Although Twolly finally sees the necessity of providing women with certain information before they need it, she doesn’t think it’s appropriate that I should be the messenger. Of course, I disagree. Who better than another woman to share such intimacies? Look at what doctors have done to our grandmothers and mothers—quick with knives and electrical curative devices. What do they know? No matter what the law says, what right do they have to give advice only to those whose bodies are bound in holy matrimony? By then, isn’t it too late?
When I first told Andrew what I was doing, he remained quiet for several moments. He gave me a paternal look and said that he wished I wouldn’t. Andrew agreed with my intent, although he didn’t approve of the methods. He claimed he would personally defend me in court, if he could do such a thing, but that the ramifications were too great no matter the principles I held so dear. I was handing out material that was illegal to even mail. I was telling women things only doctors are supposed to discuss. And above all, it was indecent in the opinion of most people. I introduced him to Mrs. Delacourt, hoping that would assuage his fears. The two most politically minded people I knew gravitated into an immediate repartee over lemonade and strawberry cake. He liked her, although he didn’t want to. With a tone of admiration, Andrew called Gertrude an imposing figure.
Gertrude and I do our best to protect ourselves and the other women. Through Gertrude’s special connections, word spreads about hygiene classes for women. She opens her own home to them—a tactical maneuver. No dark rooms or alleys that invite suspicion; instead, a respectable home in a respectable neighborhood, the least likely place in the world. We do, however, have the gatherings late in the evening.
The parlor where I once eavesdropped has become a den of rabblerousing once again. I didn’t ask her to keep this a secret from my mother, but I know that she does. My mother has never confronted me.
I hold a Boyless Party every couple of months. Somehow, through a network of whispers, women—mostly working girls and poor mothers—discover the location. At first, only one or two women came. Now, the gatherings include five or more. Gertrude has some way of ensuring a small crowd.
The front porch light is always off. The women sneak into the yard and come through the back door. I greet them and point them through the kitchen toward the brightly lit meeting place. The parlor’s unusually thick drapes block all light to the street. A passerby couldn’t guess that several women settle into the room with hats pulled low near their faces. If the guests say anything at all, the girls speak in nervous, staccato sentences. That is, until Gertrude enters with a rolling cart filled with tea, coffee, and nibbles from the best French and Italian bakeries in town.
I begin my talk with a little game of catch first. The ball is a rubber inflated within an inch of its life. This makes the girls laugh, even the ones who refuse to touch it, and once the tension splinters, they are ready to listen. Anatomy first—quality medical-school posters showing the mysterious organs hidden behind our belly flesh. Some take notes on paper scraps from their handbags, others borrow the tablets and pencils Gertrude leaves in the room. Most listen intently. A rare cough breaks the silence while I continue my talk:
“You must learn where your clitoris is.” (I point to a giant diagram of the external female organs.) “It’s a critical key to satisfying relations. A very famous psychologist claims mature women should not only achieve but also prefer vaginal orgasms. When you find the right spot, you be the judge of how much he understands about female anatomy.
“You can buy rubbers and suppositories to kill the sperm at most drugstores. The vulcanized rubbers are stronger. Men last longer with those. Yes, I mean, during the act.” (A box of these items makes its way around the room for inspection.)
“There are recipes for various douches that you could try, but they must be used right after the act.” (I hold a stack of pamphlets.) “However, unless you plan to sling a douche bag over the shower curtain bar, I recommend the other methods.”
“Pessaries fit over the neck of the womb. Advertisements state that they are used to correct a prolapsed uterus. That’s not the only purpose. The rubber pessary blocks the male fluid from entering the uterus, especially when coated with a special jelly before insertion.” (I share another box full of examples.) “Diaphragms are similar to pessaries but have a spring hinge that folds so they can be properly placed. They are not yet readily available here. You must be fitted by a doctor and taught to use them.”
“If you haven’t married yet, get a fake wedding ring. Most doctors won’t tell you a thing if you don’t have a husband. They wouldn’t want to break a precious Comstock law, now would they?”
