by Andre Dubus
Marsha looked at her and said: “I wish I’d had the chance. Tell.”
“You do?”
“I’m human. Depends on who it was.”
The path gently rose and LuAnn looked at the trees on the riverbank and, far away, the trees across the river; she could not see the water.
“Roger Sibley,” she said.
“Who’s Roger Sibley?”
“The director. Of the girls’ home.”
“Him?”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“Nothing. I saw him that one time, in the bar. The reason I said him was I couldn’t get a picture. How do you get that done while you’re reading—What?”
“Alice Munro.”
“You look like you’re in heat.”
“I am. That’s why this morning I—” She looked at Marsha’s hazel eyes. “And last night and Thursday night. I’m burning it up with Ted.”
In Marsha’s eyes was a brief concupiscent light; then she smiled and looked ahead, and LuAnn did, and they walked between two old oaks with yellow leaves. The football crowd cheered and someone steadily beat a bass drum, and LuAnn heard her deep breath and Marsha’s, in rhythm. Desire was part of their friendship and they had known it for a long time; known they could be lovers and they would not be; they neither talked about it nor avoided talking about it.
“Lucky Ted,” Marsha said, and LuAnn looked at her in profile, at her mouth and a trickle of sweat on her cheek. “I’m going to volunteer there. You’re sitting in a room with some very unlucky girls, you’re reading Alice Munro, and somehow—” LuAnn saw the room, and Sylvie, sixteen, with a small body and a pretty face and light brown hair down to her lower back and falling over her cheek when she lowered her head; Sylvie watching, listening to LuAnn read. “Didn’t you tell me it was a glass room?”
“It’s all windows—the upper halves of the walls. It’s on the first floor, and it doesn’t open to the outside. You can’t be in there without someone seeing you. It was later, in my car.”
“Holy shit.”
“It’s their smoking room—the girls, the staff. The girls can smoke on the sundeck, if a woman is with them. They can’t be alone. Only in the bathroom or when they go to bed. Sometimes when I’m reading, girls come in to smoke, and sometimes they stay and listen to the rest of the story; sometimes they just listen while they’re smoking, then leave. Thursday I had my regular four—anyone can come; I wish they all would—but I had Sylvie and Tracy and Lisa and Annette. Sylvie is smart. They’ve all seen too much and heard too much, and they’ve had too much done to them, and they’ve done too much. Some don’t seem bright, but I don’t know if that’s because they’ve spent all their lives surviving, or if they wouldn’t be bright anyway. But Sylvie is smart. If she had just had ordinary parents—” LuAnn saw again the small yellow house in the neighborhood near the hospital. “Just ordinary, bumbling, mistaken parents, who loved her and made a home for her, and fed her, and sent her to school. Read her a story at bedtime. Talked to her. She’d be in high school in some little town, with girlfriends, and a boyfriend, and learning to drive, and thinking about college. What she got was a father she’s never seen and a mother whose boyfriends fucked her since she was four years old. There was always somebody fucking her till she was twelve; then she ran away and everybody fucked her. She was on the streets till she got in drug trouble. Then it was juvenile court, and now she’s watched all the time, and fed, and taught. And loved, too. By some of the girls, and the staff.”
“And you.”
“And me. Sometimes I think about adopting her. But I don’t know if I have it in me. She was the catalyst Thursday night.”
The path rose toward the riverbank; then she could see the water. On her right, a Hispanic family with three young children sat on the grass, eating sandwiches. To her left were trees, tall and close to one another, their leaves red and yellow. In the stadium the band played. The river was bright blue and moving toward the sea. The path turned away from the trees and was flat, parallel to the river, and the couple on Rollerblades came toward them, and LuAnn and Marsha parted to let them through. Trees lined the high bank and LuAnn looked between their trunks at the river, and across it at red and golden trees, and hills.
