I sighed. “It will be good for her to have some time away from him. I don’t think she’s had time to truly heal yet.”
Gussy nodded and reached for my hand. “I am so glad you have such a good friend. She’s lovely. And she’s lucky to have you so close.”
Close
. I thought about how far away I’d felt from Eva all summer. First with her sequestered in the house, and then later hiding from me. Ashamed of what her husband had done to her.
Gussy and I hung the curtains that afternoon, and I felt a small ray of optimism as the sun struggled through the ominous clouds. As the rain cleared.
“We should get these clothes out to dry while there’s still sun,” she said, noting the tub of wet clothes on the floor in the bathroom.
As we clipped the clothes to the clothesline, the leaves casting shadows across our faces and hands, the air smelling clean, I even felt my frustration with the children dissipating. And for one moment as we stood on opposite sides of a sheet, Gussy only a silhouette behind the fabric, I thought about telling her. About just opening up, letting the clouds of my secret part and sharing that brilliant and dangerous sun with her. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I trusted my sister. I loved her. But I was also afraid of the advice she would give. I didn’t want her to tell me that what I wanted, what I loved didn’t belong to me. And never could.
The next three days waiting for Eva actually passed fairly quickly. We spent one day visiting my mother and father. While it wasn’t how I would normally have chosen to spend my time, it occupied me. And the girls loved the farm: the animals and the wide open spaces to run. My mother’s bitterness toward me used to sting but had grown into a dull ache. We endured each other for the children. We drank tea, and she showed me things she planned to order from the Montgomery Ward catalogue. And my father worked.
Back at the lake, I busied myself with getting the camp ready for Eva and the kids: sweeping the floors and changing the sheets on the beds. The children and I went on nature walks, collecting twigs and leaves and flowers, which we strung together and hung from the ceiling over my bed. At the end of the last day, I lay on my back, staring up at the mobile, which spun lazily in the breeze coming through the open window.
Ted’s new job didn’t allow him even a moment away; he was working weekends as well as during the week that summer. And so he had no choice but to allow Frankie to drive Eva and the kids up to Vermont. Frankie would stay with us only the first night, and then he would go back to the city, leaving us alone. My whole body buzzed with happy anticipation, but it was also agonizing, this thrilling, trilling feeling in my body.
All morning I paced as the girls readied the camp for their visitors as well. Mouse gathered a bouquet of wildflowers (mostly Queen Anne’s lace and purple puffs of joe-pye weed) which we put in a jelly jar on the kitchen table. Chessy drew her father a W
ELCOME TO
C
AMP
! sign, which we thumbtacked to one of the exposed beams in the living room.
I, on the other hand, tried to put Frankie out of my mind. Lately Frankie had seemed little more to me than an obstacle to Eva. When I stopped long enough to consider this, I was overwhelmed by guilt. But I was also quickly able to rationalize my behavior, thinking only of the drinking, the anger, the treatment I had endured for the last fourteen years. I was not some broken-down bureau that Frankie could restore. I wasn’t some neglected, abandoned highboy he could rescue and then shove in a corner to look pretty. I was a woman with an intellect, with dreams, and with real desires, wants that were bigger than Frankie. Bigger than this life. He’d never once acknowledged that. He’d never once, in all the years I’d known him, considered that maybe there was more to me than what met the eye. The more I thought about it, the angrier I became, the more frustrated and intent upon pursuing all of the passions that did not include him. With good conscience. With Eva.
But, of course, following these liberating revelations was always the hard, cold hammer of reality. I was a thirty-three-year-old woman with two children, no education, and no real skills, unless you counted my pathetic forty-word-per-minute typing skills or my breaststroke. The house was in Frankie’s name; the car was in Frankie’s name. Even our bank account was not my own. I bristled at the thought of Frankie doling out my weekly allowance, making all of the decisions regarding purchases I made. And Eva was no better off than I, and with more children. The fantasy of running off together was just that: a fragile, fantastical mobile. We were tethered to this world, to our lives, by our husbands’ strings. Flight was an illusion.
