by Edna O'Brien
“I would have won quite a penny,” he said.
“Waterlogged?” he said. Humor!
“You’re trying to be funny,” I said.
“Relax,” he said, sort of bullying then. Relax! I was thinking of women and all they have to put up with, not just washing nappies or not being able to be high-court judges, but all this. All this poking and probing and hurt. And not only when they go to doctors but when they go to bed as brides with the men that love them. Oh, God, who does not exist, you hate women, otherwise you’d have made them different. And Jesus, who snubbed your mother, you hate them more. Roaming around all that time with a bunch of men, fishing; and Sermons on the Mount. Abandoning women. I thought of all the women who had it, and didn’t even know when the big moment was, and others saying their Rosary with the beads held over the side of the bed, and others saying, “Stop, stop, you dirty old dog,” and others yelling desperately to be jacked right up to their middles, and it often leading to nothing, and them getting up out of bed and riding a poor doorknob and kissing the wooden face of a door and urging with foul language, then crying, wiping the knob, and it all adding up to nothing either.
“All right?” he said. I took deep breaths.
“I wish,” said I to him, “that I’d been born a savage.” So I did, where women aren’t tightened up and just drop the babies out of themselves and go on cutting sugarcane or whatever the hell savage women do.
“What an extraordinary statement,” he said, and I could feel his finger withdrawing. More pain, more pressure. I wondered if he ever got fresh, or if all that disinfectant and stuff put him right off. He said yes indeed, that I’d started a baby. He put it in a way that nearly made me sick.
“God has fructified your womb.” That is the exact way he said it. Then he said how pleased my husband would be and he talked all sorts of technical stuff that I didn’t want to hear. All about embryos.
He went down ahead of me while I retrieved my knickers from my handbag and put them back on.
Downstairs he got the runny-eyed nurse to write out for me when I was to come again, and he gave me a prescription for iron and vitamins. All I wanted was a prescription for ergot, or whatever it is wise women take. I came out and sat in the square opposite, where it said RESIDENTS ONLY, and I cried bucketfuls to the tune of “I came. I didn’t think I would.” If only it had been Durack’s. Don’t ask me to say crime does not pay because I’ll say it, but I’ll also say virtue does not pay, it is all pure fluke, and our lives prove it. Kids, I thought. God help them, they don’t know the bastards they’re born from.
11
The silence was shocking. Even the clock on his desk did not tick, though it gave the correct time. Kate looked around: the rubber plant was still there and the couch with the sheet over it. Did other patients lie down? Some of those nameless, awed people who sat outside in the waiting room, the ticking shadows, preparing to spill out their woes. He gave them pills each week—tiny white pills packed into tiny circular boxes—and fifty minutes of solace. It allowed them to keep numb, get on and off buses, walk the dog, and go to bed at night without being tempted to carry a pillow downstairs and bury their heads in the hire-purchased gas oven. It enabled them to die slowly.
It was Kate’s fourth visit to the psychiatrist, and she found she had nothing to say, or had so much that it was useless to cramp it into the time allotted and then stop and retain it until the next week. Desperateness by installment. She was looking at this pale, thin-lipped man who sat like a dummy and had heard her woes as if he was hearing the weather forecast. After the Waterloo debacle, Baba’s family doctor decided that Kate should see a psychiatrist because she was unstable. He’d sent her to the outpatient’s department of the local hospital. On the first day she’d done nothing but weep, and on the second she’d talked about Eugene and of how she’d given him false proportions—set him up, as one sets up things that are past. Like thinking that the weather was always fine when one was young, and that the hedges were full of wild strawberries, when, in fact, there were only a few hot days and the strawberries were hearsay, found by Baba or said to have been found. Anyhow, she resented telling about her marriage. It not only violated her sense of privacy, it left her empty. Life, after all, was a secret with the self. The more one gave out, the less there remained for the center—that center which she coveted for herself and recognized instantly in others. Fruits had it, the very heart of, say, a cherry, where the true worth and flavor lay. Some of course were flawed or hollow in there. Many, in fact. Was he? This spruce Englishman in his pink shirt with the collar held down by pill-white buttons. She would have to sleep with him to know. The only way of ever really knowing a man. The thought sickened her.
Before she left Eugene, she had often thought of being with other men—strange, distant men who would beckon to her, and as she moved they would draw back their coats on their naked bodies and have her float away on the wing of the wavering outthrust penis. Mostly dark-horse men. But one was blond and had pale-green eyes like the whey of the milk. But now that she could taste the mystery of other men she declined, and shrank back into her dream.
“What are you thinking?” the psychiatrist asked. Half the allotted time gone.
“Of a plane crash,” she said, cheating beautifully. The words came out of nowhere.
“One you escaped from?”
“No, I read about it. One hundred and four people were killed outside Boston or somewhere, and when the cause of the crash was investigated afterward by millions of experts, I mean by experts, they found the engine went wrong because starlings had nested in it. That haunts me.”
“Why?”
“Because I feel like the starlings.”
“You feel you kill people.”
“I feel I sort of destroy them, with weakness.”
“How many people have you destroyed?”
