The Final Confession of Mabel Stark: A Novel (An Evergreen book)

by Robert Hough

  I swallowed hard, and found there was nowhere to look; every time my eyes settled on a spot it happened to be that spot, a phenomenon making it hard to think or get things done. Finally I whispered, "Now you look here, Mr. Aganosticus. My instructions are to give you as good a washing as I'm able, and while I'm not particularly pleased about it I don't have much choice in the matter. At the same time, I'm keen those on the other side of this curtain don't know what's going on in here. So if you make one peep, if you make one unnatural noise, party's over. You understand?"

  He nodded, and I proceeded, lathering my hands until they were barely recognizable as hands. Breathe, I told myself, breathe regular, for I was starting to feel a little faint, society having a way of preserving eighteen-year-old girls in a sort of virginal aspic back then. After a bit, I reached out and made contact in the way you make contact when contact's a thing you're not sure you really want. Suppose gingerly's the word. Or tentative. Problem was, I was so young I didn't even know when it comes to certain parts of the body a lightness of touch is the very thing that causes the most sensation. So I went ahead, not enjoying myself exactly but not hating it either: I remember feeling worldly for getting to know the contours involved and that particular way thickness can feel. After a moment, I looked up at Dimitri's face and saw he'd clamped one hand over his mouth and that tears had welled up like jelly in the corners of each eye-trembling he was, and red as a fire engine. His facial contortions so fascinated me, in fact, I neglected to put an end to what I was doing to cause them in the first place, the upshot being that seconds later I discovered what a grown man will do when treated to an excess of soapy rubbing.

  I stood there, shocked. I was seriously considering giving the patient a whack across his sheepish-looking face, and surely would've were it not for the fact it was my whacking hand that'd gotten soiled. Then, I heard it. Shoes, comfortable ones, coming to a squeaky stop outside the curtain. I froze, which was a mistake, for the sudden lack of movement tipped her off. She whipped open the curtain and caught me, still as a figurine, right hand held out and messy with seed.

  For the longest time she just stood there, not talking, arms folded across her stomach, one hip jutted, smiling like a crocodile.

  Home for the next week was the hostel for Christian women on Portland Street. That weekend Dimitri and I married at the Greek Orthodox church on the corner of Seventh and Main, Dimitri insisting we had to, my honour now being his to protect and my being his sweet angel of mercy besides. It was a warm day, flowers blooming, air perfumed with honeysuckle, everything perfect.

  After my folks died, I'd spent five years with my aunt in her terrier-filled apartment in downtown Louisville, an experience bad enough I'm in no particular rush to recount it. Still, blood's blood, and she did keep me from starving, so I swallowed my pride and sent her an invitation. She didn't answer, and later I heard I'd been disowned for marrying down, which sounded like something that auntie of mine would do. Dimitri was without family too, they being all in Greece, though the occasion was far from lonely. Seemed all of Seventh Street turned out: the fishmonger, the butcher, the neighbourhood cantor, both bakers, a half-dozen washerwomen, a letter writer, the gypsy tarot card reader, a tanner, a milliner, a sausage maker, that damn Arab (who had a shop where he sold carpets and, if you knew to ask, risque Parisian photos), a hat blocker, a cobbler, a confectioner, the man who ran the numbers game, the ice man and Mr. Wong the Chinese herbalist, who at one point got me alone and, grinning and bowing, passed me a potion marked "For Marital Impediments." Rounding out the guest list was little Mr. Billetti, who looked dapper and taller than usual in a donkey jacket and high-hemmed pants (Dimitri having made the suit as a way of saying thank-you). They all brought their families, and after the vows every man, woman and caterwauling child crammed into the three-room apartment Dimitri kept over his shop. There were mountains of food and chatter in a half-dozen languages and as much dancing as was possible in the space provided.

  The last guest left around three in the morning. The apartment fell quiet, like a person grown tired of talking. Dimitri approached me, looking solemn as a priest. With a grunt he picked me up and carried me over the threshold into our boudoir, his spindly arm muscles tightening like rope against my backside. I could tell some of the wives had been there, for candles had been lit and windows opened and flowers placed. After letting me take it in for a second, he lowered me to the bed as gently as he was able and whispered, "You can get ready now...."

