The Secret Women

by Sheila Williams

  And then there was a Bible that looked brand-new and a well-thumbed Book of Common Prayer, a ribbon marking the fifty-first psalm. Dee Dee didn’t remember her mother being religious. On Sundays, sometimes, they visited Nana and Grandpa Brown’s church, Pool of Bethesda Holiness, or attended Saint Philip’s with Papa, Laura’s stepfather. She glanced at the inside cover of the prayer book: “Property of Saint Philip’s Episcopal Church.” The pages fell away like a waterfall until they reached the stem of a dried flower.

  Have mercy upon me, O God, after thy great goodness . . .

  She saw Laura’s handwriting in the margin—“Me!”—and an arrow drawn to verse 17:

  The sacrifice of God is a troubled spirit: a broken and contrite heart, O God, shalt thou not despise.

  Dee Dee closed the little book and set it aside. The meager inventory of the box spun around in her brain. How could her mother’s life be reduced to such an obscure and disposable group of objects? Fossilized chewing gum. A packet of incense so old, it had turned to dust. Dried up pens and a prayer book. Was this all there was to Laura? Bits and pieces? Leftovers? All evidence of a troubled spirit?

  The second box weighed a ton, full of books, the hardcover variety, so full that it hadn’t been closed properly, the peeling masking tape bulging at the top. This time Dee Dee’s sorting process broke down: she kept nearly every book. Laura’s reading tastes, like her own, were broad and transcendent. The poetry of Nikki Giovanni; The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran; Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston’s masterpiece; Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye; P. D. James mysteries alongside those of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers; the poems of Sylvia Plath, including the collection Ariel; and, interestingly, the four Mary Stewart titles traversing the landscape of King Arthur’s tales from the birth of Merlin through his and Arthur’s deaths.

  This was easy, Dee Dee said to herself, putting the books back into the box so she could carry them upstairs. She placed the Arthurian titles on top.

  And now box number three. What time is it? Ten fifteen. E and Carmen were coming around lunchtime. Plenty of time to sort through the box, consign some of the items to the fire pit or the recycling bin, the others to a to-be-determined pile, maybe to be sent to her sister in Chicago as mementos, depending . . . Dee Dee opened the box and picked up what looked like a journal. She flipped through the pages, stopping at a sketch that her mother had drawn. She shuddered and closed the book.

  Sorting the journals was easy. It only took ten minutes to create a pile of notebooks ready for the recycling bin. The first journal was small and had a “My Little Pony” themed cover. At first Dee Dee thought it had belonged to her or Debora, that the little book had gotten mixed up somehow with Laura’s things. But when she opened the cover, she saw her mother’s distinctive handwriting on the title page: “Laura O’Neill Brown,” written in fuchsia-colored ink. Inside, many of the pages had been torn out, jerked from the spine of the book, leaving a savage tear. The writing not excised by tearing out the page had been redacted—a tidy word for what it looked like, Dee Dee thought. Laura had blacked over her scribbling with a heavy hand. The Magic Marker ink had seeped through to the pages behind, when there were pages. Dee Dee sniffed. Laura had pressed down so hard with the marker that the ink smell was still sharp and fresh after all these years. She found the same in other journals and diaries. Large swaths of pages were either ripped or scissored out in an ominously neat and precise manner, as if the cutter had measured the pages and drawn lines so that the cuts were razor straight and perfect. Any pages that remained were scribbled over with a black or dark blue marker. Dee Dee closed the diary and sighed. The only legible words inside it were her mother’s name and the dates.

