Flesh of My Flesh: Short Story

by Barbara Gowdy

  Her innocence! That’s what floors her now. “What if I don’t mind whether you respect me or not?” she said once.

  “I won’t respect myself,” he answered.

  “Then let’s elope.”

  “We said we’d wait until I visited my relatives.”

  “What if I tear all your clothes off?”

  “Let’s just wait.” (Moving her hand from his knee, coming to his feet.) “Okay, honey? I’m not cut out for this kind of thing.”

  That’s exactly how he put it—he wasn’t cut out for this kind of thing. In six months he thought he would be. Then there would be the months it took to recover. What he told her was that he wanted to visit his parents’ grave in Delaware, then look up some relatives he’d suddenly heard of, get to know them, invite them to the wedding, and after that he wanted to do some camping in Vermont on his own. He’d be gone three, four months, he said.

  But he misunderstood how complicated the operation would be. By the time he had the facts, and was therefore going on about delaying the wedding a few more months (he said his relatives might be away in the spring and it would be better to visit them in the summer), she was so sure that this was just him throwing up barriers between himself and his happiness, she wouldn’t listen. She covered his mouth with her hand.

  Sometimes she feels as if her hand is still there. Oh, they still talk. They tell each other about their day, that kind of thing. But whereas she used to tell him things she’d never imagined telling anyone else (even before they said they loved each other she admitted having faked her orgasms with John), now they talk as if their conversation will be played back in church. Neither of them goes near words like “orgasm” or “sex.” She can’t even say “love.” She can’t tell him that the ferret has gone into heat. She says, instead, “I’m going to have to get hold of Arnie,” and leaves it to him to remember that Arnie is the guy out on Highway 10 who has a breeding farm.

  She keeps wondering how long it can go on. The marriage, yes, but mostly how much longer they can keep up this uneasy peace. Then a letter arrives with a Boston postmark. She watches him read it. “Well?” she says from a state of calm that she can feel quickly giving way … to total rage or total apathy, she has no idea.

  “I guess this is it,” he says.

  “You’re not going to go ahead with it, are you?” she says.

  He looks up, surprised. “Well, yeah. Of course. I mean, I thought that’s what you’d want.”

  It’s rage. It shoots up inside her like a geyser. “What I’d want!” she cries. “Why would I want that?”

  He just looks at her.

  “What on earth do you think? That all this time I’ve been holding my breath for a penis?”

  He starts to speak but she cuts him off. “It won’t be real!”

  “It’ll be real. They’ll use my own skin and—”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sakes, it makes me sick to think about it.”

  “It won’t ejaculate sperm—”

  “Shut your mouth!” She actually punches him.

  “But it’ll get erect,” he continues in the same instructive tone. “There’s a way to do that.”

  She collapses on the little stool where they put on their boots.

  “What if I lost a leg and got an artificial one?” he says. “Or if I had a glass eye, or, I don’t know, a toupee, or I had a nose job? What about women who have breast implants?”

  She shakes her head.

  “What about fat people who used to be thin? What about Grace? You know what she said at the wedding?” His voice goes softer, more urgent. “She said, ‘I don’t know who this fatso is.’ She said, ‘It isn’t me.’ “

  Marion swallows around what feels like an acorn in her throat. “You just can’t come into the world a woman and decide to be a man. That’s what this is all about. You can’t do that.”

  He goes on as if she hasn’t spoken. “Grace has the same dilemma I have. She knows who she is.” He thumps his fist where she hit him, over his heart. “But she’s in the wrong container.”

  Marion lets out a morose laugh. Grace as a container. “I thought I fell in love with a man,” she says. “I thought I was marrying a man.”

  “You did,” he says. “You did.”

  She lifts her eyes to his face. Against all the visible evidence, she says, “You’re not a man.”

  He starts blinking. He lowers his head. He carefully folds the letter and puts it back in the envelope. When he looks straight at her again, she thinks he’s going to kill her. “Who are you to say that?” he says quietly. His pupils are the size of pinholes. “Who are you to tell me who I am?” He reaches, and she flinches, but he’s only pulling his jacket off the coat rack.

