Mrs Caliban and other stories

by Rachel Ingalls

  ‘It’s too different. We don’t give names.’

  ‘Isn’t that confusing?’

  ‘Everyone knows. We recognize each other.’

  ‘Do you talk?’

  ‘That’s different, too.’

  Dorothy waited. He looked placidly back at her.

  ‘How?’ she asked.

  ‘More like music, but not like your music. Not jumping.’

  She rose from the table and switched on the radio. The foreign broadcast came on. They were playing a record of Mozart.

  He said, ‘Is that music?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ve never heard this kind of music. They didn’t have that at the Institute.’

  She started to turn it off, but he said, ‘Please, let me hear‚’ and she left it.

  ‘If you’ll excuse me, I’ll do the dishes now. Unless you’d like some more to eat.’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  She began to clear up the kitchen, while he watched her actions with great attention like a child whose eyes follow its mother wherever she goes. Because he was so different, she was not bothered by him seeing her still in her bathrobe, with her hair straggling.

  He asked, ‘Is the morning a time of festivity?’

  ‘Just the opposite‚’ she answered, pulling the plug out of the sink.

  ‘Is the dress you are wearing a garment of celebration?’

  ‘It’s just my bathrobe over my nightgown. What I was wearing last night was more for a party, but not formal. It was – well, which do you like better?’

  ‘This.’

  ‘You think it’s fancier?’

  ‘More special.’

  ‘And my hair this way?’

  ‘Better this way.’

  ‘Is it because the dress and the hair are long now, and last night the dress was shorter and the hair was up?’

  ‘I understand now‚’ he said. ‘I like these things unrestricted. It isn’t a matter of the rules of clothing. It’s a question of freedom.’

  ‘To me, it’s a habit. Everybody agrees that certain clothes are worn for certain activities. Once the habit is accepted, it means something. And then, to break it means something too.’

  ‘For me, clothes aren’t necessary. I don’t see a meaning.’

  ‘For protection from the weather, for warmth and to keep the skin from too much sun, or from being cut and scratched.’

  ‘My skin is strong,’ he said. He lifted her hand from where she had been wiping the tabletop and placed the hand on his arm. He rubbed it from high up near his shoulder down to his wrist. She was shocked and pleased. Long after her hand was away from him, it seemed to remember the feel of his arm: warm, smooth and muscled.

  ‘Yes‚’ she said. ‘If you’ll excuse me now, I generally clean up in the mornings, and then afterwards we can sit down and decide what we’re going to do about you.’

  ‘I can clean, too?’

  ‘Well,’ she laughed, ‘come keep me company, that’s all.’

  ‘You could show me what to do. You see, I’m not used to this. It’s so different. Before, I was only being studied. There was nothing. Now there’s everything. I could do things. Couldn’t I? You wouldn’t prevent me?’

  ‘Of course not. The only thing you’d better not do is go outdoors in the daytime. It would probably be all right at night.’

  She rinsed the cloth, hung it up by the sink, and went through the doorway and hall, into the guest room. He followed her closing the door and shutting out the sound of the Mozart. She turned to ask him if he still wanted the radio on, and saw by the light – bright although blocked by the curtains – that when he had asked if she would prevent him from doing what he wanted to do, he might have meant something quite specific. That was another reason, which she had been too prim to mention, for wearing clothes.

  He stepped forward, took off her bathrobe, letting it fall on top of the bed, and started to take off her nightgown from top to bottom, but quickly realized that it must be made to work the other way. He picked up the skirt from around her knees and lifted it over her head. He put his hand on her shoulder and pushed her gently down on the bed. He sat beside her. He said, looking at her, ‘I’ve never seen. Men, but not someone like you.’

  ‘A woman‚’ she whispered, her throat beginning to close up.

  He asked, ‘Are you frightened?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I’m not. I feel good. But it’s very strange.’

  A lot more than strange, she thought. And then: no, it’s just the same. They rolled backwards together on the bed.

  ‘Wait. Not like that,’ she said.

  ‘Show me.’

  ‘I’m a bit embarrassed.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  She didn’t really know. What the hell could it mean in such an encounter?

  Later in the day, when they were lying side by side, she asked, ‘Are you young, or are you old, or are you in between?’

  ‘I’m between young and in-between. And you?’

  ‘So am I, but I’m afraid I’m nearer to in-between now than to young. In the middle.’

  ‘Is this time worse for you than it was before?’

  ‘Not now. Now it’s better.’

  They made love on the living-room floor and on the dining-room sofa and sitting in the kitchen chairs, and upstairs in the bathtub. And they talked. Most of their talk consisted of asking and answering questions. She asked him, ‘Where do you come from? Does everyone make love so many times in one day?’

  ‘Is it too much?’

  ‘No. It’s just the right amount for me. It’s perfect. People here are all different about it: some people like a lot, some only like a little, some change according to who they’re with or what age they are or whether they’re in a good mood, or even if the weather changes.’

