God Help the Child: A novel (7 page)

Steve and Evelyn's house seemed to be a converted studio or machine shop: one large space, containing table, chairs, sink, wood-burning cook stove and the scratchy couch Bride lay on. Against a wall stood a loom with small baskets of yarn nearby. Above was a skylight that needed a good power-cleaning. All over the room, light, unaided by electricity, moved like water—a shadow here could be gone in an instant, a shaft hitting a copper pot might take minutes to dissolve. An open door to the rear revealed a room where two beds, one of rope, another of iron, stood. Something meaty, like chicken, roasted in the oven while Evelyn and the girl chopped mushrooms and green peppers at the rough home-made table. Without warning they began to sing some dumb old hippie song.

“This land is your land, this land is my land…”

Bride quickly dashed a bright memory of Sweetness humming some blues song while washing panty hose in the sink, little Lula Ann hiding behind the door to hear her. How nice it would have been if mother and daughter could have sung together. Embracing that dream, she did fall into a deep sleep, only to be awakened around noon by booming male voices. Steve, accompanied by a very old, rumpled doctor, clumped into the house.

“This is Walt,” said Steve. He stood near the couch, showing something close to a smile.

“Dr. Muskie,” said the doctor. “Walter Muskie, MD, PhD, LLD, DDT, OMB.”

Steve laughed. “He's joking.”

“Hello,” said Bride, looking back and forth from her foot to the doctor's face. “I hope it's not too bad.”

“We'll see,” answered Dr. Muskie.

Bride sucked air through clenched teeth as the doctor sliced through her elegant white boot. Expertly and without empathy he examined her ankle and announced it fractured at the least and unfixable here in Steve's house—she needed to go to the clinic for an X-ray, cast and so on. All he could do, or would do, is clean and bind it so its swell wouldn't worsen.

Bride refused to go. She was suddenly so hungry it made her angry. She wanted to bathe and then eat before being driven to another tacky rural clinic. Meantime she asked Dr. Muskie for painkillers.

“No,” said Steve. “No way. First things first. Besides, we don't have all day.”

Steve carried her to his truck, squeezed her between himself and the doctor and took off. Two hours later as the two of them drove back from the clinic she had to admit the splint had eased her pain, as had the pills. Whiskey Clinic was across the street from a post office on the first floor of a charming sea-blue clapboard house, which also contained a barbershop. Windows on the second floor advertised used clothes. Quaint, thought Bride, expecting to be helped into
an equally quaint examination room. To her surprise the equipment was as cutting edge as her plastic surgeon's.

Dr. Muskie smiled at her astonishment. “Loggers are like soldiers,” he said. “They have the worst wounds and need the best and quickest care.”

After examining the screen-shot from a sonogram, Dr. Muskie told her she would live but she would probably need a month at the least to heal—maybe six weeks. “Syndesmosis,” he said to his uncomprehending patient. “Between the fibula and the tibia. Maybe surgery—probably not, if you do what I say.”

He put her ankle in a splint, saying he would give her a cast when the swelling decreased. And she would have to come back to his office for it.

An hour later she was back in the truck sitting next to a silent Steve with her left leg sticking as straight under the dashboard as the splint allowed. After being carried back to the house, Bride found that her earlier hunger had dissipated as the awareness of being unwashed and sour-smelling overwhelmed her.

“I'd like to take a bath, please,” she said.

“We don't have a bathroom,” said Evelyn. “I can sponge you for now. When your ankle is ready, I'll heat water for the washtub.”

Slop jar, outhouse toilet, metal washtub, broke-down scratchy couch for a month? Bride started to cry, and they let her while Rain and Evelyn went on preparing a meal.