  Her father and Grace were married in May, in Detroit, but they came back to the farm to live. It was a huge wedding, paid for by Grace, who waved away Marion’s father’s protests, saying, “The bride pays! The bride pays! That’s the tradition!” and who arranged it all so fast and with such scouring efficiency, blasting the caterers on the phone while zooming out seams on her wedding dress (which she was sewing herself, using Marion’s mother’s ancient Singer), that all Marion’s father had to do was stay out of the way.

  After her second visit in early April she had moved in. She’d had her own phone line installed in the guest room, and she began doing all her Christmas tree business from there, sitting at Peter’s little rolltop desk. When she wasn’t on the phone—or sewing, or typing—she was baking. She showed Marion how to bake roll cakes and soufflés. She also painted the master bedroom pale yellow. She didn’t even consult Marion’s father, she just bought the paint and went ahead. “Green isn’t my colour,” was her explanation, not that Marion’s father demanded one. With the paint that was left, she put a coat on one wall in the guest room. “I’ve got ants in my pants,” she said. “I can’t keep still.” After supper, in front of the TV, she knit sweaters for Marion’s father, multi-coloured cable knits that straightened his posture, he wore them with such pride.

  He’d come a long way since that first visit, when her bossiness, her spectacular size, and especially the news that she was made of money seemed to hit him like a shovel. That entire weekend he wore his neck brace to keep his head from thrashing, and after she was gone he fell into a kitchen chair and said, “What the Sam Hill have I gotten myself into?”

  “I liked her,” Marion said. She did. She liked Grace’s good-natured self-awareness. When Grace had caught Marion’s father staring at the way she loaded food into her mouth, she’d said, “This isn’t a hormone problem, Bill. This is pure unadulterated appetite.”

  “I liked her laugh,” Marion said.

  Her father nodded.

  “She’s going to teach me how to knit,” Marion said.

  “You don’t say?” her father said. He frowned and scratched under his neck brace. “All that money’s something to think about,” he said uneasily.

  “For heaven’s sakes, Dad. What if she were thousands of dollars in debt? Most people would say you’ve hit the jackpot.”

  “Well, I don’t know …”

  Something brought him around, though, something Grace must have written in the daily letters she continued to send. Because she came back. She came back with two trunks of clothes, a typewriter and eight boxes of business files. And three boxes of wedding invitations, already printed up.

  The entire family, plus six of her father’s friends, flew down for the ceremony in a private plane. John went as Marion’s fiancé. He kept asking how much Grace had spent—he was comparing what they planned to spend on their own wedding in June, even though he had agreed to a small ceremony in the living room of Marion’s house, where Marion’s parents had been married thirty years before.

  “What does it matter what she spent?” Marion said. Finally John leaned across the aisle of the plane and asked Grace. Marion cringed, but Grace couldn’t have cared less.

  “This here shuttle bus,” Grace asked, “or the w
hole shebang?”

  The whole shebang came to just under thirty grand. It was an amount that haunted John, and more or less ruined their own wedding. He made last-minute changes, hiring a drummer and electric guitar duo who played so loud people had to go upstairs to talk. He had a canopy erected behind the house, a complete waste since it was a cool, rainy afternoon and there weren’t enough guests to spill outside anyway. Because he was paying for the liquor he brought in crates of it and yelled at everyone to drink, drink. By the end of the night there was a line-up to be sick in the toilet. There was a fistfight between the drummer and the accordion player her father had hired weeks earlier. Marion’s last memory, before she passed out on the trundle bed, was Aunt Lucia’s bare stomach … Aunt Lucia with her red silk dress pulled up over her black bra, pointing at a snarl of purple scars under her navel and whispering, “Guarda! Guarda!” and Marion thinking that the scars had something to do with the birth of babies, that there was a Bucci baby curse Aunt Lucia was warning her about.

