Stony River Page 21

  She checked her wristwatch. Linda would be home soon. She pulled herself up and tried to slow her breathing. Fingered the worn spot on the arm of the drab brown couch that had been Mother Wise’s. She’d wanted to replace it for years but Roger always found some sentimental memory stuck behind a cushion. She wouldn’t earn much at Lou’s but surely enough to buy slipcover material. She hadn’t used the Singer in a while, had made most of Linda’s clothes until fifth grade when it embarrassed the child to be seen in homemade duds.

  Roger stopped in nightly to see Linda. He never came upstairs, which was just fine. It irked Betty to hear him clomping around as if he still lived there, opening the Frigidaire or the cookie jar Linda kept filled, the racket of him rising through the register in Betty’s room.

  She hadn’t told her parents yet or her sister and brothers out in Kansas. They wouldn’t approve. But Betty couldn’t think anymore with Roger around; she didn’t know where he ended and she began. She reckoned she shouldn’t have married at all, but what choice did a woman have? Roger phoned each morning to see if she and Linda needed anything. He would have taken her to the doctor’s but darned if she’d ask. She had Linda call if the toilet overflowed or anything else went wrong in the house. It was like being sprung from a girdle not having to hear the exasperated patience in Madge Bryson’s voice: Are you sure you want me to interrupt him, Mrs. Wise?

  She looked at her watch again, a Bulova, a gift from Roger for their fifth anniversary. She’d been hinting for a hope chest. Most girls got one before they were married, but her parents couldn’t afford such a thing. She’d asked Roger if what he was getting her needed two people to carry it and he said yes. So didn’t he go and carve two men from plywood, nail them to a board and put the watch box between them. She hadn’t thought of that in years.

  JULY 21, 1957. Buddy’s bed was big enough for two people, like he’d known Tereza would share it one day. On this Sunday morning, she sat against the headboard plodding through The Facts of Married Life, tracking each word with her finger. She’d borrowed it from the library after asking for a book that would tell you what was normal or not. The librarian gave her one with big words and boring schoolbook-y stuff but it had a chapter she was keen to struggle through.

  Some people do not respond sexually to their lovers.

  Buddy was off from Saturday morning until midnight Monday. Sundays they woke up together, Buddy sometimes turning to her wild-eyed, like he was surprised to find her in his bed. Today he’d bounced up and said, as he often did, “Don’t dilly-dally.” Atlas words.

  At the moment he was naked before the full-length mirror, watching himself exercise. Tereza was naked, too, because it was damned hot up there even at eight in the morning. Buddy said it was a scientific fact that heat rose. The fan on his desk going swish-swish only shoved around hot air from the open window at the end of the long, narrow room.

  The male sex glands are two firm oval bodies about one and a half inches long. They hang between the thighs in a sac called the scrotum.

  Was that supposed to mean balls? She looked up from the book. Clasping his hands behind his head, Buddy bent down and touched his elbows to his knees. His leg and back muscles twitched. Compared to his tanned parts, his ass looked like a peeled orange.

  “Why are guys’ asses higher than girls’?” she asked.

  “I’d rather you said buttocks.” His bent-over voice sounded strangled.

  She made a face into the book. Nobody said buttocks.

  In its relaxed position, the penis hangs just in front of the scrotum.

  “And it’s probably biological,” Buddy said. “That’s the reason for nearly everything.”

  She looked up again. He was doing squats now, his penis definitely relaxed, sweat beading on the bush around it like dew.

  If Buddy’s room had been an ice-cream flavor it would’ve been vanilla: white walls with no pictures, a wood floor, desk, chair and dresser all painted white, no rug. Once a week he scrubbed the walls, floor and furniture with a concoction of ammonia, vinegar, baking soda and water. It didn’t smell anything like vanilla.

  He had let her hang her Grace Kelly coat and suit, wedding dress, dungarees and uniform next to his jacket, shirts and pants in the open closet. Her pumps, white heels, flats and briefcase sat beside his boots. He’d cleared out a dresser drawer for her. She kept her makeup in her pocketbook because he didn’t like anything cluttering the dresser top. An exception was a framed picture from their wedding. Herman had caught Buddy looking off to the right, both arms around Tereza’s waist and his chin resting on her head. Buddy liked it because he looked like “a good guy, not me.” Herman had caught Tereza laughing right into the camera, looking like somebody you could love, somebody she wouldn’t have imagined herself to be.

