by Melanie Tem
As usual, Trudy Belker drooped sideways in her chair, the restraint dragging on the floor. Rebecca spoke to her, touched her shoulder, then stood behind her and lifted her upright. The old woman was hardly any weight at all in her arms, and she smiled gratefully, but Rebecca flinched, afraid she would leave bruises. 'I'm sure,' she heard herself challenging Ira, 'you've seen worse.'
'Of course I have seen worse. My wife and me, we were in the camps. I've seen things you don't believe. True horrors. This - this is nothing.' He waved his hand contemptuously, then brought his bearded, pipe-smelling face close to hers. 'I tell you. The human beings died and the animals lived. That's all.'
'Come, Myra,' Naomi was saying, so quietly that she spoke more to herself than to Myra. 'Let me wash your face.' She touched the warm cloth to Myra's cheek and the old woman howled.
'I am Pocahontas and they're selling me to the white man! I am Pocahontas and they're selling me to the white man! Ohh.'
'I am going to the gas chamber! I am going to the gas chamber! Take me to the gas chamber! Ohh!'
Naomi listened to Myra Larsen with the same mixture of awe and deep shame she had always felt toward her parents. Naomi herself had never suffered; her parents had seen to that. Suffering was mythical, untransferrable, ennobling, degrading. Only the chosen suffered; without suffering, one could not know who one was. Myra Larsen was the closest Naomi had ever come to genuine, present suffering, and she couldn't get enough of her.
Suddenly hands were Pulling Naomi's hair, forcing her head down. The hands were strong, nails sharp. Naomi held her breath and made herself very still. Myra leaned as far over as the Posey would allow, put her mouth close to Naomi's ear, and shrieked, 'Listen to me, girlie! Be still and listen to me and you might learn something! Ohh!'
Painfully on her knees now, Naomi had a sudden image of herself lying unconscious at Myra's pale feet. Myra screamed and thrashed, twisting Naomi's hair.
Naomi held her breath, waiting, thereby intensifying her lightheadedness. The pain was considerable, and there was humiliation in it. Was this suffering?
Now hands whirled to cover Myra's mouth. Naomi's hands, though she first didn't know it and then willed them desperately to stop. The side of her left hand worked itself between the hard gums, a gag, while her right thumb and forefinger pinched shut the wide flanged nose.
Suffocating, Myra still did not shut up. She kept right on inventing herself, stringing tales about herself haphazardly together, stealing other people's stories for her own. 'Ohh! Ohh! I am Faye! I abandoned my husband and my child, and I never once looked back! Why should I? The greedy little bitch! Listen to me, girlie, and you might learn something! Ohh!'
Naomi tried to pry her hands loose from Myra's straining face, but the fingers were frozen, and a terrible pressure was being exerted on them, pressing them in, manipulating the stringy flesh like old clay. She would fill the old woman. She would swallow her up. Her thumbs would punch through the papery skin. Her nails would scratch the harridan voice into silence, leaving the stories free-floating as birds needing a place to land. Rage made her press harder, reach more deeply. Rage, and raging need.
Naomi struggled to throw herself onto the floor, thinking in that way she could break her own hold. But she was held upright on her aching knees, until the screeching subsided into a whisperI am Faye. I am going to the gas chamber. I am Faye. Ohh' and the tangled grip on her hair loosened and Myra Larsen slumped against the restraint, eyes and mouth wide open, all the suffering she could access finally used up.
Chapter 10
Without warning or even prelude, Rebecca's mother told her, 'Your father was married before, you know.'
Rebecca stared, a gesture wholly expressive rather than communicative since her mother's broad back was stalwartly turned to her. She did not want to have the conversation that loomed here; she did not want to be in possession of the information her mother was threatening to impart; she did not want to receive any secrets about her parents, especially not painful secrets. Especially not now.
Busy at the sink and counter—Rebecca's sink and counter, doing Rebecca's dishes although Rebecca had specifically asked her not to—Billie said, 'She was a mean, selfish woman. Dangerous. Evil. She can't have him back. She can't have my husband or my'
'Evil?'
'Yes, evil. She fed off other people. Used them for her own purposes and then just threw them away.'
'Evil's a strong word.' Rebecca was bemused by her mother's vehemence, imagining youthful jealousies - made to seem quaint by the passage of time and by the angle of her own perspective. She even rather liked the image of two girls setting their caps for the young man who would be her father.
Now sometimes he thinks I'm her. All these years and now he's going to die thinking I'm her.'
Rebecca asked cautiously, 'How long were they married?'
'I don't know how long they were married,' her mother said disdainfully. She was scrubbing at a spot on the counter, and Rebecca was trying to pretend that this industriousness wasn't a comment on her housekeeping. 'I don't really know if they ever were legally married. Your father has never produced the marriage license or the divorce decree. For all I know, they're still married. For all I know, he's a bigamist.'
'Oh Mom, come on. That doesn't seem very likely, does it?' Rebecca laughed. Her mother did not. 'What happened to her?'
'She left.'
'He just never heard from her again?'
'I didn't say that.'
