When I was a teenager, my friend Julia said one day, We got to look pretty. I shaved my legs for the first time, and it took a long while to stop the bleeding. Us and two other friends got hold of a six-pack, though we didn’t like the taste of beer. We carried the bottles to where some men lived and reclined on their couch, ankles crossed. We didn’t know how to talk to men, so we just smiled, and silence hung above the bag of pretzels they brought out until the men started to laugh, until we laughed with them. They were older and muscular and smelled of smoke and solvents from the repair shops where they worked. One man had a glass eye, said he’d been shot. When he popped it out, we were all possessed by a powerful desire to hold the blind thing in our hands. Julia touched it first and passed it around. She got pregnant right away, and the rest of us followed, and for a lot of years we raised our children, fed our husbands, worked hard at low-paying jobs or at jobs that didn’t pay at all, and learned just how tired a body could be. Those men took me by surprise, but I never looked back, never stopped singing love songs, never longed for a time before men.
Men’s machines still sing to me: revving chain saw, motorboat, log splitter, rototiller, leaf blower, generator humming, cordless drill, rattletrap tractor, power washer, hedge trimmer, biting grinder. Motorcycles with mufflers torn off, diesel trucks chugging in the driveway. You remember those men who came to me after a fishing trip up north and filled my wringer washer with smelt? Come out with us and play, men used to call, like tomcats, and out I went. That old wringer washer was never the same after all them fish. The men who came around never passed up an easy target, so they killed all the rabbits. I meant to sew a blanket from the soft skins to replace my own skin, which I imagined wadded up under the bed in my room, smeared with menstrual blood, stiff with sperm, stretched by pregnancy. For years, I’d warmed myself in the borrowed skins of men. I was good at cutting pelts from flesh, muscle from bone.
After partying all night, a passed-out man might resemble a great cut of meat in my bed, or on the couch or floor, leathery bronze shoulders and a fish-white behind. Men inhaled great swaths of oxygen, exhaled smoke and sweat, so sometimes I could scarcely catch my breath. I remember finding you and your brothers fishing through a man’s wallet like grubby elves. Shoo, shoo, I said, and the men slept on. After your daddy left, I tried to raise you to know men and to not fear them, so you wouldn’t be taken by surprise. I figured that if any of them bothered you, you would make a fuss, the way you made a fuss when I wanted you to get out of bed early and haul buckets of water from the creek when the pipes froze. Of course you were scared of your daddy—he was a fearsome man, and he scared me, too—but you could’ve whined and glared at them other men the way you did at your poor worn-out ma who tried to feed and clothe you with no money. How was I supposed to know there was trouble with the way they pulled you onto their laps if you never told me you didn’t like it? It seemed like you were having fun when they said how pretty you were. You never were the kind of kid who smiled, so I couldn’t tell.
STRANGE TO THINK, watching you wash my dishes, I’ll never stand there at that sink again, never put my old hands in warm soapy water. I always sang old songs as I looked out the window over the septic tank, over the clotheslines and creek. I used to try to get you to sing along about dying for love or waiting for a soldier to return from the war, but you shook your curly head—I guess you never believed in them folk songs, how a man’s love was going to be the reward for the hardships of a woman’s life. After the autumn leaves fell, I saw all the way to the pond, and sometimes when I washed dishes late into the night, I could see past the edge of this property to the rest of the galaxy. I’ve washed thousands of cast-iron pans, a million quart-size canning jars, some of them made of pretty blue-green glass that glowed like moonlight. My back ached sometimes from lugging hay bales and bags of grain, but once I got started, I never rested until I finished, until every dish was washed.
Haven’t had a clothes dryer since mine broke in 1972, so I’ve hung my clothes on the line in all seasons. In winter they freeze-dried, in spring they smelled of pond thaw, and sometimes in summer I’d find them streaked with bird shit. When this farm was thriving, when I was thriving, I used to dress out chickens, used to wire their feet to the clothesline and slit their throats. You thought me hardhearted, but you ate the meat, same as your brothers. Where the blood drained, wildflowers grew, red trillium, ghostly Indian pipes.
