The spring thaw came and things started poking up through the snow. A curb, a mailbox, a hedge. Like the place was showing itself to me, little by little. Every day was something new, a stretch of sidewalk or a big rock down at the corner, buds coming on the trees and the rain washing away the dirty snow. The city grew curves and lines. It got color. And my baby was growing, too, getting a mind of its own, making its presence known. Everything was opening up, getting fuller.
And Abel. Well, I started getting attached to that donkey’s ass. My husband, I said to women in the store, to the landlady who came around to collect our rent. I was proud to have a man who was working, I’ll tell you that, what with so many people starving, down and out with no place to go. I tried so hard to love him. I made a list in my head of everything he’d done for me, all the ways he took care of me. I practiced getting excited when he came home from work, smiled up at him, kissed him real sincere when he walked in the door. I cooked for him, kept that crooked little apartment real nice, made curtains, put new paper on the cupboard shelves, cleaned around the baseboards. I got myself up special if we had a night out.
Other women looked at him, then looked at me like I was lucky. Wishing they had it so good. Maybe they wondered how a fat woman like me could snag such a thin, handsome man. So I busted ass, tended to every little thing, made him happy in bed at night. And oh, was he happy. Hard as he worked, tired as he was when he came home at night, that man was glowing. I almost envied him. He was in love. And me, I did my best.
I couldn’t make myself fall in love, but I got to liking him, maybe even loving him. I appreciated how strong he was, how he carried on no matter what, how he’d die before he’d give up. He was good-natured as could be, woke up with a smile on his face every day. He never complained, and he’d do anything for me. Yes, despite everything that had happened, I was number one on his list. He didn’t breathe a word about Edward, or the baby not being his, or how I’d double-crossed him.
We had us some fun, me and him. All day he squatted down in the noise and dust, wet-sanding that metal. His hands were scuffed and raw. He was hollow eyed by the time he got home, all done in. He threw himself down flat-out beat on the divan and had a beer, then we’d have dinner, and by the time it was over he was better, ready to go downstairs and play cards with the young couple who lived below us, or to go out walking, looking in the shop windows. A couple times we went dancing, or out to the pictures.
Abel took to that place just like I did. He wouldn’t say, but I think he was glad to be away from his family, too. All them brothers and cousins and uncles living back in those hollers, all of them ignorant as mules grubbing their living out of the dirt, mucking around in the mud one way or the other, either the mines or some farm, just like their daddies and their daddies before them. That’s what he had to look forward to, and he’d gotten away.
Everybody was in the same boat. They’d swarmed there from all over the country to work in the factories. There was Polacks, Italians, and Irish, all those Catholics who wore hankies on their heads when they went to church. There was colored people by the droves living over on the other side of town, and all manner of people we’d never seen the likes of in our lives.
I guess they hadn’t seen nobody like us, either, because every time I opened my mouth, somebody’s head would snap around, and they’d ask, “Where you from?” I got so tired of that question. If I acted like I didn’t know what they were talking about, they said your accent, the way you talk. They looked at me like they were surprised I had shoes on my feet, that I could read a street sign or eat with a knife and fork. Abel got it, too. People in the shops and banks and barbershop treated us like backwoods hillbillies who couldn’t write our own names. That was a tie we had, me and Abel, something that kept us close. We were each other’s little piece of home.
Things were so new and so much was happening, I started to forget about Edward. Only when I dreamed about him could I remember the feeling he gave me, how strong and joyful it was. Then I’d wake up raw, longing again to see his face, to feel him standing next to me. But those dreams got fewer and farther between. Things might not have been the way I’d dreamed of, but all in all it was a happy time.
And there was my baby I was waiting on, that precious little face I longed to see. Alice. I haven’t let myself say that name for so long, much less write it. Shaping it, writing the mountain of that first letter, lifts the corner on a whole world of sorrow.
