by Melanie Tem
All of a sudden, Deborah was thinking about her mother. She didn’t want to be, but she was. She’d been gone a long time—about a month, she thought, but it might even be longer. It had been hot summer when she left and now the days were still hot, but the nights were definitely chilly. She thought it was September. Maybe her mother had forgotten all about her. Or maybe her mother wasn’t mad anymore.
Her mother was pissed off all the time. Like being sick to your stomach all the time but never enough to throw up. Never enough to let the sickness go into your heart and your brain and turn you into something else.
Deborah missed her mother. She couldn’t believe it. She was worried about her mother. A phone booth was just standing there all by itself along the bike path; she supposed it was in case joggers or bikers or somebody needed help. She doubted it was meant for bums or for her. It was meant to protect decent people, normal people, from bums and from her.
Deborah went on past the phone, circled, went back, stood in front of it, went to stand with her head and shoulders under the bright red hood. She didn’t ever want to talk to anybody at home ever again. She wanted them to forget her. She wanted to be somebody different. And she didn’t have any money.
She picked up the receiver, winced at how loud the dial tone was, glanced out of both sides of the phone booth without backing out from under the hood. For a minute she couldn’t remember how to call collect from a pay phone. She kept telling herself to hang up, but she didn’t.
Then she dialed 0 and her home phone number. All those beeps hurt her ear. The operator came on, a guy with a booming voice that made her mad just to listen to it. She said her name. He pretended not to get it. She had to say it three times before he would put the call through. Then he said, “Thank you for using AT&T, Deborah,” as if she’d had a choice, as if she’d done anything but pick up the stupid receiver and dial the stupid number. She was trembling.
The phone rang a lot of times. She visualized it prowling through the old house where she didn’t live anymore.
Through the living room, where nobody ever sat to read or talk or watch TV. Through the family room, which was a joke, which should have stayed a back porch, a mud room, which in Nana’s house was the room where rituals were held but there weren’t any rituals in her mother’s house and there never would be.
Through the kitchen, where her mother spent almost a whole day every weekend cooking for the work week ahead. Breakfasts, lunches, dinners, breads, and desserts in microwave containers, labeled and lined up on the counter and then stacked in the freezer. Her mother hated cooking. By the end of the marathon she was always exhausted and irritable. If she didn’t have all these people depending on her, she said, she’d find better things to do with her time. Deborah didn’t know what. Deborah was one of those people her mother cooked for. Deborah refused to learn to cook anything.
Through the dining room, with the bay window where her mother kept plants, because you couldn’t let such good southern exposure go to waste. Two dozen plants, sometimes twenty-three or twenty-five. Not because plants gave her pleasure—she complained all the time about having to take care of them, just as she complained about having to take care of Nana and Grandma and Deborah, but she didn’t have to take care of Deborah anymore, Deborah could take care of herself. Not because she had a green thumb, either. The plants died. They sat around for weeks all brown and disgusting after they were dead. Deborah didn’t know if her mother was hoping they’d miraculously come back to life, or if a dead plant was as good as a live one to her. She got mad if Deborah watered them, or if she threw a dead one away, or if she even said anything. Deborah remembered a punishment when she was eight or nine because she’d pulled some dead plant out of a pot. “I’m not mad,” Ma would always say, even while the belt marks and bite marks were still fresh. “But you have to learn to mind your own business and do what you’re told.”
“I’m not mad,” she’d always say when Deborah was still young enough and dumb enough to ask her. “I’m tired. You just wait till you have kids.”
“I’m not mad. Will you quit saying I’m mad? I’m just a mother. I’m just doing my job.”
“I don’t have time or energy for anger.”
“Leave me alone! It’s because of you that I have so much to do in the first place! Find something to do and leave me alone!”
“Shut up, Deborah, and stop telling me what I feel. I know what I feel and I’m not mad.”
Prowling, ringing, up and down the stairs. There were a lot of stairs in that house, a hundred and seventeen, she’d counted them over and over again and it was always a hundred and seventeen except for once when she’d made a mistake and it came up a hundred and eighteen and she’d had to count them all over again to get it right.
Through her mother’s bedroom, where of course her father had never slept, peeling yellow wallpaper and no pictures on the walls, carpet that maybe once had been beige or white or cream-colored, bone-colored, now patterned with years of footprints and paw prints, years of trails leading nowhere, giving no clues. No clues, anyway, that Deborah could read.
Even prowling around Deborah’s room. Where she would never live again, sleep again, fuck again. Where she would never have her baby. Where there wasn’t anybody to answer the phone.
Nobody answered the phone. The operator with the loud voice didn’t come back on the line, either. Deborah wasn’t sure what to do. Finally, she pushed the cradle down, but it didn’t break the connection; the phone kept ringing in her ear, kept ringing all over the distant empty house where nobody was waiting for her to call. Furious, she punched the cradle with her fist. It sprang too easily back against the wall of the phone, hurting the side of her hand, probably bruising. She held it down for long seconds, standing on tiptoe to put as much weight as she could on it, hers and the baby’s.