  The clitoris is not unlike a rudimentary penis.

  Tereza pulled her knees up and peered down between her legs. Either the book was bull or her body was busted ’cause she didn’t have anything like a penis, rudi-whatchamacallit or not.

  She slipped into red shorts and a black blouse and went downstairs to pee. Dearie’s door was still closed. Tereza made a little noise coming back up the stairs, in case Buddy wanted to scare her. On Sundays, he often hid behind the door and jumped out when she returned from the bathroom. At first he’d only needed her to act scared to get hard. Lately he had to believe it was real. Convincing him was good practice. Actresses had to ignore the camera, the director and anybody else watching when they did a scene. Pretend they were going through whatever it was for the first time, even after a hundred takes. Tereza had to forget about Dearie sleeping downstairs and let out her scariest scream, trusting Buddy would put his hand over her mouth. Today when she got back upstairs he was doing push-ups.

  She sat on the bed and picked up the book again. Orgasm in the man is noticeably marked by the ejaculation of semen. Why couldn’t books use words you didn’t have to look up?

  She hadn’t minded being scared when it was a game, but not when it felt real. Like when he’d almost strangled her with a necktie or jumped out at her waving the switchblade he kept in his desk.

  Rapid breathing and a series of spasmodic sensations, which reduce her tension, mark the woman’s climax.

  Tereza reduced her “tension” alone in the bed at night when Buddy was on shift. It was no big deal—she’d been doing it since she was ten. She’d thought it would be different when she got married, that was all. Dearie had given her a hot water bottle with a nozzle and tube to use “after” but so far there hadn’t been any after.

  The lower end of the vagina has a thin, pliable membrane called the hymen.

  She softly tried out the last word. It sounded like Dearie saying Herman.

  She stood and peered at the schedule on the wall beside Buddy’s desk. He’d be waxing the car this morning. Her morning was free since Dearie fixed breakfast on Sundays. His afternoon was designated for “Tereza.” Hers, natch, said “Buddy.” She ignored the schedule when it didn’t suit her but mostly she went along, hoping it would make Buddy want her more. Plus, she didn’t know what might set him off. She didn’t want him putting his fist through a wall, sticking his head in a pail of water or something worse.

  “Want to go to the show this afternoon?” She enunciated the words, trying not to say wanta. “IWas a TeenageWerewolf is playing.”

  Buddy was ass-down on the floor now, his heels on the bed, doing sit-ups. “We should talk about finances today. I’m not going down the shore tomorrow. I’m taking you to the bank.”

  Tereza never went to the shore with Buddy on his Mondays off because he couldn’t guarantee they’d be back by the time she had to be at Herman’s. She’d begun counting on him being away. Mondays before work she was scheduled for laundry, but Dearie did it for her so that she could go to the Linden pool where there was always a herd of boys to tell her she was sexy. Sometimes she let them feel her up.

  She straddled the desk chair and stared down at him. “What fo
r?”

  “To open a joint account so I can deposit your tips with my pay each week.”

  Tereza’s gut ached watching his long, flat belly muscles lift him from the floor. Up. Down. Ouch. “I don’t like the idea of locking up my money. What if I need something?”

  Up. Down. “First of all, it’s our money now. Same as my pay is our money. Secondly, you can have an allowance. This afternoon we’ll talk about how much you need.”

  “Maybe I need it all.”

  Up. Down. “That’s selfish. It’s our turn to look after Dearie.” “Jimmy used to take what Ma made. She couldn’t buy nothing without his say so.”

  “She couldn’t buy anything. I’m not Jimmy so don’t give me your tough look.”

  He put his hands behind him and lifted his legs and his chest till his body made a V. Lowered and lifted them again.

  “Do you love me?”

  “I married you, didn’t I?” Lower. Lift.

  “That don’t mean you love me. You never say it.”

  “Well, I do.” Lower. Lift.

  “Say it.”

