Nine Women

by Shirley Ann Grau

  The paper crackled loudly in the silence as she smoothed the folded sheets. “Your glass is empty, Vicky. Why don’t you have another drink while I read this.”

  Angela was not sure how she felt about her daughter, that beautiful young woman who seemed capable of endless understanding without a hint of malice or anger. She’d adjusted to her parents’ divorce, had lived happily with her father, had grown to love her stepmother. With Vicky, she’d been quietly friendly, relaxed, and quite free of embarrassment. Cool, disciplined, well organized, a model student in college, now working on an MFA, she was married to an associate professor of economics who looked like a young John Wayne.

  Perfection, Angela thought. How could I have produced anything so damn perfect … And where was Vicky?

  She was standing at the refrigerator, one finger rubbing a small circle on the door. Carefully Angela put her arms around her. In the softness of that body and the muskiness of that hair, Angela felt again the familiar rush of pain and love and tenderness. And something else, something darker and stronger. Something she could not name, something she refused to think about, a force that gave a restless desperation to her life.

  Wearily, for the uncounted thousandth time, Angela pushed back the thing that crouched waiting in the shadows. She heard the crackling of its voice and the swishing of its tail. Not yet, she told it, not yet. Not this time.

  And softly into Vicky’s ear, pink curves under wisps of black hair, “We’re both tired, honey. Come on, let’s finish our drinks now. I saw some kind of dip in the refrigerator. And after a while we’ll go and have dinner at Paul’s, but we won’t try the theater. Not tonight, when we’re both so tired.”

  Vicky nodded silently, eyes closed, anger lines fading from her small face—the wistful, heart-shaped face that had haunted Angela ever since they first met, years ago, when Vicky was a college student, Angela a young matron with a husband and child.

  Now again, as always, seeing Vicky’s face close up, seeing the perfect porcelain skin, the lash-fringed eyes, naturally shadowed as some Irish eyes are, the thin-lipped and very small mouth—the face of a mannequin—Angela was reminded again of the toys of her childhood, the dolls whose china heads she had smashed open against rocks just to see the glass eyes spring out and roll away.

  Dinner was pleasant. They knew a dozen people in the restaurant, they waved to them. The Bartons, their neighbors down the hall, joined them in the bar for an after-dinner brandy. It was the sort of evening Angela liked best—lively, amusing, time filled with people who were not close to you. Nice people, people you liked, people who were gone before they became tiresome.

  Vicky’s moodiness vanished. She talked gaily with the Bartons, laughing at their long stories of misfortune and confusion during a trip to Hong Kong.

  By eleven they were home. “Huuuu.” Angela closed the door and leaned against it. “I am tired!” She stretched, rubbed her eyes. “Bed is going to feel so good.”

  They had separate bedrooms now that the first frenzy of love had passed and they no longer required a presence within arm’s reach all night. Angela shook her head, still puzzled by the lust of those early years, the rhythmic beating of blood that silenced everything else. They had been, she thought, more than a little crazy.

  Eventually balance and control had come back. Or was it weariness? Angela yawned. Age and habit finally muffled everything, that was sure.

  She ran her bath, poured in oil, and eased herself into the slippery tub, sighing with comfort. These pleasures were becoming more and more important to her—the perfumed hot tub, the wide bed all to herself, the smooth cool sheets with their embroidered edges.

  She soaked, half asleep, remembering the first time she met Vicky, fifteen years ago. It seemed even longer than that, all the figures were fuzzy and out of focus, softened by time and distance.

  It was a Thursday. Angela and Neal always went out to dinner on Thursday. Their ten-year-old daughter stayed with the housekeeper, Felicia, a thin pious spinster who left the house only for early Sunday mass, who never touched the television, and who turned on the radio only for the evening rosary in Spanish. All her salary went into a savings account. One day she would return to Guatemala and start a shop, a fabric shop that also sold candies and baked goods, she told Angela. But years passed and Felicia did not go home. She seemed to have forgotten her plans. After the divorce she stayed with Neal and the child. When they moved, she went with them. She was still there; Louise’s letters mentioned her occasionally: “Felicia, dour as ever.”

