Flesh of My Flesh: Short Story

by Barbara Gowdy

  “Okay,” he says carefully.

  “Glenda will think we don’t trust her with the dogs,” she says. Glenda is the retarded girl who works for her part-time.

  “She’ll be right,” Sam says, laughing.

  “Nothing is settled,” she says sharply.

  He gets up and goes into the bathroom. He’s in there a long time with the taps running. She feeds the kitten. When he comes out, she and the kitten go right in. She manages to coax the kitten into peeing, then she sits on the toilet and flushes to veil the sound. Sam calls out that he’s going to the office to pay the bill, so she decides to have a quick shower. Seeing her breasts in the mirror makes her cry. Everything about her from the neck down seems a waste now, and perverse, as if she’s the one with the wrong body.

  By the time he returns she is dressed and is packing the few things they unpacked. He says he thinks he’ll have a shower, too. She sits on a lawn chair outside their door and eats wedding cake until the thought of him washing his female genitals crosses her mind, and she has to spit out what’s in her mouth. A few minutes later he steps in it, coming out with the suitcases. “All set?” he asks.

  In the car, neither of them say a word. At one point he clears his throat, making what strikes her as a prissy sound, and for the first time since he told her she has the horrifying thought that people might be suspicious. She remembers Grace saying, “Does he ever have long eyelashes!” She looks over at him and he’s blinking hard. It means he’s nervous, but she used to think he had a tic.

  Her eyes fill. The “him” that she used to love isn’t there any more. It never was there, that’s the staggering part. And yet she still loves him. She wonders if she’s subconsciously bisexual. Or maybe it’s true that she loves blindly. When she kept protesting that she loved John Bucci—years after the divorce—her friend Emma, who was always trying to fix her up with a date, told her about an experiment in which a newborn chimp was put into a cage with a felt-covered, formula-dispensing coat hanger, and the chimp became so attached to this lactating contraption that when its real mother was finally allowed into the cage, it wouldn’t go near her.

  On Valentine’s Day, John Bucci gave her chocolates in a black velvet case as big as a pizza box. Also a gigantic card with a photograph of a grandfather clock and the message “Time Will Never Change Our Love.” She dropped the chocolates off at the pet store for Mrs. Hodgson to offer to customers. The card she took home in a shopping bag and hid in her underwear drawer. The next night, during supper, her father asked if she was seeing the Italian fellow who sold shoes at the mall, and her first stunning thought was that he had gone through her drawers, but it turned out that Mr. Grit had spotted her in John’s car.

  “Oh, well, I have lunch with him sometimes,” she said, which was true. “He’s a friend of Cory’s,” she added, which was also true, or had been.

  “He sold me those maroon loafers,” her father said. “Must have been three years ago now. Crackerjack salesman, I’ll hand him that.”

  She didn’t know what to say.

  “Doesn’t he have something to do with that Esso station out on Highway 10?” her father asked. “I saw him on the phone once. In the office.”

  “I think he’s a partner or something,” Marion said.

  Her father pushed his plate away and took a cigarette out of his shirt pocket. When his head was shaking as much as it was tonight, he didn’t light his cigarettes in his mouth. He held the match under the end until the paper and tobacco caught on their own. “Used to be a Shell station,” he said, putting the cigarette between his lips and taking a deep drag.

  “Oh, that’s right,” she said.

  “Jack Kreutziger owned it,” he said.

  She nodded.

  “Before that,” he said, “there were the Diehls. Then before that, now this is going back, it was a restaurant. I remember you could buy two thick slices of roast beef, a mountain of mashed potatoes and a side order of fresh peas for a dollar forty-nine.”

  “A dollar forty-nine,” she marvelled.

  “Yes, sir,” he said.

  She could have told him everything—this burst of conversation was him putting out the welcome mat, doing his best to be both mother and father to her. Instead she stood up and began clearing the table. It wasn’t that she thought he’d be mad or even particularly worried about her, that had never been the issue. Her mother might have had something to say about an Italian Catholic who drove a red convertible and wore gold jewellery, but all Marion could imagine her father saying was, “You should bring him around for supper.”