  “I love you.” Lower. Lift.

  Tereza twisted her wedding ring around and around. “It ain’t right I’m still a virgin.”

  Buddy took his heels off the bed, brought his knees up and made like riding a bike. He touched his left elbow to his right knee, then right to left.

  Tereza got up from the chair and stood over him. “Did you hear me?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “We both had blood tests. You saw mine. It said I don’t have a disease.”

  Elbow to knee. Pedal. Elbow to knee. Pedal.

  “Don’t you want to feel what it’s like inside me?”

  Dearie’s “Breakfast!” floated up the stairwell.

  Buddy leaped up without using his hands, like some Ed Sullivan acrobat act. He toweled off the sweat and put on old bathing trunks and a gray T-shirt, his car-washing clothes.

  Tereza blocked his way to the door. “On Mondays I go to the pool, not the bank.”

  Buddy banged his head on the wall, hard, one, two, three times, leaving an angry blotch on his forehead. He turned to the mirror and said, “Behold. The mark of the devil.” Tereza gripped the railing as they went downstairs to the smell of coffee and something sweet.

  Dearie flashed them a grin. “How are my little bride and groom today?”

  SIXTEEN

  JULY 28, 1957. Miranda summons the courage to confront the sealed envelopes Doris has pestered her to open: “Cian’s birth certificate could be there. I can’t believe you’re not curious.”

  Miranda knows she won’t find Cian’s birth certificate. It doesn’t exist. Lack of a sign, not curiosity, has kept her back: she’s not held James’s voice in her throat for weeks. If he wanted her to open the envelopes, wouldn’t he have spoken?

  The priest’s homily today—“Expose your fears to God’s healing light”—reminded her of Sister Celine’s admonition to “face what you don’t want to know about your father.” Doris has taken the children to visit her parents. How much more of a sign does Miranda need?

  She sits at the scarred desk, slides out the compartment containing the envelopes and chooses one at random. Inside: two sheets of thick, soft paper the color of rice pudding. Not the onionskin on which James, concerned about postage, penned letters to his mother before her death. Miranda lifts these indulgent pages to her nose and sniffs the ink: a faintly sharp smell. On them, a missive dated on Miranda’s fifteenth birthday. Only weeks before James died.

  My darling Eileen, the letter begins in the swirls and delicately shaded letters of James’s script—Miranda stifles a gasp. Am I evil? Will she mourn me? Her fingers are as long and slender as yours. Pallid as the snow she touched only the once, the night I cracked open the back door to the transformed landscape and told her we’d been visited by snow angels. Palsied with fright at the risk I was taking. Jubilant at the wonder in her eyes.

  The trembles come over Miranda’s hands and shoulders at the possibility James lied about Eileen dying from food poisoning. She opens the other envelopes, each containing a letter written on an anniversary of Miranda’s birth. Allows her eyes only snippets: Sometimes I think I’m just an old drunk playing with the faeries … I hold onto her as though there’s no gravity … Have I lost my sense of what is forbidden? She imagines her mother alone someplace—where, why?—hungry for news of her daughter.

  Tucked into one letter is a faded photograph: a young woman, the heels of her white sling-back shoes sinking into a tidy lawn in front of a Hansel and Gretel house. The slender woman wears a longskirted white suit and clutches three lilies. Her alien face stares back at Miranda, a hint of resignation in its cautious smile, the eyes shaded by a floppy white hat. Written on the photo’s underside in James’s hand is Maryland, Sept. 1939.

  Miranda rubs her fingers gently over the slippery surface and senses energy still resident there. She closes her eyes and drinks deeply of air, enlarges the photograph in her mind until it is big enough to enter. She steps briefly into its sunny afternoon, then into the welcome coolness of a long hallway paneled in dark wood. Her inner eyes adjust to the dim light. A different woman with a halo of wispy gray hair appears from around a corner, smiles and waves Miranda forward. “You’re just in time. I didn’t want to be the only witness.”

  Three vases of lilies flood the parlor with a cloying scent that constricts Miranda’s lungs. The woman in white and two men huddle around a console radio in the middle of the room. Though cleanshaven and impossibly young, the man in the pale blue suit can only be James—the tilt of that head with its unruly ginger curls, the already slouching shoulders. He listens intently, hands shoved in pockets, but when Miranda enters the room he gazes up with a smile so joyous she could swoon.

