WIDOW

by Billie Sue Mosiman

  Kay froze. He was the first child she had seen since her own children had died. There had been no children in the section of Marion she was kept in. No children on the bus to Houston. No children at the boarding house, not with all those old women living on their retirement checks. For the first time since the horror of Gabriel's and Stevie's deaths, she faced a child, a boy child who reminded her strongly of her own dark-haired sons. She could not speak or move. She could not swallow or draw a breath.

  She wanted to die.

  A tall woman wearing an orange sundress and an orange headband to match, placed her hands on the boy's shoulders and pulled him toward her into the entrance way. “Oh, I see you're right on time,” she said to Kay. “I've always been able to depend on Severenson for good people. Please come in. This is Andrew. Say hello, Andrew.”

  “Hi,” he said again, giving her a mischievous smile. “My mother isn't in the bathroom now.”

  “Oh Andrew! You'll have to forgive him, he's at that stage where he says anything that comes into his head.” She stooped to admonish the boy. “That isn't polite to tell strangers when mommy is in the bathroom. All right?” He nodded, and she stood to usher Kay inside and closed the door. The house opened out from the tiled entrance into a modern, airy cathedral space with a two-story ceiling where a balcony overhang looked over the living area.

  “Andrew and I will be gone until noon or one. If you finish by then, you can lock the front door from the inside on your way out. I don't have any special things for you to do, just . . . uh . . . you know, clean it up the best you can.” She waved a bejeweled hand around the room at the scattered stacks of magazines, newspapers, two empty cups and saucers on the wood-and-brass coffee table. Kay had lived like this once, privileged, her home more a thing to show off to business partners than a place for living. Her first husband came back to find it wrecked. And it certainly served him right. She wondered idly if this woman ever checked up on her husband's late hours at the office, his “business” trips.

  Kay had not yet said anything, she had not been able to. She kept seeing her sons, holding them, cherishing them, loving them. She saw them laughing, bathing, playing with their toys on the den floor. She couldn't withdraw from the past when the past held her so rigidly in its grasp.

  “Do you think you'll be able to find your way around? The cleaning supplies are in the kitchen on the counter, I set them out for you, and in the downstairs' bathroom, again on the counter so you could find them. All right?”

  Andrew had sidled over to where Kay stood mute near the coffee table and now he took the loose fingers of her right hand into his own. She glanced down at the touch and her smile was beatific. “He's a beautiful boy,” she said to the mother. “Such lovely eyes. Brown.”

  The woman wasn't listening. She had found her purse on the entrance table and the keys to her car inside. She was gesturing Andrew to hurry. “We've got your piano lesson and then we have to meet daddy for lunch. Hurry up now, we don't want to be late.”

  When the front door closed, the latch snicking shut, Kay shook herself as if she were coming in from a rain shower. She didn't know how long she could stand this. She wondered if every child she saw would affect her so keenly, or if it would be just boy children. What about little girls, or babies? Did everyone she might clean for have children? How could she bear it if they did?

  Rage filled her again, coming up from her gut to her torso and finally suffusing her brain until the room turned red. She blinked, unclenched her fists. She made herself walk through the house to the kitchen for the cleaning products. She did a load of dishes in the dishwasher, cleaned the white counter, mopped the red-tiled floor. She had to finish before noon. She wanted out of this house and away from another meeting with Andrew. Next time she might break down and weep. She might lose her job. She might never come out of this as a survivor. Damnit, if she would let that happen.

  Severenson sent her to other homes the rest of the week, but she realized she'd be servicing the one with Andrew in it every Monday, regardless. The four other homes she cleaned did not upset her quite as much. One of them had three teenage girls living in it with their parents. It was a tougher job, but at least she didn't have to fight off waves of nausea thinking about her sons. Two of the houses were occupied by professional couples too young and too work-oriented to think about bringing children into the world. The fourth house had a single mother who seemed to be at work all the time, leaving her three-year-old daughter in the care of an elderly aunt. The little girl tugged at Kay's heartstrings, but not nearly as badly as Andrew did.