  He told her about the two men, Kelsoe and Wachter, who had mistreated him. They had taught him human speech, using an electronic gadget which gave him a shock every time he got something wrong. The teaching scheme was run by a Dr Forest, who was severe but emotionally detached. When he went away, Kelsoe and Wachter used the electric prod and other devices – the chair with the straps and the fitted eye-glasses – to tease and torture. They had also, he later told her, taken advantage of their positions of power in order to force his participation in various forms of sexual abuse, some of which she hadn’t known of before. That first hesitant approach down in the guest room must have been because of what they had done to him at the Institute. She tried to explain. He said it didn’t matter – he could tell that this was different. She felt incapable of making him understand how such a thing could have happened, and why the same thing done from different motives could be either good or bad, and what those ideas meant. She would have liked to say: it’s the lack of love. But that too was hard to talk about. In highschool she had been asked to write essays like that: Love, Beauty, Time. Time had been the most interesting. She had written fifteen pages on that before the bell rang. But, of course, you could see Time. It was easier to write about something you could see, or of which you could see the effects.

  He took showers often, several throughout the day. He liked watching television, and most of all he liked music. As for his diet, she was soon to find it no more out of the ordinary than that of the average man on a health-food kick.

  That first day, she brought in her tape measure before going out to do her afternoon shopping. She measured his feet and wrote down the numbers on a piece of paper.

  ‘I know your skin is strong, but you’ll have to get some exercise, and if you go walking around here late at night, there’s always a chance of picking up a nail or some broken glass. And the sidewalks can be hard.’

  ‘It’s true. Last night when I came into the kitchen, my feet were hurting very much.’

  ‘I’ll try to find you some sandals.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. He was always scrupulously polite. Now that she. knew of the brutal methods that had be
en used to ram home the Institute’s policy on polite manners, she found these little touches of good breeding in his speech as poignant as if they had been scars on his body.

  When she left the house, she told him about the phone and the doorbell, gave him a key to his room, and warned him to keep the volume down if he wanted to listen to the radio or watch television.

  She drove off to do her shopping like a young girl setting out on her first job. Not even the sarcastic attitude of the man in the shoeshop could entirely spoil the outing.

  ‘What’s this for, lady, the abominable snowman? Are you kidding?’

  ‘For my brother-in-law,’ she answered calmly. ‘He has to get his shoes hand-made. And now his luggage was stolen, he’s in a fix. He told us how it used to be when he was in school – how people in the shoeshops would laugh at him and make jokes. I never believed it before. I couldn’t imagine people would laugh at a natural physical condition.’

  ‘All right, all right, you’re breaking my heart.’

  Heart? She could picture the man with an electric prod in his hand. He called down the stairs to the storeroom. A voice answered from below, and a few moments later a boy with long greyish hair handed up a shoebox.

  ‘Just as long as the measurements are right.’

  ‘This is the right size.’ She thought he would leave it at that, but he couldn’t resist. ‘Any bigger than that‚’ he added, ‘and he’ll have the wear the boxes.’

  Even without the extra money for the sandals, she spent more than she had intended to. She bought extra vegetables, noodles, more rice, an extravagant pack of wild rice, and avocados, which she saw just as she was ready to head for the cash registers.

  Her happiness returned, like a glow, as though she had swallowed something warm which was continuing to radiate waves of the warmth. It was a secret thing of her very own, yet she also wanted to talk about it to someone. This was the way she had felt the last time she had been pregnant. Could she say something to Estelle? If Estelle didn’t understand, if she ever dropped a hint to anyone, the police would be at the door with pistols and truncheons, or the doctors with injections of drugs, which might be even worse. They would say it was for the good of society, perhaps even for Larry’s own good. And there was the evidence of the two killings to back up any such claims. On the way to the shoeshop she had turned on the radio and heard the news bulletin, which told how one of the men, the one named Kelsoe, had had his head literally torn from his body, while the other one had been ‘ripped in two and gutted’.

  It was better not to tell anyone, though she would have to plan out what they would do if he were seen by accident.

  She was thinking of outsiders. Fred wouldn’t notice anything because he never came near those rooms. In fact, he seldom came into the kitchen. He even preferred to have breakfast at the dining-room table. Years ago, they had been in the kitchen all the time, and Scotty too. That was a long while back now.

  She left the highway, drove straight on, turned off into the street that ran by the plant nurseries, passed the fancy villas with their big gardens, and went around the corner. There, up in the sky, she noticed for the first time a gigantic mounded cloud, as large and elaborately moulded as a baroque opera house and lit from below and at the sides by pink and creamy hues. It sailed beyond her, improbable and romantic, following in the blue sky the course she was taking down below. It seemed to her that it must be a good omen.

  *

  At supper Fred was quiet, as usual. He had papers to see to, he said. And she, also as usual, retired to the kitchen.

  She prepared a massive salad for Larry, took it through into the hall, and gave the prearranged knock on the door.

  She sat with him for a few minutes while he ate, but soon decided that it would be better if she stayed in the kitchen. The phone might ring, or Fred might call through to her about something and, not hearing an answer, come on in and find them both.

  ‘I’ll be back later, when it’s dark, and we’ll take a walk.’ She looked at his feet in the sandals. ‘Are they comfortable?’