  A crackling voice, full of regret, pulls him back to the radio: “… I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.”

  The other man, dark-suited and cherry-faced, says, “You’re not likely to forget this wedding anniversary.”

  The woman in white notices Miranda and starts. “This changes everything,” she says. Her voice is nasal, harsh.

  “Sure and doesn’t it,” James says. He opens his arms to Miranda in a wide embrace.

  The woman glares at him and presses her stomach with both hands. Miranda plunges into a dark, warm pool where the only sound is a steady lub dub, lub dub. Her lungs drink a berry-sweet liquid with a bitter aftertaste that suffuses her veins with revelation: the woman wants to flush Miranda from her womb.

  “Go back,” James says, his voice simultaneously muffled and clear.

  Next, the sound of a barking dog. Nicholas?

  Miranda opens her eyes, alone once more in the room she shares with Carolyn. She steps to the window: a neighbor’s dog, a collie, not a shepherd. She returns to the desk and slides the photograph into its envelope. Kneels beside her bed and whispers, “I cannot do this, Sister.”

  EVERY DAY BRINGS MUCH to distract her from James’s letters: story time with the wee ones; the nightly news from Chet Huntley’s sonorous voice; the library she’s set up in the living room; the detective who brings her objects to enter; Doris’s prodigious Task List.

  So many distractions. Yet, here she sits abed with a flashlight casting a pool on the pages in her lap. She has chosen more letters at random and has prayed to Mary and Danú for protection. She keeps a wary eye on Carolyn a few feet away, asleep with her arms flung out, not even a sheet covering her this sweltering night. The child’s bubble-bath scent permeates the humid air. Miranda is atop her own sheets, wearing whimsically named shorty pajamas patterned in pink rosebuds on white cotton.

  Eileen’s shorty pajamas would be silk. Miranda pictures her reclining on a chaise longue in a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps, sipping a tall lemonade laced with mint, each swallow a cruel reminder of her bittersweet exile, necessary to shield her daughter from the pernicious c
onsumption from which she suffers. Despite the mountain height, nary a breeze finds its way through the open window. Eileen fans herself with her dear, brave husband’s letters before reading the one written on the seventh birthday of the daughter she sorely misses.

  You might rather I’d returned to Ireland with the lass when the university censored my lectures and sent me packing. In my mind I’ve argued myself dry with you over this. But I would not have been able to keep the Catholics from her no more than my dear mother could keep them from me. I like to think I’m keeping her safe whilst adding to the understanding of how cultural and social forces shape the nascent personality. The contribution we’ll make to anthropological knowledge! I was never told the truth as a lad. Think on this: what Miranda will know of what is proper and good, holy and unholy, natural and unnatural will be uncontaminated by the Church or any other institution. Is it wrong to lock her away from a society that sees women as a lower order of being? Wrong to shield her as long as possible from a culture in which goods are the measure of personal achievement? What’s wrong with learning for its own sake or simply being?

  Eileen leans back in the chaise, closes her eyes and gently shakes her head with a smile. My husband, she thinks: ever the professor, the lecturer. Or perhaps she frowns at the thought of her husband turning their daughter into an academic study. Of his deciding only he knows the truth. It’s so hot! Eileen arises from the chaise and paces as Miranda opens another letter, written when she was four, the year after they moved into the house she strains to picture now.

  It’s been one year, four months and five days since that awful day I stood o’er your corpse and said, “Aye, there was a lass.” Wondering who’d stand o’er mine and say,“There was a lad.”

  Her heart plunges off the Alps. She didn’t honestly believe she had a guardian-angel mother languishing in a magic sanatorium kingdom—James would have sent the letters—but she wanted to indulge herself awhile longer. The psychiatrist Doris took her to claimed Miranda engages in infantile magical thinking. He suggested she take up painting or writing to channel her fantastical imaginings. He also said she’s so anesthetized from a traumatic past she is unable to grasp how “adult–child relations” are viewed in the real world. She told him she did not have a traumatic past.