  Still, she didn’t tell him, and although she was touched by what he was trying to do, and she was afraid he’d go away thinking he couldn’t get through to her, it was John she felt guilty about. Ever since Christmas, John had been badgering her to give him an exact date when she intended to introduce him to her father. “Not until the end of February,” was what she said at first, February second being the day her mother died. Now that it was almost the middle of February, she was thinking she’d better wait until after her brother’s wedding in April.

  “If you’re playing games with me …,” John said, shaking his head.

  “You can come around the day after the wedding,” she said. “April twenty-third.”

  “I mean, if you’re trying to tell me something …,” he said.

  Lately he was accusing her of having hidden motives. When she got her hair cut short he said she did it to get back at him for flirting with the French girl who worked in his store.

  “I didn’t know you flirted with her,” she said.

  “I don’t!” he shouted.

  He accused her of thinking that selling shoes was low class. Otherwise, he said, if she’d wanted to work in a store, she’d have come to him for a job.

  “But it’s better for our relationship if I’m not your employee,” she said. “Besides, I really love animals.”

  “I hate you working there,” he said. “That old bag’s poisoning your mind.”

  She let that go because it was probably true. Despite John saying “I don’t want to hear about it,” she couldn’t resist repeating Mrs. Hodgson’s grisly stories, usually to his enthralled sisters when he was in another room, but he always seemed to walk in and catch the worst part. He said she did it on purpose, as another way of torturing him. She kissed his clenched fist. She blamed his paranoia on herself, on the secrecy she was forcing him to live in. And her guilt was compounded by a misgiving that there was no real reason not to introduce him to her father, that there had never been any reason. This suspicion, and the prospect of losing him, gave her some troubled moments, although not so many that she moved up the April twenty-third date.

  What moved the date up was something else altogether. The last Tuesday in March she arrived home early to do the ironing, and her father was waiting for her with a snapshot of a fat woman who seemed to be laughing her head off.

  “Her name’s Grace Inkpen,” he said. “She’s coming here Friday to spend a few days.”

  It turned out he’d been writing to her for five months. He had an accordion file of her letters, all of which were written in mauve ink on pale yellow writing paper. “You’ll get a kick out of the letterhead,” he said, showing her the drawing of an inkwell and quill pen and, underneath, a Michigan address. “Howdy Bill!” Marion read before he turned the letter over and let her read the newspaper ad, which he had cut out and taped to the back. “Queen-sized, happy-go-lucky widow,” it said. “Country gal at heart, 54, seeks marriage-minded gentleman. Age, looks, unimportant, although teddy-bear type a plus. Will relocate. No games!”

  “Of course, I’ll always love your mother,” her father said.

  Marion looked again at the photograph. Glasses, fuzzy blond hair. Yellow Bermuda shorts oozing chubby knees. So different from her trim little mother that she said, trying to get it straight, “But you’re not going to marry her.”

  Her father stacked the letters and tapped the si
des and ends to line up the edges. “That’s what she’s flying up here to see about,” he said, but he looked desperate, as though the whole thing had gotten completely out of hand, and Marion let out a laugh, then closed her eyes, overcome by a sense of the pure loneliness that must have driven him to this.

  “Hey, listen,” he said. “This is your home. If you don’t take to her—”

  “No, it’s okay, Dad,” she said. And it was only to reassure him that she added, “Because I think I’m going to be getting married, too.”

  So John Bucci came for supper the next night, bringing two bottles of red wine, a case of brown shoe polish and a stack of gas coupons. He wore his sharkskin suit. He offered to have his gravel company grade their driveway, and her father took him up on it. After he had gone, her father said, “His heart’s in the right place,” meaning he was prepared to see past the suit and big talk. Then, after a minute, he said, “That’s what counts,” and Marion got the feeling he wasn’t thinking about John now, he was thinking about—he was selling himself on—Grace Inkpen.

  He drove into the city to pick her up from the airport. He wore the charcoal suit he bought off the rack for the funeral. While he was gone Marion changed the sheets on the little trundle bed in her brother’s old room. Last night she had offered to let Grace sleep in her room, which had a double bed, but her father had said, slightly alarmed, “She’s not that big.”