  It was Andrew who reminded her too much of her loss, and it was Andrew who made her feel tortured every minute she spent in his home even when he was not there. In his room she would catch herself immobile, staring at his bed made in the shape of a racing car, or she would find one of his Tonka toys on the carpet, and stand holding it like a talisman until her eyes burned. In the boy's closet she could spend an hour touching his little shirts and trousers or holding his pajamas close to her face so she could inhale the baby scent he had not yet lost.

  With her first week's paycheck, Kay started going to an exercise club not far from downtown. It wasn't as good as the Houston Racquet Club or some of the more expensive exercise arenas in the city, but they had enough equipment, and the men didn't bother her as long as she didn't look at them much. One of the employees, a muscle-bound hunk with surfer-blond hair, tried to put the make on her the first time she came in, but she took him aside and whispered, “If you come on to me one more time, if you even raise your eyebrow in my direction, I'm going to the management and report you, then I'll ask for a full refund of my membership fees. They won't be happy with you. Do you fully understand what I'm saying to you?”

  He steered clear of her after that, though he still stole looks her way when he thought she wouldn't notice.

  She had to take buses everywhere she went or sometimes, when it wasn't far, she walked, but she meant to remedy that soon. She had her eye on a used Toyota in a car lot she passed on the way to the diner. If she scrimped and saved, if she remained in the run-down boarding house with the old ladies, if she ate sandwiches two and, sometimes, three times a day, she'd be able to get her body into shape and still save enough for the car.

  She called Charlene at the end of the first month she was out of the hospital. “I'm getting it all together,” she said, hoping she sounded happy. “I have a job, which I hate . . . “ She laughed a little to soften her words. “But this job will afford me the things I need to get out of it. I'm getting a car in another month so we'll have transportation. It isn't much, about ten years old, but it's a Toyota and they run forever. So, how are you doing? Are you all right?”

  Charlene babbled on and Kay stopped listening after ten minutes, but she held the line and waited patiently, glad she had someone who wanted to talk to her. “I'll call you again next month. If they start talking about letting you out, call me at the boarding house. I'll give you the number, okay?” What Kay didn't say was that she hoped Charlene didn't get out until things were more under control. They needed the car. You couldn't get around in Houston without one. The Metro Transit System worked, but it took a lot of time to get anywhere, and the men on it seemed to think they were destined to flirt with every pretty woman they saw. She spent all her riding time brushing off men and giving icy stares that would have shriveled the hottest desire.

  Kay also needed another place to live. She worked out like crazy, every day after work until eight or nine at night. She had one pair of cheap black Spandex pants and top that she bought at the local Woolworth's store. She had to wash them out every night in the hall sink at the boarding house, then hang them in the window of her room to dry overnight. After a month she had saved two hundred dollars toward the purchase of the car, and the muscle tone was coming back in her arms and legs. She stood five-foot-six, weighed a hundred and twenty. Her waist needed a little work, had to get those inches off, so she switched from sand
wiches to salads and cups of yogurt. She still had to have her hair cut and styled.

  Every night when she returned to her depressing room with the peeling cabbage-rose wallpaper and the veneered chest of drawers, she stood looking at herself critically in the strip of mirror nailed to the closet door. With the overhead light on, she examined her face for telltale signs of aging. No wrinkles. No deep crease lines yet. She was blessed with good bone structure that would shield her from looking her age for a few years to come. Her hair was thick and lush, but she worked at it, brushing the shoulder-length tresses a hundred times every night before bed. She washed it with beer and lemon. She used the best conditioners. It was beginning to shine like wet slate rock, and have a bounce of health when she flung her head.

