by Karen White
“I didn’t ever think I’d get a little gift like this,” she said. “I have a baby. I can’t believe it. I hope I do right by him.”
“You will,” I said.
“You’ll help me?” she asked.
“Of course.”
We sat in silence until the clock chimed the two o’clock hour. Once its sound was extinguished by the night shadows, she continued. “You are always welcome here,” she said.
“I know,” I replied.
“No, I mean if you need to get away from . . . anything.”
She looked at me. I could see she wanted to say more, but I understood what she meant and didn’t want to talk about it.
I had a hard time sleeping that night.
—
The Oyster Bar waitress is back and chatty, but my simple responses send her to another patron. How can she not see that a storm is brewing inside me? When I close my eyes it’s as if I’m in a small boat on a big sea, but when I open them, the room is steady around me. People laugh and suck oysters from their shells. Timmy eats his pudding and hums a little song. I pick up the melody of “All Through the Night,” and I’m in a fresh panic. What if Mitch is suspicious of how Timmy knows that song? But no, that is ridiculous. I can simply say we hear it on the radio, which is true. I blot my forehead again with my handkerchief.
“You remind me of my Lorraine, my daughter.” The woman is speaking to me. I look at her, seemingly so interested in her crossword puzzle, and am somehow certain that she is acutely aware of me and of my tension. “Dark hair like you. Green eyes. A wife.”
She says the last word with ice in her voice, and looks at me.
Her blue eyes are moist and filmy. Her cheekbones are high, and her hair is styled neatly. She wears a navy blue dress with a white lace collar, and has a smear of pink on her lips. She was pretty once.
But I think again about how she said wife. It sounded like a dare.
—
The little island of pleasure where my relationship with Mitch began is a place I often go in my mind. It is a still shore in a vast and chaotic sea, and it seems far away.
I met him at a blueberry festival. All was blue that day—my dress, the sky, the fruit, pies, farmers’ dungarees, the berry-stained fingers of children, Mitch’s eyes. I saw him, a handsome stranger looking tense and lost, searching the midway for someone. He studied all of the passersby but clearly couldn’t find the object of his search.
I stood with my mother at our pie stand. I noticed him because I had never seen him before, and when he caught me watching him, his face softened. He stood there like a man struck, and I glanced away, hoping my mother didn’t notice his open admiration. I made busywork of arranging our pies in neat rows until I sensed that he was near. I looked up and he was right before me, grinning at me with only the table between us. I found my voice and tried to sound calm, though I felt jumpy. Growing up in a small town made outsiders captivating and dangerous.
“Would you like a slice of pie?” I said.
He shook his head no, and his expression was so funny that I laughed. I glanced back and saw my mother whispering with her sister. My father wasn’t with us. He didn’t like mixing in town.
“I’d like a walk with you by the river,” he said.
“I don’t even know you.”
“I’m sorry. I can’t believe I just said that,” he said. “Hey, you don’t happen to know Bobby Miller, do you? He’s my cousin. My name’s Mitch.”
The faintest trace of a New York accent hung about his perfectly formed lips, and I had to blink and look away. I’d gone to school with Bobby my whole life, and easily picked him out of the crowd buzzing around the soda pop counter.
“There,” I said, pointing toward Bobby’s group. He looked at them, and then back at me.
“Thanks,” he said. Awkwardness settled between us, and he seemed to be thinking whether or not he should say more. He finally spoke again. “I know this is forward, but could I have a dance with you later?”
As much as I yearned to agree, I couldn’t. “I’m singing. They don’t let us offstage.”
“Then afterward? I bet the river is pretty by moonlight. We could take a walk.”
Bobby caught sight of him. “Mitch!”
“You’ll consider it?” he asked.
My mother was at my side with her hand on my arm. “Would you like a slice of pie, young man?” She must have sensed the energy buzzing between us, and wanted to protect me.
“No thank you, ma’am, though I’m sure it’s delicious. I don’t want to eat before I go on the rides.”
“Smart,” she said.
“But I’ll come back when I’m finished and get some. If there’s any left. I’m sure it’s selling better than all of the other stands, with flaky crust like that.”
And in an instant, she was won over. I think I even saw her blush. He nodded to her and didn’t look at me. I couldn’t help but stare as he walked away.
“I wonder who that nice young man is,” she’d said. “Seems like a catch, Mary Josephine.”
—
I wish I could whisper to my younger self, “Run, Josie. As fast as you can.”
But my mother’s blessing and encouragement all through that afternoon felt like fate to me. She had never approved of a boy so quickly. I should have seen the strength of his charm and been wary, but I was just as snowed as everyone else about Mitch.
Timmy’s spoon clinks against the inside of his empty glass dish. Chocolate outlines his lips in a sloppy smile. I grab my napkin and dab it into the water the waitress has placed before me without asking to refill my old-fashioned. As I clean his face, I can’t believe I finished my drink so quickly. I crave another, but I’m already afraid Mitch will have something to say about the smell of booze on my breath.