“They’re here! They’re here!” cried Mouse, scrambling out of the kitchen nook, where she had been worrying the flower arrangement. She was wearing blue jeans rolled up and two different-colored socks. I had learned long ago that a battle over clothing with Mouse was not one I wanted to wage. Chessy, on the other hand, had put on a clean jumper and had even polished her Buster Browns with an old sock and some shoe polish she found in one of Gussy’s drawers that morning. She came bounding from the living room, dropping the book she’d been reading on the table next to me as she made her way to the back door. I pressed my palms flat against the Formica to steady myself.
Frankie was nothing if not a gentleman (during waking hours anyway, especially with other women), and he hurried out and around the car to open Eva’s door: gallantly, I thought, as if he’d only been hired to deliver her to me.
Donna and Sally rushed out of the car and off into the woods with my girls, and Johnny whooping behind them, his cowboy costume replaced by an Indian headdress he’d gotten for his eighth birthday. Rose was still in the backseat, and I went to her first, afraid that if I went to Eva I would embrace her and not be able to let go.
“Rosie Posey!” I said, looking in at Rose, whose cheeks were flushed pink.
“Billie!” Rose cried, leaping into my arms. The Wilson children had stopped calling me Mrs. Valentine long ago. She buried her hot cheeks against my chest, and I breathed the baby shampoo smell of her hair.
I stood up and Eva came to me, hugging me, with Rose still in my arms, and for a brief moment, I had the feeling that
this
was my family. It was as though I had slipped into some other dimension.
The Twilight Zone
.
We pulled apart quickly, carefully, and I went to Frankie, who had his arms wide open and waiting for me. I could smell beer on his breath when he kissed me, and I glanced toward the open door of the car, and sure enough, there were three empty cans on the driver’s side floor.
“I’ve missed you, Billie,” he said. “The house sure has been empty without you.”
I tried sometimes to imagine Frankie alone in that house. When I dreamed myself away from him, I couldn’t help but picture what we would leave behind. What would Frankie’s days be like without us? Would they be much different? I imagined him making his big breakfasts alone, sitting at the kitchen table and being able to read the newspaper without the children crawling over him, without me jabbering away in his ear. He would go off to work, as he always went off to work, and he would bring his junkyard, Dumpster treasures home without having my disapproval greeting him. He would settle in at night with his bottle of wine and his pork rinds, his
McHale’s Navy
on the TV. No one would turn away from him in his bed. No one would feign sleep instead of making love to him. Would his life really be worse without me? I was starting to think that we might be doing him a big favor. And Frankie was still young. Surely, he’d find a new girl: maybe a customer who came into the post office looking for an Eleanor Roosevelt stamp. Maybe he could find another project, another fixer-upper, someone more willing to be renovated.
I had made a pan of lasagna earlier in the day; it had been more of an effort to kill time, to busy my hands, than it had been to please Frankie. But nevertheless, it was Frankie’s favorite. He had given me his mother’s recipe when we were first married, and I had never deviated. As it heated up in the oven, he took the kids to the beach to swim, and Eva and I stayed behind to prepare the rest of supper, though there was little to do besides toss together a salad. And so we held each other. The feeling of her in my arms never ceased to ease my mind, my worries turning soft and malleable. It was easy to hope when she was holding me.
“Let me get you some tea or something?” I asked.
“Do you have a beer?”
Normally, Eva didn’t drink before nightfall, but this was vacation. I wasn’t going to make a stink about it. She had been stuck in the car with Frankie and the kids all day, after all.
“Let’s go sit out on the lawn,” she said.
Inside the safety of the camp, we could touch each other. We were free here, if only until the kids came back from swimming. I had no idea why she would want to relinquish this delicious freedom. My heart panged in my chest like a spoon in an empty stainless steel bowl.
“Okay,” I said, reaching for her hand, needing assurance that everything was okay. That nothing had changed while she was away. That she hadn’t changed her mind about us. I could feel myself perspiring, sweat rolling down my sides. “It is awfully hot in here.”