  Apparently she was carried by John and her brother to John’s car, and then carried by John alone over the threshold of the Meadowview Motel’s honeymoon suite. They spent three nights there, a mini-honeymoon that John promised to make up for with a trip to Italy, when he could afford to take some time off. From the motel they moved straight into their new house, a two-year-old five-bedroom, three-bathroom, white-stuccoed back split on ten acres. It had pillars on either side of the front door, a four-car garage, a sunken ebony bathtub and acres of white carpeting in which the imprint of a foot remained all day.

  John had never had any intention of living on his Aunt Lucia’s property. He bought the house back in April, assuming a mortgage so high that Marion left off one of the zeroes when she told her father about it. Her father was still thrown for a loop. He and Grace gave them the five major appliances. The black leather chesterfield, two red velvet easy chairs, black veneer bedstead and black veneer dining-room suite John bought with the money his business associates sent in Congratulations cards. He wanted everything to be modern and either black or red. In a linen store in Ayleford, Marion found a red bedspread and black-and-red-striped pillow cases. She kept her eye out for coasters, towels, vases, lamps, ashtrays in red or black. She capitulated completely to John’s taste because she didn’t have any. Pointing out the dress she liked in a store window or in a catalogue had been one sure way to make her mother laugh.

  She planted red and white carnations along the front of the house. She put in a vegetable garden. And three mornings a week she still went into the pet store. John wanted her to quit, but he said he’d let it ride until she got pregnant. Now that she was his wife, he was more easygoing about things, he was back to being his hearty, adoring self. He brought her long-stemmed roses and bags of seedless grapes. He wasn’t home much—he liked to close the shoe store himself on the nights it was open, and he was always having to go to the gravel pit or the gas station to take care of some problem—but when he was home he followed her around, kissing her, undressing her, telling her how beautiful she was. He ran her bubble baths in the ebony tub and washed her breasts and belly. Some mornings she woke up to find him looking at her, the two of them almost nose to nose, and it gave her a start because his eyes were so huge and inky. Moved by what she took to be his gratitude and amazement that she was finally his, she wrapped him in her arms and promised to love him forever.

  A couple of times a week, when he was working late, she drove over to the farm and watched television with her father and Grace and knit John a sweater. Friday evenings she went to Aunt Lucia’s to see John’s sisters. Aunt Lucia still glared at her, but now she also pulled her out of the kitchen and made her feel the hard lump on her left breast, seeming to want to know if Marion thought it was growing, and one night she did a couple of knee bends to let Marion hear all the places her joints cracked—knees, hips, ankles, feet. It sounded like someone breaking up kindling.

  “Your brother’s a vet,” John explained. “That’s doctor to her.”

  “I’m not a vet,” Marion said.

  John shrugged. “Brother’s close enough.”

  “Maybe she should see a real doctor,” Marion said.

  “In a million years she’d never go. Listen,” he said. “She’s old. She’s gonna die soon. Humour her.”

  Marion was glad to. She was glad to be a Bucci, to belong to this large, passionate family. She was glad to be able to get away from them as well though, to drive back to her own ten acres and her enormous white house and its silent, mostly empty rooms. Its newness and splendour. She wished her mother could have seen it, could have seen how both she and her father had landed in clover. Maybe it was all her mother’s doing, though. That thought crossed Marion’s mind a lot. Her mother still running their lives but with the power, at last, to go to town.

  Her mother’s birthday was the fifteenth of October. On the morning of that day Marion and her father and Grace visited the grave, Grace laying down a garland of white roses with a red ribbon that said “Gone But Not Forgotten.” They all cried. “She had such a sweet, tiny face,” Grace blubbered, and Marion wondered where she had got that from—her mother had been rather moon-faced, as Marion herself was.

  In the afternoon, as Marion sat in her kitchen looking through her old photo albums, it started to rain. She got up to close the window over the sink and noticed that the raindrops were small spheres aligned in a plaid pattern so exact it looked like chenille. It looked like the kind of orderly message her mother’s spirit might send.