  The notebooks sentenced to the fire pit held the same story: the scribbling was blacked out or, in some cases (and this was new), graffitied over with black or navy markers. The notebooks that held actual writing, some of it legible, were only five in number, and these Dee Dee stacked on the Ping-Pong table. Mentally, she’d noted the time periods each book covered. Even when there wasn’t anything else substantive in them, Laura had documented dates. The problem was the dates weren’t chronological: her mother had written concurrently in different books but all out of order. There had been bad times: the early and mid 1980s through the mid 1990s, and one book, ascetic-looking moleskin from 1985, had its cover dotted with greasy fingerprints. A shiver went up Dee Dee’s spine. She thought about putting the little book in what she’d designated the burn sack. But she didn’t. She set it down on the table and ran her fingertips across the cover. She didn’t know if she wanted to read it. She was afraid of what she’d find out from Laura’s words. Or of what she wouldn’t find out.

  She turned back to one of the open boxes and extracted another notebook, this one a psychedelic pink with the words “Flower Power” on the cover. She clicked open the lock and flipped through the pages. The diary pages were labeled by date and day of the week. If not for that, there might have been no words at all. The garish cover swaddled an empty landscape of pristine white lined pages. Days, weeks, and sometimes months went by without Laura writing a single word. But when she did, it was only one word:

  “Sleeping.”

  This time no blacked-over words, no torn or cut pages. Just emptiness.

  Was Mom sleeping all that time?

  “Sleeping.”

  Dee Dee wasn’t sure how long she stared at the word, taking in the ornately looped l and the huge p, which Laura had drawn rather than written. The period was lovely, a dot made with a flourish. Even on medication, the artist in her would not be subdued. Then the word blurred and Dee Dee started to remember. Shards of memory, really. Bits and pieces. She had been only six, and she had no context in which to place the things she saw. And it was so long ago that she wasn’t prepared to acknowledge that each sliver of remembrance was even true, that she actually had seen the images now coming back to her. But deep in the abyss of her memory bank, she realized that, at the very least, she could answer her own questions. The six-year-old she was then didn’t know what it meant, but she knew what she had seen.

  Was Mom sleeping all that time?

  Yes, she was, or so it seemed to Dee Dee. She slept when it was light and she and Debora got home from school. And she slept when it was dark and Daddy came home from work, his brow furrowed with many lines as he smoked cigarette after cigarette after cigarette. Shaking Mommy’s shoulder as she lay on her side in the bed. Fully dressed. “Laura? Baby? Are you okay?”

  What kind of drugs had her mother been on?

  One word came to Dee Dee’s mind.

  There were so many bottles filled with pills of many colors. There was barely room for the lamp on the nightstand. One day Laura had made a game of it. “The giant white ones and the pixie blue ones,” Laura told the girls, laughing as she popped one into her mouth and drank a tall glass of water to get it down. Then she belched, much to the girls’ amusement. “There.” She picked up another bottle and peered at the label. “Now. Which one shall I take next? Yes. This one. I call it the ‘troll.’”

  “Which one is that, Mommy?” Dee Dee couldn’t remember if it was she or Deb who asked the question.

  Laura grinned and stood up, taking their hands. The bottle of trolls fell to the floor.

  “It’s the teeny-tiny one. Blue and white,” she answered, kissing them gently on the forehead. “Those are my favorites.”

  What kind of drugs had her mother been on?

  Dee Dee wiped away a tear from the corner of her eye and closed the book.

  Many.

  Chapter 35

  Laura

  Barbie diary, 1980-something, illegible:

  This diary belongs to: Laura Frances O’Neill Brown

  Dear Diary,

  This is silly. A grown woman writing in a child’s diary with “Ski Barbie” on the cover! It’s Luke’s fault. That’s what happens when you ask a man to go shopping. The doctor said that I need a journal, a
kind of diary to write in. Luke bought the first “diary” he saw, Barbie’s. You gotta love him. I do. I’m not sure about actually using it, however. I am not a word person; I’m a picture person, sketches, paintings, cartoons, that’s my language. But Dr. Christiansen wants me to write things down. He says to think of it as “The History of Laura.” Ever since the incident. Scratch that, OK? I’m not ready to write about that yet. I’m not sure that I want to write about anything at all, but Luke says please try. I will do anything for Luke.

