Women Within

by Anne Leigh Parrish

“Like breaking the law.”

  “Like living out of the mainstream.”

  “Oh, so that’s it. You sell drugs so you can feel like you’re interesting and different and better than anyone else.”

  Barry shrugged again, but the twitch in his jaw said she’d hit home.

  “All that guff about steering kids in the right direction,” she said.

  “Not guff.”

  “You only sell drugs to bad kids, right?”

  “I’m a pretty good judge of character.”

  “Lives out of the mainstream and plays God, too.”

  It took Eunice a second or two to realize that the chirping from inside her purse was her new cell phone. She’d never had a cell phone. Lindell suggested she carry one in case they needed to reach her. She was especially good with some of the residents, talking them through irrational stubborn moments, usually about refusing to take a prescribed medication or meeting with a family member who had been long estranged.

  It was Karen. She’d just gotten a call from the police up in Geneva. Seemed that Constance Maynard had taken herself on a little drive and didn’t know where she was or what she was doing there. Could Eunice come in and go along with the social worker to fetch her?

  “How long till we get back to Dunston?” she asked Barry.

  “Hour.”

  Eunice told Karen she was going to be a while. Karen sighed.

  Jesus, it’s my day off!

  Eunice was worried, however, about Constance. Karen said she’d find someone else, and thanked her.

  “I’ll be in tomorrow, but if something weird is up with her, I’ll come in tonight,” Eunice said.

  “You probably won’t have to. We’ll get her back, fed, and give her a sleeping pill.”

  The magic cure. Keep them quiet.

  “Everything okay?” Barry asked when she had put her phone back in her purse.

  “One of our residents took off.”

  “Good for him.”

  “Her.”

  Eunice was aware that her tone was fierce. The events of the day had made her restless. So did Constance’s flight. She watched the land, thinking all the familiar hills and fields would soothe. They didn’t.

  “If you could go anyplace at all, where would it be?” she asked.

  Barry thought.

  “Greece. You?”

  “West.”

  “How far?”

  “All the way.”

  Barry had nothing to say to that and kept quiet until they reached Dunston.

  chapter nineteen

  Eunice and Barry became fast friends. When he stopped selling drugs in his bar, he said it was because demand had fallen off. Eunice didn’t believe that for a minute, nor did she believe that her pressuring him, which she did now and then, had had any real effect. She had learned that Barry did what he wanted, when he wanted.

  She moved in with him, and had her own room. When he invited her, he said he was past that age, if she knew what he meant. She did, although she wasn’t sure she was as past as he was, and decided that if a man caught her eye, or vice versa, she’d worry about the logistics later. So far, it hadn’t come up.

  His house was on the lake, about four miles outside of town. He’d renovated it from top to bottom. The bedrooms and common living spaces all had open views of water. Eunice loved it, though she knew better than to say so. Another thing she’d learned about Barry was that he didn’t care for praise or compliments, or to know that someone was enjoying themselves. It wasn’t that he had a negative outlook or was an old crab; he just didn’t like overt displays of emotion, so Eunice kept her commentary on an even keel, and so did he, usually.

  The one time he went off the rails, Eunice had been living with him for almost two years. One of his children had called on the telephone. He’d taken the call in his den, where he could sit in private. The den was in another wing of the house and met the main section at a ninety degree angle. When Eunice stood in the living room, she had a clear view of Barry at his desk, the phone to his ear, his face growing increasingly grim.

  She turned away. He said nothing of the call over dinner, a meal they made it a point to share on the nights when she wasn’t working. He’d cut back his hours at the bar, leaving it in the hands of a new manager who turned out to be surprisingly competent at keeping an eye on both the customers and staff. Their evenings were quiet and pleasant. That one, though, was strained. Eunice was determined not to pry. Instead, she talked.

  She said her mother was leaving the farm where she’d lived with Jean to move into the Medicaid facility downtown. Eunice was keen to help Jean get her mother settled, but Jean’s daughter always seemed to intrude. Eunice wasn’t allowed to be useful. Jean’s daughter was claiming some sort of ownership, though of what exactly, Eunice wasn’t sure. All she could think was that the daughter was one of those naturally bossy women who always had to run the show. She supposed it was a useful trait, but people always ended up getting offended or downright angry.

  Barry had met her mother once, when they drove out together to visit, and said bluntly that he could see why Eunice had never wanted children. She didn’t know how to interpret that. For one, she’d never spoken of wanting or not wanting children. Next, in her limited experience, it was the people who’d had rotten parents who did a good job of parenting.

  Some of the people she worked with at Lindell supported her theory. Dee, one of the other aides, had been beaten by both of her parents, taken away by the State, returned, and left on her own at fifteen. She had three children, all of whom were good students with easy, pleasant dispositions. Velma, the cook, had had a drunk for a father who disappeared for weeks at a time. Her son and daughter were both in veterinary school. Of course, a good partner was key. The husbands of both women were solid and stable.

