not the energy to remind him: maybe she’d get pneumonia and die, and then how sorry they would be—wouldn’t they?), the bouquet of dried weed flowers in a chipped blue vase (goldenrod and devil’s-paintbrush mainly, with some corn tassels thrown in, and three cattails that were once quite handsome but now a little dusty), the Raggedy Ann doll Mrs. Vickery had made for her how many years ago?—why, it must have been fourteen years at least!—sitting propped up in the child-sized rocker by the radiator where it was too hot to sit most of the time when the furnace was working, and anyway the rocker was too little now for Elsa—if she sat herself down in it she might be stuck for good. And the peach-colored organdy curtains she and Opal had made, and the pinewood hope chest at the foot of the bed, filled mainly with moth-eaten old blankets and comforters and sweaters Elsa had outgrown, and the china fowl atop the bureau (rooster, hen, and three baby chicks almost life-sized), and the picture of Christ framed in something very ornate that looked like gold, but Elsa supposed was not gold: Christ with bright-glistening brown eyes, reddened lips and cheeks, droplets of rich, sullen blood making their way down his bluish forehead from his cruel crown of thorns that looked to Elsa just like the briars growing out behind the old carriage house where she had played as a child, unwisely, and scratched her arms and legs more than once. All these things were familiar enough, daylight returned them to her; or her to them. Blinking in amazement, she would stumble from bed to look all around the room—all around it—from wall to wall to wall to the window (where she sometimes stood in her nightgown, shivering, empty-headed, waiting for her mind to fill, staring at the semicollapsed roof of the carriage house and the broken weather vane, and the pigeons that flew in and out of the hay-door, and, past the mist-shrouded field where Carlson Bell’s horses stood asleep, the foothills and the mountains and the distant, almost invisible peak of Mt. Ayr, which was lost to her sight for days at a time in the winter). And gradually a sound in the room claimed her sleepy attention: a sputtering half-whimpering gasping sound; and she would turn, startled, frightened, and see the baby bassinet that had not been there a minute before.
Always in the morning her room, her life, looked and smelled and sounded the same, and felt the same (as her nails scratched absently at a bump on her thigh, or her fingertips drew themselves lightly against the baby’s fair downy silky blond-brown hair), and whatever had taken place during the night—whatever shouts and screams and jostlings and jeering laughter and cries of Jesus, Jesus—simply fell away and were forgotten. Elsa stood barefooted and flatfooted in the daylight world and there, changing a wet diaper for a fresh dry one, sprinkling a vaguely lilac-scented powder onto the kicking infant, she yawned noisily (as she must not do downstairs, for Mrs. Vickery said it was rude, and wasn’t it bad enough that Dr. Vickery sometimes forgot himself and yawned even louder?—and it was no excuse to say you were tired).
Sometimes Mrs. Vickery scolded; sometimes she sat herself down on the horsehair sofa and, sighing, feeling lazy, would get Elsa to sit close beside her, the baby on both their laps, and talk for long minutes at a time about nothing much: just talk. What kind of jam did Nathanael like best, how tall did Elsa think he would grow, would his eyes change color, or his hair, how did Elsa feel these days, how was her schoolwork going (Elsa was supposed to be working on her own this year, Sarah Grace Renfrew was supposed to be bringing her assignments over, and there was talk of some “tutoring” by one of the teachers: but Elsa never brought up the subject), should they drive to the city one of these days and buy some clothes, maybe a nice winter coat for Elsa, for Sundays—when was she going to start going to church again? Soon? Sometimes Mrs. Vickery talked like this, lazy and loving, and sometimes she was snappish, and in a bad temper, and Elsa whispered, “Oh I hate you: you!” and ran upstairs. And sometimes . . .
Sometimes they talked about her in secret. As they had from the start. They whispered about her, and shouted, and lapsed into silence. And then she would hear their footsteps taking them away from each other. Dr. Vickery to his office, where he closed the door hard, Mrs. Vickery on the stairs, where she paused midway. She knew. From the start. Her father had taken a sample of her urine to a laboratory in the city but she knew she was pregnant, as surely as if she’d been pregnant many times before and was now only remembering. The nipples of her breasts were queer and sensitive, and in the morning she was lightheaded, confused from so many crammed noisy dreams, and she remembered a baby’s wail—had it somehow been in the room with her? Some days she was ravenously hungry and hardly cared what she ate, scavenging in the refrigerator half an hour after dinner, braving Mrs. Vickery’s sharp tongue, but, even worse, her unpredictable tearful pity; other days she vomited up everything, even skim milk, even weak tea, even honeycomb honey smeared on whole wheat bread, her favorite breakfast. So there was no need for her father to run off to the Yewville hospital with the little glass jar and make a fool of himself; she knew.