“Sylvie asked if she could go to the bathroom. I stopped reading. She took her purse. I lit a cigarette. So did the girls. We talked about our hair. Tracy had hers cut, and she dyed it pink. Some girls were doing homework at tables in the dining room. A staff woman was with them—Sherri—reading something. Roger was working in his office. Facing me, but his head was down; he was doing something at his desk. I looked at his yellow rusty hair. I finished my cigarette. The girls finished theirs. We were still talking about hair and I was looking around through the glass, and then Annette was, and I said to her: ‘Do you think Sylvie’s all right?’ And Lisa and Tracy stopped talking, and Annette said: ‘I don’t know.’ And she sounded like she did know. Or she sounded frightened. She’s Sylvie’s roommate. And Tracy and Lisa and Annette looked at me; there was trouble in their eyes, and they were waiting. For me. For Sylvie. For what was going to happen next in their lives. So I said: ‘I’ll just check on her,’ and I left my purse on the floor by my chair, and while I was going through the dining room, and girls were looking up from their homework and saying hi, and I was smiling and saying hi, I worried about the money in my purse, but it wasn’t really the money; it was having it taken from my purse, my intimate piece of dead calf, and I was feeling stupid for leaving that temptation for three girls who have so many good reasons to take from somebody, especially some foolish woman with money who reads to them so she can believe or just feel that she’s doing something for the hopeless—”
“You Catholics can be very complicated.”
“We’re good at sin. We study it.”
“Did they take your cash?”
“No.”
“If they had, would it be your sin?”
“Equally” She smiled. “At least. But mostly I was worried about Sylvie. She hadn’t looked sick. She has these pink cheeks. I went down the hall to the bathroom and knocked on the door. It was quiet. I was alone in the hall, and I knocked again, and it was still quiet. So I said her name. Then I said it again, and knocked. Then I said it louder; then I went fast through the dining room and past the glass room, and Lisa and Annette and Tracy watched me, and I tapped on Roger’s window. When he looked up and saw my face, he got up fast. He’s so big, but he’s quick. And he always looks calm. He’s not. You look at his eyes and you know he’s contained. He opened the door and I told him and he nodded—just that—and was past me, walking as fast as we are now, and I followed him, and I’m sure the girls’ eyes did, in the glass room and the dining room; I was only looking at his back I couldn’t see around and his head I couldn’t see over, and I noticed he was quiet, his shoes—his feet—didn’t make a sound, and he turned down the hall and stopped at the bathroom and knocked lightly. Then he spoke very softly. So very softly. He said: ‘Sylvie?’ and I imagined being Sylvie in there, hearing him. Probably she never heard a man speak so softly till she met Roger. Not with love, anyway. He said: ‘Sylvie, open the door, please.’ Then two of the staff came, Susan and Deborah, and they called Sylvie. Roger said: ‘Sylvie. Sylvie, I’ll have to open the door.’ I was standing beside him. He opened the door, and she was standing there with her sleeves pushed up to her elbows, she was wearing a teal sweater, and she was stabbing her wrist with a ballpoint, her left wrist, and she had stabbed her hand; it was bleeding and her wrist was, not a lot, but she was raising the pen high and stabbing—” LuAnn raised her right fist and swung it down to her left and turned it back and forth—“and twisting the pen in her flesh, and that’s what she was looking at when Roger opened the door. She looked up at us. Not at any one of us. I know she saw us all, but her eyes—those big sweet brown eyes—saw something else, maybe saw the pen going in, or the pen when she held it high and drove it down. Maybe she saw her whole self, st
abbing, being pierced. As if she stood beside herself and watched. Maybe what she stared at was just being alone. This was an instant, that look in her eyes. Then Roger moved and grabbed her hand with the pen, and Susan was behind her, holding her waist, and Deborah was holding her bleeding arm and turning her to the sink. Sylvie was fighting. I just stood in the doorway, the woman who reads. I know she saw me. But seeing me wasn’t in her eyes. She was bucking, squirming, elbowing, kicking. And the sound she made was a long moan. It was plaintive, and it was angry, and her head was moving, up and down when she bucked and kicked, side to side when she squirmed and elbowed, and all the time she made this loud sound of despair; it only paused when she inhaled, but it was so loud and she was in so much pain that it didn’t even seem to pause; it was like she was blowing a trumpet to raise the devil. I was trembling.”
“Jesus. I couldn’t do that work.”
“I don’t. It was like an accident in my life.”
“I mean the staff. This must happen and happen.”
“It does. I’ve only heard about it, till Thursday.”
