This time I kissed the top of his blue shirt, just under the collar. I kept kissing and crying until the fabric was sodden and I felt calm again. But just as soon as I recognized the calmness, as soon as it lit in one place, it flew off and away again, leaving my head to buzz.
“Come on,” I said to Frank, pulling him back toward what I knew must be the bedroom. There were no lights on except for the fluorescent yellows and greens flickering from the tubes of a fish tank on a shelf in the far corner. It was like walking into the Boston Aquarium, the way you feel a part of the giant circular swim. “Come on, Frank. Zappa.” The syllables tickling my tongue made me giggle. I unbuttoned his shirt, pulled it off, and let it drop to the floor. He tried to say something, but I wouldn’t let him; then we were next to the bed and I flopped us down on it while lifting my lips to his as if they were my sole source of oxygen.
“Wait a minute.” He gulped, then sputtered. “I have to swallow.” He pulled away so he could look at me and took in a deep breath. “This isn’t good.” He closed his eyes, but before he could open them again, I had my hand in his pants and he was moving under my touch.
“Oh, shit,” he groaned, and I knew he wouldn’t stop me. My few sexual experiences, in college, had been drunken rounds of naked grappling that left me gasping in pain without making a sound. Technically, I was a virgin—my muscles always clenched to prevent penetration, which nobody but Justine knew. But this felt like the right—the only—thing to do. I brought Frank to orgasm with my hand; as he was about to ejaculate, he rolled to the other side of the bed and came into the sheets. He lay there, his back to me, for a few moments, catching his breath. “Oh, shit, Ana,” he said, when he turned again to look at me. His lips were swollen where we had both bitten them. “We shouldn’t be doing this.”
“Too late,” I whispered. I drew his sweaty face to mine and slipped my tongue in his mouth to keep him from speaking. “Now me.” I could tell he wanted to protest but I also knew he wouldn’t dare. I didn’t care that he thought it was a mistake. I didn’t care about anything except changing the way I felt.
I slipped off my own shirt and flung it to the foot of the bed. At first Frank averted his eyes, but then he rose up next to me, reached over to unhook my bra, drew it off, and began rubbing my breasts with the backs of his fingers. Not knowing what else to do, I turned toward him, took his other hand, and pressed it flat against my stomach. I had only ever had orgasms by touching myself, but now I wanted it from outside, and I felt the pressure building, the anticipatory tingling in my crotch as Frank’s hand slid down from my stomach and between my thighs. With his other fingers, he pinched my left nipple. “Ow,” I said, trying to bat that hand away, but he pinched harder and I thought, He must not have heard me.
By then he was stroking me and I caught my breath. My nipple was being squeezed between fingernails and the pain made a noise in my throat, but at the same time he moved his fingers inside me and in a few seconds I came, hard, though I still felt the pain through the pleasure, in the tenderest flesh of my breast.
He took his hand out and pressed it against my crotch to feel the pulse beating as my breath came back. He kissed the nipple he’d pinched so tight it would show the red dents for days to come. “Did you hear me?” I whispered, gesturing at the raw breast. “Say that part hurt?”
“I thought you liked it.” He tried to put his tongue on the injured skin, but I covered it with my own hand as a shudder seized my body without warning. He lifted his head and took his hand out from between my legs, and I saw that he looked stricken. “I thought it would help.”
“Oh,” I said. “Okay. Well, thanks.” I pulled the covers up over myself, feeling mortified and ashamed. “Sorry.”
“You’re not the one who should be sorry.” He put a hand up to brush my hair out of my face. “I didn’t really hurt you, did I?”
“No. I mean, a little. But you’re right. Maybe it did help.” I turned toward him and pulled my legs up to hold myself closer. “Besides, I’m the one who assaulted you.” We made slight laughing noises to cover our mutual chagrin. “Would that be sexual battery?”
“No. That’s when the other person doesn’t want it,” he said.