At the end, the bravest ones ask questions in front of the group. Is it true there is a safe time each month? Why does the bosom become so sensitive? Does it hurt? Is this a venial or mortal sin? Occasionally, a woman stays behind with an inquiry the rest don’t need to hear. At these times, Gertrude sends me out with dishes to wash. There are connections in the city that it’s best I can’t name. My purpose, she says, is to ensure that no woman becomes so desperate in the first place.
WHATEVER THE FANATICAL cleanliness had done for Amy no longer worked. She needed a new distraction. She called several members of her family to ask if they had photographs she could borrow to scan. Amy had promised her Grandma Sunny that the family snapshots would all be archived in some way, and she was going to keep that vow.
There wasn’t nearly the crowd at Twolly’s that Saturday as there had been for her birthday. A few boxes and albums of snapshots had been left at the house for others to sort. After an early lunch of sandwiches and salads, the small group sat at the dining room table to go through what had been delivered. Amy’s uncle Stephen and her mother Nora sat together on one side. Twolly’s granddaughter Julie, without her four little monsters, sat on the other.
“Okay, everybody,” Amy said from the head of the table, “I’m trying to get this into some kind of order, by decade if possible. If there’s a date on a picture, great. If not, take your best guess. I didn’t want to mix up everyone’s pictures, so use the labeled envelopes.”
The room was bright with laughter from the moment photographs started passing among their hands. They enjoyed unearthing forgotten stories, reminding each other of fun they’d had. Twolly’s memory was unusually sharp, although a person’s name occasionally escaped her.
“Oh, here’s one of Mom and Amy,” Stephen said.
Amy took the photo from her uncle. Her seven-year-old face puckered tightly in the foreground. Behind her, Sunny laughed. Her waving chopsticks brushed a fan of yellow on the still frame.
“Sweet and sour squid. I can still feel the texture in my mouth. That’s the only weird food favorite of hers I never developed a taste for. Who took the picture?”
“My oldest. Here, see if there’s more in the pile,” Stephen said.
There were several other snapshots from that day, but the remaining ones were odd. No people, only shots of a backyard. Few mature trees dotted the landscape. They were all trimmed dramatically. There was no limb closer than fifteen feet to the ground.
“Your son captured Poppa’s pruning skills.” Amy frowned as she pushed the photos back to her uncle.
“Time for coffee?” Nora asked.
Wood groaned and fabric whispered as they stood up to scatter across the house. Everyone moved into the kitchen. The vacuum seal on a coffee bag gasped open. The scent of dark roasted beans drifted through the dining room.
Amy returned with a glass of milk and homemade pound cake. She began to sort through her great-aunt Twolly’s two boxes, which were full of paper slips, postcards, and photos. Twolly had assured Amy that there was more to see, but it was separated and spread throughout the house. This was no surprise. In college, Twolly’s dorm room had been a piggy short of a sty.
My dear old friend’s snapshots were much older than the rest of her family’s. The sepia tones captured shadows in a way that color photography
never could match. I thought of Andrew’s secret photographs of me, the curves of my body so much smoother because of the way he made light cascade on my flesh.
I looked over Amy’s shoulder as she shuffled through the pile. I recognized Sunny as a little girl. She smiled wide and took the center at the front of any group shot. Twolly stood with her hands tightly clasped at her waist.
Amy peered closely at one of Sunny as a young woman with a man dressed in an army uniform from World War II. Their arms were wrapped tight around each other, and they looked into the other’s eyes, not at the camera. Their pose was unusually intimate, nothing like the images I’d seen of women tucked under the awkward arms of men. Amy twisted her wrist. The date on the back was April 1942. That photograph caught a moment before a good-bye. Amy held her breath.
Back in the pile, the photo swept under a wave shifted by Amy’s hands. The next one that surfaced to her attention was another of Sunny from the early 1940s. She held a child in her arms who wore a military dress hat too large for his head. The face was vaguely familiar, a baby Stephen. That one was thrown back as well.