The trail ended at a parking lot, and between it and the river were picnic tables. Teenaged girls and boys were sitting on one, and a family sat at another with food. Marsha said: “You want to walk on the road?”
“Yes,” LuAnn said, her arms swinging, sweat dripping on her skin, her tank top damp, her leg muscles warm with blood, and eager, her breath deep, and her biceps hard, her wrists and hands relaxed. Beyond the parking lot was a road going upriver. They walked through shadows of pines; then were on the road, and around a curve, and LuAnn could not hear the crowd at the stadium. They walked on the side of the road, with the river on their left and houses on their right. There were no cars; probably few people used the road, except those who lived on it. The river sparkled. Marsha said: “You believe in the devil?”
“I don’t know. I believe in possessions, and exorcisms. I don’t know if there’s a devil. I used to think of Christ in the desert, tempted by this powerful, visible, evil spirit. Maybe ugly with horns and fur, maybe beautiful, a shining face with black eyes. Now I think what tempted Him was his humanity He was hungry. He wanted people to know who He was. He wanted to just take over and call the shots. Impose agâpe on everyone. It’s funny, when I was at BU, somebody in our group started this: if you said the Lord’s Prayer backward, the devil would appear. There were probably only two of us who even believed in God. Me, and one of the guys. We laughed, we snorted coke, we drank tequila, but no one would say that prayer backward. I wouldn’t right now. I don’t know if there’s a devil, and I’ll stay with that.”
“We hardly need him.”
“No. We’re doing fine on our own. Sylvie cried. Deborah was washing her. That’s when she stopped that awful moan; her eyes had been dry, and bright with something that was in her, and when Deborah ran water on her arm, she cried, deep, loud crying, and the tears jumped out of her eyes; her face was wet, and Deborah was washing and blood was in the sink, but it stopped soon, the bleeding; Sylvie quit fighting as soon as she cried. She looked like she’d fall down if they weren’t holding her. Roger just kept saying her name, and he loosened his grip on her right arm; then he let it go, and she clutched him, his sleeve, then his bare arm. There she was, in her jeans and teal sweater, sobbing. She was looking at Roger, but I don’t think she can remember what his face was like then, in the bathroom. Maybe his touch, his voice. She was still seeing herself, her pain. She’s in a hospital now. Psychiatric. After a while she’ll go back to the home. And after a while she’ll say she’s sorry, that she did it to get attention. She’ll even say it to me, one Thursday night. And it’s bullshit. She did it because hurting her body felt better than the pain in her soul, and it gave her relief.”
“Sure it does. I used to binge, when I was a girl. I still do.”
“With food?” She looked at Marsha, who was smiling and wiping sweat from her brow.
“Not now. I go to the gym. I work on those machines till I’m not me anymore. In the shower I’m me again, but the part of me I couldn’t stand is dead. It’s in the gym, draped over a Universal.”
The road curved with the river, climbed and curved again, and a speedboat came downriver and LuAnn watched its wake spreading. Its motor was the only sound in the air. Then it was gone, and she said: “When Ted got hurt, he was relieved. After the explosion, when he was on the ground and there were no more explosions and he knew he was alive. His captain was talking to him and a corpsman was working on his leg, and he knew he was alive and he was going home, and he was relieved. He said it took him months, when he got out of the hospital in Philadelphia, to know it wasn’t relief he felt. It was gratitude. Because it was over, for him. He was going home. He had been afraid every day and every night at Khe Sanh, but it wasn’t that. He said sometimes the fear was a rush. It was the pain in his soul. It’s still there. All those boys he bandaged and shot up with morphine, talked to while they died or didn’t die, boys he saved or didn’t, all the boys whose bleeding he stopped and whose shock he stopped, and they went home without arms or legs or with their cocks and balls shredded. When he got hit, his pain was terrible, but he had morphine. I think Sylvie felt something on the edge of that. In its penumbra. But she’s not in a war she can come home from. When I talk to Ted about these girls, what they say about their lives, what the staff tells me, he says he’d rather Vietnam than a childhood of being raped by people he was born to trust. Nobody he trusted hurt him over there, and he always felt loved. Sylvie kept crying—her face was on Roger’s chest—and Deborah bandaged the cuts, and I looked behind me, and the hall was full of girls and three staff, talking to them, turning them around, getting them out of the hall. Susan went through them, to call the hospital. Roger and Deborah were holding Sylvie, and they started walking her toward me, or toward the doorway I stood in, and I backed up, looking at Sylvie. Tears were still on her face, but she was quiet. She was breathing through her mouth; I could hear it. I looked at Roger. He was watching Sylvie and his face was firm and gentle at the same time. He was a father, doing what he could, and I knew he was sad and disappointed; maybe he felt betrayed, hopeless, but none of that showed, and I just wanted to lean against the wall and cry. I’ve never seen a child hurt herself on purpose. Or an adult, either; not violently, just drugs and drinking and smoking and eating—”
“And working.”