Rebecca waited. Either the spot finally yielded or her mother gave up.
'Oh, he's heard from her all right.'
When nothing else was forthcoming Rebecca ventured, 'Why did she leave him?'
'Couldn't stand the responsibility, I suppose. It tied her down.' Rebecca's mother was folding the cloth she'd used to clean the counter, although it was wet and dirty now. She put two corners together, smoothed it out. But the cloth wasn't square, and it didn't fold right. Frowning in frustration, she tucked the uneven edges in, making a deceptively neat little package, which she placed on the back of the sink. 'Or she used him up. Got all she could from him. She was a user.'
'What was her name?'
Her mother spat, 'Faye.'
Rebecca's breath caught, and blood rushed to her head, blackening her vision for a long moment and making her ears ring. Tillie had not been able to get the red and pink and orange lipstick off the bathroom walls or the bold black FAYE off the mirror; they'd had to repaint the walls and ceiling and replace the glass.
What did it mean that her father had once been married to a woman named Faye, whose name she now seemed to be encountering on all sides?
'Becky, where are your paper towels?' her mother was demanding, as though she'd asked the question before.
'I - I don't use paper towels,' Rebecca said. 'It's bad for the environment.' As her shock subsided, she was distantly amused and annoyed by her own defensiveness. 'There's a rag bag under the sink.'
'I don't see how you can keep house without paper towels.' Rebecca got up to get the rag bag. It contained only one piece of corduroy, too small, too linty, and not nearly absorbent enough to make a decent rag. She handed it to her mother anyway, who didn't disguise her contempt for it or the burdensome necessity of making the best of this bad situation.
'Just being married was too much responsibility for her?' She didn't want to say the name, but she had to. 'For Faye?' It was obvious she was pushing the limits of tolerable dialogue between her mother and herself, but Rebecca hoped to find out a few more tidbits of information before she was shut off completely. 'This Faye person - ' she said the name again, and shivered ' - must have been a real free spirit.'
Her mother snorted. 'That's not what I would call her. A woman who deserts her husband and her' Without much finesse she interrupted herself and demanded, 'Where do you keep your broom and dustpan? I'll just sweep up the cat fur on this floor.'
Rebecca stopped herself from explaining that the cats were Kurt's, and
crossed to the basement door. 'Her what?' She pulled out the broom, saw the dustpan lying in the gloom at the bottom of the stairs and went down to retrieve it. Emerging, she pressed, 'Abandoned her husband and what?'
But her mother had had enough. 'Look at this broom!' She was holding it aloft and overhand as if about to use it to squash vermin. 'There are hardly any bristles left on it! This wouldn't sweep up a thing!'
It was the broom from the garage. The house broom, in somewhat better shape, was supposed to be hanging on one of the hooks in the stairway but was nowhere to be found. More embarrassed than she ought to be, Rebecca didn't want to explain. 'Don't worry about the floor, Mom. It'll just get dirty again.' She wished she hadn't said that. 'Tell me what you started to say about Faye.' The naming again; again, the shiver, unpleasant but leaving her craving more.
Hands on hips, balefully regarding the floor, her mother shook her head. 'I shouldn't have told you about her.'
'Why not? Why didn't you guys tell me before?'
'Your father made me promise not to.'
'Why?'
'He didn't want you to know.'
'Why?'
But her mother said again, distractedly, 'I'll just sweep this floor,' and started in. The broom left bits of itself on the linoleum.
After a pause, which Rebecca could have ended by saying any of a number of things that crossed her mind, she stood up. 'I'm going into work.'
'It's after six o'clock at night,' her mother admonished. 'You work too hard.' It was as much an accusation as an expression of concern.
'I have a lot to do.' And I want to talk to Dad, she very nearly said. About Faye.
'Won't Kurt wonder where you are?'
'He's not going to be home until late, either.' She couldn't remember where he'd said he'd be, or whether he'd said.
Her mother looked at her and looked away without comment. Although it was never likely that they'd talk about anything more personal than housekeeping, she was actually a little disappointed to escape a maternal observation about her relationship, such as it was, with Kurt. She'd been ready. Independence, she'd have said. Our own lives. I'm still trying to find myself.
For the first time, she was saddened by how separate she and Kurt were from each other. For the first time, she envied the bond between her parents, which persisted, apparently, no matter who either of them became.
She hugged her mother goodbye, keeping her distance, feeling her mother keeping hers. This was their way with each other, as though it would jeopardize both of them to come too close. 'I guess I'll go on home,' the other woman said, and abruptly Rebecca understood how much her mother missed her father. She didn't want to know that, and her mother wouldn't want her to know.
Driving to The Tides, against the flow of rush hour but still in traffic, she tried to think about this Faye. But that was an unsettling line of thought, and anyway, she'dalready decided what to do about it. As soon as she could, when her father's mind was reasonably clear, she'd ask him some questions, take advantage of the weakening of his intellectual defenses. Such opportunism made her feel a little guilty, but not much.
So her thoughts sailed automatically, happily, toward work. Certainly there was plenty there to occupy them. Such as whether she'd done the right thing about Mickey Schipp.
