“Remove the woman.”
“Oh, the woman doesn’t need removing, Simon. The woman is leaving on her own accord.”
I try to run after her, but I can’t. My legs buckle and I fall to the floor.
Outside Minnie shouts, “You come see me, Ellie. I’ll tell you stories.”
HAVE YOU SAID your farewell to your father, as you sent him where he is now? He said you didn’t. He said you just killed him, said Ophelia, said Norah, to Ellie who wasn’t listening. Norah choked from the stench of the white lilies that crowded every vase in the house her husband built. Everyone seems so slow, so immobile, that I sometimes wonder if I’m living amongst statues, said Ophelia, said Norah, while Ellie chased fireflies and insects in the grass. They lived in a home plagued with shadows, old music, and everything they could want but never needed. Norah was often lonely. It had been two weeks since she was laid to unrest, and during this time she realized their home was not dissimilar to the box in which her husband was buried. There were windows, yes, but her view was the undertow; she looked out to see the waves pulling her further under. You will forgive me in time, she said aloud to her dead husband. And just as Norah set out to join her husband, her father burst in with Ellie and said, “Every day I look at the child I’m reminded that she is not the image of you. In fact, she’s the image of me. I gave you my seed and you gave me what? A girl? If only she were a boy. If only she’d grow into something useful.”
“Stop talking,” the mother said.
“I wonder,” her father said, “are you sad because he died, or because you had something to do with it? Does it break your heart to know that when given the choice between you and someone else, you will always, invariably, choose you? What would have happened to you, to our family, had people found out about our indiscretion? Do you feel proud that you seduced your father and bore his child? That dirty little secret you fought so hard to hide, finally let loose upon the world because that God-fearing man you let crawl into your bed planned to go to the police? Things had to be done. In the end, we do what we have to. We do what we must.”
Ellie played hopscotch over the flowers inside the house. “Don’t play inside the house, Ellie,” she snapped. She even hated the sound of her daughter’s name. Ellie. Ellie. Ellie.
Norah’s father picked up the bottle of pills, laughed, and said, “Don’t play inside the house, Norah.”
FLAMMABLE WOMEN
1968–1974
A WEEK LATER I see Tim through glass. He’s on a bus, waving, and it takes everything in me not to shout, “Take me with you.” Before he boards he presses a folded piece of paper into my hand and says, “This isn’t goodbye. This is I’ll see you soon.” He’s leaving for California to live with his crazy aunt Minnie, who registers him in a school that allows him to play the saxophone as loud as he wants to. If you ask me to remember the evening Minnie came for dinner and the aftermath, what remains is my mother whispering in my ear that grief will undo you. It will make you drive to someone’s house and unload lies, as if the unburdening will relieve them of their grief. That night my grandfather found comfort in a bottle of scotch and my mother invited me to pray for Minnie, even though we were a family who lied about our devotion. We were Christians on paper, and I remember a few Sundays praying for a woman who lost her sister at the Pavilion.
IT’S BEEN SIX years since then, and now I wonder if there was a grain of truth to what Minnie said. Mother and Grandfather, a knitting circle of two—did they conspire and plan my father’s death, too?
“Hey. Where did you go?” Tim asks, interrupting my memory.
We’re in bed and my body caves from the weight of his. We’re making love, although love isn’t quite the word I’d attribute to my fiancé. We’re making escape, making safe, but he doesn’t know this. I want so much to love him but I don’t have it in me; it’s as if I’m not physically built to endure it—love, and the magnitude of its inevitable loss. Everyone I’ve loved I’ve lost, so I have a hard time distinguishing the difference between the two.