ALICE WAS BORN May 20, 1932. An easy birth and a perfect baby. Women stopped me on the streets to exclaim at her. Even men said, Isn’t she a pretty one? Men, you know, don’t usually notice girls til they’re older. She was a quiet baby, content and calm. She grinned every time you looked at her, and laughed out loud if you clapped your hands.
She was six months old on November 15, 1932, exactly one week after Roosevelt was elected president. Tuesday, the most run-of-the-mill day of the week. Not laundry day, or prayer-meeting day, or market day, or the Sabbath. Tuesday is the day you’re most likely to forget about, the day you don’t expect anything to happen. I’ll never forget how ordinary that day felt. You’d think you’d know, that you’d wake up with a bad feeling, but I was heedless as the day is long, going about my business without a care in the world.
It was the first fall we’d spent in Pontiac, and I didn’t know what to expect. People from around those parts remarked on how funny the weather was, frost and freeze one day, warm as summer the next. The morning before there’d been an icy crust on the porch when I went down to hang the clothes on the line behind the building. I nearly slipped on my ass. But that day, Tuesday, the sun came out bright and warm, melting everything. Water dripped from the corner of the roof, beating a hollow in the mud below. By eleven o’clock, the sidewalks were steaming.
That’s when I put her down for a nap.
We lived in a square brick building that had four little apartments, two on top and two on the bottom. We were on top, just a living room, a kitchen with barely enough room for a table, a bathroom with beige tile, and a bedroom that looked out over the backyard, which was muddy right then, the grass worn off except around the edges. A boiler in the basement heated the water and ran the radiators. They clanked and banged like crazy, and kept it too warm in there, so we had to leave a window open, even in winter.
The bedroom was only big enough for our bed, a dresser, and the crib squeezed in the corner by the closet where we hung our clothes. I had just given Alice a bath in the kitchen sink. She kicked her fat legs and splashed with her hands, giggled when the water hit her in the face. What a doll. I loved her like life itself, couldn’t wait to see her each and every morning, marveled that God had seen fit to give her to me, to fill me with such joy. I loved the way she clung to me when I lifted her out of the sink, her skin so soft and her hair smelling so good. I carried her to the crib, diapered and dressed her. That day, that Tuesday, I looked forward to her going to sleep because I was tired myself. She still wasn’t sleeping through the night. I wanted to go in the living room and lie down on the divan with a magazine.
I opened the bedroom window a crack to let in some fresh air, then I leaned over the side of the crib and rubbed Alice’s belly. She liked that while she was falling asleep; it comforted her. She had the sweetest way of holding onto your hand while you did it, her little fingers caressing and squeezing yours while she looked up in your eyes.
She always fought sleep, jerked herself awake just before she went under. She didn’t want to miss anything. I’d have to stroke her belly again, so tight and firm in her gown, ‘til finally her eyes drooped closed and stayed shut. I tiptoed out, let down the blind in the living room, and stretched out in the breeze from the window. I don’t think I read two words of that magazine before I fell asleep.
It feels so strange to write this down. To pick out the words and set them down next to each other so they make the sentences that tell the story of what happened, when all these ye
ars I’ve only seen it in pictures, only seen myself wake up from that nap, open my eyes, blink at the sun coming through the blind, smack my lips a few times, and sit up, looking at the white face of the metal clock that Abel wound every night before he went to bed and set on the little table beside the door where he put his keys and the change from his pocket when he came home from work. It was just before noon. I’ve seen myself, so many times, straighten my hair and pull down my dress, get up off that divan and walk into the kitchen for a drink of water. Not knowing. Not having the faintest idea.