  On that Thursday night fifteen years ago, the night her life changed, Angela and her husband had dinner early and went to the University Theater for a production of The Glass Menagerie, directed by Neal’s sister. Angela was bored: the actors were painfully amateur, the staging was awkward. Still, remembering Neal’s sister, she applauded dutifully and smiled and tried very hard to be encouraging. Afterwards they went to the cast party in the student center, where they hugged and kissed everybody and laughed loudly and made silly toasts in beer. And Angela met Vicky.

  She remembered the exact moment she first saw her—a jolt, a shock. Too violent to be pleasant. (Vicky remembered it differently: “I didn’t notice you until you spoke to me, Angela. And then I thought you had a lovely voice.”)

  Angela remembered it all—the way the room smelled: beer, dust, sweat, the sourish odor of makeup, the sweet smell of cold cream. Somebody broke a confetti egg against the roof and bits of colored paper whirled in the air like bright midges. Neal and his sister were at the bar filling their mugs, laughing and talking as they worked their way through the crowd. A group of student stagehands in T-shirts and blue jeans gathered in one corner, fifteen or twenty of them, stretched on the dusty floor, perched on the windowsills. Vicky was there. She was standing in the bewildered way that was so characteristic of her, hands limply at her sides, a small frail figure in large overalls, dark hair cut short in fashionable imitation of Mia Farrow. She seemed utterly alone in the midst of the crowd.

  Angela walked briskly across the room and touched Vicky’s sleeve. “I feel that I know you,” she said. “Isn’t your name Vicky?”

  “No,” Vicky said.

  “It should be. Vicky Prescott.”

  “It’s not.”

  “It is now,” Angela said. “I just gave you a new name.”

  Three months later they moved into a small apartment near the campus. Angela took four suitcases of clothes—nothing else—with her.

  When she told Neal, he said nothing, absolutely nothing. His face froze, then gradually drained of color until the bones showed as dark shadows. His lips turned white and then a clear pale blue. Without a word he went upstairs into the bedroom and locked the door.

  Felicia said he stayed in the room all that day, and there hadn’t been a sound. The morning of the second day he appeared at breakfast, he read the paper and talked with his daughter; he asked Felicia formally to stay on as housekeeper, and he drove the child to school. She was delighted; usually she took the bus.

  A year later, to the day, Neal sued for divorce. Angela did not contest child custody, finding that weekend afternoons with her daughter were quite enough. She and Neal met occasionally at lunch to agree on the details of the dissolution of their marriage. “You know I have quite enough income of my own,” she told him. “I do not think I should ask you for anything.”

  He nodded gravely. (He seemed to have become very ponderous and solemn, she thought.) “When will you come to the house to select the things you want to keep?”

  She shook her head.

  “Things of sentimental value? Things from your family?”

  “There is nothing,” she said. “Nothing at all.”

  Three years later Neal moved to the West Coast, to begin his own consulting firm. Angela supervised the packing and the moving. And declined again the offer of furniture. Neal kissed her good-bye on one cheek, her daughter on the other. (Vicky had not come, she had always refused to meet Ne
al.) Then they were gone, astonished at how very simple and easy it all had been.

  Six months later there was a formal announcement of Neal’s marriage. After that, from a distance, Angela saw her daughter through the rituals of growing up—birthday presents, summer visits, graduation presents, wedding presents. All conducted quietly and factually and coolly, like the business transactions they really were.

  Drowsy and comforted by the warm perfumed waters, Angela left the tub, toweled carelessly, reached for a nightgown without looking at it. She patted the heavy embroidery on the edge of the sheet once or twice and fell into a deep black sleep.

  When Vicky slipped into her bed next to her, she scarcely stirred. “Tomorrow.” She pulled away. “Vicky, it’s late and I’m tired.”

  “I don’t want to make love,” Vicky whispered so close to her ear that her breath tickled unpleasantly.

  “You can’t be this spoiled,” Angela muttered. “Go away.”

