“Oh, Mama. Why do you have to be like you are?”
But that was just it. Mary was the way she was. Her children relied on that. She wondered how they would manage after she was gone. When Doris had died so long ago, it was weeks before Mary could think clearly and remember what she was supposed to do the next minute and then the minute after that. Even though Doris had shown Mary how to get rid of the chiggers that burrowed under skin or how to add potatoes to bread to make it heavy so it would fill a stomach faster, she had never explained how she had survived the death of a husband and the loss of a child. Parents never told their real secrets. They never let you know how they lived in the spaces between working and cooking and running after children and counting dollars. Mary had never told her children about the dread she felt each night while she waited to fall asleep. She had never told them how she survived each day after her last baby boy was gone, after she’d done the most terrible thing a person could do.
“But Mama,” Ellie said, as if reading Mary’s thoughts. “What are we supposed to do now?”
Mary said nothing, holding her secrets close. She told her daughter not to worry, hung up the phone, and boarded the bus.
• • •
It had been nearly twenty years since she’d read about the photographer’s death. She had seen the obituary in the newspaper. Instead of Vera Dare’s picture, the newspaper had printed the picture of Mary, and for a moment Mary thought she was reading her own death notice. She had felt the loss as if something had been taken away from her in particular, even though, according to the article, the woman had a husband and two sons and several grandchildren who were, no doubt, feeling a sharper kind of removal. Still, there were unhappy things that you lived with so long that you missed them when they were gone. She’d cried when that old Hudson had finally given out, even though it had been unreliable and filled with hard memories. She’d cried the night she’d slept in a real home for the first time after all those years of tents and shacks and backseats. She’d wept for the lock on the door, the key in her hand. She hoped Vera Dare had not suffered, although she knew that probably she had, because most people do. She’d died of cancer just like Mary would die of cancer. Probably Vera sat in hospital rooms and watched the slow drip of medicine move from the plastic pouch down the clear tube and into her body. Most likely she sucked on candies her children gave her not because she thought a ginger lozenge would do any good but because making her children feel useful was worth the lie.
Mary wondered if all the pictures Vera Dare took lived in the photographer’s mind just the way a child does even when you’ve tried to banish thoughts of him, the way a face you’ve forgotten and haven’t seen for so long can come to you when you least expect it. You’re brushing your teeth and you see him looking back at you in the mirror. Your eyes are his eyes that stared up at you while he sucked, as if he was not only drawing milk from your breast but an idea of who he was. You hold a cool peach and feel his cheek in your palm.
As the bus continued its journey, she dozed again, and when she woke and looked out the window, it was as if someone had reached back and grabbed the past by the collar and dragged it forward. The bus sped by so quickly that she wondered, for a moment, whether she had been dreaming of the house with those tiers of oddly shaped windows and that wraparound porch. But when the bus passed the sign signaling that they were leaving Porter, she knew what she had seen. She pressed her face to the glass, watching the rows of orange trees bending at uniform angles in the stiff wind. She stared at the land where she had spent so much of herself. But land was ignorant. It had no notion of what had occurred on it a half century before. It was a sheet of paper on which the stories of thousands of small lives were written over time. And to think that what had happened to her was any more meaningful than what might have befallen another person, or a cow, or an ant—well, there were all sorts of ways people convinced themselves they were above the thick of life, and all of them were wrong. She had avoided Porter for years, tried never even to think of its name. She had convinced herself that if she didn’t acknowledge it, then it would not exist and neither would her longing. But it had always been here. This dirt. Those trees. That house.
When the bus pulled into the Visalia station, she got off. She read the schedule and saw that there would be another one coming through in five hours. The woman behind the ticket counter gave her the number of a local taxi service.
“That’ll be forty dollars,” the cabdriver said, after Mary sat in the backseat and told him where she wanted to go.
“I’ll give you twenty,” she said.
The man looked at her in the rearview mirror. “It’s not a negotiation, ma’am. We charge by the mile.”
“Thirty for the round trip.”
He was about to protest.
“If you’ve got other customers, go ahead and take them,” she said, looking at the empty sidewalk outside the bus station. “But to my mind, thirty dollars is better than zero dollars.”
Once they were back in Porter, she pointed out the house from the highway, and the driver found his way to the service road that ran past the property.
“You want me to pull into the drive?” he said.
“Just stop. Right here.”
He parked the cab on the shoulder of the road. When she did not make a move to get out of the car, he turned around in his seat. “Do you need help, ma’am?”
“I just want to sit here for a minute, if you don’t mind.”
33.
Porter, California, 1935
She didn’t question Charlie when he told her he’d arranged for the kind of doctor who would take care of things. The inequality in the relations between them suggested that she had no say in this matter, and she couldn’t risk losing her job. And what would she do with another child? Her kids grew hungrier as they grew bigger. There were times when she’d stand next to Trevor, realize he’d grown another inch, and something would collapse inside her. Ellie was so thin that she hadn’t yet gotten her period. Other women in the camp told Mary to be grateful that the girl wouldn’t be able to make babies yet, but the unnaturalness was upsetting.
