Nine Women (17 page)

“You always talk longer in the dark.” Angela squinted at the green dial on the clock: three-fifteen. “I’ve got a nine-fifteen appointment, and just look at the time.”

“Now,” Vicky repeated.

Angela sighed deeply, pulled the pillows up behind her, and settled back against them. For a moment she dozed—then shook herself awake. Vicky remained curled in the middle of the bed.

“My dear,” Angela said, stifling a yawn, “this had better be important or I am going to be perfectly furious with you.”

“I want a child,” Vicky said. “I want to get pregnant.”

In the silence a far-off clock ticked steadily. A police siren waved a thin finger of sound down a distant street.

“That is important,” Angela said dryly.

Vicky was silent, unmoving.

“Is there anything more you want?”

A small despairing hiss, like air from a balloon. “I knew you’d misunderstand.”

“You must give me a moment,” Angela said, “to catch up with you.” (Is this how Neal felt when I told him—when the unthinkable happens?)

“I knew you’d be angry … and I knew you’d misunderstand. I’ve been dreading this so much that I’ve been putting it off and putting it off. For months. I just couldn’t tell you.”

“You have lost your mind.”

The bed moved slightly. Vicky was shaking her head. “I don’t want to want a child, you see. I know it would be trouble, and I thought you might even leave.”

Did you? Angela thought. I don’t believe that.

“It got so bad, I even began going to a psychiatrist.”

“I didn’t know.”

“I thought at first it would go away, so I waited. But it didn’t. I thought about a tranquilizer or an energizer or lithium if I was really crazy.”

“A strange pharmacopoeia,” Angela said into the dark. “Was the shrink any help?”

“No drugs,” Vicky said sadly, raising her head slightly so that she showed briefly as a silhouette against the pale yellow wallpaper. “He said it would be months or years before anything could change. If then.”

“No help from him.”

“No,” Vicky said.

The clock was still ticking, but the siren had vanished. The room was filled with a faint humming, the building’s air-conditioning system. Like the far-off hum of bees, Angela thought. There’d been hives on her family’s summer place in Maine.

Vicky was talking again, rapidly, slurring her words. Angela noticed the heavy smell of brandy. She’d been drinking, and she probably hadn’t been to bed at all.

“I didn’t want you to be angry. I tried every way I knew. But nothing helped. It’s even getting worse.”

“The urge to procreate.”

Vicky sobbed softly.

Dear God, Angela thought, if I still believed in you, I would think that you are punishing me for my sins. But I left Sunday school too long ago for that …

“You’ve got to understand,” Vicky said. “You’ve always helped before. Even when my parents died. You were so kind then.”

They'd been killed in a highway accident and Vicky, wild with grief, neither ate nor slept. Finally Angela took her, dizzy with Librium, for a six months’ trip through Europe. They worked their way page by page through the points of interest listed in their Baedekers. They climbed mountains, hiked through forests, they exhausted themselves in the thin Jura air and staggered through the smells of Naples.

“Listen to me now.” Vicky spoke clearly and slowly, as if she were instructing a child. “I am thirty-six. How much longer can I have children. One child. I feel, I don’t know, I feel hollow and empty and useless. Sometimes I feel so light I think the wind will blow me away.”

“It won’t,” Angela said.

“You have a child.” The harsh accusation startled Angela. “You have a child. Every time a letter comes from her, every time she telephones and talks to us, I want to die. Because I have nothing.”

Nothing, Angela thought dully, sadly. You have me. And your career. You are the owner of a very successful shop. You have friends. You have a lovely apartment. And just today I saw a carriage house uptown, not too large, early nineteenth century, with lovely cypress woodwork, and a garden that is completely enclosed by a high brick wall, a perfect house for us. And you have love.

“Nothing,” Vicky repeated as if she had heard.

“I’m going to get a drink.”

“Take mine.” Vicky put her glass carefully into Angela’s hand. “I want you to understand, but I’m not saying it very well.”

“I understand,” Angela said.

“No,” Vicky said. “I love my life. I love you and I love my work. There isn’t anybody else, you know that. I make more money every year. So it isn’t any of the things it’s supposed to be—not sex, not money, not boredom.”