She smiled at me sadly, squeezed and then released my hand, and it felt as though the metal bowl had fallen to the floor. I could hear its clanging echo with every step as I followed her out the door to the yard.
I had already arranged our two chairs in the same spot on the lawn where we had sat together two years before. I had fussed over re-creating just about everything from that summer, which felt far away now.
She sat down in one chair, shielding her eyes from the sun and peering across the road and toward the lake where I could hear the sound of our children playing.
“You look good,” I said, for lack of anything better to say. “Healthy.” I nodded, wanting it to be true.
She studied my face, as if gauging my ability to handle what she was about to say. And then it came to me, in one horrific, clanging crash.
Cancer
. She was going to tell me they had found more cancer. I could feel my throat swelling in anticipation of the news. My whole body was trembling despite the oppressive heat. I reached for her arm.
“I’m pregnant,” Eva said softly, looking down at her hands.
“What?”
She nodded, tears slipping down her cheeks; she quickly whisked them away with the back of her hand and then jutted her chin forward.
“No,” I said, shaking my head.
If Eva was pregnant, that meant that she and Ted had made love. That despite the scars and Ted’s aversion to them, despite his disgust, they had been intimate. That something in her had healed enough to let him inside her life again, inside her body again.
I shook my head, looked out at the lake so that I wouldn’t have to look at her. “When,” I said, the word slipping out of my mouth before I could stop it.
“That night, the Fourth of July, after we were at your house. The night that he”—she was struggling to get the words out—“hurt me.”
I turned to look at her, willing her to lift her eyes to me. The night he had hit her? The night he had treated her like Johnny’s blow-up Bozo punching bag?
“What do you mean?” I asked, though I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear the words. I didn’t want to picture myself inside that house, inside that madness, incapable of doing anything to help her.
“It was awful,” she said.
He had raped her. Like some masked man in an alleyway at night. He had taken Eva,
my
Eva, her incisions only barely healed, her body still wounded and tender, and forced himself into her. And worst of all was that he’d left this reminder behind. A baby. Oh, dear God, another baby.
“Eva,” I said. But I had no words to make this better. Nothing to make any of this better.
That night, Frankie, drunk on wine and desperate for my affections, grabbed at me, his clumsy hands squeezing and prodding and plying. His unshaven cheeks scratching my skin, his fingers demanding. Downstairs, Eva and the children slept. And under Frankie, I thought I might suffocate. That under the weight of him, I might as well be dead.
When he left the next morning, I refused to say good-bye. In my mind, he had become no different than Ted with his violence and need, his disregard, his selfish oblivion. As the children clung to him and pleaded with him to stay longer, I disappeared into the camp and busied myself so that I wouldn’t scream. As he drove down the road, waving ridiculously out the open window, and the kids ran after him, making clouds of dust in their wake, I held my breath. It was only after he was gone, after the smell of him had disappeared through the windows that I opened to release him, that I could finally let go of my anger.
The day was hot and sluggish. Because of her surgery, Eva did not want to swim. The children didn’t know what she had been through. She had prosthetics that she stuffed into her old bras, but a suit would have revealed the carefully constructed illusion. And so she sat alone at the shore and watched as I slipped into the cold embrace of the lake. I waved to her, splashing some water her way, but I wasn’t really feeling playful. I wasn’t feeling anything but a longing so deep it seemed to live inside my bones.
That night, outside the open window in the loft, the loons were keening. Eva stood in the darkness of the small room and slowly lifted her thin, cotton nightgown, revealing her body as a magician might, as if this were only a performance, as if I were only the audience to some terrifying sleight of hand. And so I sat on the edge of the bed captivated and horrified and watched, willing myself not to cry.
The fading bruises on the insides of her thighs were in the shape of Ted’s hands: inky silhouettes of his anger. The blue remains of his rage. These shadow hands traveled around her hips and waist, where still they gripped and demanded. They tugged and squeezed, they damaged. They
took
. Her buttocks were like bruised fruit. And around her neck, his hands had left the imprint of a noose.