Later, after the family finished eating, Bride tried to overcome her embarrassment and accepted a basin of cold water to rinse her face and armpits. Then she roused herself enough to smile and take the plate Evelyn held before her. Quail, as it turned out, not chicken, with thick mushroom gravy. Following the meal, Bride felt more than embarrassed; she was ashamed—crying every minute, petulant, childish and unwilling to help herself or accept aid gracefully from others. Here she was among people living the barest life, putting themselves out for her without hesitation, asking nothing in return. Yet, as was often the case, her gratitude and embarrassment were short-lived. They were treating her like a stray cat or a dog with a broken leg that they felt sorry for. Sullen and picking at her fingernails, she asked Evelyn whether she had a nail file or any nail polish. Evelyn grinned and held up her own hands without speaking. Point taken—Evelyn's hands were less for holding the stem of a wineglass and more for chopping kindling and wringing the necks of chickens. Who are these people, wondered Bride, and where did they come from? They hadn't asked her where she was from or where she was going. They simply tended her, fed her, arranged for her car to be towed for repair. It was too hard, too strange for her to understand the kind of care they offered—free, without judgment or even a passing interest in who she was or where she was going. She wondered on occasion if they were planning something. Something bad.
But the days passed with boredom unbroken. Steve and Evelyn occasionally spent time after supper sitting outside singing songs by the Beatles or Simon and Garfunkel—Steve strumming his guitar, Evelyn joining him in tuneless soprano. Their laughter tinkling between wrong lines and missed notes.

In the following weeks of more visits to the clinic, leg exercises and waiting for the Jaguar to be repaired, Bride learned that her hosts were in their fifties. Steve had graduated from Reed College, Evelyn from Ohio State. With constant bursts of laughter they described how they met. First in India (Bride saw the light of pleasant memories shining in the looks they exchanged), then London, again in Berlin. Finally in Mexico they agreed to stop meeting that way (Steve touched Evelyn's cheek with his knuckle) so they got married in Tijuana and “moved to California to live a real life.”

Bride's envy watching them was infantile but she couldn't stop herself. “By ‘real' you mean poor?” She smiled to hide the sneer.

“What does ‘poor' mean? No television?” Steve raised his eyebrows.

“It means no money,” said Bride.

“Same thing,” he answered. “No money, no television.”

“Means no washing machine, no fridge, no bathroom, no money!”

“Money get you out of that Jaguar? Money save your ass?”

Bride blinked but was smart enough to say nothing. What did she know anyway about good for its own sake, or love without things?

She stayed with them for six difficult weeks, waiting until she could walk and her car was repaired. Apparently the single automobile-repair place had to send away for hinges or a completely new door for the Jaguar. Sleeping in a house of such deep darkness at night felt to Bride like being in a coffin. Outside the sky would be loaded with more stars than she had ever seen before. But in here under a filthy skylight and no electricity she had a problem sleeping.

Finally Dr. Muskie returned to remove her cast and give her a removable foot brace so she could limp about. She glimpsed the disgusting skin that had been hidden underneath the cast and shivered. Even more than having the cast removed, the best thing was Evelyn, true to her word, pouring pail after pail of hot water into a zinc tub. Then she handed Bride a sponge, a towel and a bar of hard-to-lather brown soap. After weeks of bird-washing Bride sank into the water with gratitude, prolonging the soaping until the water had cooled completely. It was when she stood to dry herself that she discovered that her chest was flat. Completely flat, with only the nipples to prove it was not her back. Her shock was so great she plopped back down into the dirty water, holding the towel over her chest like a shield.

I must be sick, dying, she thought. She plastered the wet towel above the place where her breasts had once upon a time announced themselves and risen to the lips of moaning lovers. Fighting panic she called out to Evelyn.

“Please, do you have something I can wear?”

“Sure,” said Evelyn, and after a few minutes brought Bride a T-shirt and a pair of her own jeans. She said nothing about Bride's chest or the wet towel. She simply left her to get dressed in private. When Bride called her back saying the jeans were too large to stay on her hips, Evelyn exchanged them for a pair of Rain's, which fit Bride perfectly. When did I get so small? she wondered.

She meant to lie down just for a minute, to quiet the terror, collect her thoughts and figure out what was happening to her shrinking body, but without any drowsiness or warning she fell asleep. There out of that dark void sprang a vivid, fully felt dream. Booker's hand was moving between her thighs, and when her arms flew up and closed over his back he extracted his fingers, and slid between her legs what they called the pride and wealth of nations. She started to whisper or moan but his lips were pressing hers. She wrapped her legs around his rocking hips as though to slow them or help them or keep them there. Bride woke up moist and humming. Yet when she touched the place where her breasts used to be the humming changed to sobs. That's when she understood that the
body changes began not simply after he left, but because he left.