  No sooner did Marion think this than the phone rang.

  “Hello?” Marion whispered into the receiver.

  “Are you there?” a voice bellowed. “Hello?”

  It was Cory Bates.

  She was back in Garvey, calling from a phone booth. She had no place to stay because her parents had moved to Manitoba without telling her. She had no money. She had a black eye.

  “Good heavens,” Marion said. “Well, you can stay here until you find a place. We’ve got plenty of room.”

  “So I heard,” Cory said. “I can’t believe you married him. I mean, John Bucci! God! Does he wear his gold chains to bed?”

  Marion had to smile.

  “So, would he have a fit if I stayed?” Cory asked.

  “Oh, no,” Marion said, leaping at the opportunity to praise him. “He’s really generous. He loves having people around.”

  “Yeah, so he can brag. I mean, I can’t believe you even went out with him. But you’ve got a mansion and probably a new car, right? Can you come and pick me up? My feet are soaked.”

  Marion gave her the only other bedroom that had a bed. It also had an en suite four-piece bath. Cory took a half-hour-long shower, then called Marion to come look at her two skimpy dresses, two pairs of jeans and three tank tops hanging in the wall-length closet. “Pathetic, right?” she said. She dropped back on the bed. She was so tall that although her head was on the pillow, her feet touched the baseboard. She lifted her head for a second to comb her fingers through her wet hair. It was jet black now, and cut an inch long all over. “Hand me those, would you?” she said, pointing to the pack of cigarettes on the bathroom counter. Her wide sleeve hung gracefully from her wrist. She was wearing an orange silk bathrobe, draped open below the crotch and showing off white, slender legs that made Marion think of the obscenely long stamens of tropical flowers. She gave Cory the cigarettes, and Cory offered her one.

  “No, thanks.”

  “Still a saint, eh?” Cory said. “Well”—she smirked—”not exactly,” and she scanned around her, implying that Marion was a gold digger.

  So Marion told her about Grace, about all the money she’d actually moved away from to move in here. “Believe it or not,” she said, “I’m really crazy about John.”

  “Christ,” Cory said, flicking ashes on the carpet. “You know, I leave this shit-hole town to make some money, get a better life. I work my ass off …” She stopped and chewed on her bottom lip.<
br />
  Marion didn’t know what to say. “At least you’re safe from Rick,” was all she could come up with.

  “Rick the Prick.”

  “I feel sorry for the lizards, though,” Marion said.

  Cory snorted. “I feel sorry I didn’t flatten their warty little bodies with a hammer and put them in his cereal box.”

  Driving back to the house, Cory had told Marion how she’d landed a job at Rick’s nightclub near the airport. A high-class place, she’d said. No nudity, strictly pasties and G-strings. Using her talents as an ex-cheerleader, she’d worked out an act in which she bounced on a little trampoline, doing somersaults and splits in the air, then cartwheeled over to a rail and performed a balance-beam routine. Within two weeks she was the headliner and had moved into Rick’s twenty-fifth-storey penthouse condo.

  Rick had two aquariums in which he kept lizards that shot blood from their eyelids when they were scared. Cory hated them, although she got a kick out of poking at them with a pencil. Evidence of blood in the aquariums was the only thing she and Rick had fights over, for the first six months, that is. Then Rick admitted he had fantasies of cutting her face so that no other guy would want her. Cory thought he was kidding until one night at a party he went after her with a paring knife. She forgave him because he was drunk and he missed her by a mile. But two nights ago, after she gave the bartender an innocent little birthday kiss, Rick tried to burn her with his cigarette lighter. She got away and ran right out onto the street, wearing only her G-string and pasties, and took a cab back to the condo. The first thing she did was pick up the lizards with hotdog tongs and throw them out the window. Then she stole the money on Rick’s dresser—a couple of hundred bucks—and spent two nights in a hotel before taking the bus to Garvey. She’d told everybody she was from the West Coast, so she thought it would be a miracle if Rick found her.