  The History of Laura O’Neill (what a title, but I can’t think of anything else) ☺

  Name: Laura Frances O’Neill Brown

  Born: April 10, 1955, Ft. Benjamin Harrison, just outside Indianapolis, Indiana

  Parents: Agnes Blaine O’Neill, Jack O’Neill

  Married to high school sweetheart, Luke Augustus Brown, tall, dark, and handsome (Of course!)

  Voted “Girl most likely to paint (over) the Sistine Chapel”

  Head cheerleader in high school (OK, I wasn’t, but it was a nice dream!)

  National Honor Society, aka “egg head”

  Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority Squeak! Squeak!

  Graduated from OU after two years at Fisk

  Same journal, 1984:

  I don’t want to write anymore

  Write. Write write write

  Same journal, date illegible:

  Big fight with Dr. Christiansen. He says that I’m not living up to our agreement. He agreed to talk with me and make me feel better. I said that I would write so that he would know what was going on with me. I thought I held up my end of the bargain. I just don’t use a lot of words. He says I’m cheating. He wants to know who I am and how I feel about things.

  Write write write write.

  How is that cheatin? He told me to Write!

  “Laura, you write as if you’re afraid that you’ll run out of words.”

  But now Luke’s pissed off, and Mom and Daddy are worried and the girls.

  I don’t see them as much as I would like, and Deanna’s only a baby! Luke says they’re being taken care of—his mom has them—but my baby needs her mother. Luke says I was too upset. Dr. Christiansen wants to know why I was upset. I told him that I don’t remember being upset.

  But of course I do.

  It’s just that I was so tired. I couldn’t even walk straight much less think.

  “Did Luke know how tired you were?” Dr. Christiansen asked.

  Yes yes yes and yes. But Luke was tired too, and he had to go to work. I was off for the summer, one advantage of being a teacher. Luke walked the floor with the baby at night. Sometimes we took turns. Then he took a shower, shaved, grabbed a thermos of black coffee, and left. And it was just me. All day long it was just me.

  “Your mother came to help, didn’t she?” Dr. Christiansen looked down at the tiny notebook he writes in. It intrigues me that it’s so small. I could fill the itsy-bitsy pages in a second! He must have the smallest handwriting known to man.

  “Yes. No. Mom wasn’t able to come until July.”

  Dr. Christiansen made a mark in his miniature book.

  “So you and your husband were on your own with a new baby.”

  “Yes, but many people are.”

  This time Dr. Christiansen looked at me with a gaze that cut me in half, examined my insides like an x-ray machine. I felt it! It was searing and sharp like a kid with a stick. Poke poke poke.

  “What do you remember, Laura? About the baby? Do you remember that day?”

  Which baby? Which day? They’d all melted together like chocolate did when I made fudge. One right after the other, all of them the same: get up stay up change baby feed baby change baby feed baby rock rock rock baby sing sing to baby. She’s a sweet baby. Both shes were. Are.

  “Yes, I understand,” he said. His blue eyes were no longer probing around my intestines. “But do you remember?” He glanced over at the clipboard on the table. “After Debora’s birth, do you remember?”

  Yes, I remember. After Debora’s birth. After Deanna’s birth. It was the same.

  The baby cried, puked, cried again, then pooped. Pampers didn’t make enough diapers to cover this kid. But I cleaned her up, fed her a bottle, and rocked her to sleep and slept a bit myself. Maybe that was it. Maybe if I hadn’t slept. But I slept and it felt so good, but when the baby started crying, I woke up. And I felt weird, almost high. And she wouldn’t stop crying. She wasn’t wet. She didn’t even spit up. She didn’t want a bottle. She just wanted to cry. And I thought, let’s walk a bit. I went back and forth and back and forth and then went to the window and looked out. It was February. This baby was born in winter. The parking lot was shoveled clean, but the snow was still around. Pretty. But cold. It looked soft and comforting. And I thought of pillows and cotton and sleep. Light and dark. A piece about contrasts. The whiteness. I wondered if I could find a similar white paint, soft like cotton. And what would the baby look like nestled in the white, in the snow? Maybe it wasn’t cold at all. But of course it was. I was sleepy. And then I thought that if I breathed the cold air, I’d wake up. My head would clear out. Cold does that, wakes you up. Of course the baby would wake up too, but maybe not. I wasn’t thinking straight. I was thinking in curlicues, spirals, and wiry rounds that went “boing, boing” like a Slinky. I know that. Now.

