Women Within

by Anne Leigh Parrish

“You came into this world with a full head of hair. Did you know that?” he asked.

  Eunice shook her head.

  “Your mother snipped a lock of it, wrapped it with a little green silk ribbon, and put it in an envelope.”

  “Can I see it?”

  “Oh, I don’t know where it got to. She may have pitched it during one of her tidy up fits.”

  These occurred on an irregular basis. In fact, their house was pretty dirty most of the time because Eunice’s mother was a cleaning lady for rich people and said she couldn’t stand to bring her work home. Her father was a deliveryman for a liquor store. His job, like Eunice’s mother’s, also brought him in contact with the town’s elite. He didn’t resent them the way his wife did, but he, too, was jealous.

  “Those folks drink first-rate hooch,” he told Eunice more than once. “Just think of that!”

  Eunice couldn’t understand alcohol’s wide appeal. She had learned over the years from watching her parents that drinking was entering a state of voluntary madness that seemed pleasant enough at first, until beer number three or four when her mother accused her father of something dire, usually of ruining her life, and threw something at the wall while he looked at the floor as if he wished it would open beneath him.

  Eunice’s father reached up and stroked her damaged hair.

  “Such a shame,” he said. His words made her feel much worse than her mother’s well-aimed blows.

  Her classmates, however, recovered then from the milk disaster, admired her new do. Sadly, she’d done a poor job. The back, in particular, was uneven. And since her hair was so thick and full of body, it stuck up in a way Eunice didn’t care for. Her Grandma Grace gave Eunice an Oreo cookie and told her not to worry, her hair would grow back. They were at her house, seated at her kitchen table in matching yellow chairs. The room was clad in faded floral wallpaper, the windowsill over the sink was crowded with flowering plants, and the ancient electric clock above the stove hummed happily to itself. Grandma Grace was in one of her many solid color dresses—this one pale green—an apron, and a pair of worn slippers. The only piece of jewelry she wore, a little chain with charms collected long ago, slid along her arm as she pressed a tissue to Eunice’s nose and told her to blow.

  Grandma Grace was Louise’s mother. She was generally a cheerful person. Eunice’s mother wasn’t. Eunice didn’t see how the two could be so different.

  “Time, that’s all. I had my trials in the world, like anyone else. I was pretty feisty, back in the day. You ask your mom. She’ll tell you,” Grandma Grace said.

  Eunice never asked. She went on as she always did, and steered clear of her mother as much as possible.

  Every so often, her mother would remember that she was there, living in the same house and eating at the same table. Her focused interest was terrifying.

  “What happened to your report card? I didn’t get a chance to see it,” her mother said.

  The report card in question contained the usual number of C’s and D’s. Eunice knew her mother didn’t care about her grades. She did, however, care about making an effort to care, and this effort, more often than not, involved presenting herself at school and demanding to speak to one or more of Eunice’s teachers, and once, to the principal himself. Eunice’s mother accused them of treating Eunice unfairly.

  “She’s much more talented than she lets on,” her mother told her math teacher, Mrs. Adams.

  “Then she must apply herself,” Mrs. Adams said. That same evening Eunice’s mother called Mrs. Adams a “moron.”

  Her lecture to the principal, Mr. Delmon, was delivered on a plume of beer. Eunice had seen her mother come into the building and knew from her exacting gait that she was three sheets to the wind. Eunice managed to position herself discreetly in the main office, out of sight, but within earshot of the open door Mr. Delmon had been too surprised to close.

  “Sheeza good girl. Mark my words. Iffa you wan my avice, lay the hell OFF,” her mother said.

  Eunice shared this with Grandma Grace. She shook her head woefully.

  “No good loving liquor if you can’t hold it. Don’t even know where she got the habit. She never touched a drop living here with me. Your dad must have wanted her to try it,” she said.

  Eunice doubted that. Her father couldn’t persuade her mother of anything.

  Eunice’s despair deepened. She stood before her mirror and peered into her own eyes until they filled with woe. She made it a point to stare at her mother until she saw it, too.

  “What’s the matter with you? Are you sick? Keep your distance, if you are,” her mother said.

  chapter nine

  By the time Eunice was stumbling unwillingly through high school, it was Grandma Grace who had perfected the look of longing and pain. She’d broken her hip the year before, and been laid up a good six months, during which time a string of sullen and inept homecare workers came and went through her kitchen door. On her feet again, Grandma Grace was a changed woman. Gone were the brassy tone and sharp tongue Eunice had known all her life. What replaced it were long stretches of silence, accompanied by a furious gaze that bore through whatever it fell upon, even Eunice, who felt clumsy and inadequate. Once, she asked Grandma Grace what she’d done wrong.

  “Who says you did anything wrong?”

  “The way you look at me.”

  “I’m not aware of looking at you in any particular way.”

  Eunice knew Grandma Grace had meant no harm.