Old Mama Cat and I lost our teeth about the same time. She was a purring pile of bones, and soon she’d have found a secret place to die, some bed of moss or pine needles along the creek, but the Mattimores’ pit bull broke her neck. We buried her out there as deep as the frozen ground allowed, and that night your brothers shot the dog and dragged his carcass, half as heavy as a grown man’s, out into the field for the coyotes. Your brothers dug me a new well the next year, on the quiet so I didn’t have to get a permit. Some women might be happy with daughters, but there’s a reason every place in the world the folks cry out for sons.
No reason I should be thinking about that old Mama Cat now, but I remember how she suffered with a new litter every spring, and another in summer before the swelling was even off her teats, something like me having six kids in six years. And I understood why she wanted to go back outside when them tomcats yowled for her. You think I ought to regret drowning all them kittens, but I’d made no promises to the damned kittens.
My pillows are fine, so stop messing. You’re so keen to wash my dishes and fuss with my pillows and morphine pump now, but where were you this summer when the vegetables in my garden shriveled? I haven’t been able to drag a hose or lift a bucket since July. In good years I hooked up the old beer fridge for the overflow of zucchini and cucumbers. Bad years, like this one, I could only watch every damned thing fail to thrive. Where were you this spring when rain was falling through the roof of the chicken coop? Your brother Jack said I should take down the whole building before it collapsed, build a new one. I told him to patch the roof, it only has to outlast me. He poked his knuckle through the soft bluish wood of the ceiling to prove me a fool. Balanced on my walking stick, I told him I was leaving the farm to you so you’d sell it. He slammed his truck door and spun his tires in the driveway.
OF COURSE I fed you kids PBB, but it wasn’t on purpose. It wasn’t me who mixed that fireproof powder into the cattle feed at the Farm Bureau and poisoned half the county. Nobody knew why cows were dying, and I couldn’t throw away fresh milk from my beautiful Daisy when I had kids to feed. Poison filtered through four stomachs could hardly be poison anymore, could it? Daisy stopped eating just before cancer sprang her eyeball from its socket, before cancer filled her like pink foam. Do you remember that loyal cow, waiting for me in the paddock, plodding to her stall to be milked? Years later, when I had cancer the first time, I plodded to my surgery, my radiation, swallowed my chemotherapy.
Women like me couldn’t afford to keep themselves pure like you girls do now. We inhaled gunpowder, spray paint, aerosol wasp killer, smoke from everything that burned. We transported fireworks from Indiana that blew off fingers and stood barefoot in puddles of used motor oil dumped in our driveways. And to clean and soothe our aches and wounds, we went down to the swamp to lie with fish and snakes and bloodsuckers, every slithery thing. The waters barely flowed, silt became slime because of the waste from upstream, and we sank deep into the muck beside the snapping turtles. We didn’t complain about our discomforts because we saw men head down into the man-killing mines, into flammable, smothering grain bins, up onto scaffolding without any safety harness. We saw men crushed under tipped tractors, their arms and legs amputated by augers and cardboard-cutting machines. Men fought over them jobs, so how could we begrudge the men our bodies? Or whatever they asked for?
Men put asbestos insulation in the attic to keep us warm, they drove trucks that sprayed a fog of DDT to kill mosquitoes before they could infect us with the ague—as kids we chased them trucks through the mist, shrieking with jo
y. Lead paint’s against the law now, but it used to stay on walls forever before latex came along to fade and peel. And for crying out loud, nobody told your little brothers to chew the old paint off the windowsills. You say my house is like the house finch nest, a tangle of plastic bits and cigarette butts, Styrofoam and fiberglass, and old green Easter grass. You say an albatross soars like an angel a thousand miles to retrieve bottle caps and syringes and fishing line to feed her young, but I wandered only a few hundred yards to the henhouse for eggs, to the barn for fresh milk, to the garden for vine-ripe tomatoes grown in manure.