People were initially suspicious about the match: the son of a woman who died working for our family. Was this our penance, a plea for forgiveness given too late, or was this his retribution, revenge served cold? However, the talk died down when everyone learned of the minor wealth Tim accumulated in Sacramento—real-estate speculation—and my mother, already panicked over my advancing age, settled for a man, any man, who was able to place a respectable ring on my finger. My mother rules over our small town by default. She’s like the china you hide in glass cabinets. Over a series of endless show-off-the-ring lunches—where I suspected I might only survive by burning my eyes out with a blowtorch—my mother regaled everyone with stories about Tim’s self-made position as if I were marrying it instead of the man. She spoke of the small house in Carmel that Tim purchased for the two of us. A shabby cottage with a porch, a garden the size of our house, and some chickens—all attached to a small shop where Tim plans to sell the organic food we’ll grow. When he showed me photographs of our new life—the life that will begin after we return from our honeymoon in Fiji—as much as I want it, need it, part of me knows I’ll never leave this house.
“I’m right here,” I joke now, in bed. “Can’t you see me? We’re not even married and already I have to manage the side effects of your old age.”
“You’re here but you’re not. You know what I mean,” Tim says, pressing his nose against my cheek. “You’re nervous about tomorrow. That’s it, isn’t it?”
“About you, us, the vows and white dress? No. About everybody else? Yes.”
“Forget it, then. We’ll get our clothes and sneak out of the house. Get in the car and go.”
“If only it were that easy.”
“It is that easy, Ellie,” he says, and he believes it. To Tim, you can leave and take the love with you. His certainty is palpable. “Do you want to go? We can go.”
There is so much goodness in his face, it makes me want to cut myself open and let him in, all the way, but I don’t. It would be like dumping Alice in the Inferno instead of Wonderland. Letting Tim in would be akin to sitting a child in front of a horror movie and telling her, Don’t blink. “No,” I say. “I’m right where I need to be, with you.”
“Cassidy will be there.”
“The last wedding she went to she set the bride’s dress on fire. I don’t think Harper ever recovered.”
“It was an accident. Completely unintentional. Cass wouldn’t harm a fly.”
“I found her asleep, wrapped up in the dress, holding a cigarette, Tim.” We laugh. “Remind me to keep her away from anything flammable.”
“I’ll carry a fire extinguisher down the aisle if I have to.”
“Now that’s the man I love.” We resume our love/escape-making, and then fall asleep in one another’s arms like children. In the dark, the band of my engagement ring glints. This is the light, I think. This is it.
Come morning I watch Tim stir in his sleep and think, I want so much to love you. I want us as we were: two teenagers in band class watching kids play in the grass. If I close my eyes, right now, I can see that spring before Delilah disappeared and his mother died. Light breaks through the trees and children get lost in the street and find their way back again. A girl shouts, “You’re IT!” Watch the children run as fast as their miniature hearts can beat, as swiftly as their legs will carry them. Before the blue hour, before the sun settles along the horizon, I sneak into my mother’s car and play the radio as loud as I can. My bare feet sway on the dashboard of my mother’s car and I pretend we’re driving, counting headlights on the highway. I pretend my mother is a woman she never was—a woman who sings bad songs off-key, who colors outside of the lines; I want her to get in a car and drive. I pretend to hear her laughter and I feel it in my heart. I want someone’s childhood again, scraped knees and ice cream melting on the lips. Children create these magical worlds that adults find ways to ruin. I want the before-the-ruin, to feel the heart a
s a colossus, to bury myself in the forest that was my mother’s hair. I want all of it before I realize that love is impossible, before I learn that black and white will never burst and bleed into color, that life is what we smother until there is nothing left. Until I become what I am now—a weaker version of Norah—a woman whose heart breaks, is broken, only to discover that there’s nothing left in her to break.
Downstairs I hear Norah banging things—her signal that we should wake. My mother always hated being the first one up in the house, alone in the cool quiet of morning. None of Grandfather’s nurses to admonish, no one with whom to gossip—solitude frightened Norah because it reminded her of her death. Death is the great equalizer, the supreme silencer of small talk, and what would Norah be without her finger sandwiches, daily intrigues, and money? The day I told her about my engagement, she said, “He’s not what I wanted for you, but at least you won’t die alone.” I responded, “Look on the bright side; at least you can curl up with your father’s money and an almanac.” My mother smacked me across the face and said, “What a mouth on you, Ingrid.”