“That what the psychiatrist said?” Angela drained the glass, almost choking on the straight brandy. She hated drinking like this, in a race for comfort.

“Not exactly, but I guess so, really.”

“Look, Vicky.” Angela tried to put the glass on the night table, missed in the dark, and heard the glass roll across the rug. “It’s late, we have to work tomorrow. Why don’t we both come home early and have a sensible discussion.”

“No,” Vicky said. “I know what I’m going to do.”

“Get pregnant?”

“Yes.” The darkness and the small voice and the absolute determination.

I am angry, Angela thought, I am white hot and frozen with anger. “You seem to have thought it out. Have you decided how? I mean, you are an attractive woman, you can certainly find a man. You could even shop around until you found a man whose face you’d like to have repeated in a child.”

A small sigh. And silence. Vicky was not going to be lured into an argument.

“I suppose,” Angela went on, “you could always have it done artificially. Like a cow.”

This time Vicky was silent so long that Angela thought that she had fallen into a drunken sleep. Her own eyelids strained in the confining dark, dry and aching.

Eventually Vicky said, “At least then my bones and blood will be quiet.”

“Just what I always wanted: quiet blood.” Angela bounced out of bed, went to the pantry. She poured a large brandy, noticing that the bottle was almost empty. I ought to get out, she thought, I ought to take the car and go for a long drive and just keep driving around until things make more sense to me.

But she didn’t. She went back into the bedroom. “Time’s winged chariot.”

“It’s like being thirsty,” Vicky said. “You have to have water.”

“Brandy. Do you know how much brandy you’ve drunk? The bottle is almost empty.”

“To give me courage,” Vicky said simply.

And there it was, the tone, the motion, the gesture that ended all discussion, all argument. Why am I like this, Angela thought, why can she always do this to me … Why does she turn me around? Why can’t I leave, even for a drive. Is there so much of my life invested here?

“You are proposing that you and I raise this child together?”

“Yes,” Vicky said. “At first I thought you might want to leave, but now I don’t think so. I think it will be all right and you will love the child because it’s half me.”

“Jesus Christ.” Angela made another trip to the pantry to empty the bottle of brandy into her glass and top it with soda and the bits of ice that remained in the bucket. The clock there said four-thirty.

Vicky uncurled and lay stretched crosswise on the foot of the bed. Angela sat down Indian-fashion to keep from touching her. “All right, Vicky, we’ll raise the child together. If that’s what you want.”

Vicky’s voice was thick with sleep and alcohol. “I knew you would.”

“How the hell could you know that?”

Vicky stretched and prepared to fall asleep where she was. “I knew.”

Do you know how much of my life I have invested in you? Do you? You, a small arrangement of bones and skin and flesh and blood that I would kill if it would free me. But it wouldn’t.

Vicky lay so still Angela thought she had fallen asleep. She got up slowly, carefully, not to disturb her, and began tiptoeing toward the door.

Vicky said clearly, without the slur of alcohol, “You’re going to love the child. And I’m going to come to hate it.”

“Go to sleep, Vicky.” And stop talking, let me alone for a while anyway. Before something I can’t imagine or control happens …

“You’re going to love the part that’s me, and I’m going to hate the part that isn’t you.”

“Vicky, you are terribly drunk. You’re not making sense.”

“I want your child,” Vicky said. “A child that’s you and me. Now tell me why that’s so stupid.”

And with a slight movement and a small sigh, she turned face down and fell asleep. The mattress moved softly with her sudden increase in weight.

Angela went into the living room. She felt strange and detached and very calm. She opened the curtains and stared at the city that stretched beyond the pale reflection of herself. She raised an arm, saluting herself in the imperfect mirror. She was breathing regularly and slowly, all anger and fear were gone. But the moving arm didn’t belong to her, nor did that figure reflected distantly back to her.

Traffic flickered slowly through the leaf-obscured streets, lights were beginning to show in some of the distant hill houses, it would not be long until daylight.

She sat at her desk and began a note to Mrs. Papadopoulous, saying that Vicky was not to be disturbed, no matter how long she slept. She herself would call the shop to tell them that Miss Prescott would be late, if indeed she came in at all today, please do not call, any decisions can wait until tomorrow.