  She sucked in her little round tummy and sighed with despair. Had to get that flat again. Do more sit-ups and bend-overs. Her buttocks had not sagged, driven by gravity earthward—not yet. They rode high without leaving a smooth line sloping to her thighs. She soaked her feet in Epsom salts, rubbed lotion into them, trimmed her nails. She couldn't do much about her hands yet. At any time when they weren't working inside rubber gloves with cleaning solutions, she found them slipping into her mouth where she gnawed at the stubby nails. Maybe if she dipped her fingertips in Tabasco sauce? It was a thought. If that didn't work, she would simply go to a salon and have them put nail-wraps on.

  She had to be perfect. She could not, would not, dared not be a maid the rest of her life. She could not continue seeing Andrew—or any other male children—who tore at her heart, and dazed her with fresh sorrow every time she looked at them. It would kill her. Or cause her to kill someone else.

  It was frightening and awesome in its intensity, but she had trouble being around men now. It had started with the job, the same as her reaction to the children. When there was a man in the house, she fought an urge to jump him, to wrestle him to the floor, and plunge a knife through his heart. Any man, it didn't matter, but usually she felt this sudden craving to destroy when the man was a father of small children. She had less animosity toward the father of the teenagers in the house where she cleaned once a week.

  But still it was there, that feeling of losing something that held the world in check, losing it to the point that she might pick up something and hurl it or smash it . . . or stab it clear through flesh and bone.

  It was crazy, she knew that. But it made perfect sense at the same time. Fathers were irresponsible. They never loved their children as much as mothers did. They were stick figures who moved through a family with the role pulled over their heads, but not their hearts. They could not be trusted. They might do something irredeemable at any moment. Kay suspected all of them of child abuse or incest or hidden motives aimed toward children that involved sexual gratification or violence.

  Once she stood on the stairway leading down from the balcony in Andrew's house and saw his father enter, a briefcase tucked under one arm. He scooped little Andrew up into his free arm and laughed in his face. She stood stock-still, her breath caught tight as if inside a steel cage, while she watched the father carry the boy through to the living room sofa and dump him unceremoniously into the cushions. Andrew laughed, thrilled, but Kay knew in his heart he must have been terrified. So high up! Such a long drop! Such a terrible hazard to endure! What if he had fallen from his father's arms onto the parquet floor and busted open his skull? What if he had rolled from the cushions and fallen into the sharp glass corner of the end table?

  That father was irresponsible and unheeding of his son's safety. Finally, Kay took a deep breath and walked down the stairs one at a time, watching her step, keeping her eyes from the now-tousling father and son in their act of play. She moved past a sideboard where her fingers reached out and slid along a silver candelabra, on to the base of a thick-necked pottery vase painted with winding green vines. She paused, listening to the sounds behind her, the laughter and giggling, but there were possibilities those sounds could change to screams of slaughter. She wanted to yell, “DON'T TRUST HIM, ANDREW! HE MIGHT KILL YOU! HE'S SO BIG AND STRONG, HE MIGHT HURT YOU! RUN FROM HIM WHILE YOU HAVE THE CHANCE!”

  As she stood quietly, fingers brushing the vase, the father took up Andrew again and marched past her into the kitchen. In passing he said, “Hello, Kay, how are you today?” Then he said to his son, “Let's get a bowl of ice cream, whatta you say, champ? You won't tell Mom, will you?”

  Kay turned her back, whipping around so fast her black taffeta skirt swished against her thighs. She ran to the hall closet and grabbed her purse, snatched the maid's silly white hat from her hair, and was out the door on her way home without saying goodbye.

  She worked harder and harder at the health club. They told her she was going to pay, she was pushing too hard, too fast, but she didn't care. It felt good to have pain, to lose herself in it. At night she lay on top of the sheets and stared at the cracked ceiling overhead stippled with shadows from the streetlights. Her back and stomach hurt, her legs, and shoulders, her neck and arms. But she was looking good. Better than she had in ten years. No one would ever know she had been the mother of two children.

  No one would ever have guessed.