Sometimes my mother forgets. Sometimes she remembers.
Norah bangs a plate on the table. Throws flatware in the sink.
One day I too will be strong enough to wreck things.
We’re in a fast car and Cassidy drives with one hand on the wheel while the other adjusts the mirrors, opens and closes the glove compartment, rolls the window down and up—it’s impossible for her to keep still. I watch the road shimmer, unveiling itself in degrees. This morning I read an article in the paper about a teenager in California who stabbed thirteen of her classmates with a kitchen knife because, she explained, “I don’t like Mondays.”
“It’ll be another hour,” Cassidy says. “You sleep while I drive.”
“She told me not to scream. Save it for the bedroom,” I say.
“You know you have this habit of starting a conversation from the middle. Let’s rewind back to the beginning. Who told you not to scream?”
“My mother. This morning. And then she got me a scrip for Valium.”
“How fifties of Norah.”
“Say something nice, Cass. I need to hear something nice.”
“Something nice.” Cassidy laughs. “What’s wrong with you? You’re marrying into the Garden of Eden. This is the against-all-odds story. This is the nice boy who played the sax. Why are you acting like this is some long walk to the gas chamber? Should I break out the harmonica and play sad songs?”
“Nothing’s wrong with me. I’m happy, perfectly content.”
“It’s the sex, right? I told you to ball him before the wedding night. No one needs the stress of bloody sheets and faked orgasms.”
“We’re not discussing this,” I say. I have this habit of pulling at my hair. It’s not a yanking, more like a desperate tug, and pulling out a clump thrills me. Tim swatted away my hand the moment he saw a tug, and for a while I stopped the tugging. When Tim first met me all those years ago in band class, he called me “impenetrable,” but he was persistent and fell in love with me anyway. Even after he moved away. Even after we found one another at Berkeley. We swore we would never go back to Nevada; rather we’d start new lives in California. We’d make our own history.
“There’s a lake just over there, behind the trees. We could go for a dip. Have a little smoke.” Cassidy holds up a joint, an invitation.
“I’ve got five hours. They let me out. Time served on account of good behavior.”
Cassidy cuts the engine, lights a joint, and we pass it between us, taking long, measured inhales. “Let’s roll,” she says, bits of her long hair tangled in her mouth. She smells like meatballs, always, even though she’s a vegetarian. That’s not the kind of meat I need in my mouth, she often jokes at formal dinner parties, creating the kind of silences that make me love her more.
“You smell like meatballs,” I say.
“I fucked that guy last night. The one from school.”
“But you dropped out.”
“Good thing I did, because you know what he gave me at the end of it, right as I’m pulling on my pants? A five-by-seven of his cock. All color, blown up to scale—the real deal. Wild, right?”
“You threw it away,” I say.
“Are you kidding? It’s in the glove compartment. I don’t need to trip; I’m already having flashbacks. Ellie, it was like a wall of flesh coming at me.” Cassidy’s eyes are wide and bright, a deep green under the curtain that is her hair. I envy her this—hair that is unkempt, cut with her own hands. A month ago Cassidy, drunk, shouted outside my window, “I got bangs!” “What that woman needs is some self-control. Restraints,” my mother said. “Women need to know their limits.”
Intrigued, I pull out the photo, study it, and say, “That’s not a penis, that’s a Mack truck. Why would you keep this?”
“Hope,” Cassidy says, and we explode into laughter.
“Tonight won’t be the first time,” I say. “We’ve slept together before. Satisfied?”
“Innocent Ellie, not so innocent. I like,” she says. “I like this a lot.”
“It’s happened,” I say to myself. “I’ve made him my own.”
“Home?” Cassidy says over the engine. “What about home?”