We lay in silence for a few minutes. In the corner, the fluorescent tank hummed as fish soared through vertical bubbles. Although I tried to hang onto the sensation of his fingers inside me—the feeling of being filled—it had begun to recede as soon as he took his hand away, and now I was only myself again, and my father and sister were dead.
We began to talk, quietly, inhaling each other’s breath as our heads lay on a single pillow. We remembered nursery school in the Methodist church basement and pony rides at the Altamont Fair. After we’d laughed about the time he panicked during his sixth-grade performance as Dick Deadeye in H.M.S. Pinafore and had to ad-lib both his lines and the song lyrics, we were silent again. I felt in danger of falling asleep. But then something dislodged itself from memory, dropping straight to my stomach and jolting me back awake. Although I’d never talked to anybody outside the family about it before, I told Frank about the day my father set his car on fire.
“He kept having these dreams that the car broke down and then exploded or something,” I said, speaking quietly across the pillow and into Frank’s ear. “Whenever he had one of them, he’d be afraid to drive the car for a week.” I waited for him to make a comment, but he just told me, with his eyes, to continue.
“My mother kept having to bring him to work and then pick him back up. She told him to have the car checked out, if he was so worried, and he did—but, of course, nobody could find anything wrong. He wouldn’t believe them, though. He was sure they were missing whatever it was.
“So this one day—I was in fifth grade, I think—I’m riding the bus home from school and we turn onto the bypass, you know, by Radio-Shack, and I hear the other kids shouting and look out the window and see all these police cars and fire trucks up ahead. There was this car on the side of the road, totally burning, and I didn’t recognize it at first, until I saw the license plate and realized it was my father’s.”
“God,” Frank said. “You mean he was right, and there was something wrong with the engine?”
“No. He torched it himself.” In spite of what I was saying, I felt a small smile play at my lips.
“What are you talking about?” He shifted to get a better look at my face, and I knew he thought I was putting him on.
“He couldn’t stand thinking about it—imagining it—anymore. It was like he had to do it himself, because his dream was so real, and he was so sure it would come true.” I hadn’t realized that I understood any of this until I heard it come out of my mouth. “But if he waited for it, he’d have no control, and it could have happened at any time. This way he could just get it over with.”
“Wow.” Frank gave a low whistle. After a pause he added, “Well, I guess I can imagine that. A kind of superstition, with a twist.”
I smiled. “Sounds like a new drink. ‘I’ll have a superstition with a twist.’” But even before I got the words out, I had to throw my arm across my eyes as sudden images of my father’s face that morning, and of Meggy’s swallowed confidence the night before she died, seized all the space before me. “Oh, God,” I said, bouncing my fist on my forehead, “last week at this time, they were still alive.”
“Ana. I’m sorry.” Frank caught my hand and stopped it, then began stroking my hair behind my ears. I concentrated on the rhythm of his breathing until I could match it to my own. “Did you know he had a gun?” he asked.
“No. I don’t think he did. I mean, he must have gotten it just for this.” But I didn’t want to start thinking, in such violent detail, about what my father had done. “What about the videotape of Annie?” I asked, remembering the items of evidence the police collected from our house. “Why did you take that?”
“You sure you want to talk about this?”
“I’m the one who brought it up.”
Frank began to shrug, then seemed to realize it was too casual a gesture, given the subject. I felt his arm go around the top of my head and I closed my eyes, to savor for a few seconds the illusion that I was safe. “Well, it was still on,” he explained, gently. “The VCR. Whenever there’s a tape that looks like it might have been viewed recently by—by someone involved in a crime, we confiscate it automatically, in case it has any relevance or contains any clues.” He fell silent, perhaps hoping I’d forget what I wanted to know.
“Confiscate. What a word.” I raised myself on one elbow to look down at his face. “Well?”
“Well what?”
“What did you think?”
“Of what?”
“The tape. What were we talking about?”
This time he shrugged without apologizing. “We only watched a half hour or so. It was just an amateur performance of something, right? A musical?” He furrowed his brow. “Why? Were you in it or something?”