Do you know how I despise myself when I picture me standing there looking out the window over the sink, when I lift that glass of water to my filthy lips? A bloated, ignorant sow slopping herself without a care in the world. What if I wouldn’t have drank that water before I walked into the other room? What if I would have checked, just once, instead of sleeping like a lump of lard on the divan? But no, I drank that water, then I walked to the icebox. For shame, I lifted the tinfoil off the roast left over from the night before and pinched me off a hunk of meat, the fat congealed white and waxy over it. I loaded it in my mouth and chewed. I helped myself to a few more bites. Even that wasn’t enough for me, so I pried loose a red potato stuck in the fat on the bottom of the pan. I stuffed that in my fat mouth, too, crammed it into that disgusting hole in my face while I stood there in front of the icebox, chomping like a cow. I’ve watched myself hundreds of times in my mind, and every time it nauseates me, fills me with such disgust that I wish I could come up those rickety back stairs to the kitchen, burst through the back door, and stab myself over and over with a butcher knife.
I went over to the sink, washed the grease off my hands, and dried them on the dish towel. I wandered back into the living room and folded the clothes I’d brought in off the line earlier that morning. I rolled Abel’s socks into balls, smoothed out his undershirts on the coffee table, and folded them neat as the packages you buy at the store.
Well, my goodness, I thought to myself. Alice is having a good long nap today.
I wasn’t the least bit uneasy. Much as I loved her, the peace and quiet was nice. So many times I’ve wondered, What if I hadn’t gone down to check the mail? What if—instead of taking my time wandering down to the mailbox at the curb, instead of looking up and down the street, sniffing the air, and watching the women standing at the bread truck parked down on the corner—I would have gone into the bedroom and checked on her. Leaned over the crib, picked her up. One minute could have made all the difference.
So when I see myself dawdle on the stairs going back up, taking a minute to squint into the kitchen of the apartment downstairs, wiping my feet a few extra times on the mat on the top landing, I want to yell, Hurry up, you stupid bitch! Go in there and look! What on earth is wrong with you? It’s torture to watch the movie of myself thumbing through the mail, slitting open an envelope, and sitting my fat ass down on the couch to read. The kind of movie where the train gets closer while someone’s on the tracks, but there’s not a damn thing you can do but cover your eyes. I almost go crazy thinking back, seeing myself those last few minutes before my life changed forever. It’s agony watching as I wet my finger on my tongue to turn a page, as I lift my head to look out the window at the maple tree that had dropped all but a few of its leaves.
Well, let’s go see if she’s waking up, I thought, still ignorant as a stump.
I can’t let go of the moment when I walked into the deathly stillness of that room. The feeling of panic is still in my body, lodged in my joints and tissue like a disease. Yes, I finally figured out that something was wrong. Oh, I knew the minute I set foot in there. I felt the angel of death, as if its wings had left a smell, a flutter in the air. A hum that was still thick and fresh. I ran to that crib and picked Alice up, plucked her from under her blanket and held her up, saw her head flop over to the side, saw the color of her face, like the livid sky before a thunderstorm.
I couldn’t even scream. My breath stopped at the hollow of my throat. I made an animal sound, the croak a pig makes when you slit its throat, the strangled gurgle of blocked pipes. I shook her, shook her to wake her up, shook her so hard her head snapped back and forth, shook her ‘til my own teeth rattled, shook her until I knocked something loose inside me, my own crying and screaming, and I bawled, No! No! No! because in my head I was thinking, This is not my baby. This cannot be my baby. This could not have happened to my baby, not my baby, not Alice.
I put her up over my shoulder and pounded her back, praying that she’d stir, cough, sputter, raise her head. She was so close to being there alive in that room, so close. If I wanted it bad enough, it would happen, she would come back, so I pounded, pounded and prayed, found my voice and screamed for her to come back, to wake up, screamed her name and called on Jesus, yelled for him to help me, to help me oh please.
When she didn’t move, I squeezed her to me like I wanted to press her into my own flesh, like I wanted to meld the two of us into a living statue, a block that would harden together and never move again. I felt her little muscles, her perfect bones and flesh, and I just could not believe, could not believe that such a thing was possible, much less that it was happening, had happened, that it was happening to me right then, right that minute, and that I was still alive, standing there holding my baby, my little Alice, who was dead.