She watched the sky. Despite the brandy, she was not drunk, she wasn’t even tired. Her mind moved lightly, decisively, thoughts clicking like high heels on marble.

When the first gray morning streaks showed, she would make coffee and scramble a couple of eggs. She would shower and dress, and go to her office earlier than usual. She would finish the paperwork there and then she would make an offer for that uptown carriage house, whose small walled garden would be a lovely safe place for a child to play.

“T
HERE’S NOTHING YOU CAN
do?”

“We are fairly sure now that the primary site is the liver. That’s somewhat unusual.”

“But you can’t help her?”

“I am sorry. There is nothing at all we can do.”

“I’ll go home now, Michael. It’s time.”

“Mother, why not wait a bit longer?”

“Tomorrow, I think. I’ll go tomorrow.”

“It’s a long flight.”

“It was just as long when I flew here to visit you, Michael.”

“You were stronger then, Mother.”

“There was more time then, too. Or I thought there was. Will you see to the tickets? I’ll go back the way I came, that flight through Dallas.”

“Mother, please wait until you are stronger.”

“I will not get stronger. You have talked to the doctors. And I know they are right.”

“You could stay here. We are all here.”

“I will take the plane home tomorrow, Michael … Now I am sleepy … Is it raining outside? I hear rain very clearly.” Water: whispering, giggling.

She, the small child, waited fo
r rain, watched across Mr. Beauchardrais’s pasture as the clouds gathered, black and silver. Heavy clouds with ball and chain lightning dancing between them, silently. The spiky clumps of pasture grass faded to pale yellow, glimmering, reflecting like water to the sky.

She sat in the porch corner, wedged comfortably against peeling boards which were corded like the veins in her mother’s hands, her father’s arms. Sometimes she even imagined that the house’s blood flowed through those raised twisting networks in the wood.

Mouse, people called her for her habit of sitting silent and still in corners. And Doodle Bug for the hours she spent under the house, crawling between the low brick foundation pillars, creeping cautiously through broken glass and slate to settle comfortably, flat on her back, at the center of the house, where the damp air smelled of mildew and tomcats and a heavy sweet stickiness that was the breath of the ground itself…

While her mother’s feet thudded up and down across the boards overhead, she lay on her back and watched the spiders weaving thick gray webs around the water pipes. Watching for the Black Widow, small with a single red dot on its stomach … When it rained, neighborhood dogs and cats sheltered under the house, politely, deliberately ignoring each other. Huddled against the underside of the front steps, a calico cat fed her latest litter while two dogs slept, twitching and yelping in their dreams. …

She sat cross-legged on the porch where the sun-bleached wood was so hard her small pocketknife could barely scratch a mark. She had to be very careful; if her parents caught her testing the strength of the boards, she would get a paddling for sure. As if the boards were something to be guarded, as if they were worth anything at all…

She watched the rain. It began with a yellowish kind of darkness in the air, then a shiver while leaves rushed into the neatly swept hard clay yard and spun in rising circles. Just like the cartoons she saw on Saturday afternoons, when her mother had extra money to send her to the movies. (On good days her father walked to work and saved his carfare in a jelly glass on the kitchen counter. For her.) When those cartoon characters ran, they left swirls of motion behind them like the wind and the dead leaves.

Rain meant her father rode the streetcar and no extra coins went into the kitchen glass.

She settled back—no movie this week, that was for sure—and waited for the rain.

On the tin roof, drops tapped, then knocked, then rattled like hailstones. A whispering, a hissing ran along the roof gutters to the cistern at the corner of the house.

Her mother called loudly, “Willie May, come quick. Come help me.”

In the backyard her mother was putting chicks and ducklings into the poultry shed. Willie May hated to touch them—the small bony bodies felt skeletal and evil in her hands. She held her breath as she hurriedly put the small blobs safely under shelter. They were so stupid that they would stand in the rain, gawking in curious confusion, and drown.

Afterwards, back in the porch corner again, wet clothes plastered tight to shoulders, nostrils filled with the scent of her own dripping hair, she watched the air turn smoky gray. She sniffed the sweet moisture-laden dust and occasionally, after a close crash of thunder, she could smell the sharp, nose-tickling odor of ozone.