Stay still, she thought; her brain was wobbly but she would straighten it, go about as if everything was normal. No one must know and no one must see. Her conversation and activity must be routine, like an after-bath washing of hair. Limping to the kitchen sink she poured water from the standing pitcher into a bowl, soaped then rinsed her hair. As she looked around for a dry towel Evelyn came in.

“Ooh, Bride,” she said, smiling. “You got too much hair for a dish towel. Come on, let's sit outside and we can dry it in sunlight and fresh air.”

“Okay, sure,” said Bride. Acting normal was important, she thought. It might even restore the body changes—or halt them. She followed Evelyn to a rusty iron bench sitting in the yard bathed in bright platinum light. Next to it was a side table where a tin of marijuana and a bottle of unlabeled liquor sat. Toweling Bride's hair, Evelyn chatted away in typical beauty-parlor mode. How happy living here under stars with a perfect man made her, how much she had learned traveling, housekeeping without modern amenities, which she called trash-ready junk since none of it lasted, and how Rain had improved their lives.

When Bride asked her when and where Rain came from, Evelyn sat down and poured some of the liquor into a cup.

“It took a while to get the whole story,” she said. Bride listened intently. Anything. Anything to stop thinking
first about how her body was changing and second how to make sure no one noticed. When Evelyn handed her the T-shirt as she stepped out of the tub, Evelyn didn't notice or say a word. Bride had spectacular breasts when rescued from the Jaguar; she had them in Whiskey Clinic. Now they were gone, like a botched mastectomy that left nipples intact. Nothing hurt; her organs worked as usual except for a strangely delayed menstrual period. So what kind of illness was she suffering? One that was both visible and invisible. Him, she thought. His curse.

“Want some?” Evelyn pointed to the tin box.

“Yeah, okay.” She watched Evelyn's expertise and took the result with gratitude. She coughed with the first toke, but none thereafter.

They were silently smoking for a while until Bride said, “Tell me what you meant by finding her in the rain.”

“We did. Steve and I were driving home from some protest, I forget what, and saw this little girl, sopping wet on a brick doorstep. We had an old Volkswagen back then and he slowed down, then put on the brakes. Both of us thought she was lost or her door key was. He parked, got out and went to see what was the matter. First he asked her name.”

“What did she say?”

“Nothing. Not a word. Drenched as she was, she turned her head away when Steve squatted down in front of her, but wow! when he touched her on her shoulder she jumped up and ran splashing off in wet tennis shoes. So he just
got back in the car so we could continue our drive home. But then rain started really coming down—so hard we had trouble seeing through the windshield. So we called it quits and parked near a diner. Bruno's, it was called. Anyway, rather than wait in the car we went inside, more for shelter than for the coffee we ordered.”

“So you lost her?”

“Then, yes.” Evelyn, having exhausted the joint, replenished her cup and sipped from it.

“Did she come back?”

“No, but when the rain let up and we left the diner, I spotted her hunched up next to a Dumpster in the alley behind the building.”

“Jesus,” said Bride, shuddering as though it were she herself in that alley.

“It was Steve who decided not to leave her there. I wasn't so sure it was any of our business but he just went over and grabbed her, threw her over his shoulder. She was screaming, ‘Kidnap! Kidnap!' but not too loud. I don't think she wanted attention, especially from pigs, I mean cops. We pushed her into the backseat, got in and locked the doors.”

“Did she quiet down?”

“Oh no. She kept hollering ‘Let me out,' and kicking the back of our seats. I tried to talk to her in a soft voice so she wouldn't be frightened of us. I said, ‘You're soaking wet, honey.' She said, ‘It's raining, bitch.' I asked her if her mother knew she was sitting outside in the rain and she
said, ‘Yeah, so?' I didn't know what to do with that answer. Then she started cursing—nastier words in a little kid's mouth you couldn't imagine.”

“Really?”

“Steve and I looked at each other and without talking we decided what to do—get her dry, cleaned and fed, then try to find out where she belonged.”