“I do not know,” she said, and began to sob suddenly and uncontrollably. He offered her a tissue from the box on the desk, probably kept there to accommodate the numerous cryings that went on.
“Come on now, pull yourself together.” The old cliché. She sat hunched, staring down at the damp, disintegrating tissue, struggling to control herself. Why had she said such a thing? Why had it upset her? She longed for him to comfort her. She could not bear to be seen crying by someone who wouldn’t for that duration enfold her, the way hills enfold a valley. Hills brought a sudden thought of her mother, and she felt the first flash of dislike she had ever experienced for that dead, overworked woman. Her mothers kindness and her mothers accidental drowning had always given her a mantle of perfection. Kate’s love had been unchanged and everlasting, like the wax flowers under domes which would have been on her grave if she’d had one. Now suddenly she saw that woman in a different light. A self-appointed martyr. A blackmailer. Stitching the cord back on. Smothering her one child in loathsome, sponge-soft, pamper love. She tried to dry her eyes, only to find them releaking. She stood up, made another appointment with the psychiatrist, and went through the waiting room so distraught that she wrung the pity of people who were worse off than herself.
At the bus queue she cried more, and in the bus she kept her head fixed to the windowpane, so that when the lady conductor came she handed her sixpence, although it was only a fourpenny fare. For days she went around hating her mother, remembering her minutest fault, even to the way her mother’s accent changed when they visited people, and how after going to the lavatory in some strange house or some strange hotel she would make a feeble, dishonest attempt at washing her hands, by putting one hand—the one she’d used—under the tap, when at home she just held her legs apart over the sewerage outside the back door, where they also strained potatoes and calf meal. In that fever of hate and shame she thought one day of something that lessened her rancor. They had laughed together once, and Kate put great premium now on laughter. It happened when she was eight or nine. She had gone with her mother to collect three dozen day-old chickens from a Protes
tant woman who lived near the graveyard. They took the upper road because it was shorter, but it was more tiring to walk on, not being tarred.
“I want to do a pooley,” her mother said. “Watch for me.” Her mother never took time to do a thing, hardly ever sat on the lavatory, and consequently had piles. They looked up and down, and then her mother squatted, just around the bend. Kate, the child, wandered off a few yards and began to daydream, as she always did out of doors, with birds and tall blades of sighing grass to make her fanciful. She was thinking of the day she bought a stamp and held it by its sticky side on the very tip of her thumb, and the wind which made the grass sigh swept the twopenny stamp away.
“There’s a man, a man,” she said suddenly, running to where her mother squatted. He was cycling downhill at a terrible speed.
“Where?” her mother said, stepping onto the middle of the road with her navy, nunnish, gusset-reinforced knickers down around her legs. The brown river she’d made was coursing over the dusty road, finding its inevitable destination to settle and be dried by sun. It was summertime. The sun was bleaching the green, ungathered swarths of hay.
“This way,” the child said, because her mother was looking in the opposite direction. He came around the corner and prised through the mother’s parted legs with the front tire of his bicycle. They both fell and were locked by the handlebars.
“Sweet Jesus, I’m killed,” her mother screamed.
“No, but I am,” he said as he tried to extract himself from the bar and from the woman.
“Where in the name of God were you going?” she said as she put her hand on the dusty road to ease herself up.
“I’m going to a funeral,” he said, taking up his bicycle and shaking it fiercely to make it straight again. He wiped the saddle with the lining of his raincoat and swore under his breath. The chickens that had been left on the grass bank were screeching through their perforated box, and the child had hidden her face in an enormous dock leaf.
“You ought to look where you’re going,” the mother said, walking toward the chickens with as much dignity as she could muster. As she walked she tried to ease the knickers above her skirt.
“The same goes for yourself,” he said as he speeded the bicycle forward, ran with it, put his leg over the bar, and cycled off, saying, “Townspeople.”
“Ignorant yahoo,” the mother said when he’d gone. She rested against the grass bank then, and laughed at the scratches on her hand, her grazed knee, her ripped knickers, the idiotic saddle of his bicycle stuck up in the air like a dog’s nozzle.
“Going to a funeral,” the mother would say, and they would laugh, and double up, and remembering some other moment of it, they would start a fresh bout of laughter.
“My good knickers, at that,” the mother said. Everything was funny.
But they were never able to talk about it again, because the mother got shy once she had laughed her fill.
Ah, childhood, Kate thought; the rain, the grass, the lake of pee over the loose stones, the palm of her hand green from a sweating penny that the Protestant woman had given her. Childhood, when one was at the mercy of everything but did not know it.
She did not go back to the psychiatrist the following week. Her excuse to herself was that she had to find some place to live. Cousins, friends, in-laws, some of the nameless stock people that come to the rescue on such occasions were on their way to take her room. They were announced by the landlady the morning after Kate was caught having Cash in the house. Eugene had given permission for him to stay with her one night. She bought a chamber pot and warned Cash about not going out on the landing. Once in bed he wanted the game—the old one in which she became a ghost and frightened him.
“Go out, and come in and be a ghost,” he said.
“We can’t play it, you know that.”
“Because of the old grump.” He knew a little about the landlady with the pasted-on smile and the snarling, asthmatic dog.