  She decided that Barry was imputing to her what he felt himself—the mistakes he regretted making as a father. Eunice wanted to know more about this but could only circle with vague questions. Then Fate did one if its funny/cruel things. Eunice and Barry ran into his children at a restaurant. It seemed they were there to celebrate a job offer one of them had recently received. They were polite to Barry, cold to Eunice, and dismissive when Barry asked about the job and what it entailed. That had only been three weeks before.

  Barry poked at the potatoes Eunice had prepared. He’d eaten little. As a rule, he enjoyed lamb. The chops were thick cut and well-seasoned, but he’d barely touched them.

  Eunice cleared, washed up, and went to her room. She worried that whatever had been said on the telephone would upset everything and she’d have to find another place to live, though that didn’t seem likely. She was mad at herself for being selfish.

  She went to bed. She woke to the sound of something breaking in the kitchen, a glass probably. She put on her bathrobe and slippers, and went to see.

  Barry was drunk. He apologized for waking her. He said he was getting himself some water and that the glass must have slipped from his hand. She turned on the light. His face was wet with tears. His sport shirt was stained, and Eunice wondered how it had gotten that way. Then she saw a dirty dish in the sink and realized he’d been snacking on leftovers. She told him to sit down. She swept up the broken glass, found another, and filled it with water. She went down the hall to his bathroom and took the bottle of aspirin from the medicine cabinet. He hadn’t told her it was there. She’d discovered it one day when she came home from work with a rotten headache.

  He swallowed the aspirin and drank the water. She told him to go to bed. He stood up and went to his room. Eunice waited until she saw the light go off. She went back to bed and didn’t sleep for a l
ong time, which was too bad, because she had to work in the morning.

  She arrived to find Constance in a small fury. Her daughter had requested a competency hearing. Eunice shared her ire. Constance was old, to be sure, but she wasn’t stupid or fuzzy-headed, even with the nightly sleeping pill on board. She told Eunice she wanted to stop taking them. Eunice said she needed to make her request to the nursing staff and that she’d make mention of it, if she’d like her to.

  Constance waved her hand to say she didn’t want to think about it anymore. Eunice made her bed. Sam, the new girl, came in with a small stack of clean towels. In the front pocket of her smock was a paperback book, probably another volume of poetry. Sam had a passion for poetry, which Eunice found completely at odds with her tall, wide stature. Then she thought it was silly to assume that only petite, delicate women loved poems.

  Sam went on to the next resident.

  “How are things with your friend?” Constance asked Eunice when they were alone. Constance heard often about Barry. Eunice mentioned the phone call and how badly he’d taken it.

  “Did you ask what was said?” Constance asked. It was mid-morning, the point during the day when she tended to be the most keen-witted.

  “I couldn’t do that.”

  “I bet you could.”

  Constance said being a parent was hard, and being a partner in a relationship was hard, even a platonic relationship like the one Eunice and Barry had. It all came down to instinct. Knowing when to speak, when to hold back.

  “Make it a parable,” Constance said. When Eunice lifted her eyebrows, Constance said, “What I mean is, tell him a story about how you were upset about something once and someone close to you drew you out. Or how you drew someone else out and knew you’d done the right thing because the person in question was glad to share, and found it…uplifting.”

  Eunice didn’t think that was a good idea. He wouldn’t like that he’d been so vulnerable with her. It might embarrass him to the point where he’d want her to move out.

  “That’s the trouble with men, isn’t it? Can’t talk about their feelings,” Constance said.

  “I know lots of women who can’t do that either.”

  Constance nodded. She fell silent in a way that suggested the onset of a bad mood. That happened whenever her daughter was due, Eunice had noticed. Families were such troublesome things. They hurt you more often than not and didn’t come through when you needed them. Except for Grandma Grace. Grandma Grace would have liked Constance. Or rather, she would have understood her, perhaps even sympathized with another example of bad mother-daughter relations. Eunice was certain that if she’d had a daughter, she’d have raised her fairly and lovingly. Of course, she’d never know for sure.

  part three

  chapter twenty

  Sam was a large girl, big-boned, her mother would say. Others called her heavy-set. And some just called her fat. Insults were Sam’s lot. Her name made it so easy.

  Sam crams spam and jam.

  She could go by Samantha, but that felt worse than the jiggle of her flesh every time she moved. Sam’s mother was stick thin. Her father might have been, too. Any questions about him were met with shrugs. When Sam was thought old enough, she got the story from her neighbor, Layla Endicott, who made an effort to take Sam under her wing on the many afternoons when Sam’s mother was still at work, and Sam’s grandparents, with whom they lived, didn’t want her around.

  Sam was the result of a rape against her mother when her mother was nineteen and on her way home from the tacky diner where she waited tables. The rapist was Henry Delacourt, the scion of a wealthy family who liked shedding all outward signs of privilege to go slumming. He enjoyed occupying the last booth in the diner and drinking coffee into which he poured whiskey from a fancy silver flask. He pulled the brim of an ancient fedora low, so that he had to tip his head back a bit to see. His coat was torn, the soles of his boots let in the rain, and his normally smooth cheeks bristled with three days’ growth.

  He fooled no one.