When she finally let it up there was, to her relief, a dial tone, but it was so loud, so angry. Quickly she dialed 0 again and Nana’s phone number. This operator, a woman, was a real bitch. Deborah finally had to yell the syllables of her name. By doing that she was giving herself away: her own voice shouting her own name would echo all up and down the river, right through the city, and anybody who wanted to find her would be led right to her, anybody who wanted to attack her, anybody who wanted to love her.
She glanced through the Plexiglas sides of the hood. Julian wasn’t there.
Her mother answered the phone. The sound of her mother’s voice—”Hello? Hello?” and then, “Oh, God, Deborah, is that you?”—enraged Deborah, made her feel like a little kid again, made her want to nurse at her mother’s tit and cut her mother’s throat.
Made her want to yell, “Ma, Ma, who am I? Who are you?” But she didn’t say that. Her mother wouldn’t know anyway. She just said, finally, “Yeah, Ma, it’s me.”
“Where are you? What are you doing? Are you all right?”
“I’m not coming home.”
“You belong here.”
“No, I don’t.”
“The baby—”
“No.”
“Deborah, Nana’s hurt.”
“What do you mean? Is she going to die?”
“She won’t die. But she’s changed. You should see.”
“I’m not coming home. I’m never coming home.”
If her mother had said, “I need you” or “I’m sorry” or even, unthinkably, “I love you,” Deborah wouldn’t have known what to do. But what she said was, “How could you do this to me?”
“I’m not doing anything to you!” Deborah sneered. Then she surprised herself by saying, as though her mother would understand—as though she even wanted her to understand—”I’m doing this for the baby.”
“I’ve sacrificed my whole life for this family, and you—”
“Fuck you!”
Leaving the receiver dangling on its stiff, silver-metal, coiled cord, leaving her mother talking and talking and her voice coming out thin and powerless on this end, Deborah ran away.
The river bent and rose a little, or else the land went down, because now she was on a plain and not in a valley at all. The river made a series of little waterfalls as even as stair steps, so she thought they were probably fake and that made her mad. And all of a sudden she hated the baby. Hated.
Feeding on her from the inside out.
Trying to make her something she was not. Binding her to her crazy family and driving her away.
Hated.
Wanted it dead, even though it would kill her, too.
“Hey. Baby.”
The odor of him had reached her just before his noise. Sweat, street dirt, pot. No fear, no desire, and just a careless kind of anger that wouldn’t do her much harm or much good.
She stopped. It would have been easy to keep going. She didn’t think he would have chased her. But she stopped.
She bent her knees a little, ready. She rested her half-closed fists, nails out, at the sides of her belly. Ready. She found eyes and stared straight into them, a challenge that he was too stoned or too chicken-shit to meet—the eyes kept wandering, wandering again.
Her ears rang, as if they’d flared to pick up sounds that usually were above or below the range she could hear. Her head hurt, at her temples and the base of her skull and the top of her skull where bone plates were supposed to have fused when she was a baby. Her thoughts changed shape.
Now she saw him. Them. Three of them. No, four—one was squatting in front of the others and didn’t have a silhouette of his own. But he must have had lighter clothes or lighter skin or something, because she could see him now, his stupid sideways baseball cap, his rag. She couldn’t tell one color from another right now, and anyway she didn’t know which color was for which gang, and anyway she didn’t care. Like she was supposed to be afraid.
“Hey. Bitch. What you doin’ down here?”
His teeth were flat, short, dull. She grinned back at him, hoping he wasn’t too stoned or too stupid to know what fangs were. Hoping that she would look weird enough, different enough, to egg them on. She ran her tongue over her teeth and tasted blood, sucked more. The ache in her gums and jaw would get worse before this was over, before whatever was going down tonight was done. She saw his tongue glistening outside his mouth, and she wanted it between her legs, between her teeth.
“Hey,” she whispered back.
They’d slunk out from their lair somewhere behind the old red-brick Forney Museum and the storage building for the Park People that had a mural of downtown painted on the side. They surrounded her. They’d obviously done this before; they all had positions. But she wasn’t some scared little chick who didn’t know any better, somebody who’d just happened to be here by mistake. They didn’t know what they were dealing with here. Deborah hoped they wouldn’t know until it was too late.
She tried to stand perfectly still, the way Julian did, the way Nana did when she was preparing herself. But nothing was still. She was fiercely aware of the cavity in the middle of her body where her guts and lungs and heart floated, of how her brain wasn’t completely attached to the inside of her skull and didn’t quite fill the space so it shifted whenever she moved her head. Her heart pumped blood so hot she couldn’t imagine how her veins and arteries could take it. Her lungs took so much shit out of the air and exhaled so little that she knew they were letting in poison.
Her senses contracted and expanded wildly. Her thoughts pulsed.
She hoped the air would poison the baby. She hoped her blood would scald it from the inside out. She hoped her thoughts would hunt it down.
The baby clawed at her womb. Trying to get out, so it could go wilding through all the caves and pathways of her body. Or trying to stay in, so it could get bigger and bigger until it made her explode.
She had to free herself from it. Or it from her. “You lookin’ for something, bitch?”
“You,” she whispered, and lunged.