Then they whispered and quarreled about what she already knew, and by the time they told her—after they had told her brother, in fact—which both angered her and made her laugh—she had no feeling about it to offer them, no surprise or tears or terror. Which baffled them. Alarmed them. Dr. Vickery especially, who kept pushing his glasses up his nose and scratching at his chin-whiskers as if they were alive with itching, Dr. Vickery especially wondered at her, speaking slow and calm and a little loud, as you would do with a child or a deaf person or someone sen
ile. Did she understand? Did she grasp the meaning of his words? Did she comprehend?
“Well, yes,” Elsa said sullenly.
Later the three of them—Mrs. Vickery and Dr. Vickery and Ashton, that is—quarreled downstairs while Elsa was trying to sleep, and she half-heard their words, and ran out of her room and down the stairs and surprised them in Dr. Vickery’s study and she shouted at them and called them names, horrible ugly names, and scratched her father’s face and knocked his glasses off, and when Ashton tried to catch her she punched him hard in the gut, right in the gut—! But no: she turned over and fixed the pillow so that maybe she wouldn’t hear. Downstairs they raised their voices one final time. Then were silent. Then paraded into the kitchen and Mrs. Vickery opened the squeaky cupboard door and got out, probably, the can of cocoa, and the three of them had hot chocolate sitting around the table and Elsa’s mouth watered and she slipped into sleep and there her mother raised a cup of delicious hot chocolate to her lips and she drank it hungrily, lustily, and almost tasted it . . . But maybe she had imagined it all and they hadn’t quarreled and it hadn’t been about her. If she came into a room they always stopped talking, and smiled at her, and asked her some question or other, and she fell into the habit of shrugging her shoulders and offering no reply at all, for what was the use? She knew she would have a baby, was having a baby, and it did no good to carry on like the rest of them. Her mother broke into tears, and even her father did (once at the dinner table: so embarrassing!), but she had no tears left and it was unfair for them to blame her, for what was the use? (“I don’t think the child understands,” Dr. Vickery murmured once, in her hearing, and Mrs. Vickery silenced him with a simple, “Thaddeus.”)
One November afternoon when it was twilight by five-thirty she pushed by her mother in the kitchen and opened the cupboard door and reached for the can of cocoa, and when Mrs. Vickery said, “Elsa, what are you doing? Do you want to spoil your appetite? We’re going to eat in under an hour—” she shrugged her shoulders and said brutally, “Well, you people had some last night,” in a voice meant to be scornful but that came out hurt and childlike; and she realized too late that it hadn’t been the night before and maybe she had only dreamed it anyway . . . Mrs. Vickery had stared at her, too puzzled to speak.
In her womb the thing quivered with—with elation, with rage? With simple lustful hunger?
All the shadows of the big old drafty house deepened. Widened. Only a cunning sleepwalker could make her way through them without tripping.
“Elsa,” they said, “Elsa—?”
But no: she carried herself haughtily enough.
Her father spoke to her tenderly, with love and dread. Behind his voice she heard another but she did not let on. I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children . . .
“The child understands the facts of her condition, but she doesn’t comprehend,” Dr. Vickery said. And in her presence, too, as if she were deaf.
Though he was not yet fifty years old his face was lined and leaden-hued, and the soiled cuffs of his long winter underwear showed at his wrists. When he fussed with his pipe, which was continually going out, his fingers trembled; Elsa had to pity him. She watched as if hypnotized while he picked out the old muck and shook fresh tobacco in and tried to light it, sucking noisily. It seemed to take him longer all the time to get his pipe functioning.
“Why do you talk about me so much?” Elsa asked quietly.
“Because, dear, we’re afraid you don’t really comprehend the circumstances of your life now. Of our lives now.”
“Do you?”
“What?”
“I said—do you?”
Both Dr. Vickery and Mrs. Vickery stared at her. “What do you mean, Elsa? I don’t quite—don’t quite follow you,” Dr. Vickery said.
“Do you comprehend the circumstances of our lives?”
“Elsa—?”
“Do you?”
She glared at them, triumphant. She wanted to burst into contemptuous laughter and banish them all upstairs and out of her sight.
In her womb the thing throbbed with life, with the beating pulse of life. She liked to think at such times that it was hers. But she was not deluded, having guessed at Your enmity with the world of man.
But the nuisance of merely living!—as long as she remained with her parents she was theirs, and if they wept they desired that she weep also; but they did not want her to weep by herself, in secret.