Amy went to the other box and fished deep under the overlapping layers of paper. These were in color, ebbing through Amy’s childhood and adolescence. She flicked through them frantically. She saw herself with cousins and her brother, with grown-ups who seemed to stand guard above her. The depth of her breathing showed she was anxious.
I recognized Jem the instant Amy nipped the shiny paper in her fingertips. His shaggy, clean hair hovered near his shoulders. He had a sincere smile. Amy’s chin was turned toward him, but she looked as if she were slowly pivoting her head to face the hidden photographer. Her smile wasn’t for the camera, though. It was for Jem, soft with adoration.
Amy breathed sharp, as if she’d caught his scent.
“Oh, sweetheart. What a precious picture.” Nora stood behind her. “His hair made me nostalgic for the sixties.”
“I know, Mom. Excuse me. I’ll be back in a second.”
She rushed upstairs. Amy dashed through Twolly’s bedroom and shut herself in the bathroom. Sitting on the closed toilet, she drew her knees to her chest and ducked her forehead down. She inhaled hard, and her shoulders trembled noiselessly. The essence of Jem hovered around her like a cloud from a sudden summer storm. After a few minutes of tears, she reached for a tissue. The door swung open.
“Oh, excuse me.” Twolly ducked behind the door. Then, as a second thought, she peeked in.
Amy wiped her face on her shoulders and jumped up to flush the toilet. “That’s okay. I was done anyway.” Her voice was a warble.
Twolly stepped inside. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m fine.”
“I have my glasses on. Let’s go in my room. Just the two of us.”
Amy followed her out. Twolly locked her bedroom door, then sat in a dainty slipper chair. “I miss her, too, honey.”
“It’s not that. Well, not just that.” Amy pulled at the edge of her shorts. “If I ask you something, do you promise to be honest?”
Twolly’s milky brow creased above her serious eyes. “Yes.”
“Did Grandma truly love Poppa?”
“Of course she did. What kind of question is that?”
“I don’t know. I was looking at a picture of her with her first husband,” Amy began, her inflection clearly indicating that she’d known this fact all her life, “and it made me think of how I remembered her with Poppa Fin. They always seemed distant. She didn’t seem, I don’t know, affectionate with him.”
Twolly grinned a little. “Our generation didn’t paw each other like yours does.”
Amy scowled at her. “No, that’s not what I mean. It’s as if something was missing for her. Did she settle for Poppa?”
“My baby sister settled for no one. You have to understand, honey, times were different. Those war years tore out people’s hearts. That’s something you won’t read in history books. For every boy who died over there, someone back home missed him in a way that nothing could fix. No one could fix. Sunny grieved over—oh my goodness, what was his name?—why, I can see his face, but his name—”
“Mitchell.”
“Yes, of course. My sister grieved over Mitchell for years before she was ready to marry again.”
“So why did she choose Poppa?”
“Plenty of reasons. He came from a good family. Our fathers were business acquaintances. He was well educated, sincere, handsome. He was protective”—Twolly noticed Amy’s expression—“although he might have taken it too far at times. Sunny felt safe with him. He was a good provider. That meant something once. They had things in common. They shared the same values.”
“How did she deal with losing Mitchell?”
“She had her tough times. She lived with us when he went into the service, then afterward. My children were still very young. Stephen was a baby. When that telegram came, well, you think the shock would leave you speechless, but she fell apart on the spot. It was even worse for her because there was no body to bury. She obsessed about that, about the way he died, all in pieces. You know, she had begged him not to enlist. As an only son, he could have been deferred. But Mitchell, he had principles.” Twolly wiped her lashes.
“They were wonderful together, Sunny and Mitchell. He was so respectful of her, a gentle man, and she thought he was an angel. For months after he died, she went through the motions of life. She knew when to smile, when to laugh, but there was no heart in it. Slowly, she decided to be grateful for the time they’d had together. She worked hard to remember their happiness. By the time she met Fin, she was tired of being alone. He was a good, decent man.”
