I shut my eyes, but too late. They had seen more than I in my prayers had ever pled to see.
My first feeling was not one of outrage—that would follow. Mine was sickness of heart. Outrage and indignation were what any woman would have felt on discovering that this was going on in her own house. What so appalled me was that my condition should be a part of their pleasure. I felt deprived of my very self, treated as a thing.
Meanwhile, occupied as he was, James was saying, “Well, Irene, dear, how did your day go?”
I found my voice and managed to reply, “So far so-so. But it isn’t over yet. Is it?”
He thought I was reminding him that this was a special day, one on our calendar. He was quick to say that he had not forgotten. I said sweetly that I was sure he would remember. I told him that he would find a bottle of champagne in the refrigerator. It had in fact been there for days. I had sent Ursula to the cellar for it. She had been puzzled to find the bottles not lying on their sides but standing on their heads. I said champagne was stored that way to keep the corks from drying and shrinking and letting the effervescence escape. She asked were we celebrating something and I said yes, but I did not say what.
Our wedding anniversary had passed unobserved. I was hurt by James’s forgetting but perhaps not hurt as much as another woman would have been. Why should he want a reminder of being yoked to me?
I doubt he knew that evening that the date was wrong, he was engrossed in more immediate matters, but I believe she enjoyed the added zest to her wickedness in making a mockery of it, in, shall I say, pulling the wool over my eyes.
We toasted the occasion. The chill of the wine went to my veins, the bubbles to my brain. But it was not the wine that dizzied me. The change in my world was so sudden, so great, that for a time I lost all sense of who I was.
Seeing her sitting there in her brazenness I had a mad moment of thinking, well, maybe you are what is keeping my husband and me together. And what would I do without him? Or without you? The sense of my helplessness and dependency swept over me like a breaker.
We chatted. I was the most talkative. There was laughter. I may have been the one who began it but their joining in sparked my fury. Behind my smile I said to myself, “Outrageous! You heartless fiends!”
Dressed as we were we dined en famille. James cut up my meat for me, and I forced myself to eat. I kept the conversation going quite gaily, thinking that they would enjoy their mischief all the more the bigger the fool I made of myself, and thereby earn for themselves the severest penalty. What was that to be? None I could think of seemed harsh enough to satisfy my bloodymindedness.
Our days, Ursula’s and mine, were all so alike, so uneventful that we had little to recount to James in the evening. For us a call at the door by the Jehovah’s Witnesses was an occasion. One staple of our dinner table conversation was our reading. Together we brought him up to date on the latest developments in our current book. We were then halfway through Pride and Prejudice. But rather than tell of Elizabeth Bennett’s empty-headed sister’s attraction to fatuous Mr. Collins I now said, “This being the day it is, I am reminded of the book we read not long ago. Jane Eyre. Remember? The last part, when Jane comes back and finds her Mr. Rochester blind and tells him she loves him now more than ever. There was a time when I would have scoffed at that. I would have said that only in Victorian novels are people so noble and self-sacrificing. You have taught me better, James. Praise to the face is open disgrace, I know, and I hope you are not blushing, but there comes a time when a full heart must speak out and give its thanks where due.”
I then sighed and said, “The end of the book is unconvincing, I am afraid. Mr. Rochester regains the sight of his one eye and they live happily ever after. Now that does happen only in books.”
James had earlier made a trip to the cellar.
“This,” he now said, proud of his honoring of the day, “is Chateau Lafitte, 1982.”
I was reminded of operatic trios, the characters singing conflicting sentiments but all orchestrated together. Said I to myself, “This is the grapes of wrath.”
Into my mind came the phrase, “Justice is blind.” I saw myself with the sword in my one hand, the scales in the other. But how in my condition was I to accomplish my revenge, one commensurate with the crime? James kept a loaded pistol in the drawer of his nightstand, but I was incapable of firing it even at point-blank range. Meanwhile, even as I considered, my eyesight was fading. With what was left of it I must act fast, before my personal night fell.
After dinner we returned to the living room. As I listened to the strains of Mozart through my earphones Ursula sat on James’s lap, kicking her legs over the arm of the chair while he fondled her.
How in my helplessness was I to accomplish my revenge? It was just that, my condition, that came to my inspiration. I could hardly keep from crying aloud, “Eureka!” The very weapon I wanted was at hand. The one I would have chosen from among all others, given a choice. An eye for an eye! For what I was about to do I would need none. It seemed to me providential. Its availability set the seal of approval on my plans. I was being aided and abetted by the very gods of vengeance. I was their impersonal agent, with no choice but to carry out their orders. Humankind itself demanded justice for the crime done to one of its pitiful.
A short time before, one of the bathroom sinks had clogged up. So badly that none of the products advertised on television worked. From a plumbing supply store James got a bottle of something called Grand Slam. Concentrated sulfuric acid it was, so powerful that—although actually anybody could buy it over the counter—the label read, “For professional use only.” The label said to wear goggles and rubber gloves while using it. A gas mask ought also to have been advised. It boiled and bubbled and hissed like a dragon in the drainpipe, and the vapors and fumes from it that filled the house were those of hell. It did the job.