  ‘All right. They’re like clothes.’ He turned from the television set, the old black-and-white one, which he was watching with the sound turned off. He picked a slice of avocado out of the salad, lowered it into his mouth and moved his lips. He said, ‘This is the best vegetable I have had so far. It’s what I like most.’

  ‘Good, I’m glad.’

  ‘May I have it for breakfast, please?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  She washed dishes and wondered how much the extra food was going to put on their weekly expenses. It probably wouldn’t make any difference to Fred – prices were going up so fast anyway. At least they were in a part of the world where avocados were not exorbitantly expensive. Lucky he didn’t like lobster or shrimps.

  The phone rang. As she picked up the receiver, she remembered that she had meant to phone her sister-in-law about their vacation.

  ‘Dorothy?’ It was Estelle.

  Oh, hi Stelle. I was going to call you. I haven’t gotten around to anything today.’

  Estelle reminded her about the fashion show and asked if she and Fred would like to come to a party on the following Saturday. Dorothy pushed the swing door, went through the dining-room, and put her head around the corner. Fred was sitting at the desk, his cheek propped against his fist, his weight on his left elbow. It didn’t look as though he could be working very hard. She asked him about Saturday. He answered, ‘No’ automatically, without even turning his head.

  ‘You sure? It might be fun.’

  ‘Not for me. You go if you like.’

  ‘Well, I might. I’d rather go with you.’ He said nothing and didn’t move. She went back to the kitchen.

  ‘Estelle? Fred says no.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know why not. He isn’t doing anything but just sitting. But he says no.’

  ‘You come.’

  ‘I might. Let me wait a few days. I’ll tell you when I see you for the fashion show.’

  ‘OK. See you then.’

  It was true, Dorothy thought: he wasn’t really working. She put the receiver back, got Larry’s salad bowl from him, and told him to be ready. They would take the car. Fred never minded where she went any more, or when. At first, after Scotty and the baby when she had begun the compulsive restless walks, he had been worried about her. He had fussed. She was unprotected, he said. Anything could happen, even in the suburbs, even in a nice one like theirs. People weren’t like eggs in boxes – they didn’t have to stay in their own neighbourhood, they could move around. Yes, she had said, and now she wanted to do some moving around herself. She ought to get a dog at least, he had told her, for protection. All right, she had said, all right. She had bought a dog; a little, upright, friendly dog called a Jack Russell terrier. She named him Bingo and took him home. Fred exploded. ‘Call that a dog?’ he had shouted. ‘It’s smaller than a loaf of bread.’ ‘He’s very quick,’ she had explained, ‘and his attention never leaves you. He’s –’ ‘Oh, Jesus Christ, Dot. You would go get some useless toy like that. Fat lot of good that would be if you turn the corner and bump into a gang of roughs who’d beat you up and rape you.’ ‘With my luck,’ she had screamed, ‘they’d tie me to the railings and rape the dog instead.’ He had hit her, in order, he had explained later, to calm her down, and she had begun to sob and asked why he had wanted the twin beds and why they never slept together any more, even just to be together. He had said it made him feel guilty, because he just couldn’t, because nothing was right any longer, but it would blow over if only they would let things alone. It might take time, but they’d get back to normal eventually, and in the meantime, if she just wouldn’t put any pressure on him. Sure, she had said, it would work out.

  She had taken Bingo on walks. They had walked everywhere. She had never seen such a lively little animal. It was fun to be with him, he was so delighted by being alive. He retained his playfulness even after leavi
ng the puppy stage. He was just becoming a full-grown dog when one day she looked up from planting some bulbs in the garden and didn’t see him. He didn’t come back because he had been hit by a car. Fred had found her crying in the living-room when he came home. Everything near her died, she had said. Everything; it was a wonder the grass on the front lawn didn’t turn around and sink back into the earth. She cried for days, weeks. And Fred began to explain less and even to talk less. No matter how much you loved someone, there was a limit to the amount of crying you could stand hearing.

  From that time onwards, he hadn’t tried to stop her going out of the house alone at night, or even asked where she was going or when she would be coining back.

  She put her head around the corner again and told him she thought she’d mail some letters and take the car for a drive. He just said, ‘OK.’ He was sitting in the same position he had been in before.

  She went in to Larry, took him by the hand, led him through the hall and the kitchen, and through the door they hardly ever used, the one that connected directly to the inside of the garage. She opened the car door and stowed him in the back. He was too large to have fitted comfortably with his head down on the front seat. She put her straw bag on the seat beside her.

  The evening was clear and a light breeze moved here and there. It wasn’t quite dark yet. She drove down the straight, neat streets in the soft, lingering twilight. All the houses looked lovely in this light, with some lamps on but not many curtains drawn. There had been a time when she could not bear seeing lighted houses in the evening hour, because they had made her think how many of those houses represented a family, and how many of them contained children.

  ‘I wish you could sit up and look, but it’s still too light. Somebody might see you from one of the windows. It won’t be long now. I’ll tell you when.’

  ‘I can smell the gardens‚’ he said.

  She too could smell the flowers, giving out their fragrance as the light went, and the grass, which reminded her of her own childhood in school during the month of May and the early days of June, when all the windows were open and the men were out cutting the grass on the playing fields.