  Even in the pitch dark of a starless November night, Sam’s mother made him at once from the smell of his cologne, which he felt necessary to splash on himself even under such a getup. She caught it up her nose more than once at work, when pleasantries had been exchanged.

  “A pretty flower, you are,” she said.

  “Like you,” he replied.

  He took her for a flirt. Maybe that’s why he chose her. A natural, if overly violent following up. The cologne was imported from France and had an overlay of cinnamon, a spice Sam’s mother had, until that night, enjoyed on winter nights in a steaming cup of apple cider. She never tasted cinnamon again.

  Henry Delacourt left town not long after the incident and settled somewhere out of state where it was said he died two years later at the hands of a jealous husband. His picture was in the Dunston High School yearbook, which Sam found online. She saw nothing of herself in his face. She didn’t look one bit like her mother either. She was sure she had been cast into the water of life by some random hand, a hand that liked to turn cruel, but not always against her alone. Her mother, Flora, had been born to strict parents who looked upon their daughter’s misfortune without sympathy. She was punished for being a sinner. When they died, rather than feeling free, she withered, as if she had needed the iron law of their simple morality to hold her up.

  She and Sam remained in the dead parents’ tall, narrow house. Three years after Sam graduated from high school, and following a string of boring, entry-level jobs, which she quit after only a few months, she escaped to southern California. She figured the time had come to feel hot sun on her skin.

  L.A. was a hard place to be fat. The bodies around her were lean and tanned. Clothes were minimal. Sam cleaned motel rooms and wore black polyester pants even after work. When she walked on the beach, she cast a big shadow that bumped along in a reflection of her own awkward gait. For along with being fat, Sam had a bad leg, a birth defect, which her grandmother, Edna Clarkson, said was the Lord’s retribution. Sam was glad Edna and her nasty husband, Hubert, were both dead. She had silently rejoiced at their passing.

  Sam was strong. The ease with which she could lift and tote came in handy when she moved into her apartment in a mid-century building called the Betty Lou. Across the street, the tenants of the Nancy Ann were often noisy late into the night. And on the other side of a wide alley that always stank of garbage, the grandest of the three, the Shirley Lynn had a fountain with running water twenty-four hours a day. Who were these women? Why not the Samantha Louise? Sam’s middle name was another misery inflicted upon her. Her last name, Clarkson, she shortened down at the courthouse. Sam Clark sounded as strong as she was. A big, solid woman needed a big, solid name.

  She didn’t doubt her sexual identity. She wasn’t a lesbian. While she didn’t find men particularly appealing, she wasn’t drawn to women as love objects either. This was no doubt Fate’s way of keeping her from reproducing. All she had ever really adored, it seemed, were small treasures: bits of sea glass, porcelain figurines, the tiny pearls in a hairclip a motel guest left behind. She arranged these carefully on a sill below a west-facing window that gave a clear view of the parking lot. Sam would have preferred a view of the ocean.

  Stingy window, Sam thought. But I’ll wash you anyway.

  Some people might not want to do at home what they had to do all day at work, but Sam didn’t mind. She didn’t waste her time using spray cleanser, as she did at the EconoLodge, but white wine vinegar and a squeegee. The window was tall, the one nice feature in an otherwise bland, dingy living space. Sam didn’t need a footstool. At five foot ten, the top was an easy reach. It was there, one smoggy Tuesday afternoon, with the anticipation of eating a nice pork chop and fried rice for din
ner, that Sam first saw her.

  Even from that distance, Sam could tell she was a tiny little thing. It touched Sam’s heart to see that she was making up for her small stature by wearing ridiculously high heels. She teetered across the parking lot, a big cardboard box in her arms, which she strained to see around. She stopped some distance from the building’s main door, put the box down, and removed her keys from her stylish red handbag. Then she couldn’t pick the box up again with the keys in her hand, so she placed her key chain between her teeth. The effort she made exhausted Sam to watch. Sam dropped her squeegee and bottle, lumbered out the door, banged down two flights of stairs, and out into the parking lot. The little thing stared up at her. Sam lifted the box. The woman grabbed her keys with her left hand and smoothed her straight, black hair with the other.

  “You downstairs neighbor,” the woman said.

  “What makes you think that?”

  “I see you take mail from box below mine. Boxes placed the way apartments are placed.”

  Sam felt stupid for not having understood that arrangement.

  “I am Suki,” she said.

  “Chinese?”

  Suki shook her head. “Japanese.”

  Again, Sam felt stupid.

  “You are?” Suki asked.

  “American.”

  “No. Name.”

  “Oh, Sam.”

  Suki continued to stare up at her coolly. Sam asked what was in the box.

  “Tea service,” Suki said.

  Sam didn’t understand.

  “Pot and cups. Also, many box tea. From Japan.”

  They went inside and up three flights of stairs. Sam wished the building had an elevator.

  In Suki’s apartment, Sam put the box on a low table in the middle of the floor. On either side of the table were a number of large cushions. A potted orchid, its petals an extravagant fleshy pink, drew light from the same tall window Sam had one floor down. The bedroom was visible though its open door. A mattress lay on the floor, covered with a blue and white blanket in an abstract pattern of flowers.