Timmy’s face is perfect enough to be a sculpture. He still has the rounded slopes of his baby profile, though his hands have grown knuckles where dimples used to be, and he’s less afraid of venturing away from me. He used to cling to me like a little koala, and some days I felt like I’d never be free of sticky fingers grabbing my hair, but seemingly overnight I long for him to wish to be picked up and held close. I long for the days, about to end, when it was just the two of us in our little apartment.
I’ve grown soft over the years. I no longer stiffen when walking around corners. I don’t worry if I leave my stockings lying over the chair, or if the sofa cushions are piled on the floor. I have become a woman who plays the radio too loud, wears her hair loose more days than not, and who sometimes serves dessert first just for the fun of it, not that there’s been much dessert during the war years—often just half a biscuit with blueberry jam from my parents’ farm.
The farm is gone now. When my father died last year, my mother sold the already failing land, the wooden farmhouse where I grew up, the rights to the paths in the woods that wound down to the river where I’d escape my father’s temper. I could hear my father’s voice yelling at my mother for some minor farm failing that was of great magnitude to him, until the bend in the path, when the rush of the water silenced him. When I’d creep home after spending hours away, my mother’s eyes would be puffy and red, and my father would be off in the field. She’d stand over her canning and tell me to behave so I didn’t upset my father when he returned, and that the burden of the farm was too much for him. Then she’d mumble about the golden vineyards she’d read about in Napa Valley.
I love my mother, and I miss her. I hope her vineyard gives her everything she didn’t have all those years in New York.
I focus on my own life now. I think of the way I tidied and straightened the apartment this week. How Timmy has been curious and watchful as I instruct him in new ways to live in the space. He hasn’t adjusted well to our new rules, and I know it’s my fault. I shouldn’t have waited so long to acknowledge that Mitch wou
ld be home, but God forgive me, I never believed he’d come back.
Until recently, the stoic telegram bearers were a daily sight. I think of how they had the worst job in the world. When the knock would come, we’d peer out our doors, hold our breath, rush to comfort the newly bereaved. But the knock never came for me.
It pains me to allow such terrible thoughts, but I had already planned the stories I’d tell Timmy about his brave, handsome father after he died. I’d conceal the nights I lay awake with eyes wide open, afraid to go to sleep because Mitch might hurt me; the way I learned to keep my gaze straight ahead and down so I didn’t make eye contact with another man in Mitch’s presence; the times when his anger couldn’t be contained. Timmy would only hear about the better attributes of his father so he’d never know he came from anything but goodness.
But we’ll never have that conversation now. Timmy will get to know his father himself.
—
Whenever I think of Mitch, I think of flowers. Flowers were his form of apology. Bouquets he hoped would brighten my eyes after he’d hurt me. After he hit me with the iron in the head, I received two dozen scarlet roses. I was lucky the iron had cooled, and all that remained was an ugly white slash across my forehead.
It began with plans for an evening out. Before going with him to the movies to see Rebecca I thought I’d surprise him by tinting my hair red. He’d been mooning over the lead actress Joan Fontaine in the theater posters, and I thought he’d like to see a change in me. He hadn’t hit me in so long, I’d dropped my vigilance. My speech had become loose. I’d expressed on several occasions how I wished I could sing onstage again, and didn’t heed the warning look on his face.
“You know I don’t want them looking at you,” he said.
“I only have eyes for you,” I teased. He didn’t smile.
I told him I’d meet him after my appointment at the beauty parlor at the corner diner for a quick bite before the picture. When I walked in, a group of young men whistled. I wish I hadn’t smiled. Mitch misinterpreted it as flirtation.
“What did you do to your hair?” he hissed.
“I thought you’d like it. I wanted it to look like Joan Fontaine’s.”
“You look like a harlot. And you drew attention like one, too.”
My shoulders tensed. I knew I’d made a terrible error. I clenched my sweating hands together in my lap to contain their trembling and prayed his anger would pass.
“We’re going home,” he said.
That old, familiar dread filled my stomach, but I obeyed without a word.
“Hussy,” he said as he closed the door to the apartment. He pushed me forward, and I almost hit the frame holding his father’s flag across from the front door. I caught myself with my hands and ran toward the bedroom. He followed, yelling hateful words at me, throwing me on the bed. I climbed over the side and tried to run out the door, but he picked up the iron and threw it at my face, clipping the side of my forehead and drawing blood. It spit on the white wall, and he was horror-struck.
“Oh, Josie, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
He lunged for the iron, and I thought he’d kill me with it, but he pushed it into my hands. “Hit me with it. I’m so sorry. Hit me.”
He begged me to hit him, but I could only crumple to the floor and cry.
He grabbed a towel and pressed it to my forehead, whispering apologies, sobbing with me, begging for my forgiveness.
I gave him words of forgiveness, but I didn’t mean them. The red roses that lay on the table the next day didn’t soothe the pain. Their red reminded me of my blood. The roses were like my husband, pleasing and smooth to behold but thorny, dangerous.
It was his charm that made it impossible not to believe him. Weeks, months would pass with such kindness, tenderness, and ease. Our lives would fill with light. I told myself this was the true Mitch, not the monster. Helping to suppress the monster became our shared mission. When the atmosphere would inevitably begin to grow dark, I made myself believe that it was my fault for smiling when men noticed me. I thought of my own vanity and how I enjoyed being watched as a performer.