  ~*~

  Mitchell Samson walked into the Hot Spot at a quarter after ten on a Saturday night when the place was packed and jumping. He found an empty table close to the men's room. He ordered the Irish coffee and turned his attention to the stage. He'd never seen the place this lively. What the hell could be the new attraction? She must be a knockout.

  Not the girl on stage. That was Babycakes and the regulars knew her. Great and sexy, but no Jezebel.

  He scanned the room and gauged the temperature. It was pretty steamy, and rising. Guys were after the girls who served the tables. “Wanna go out with me after this joint closes? Want to make some money, honey? Want to make it with a real man?” All the old lines, all the old brush-offs. The dancers had to wait on the customers between gigs and they had their hands full tonight.

  He turned his gaze back to Babycakes who was winding up her dance. He hadn't noticed a new girl advertised on the posters in the glass cases outside the club. It had to be that, though. This place never pulled such a crowd, even on a Saturday night. Maybe she was so new they hadn't done any publicity photos yet. Could be.

  Interesting. Word had spread along the street fast. He was in here just the week before and it was deader than roadkill.

  Babycakes walked off stage with her tits swinging, her shoulders squared, and her G-string riding high. Mitchell admired her bravado in the face of whatever young woman had come along to draw the crowd. He put his hands together to clap for her loud and hard. The crowd joined in. Good. The girl deserved some appreciation, that was obvious.

  Could his favorite, Jezebel, have made it word-of-mouth and drawn this mob? Is that who was about to part the curtains and mesmerize them the way she had him? That rankled. She was his devotion. He didn't much want to share her.

  A new song by Prince came over the music system and the men took a collective breath and held it. Mitchell had his cup of Irish halfway to his lips when she walked down the runway like Queen Cleopatra taking her place before her subjects. Walked. She didn't dance out. She didn't slink. She didn't vamp. The platter-player said, “Gentlemen, we are proud to give you SHADOW, the sensation of the nation, the dark side of the wild side. Only the Shadow knows which way the wayward wind blows . . .”

  Mitchell lowered the cup to the table with a shaky hand. He checked to see if his mouth was hanging open and it was. He shut it with a snap, his eyes glued to the stage.

  Shadow did it all wrong and it worked anyway. It worked like gangbusters. The men who had come to see her, even those who were now drunk, didn't pull any stunts. They might have been statues, all turned to stone and gone to heaven. Faces softened, eyes glistened, jaws went slack, and eighty male heartbeats drummed as one, in love. Or lust. Or both.

  She was a dark doll. She moved just slightly to the music, and she never l
ooked at the audience. She kept her long lashes down cast. Her hands roved over breasts and waist, slid down hips and thighs. She took the center pole as if it were a lover, while men ground their teeth and drew their muscles tight to keep from leaping onto the stage to carry her away. Shadow might have been alone in her own bedroom thinking the most exquisitely private, sensuous thoughts for all the attention she gave the room full of men.

  Mitchell couldn't believe his eyes. Her loveliness was something absolute and indisputable. She was a goddess, something come to life from myth. She was a queen, not flesh and blood. She had the movements, smooth but careful, that made the men lean forward toward her. She was of medium height, but not small, perfectly proportioned, the breasts behind the veil of pink nylon round and tilted, the nipples shockingly large. Skin the color of lightly stained birch, flawless, smooth, reflecting a soft sheen like the finest polished wood.

  He watched her long hair sway, the black color so deep it could mirror a face from its surface. He watched her while she ignored the room, and when the song, a long one, drowned in its last note with a wail from Prince, she vanished, the curtains trembling from her passage through them.

  Mitchell blinked. He looked around at the other entranced men. They came to their feet and a thunder rose from their stomping and clapping. He sat perfectly still wondering if he had seen what he thought he had seen. Of all the exotic dancers in this city he had watched over the years, he had never experienced such a loss when she left his sight to disappear behind the curtains.