  Well, she was. As soon as Marion saw her getting out of the car, she raced upstairs and gathered her brush and comb, her nightgown, slippers, pillow and the photo of her mother that she kept on her bedside table, and she threw them on the chair in her brother’s room. Then she grabbed the pillow from the trundle bed and the vase of lilacs from the dresser and put them in her room.

  When she got back downstairs, her father and Grace were still coming up the walk, Grace stopping every two steps to gaze around and exclaim. She had on a billowing pink coat and was holding a little artificial Christmas tree in each hand. “Bad boy!” she cried, laughing, when Sophie, their pregnant collie, leapt at an electrical wire dangling from one of the Christmas trees. Her father, who was carrying the suitcases, tried to kick Sophie in the rump but he missed. An unlit cigarette hung between his lips, and his head was shaking badly. Marion opened the door, and Grace, looking overwhelmed with joy, came straight for her. “Well, well, well,” Grace said, rushing and panting up the steps. Marion backed up a bit. “You okay with those cases, Bill?” Grace cried, but her ecstatic eyes stayed skewered to Marion.

  She gave Marion a hug. She was still holding the Christmas trees. “I know who you are,” she said. She let go of her and shouted over her shoulder, “Why didn’t you say you had a pinup girl in the house, Bill?” Then, “You can light that now!” She turned back to Marion. “I upchuck if somebody smokes in the car.” She laughed.

  “I know how you feel,” Marion said.

  Grace used the point of one tree to push her glasses up her nose. “Now these,” she said, setting both trees on the counter, “are for you, Mary Anne.”

  “Marion,” Marion said shyly.

  “Out of season,” Grace said, “but what the heck, I made them myself. That’s my business, making Christmas trees. Where’s an outlet? Where’s an outlet?” She picked up one of the trees and hurried over to the stove. “There,” she said, pushing in the plug.

  “Oh, that’s beautiful,” Marion said. The tiny lights shot off a rainbow of colours on the shiny metallic strips the tree was made of. “Dad, look,” she said.

  “Hey, that is nice,” her father said. He came over beside Grace, and Grace put an arm around his waist.

  “Now’s the time to tell you, Bill,” she said, beaming up at him. “Now that you brought me up here for my looks and personality.”

  Her father stood there stiffly, giving her a smile that didn’t make it to his eyes.

  “I’m a rich woman,” she said. “Oh, yes, oh, yes,” she said. “You got a stack of Bibles, I’ll swear on them. These here trees are a gold mine. I got a head office and five branch locations. I’m made of money.”

  Marion is taking it second by second. Will she tell Sam not to come up to the apartment? A second later it’s, Will she let him unpack? While she’s wondering, he goes ahead. In the interval between one second and the next, he moves in.

  One morning she wakes up and they’ve been married two weeks. She can’t believe it. She lives in amazement, perpetually in the first shocking moment. She’s in a kind of torpor, which she and Sam are pretending is the dawn of acceptance. Maybe it is. Before going to sleep on the couch he kisses her lips, and she lets that happen. “I love you,” he says, and she breathes shallowly and thinks, “What if we just go on like this?”

  They never talk about it. If he still wears the dildo, she doesn’t ask. She avoids looking at his crotch. The rest of his body she catches herself looking at for slip-ups, as if the real Sam is somewhere else and this one’s a fake. She looks at him coolly and sometimes with distaste and wonder, saying to herself, “That’s a woman’s shoulder. That’s a woman’s arm.”

  And yet she knows that whoever he is he’s who she loves. She knows that if she didn’t love him, she wouldn’t know who she was. He listens to her. He’s the only person who ever has, although until he came along she didn’t know that. Right from the beginning, whenever she was telling him what she thought or felt, she had the very real sensation that the breath of life was entering her, just as if she were a flattened blow-up doll taking shape. After he left the store she always felt lighter and rounder, and a bit cockeyed. She remembers punching the cash-register keys and the tips of her fingers feeling ripe enough to burst.

  Now, all the time, she feels limp, despite the love being there. To her it’s a miracle, her love. It’s like the one thing, the one little tree, that survives the otherwise total devastation of a tornado. She’s going by the restaurant where he works, and she sees him in the window playing the guitar for nobody but the other two waiters (he’s the entertainment when it’s not busy), she sees the narrow curve of his back, and she would still stand between him and a bullet.