I fed all you kids on the tomatoes and string beans I grew and canned and on the meat men gave me: venison, elk, moose that got hit by a truck, even bear they’d shot in garbage dumps up north. They say bear is gamy, but I figured bear tastes how a man would taste. Bears, like pigs, like men, carry disease, so I ground up the meat and yellow fat and cooked the hell out of it, added my high-acid tomatoes and garden potatoes and onions to make goulash and spaghetti sauce and Spanish rice. That’s what I fed my children, and you always held out your plate for another helping.
THE SURGERY TO remove my first cancer was nothing. Such a fuss they made over a tumor the size of a pinto bean! I didn’t see your face behind the mask, I told the doctor as I came out from under the drugs. I wouldn’t recognize you in a lineup of men wielding knives. With morphine, it’s sometimes hard to untangle what’s happened. I hope I didn’t contract a virus while I was lying there open, I told one of the men, my husband or the cancer surgeon or my rapist. My insides exposed like that, I might have caught something that turned into the cancer that’s killing me now. Do not move during radiation treatment, men in masks told me. Lie still with your eyes closed. You say that when Bill Theroux stood in the doorway to your room, you closed your eyes and lay still, and you never opened them until he left. But you say he didn’t have sex with you, so what’s the big deal? I was raped behind the Lamplighter, but I had better things to do than get bent out of shape about ten minutes of my life. I didn’t want to testify in court about my private business, and I didn’t want my name in the Gazette. Your daddy got all pumped up, promised me, I’ll find the guy myself and kill him, but, far as I know, he didn’t even look.
Did I ever tell you the trouble they had finding my appendix? During my first surgery, the doctors, dogged in their masks, kept chasing that traveling organ, dragged my body like a river, and finally hauled it out of me. They made a mess of my belly and then stapled me back together—they might as well have wrapped me in barbed wire like them old spotted horses. I’ll show you the scars. None of my busted ribs left scars. Neither did my rape. No scars from bringing six children into the world, and if there was great pain in giving birth, I don’t remember it, and you can tell people that. I’ve got a tattoo above where my cervix used to be—that’s how the cancer doctors mark you. Don’t feel sorry for me, Sis. My rapist’s surely dead and gone by now, and that old surgeon, too. The radiation treatments for the cancer warmed me up inside, gave me a new lease on life. That’s what I said back then, and that’s the story I’m sticking to.
PEOPLE SAW YOUR picture in the Gazette after you got that big award for teaching at your college, for going above and beyond, it said. The lady from the newspaper called the house, and I was tempted to tell her about the night you were born, how I poured myself a pint jar of homemade wine to calm my nerves and then headed up to the hospital where they shot my spine full of dope, how I then spit you out like a watermelon seed, no trouble at all. Of course, I told the newspaper lady I was proud. What mother wouldn’t be proud? You win awards and make a career, but you can’t let it go after fifty years that Bill Theroux went into your bedroom and I didn’t stop him. You admit he just kissed you and put his hands on you, okay, all over you, nothing more. The man is dead and gone, for crying out loud, and pretty soon I’ll be dead, and you’ll wake up and realize you’ve got your fist clenched around nothing.