  “I have to talk to you.” There was that rasping note of decision in the soft voice.

  Oh, oh, oh, Angela thought in her comfortable sleepy haze, I hope this isn’t going to be one of Vicky’s long rambling middle-of-the-night talks. “I’m dead tired, Vicky. You can’t be this selfish.”

  “I have to talk to you now.” The small voice was cool and steady.

  Well, Angela thought, maybe it won’t be such a long talk … She rolled over, reaching for the lamp switch. Vicky’s hand closed over hers, stopping it.

  “No. I want to talk in the dark,” Vicky said. “I always talk better in the dark.”

  “You always talk longer in the dark.” Angela squinted at the green dial on the clock: three-fifteen. “I’ve got a nine-fifteen appointment, and just look at the time.”

  “Now,” Vicky repeated.

  Angela sighed deeply, pulled the pillows up behind her, and settled back against them. For a moment she dozed—then shook herself awake. Vicky remained curled in the middle of the bed.

  “My dear,” Angela said, stifling a yawn, “this had better be important or I am going to be perfectly furious with you.”

  “I want a child,” Vicky said. “I want to get pregnant.”

  In the silence a far-off clock ticked steadily. A police siren waved a thin finger of sound down a distant street.

  “That is important,” Angela said dryly.

  Vicky was silent, unmoving.

  “Is there anything more you want?”

  A small despairing hiss, like air from a balloon. “I knew you’d misunderstand.”

  “You must give me a moment,” Angela said, “to catch up with you.” (Is this how Neal felt when I told him—when the unthinkable happens?)

  “I knew you’d be angry … and I knew you’d misunderstand. I’ve been dreading this so much that I’ve been putting it off and putting it off. For months. I just couldn’t tell you.”

  “You have lost your mind.”

  The bed moved slightly. Vicky was shaking her head. “I don’t want to want a child, you see. I know it would be trouble, and I thought you might even leave.”

  Did you? Angela thought. I don’t believe that.

  “It got so bad, I even began going to a psychiatrist.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “I thought at first it would go away, so I waited. But it didn’t. I thought about a tranquilizer or an energizer or lithium if I was really crazy.”

  “A strange pharmacopoeia,” Angela said into the dark. “Was the shrink any help?”

  “No drugs,” Vicky said sadly, raising her head slightly so that she showed briefly as a silhouette against the pale yellow wallpaper. “He said it would be months or years before anything could change. If then.”

  “No help from him.”

  “No,” Vicky said.

  The clock was still ticking, but the siren had vanished. The room was filled with a faint humming, the building’s air-conditioning system. Like the far-off hum of bees, Angela thought. There’d been hives on her family’s summer place in Maine.

  Vicky was talking again, rapidly, slurring her words. Angela noticed the heavy smell of brandy. She’d been drinking, and she probably hadn’t been to bed at all.

  “I didn’t want you to be angry. I tried every way I knew. But nothing helped. It’s even getting worse.”

  “The urge to procreate.”

  Vicky sobbed softly.

  Dear God, Angela thought, if I still believed in you, I would think that you are punishing me for my sins. But I left Sunday school too long ago for that …

  “You’ve got to understand,” Vicky said. “You’ve always helped before. Even when my parents died. You were so kind then.”

  They'd been killed in a highway accident and Vicky, wild with grief, neither ate nor slept. Finally Angela took her, dizzy with Librium, for a six months’ trip through Europe. They worked their way page by page through the points of interest listed in their Baedekers. They climbed mountains, hiked through forests, they exhausted themselves in the thin Jura air and staggered through the smells of Naples.

  “Listen to me now.” Vicky spoke clearly and slowly, as if she were instructing a child. “I am thirty-six. How much longer can I have children. One child. I feel, I don’t know, I feel hollow and empty and useless. Sometimes I feel so light I think the wind will blow me away.”

  “It won’t,” Angela said.

  “You have a child.” The harsh accusation startled Angela. “You have a child. Every time a letter comes from her, every time she telephones and talks to us, I want to die. Because I have nothing.”