James stored the half-empty bottle in the upstairs broom closet, not among other bottles, where it might have been mistaken, but in a spot all by itself, and he told me just where it was so I could tell the housekeeper not to go near it.
I was accustomed to finding my way in the dark. It was my element.
Her door stood open in expectation.
“James?” she purred. And that guided me like a missile to my mark.
Ursula
Often at night I wake up screaming, and often I scream waking.
After graduation from school I stayed on at the orphanage for several years, tutoring the children. The pay was low but the place had been my only home. I knew I must move on, and I read the Help Wanted columns in the papers, but I had no special skills, and I feared the outside world. What I wanted to find was a live-in job. Appearances were against me. I was young, and I was not unattractive. The wives whose ads I answered did not want me in their homes. Then one day I saw an ad for a companion to a blind lady. I applied and was hired.
The lady was all but helpless. I found myself the mistress of the house. There was a cleaning woman who came twice a week but I did the shopping, the cooking. I read to her, chose her clothes, dressed her hair. It was being her companion that I disliked. She depressed me. At times I shut my eyes trying to feel what it was to be her. It was like holding my breath under water. Alive, yet doubly detached from the world as she knitted and listened to music through her earphones, she sat in her armchair as stiff as a statue in its niche. Seeing those skeins of yarn being turned into shawls and scarves I could not help thinking of a spider spinning its web. Sometimes I shuddered and said to myself, “There but for the grace of God go I.”
In the evening after the dinner table had been cleared and the dishes put to wash we three settled down, she with her earphones on, the husband reading his newspaper, I with my book or magazine. There was a television set and she urged me to watch it but I seldom switched it on because she could not watch. And light entertainment seemed unsuited.
I would stifle a yawn and lift my eyes from the page and sometimes then
I found him studying me over his paper. We both quickly looked down and resumed our reading. Between us there was some little awkwardness. It was as though she was not there, being both blind and, shut off by her earphones, deaf, and he and I were as good as alone together.
Then one evening in the kitchen he grabbed and kissed me. I was surprised at myself as much as at him. I did not resist nor protest. I felt a thrill at having attracted a man. Strongly enough to overcome his scruples. I, Cinderella in her chimney corner, had made a conquest—and the glass slipper fit. Never mind that I had not much competition.
He had seen in me something more than met the eye. He had shown me a side of myself that the mirror did not show. Of interest for the first time ever to another, I was instantly more interesting to myself. I had always been lonely, unloved. Placed as an infant in the care of paid guardians, strictly reared, dependent on the charity of strangers, I had had to be well behaved all my life. I was tired of being well behaved.
I now had a double life—I who until then had hardly had one to call my own.
I hardened my heart against her for what I was doing to her. The ease with which it could be done did not reproach me. Living with it as I did, I had come to hate infirmity, helplessness, dependency. Maybe my orphanage experiences conditioned me for that. I knew what it was to be both pitied and despised. Rather than appealing to my compassion, misfortune frightened me. It exposed the unforeseeable possibilities that lurked in life.
These are not excuses. Neither are they self-accusations. I have no need of either. My bad conscience, rather than making me repent, reform, goaded me on. I was trying to train it into submission, teach it that I was the mistress, it the dog, ordered to heel. That I can admit that now is the measure of how much I have paid for it. For what I did I deserved punishment, but not what I got. I have been more sinned against than sinning. I have more than atoned. I have been purged of remorse.
So we became a cozy little family. There was no reason that we should not live happily ever after.
But I was always nervous, ill-at-ease. Because her eyes were outwardly unimpaired I had to reassure myself constantly that she could not see us. Maybe it was partly to test that which made me more and more audacious.
Then there was that dog. I have since wondered whether it was not Rex who alerted her to the suspicion that something funny was going on. He was her eyes. The animal could do everything but talk, and his whole life was devoted to her protection. He was the fourth member of the family. He was as jealous of her as a lover, resented even my attentions to her. At anything out of the ordinary he bristled, and the telepathy between the two of them conveyed that to her.
Or maybe her suspicions had already been building before that evening, aroused by things I had said. I enjoyed saying things to her that had for me a double meaning. I had become perhaps reckless at that, skating on thin ice. I would say as I applied her lipstick, combed her hair, “We must look our best for our man. When he gets home from his day’s work we must make things as inviting for him as possible. N’est-ce pas?”
I enjoyed also hearing her say things with meanings for me of which she herself was unaware.
“It’s you who make things inviting. I can hear the difference in James’s voice. I, too, am lighter-hearted thanks to you. I am so grateful to you for bringing light into this dark house. You do so much more than just your duty.”
“It’s my pleasure. Now then, what shall we wear this evening? Our purple paisley blouse and pleated white skirt?”
“Good. And you too, dear. I know it’s dreary for you here, but make yourself decorative, for my sake.”
“I’ll do the best I can with what I’ve got to work with.”