Of course someone did weep, often. Curled beneath the bedclothes; brushing the tangles out of her hair; trying to shake herself out of her numb, bruising sleep. Sometimes in the early morning there was the simple excitement of Elsa, an Elsa-as-always, who broke away from her and dressed quickly and eagerly for school, paying no heed to her tears, and this Elsa rushed about like the cat foolishly frantic for his supper and took hardly any time to eat and hurried outside to catch up with Sarah Grace and Gina and the others, and they called her Slowpoke, as they used to, and asked her if she’d done her homework, and later on they sat together in the crowded lunchroom, and passed notes to one another during study hall second-to-last period of the day . . . But most of the time there was just the person pretending to be Elsa, who lay in bed stubborn and cold and fixed and hard, who didn’t give a damn about Sarah Grace or Gina or anyone else.
Out of her hearing they talked about an abortion. She knew, somehow she knew. Maybe she had actually heard the words. Maybe she had heard them in her sleep. But she knew it would not happen because the baby’s wail had already sounded in the room with her, in her very bed. It would not happen. Her breasts grew plump and white and pink-nippled, and the skin of her belly was shiny white and quite pretty (so she thought, sadly) and so it would not happen, God would not allow it. She was meant to have the baby, which was his baby, the man with the knotted scarf, his, and no one else’s, what was the use of crying or carrying on?
And if, afterward, he came for her—came to claim the baby?
No.
She would stare coldly at him and turn aside as if not recognizing him. She would say: “I don’t know you. I’ve never set eyes on you.” He might plead with her, and say how sorry he was, how sorry, sorry, in a voice like her brother’s whine when he’d broken something in the kitchen, coming in so staggering-drunk, but she would hardly listen, and she would not look at him at all. “I don’t know you. I’ve never set eyes on you,” she would say coldly.
Why was the baby’s food so slow in heating up?—ah, she saw that she’d forgotten to turn on the burner. Damn it, she thought.
“Damn it and damn you,” she said aloud.
It was chilly in the kitchen, as always, which was why she wore her wool bathrobe and her thick imitation-fur bedroom slippers and knee-high wool socks. Her hair needed washing; needed trimming because it grew in unevenly and the ends were split. She was pale with the long winter, and plain and flabby and sullen, but any time she wished she could fix herself up, any time at all: she could be just as pretty as before. As pretty as Gina Talbot, maybe. She could shampoo her hair and pinch her cheeks to make them red and maybe dab on a little lipstick, if it wasn’t too noticeable. But what was the use, why should she bother? Even before she began to show, they hadn’t allowed her to return to school. “She might distract the other students,” the principal explained to Dr. and Mrs. Vickery. “She might alarm the other girls, the younger girls especially.” They had not wanted her anywhere near. Not even to look at. She could study at home, they told her, an “arrangement” could be made very easily, her friends could bring assignments and her work back and forth, and one of the teachers could be persuaded to tutor her, and she could take exams just like the others at the end of the year, and be spared the presence of the other students. The bigger boys, especially: it might be better for her to avoid them. “In that way everything will work out for the best, for your daughter and for the other students, and for her teachers too,” the principal said.
Well,
that was about Elsa—not about her.
She had no wish to fix herself up just to please them, and to pretend to be Elsa again, now she knew how they despised her.
“I know what I know,” she said, stirring the baby’s food with his own little spoon.
Suppose they looked at her—who did they see? Not her. Not even Elsa. (“That old sad silly cow,” she laughed.) They saw someone else and spoke to that person in their heads, their skin tightening, around the eyes especially. There were, naturally, false smiles—even Ashton (who now could barely stand to be in the same room with her) managed to smile. Showed his teeth, anyway. But she didn’t mind—why on earth should she mind? It was what they had always done to each other anyway.
The baby Nathanael, beginning now to fret, waving his fat little hands excitedly—did he see her? Her?
He had wanted to breast-feed shortly after his birth and she, or someone in her place, had wanted him to do so: but it had not worked. She tried and tried, and the infant tried, and Mrs. Vickery helped also, but it did not work. Straining on all sides: but it was a failure. Reverend Sisley baptized him Nathanael William Vickery and Elsa, who had not chosen the name, or anyway could not remember, had not objected, for what was the use? They propped her up in bed, they gave her the creature to hold. It was just like any other baby she’d seen in her lifetime—no smaller than her cousin Marilyn’s, which had been born even earlier than hers, a seven-months’ baby. Small enough but not too small. A nice little tidy weight. Bawling and gasping and wetting even before, it seemed, he would have anything to wet.
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