In truth, I didn’t feel worthy of Mitch or anyone then, and something inside me still doesn’t. I have ugly chicken pox scars on my chin and close to my left ear. The pox scars on my torso could be a constellation. That’s what Mitch said the first time he traced them, when he said my body was like the night sky, and he kissed me from one end to the other.
Later he called me deformed, a mutant, lucky to have a guy like him who was willing to overlook my imperfections. His words spoke to the demon that whispered such things in my ear. At first, his voice sounded like my father’s, but over the years it became Mitch’s.
—
I’m tapping my fingernail on the counter when the woman places her hand on mine. My instinct is to pull away, but she is too strong.
“How much longer?” she says.
I glance at the clock. “Thirty-five minutes.”
She stares at me for a moment with a furrowed brow. Then she nods as if she has decided something.
“You’re just like my Lorraine.” She has said this before, but it sounds different this time. She chokes on the name. I look into her pale eyes. Her mouth is pursed. It is clear that she is trying not to cry. I know I can’t pull away from her. She looks up to keep the tears in place, and the futility of the gesture as the salt water starts a path through her blush stirs me with pity. I pass her my napkin and she pulls her hand away and presses it to her cheek. “God rest her soul.”
We live in a world of loss. Tears among strangers are common. That her daughter has been lost is no surprise. I think she must have been killed in the war.
“Was she a field nurse?” I say.
“No, but she lived in a war.”
“In Europe?”
“At home.”
I don’t know what she means.
“Like you,” she says.
Understanding begins to form in my mind, like clouds merging in a dark sky. My teeth are suddenly chattering, though I am not cold. Timmy tugs my arm, but I cannot look at him. I’m afraid he’ll see my shame. Am I so obvious? Do I wear my fear so prominently? I spend a lot of time in nightclubs with liars and actresses, and living with Mitch has made me one as well. I transform my face into stone.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I say, hating myself.
“You do,” she says. “The way you flinch, the lock of hair you keep moving to cover the scar on your forehead, your nerves. You don’t fool me.”
I stand quickly. Timmy looks at me with wide eyes.
“I have to go,” I say.
“Please,” she says. “Please let me talk to you.”
“No!” My voice is louder than I intend, and the couple across from us looks over. They stare for only a moment before they turn back to each other. “No. There’s nothing to talk about.”
“Please. You don’t understand.”
I don’t know what she can mean. All I can take in is that the clock says I only have thirty more minutes before he arrives. I look up at the ceiling, the archways made of brick, and the weight of the stone above presses down on me. I have to get out of here.
“Come on, Timmy.”
I’m hurrying with putting on his coat, and my elbow knocks his glass dish to the floor, where it shatters. I could cry over this broken glass.
“Stay there,” I say to Timmy with a trembling voice, setting him back on the stool so he doesn’t get hurt.
The waitress arrives in moments with a towel.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“Don’t fret over it,” she says. I crouch on the floor with her and carefully pick up the broken pieces. A busboy sweeps the rest into a filthy dustpan and disappears.
“I’ll have my check,” I say to the waitress as I sink onto my stool.
<
br /> “Miss,” says the woman, as persistent as a mosquito. I want to swat her away, but when I look at her, I see her pain and suddenly wonder if I am her reflection. Does she see herself in me? She seems to be trembling as much as I am.
“Lorraine was a girl like you,” she says. “Tall, dark haired, pretty as a summer’s day, but always with a storm in her eyes. At least, once she married Harry. My lively girl became quiet. Sullen. She grew jumpy and snapped at me. She became secretive and started showing up for Sunday dinners with strange bruises and stranger stories of how she got them. Then she stopped coming. I think the hiding wore her out.”
I have the urge to run from this woman again, this stranger. But my curiosity about her daughter keeps me in place. I sense her story doesn’t end well, and like some form of self-punishment, I have to hear it from her lips.
“Harry was a major in the army,” she says. “He worked under my husband, and was the pride of his hometown, the brightest in his class, the handsomest man. Harry used to bring me flowers and visit me when no one was home. He’d ask me about my needlework and the sewing circle at church with what seemed like real interest. I never would have guessed what a monster he was.”
It is as if she’s telling my own story to me, and it hurts to hear it. I’ve been training myself these past few months, knowing he’d eventually come home, hating myself for wishing he wouldn’t, and rereading the promises in his letters, praying he’ll be different—that my love for him will change him. I don’t want to hear the rest of this woman’s story, but the waitress hasn’t yet brought the check. I put my hands in my lap and squeeze them together.
“One night, Lorraine was dropped off at my house in a car I didn’t recognize. She came in smelling of alcohol and cigarettes, mascara running down her face, and wearing a purple welt around her pretty blue eye. She was drunk and started shouting about how Harry had punched her, and her friend came to help but grew afraid and dropped her off at my house. During her incoherent tirade Harry stepped out of my drawing room with his hands in his pockets, wearing a look of sadness that nearly broke my heart. Lorraine’s eyes widened, as much as they could, and she backed up until her head hit the wall.