  Nothing, Angela thought dully, sadly. You have me. And your career. You are the owner of a very successful shop. You have friends. You have a lovely apartment. And just today I saw a carriage house uptown, not too large, early nineteenth century, with lovely cypress woodwork, and a garden that is completely enclosed by a high brick wall, a perfect house for us. And you have love.

  “Nothing,” Vicky repeated as if she had heard.

  “I’m going to get a drink.”

  “Take mine.” Vicky put her glass carefully into Angela’s hand. “I want you to understand, but I’m not saying it very well.”

  “I understand,” Angela said.

  “No,” Vicky said. “I love my life. I love you and I love my work. There isn’t anybody else, you know that. I make more money every year. So it isn’t any of the things it’s supposed to be—not sex, not money, not boredom.”

  “That what the psychiatrist said?” Angela drained the glass, almost choking on the straight brandy. She hated drinking like this, in a race for comfort.

  “Not exactly, but I guess so, really.”

  “Look, Vicky.” Angela tried to put the glass on the night table, missed in the dark, and heard the glass roll across the rug. “It’s late, we have to work tomorrow. Why don’t we both come home early and have a sensible discussion.”

  “No,” Vicky said. “I know what I’m going to do.”

  “Get pregnant?”

  “Yes.” The darkness and the small voice and the absolute determination.

  I am angry, Angela thought, I am white hot and frozen with anger. “You seem to have thought it out. Have you decided how? I mean, you are an attractive woman, you can certainly find a man. You could even shop around until you found a man whose face you’d like to have repeated in a child.”

  A small sigh. And silence. Vicky was not going to be lured into an argument.

  “I suppose,” Angela went on, “you could always have it done artificially. Like a cow.”

  This time Vicky was silent so long that Angela thought that she had fallen into a drunken sleep. Her own eyelids strained in the confining dark, dry and aching.

  Eventually Vicky said, “At least then my bones and blood will be quiet.”

  “Just what I always wanted: quiet blood.” Angela bounced out of bed, went to the pantry. She poured a large brandy, noticing that the bottle was almost empty. I ought to get out, she thought, I ought to take t
he car and go for a long drive and just keep driving around until things make more sense to me.

  But she didn’t. She went back into the bedroom. “Time’s winged chariot.”

  “It’s like being thirsty,” Vicky said. “You have to have water.”

  “Brandy. Do you know how much brandy you’ve drunk? The bottle is almost empty.”

  “To give me courage,” Vicky said simply.

  And there it was, the tone, the motion, the gesture that ended all discussion, all argument. Why am I like this, Angela thought, why can she always do this to me … Why does she turn me around? Why can’t I leave, even for a drive. Is there so much of my life invested here?

  “You are proposing that you and I raise this child together?”

  “Yes,” Vicky said. “At first I thought you might want to leave, but now I don’t think so. I think it will be all right and you will love the child because it’s half me.”

  “Jesus Christ.” Angela made another trip to the pantry to empty the bottle of brandy into her glass and top it with soda and the bits of ice that remained in the bucket. The clock there said four-thirty.

  Vicky uncurled and lay stretched crosswise on the foot of the bed. Angela sat down Indian-fashion to keep from touching her. “All right, Vicky, we’ll raise the child together. If that’s what you want.”

  Vicky’s voice was thick with sleep and alcohol. “I knew you would.”

  “How the hell could you know that?”

  Vicky stretched and prepared to fall asleep where she was. “I knew.”

  Do you know how much of my life I have invested in you? Do you? You, a small arrangement of bones and skin and flesh and blood that I would kill if it would free me. But it wouldn’t.

  Vicky lay so still Angela thought she had fallen asleep. She got up slowly, carefully, not to disturb her, and began tiptoeing toward the door.

  Vicky said clearly, without the slur of alcohol, “You’re going to love the child. And I’m going to come to hate it.”

  “Go to sleep, Vicky.” And stop talking, let me alone for a while anyway. Before something I can’t imagine or control happens …

  “You’re going to love the part that’s me, and I’m going to hate the part that isn’t you.”