“Did Grandma ever talk to you about what it was like having that first baby, Mitchell’s baby?”
Twolly squinted at her suspiciously. “No. She worried most about him not having a father, I know that. And Fin did his duty. He was a good father. And Stephen was a comfort for her, really. He got her through those months when her husband was at war, then through those years after he was killed. She always had a piece of Mitchell in Stephen.”
Amy bit the inside of her cheek. “Did she ever regret having him?”
“Of course not. What kind of question is that?” She got up and sat next to Amy on the bed. She placed her thin hand on her great-niece’s knee. “What’s the problem, Amy?”
“I guess I’m trying to work out who they were. As if I just realized I barely knew them at all.”
“Baby, if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that people are full of surprises, no matter how long you’ve known them. All you have now are your memories and those of whoever is left. What’s that saying? The dead tell no secrets?”
“The dead tell no lies.”
TWOLLY LIVED in her parents’ home in the same room she had as a girl. Her double bed, unmade of course, was topped with a stunning white quilt that was stitched together with rows of flying birds. A thicker, more homespun quilt lay in a pile on the floor. Her pillows were arranged in a horseshoe so that she had something to cling to no matter how she turned in the night. All of her furniture was only a few years old and very expensive, proof that her daddy had struck it rich enough to be almost garish. Twolly crowded her solid bird’s-eye maple nightstand with a lamp and books bound in leather. The armoire stood open with dresses and coats dancing wildly from their wooden hangers. A trail of shoes and hatboxes led to her vanity, which was covered in scarves, face powders, bottles of perfume, hairpins, and stray candy wrappers.
The mirror above the vanity shimmered.
I had been dead almost five months. It was the middle of December. I had adjusted to seeing my own image again, my form a shapely haze of light, an interaction between what I was and the silver of the looking glass. Seeing a photo was entirely different, a jolting reminder of the life I didn’t forget. Twolly had a snapshot of the two of us on a seesaw tucked into the frame of the mirror. The presence of the photo made me think she missed me, at least thought of me now and t
hen. I was comforted that I had not been forgotten—or shut away from her memory.
I spent a week with Twolly. She seemed restless, although she was busy all the time. Her mornings were spent reading the local newspaper and writing long letters. She watched their housekeeper set the table for the noon meal and ate slowly as she listened to her mother’s gossip. There were afternoon visits for coffee with lady friends who were her age, several years married, and in various stages of pregnancy or postpartum. Twolly absently patted the little ones who were drawn to her whimsical brown eyes. Before supper, she played checkers or worked crossword puzzles with her youngest sister, Sunny, then eleven years old. Her father was home to eat with the family on those nights. A few moments of conversation were devoted to Twolly’s search for a husband. On two separate evenings, two different young men came to sit in the parlor with her. Twolly was cordial, but they bored her. Neither could have sensed it, masked as her indifference was by her manners.
After her bath and a generous slathering of skin cream, she crawled into her unmade bed and read for an hour or two. Her enormous alarm clock was silent. There was no reason for her to measure time, no reason to get up before her internal rhythms stirred her conscious.
On the second to last night I was there, Sunny burst into Twolly’s room holding her hands open. “Sissie, it broke. Fix it, please.”
“What broke?” Twolly didn’t look up.
“The pretty necklace you made for me.” Her cotton nightgown swished as she squirmed within it. I smelled Ivory soap, peppermint, and tree bark.
Twolly went into the cedar chest at the end of her bed and pulled out a wooden box I remembered well. Inside were her jewelry-making tools and supplies. She returned to her bed and tilted the bedside lamp’s shade to cast more light near her. The chain of Sunny’s necklace was snapped into three pieces. The topaz stones below a delicate silver pendant had not been damaged.
The Mercy of Thin Air Page 12