  The only person who seems to have any idea that something’s the matter is her friend Emma. Everyone else makes newlywed jokes and asks how the wedding went. Glenda keeps asking when she’s going to have a baby.

  “Never,” Marion says.

  Glenda smiles as if she knows better.

  Emma, on the other hand, says, “Whatever you do, don’t get pregnant.” This is after saying, “You okay? You sure? You look like hell.” One day she goes so far as to say, “A marriage licence isn’t carved in stone,” and Marion loses her temper.

  “What are you talking about?” she says. “I’m coming down with a flu bug and here you are herding me off to divorce court.”

  The idea of telling anybody, even Emma, is appalling to her. Here in Colville she has no fame. That has been the miracle of living in Colville. When she left Garvey and came here to live, all anyone knew about her was that she had enough money to buy the old plumbing supply building and turn it into a pet store and an apartment. She could laugh and nobody thought, How can she laugh? Eventually she could talk about her divorce from John Bucci because other people got divorced. Until she told Sam about the murder, not a soul knew that she had the nerve to open a store in a retail recession and to iceskate on the Grand River during a thaw and to recount Mrs. Hodgson’s pet-death stories without batting an eye because she was someone who had survived the most terrible thing that was going to happen to her.

  She thinks that telling Sam was what made this other terrible thing happen. That talking about the murder here in Colville, where it had been under wraps for ten years, was like releasing a deadly virus. If it didn’t instantly turn him into a transsexual (and who knows? It’s not as though she hasn’t witnessed the frailty of natural laws) then it did make her fall in love with him, the first man since John she goes and falls in love with.

  Before that she wouldn’t have dreamed t
hat he’d be the one for her. He was the new man in town. The mysterious stranger, the catch. And then she started seeing him arm in arm with Bernie, a topless waitress at the Bear Pit. She saw the two of them kissing once, in the bank line-up, but the first time he kissed her, and she asked, “What about Bernie?” he laughed and said, “God, no. I mean, she’s great, it’s just …”

  Marion waited. She wanted to hear it—the thing she could possibly have over a sexpot like Bernie. But all she got was, “She’s not you,” said so reverently, though, that she kissed him and told him she loved him, too, a delayed response to his declaration of a minute before. She was still bowled over by it. If he’d come out with anything else, she would have started crying. She’d just finished telling him about the murder. The name Bert Kella hadn’t crossed her lips in a long time, and it lingered in the air like a toxic gas that burned her eyes.

  “He shot himself a few hours later,” she said. “What my brother always says is, ‘He saved me the trouble.’ “

  “I love you,” Sam said.

  She looked at him. He was blinking as if from a tic. “Pardon?” she said. He put down his cans of dog food, came around the counter, took her face in his hands and kissed her like a man digging into a meal. Between kisses he kept saying he loved her, but in a voice so full of doom that she figured he must have said the same thing to Bernie.

  That tone of doom and everything associated with it—the looks of defeat, humility, anguish, the hesitation, the guarded answers, the withdrawing, the physical modesty (he wouldn’t even take off his undershirt!)—she got wrong all the way down the road. With Bernie out of the picture her immediate sense was that some emotional deprivation, most likely the death of his parents, had left him with the idea that he didn’t deserve love. So her job, her joyous crusade, became to persuade him that he did deserve it. He would sigh for no reason and she would say, “I love you.” “I love you,” she would say when she picked up the phone and it was him. He had a frailty she had never witnessed before in a grown man, not so much because of the way he looked, although he was slim and big-eyed, and not because he seemed frightened of loving her, either. It was something else—his dreaminess, partly, which she felt had to do with a spiritual bent, a private purity. Just as a room’s perils leap out at you when you bring a baby into it, everything that was common and hard about living in Colville seemed more evident to her whenever Sam was around. The very first time he came into the store and they got to talking, she’d wondered how anyone so open-minded would ever cope with the bull-headedness and rectitude of people here. When she’d started seeing him with Bernie, she’d said to Emma, “A racy girl like that will break his heart.”