Last Saturday morning, she and Lisa had loaded Mickey, wooden-faced and croaking rhythmically ('Faye'? Had Mickey been saying 'Faye,' too?) but without much remaining energy, into the back of her station wagon, and had taken him to the emergency room of the public hospital, which was mandated to treat everyone. Diane had refused to have anything to do with the plan, because there was no doctor's order.
The sights and sounds of the E.R. had agitated Mickey, and his bellows had risen again, louder and much more frequent until he seemed to be not even pausing for air. Lisa and Rebecca had sat with him until an orderly came to wheel him away, then stood together and watched him disappear through the metal swinging doors. 'I'm afraid we'll lose him,' Lisa had sniffed. 'I'm afraid the system will just swallow him up, and we'll never see him again or even know what happened to him.' And, indeed, when Rebecca had called the hospital today to find out how he was doing, no one would talk to her because she had no legal relationship to the patient.
Census, for another thing. With Mickey's discharge and Myra's death, they were down to 131. Anxiety tightened her throat.
She thought, too, about the memorial service they'd held for Myra. The dying of people in The Tides without anything to mark their passage had come to seem wrong to her, never mind Diane's testy remark that they couldn't take time from the nursing schedule every time somebody died, considering that death was a not infrequent occurrence in a long-term care facility. Lisa and Colleen had helped organize it, and people did come, residents and staff, no family. Sandy wept a little, said at least Myra'd gone peacefully, just stopped breathing, saying she felt sorrier for Naomi, your first time losing a resident you were close to wasn't easy, and to be right there. Naomi was no more or less withdrawn than usual.
Rebecca had come away from the service feeling worse than before, for she'd had no clear image of a person to mourn and she didn't think anybody else did, either. Pocahontas, Joan of Arc, Cleopatra, Myra Larsen. All constructs. All tall tales.
Then, altogether unwillingly, she was thinking about Faye - a woman she'd never heard of until half an hour ago but about whom, now, she seemed to have always known. Dread rippled through her, and a profound longing.
Suddenly she was remembering something, just a flash:
Being left. Not alone, for someone else warm and solid was there, but something was gone from her, a fragrance, a soft pink and lavender touch. Lost.
'Jesus,' she said aloud, shaking her head to clear it. Her suggestibility was unnerving; nothing more than hearing about Dad being abandoned by a first wife she hadn't even known existed could cause her, just like that, to feel abandoned, too. She was relieved to turn onto Elm Street, nearing her facility.
But some impulse drew her past the parking lot and around the long block behind The Tides, so that she came up on it this time from the rear. In the snowless winter evening, the bowl of the vanished lake in the unlit field caught stray light and shimmered. The building itself, long and low and harshly lit, looked alien.
Rebecca parked along the road and got out, vaguely wondering what she was doing but seeing no harm in it. The cold instantly set her shivering and she hugged herself, tucked her hands under her arms. But there was also the peculiar sensation of proffered warmth, an invitation and a tease, tingling and sparkling just beyond her like moonlight on water, like poison gas.
Dead frozen weeds pricked through her stockings and deposited small, annoying debris in her shoes as she cut across the field. Now and then the slipping of her heels on the hard ground was abruptly interrupted when they sank in and then came away with clots of mud that altered her pace and gait. Forced to unfold her arms and extend them to the sides to keep her balance, she was cold and keenly aware of being alone out here, though a building full of people she was responsible for lay not far behind her and, indeed, the city surrounded this place like an incandescent fairy ring, not really as far away as it looked.
Something wet was rising over her shoes. She looked down. Her feet were almost entirely obscured by cold grass and shadow, but she caught a glimmer across her left ankle, a fluid streak up her right shin. She must have stepped into a boggy section of ground she hadn't realized was there; she'd been under the impression that the water table here was low, seepage minimalin fact, they'd had trouble keeping the lake full, and lack of drainage had made it stagnant, more swamp much of the time than lake.
She veered to one side, searching for a more solid route. With some irritation she told herself that she ought to just give up and go inside, but instead, she went farther out toward where the lake had been. Now the sensation of lapping water was at her groin and waist, but her clothes were not wet.
Her feet found the slope of
the lake-bed before her eyes did, and though her hands flailed, there was nothing to grip that could stop her brief, jarring descent. There were veritable currents of trash, papers and cans, a single shoe and, she swore, parts of human bodies and faces—a watery crooked bony hand like Myra Larsen's, Larry's grin above the mirroring gash in his throat, the glowering blue eye of Bob Morley.
She hit bottom. It wasn't very far down, and the depression showed itself now to have nothing in it but dead field grass and ordinary litter. But, in what must be a last remnant of this hallucination—stress-induced, it had to be—Rebecca was surprised not to splash, for all around her rippled a substance that she expected either to soak or to sear, while at the same time she knew it was not real.
It did neither, precisely, but somehow it was getting through her clothes, through her skin, into her flesh and bone, into her heart and the cavity that housed her heart. This, she realized, was the false fulfillment of the earlier promise of warmth, but it was not warm.