  When the supply of care workers dried up, Eunice took over. Though she got around reasonably well, Grandma Grace was clearly terrified of another fall. So Eunice cleaned her house, changed the sheets on her bed, did the laundry, and even bought groceries when her father had time to drive her to the store, which had to be scheduled during the narrow window between the end of his workday and the start of his evening revelry. He now roosted in their living room, watching the same television where Eunice had discovered Lillian Gish years before. Her mother had claimed the kitchen table for her daily binge. Eunice passed by them, receiving scant acknowledgment, sometimes a request for another bottle of beer, a clean ashtray, or to take out the trash.

  “What are you going to do with your life?” Grandma Grace asked Eunice one afternoon.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Nonsense. You’re almost eighteen years old. You have to have some idea.”

  Eunice shrugged. She unpacked the two grocery bags she’d brought in. She now had a driver’s license and used Grandma Grace’s old Buick to go back and forth.

  “How can I, when I’m not good at anything?” Eunice asked.

  “You’re good at taking care of people.”

  Eunice supposed that was true. She’d taken care of her parents for years. To fulfill her quota of mandated community service hours (this was a new requirement to graduate from high school) she volunteered at the Clearview nursing home where she read stories to dull-eyed old men and women, then wheeled them around the grounds to look at the flowers. And she’d been at Grandma Grace’s side almost constantly, so much so that they’d talked about her moving in and leaving her parents behind.

  “But it might not be the best work for a young woman. Not right off, anyhow. Go out and tool around for a while first.”

  It was 1976. The bicentennial had people on the road in record numbers. Everyone wanted to see America.

  “I bet the world is pretty much the same everywhere as it is here,” Eunice said.

  “Maybe.” Grandma Grace paused to shuffle the worn deck of cards she always had in the pocket of her sweater. She could play solitaire for hours.

  “Besides, who would take care of you?” Eunice
asked. She put a can of tuna fish on the counter as a reminder to herself to use it later to make sandwiches for lunch.

  “I’ll find someone.”

  They had this conversation about once a month, and it always ended with them dropping it until the next time.

  “What about boys?” Grandma Grace asked. This was a new tack, and it caught Eunice off guard.

  “What about them?”

  “Don’t you like any?”

  “No.”

  Eunice had had a terrible crush on Brad Chalmers in her math class the year before. He was spectacularly handsome, and incredibly stupid. Whenever he spoke, people laughed, and the poor thing turned red. Eunice felt his pain. She, too, was sometimes laughed at. She decided that they were peas in a pod, two survivors stranded on the cruel island of Dunston High School, alone against the world.

  “We can face it together, you know,” Eunice once summoned the courage to tell him when she cornered him by his locker.

  “Face what?” he asked. Up close she noticed that one nostril was smaller than the other, there was a pimple on his chin, and his breath smelled like an old shoe. She loved him all the more for his flaws.

  “Our common affliction,” she whispered and put her hand on his cheek.

  He backed up. “Take it easy,” he said.

  She watched him trot down the hall. Her heart went with him.

  But soon another boy caught her eye. Larry Lester, a bad sort Grandma Grace would say, only wanting a girl for one thing, which Eunice gave him willingly under the bleachers after school one day. The act was stunningly brutal. He pressed into her so hard, it was difficult to breathe. Then afterward, he merely rolled off, pulled up his pants, and said he’d see her later. She felt as though she’d been mauled by an animal, and left to die.

  When her period was late, she panicked, looked up the laws about getting an abortion, and cried with relief when her period showed up in the middle of the following week. The use of birth control didn’t occur to her until later, when Larry had moved on to another girl, and yet another one after that.

  “Well, men have their uses, you know,” Grandma Grace said. “Just you keep an open mind.”

  Grandma Grace told a tale she’d told many times before, about being courted by her late husband. He came to her house with flowers, then sang beneath her window with a guitar he played so badly that her father chased him off with a shotgun. Only then did Grandma Grace’s expression lighten, before quickly becoming dark and brooding once again.

  Not long after, Grandma Grace died in her sleep. It wasn’t Eunice who found her but a neighbor Grandma Grace had invited over for coffee, in a rare mood of hospitality. Eunice took it as a sign—not the death, which was inevitable—but Grandma Grace’s change of heart about having people in her home. That Grandma Grace had left her house and bank accounts to Eunice rather than to Eunice’s mother, proved that life contained a number of unexpected possibilities that one should be ready to embrace. Of the roughly three hundred thousand dollars Eunice received, including proceeds from the sale of the house, she gave ten thousand to her father alone, in recognition of the fact that he did truly care for her. To her mother, she gave nothing, despite being treated to a daily rant about her disgusting ingratitude and monstrous selfishness.

  chapter ten

  Eunice moved into a new apartment complex, where many younger professors lived. She had a spare bedroom. The living room looked out over the gorge. It came furnished. The couch and loveseat were white leather, which she found alarming. It took her over a week to sit on either, then she decided that they were deliciously comfortable.