One Sunday, she left the little ones under the care of Ellie and Trevor. She walked out of the camp and down the road to the place where she and Charlie usually met. He did not look at her when she climbed into his shiny DeSoto. When she mentioned the fancy car, he admitted that his mother thought he was out driving with a girl named Naomi.
“This Naomi is going to be your wife?” Mary said.
He didn’t answer.
“You do with her what you do with me?”
“No.”
When they rounded a corner, she saw a grand home set back from the road. The house was painted a pristine white and trimmed the color of raspberries. It seemed that there were more windows in the house than there were walls. Some of them were round, some rectangular; the one at the top of a pointed turret was cut in the shape of a crescent moon. The roofline stopped here and rose up there, as if the house had been built in stages by someone dreaming a new dream.
“That’s yours?” she said.
“It belongs to my father,” he said. “But I live there.”
“It’s where you’re going to bring your wife? This Naomi?”
“I suppose so.”
She looked back at the house, which sat proudly on its tuft of lawn.
“She’ll like that,” Mary said. “Any girl would.”
He drove through town, past the shops that were closed for the day, their awnings rolled back against their brick fronts, past the Huntington Hotel and the grand-looking Adelaide Theater and a billiard parlor whose sign was a ball that doubled as an orange. She saw a sign for a doctor’s office hanging outside a detached building, but Charlie didn’t stop his car. Instead, he drove past the end of the main street and out again into farmland. He turned the car down a bumpy road that ran
through a grove of lemon trees and headed toward a plain clapboard house. Sheets and shirts and men’s drawers hung on a line strung between two trees. A girl stood on top of a tire swing. She eyed the oncoming car as she lazily worked her hips to get up some momentum. Two small boys took turns kicking a ball into the air. Charlie parked the car a short distance from the house. They both sat in silence, listening to the ticks and groans of the spent engine.
“Just go on in there,” he said finally.
“By myself?”
“I won’t be of any use,” he said.
“I don’t have money.”
“It’s already paid for.”
“You’ve got it all figured out, I guess.”
The door of the house opened, and a woman appeared. She cleaned her hands on her apron. Mary’s stomach turned at the thought of what the woman might be wiping away. Charlie stared at his lap.
“Say my name,” Mary said.
“What?”
“Say my name.”
“Mary,” he said.
“Mary Coin. Say it.”
“Mary Coin.”
She got out of the car and walked quickly past the children. Mary felt certain the girl knew what she was there to do.
The woman led her to a room that was dominated by a table draped in a white cloth. Two chairs stood at the end of the table. A man in shirtsleeves stood over a sink, washing his hands.
“She’s here,” the woman said.
The doctor was young. His face was as unlined as a boy’s, and Mary wondered if, in fact, he was a boy playing at doctoring the way Ray played at being a train conductor. He dried his hands with a dishcloth. His palms were pink.
“You’ve done this before?” he said.
“Have you?” she said, but her bravado fell flat. She had no power in this situation. Charlie had most likely found a doctor who had nothing to do with his family, someone who needed the job so badly he could be trusted, or maybe paid, not to talk. “No,” she said quietly. “I’ve never done this before.”
“Take off your drawers,” the woman said.
“Right here?” Mary said.
The doctor rolled up his sleeves and tossed his tie over his shoulder. “Lay out the instruments, please,” he said to the woman.
Mary started shivering. She turned her back to the others and stepped out of her underwear. There was nowhere to put them so she held them. When she turned around, the woman handed Mary a cup and instructed her to drink. Fumes shot straight up Mary’s nose and she gasped. Then she drank the liquor down quickly, feeling it cut against her throat. Her chest widened out with the drink’s heat. She watched as the woman placed strange-looking instruments on a tray—thin, sharp-tipped lengths of metal, a pair of bent scissors and something that looked like a shallow spoon.
“You can get up on the table now,” the woman said.
Mary did as she was told. She was shaking convulsively.
“It will go easier for you if you calm down,” the woman said, not unkindly. “Now, I need you to slide down to the edge.” Once Mary did this, the woman took her legs and put one, then the other, on the top rung of each chair.
“There will be some pain,” the doctor said. “But that whiskey will help.” He picked up one of the instruments from the tray. “At least it will help you forget,” he said.
“What if I don’t want to forget,” she said.
“This isn’t something you want to remember.”
• • •
As she walked toward the car, she had no sense of her body. Something had happened to her in the middle of her screaming, and the doctor’s confusion, and then the woman’s anger as she told Mary to quiet down if she didn’t want to get them all arrested. Something had happened when she pushed away the doctor’s hand, upsetting his instrument tray so that it crashed to the floor. She reminded herself to move slowly so as not to arouse Charlie’s suspicion. She made a few noises of discomfort when she sat down in the passenger seat. It was not hard to pretend; she could still feel the man’s cold, pink fingers on her skin. She imagined Charlie had heard her cries, but he must have assumed things were going as planned.