  He turned and walked out while I, eighteen-year-old Mary Haynie of Princeton, Kentucky, lay on the bed struggling not to cry. Lord, how I was mad at my mother, it being her job to take me aside and tell me how moments like this worked. (Course, it was an anger tinged with sadness, for even if she had been alive I probably couldn't've counted on her for this sort of information seeing as heart-to-heart talks weren't exactly something she enjoyed putting up with.) My throat swelled, I felt so sorrowfully ignorant, and what followed was my getting furious at myself for turning what was supposed to be the most glorious moment of my life into one of the saddest. I suppose I wasn't yet old enough to know this is a trick human beings are famous for playing on themselves.

  Just then, it occurred to me that maybe taking off my wedding getup was what he meant by readying myself, so I wriggled out of my gown and pulled back the sheet, finding a dark towel where my pelvis would go; at least I knew what this was for, my being an ex-nurse and therefore knowledgeable of things physical. Outside the room, I heard the sound of a buckle undoing and pants being dropped.

  Dimitri hummed softly as he opened the door. The light from the living room showed me the natives had already hefted his totem pole into place. I pulled the sheets up to my chin while trying to make my eyes look at least somewhat bedroomish.

  Now, I don't have to tell you some things fit inside other things and some things just plain don't. If they're too big they're too big and that's all there is to it. By the same token, there's a fever comes over a man on his wedding night that robs him of the sense necessary to understand this simplest of mechanics. Dimitri sauntered over and slipped into bed. He kissed me on the lips and chin before moving onto places normally covered by clothing, though this didn't last particularly long as my new husband seemed unduly eager to get to the rubbing and coaxing and prodding part of the program.

  Was no use. I suppose if I'd been at all interested it would've helped, the simple fact being I'd married Dimitri because it'd seemed to solve so many problems in one fell swoop. Unfortunately, I'd picked my wedding night to figure this out, instead of a day earlier, which would've been in time to do something about it. I could feel my cheeks burn I felt so stupid, my only hope being that Dimitri would mistake my flushing for wifely desire. To add to the awkwardness, I kept saying things like "Yes, darling, a little bit more, a little bit more," which ignored the fact those little-bit-mores were so little we could've been there all night and still had a ways to go come dawn.

  Finally, he sat up and tried to look understanding. He stroked his chin and said, "Hmmmmmmmm." Yet his body language was all pou- tiness, every vestige of hope gone out of him. I was about to go sleep on the sofa when his face lightened.

  "Wait!" he said. "Mr. Wong-he has give you something for this sort of problem?"

  "Yes," I said, "he did."

  The possibility there might be a way out of this logjam enthused me considerably, so I leapt from bed and fetched the little brown glass bottle I'd left on the windowsill in the living room. After unplugging the stopper I upended the contents into my mouth. It tasted bitter but not awful.

  As I hadn't eaten much during the party (nerves) the potion took effect quickly, turning my lower body numb and my head giddy in a matter of minutes. When Dimitri plopped me back on the bed, in the middle of the towel, I had to fight the temptation to giggle like a schoolgirl, for it suddenly seemed so ridiculous what we women put up with. Plus I was hallucinating. This was new for me, and what helped take my mind off Dimitri bein
g on top of me, eyes shut and mouth gone loose and rubbery like a cow's, was our bedroom ceiling coming alive with marching red-and-black toy soldiers. Gleeful and shimmering with light they were, and not prone to exhaustion: they marched and marched while my new husband finally managed to gain entry, all of which seemed like a tremendous amount of effort for the four or five seconds of pistoning that followed.

  Next thing I knew, I was opening my eyes and could tell by the quality of daylight sneaking through the break in the curtains I'd slept somewhere close to noon. After waking totally, which took some time, I pulled back the cover; someone had removed the towel and put me in a white flannel nightie. I lifted the hem and inspected myself, half surprised and half not that everything looked like it had the day before. When I took my first step I most keenly recalled last night's deflowering, on account of I was tender as a hammered thumb. I stumbled toward the bedroom door. On the way I discovered no amount of favouring one side over the other helps when the soreness is coming from smack-dab in the middle.