“Not me.” I moved away slightly. “Meggy. She was Annie. Couldn’t you tell?” Although it wasn’t my intention, my voice sent out irritated rays.
Frank shook his head. “No, I missed that.”
“How could you? I mean, she was the star.”
Now he rose on an elbow, too, and collapsed mine so he could pull me closer. “The guys at the scene—we—didn’t necessarily know what she looked like,” he whispered, holding me tight against him. When he saw that I didn’t understand, he added, “What she looked like when she was alive.”
“Oh, my God.” I dove under the covers and thought I would be sick, but he brought me up to the air again.
“You okay?” he asked, still whispering, and I nodded, even though my heart had caved in and I thought I might die. Frank placed his hand over my chest, but it took several minutes for my breathing to slow again. “You’re okay,” he told me, patting. Then he mumbled, “You don’t look like your sister, you know,” and though I’m sure he only meant to distract me, it made me feel worse. I put my head on his bare chest and prayed to fall asleep, soon hearing above my head the sound of his soft snoring into my hair. I dozed in and out, half-waking a few times to shimmers of light bouncing toward me from the fish tank, but it took me several moments to realize where I was when I felt Frank start as he woke above me and craned to see the clock.
“Ana, get up. It’s 3:30.” He moved a hand down my shoulder. “Come on. I have to get you back.”
“Okay,” I murmured, but I made no move to leave his bed. He pulled his arm gingerly from under my head, got up, and took some clothes out of a drawer. Swiftly, he put on sweatpants and a T-shirt with Police Benevolent Association Softball League stitched in the shape of a ball over his chest.
“Meggy played softball,” I said. Through the haze of near-sleep I saw my sister getting ready to pitch, the bill of her Parrelli Hardware cap creased down the middle of her forehead, her braids hanging beneath her shoulders. Closing my eyes, I could hear the voices from the playing field: Good eye, heads up, batter batter batter.
“Whoa,” Frank said, “don’t fall asleep on me.” He put a hand out. “We’d better hurry, in case they miss you.”
I swung myself off the bed so fast it made me dizzy, and he caught me as I swayed. He kept hold of me as I put my shirt back on, then let me lean against him as we walked through the house and outside. I wasn’t drunk, though I wished I were. Something else—grief, or fear, or the wish that I hadn’t awakened—made me stumble. “Aren’t you afraid of what people will think?” I asked, realizing what they would see if they looked out their windows: the neighborhood police officer assisting a wobbly young woman from his front door, a few hours before dawn.
“Nobody’s up now,” he told me, and he seemed to be right. We saw not a single light on in any of the houses all the way down the block. The air felt already damp, containing the drizzle forecasted for the next day. At the motel Frank walked me to the door of our room, and I had to wake Justine up to let me in.
“Where have you been?” she said, grumbling back into bed.
“Just answering questions,” I told her. Frank leaned toward me and I put my hand up to warn him away, but he ignored me and touched his lips to my forehead while Justine’s back was turned. Before I closed the door, he made a sliding motion to remind me to bolt it behind him.
3. Some of us are out of breath
Q. How old is the institution of permanent marriage?
— H.T.O., Selkirk
A. There was considerable freedom in early history to initiate and terminate marriage without formality. Christianity, however, decreed that sex relationships that were considered to be marriages must be monogamous and should be characterized by faithfulness, especially on the part of women. At one time the marriage union was indissoluble. The doctrine of indissolubility of marriage was given special importance when marriage became a sacrament, notably in the 4th century through St. Augustine.
My mother went back to work at the Delphi Oracle two weeks after the deaths. Her editor told her she should take off as much time as she wanted, but my mother said she needed to get back into a routine. She wouldn’t know what to do with herself if she had all that time on her hands.