Had I overstepped myself? Had I allowed my tone in speaking to him in her presence to become unguarded, familiar, intimate? To any such inflection she would have been extra sensitive. When he and I left her alone to clean up the kitchen did she wonder what else we were doing as we did that? Did she, like any creature handicapped, feel herself vulnerable to attack?
Sometimes I thought she might not have minded if she had known. Sometimes I thought she did know, and that that was another reason for her appreciation of my putting myself out “beyond the call of duty.” For they had separate bedrooms and when he left his it was to come to mine. There was something behind the way she sighed, “Poor James,” that seemed to say she felt herself beholden to him for more than just her blindness. I came to feel I was doing her a favor, two favors. Keeping her man happy while relieving her of an unwanted duty.
As I had nowhere else to go on being discharged from the hospital, and had already concocted my story for the doctor, I was brought back here. It was where I would have chosen to go if I had had a choice. I did not fear any further harm from her. She had done her worst. She would want me here. And I was going to need a home, someone to take care of me from now on. In him I would have a devoted attendant.
The first time I ventured downstairs afterwards I got evidence for my suspicion that she had a sixth sense which only the blind could develop over time, hearing like radar to compensate for the loss of sight. She could have heard a kiss, the touch of two hands, the blink of an eye.
She joined me. I made not a sound. I hardly breathed. Yet, her voice aimed directly at me as though by an antenna, she said, “Is that you?”
I said, “What’s left of me.”
I rose from my chair, found my way to her, took her hand and placed it on my head. I wanted her to know just what she had done to me. At the same time I wanted to deny her the credit for it.
Her fingertips fluttered over the bald patches of my scalp, the pits and ridges of my face, the scars that were my eyes.
“Feel what I did to myself,” I said.
I let that sink in.
“I mistook the bottle of acid James used to unclog the sink for shampoo.”
It was what I had told the doctor.
She would be indebted to me for not denouncing her. Then she would understand that I was not letting her off light. She would get no chance to defend herself, to expose my part in the affair. She would not serve out her sentence and then be let go. She would have me on her hands for the rest of my days. She would have to play along in the fiction of my “accident.”
And he would come home to us both every evening and be turned to stone by the sight of me.
A Tomb for the Living
WE WERE PLANTING POTATOES when the storm sprang up. What we were planting were potato skins. There was a better way to plant potatoes: in pieces, two eyes to a piece. But you did that only if you could afford to and if you had some hope that they were going to sprout. We had eaten the potatoes and we had no faith that these would come up. We were planting in dirt as dry as gunpowder and we had not even spit to water with. The well and the cistern and the stock pond were empty and we were hauling drinking water for ourselves and the mule. Nobody spoke anymore of a “dry spell.” A spell could be short or long but not this long. As Pa said, speaking of rain, he was plumb prayed out.
This storm came on us so suddenly we had to run for it to the cellar. Or try to run, as we were heading into a northwest wind all the way from Kansas and it was like swimming against a flash flood. We had to close our eyes to keep from being blinded by the dust but you could not have seen anything with them open and besides, we had had to take to the cellar so often by then we could have found it in the dark. In years past we had sheltered there from the occasional cyclone, but in these years of the dust storms we spent almost as much time down there as we did in the house. The sound of the wind reached us through the ventilation pipe overhead like someone blowing across the mouth of a jug. It could be hours before it quieted down and we surfaced blinking at the light like prairie dogs.
Pa raised the double doors and held them while Ma and I went down the steps. There was headroom for me but Ma had to duck. We went always in fear of finding a rattler in there with us. We sat ourselves on the bench that ran around the wall. Pa low
ered the doors behind him, shutting out what light there was.
When he quit coughing and gasping and hawking Pa said, “Lost my hat. Lost my goddamned hat.”
He made it sound like the final blow.
“Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain,” Ma said. “He hears you.”
“He ain’t heard nothing else I’ve said to Him,” Pa said.
We sat silent for some while, coughing now and again. Then Pa said, “This is no way to live. This is hell on earth.”
Yet the word that came back from those who had given up and gone west in search of a new life was to hold on if you could.
The way things were going we could not hold on much longer. We were not yet quite as bad off as some of our neighbors but we were only a step behind them. They were sharecroppers, we owned our land. At one time Pa had talked of selling out while we still could. But we had waited too long. As Pa said, we couldn’t give the place away now.
Though the crops kept failing we went on trying. To plant this year’s we had borrowed seed money. For Pa to be in debt was like having a noose around his neck.
Above the sound of the wind wailing in the pipe Pa said, “Like Onan, I have spilled my seed upon the ground, and the Lord has smitten me.”
“Hush your dirty mouth!” Ma said. “For shame!”
“I’m only quoting scripture,” Pa said.
A long time passed in silence.
“It’s blowing to peel the paint off a house,” Pa said.
“If a house was to have paint,” Ma said.
It was still storming as hard as ever when Pa said, “I’m going out.”
“What!” Ma cried. “Going out? In this weather?”
“I can’t do what I’ve got to do in here,” Pa said.
When he returned, he reported that the outhouse had been knocked to flinders.
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