“So, you’re all right, then?” he said awkwardly as he drove back through the lemon trees.
“You got your money’s worth,” she said.
“Oh, Mary,” he said.
She saw that something had changed in him, that he was deflated, as if in the administration of some kind of obligation to his stature he had discovered he was a fraud. Well, they both were now.
“Just take me back to my children,” she said.
Once again, they passed through town, where people gathered by the open doors of a church. It struck her as an amazing fact of human nature that even while people lost jobs and money, they still clung to their habits, their Sunday strolls, their belief in a terrible God. This was endurance, she supposed, this stubborn repetition in the face of the world making no sense. As they passed Charlie’s home once again, she imagined a child growing up there. If it was a boy, he would be taught to uphold some unexplained code of family honor, to ride through the groves in his truck as if on the back of a fine stallion. He would learn how to level a glare that would keep workers from taking too much water, and he would turn into a man who had no idea who he was, just like Charlie had no idea what kind of man he was. If it was a girl, well, she would be like that Naomi, ignorant of the lies that underpinned her life.
Before they came within sight of the camp, Charlie pulled the DeSoto to the side of the road.
“You can make it back okay,” he said.
“Are you asking or telling?”
“I’ll be leaving soon. We have another farm. My father needs me there.”
“If you’re running away from me, I’m not going to say anything to anyone.”
“I’m not running away.”
She opened the car door and stepped out onto the road. “Well, good-bye then, mister.”
34.
Sickness spread through the camp. There was not a day when one of Mary’s children didn’t have a nose running yellow. Their dry coughs were terrible memories of Toby’s last days, and she had to keep herself from being harsh with them when they complained of aches or pains, her fear congealing into anger. Mary paid a half-wit named Lucille to look after her kids when they were sick. She’d spend the day in the groves worrying that Lucille would not be smart enough to come find her if someone’s fever rose. Despite being near her term, Mary had lost weight and she worked slowly. There were times when exhaustion came over her with such force that she had to stop what she was doing and rest. She carried this new one like she had carried all the others, and the swell of her stomach was unmistakable. She was sure that any day the foreman would give her job to someone else.
The five-o’clock whistle blew. Mary dragged her orange baskets to the end of the row. When the truck finally pulled up to collect the day’s take, she was shocked to see Charlie at the wheel. He had been true to his word, and she hadn’t seen him for months. But now here he was, stepping out of the truck, as clean and golden as she remembered him. Before she could figure out how to hide herself, he noticed her. At first, his face opened with uninhibited pleasure as if he was remembering the way he whispered into her ear while he moved on top of her, murmuring words and half sentences Mary was never able to make out. But as his eyes traveled the length of her body, his expression turned to one of disbelief. James came running over and stood by Mary. Charlie looked at the boy’s dirty face and his dusty clothes that were too big, and Mary could tell that he would consider the child in her belly as just another wretched thing.
She knew he would be waiting on the road for her later that afternoon, so she was ready for him. She didn’t care if he followed her or if he watched her go to the bathroom. Let him know what it was like for her to live and shit and clean herself.
> “Is it mine?” he said.
“It’s mine.”
“I talked to that doctor.”
“So why are you asking me what you already know?”
The shouts of camp children playing games of chase and skip-rope reached them. Why did the sound of a child’s happiness make her sad?
“Why are you doing this?” he said.
“I told you I wouldn’t say a thing about what happened, and I won’t. Now walk away from me before someone sees you.”
He hesitated.
“Do it,” she said. “Go.”
At the end of the week, she went to exchange her chits for cash. The bursar told her to sign her name and then handed her double the amount she was owed.
“That’s not right,” she said.
“If you have a problem with the pay, there are other farms down the road.”
“You made a mistake to my advantage,” she said.
He looked at her like he was trying to search out her strategy.
“This is twice as much as I got last week for not nearly the same amount of baskets,” she said.
He looked at his paperwork. “I don’t know anything about last week. It says here this is what you’re due.”
“I don’t know,” she said uncertainly. She didn’t want to be accused of stealing.
“If you don’t want the money, give it to the next person in line,” he said. “If my accounts don’t balance at the end of the day, I got a bigger problem than a crazy lady doesn’t want her pay.”
She closed her hand around the money. She walked past the long, patient line, looking down to avoid the gazes of the other pickers, certain they would know she had been privileged and why.
The next time she saw him in the groves, he did not acknowledge her, and there was no way for her to tell him to stop what he was doing. And then the bigger she got, the harder it was to work at a decent pace, and she stopped thinking about the fact that she was taking his money for her silence. Her children’s stomachs were full.
Mary Coin Page 22