Do you know how many questions I’ve asked myself? Why she had to die, why I couldn’t keep her safe, why she had to be born in the first place. Was there a reason? Did someone plan it? Why did it have to be Alice, rather than any other baby in the world—the Rasmussens’ down the street, who was born blind, or the Sheas’, who already had eight and let them run wild in the streets all hours of the day and night, dirty as beggars.
But the biggest question, the one I’ve asked myself every day since she died, is whether it was my fault. Whether I caused it, the way I tried to get rid of her, tried everything I could think of—drank that vinegar and douched with it, too. Threw myself down Indian Hill, bounced all the way to the bottom. All the schemes I had, the thoughts that crossed my mind, shameful things I can’t even mention. I wanted her dead. I torture myself with that, think of the times I prayed for her to go away.
Not a day has passed that I haven’t seen myself standing in that room with Alice clasped to my chest like that. Part of me stayed there, never left. Never went howling out of the room with her still pressed against me, never ran screaming to pound on the door of the next-door neighbor, who pried Alice out of my arms and laid her on her kitchen table and, when she saw there was nothing she could do, ran and got the neighbor downstairs to go fetch a doctor. The part of me who stayed in that room never saw the doctor take one look at Alice and turn to me, seeing that I was the only one who needed looking after. He guided me back to my apartment, where he put me to bed and stayed with me until someone went and fetched Abel from the factory.
I can’t get past that picture. I see it like somebody else is frozen in that pose: a big woman with the limp body of a baby pressed against her, standing in the hot bedroom of a rented apartment in a cold city far from her home. All those things that came later—the bleak, nightmare weeks that followed, and that winter I spent in bed, sleeping as much as I could, waking only to eat and use the bathroom, to moan and roll over and sleep again—seem to have happened to half a person, the woman I came to be. Having more kids, moving out here to California, all the Christmases and heartbreaks and, yes, even the joys I’ve had since then, don’t keep me from craning my neck around and looking back at that same old scene, like maybe I’ll see it different this time. Maybe this time she’d cough, and stir, and draw another breath. Those maybes, along with the what-ifs, won’t leave me alone. To this day, I open my eyes every morning and hope that none of it really happened.
THE GHOST
I had another restless night, and the strangest morning.
I don’t know what time it was, long after midnight, when the raccoons starte
d raising hell in the Dumpster outside my window. They banged on the metal, squabbled and fought and caterwauled like banshees. It must have been three o’clock when I finally drifted off, and that’s when the worst started. Writing about Alice plunks me right down in the middle of those tormented times. Those memories prey on me, lay in wait for me to fall asleep so they can get busy spinning out a nightmare.
I dreamed I was reading the newspaper, turning over the pages and looking at the photographs. “Oh, look! Here’s Alice!” I said to Abel, who was stretched out on the couch like always. Sure enough, there she was, all grown. Turns out she’d never really died. I just thought she had, so we buried her and she grew up without me knowing it, and made a life of her own separate from me. Having her grow up without me felt worse than her being dead, and I started bawling, crying so the tears sprayed like a fountain on the carpet around my armchair.
“Now look what you’ve done,” Abel said. “That rug’s going to mildew and stink to high heaven.”
Then came the same dream that’s tormented me for decades. “Oh, lookee here, what’s that?” I say to Abel. I see a bundle, something covered with a blanket, or a newspaper, or dried leaves—beside the road, in the tool shed, or at the back of a closet. I lift up the cover even though I know I shouldn’t, even though the part of me that knows this dream so well is hollering, Don’t you lift that cover up now, you’ll be sorry! But I go over and lift up the edge of the blanket and there is Alice, half dead or taken apart by some animal or starving or struggling for breath, but always deformed and frightful, looking up at me with eyes that are feverish and in pain, eyes that aren’t human. I started up from that dream feeling like I couldn’t contain the terror, like if I had to live with it for more than a minute or two I’d have to do myself in.
Breaking Out of Bedlam Page 23