  To be truthful, all I wanted was a cup of hot tea and maybe a good cry, none of which happened because a woman I recognized in only the faintest sort of way was sitting on the living room sofa, knitting. I thought I recognized her from the night before, but with my head so fogged up I couldn't be sure.

  "Oh!" she cried, "she is awake! You look so beautiful last night! You look so beautiful it make me want to cry!" As she said this, she put aside the knitting and ran toward me so she could hug me and kiss me and express all the emotion apparently caused by my radiance of the night previous. When finished, she took me by the hand and led me toward the sofa. She sat me down. Wiping away her tears, she said, "Oh, my child. Dimitri told me you are orphan? That your mother and father they die when you are just young girl?"

  I nodded.

  "Oh ... such tragedy. Such sadness we have. But you don't to worry. Dimitri he ask me to show you how to look after a home. Is all right I help you?"

  I nodded again, which triggered another attack of tears and hugs and kisses on the part of this strangly comported woman. "Oh, is such a happy time. Soon you will have little ones, and I know it not sound possible but you will be even the more happier."

  It wasn't till later, when we were in the market, and she was showing me how to thump an eggplant, that Mr. Billetti called goodmorning to her and I realized how I knew her; she was married to Mr. Nickolokaukus, the baker from down the street, which explained why she smelled so warm and yeasty. Five minutes later and two stalls over, with her showing me the difference between good spinach and spinach readying to wilt, I asked, "Do you use the stems in cooking, Mrs. Nickolokaukus?" just so I could show I knew who in the hell she was.

  "Oh please," she answered, "why so the Mrs. Nickolokaukus? Georgina. Please. My name is Georgina."

  Over the next few days, Georgina decided I was pretty strong in the cleaning department, having done more than I ever cared to do at St. Mary's, and next to hopeless in things kitchen related, my having only the dimmest memory of watching my father prepare tortiere and nettleberry torte. (Have I mentioned he was Canadian French? That my mother was English? That they were an odd mixture, she being stony and capable of the darkest moods, he being passionate and on the speak-your-mind end of things? That basically I'm a mixture of the two of them, personality-wise?) That week, Georgina showed me how to braise fiddleheads, how to roast potatoes in garlic and drippings, how to take home a baby lamb bound at the hooves and hold it down, panicked and bleating, before slicing its throat in a way the flow doesn't get on your clothing. ("You see, Mary? You must hold knife dis way....") She watched as I struggled through my first moussaka, as I charred my first piklikia, as I over-garlicked my first bowl of tsatsiki, as I put way too much onion in my first batch of spanakopita, and throughout she showed a patience that wasn't merited as I was still suffering from the gloominess that'd gotten a firm grip on my wedding night.

  For instance-there I was, trying to bake some sticky monstrosity called a baclava, when it caught fire and I started shrieking and Georgina had to jam wooden spoons into the handles and rush to the window and shout "Gardyloo" before hurling it to the street. She leaned out, haunches wide as a baker's oven, a smouldering spoon in each hand, worried the flames might spread to the wooden stalls of Seventh Street, before finally saying, "Oh, the pot, it didn't break, maybe dent a little, nothing to worry about, fire is out...." When she turned I was slumped in a kitchen chair, face in my hands, aching all over, ashamed. She came over and put her arm around my shoulder, a kindness that loosened my guard and made me feel a hundred times worse.

  "Oh do not have worry!" she said. "Please do not have ... is very difficult making baclava. Do not cry, it will be better next time...."

  So I sat there, hiding my face, letting her think what was bothering me was the fear of disappointing my husband, when what I was really thinking was, Why didn't anyone tell me marriage was just another form of busy-making? Why didn't anyone tell me a name change doesn't change things that've already happened?