“Yes.”
“You were helpless, too.” Ducks were sitting on the river, gently bobbing. “If it were Julia or Elizabeth, you’d have been different.”
LuAnn looked at her.
“You’re right. I haven’t thought of that. I just felt in the way. So I got out of the way. I turned and went down the hall and through the dining room, and didn’t look at anyone. All the girls were standing in the dining room, with Sherri and another woman. I went to the glass room and sat down. Annette and Lisa and Tracy hadn’t come back, and their purses were gone. Roger and Deborah came with Sylvie and walked her through the dining room, with everybody watching. Annette and a woman came from the bedrooms. Annette was carrying an overnight bag, and she handed it to Deborah; then she and the woman stood with the others. Roger and Deborah took Sylvie through the kitchen and outside. The girls were moving tables and putting chairs in a circle, and then I knew they were going to have a meeting now, to talk about it. So I went outside. Roger was standing in the driveway, and Susan was starting the van, and Deborah was holding the passenger door for Sylvie, and she got in with her bag, and Deborah sat beside her. I stood on the steps, looking past Roger at Sylvie. When they backed out, I started to wave. My arm started to; but I didn’t let it. Then they were gone, and Roger stood looking at the road. He folded his arms. He thought he was alone. I’ve always had a crush on him, since I started there—”
“You didn’t tell me that.”
“A crush. I have them all the time. I have one on the guy who delivers springwater.”
“You, too?”
“We
have the same guy?”
“I had an affair with one. It ended my first marriage.”
They stopped and looked at each other. LuAnn said: “That’s why it ended, and you never told me?”
“It was eighteen years ago, and it was dramatic and tragic and all that. Now it seems like another life.”
They turned and walked downriver, LuAnn watching Marsha, trying to see her eighteen years ago. Marsha said: “This is my real marriage. With Bill and Annie and Stephen. Rick and I didn’t last two years. We were young, and it was before AIDS, and I wasn’t used to monogamy. You remember.”
“I was mostly sequential, except in college.”
“I was multiple. Then I was married, and I didn’t want children yet, and Rick was light-years from it. I’ve rewritten that marriage so much in my head that it’s not real anymore. I know I loved him, and he loved me; after that, I don’t know what we were doing. This cute, sexy guy delivered water early in the morning—usually Rick was in the shower or shaving—and I made some moves and he made some moves, and one morning he kissed me. I told him to come back in an hour, and Rick left for work—he had to drive farther than I did—then I called in sick. And stood in the living room and looked out the window for an hour, and bam, on the dot, here came the truck up my drive. After that we got on an adultery schedule. Rick was on the road a lot, and Derek would come to my house after work. It was winter, so it was dark early. He was married, too. He’d show up in his uniform, with all those muscles from carrying water. Here’s what’s odd: everything was fast. I don’t think he was ever with me for two hours. But Rick caught us. He was on the road—in the air, really—selling in Chicago; it was a Tuesday night, and he was supposed to come home Wednesday. But he finished in Chicago a day early, and he didn’t call; he just flew to Boston and got in his car, poor man, and drove home. I heard the door open. Because the bedroom door was open, and if it hadn’t been, he would have walked in on us. But I heard the door—I don’t know how; maybe when you’re cheating you keep waiting for that door—and I told Derek to get dressed and I left him and closed the bedroom door, and ran down the hall just when Rick turned into it, still carrying his suitcase and briefcase, still in his overcoat—”