  She invited her father to come and see for himself how she was living now. He seemed impressed, though not envious. Her mother, who was not invited, continued her daily wheedling. Eunice had to admit she was getting worn down. She wondered how much her mother would accept to get off her back.

  Without Grandma Grace to take care of, Eunice became bored. Her father said she should go to college and study film. Didn’t she used to like old movies? The choices of higher education in Dunston were the university, which was Ivy League, and Dunston College, which offered good arts programs, but mostly in music and theater.

  “What about UCLA?” he asked.

  “What’s that?”

  “University of California at Los Angeles.” He spoke proudly. He’d done his research.

  “That’s pretty far away.”

  “Wouldn’t hurt to put a little distance between you and you-know-you.”

  Her mother would only turn up the volume long distance.

  You can swing a fancy-shmancy education, but for your mother, not one red cent!

  And in any case, she knew she wasn’t college material.

  She bought herself a car, a used Carmen Ghia. She loved it, even though it was yellow, her least favorite color. The salesman showed her how to drive a stick shift. She hoped she’d learn before she burned out the clutch. His same was Beau, short for Beauregard.

  “That’s ‘beautiful view’ in French,” he said.

  He was beautiful, with a very Douglas Fairbanks flair. He looked like he could handle a sword just fine. Eunice said she could see him with one. He blushed, then took her out for another quick lesson on the stick. She beamed. She was learning how to flirt! Heady stuff, she thought. She wanted to flirt some more, so she took him on a long drive around the back of the golf course. They parked on a grassy verge. He put his hand on her knee. There wasn’t enough room in the car, so out they went, pawing and kissing and dropping to the ground.

  It was better than with Larry Lester. At least Beau asked her, panting, how she was doing. He didn’t roll off right away, but remained inert and warm, crushing her ribs. Something dug painfully into the tender flesh of her thigh. It was his belt buckle, she discovered as he pulled his pants back on.

  Afterward, they sat in the car to compose themselves. Beau told Eunice he was married and couldn’t get involved with her.

  “What do you call what we just did?” she asked.

  “Just one of those things.”

  “Don’t you think I’m pretty?”

  “Sure.”

  “Look at me.”

  He looked at her. She held his gaze. She saw him admire her hazel eyes and the paleness of her skin. The green blouse she wore went perfectly with her red hair, which she wore long and full. He took in the curve of her breasts and her flat stomach. He patted her smooth knee.

  “Like I said, sure,” he said.

  She asked him to get out of the car.

  “What? Why?”

  “Because you’re a cad.”

  “I don’t think that’s a word people use anymore.”

  “I just did. Now get out.”

  “Wait a second! How am I supposed to get back to town?”

  “You can hitch a ride.”

  “That could take hours!”

  “Too bad about that.”

  He crossed his arms.

  “If you don’t get out this minute, I’ll say you raped me,” she said.

  His face went slack. His eyes filled with muted rage.

  “Fine. Do your worst. Your word against mine,” he said.

  Eunice started the engine. She released the brake. As her hand went to the gear shift, he grabbed it with a sweaty palm.

  “I don’t scare easily,” he said.

  “How about your wife?”

  He opened the door and got out. “Jesus, if it means that much to you, fine, I’ll find my own way.”

  A school bus came slowly up the road. The childr
en inside waved joyously at them as they went by. Eunice waved, too.

  She turned back to Beau. He looked like a scared little boy wearing a suit that was too big for him. She hadn’t noticed before how poorly it fit. The sleeves fell to the middle of his hands. She heard Grandma Grace.

  Don’t waste another minute on that poor son-of-a-bitch.

  “Get in. And keep quiet,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  She stopped a block from the dealership and turned off the engine. Her eyes burned with held-back tears. She sniffed.

  “Try not to take it so hard,” he said.

  “I’m not crying about you.”

  That was true. She was crying for herself, and how ridiculous she was.

  chapter eleven

  The man at the bank suggested an investment. Something to make her money grow.

  Eunice didn’t know anything about investing. She could barely balance a checkbook. When she confessed to both, the banker smiled. It was charmingly clichéd that he had a gold tooth. The charm vanished when he leaned forward and whispered, “Real estate.” The banker was fond of garlic.

  There were plans to build a shopping center on a wide patch of land overlooking the lake. If she were to commit her entire savings, she was certain to double her return in five years.

  “What if it doesn’t work?” Eunice asked. The banker smiled at her kindly, as if she’d just asked if the moon were really made of cheese.

  “It’s a very well-studied proposal. Baxter Bain will tell you all about it.”

  “Who’s that?”

  Again, the kind smile, the gentle acknowledgment of her shocking ignorance.

  “Baxter oversaw the entire redevelopment of the Downtown Commons,” the banker said. The Commons closed off the major streets in the small downtown core. The stores had hoped that with increased foot traffic, they’d prosper. They didn’t. At the same time, the town’s first shopping mall was built, and everyone took their business there. Eunice didn’t see how the town could support a second shopping center. She raised this with the banker.