  Those were my days. Every night at six Dimitri came up the stairs whistling. I'd put his hands in warm water and massage them, so as to get the crimps out. When finished, I'd present him with whatever creation Georgina had helped me with that afternoon. Like all lanky men, he ate enough to feed a platoon, and no matter how singed or dry or oversalty the food he'd polish it off while making delighted little snorting noises. Was a little like listening to a Pomeranian trying to breathe.

  "Is good," he'd say, "is so good," the problem being he'd say this no matter how bad the food was (and many a night it was pretty bad) so that after a while he started sounding more like a father being patient with a child than a man discussing things with his wife. Generally, I ate little.

  Next was the evening's recreation, Dimitri being fond of reading newspapers, listening to oud music recorded onto cylinders or having people over for games of cards. All this I would've enjoyed, as I do like music and've never had a quarrel with a spirited hand of whist, the problem being it was during this portion of the evening I'd start to worry about our nightly congress, which still wasn't proceeding in a way I figured was even close to natural. Mind you, I wasn't positive, my not having enough nerve to raise the subject with Georgina: could've been all women had to be elixired to the gills before dealing with husbandly randiness. I had no way of knowing, my own mother not being alive to ask, and I guess that's why I put up with it as long as I did; for all I knew I was being unreasonable.

  Dimitri wanted children, you see. Wanted them the way a man lost in the Kalahari wants water. He craved them. Yearned for them. He'd wasted so much time setting up in America he worried he'd never have them, which to a Greek is as embarrassing as a forehead boil. What I'm saying is, he wanted to do it every night. And while we didn't do it every night-he was gentlemanly if I pleaded a headache or a case of the monthlies-we came pretty close. A routine developed. I'd tense up, his long loggedness wouldn't go where God had meant it to go, there'd be an excess of prodding, until finally he'd suggest I take a Chinaman bottle. After a couple of months we learned to skip the first two steps and springboard straight to the third, so that within fifteen minutes I'd be flat on my back, giggling and watching those damn tin soldiers on manouevres across our shimmering bedroom ceiling. I'd wake up sometime in the middle of the next day, feeling foggy and headachy and a little more like my grip on things was loosening.

  Understand there were things I liked about Dimitri. He brought me flowers, often, one arm crooked behind his back as he came whistling up the stairs. He wasn't the type of man you had to follow around and clean up after, his having been a bachelor for so long, and he didn't drink, other than the odd glass of retsina. Plus, he'd given me a place to go, and at eighteen years of age it isn't hard to mistake gratitude for affection. It was just I was starting to mistrust his motives a little.

  One night he suggested that different ways of coupling might make baby-making easier for us. "Do not have worry," he s
aid. "I read in a book."

  What followed was him suggesting I climb on top, a proposition akin to my trying to engulf a bedpost. Not wanting to disappoint, I agreed to give it a whirl. This turned out to be a mistake, as it gave Dimitri a green light to suggest other means of copulation, some of them more befitting barnyard animals than human beings. Over the next few weeks I watched those damn tin soldiers march not only across the ceiling but across the headboard, the wall opposite the foot of the bed, the pillow supporting my chin and, one night, when I somehow ended more out of bed than in, the chipped pine floorboards. What made it worse was Georgina had stopped coming, and though I'd always found her sugariness annoying I missed her fiercely nonetheless. Alone, I did a lot of sniffling and wondering how on earth everything was going to work itself out.

  My answer came one day in the new year. We'd just moved to the bedroom, and I was about to unstopper a little brown bottle when Dimitri put a hand on my forearm and said, "Wait, I have other idea to make things easier."

  With this, he took the bottle from my hands and went over to the bureau. He stooped and opened the drawer reserved for socks and handkerchiefs. He then pulled out a large packet, which surprised me for as late as that morning his sock-and-handkerchief drawer had contained nothing but socks and handkerchiefs (my having put them there, folded and de-lintified, myself). He sat beside me and unwound the string wrapping the packet. "This will help," he kept muttering, "I am sure," though he had difficulty unsealing the paper as his hands had gone shaky and unto-operative. Finally, he pulled out what looked like a breadboard-sized photograph, though I couldn't tell for sure seeing as he kept the face of it angled away from me.