They were all over her. Hands everywhere, punching, scratching, holding her down, forcing her open but she would have opened anyway, to trap them and take them in. Mouths everywhere, slippery tongues and teeth that couldn’t do much, didn’t hurt much, gums with only a little thin blood. Cocks out already, hard already except one of them, she lowered herself onto that one and it swelled in her mouth, in her cunt, in her mouth again so that she was tasting herself, eating herself. Cocks in her, hands in her, hurting, hurting the baby, breaking walls and sacs and tubes, wilding, Deborah was wild with fury, hurting the baby, destroying the baby.
No.
“No!” she screamed, and fought them off.
She could have killed them. It wouldn’t have been easy—she was surprised by how hard it was —but she could have done it. Could have killed them all and eaten their hearts and left them in the weeds by the river. But as she sank her fangs into the throat of the first one and her claws into his belly, she remembered, suddenly, the bum lady, the taste of her heart, and she stopped herself, did not kill again, fought them off and sent them swearing and shouting into the noisy night, but did not touch their hearts.
But inside her the baby was loose now to go wherever it wanted, to grow however it could.
Chapter 13
Pam was in her house again. This time, Lydia had invited her in. The profound risk, the nearly incredible defiance, frightened her. The fear excited her and made her angry—with her mother and daughter and grandmother, with Pam.
“Want a ride home?” Pam had asked her as they’d left the store together well after closing.
Lydia had tried to decipher bus schedules when she’d left her car at the shop that morning, had finally concluded that she’d have to walk downtown and catch a bus home from there rather than trying to transfer. Defeated, she’d thought irritably of Deborah, who apparently took buses all the time, and of her mother, who used to be able to go anywhere in the city on foot but who now could get lost within a block of their houses. “No, thanks,” she’d told Pam. “I can walk.”
Pam had put an arm around her, so briefly that Lydia hadn’t had time to react. But her head had been buzzing with the sweetness and danger of the embrace, and she’d had trouble focusing when Pam had said cheerfully, “Don’t be silly. Walk home with me and we’ll get Friedrich and the car. Friedrich loves to ride in the car.”
Friedrich had been beside himself with pleasure to see Pam, and had yelped happily at Lydia, too. Pam had crouched, taken his long-eared head in both hands, and nuzzled him. Lydia had actually found herself bending to pet him, too, very tentatively and quickly. On the ride to her house, he’d braced his hind legs on the edge of the back seat and his front legs on the headrest behind Lydia, stretching his long little body, his breath warm and faintly rancid. “Friedrich loves going for a ride,” Pam had observed again, smiling. “Do you have pets, Lydia?”
Lydia had laughed before she could stop herself, then said, “No.”
Suddenly worried, Pam had glanced at her. “I never thought to ask if you minded him coming with us. He’s so much a part of my life that I forget other people may not think he’s as wonderful as I do. Sorry.”
Friedrich had snuffled against the back of her neck and licked her once. She’d winced and shuddered, but said, “It’s okay.”
Stopped for the light at 44th, Pam had reached across to pet Friedrich and brushed Lydia’s hair. Lydia had thought Pam’s fingers rested there a split second longer than necessary, but they’d been gone before she could fully register their lingering or what it could possibly mean. The dog had made curious little moans of ecstasy as Pam stroked him. Then the light had changed and Pam had put both hands back on the wheel to turn south onto Federal. Lydia had kept herself very still, thinking against her will how starved she was for human contact, how the need had not at all diminished with time and neglect, and how utterly vulnerable that caused her to be.
“Nothing from Deborah?”
“She called.”
Pam drew in her breath sharply. “Oh, thank God. What did she say?”
“I’m sorry, Lydia,” Pam said, and then, mercifully, said no more about Deborah. Already it seemed to Lydia that her daughter had moved into her past, and that she would surely never see her again. After a slight pause, Pam asked, “Which house do you want to go to?”
The fact that Pam would think to ask the question had startled Lydia a little. It seemed arcane, intimate knowledge that there were four family houses around a central walled courtyard, and that she might be expected to go to any of them. Although she’d probably herself told Pam enough for all this to be apparent, Lydia had wondered uneasily, hopefully, what else the other woman already knew about her.
“Mine,” she’d said. “On Harvey.” And then, when Pam had pulled the car over to the curb—as Lydia had seen, to her obsessive chagrin, the dry and untrimmed grass along the front walk, the gutter pulling loose from the eaves—she’d found herself rushing headlong to ask, “Would you—do you have time to come in?”
So now she was standing on the first landing—dust on the uncarpeted edges of the stairs although she’d washed them just last week, a hairline crack she hadn’t noticed before in the wallpaper beside the door—and Pam and the nosy, distressingly charming little dog were actually in the entryway of her house, and she had absolutely no idea what to say or do next.
“This is a beautiful old house,” Pam was saying, looking around.
Lydia wanted to cry out, Don’t do that! Don’t look around! But that would be silly. But since she loathed the house, it would also be silly to say thank you.
“It must be a lot to take care of,” Pam said. “I have enough trouble keeping up with my apartment, and there’s just Friedrich and me. Do you do it all yourself?”
“All four of them,” Lydia admitted.
Pam stared. “All four houses? By yourself?”