We run through the trees down to the water like we’re fifteen again, when Cassidy nicked red lipstick from her mother’s vanity and we spent an afternoon puckering our small mouths. When I came home, my mother smacked me, hard, and rubbed off the lipstick with the back of her hand. Back then everyone called Cassidy spirited, she was a rich girl who lived in a big, empty house replete with paintings of dour spinsters and rugs from the Orient. The house is still empty and Cassidy hocked a rug to a buy a car, some smokes, and a trip farther west, which she refuses to talk about, except to say that things “got pretty fucked up, really fast.” Everyone calls Cassidy an undertow, but I don’t mind this. I wouldn’t mind sliding in and under.
I live in Nevada; I’m trained to breathe underwater and survive in the desert.
The sky is cloudless. The waters recede. Nothing would dare interrupt two women on the verge.
“Go on in,” I say, holding up a book, rattling it. “I’ll watch our stuff.”
“You like to watch?” Cassidy teases, lowering her bikini to a point where it’s dangerous.
“Funny girl.” Only now do I notice Cassidy’s T-shirt, which reads, “In Cock We Trust.”
“So if you’re getting balled, what’s with the sad face? Is Tim putting your feet to sleep? I always thought the nice ones were craftier.”
“You had to take it there, Cass.”
“The extreme makes an impression. Maybe it’ll make you realize that you need to run, Ell. I’ve been mopping up your sadness since day one. Tim’s a sweet guy but he’s not your way out. You’ll live in that house and end up a repeat of Norah.”
I thought about Delilah Martin: I’m scared that she’s going to make you crazy. I repeat to Cassidy what I said to Delilah: “Already there, baby.”
“I’m giving you a way out.”
“How? How is getting in a car and driving who knows where with no money, out? Out is not in my plan. It’s not even on the fucking map.” I rake my hair with my hands, depleted. Finished, last call, boxed in, no way out.
“That’s Norah talking. You make your own plans. Think about what I’m saying.”
“This coming from a woman who carries a picture of a man’s cock in her car,” I laugh, wipe tears.
“Hope, sister. Hope.”
Before Cassidy leaves and breaks into the water, she teases me. “Imagine if I don’t make it back.”
Today of all days this threat frightens me, holds a weight it normally wouldn’t, but then I realize that Cass would never settle for a meager curtain call. Hers is a plane hurtling into the ocean, a great machine crackling and hissing with black fire. Wings floating and somber men narrating the six o’clock news while we clink our forks on dinner plates and refill
tumblers with gin, neat, to the brim. Cassidy would never go quietly.
“You’ll make it back; you always do,” I say.
“I guess that’s my trip.”
Cassidy treads water, waves at boys on a boat. I watch my friend swim toward the boys, her body inching closer, and they lift her up and onto their boat. It’s a small dinghy, a scrap of wood and a prayer, but Cassidy doesn’t seem to mind. For an hour Cassidy drinks and smokes with the boys, and they inch closer, start rubbing her back, and suddenly I’m furious that my last day of freedom is being spent watching my best friend spring free.
“I’m pregnant,” I say to myself, out loud. Once spoken, the words feel permanent, regardless of whether anyone has heard them. Looking down at my stomach I can’t help but think that I am choosing to build my own prison; I am the warden of this body, my small but growing penitentiary. This body will never be in that water with those men; it’ll be beneath Tim, always, smiling for the camera. The body will be a repeat of Norah. The body will never move to California.
I’m fine, really.
Clothes hurled overboard. Liquor poured on Cassidy’s back. I crawl down the green to see skin. How one boy grabs her hair while the other cups his hand under her chin. My mother is right—men are forever lunging for things.
Suddenly I’m ravenous, starving, and I gather my things, run up the hill and through the trees to the car. Click the key, fire the engine, and take it down the road. Drive the car to the only place I know—home.
Another key, another door, up the stairs and through another door into the room where all I can see is white for days. Tulle and silk, oceans of it, cover the floor.
“You’re back early,” my mother says.
I turn to my mother, take her by the neck, pull her in, and kiss her on the mouth, hard. My mother shrieks at first, recoils, but then her body falls slack, allows the kiss, the violence of it, to settle.
Follow Me into the Dark Page 12
