She knows the sound of approaching steps, can tell when the steps are heavy enough that an orderly’s about to poke his head through the curtain and wheel her off to be x-rayed. Sometimes when she hears voices she can’t tell if they’re real or if her mind’s making them up for company. Sometimes the orderlies bring her new drugs, which she swallows still lying on her back on the cot. Drugs for the infections, drugs to help her sleep, drugs for the pain. Mostly, drugs for the pain. The drugs do not take away the pain. When Alcide visits he brings her bottles of liquor, and they keep the curtain closed around them as he unscrews the cap and pours. In the early months, when they still fear one of the nurses will notice, he pours gently, to muffle the sound. Then quickly, once they realize no one will. Carefully he hands the cup to Bessie, who tilts it to swallow. The liquor burns as it enters the body of a woman so malnourished she’s losing half her body weight. But it helps.
At Christmas, the doctors let her leave the hospital for a few days. Alcide borrows a pickup for the occasion, and with the orderlies’ help gets her lying down in the back on some pillows Luann piled there for her. Luann and Lyle move into the living room and give Bessie and Alcide the bedroom. On the bed she can be eye-level with her girls. At night, Alcide lies down next to her, and the children come, too, and bend over her, in turn, to touch their foreheads to her lips. In those moments, they are all together again as a family—all of them, that is, who are left. The girls go to bed, and Bessie and Alcide lie together in the night. When the year turns to 1965, the family celebrates. Then Bessie returns to the hospital.
For five more months she lies on her back encased in plaster, five more months of the X-rays and the drugs for the infections and the drugs for the pain that do not work and five more months of the whiskey. Her body withers inside the cast, until she weighs less than seventy pounds. She is the size of a child.
But while she gets smaller, the cast tightens. Not everywhere. Only around her midsection.
Bessie is five months pregnant.
TRIAL TRANSCRIPT, 2003
Judge: “I know I can’t ask questions, but—”
Defense attorney: “Would you like me to ask the question?”
Judge: “I just want to know how you get pregnant in that thing.”
Defense attorney: “Judge, I was trying to be delicate and not ask those questions.”
Judge: “I just said what everybody was thinking, you know—what’s up?”
Defense attorney: “Doctor, I believe we’ve decided to leave it to people’s imaginations, have we not?”
In the courtroom, the story is told this way: She is in a body cast. She becomes pregnant.
Ricky grows inside her.
* * *
Imagine Bessie’s joy when the doctors tell her. Her baby is dead and her boy is dead and the year has brought grief and pain unimaginable and somehow out of all this pain, on one Christmas bed, new life has begun. The doctors had told her she’d never be pregnant again.
This baby is a miracle.
Picture the doctors as they stand by her bed. The white coats they wear, the stethoscopes that hang from their necks, the lives and education they’ve had. Yes, they know she’s happy, but this pregnancy cannot be thought a miracle. She’s been on every drug they can give her, many not intended for pregnant women. The fetus is five months along, which means for five months it has grown against the hard plaster of the cast. She’s been x-rayed countless times. Those might have killed off the pregnancy, but the fetus survived, and now who knows what it has survived with. “Your pregnancy cannot be carried to term,” one doctor says. “It’s not safe. Not for you, and not for any child.”
“This proves you can get pregnant again,” the other reasons with her. “Better to let your body heal now. Better to ready it for another chance.”
Perhaps Alcide holds hands with Bessie as they listen, and perhaps between their pressed, complicit palms passes the knowledge of what the doctors may not know: the whiskey. Eight years must pass before Roe v. Wade, Charity is a Catholic teaching hospital, and still the doctors insist: This baby cannot be born.
But this mother is not going to let her child go.
So the doctors do what they must, and take a saw to the cast, cutting a wide moon into it to halo Bessie’s stomach. Bessie does what a mother must: Inside her cast, she waits. And the baby grows.
On September 11, 1965, they cut Bessie open in one long slash across her abdomen and pull the baby from her. A boy. Seven pounds, two ounces. Ricky Joseph Langley, Bessie names him, the boy who will live in place of the dead son. Alcide and Luann come to the hospital to take him home to where his older sisters wait, giddy, ready to meet their new brother.