  I unlatched the lock and pulled the window open. Looked down at the snow and thought . . . about the white, white paint on white paper in white snow . . .

  I didn’t hear Luke come in.

  “Laura? Why is it so cold in here? What . . . why is the window open?”

  He took the baby from me and closed the window, hard with one hand. Then he grabbed me by the arm and sat me down on the couch.

  “Laura, what were you doing? What were you going to do with the baby?”

  It was so hard to answer him. I must have talked in circles. I told him. About the snow and the cotton and the whiteness. How precious the baby would look against the soft white snow. A baby painting of snow. And I sounded like a nutcase. Which is what I am. Luke called the doctor, who called another doctor, who called Dr. Christiansen, which is why I’m writing in this silly Ski Barbie diary. Because I’m a nutcase. He asks me to remember over and over. But I felt like this before partum before baby before, didn’t I? The only thing I remember is to forget.

  Same journal, no date:

  Dr. Christiansen doesn’t like it when I call myself a “nutcase.” He says that what’s wrong with me is common in new mothers, it’s not unusual. “It’s called postpartum depression,” he says. “Some people call it the after-baby blues.”

  Blues? Colors are to me as musical notes are to a violinist. I know about blues. Sky blue, powder blue, azure blue, turquoise, cobalt, navy, teal. What I have? It’s not blue. Blue is cool, soothing, fluid like water, and smooth. It comforts and flows. It’s soft. It has no form or shape really. This thing I have? It ain’t blue. It’s black and noisy and hard. It has a head, a big head. And it screams a lot. Through a wide-open mouth that never closes. Never closes. Never.

  Closes.

  Dr. C asked me if I could draw a picture. I said to him, “Yes, I can, but I won’t.”

  “I don’t understand. Why not?” he asked, his tiny pencil positioned between his fingers, poised like a weapon ready to aim, shoot, and fire onto its target, a tiny page. “What is it?”

  “It’s . . . what it is,” I said.

  Dr. C’s eyebrow rose, and he smiled slightly. And suddenly I was pissed. Really pissed. This is no smiling matter.

  “And what’s that?” he asked. Then “Who’s that?”

  That’s a place I won’t go, so I lied. “It isn’t a ‘who.’”

  “I want to see what it looks like. Don’t tell me you can’t sketch it out. You are an artist. A good one, from what I’ve seen.”

  “I can draw anything,” I told him, and it’s the truth, I can. But. “It’s just that . . . I won’t draw this.”

  “Why?”
<
br />   I have to explain everything.

  “Because drawing it will make . . . it more real,” I told him. “And dangerous.” I have to be careful what I say. It’s listening.

  He smiled slightly, the tip of his pencil skating across the elf-size page.

  “Laura, if you draw a picture of a spider, it won’t leap off the page and bite you.”

  “No, a spider won’t,” I said to him. “But this will.”

  Dr. C kept after me. He said that it’s important for me to face it. To know it for what it is: just an image on a sheet of white paper. We argued about this at every appointment until, finally, I did what he asked. I did it as safely as I could. To protect both of us.

  He took the notebook and began flipping through the pages. Then he frowned.

  “It’s in here? I don’t see anything. The pages are blank.”

  I shook my head. “No. It’s in there.”

  Finally he was on the right page. He studied the drawing for what seemed like hours, turned the notebook slowly, clockwise, then set it in his lap.

  “What will you put on the rest of the pages? Other sketches?”

  “Nothing,” I told him. “I don’t want my drawings contaminated.”