“Well, go behind the curtain,” he said, “and be a ghost.”
She did, and no sooner had they begun the game than he begged to be tickled and frightened into insane laughter. There was a knock on the door, and the landlady, barging in, discovered the child in his pajamas, in bed. Kate said she could explain everything, but the landlady saw it as a piece of treachery. Kate took him home early the next morning.
“Tell me about the First World War, how many infantry there were,” he asked. She couldn’t tell him. She didn’t know. “Chew your gum,” she said. She’d bribed him with four gum balls from a machine because that morning when she forced his feet into his socks he’d said, “When are you coming home forever?”
“I don’t know about the First World War,” she said, “I wasn’t born.”
“Well, the Second World War,” he said.
“I don’t know about that either,” she said. He made a wronged face and resigned himself to counting all the toy shops on his side of the street, which the bus passed by, and told her to do the same.
In the afternoon she began to look for a bed-sitting room. She knocked on doors, spoke clearly, swore that she was white, house-trained, had no pets, could dry her clothes magically in a hay box, and would keep her radio (a thing she didn’t own) to a mute whisper. And to the three who thought of considering her as a lodger she suddenly excused herself on the plea that she must think about it. She ran from their terms. She ran to another address. There must be a Bowery somewhere.
In the end she found a small, single-story house in a terrace of identical houses. They looked like drawings out of a child’s storybook, small and dark, with tiny turret windows and a stone cherub over each door. Inside, it was so dilapidated that Baba said it would be a cinch for entertaining the bicycle-chain, orange-box set.
They went to an auction room and bought the necessities.
“Where’s my smelling salts?” the pregnant Baba said, advancing sideways up the narrow passage between the mountains of used goods. Kate felt disgust. A smell of homes that were, stained mattresses, mildewed, bed ends on which hands had laid the pickings from their noses, sofas farted into, the dregs of lives. Baba bid—a table, chairs, one armchair, a bed, a wardrobe, and an umbrella stand. On the way home they bought a tin of disinfectant and a spray gun, just to be on the safe side.
“We’ll fumigate it,” Baba said, trying out the empty spray gun in the hardware shop. They also bought new ash-white wooden spoons, and a fish lifter, and a kettle, and a chemical to make the sink sweet-smelling.
“You’ll need this,” the man in the hardware shop said, holding up a white shell.
“What is it?”
“A water softener.”
“We’ll have it,” Kate said. There was something ridiculous about everything she did. Homes were not put together roughly, like this.
Baba blessed the house with a bottle of whiskey and they drank while they waited for the men to deliver the stuff.
“There’s no doubt,” Baba said, looking around at the job-lot wallpaper, “but you’ve got on in life, Katie. You’ve made a good match.”
The wallpaper was purple with red veins on it, like a graph of someone’s lousy bloodstream. The same pattern throughout the house.
“This will be a real salon yet,” she said as they sat in front of the fireplace nursing rubber hot-water bottles.
The slight eerie noise of soot falling through the chimney and rustling onto the crepe paper, which had been laid into the grate, got on their nerves. The fire could not be lit until the chimney was cleaned, and the chimney could not be cleaned until the electricity was turned on, and the electricity could not be turned on until the wiring was repaired. Broken sockets fell away from the wainscoting, and where they had already fallen off, wires stuck out like two evil eyes of danger.
By the time Cash came, the furniture was installed and the Victorian armchair was held up partly by books and partly by castors. He sat on it. He, too, thought it was a house out of a story, where a witch might live. But h
e was excited.
“Good, good,” he said, marching around the rooms, stamping on the boarded floor, rejoicing because everything was so empty and therefore free to wreck.
“I must go, Katie, or I’ll get murdered,” Baba said. The place bored her. If there was one thing she couldn’t stand, it was bare boards. These particular boards were the limit altogether, because the previous owners had let their kids daub them with every color paint under the sun.
“I wish you could stay,” Kate said, seeing her to the door reluctantly.
The sky was green and watery. Kate said it would rain. Not just rain, Baba said, but thunder and lightning and deluge and floods. She also said to remove the NO HAWKERS, NO CIRCULARS sign from the wooden gate because hawkers wouldn’t waste their time coming near the place. The path was strewn with leaves, papers, and rainwashed notes to the milkman that had blown in from other porchways. The wall between her and her neighbor was too low. She’d put trees there so they wouldn’t have to talk. Talk would only lead to questions, and then condolences and then friendship. She had no energy left for friendships.
Cash tried pulling off the sign with his nails and then with a fork, but it was firmly screwed on, and the screws had rusted into the metal sign.
“Come, we’ll go around the house and plan what we’ll put in all the rooms,” Kate said. He’d shed a few tears when Baba went.
A Turkish carpet here, a brass fender there, a picture of soldiers for Cash to look at, geraniums, a new pink bath, a lavatory with china flowers in the bowl, occasional tables, and woolly rugs that he could snuggle into when he took off his shoes to have a pillow fight.
There were green spots of damp on the four ceilings, and older fainter stains like rivulets running from these damp spots across the center of two ceilings. A big roof job.