Years from now a lawyer will stand in front of twelve jurors and lift a stack of paper made from taping together the pregnancy warnings of all the drugs Bessie took. Then he’ll drop the bottom page—and the pages will unfurl all the way to the floor and smack it. Demerol and Codeine. Librium. Atropine, chloral hydrate, Diabex, and Fluothane. Imferon, Lincocin, Luminal. Menadione, Nembutal, and Vistaril. Then all the X-rays.
Years from now, those twelve jurors will sentence the man who is this child to die. He will be sent to live in a small tile cell on a block where five times he will hear guards come to the grate of another man, pull that man from his cell and lead him off down a corridor and into a chamber from which he’ll never return. The man who is this child will wait in his cell and listen to the condemned man’s footsteps fade down the corridor. The man who is this child will wait to know when it will be his turn.
But none of this, yet. Not in 1965. In 1965, a proud older sister lifts the corner of a blanket and peeks at the brother who is now hers. “Two arms, two legs, five fingers, five toes,” Darlene will say years later, remembering this moment.
That baby was perfect. She checked.
Twelve
New Jersey, 1987
I fall in love with the law through objects. The windowsill of my father’s office is cluttered with them: a snarled metal wheel-well cover that survived a car crash; a plastic replica of a spine, nicked off-kilter as though by a knife; a pair of bullet casings I roll in my palm like marbles, left behind by bullets that didn’t hit my father’s client. When my father wins that verdict, the casings disappear from the windowsill. A week or two later, while my parents are in their bedroom dressing to go out, my mother surprises him with a small wrapped box with a ribbon around it. He unties the ribbon, tears off the paper, eases up the lid, and there it is, the trophy he didn’t realize was missing: those cracked casings, now encased in gold and mounted on cuff links. She smiles at him, takes his palm in hers, and gently twists his wrist. Carefully, she slides the metal prong through his shirt cuff, then flips up the end, securing my father’s cuff with the missed chances of someone else’s life.
A decade and a half from now, when I’ve grown up and followed my parents into the law—when I am still certain that I believe in the law—I’ll be assigned to work in the vast intern room of a Louisiana law firm while I wait for an office to become available. The intern room is windowless, situated in the heart of a warren-like building. It holds a cluster of craft tables pressed together, each like the one my mother kept in the playroom for us when I was a child. Each table holds a boxy beige computer that still uses floppy disks. The computers contain a database of legal briefs we’ll modify for all the cases that pass through the office.
Against the bookshelves in one corner stands a mannequin that must have been used to illustrate a defendant’s position during a shooting death. Now its neck is strung with colorful Mardi Gras beads. The mannequin is black, one arm white, and an intern has posed the arm into a permanently lewd gesture at its crotch. On the floor to my left sits a large cardboard box with its top open, full of folded felt blankets. They’re not here for the late nights we sometimes spend in the office. They’re too hot to be of use in this swampy climate. Instead, intern rumor has it that they were once used to illustrate the smothering
death of a child. Working in that room afternoon after afternoon, looking up cases as the Pixies blare from my computer speakers, it will again be the objects that compel me the most. That return me to the feeling of my childhood, to the collision between the story and the artifact. Next to the box lies a replica of a white plaster cast in the shape of a woman’s torso and legs.
Bessie.
I stare at that cast every day and I remember the cracked casings on my father’s wrists that held the story of something long ago. Lying in that cast, immobile and imprisoned—is it possible Bessie wanted to make love to Alcide, that Ricky was born of a desperate attempt at connection, a desperate attempt to regain what was shattered in the crash? Or was it Alcide who wanted it, always a drinker with a temper, now more so after the crash? Was what happened—was what began Ricky—love? Rape? Something hard to define, in between?