You’re a middle-aged woman, too old to hold onto a childhood grudge. I always told you I didn’t remember him going in your room, but I did know, and I’ve been lying here for a long time deciding there’s no sense my taking the truth to the grave. And if we’ve all got to spill our ugly feelings in this life, you ought to know I was mad as hell about it. What did you, a kid, have to offer that man? I had a steak to cook for him. I could listen to his stories, tell him my own. When he played the guitar, I sang along. He played beautifully, and singing along with him was like floating on a cool lake in hot summer after a long day’s work. I think I’ll go teach your daughter how to French kiss, Bill Theroux said to me one time, the first time, I guess. Is that okay? he said. Ask her, I said, and under my breath, you son of a bitch. I kept my back turned, but I heard the stairs creak under him. I washed dishes waiting for him to return, playing records and singing along about women drowned by their lovers and snow-white doves nesting on girls’ graves. I thought his wanting to kiss you was one more test, one more hardship I had to endure. Maybe I lied to you all these years because the thing was a confusion to me. But you got it wrong, Sis, when you said I didn’t care what a man did to you. I didn’t like it, and I’ve been lying here racking my brain about it. Maybe it was the way he asked, so casual, like it was an ordinary thing, like, can I borrow your truck? Maybe that was why I couldn’t say no. Maybe I thought it would’ve been selfish to say, Hell, no, you can’t kiss my eleven-year-old daughter. So I left it to you. At eleven you knew how to chop wood, start a fire in the stove, milk the cow, and strain the milk into bottles and make butter out of the extra cream. You could get your little brothers dressed for school. Surely you could tell a man to leave you alone if that’s what you wanted. I waited in the kitchen, hungry, with the raw steaks, a cribbage board, singing out my sadness—you say you heard my voice upstairs while he did what he did. I waited for you to send him away, to send him back to me.
He was the handsomest man I ever knew, looked like Robert Redford, and with such beautiful hands. And you were so pretty then, with your curly blond hair like mine used to be. When he told me he thought you were beautiful, I thought how that used to be my hair, my freckled face. A girl has to learn a little about men somehow, better just a kiss from a man you knew than all at once with a near stranger like it went with me. You didn’t run away from home after the first time. I figured you must’ve wanted him in there. And when you finally did run away, did that solve your troubles?
You can’t possibly understand, Sis, can you, with your women’s power and women’s rights, how I couldn’t say, Hell, no, you can’t kiss my daughter? It’s strange to imagine them words coming out of my mouth, even now. Theroux was the most elegant man I knew—made your daddy seem like a farmhand—and I loved him as much as I’d ever loved your daddy, and he worked hard tending bar, sometimes sixty hours a week, and he could have gone back to his wife anytime—and when you ran off, he did go back to her.
You should’ve had a daughter of your own. That would’ve been a bone for you to chew on all your life. I guarantee, though, you wouldn’t win any award for raising a daughter. Hell, if you had a daughter, she’d probably admire me more than you ever could, for my toughness and the way I like to laugh and party, for the way I’ve never given up, for my knowing how to break horses and grow vegetables and bale hay, and the way I overlook nonsense and small troubles. If you’d had a daughter, you’d be more forgiving of what people do. You think I’ve failed you, Sis? Well, my ma failed me, too. She let herself get locked in the nuthouse. And you would’ve failed your own daughter if you had one. That’s women’s studies.
AFTER YOU RAN away, I told Bill Theroux how you weren’t really gone, how you must be sleeping in the barn or the tree house, how you came in for food and to use the shower. He searched for you in all the soft secret places, but you were too clever to choose comfort. You didn’t help us with the hay or the garden that summer. Bill came to see me over the years, brought his guitar, but he would never again leave his wife. He always asked h
ow you were doing, was glad to hear you graduated, glad when you got to be a professor, and the way he cared about you hurt me a little every time—he should’ve regretted what he’d done, driving you away. Twenty-some years later, after his wife died, he came to me with his raw loneliness, and I took him in. I thought I’d already paid the price for his company, so I was damn well going to have it.
After we buried Bill next to his wife four years ago, I went down by the Kalamazoo River, watched the fishermen troll for suckers and carp and drink from paper bags. I carried my own paper bag and sat watching the moon, its reflection in the water as blue as one of my old canning jars. Beneath the willows and white pines, the moss and needles made a soft mattress. I thought I might curl up and die, figuring he was the last man who would love me, but mosquitoes bit me, crayfish pinched me. Men baited hooks with crickets and listened to my singing. Over and over, I sang that song that used to make you cover your ears, where the woman visits her lover’s grave wearing a long black veil. We all spent the night together, and in the morning when I was still alive, I realized my life was exactly what it had been, nothing more, nothing less.
Mothers, Tell Your Daughters Page 8