I had been planning a vacation on Cape Cod that July with my friend Ruthie and some other people from college, but I canceled it, as Justine canceled her job as a coach and counselor at a cheerleading camp near Rochester. We shut ourselves in the condo’s living room with the shades drawn tight. We made a fortress of the couch and its cushions, and at night we slept together in the sofa bed, because neither of us wanted to use the bed in the room that would have been Meggy’s.
Neither Justine nor I had menstruated since the deaths, though our mother remained regular. Justine and I sat around waiting to bleed again. If one of us ever had to leave the apartment alone, to go to the dentist or the post office or an appointment with Nora Odoni, the other was always standing at the window, watching, when she got home. Nora was the therapist we all saw after the deaths, sometimes together but more often separately. Mom was the first one to meet Nora, in the hospital, where they took her after she lost control at the funeral. She started screaming and crying and calling out Meggy’s name, and she threw her handkerchief at our father’s coffin but it fell before it touched wood, so she started taking her clothes off and throwing them before Kay and Ed Lonergan grabbed her and took her outside.
Nora Odoni was Greek, and I spent most of each therapeutic hour listening to the way she pronounced words with an accent that made even “murder” sound elegant. I kept my appointments for a while longer than my mother and Justine, who quit after a couple of weeks.
When we met as a family, Nora said our grief was like rice boiling inside a pot with a stuck lid: if somebody didn’t do something to relieve the pressure, the whole thing would explode. I asked her if she didn’t think oatmeal would make a better emotional metaphor. Justine hated the doctor because she couldn’t bring Meggy back. She never said this directly, but a sister can tell.
While our mother was at work, I read novels and Justine watched TV: Phil Donahue, soap operas, the Olympic track and field trials from Barcelona, and—at night, to keep us all from having to talk to one another—sitcoms and Movies of the Week, except when they were preempted by the presidential conventions. The only things we always had to switch off as soon as they came on were police dramas, or anything else that might show a gun, anyone shooting or being shot. Using a notebook of graph paper and a system intelligible only to herself, Justine kept elaborate track of selected dramas (the hundred-yard dash, what Erica was up to on All My Children, delegates for Dukakis and Bush), fortifying herself with snack chips and candy bars.
She had begun eating out of control on the day of the funeral. Since the night she discovered our father’s body, she had not been able to keep any food down, and her face above her violet collar looked as white as the light of the candles on the bier.
At the gathering afterward at the Waxmans’ house, Justine
would not leave our mother’s side. I moved in a slow circle around the living room, saying thank you and no thanks and I don’t know and I know. It was only the second of July but already there were a few fireworks, and every time I heard a pop in the sky I flinched, imagining the sound of the gun my father had used. I couldn’t taste my food or feel any part of my body, except the headache of sunlight beating between my eyes. My friend Ruthie had come from Boston for the funeral, and she always managed to get her arm around me just when it seemed I might fall without realizing.
I watched people go with hesitation to the Waxmans’ window, the one that looked out on our yard, and peer through it as if they might see something that could help them believe what had happened. The ones who spent the most time drawing the curtain aside and looking for clues were Meggy’s friends, both boys and girls, who came to the funeral as a single shuffling body and left soggy wads of Kleenex in the pew. In the family room, one of the kids had turned on the tennis at Wimbledon, but Mrs. Waxman hurried in and slapped off the TV.
My mother and Justine sat together on the couch, and people kept bringing them plates of food. Both refused, shaking their heads and trying to smile. Toward the end of the afternoon Lois Phelps approached, twisting her hands in front of her. “I’m so sorry to have to do this,” she said. “This is so awkward.” She seemed to be appealing to my mother for help, but none of us knew what she was talking about. “My niece’s son is being christened in Ithaca tomorrow,” Lois went on, her voice getting louder as if she thought it might drown her chagrin. “Isn’t it funny—well, maybe that isn’t the right word, but doesn’t it always happen this way? Doesn’t it seem like maybe God plans it so a birth comes right after a death, to maybe show us something?” She flushed with desperation as the words spilled out.
And Give You Peace Page 6