* * *
When I am twelve, my mother decides to go to law school. Quickly, law spreads everywhere in our house. The bookshelves hold memoirs by the hard-charging trial lawyers my father admires. He plays cassettes of their closing statements while he does push-ups on the carpet of the staircase landing, or sits on the steps shining his shoes with a wooden brush. In her early forties now, my mother attends law school not part-time at night but full-time during the day, with students in their early twenties. Evenings, while dinner cooks on the stove, she spreads her books on the white Formica table. They are each three inches thick, with hard burgundy covers. She opens one and leans close to its dictionary-thin pages, licking the pad of her ring finger to turn each page. Sometimes she holds her finger there, and pokes up her head to root for a yellow highlighter she’ll use to underscore the text. Then one of our school No. 2 pencils. She marks a note in the margins, sits back and bites the pencil in its middle. I bite my pencils the same way. The house is soon full of pencils nearly splintered at the center. Years later, I remember the waxy taste of the yellow paint, the papery taste of splintered wood, the sharp metallic of the graphite. When dinner’s ready, she calls to us. We set our plates on the other end of the table, and while my mother studies, we eat.
My mother has a talent for law, it turns out. She makes good grades and joins moot court. Soon my father takes over dinner, wrapping pork chops in bacon and provolone, griddling them and dousing them with ketchup. We have been raised my mother’s way, eating carob instead of chocolate, taught as toddlers that the word candy meant bananas topped with plain, unsweetened yogurt—at least until we got to kindergarten and our friends corrected us. The griddled, tangy fat against the cool sweet slip of the ketchup shocks our tongues. That year, my father makes our Halloween costumes, and he throws himself into the job with a newcomer’s enthusiasm. With yellow fabric and a staple gun, he turns me into the Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz. The television show ALF, about a furry brown alien with a porcine nose, is popular that fall, and for my brother my father staples together brown felt and paints a cardboard toilet paper tube into a snout. Next year, the stores will be crowded with ALF costumes, but that year, when the local children line up in the town auditorium on Halloween, the municipal employee serving as the judge walks down the line of children dressed as clowns or in witches’ hats, their ninja blacks and their fairy-tale pinks, and pins the blue ribbon on my brother’s chest. When we have a school vacation while the law school is in session, it’s my father’s turn for a break and my mother takes us to class with her—and to the cafeteria. My brother is still frighteningly skinny; anything he wants to eat is cause for celebration, and later we’ll all talk about how much we love law school when what we mean is we love macaroni and cheese.
But it’s the professors who make an impression on me. I sit with my knees close together in a hard-backed chair at a pull-down desk, impossibly grown-up law students all around me, and stare at a woman with bobbed gray hair who wears a burgundy jacket and skirt. I’ve never seen a woman in a suit before. Standing in front of an enormous three-part blackboard, she raps the board with the chalk and begins. “Imagine…” she instructs the students, and begins to describe a set of circumstances. I don’t know yet to call what comes out of her mouth a hypothetical, the quick situations sketched by law professors to teach students to analyze how a principle applies to different circumstances. I recognize it for what it is: a story.
* * *
My mother’s law school loan money is a windfall. My parents have always loved money, always had the faith that more will appear if they spend it. They take us to the French Caribbean, renting a house at the edge of a cliff. They’ve miscalculated, it turns out: Dinner the first night costs as much as they’ve planned for the week. But we are already there, the trip has already begun, and soon the week has the feel of magic.
During the day, we run barefoot on the beach, and try to shimmy up coconut trees, able to scale only a few feet before we tumble back onto the sand, laughing. We collect the fallen coconuts from around the trunks and pitch them into rocks, trying to smash our way to the sweet meat inside. My father has rigged up speakers at the house, and at night he sends French torch songs sailing over the deck. He and my mother hold hands and kiss as they listen to the music. My sisters and I stand on the deck, the shale tile cool against the soles of our feet—for a week, it seems we never have to wear shoes—and take turns twirling, the matching turquoise silk skirts my mother has bought us sliding coolly up our legs, our laughter flying out over the ocean. We are all light and happy and far, far away from home.
The last day, we stand on an airport tarmac waiting for the flight that will carry us home. Back to the Saturdays of my grandparents’ arrival, back to my father sitting late into the night at the kitchen table, drinking, or the scrape of his car tires sending gravel spinning off into the dark. I remember a new heaviness in my body, but maybe that’s the work of time and my looking back. On the tarmac, the island sunlight ricochets off the parked bodies of silver planes, so bright it stings my eyes.
My brother stands in front of me. He is still thin, still not quite out of the danger woods of our birth, and the crew cut my mother made him get for the trip has only emphasized the shape of his skull, leaving his eyes round and wondering. While we wait, he curls his palms under his chin like paws and juts his lower teeth out. His eyes big, his head small, he makes a perfect chipmunk. My sisters and I laugh. Already he is the entertainer, the one who, sick for so long as a child, now wants only to make others laugh. Next he tells a joke. The setup has seven Chinese brothers in it. For the punch line, one fries in the electric chair.
“What’s that?” I ask. I am a proud child and I hate having to ask, but something in the phrase “electric chair” demands that it be known.
“He got the death penalty,” my brother says.
By the time I understand his words, I am against the death penalty. Death is what I am afraid of. Death is what my sister was lost to; death is what the grown-ups fear for my brother; death is what I have nightmares of. Through my mother’s books and my father’s stories, I have begun to think of the Constitution as a document of hope. The law I love can impose death? Never mind the reasons in law books. This is where it starts: with horror. From this moment on, I will always be against the death penalty.
* * *
For my mother’s graduation, my father has a white tent erected in the long sprawl of our backyard. That night darkness envelops the tent, and there’s a moment when the band stops playing, the crowd he has invited hushes, and a waiter in a vest emerges from the dark carrying a cake, its top aflame. The waiter sets it on the table with a flourish. My mother’s eyes are wet and shiny in the candlelight as she bends, beckoning to us children. Together, we blow out the candles, and what the cake says is suddenly clear: L & M-L. My father, tall and burnished in a tuxedo, squeezes my mother’s hand. They will become law partners.
The building they find to rent is at the center of our town, along the railroad tracks, across from the old train station. On the other side of the station is the big Catholic church.
A few steps down the block from their new office is the movie theater and a newsstand that sells bubblegum, Archie comics, and books of logic games. Around the corner is the one apartment building, where the only magnolia tree blossoms lush every spring. My father takes the third floor for his criminal and malpractice cases. On the second floor, my mother becomes a family lawyer.
I am raised in the law the way other children are raised in religion. When my siblings and I gather around the table for family dinners, we don’t bow our heads to say grace. Instead we raise them high and try to catch the words that fly between my parents. The divorce fights she’s handling, the battered women she advocates for in those early years when she still takes low-paying work. The medical malpractice cases that pay nothing if he loses, but big—one-third of the verdict—if he wins. A gambler’s payday, and one that rewards curiosity. “I like the law because I get to learn a little bit of everything,” my father tells me. I recognize something of myself in his words—and something of the way I love the objects on his windowsill.
As a child I learn to write on long legal pads pilfered from my parents’ office. I lie on my stomach on the nubby carpet and try to fill the pads’ lined pages with my writing. I have invented a character I name Cassie, who lives on the same island we visit every summer and goes to the movies in the same theater. The difference is that Cassie loves a boy, Bobby, and so is unlike me.
I am ten and then eleven and then twelve, and though my friends all talk about boys, I don’t have crushes. I think love is foolish and distracting and I alternately pity and scorn my friends when they talk about it. I don’t like pop music, because all the songs are about love, and I think most of the preteen magazines at the comic store downstairs are silly, because all they talk about is crushes. It’s not just that I feel too tall, too awkward, and too dark, with my frizzy hair in a town of straight blond hair, to think a boy could like me. It’s something deeper than that, though I can’t say what. How I feel about it is like the answer I give when, a few months after Christmas, my mother asks me what happened to a new stuffed animal. “Shh,” I say, and point to a corner of my room. “It’s sleeping.” When she asks me again a few days later—“Hasn’t it woken up by now?”—the answer must come from a place inside me that understands more about my brother than I’ll let on. “It’s in a coma,” I say.
The Fact of a Body Page 9
