who lived in the houses that clung to the hillside leading up
from the valley floor and Main Street. Louise listened to
their talk, trying to find some way to get through to her
grandmother, but she never found the key. Lena and Pete
communicated with single words over the supper table in
the kitchen. They seemed to understand each other; Louise
understood nothing.
She was not a bright child. Most of her teachers barely saw her small pale face in a sea of pupils. She neither caused trouble or excelled enough to be noticed. Over the years, an occasional teacher tried to draw her out, but there was never enough time, and Louise shrank from attention that singled her out. She was afraid they would find out that she could not read. Arithmetic was the same. What was it that other students knew that she could not learn? Why couldn't she learn?
Louise was passed from grade to grade along with the rest. As she fell further and further behind, her imaginary world insulated her from the frustrations that threatened to bury her. She fantasized that her mother would come back for her, that Dorothy would realize how much her child resembled her, that she had left part of herself behind. Louise was quite sure that her mother was an actress, really successful, who lived in a grand house somewhere. It was only a matter of time until they would be together. She lied about Dorothy at school, but no one believed her, and the popular girls in soft cashmere sweaters and coordinated skirts laughed at her. She could blink her eyes and make them go away.
Pete and Lena knew that Dorothy was never coming back to claim the strange, skinny child she'd foisted off on them. They knew Dorothy had been dead for three years, her body thrown away in an alley in Chicago by the man whose hands had closed around her neck until they left ten pale blue
fingermarks in the soft flesh there. They had accepted the news of Dorothy's murder with stoicism; as far as they were concerned, Dorothy had died the day she walked out on the family, and her actual death neither surprised nor angered them. They hadn't sought vengeance, and no one was ever arrested for the crime. Pete and Lena had been relieved to have her gone, and they'd resented only that she hadn't taken her child with her. Her death verified for them their conviction that the wicked would be smitten down by the unyielding god they answered to. They had seen no need to tell Louise that her mother was dead. Children always carried tales. When Dorothy's belongings arrived in a brown paper package, Lena picked through the clothing, papers, and bits of costume jewelry with distaste. She had always thought that Dorothy was a tramp, unworthy of a hard-working man like Pete, and the tight sweaters and flimsy undergarments confirmed her feelings. She lumbered down to the coal furnace in the basement and burned everything but the jewelry. Maybe she hadn't noticed the letter addressed to Louise; maybe she had. It didn't matter. Those who died out of grace had no right to send messages to the living.
Lena suspected that Louise carried the bad seed within her, and she watched her granddaughter closely for the signs.
Louise became Lureen in her own mind when she was fourteen, but she didn't tell anyone. There was no one to tell. She chose it for her own name, her real name, when she heard it in one of the Saturday afternoon movies she saw— something with Joan Crawford or Shelley Winters. Louise never identified with the main star of the movie; she liked to pick someone in the background, a young girl who was pretty and nice and always turned out to be happy at the end of the film. It might happen to her, when Dorothy returned, or it might happen when she grew up and was old enough to leave home. It couldn't happen where she was because no one could be happy there.
Louise-Lureen's body remained as slat-thin as a child's until she was almost fifteen, and Lena thanked God daily
7
for that. But in the almost tropical heat of the August before her sophomore year in high school, the fact of her budding could no longer be denied. She lasted only a week in high school before she was called into the assistant principal's office.
"You'll have to wear a brassiere," the woman explained. "Or you can't come to school."
Louise was embarrassed to tears, and felt her skin suffuse! with a wave of heat as it was pointed out that she "flopped"! when she played volleyball in the gym.
"You must remember there are boys' classes on the other side of the gymnasium. There have been complaints."
Louise stared at the woman, confused. Who had complained? The boys?
The other girls? The teacher? She had never really felt her own body; it had suddenly become as] heavy as stone.
"You must be modest, Louise. You must show respect for] yourself and for others."
The woman before her had no discernible breasts. How' could she understand? Louise wished that she could have had a principal like Greer Garson or Maureen O'Hara, someone who might know that she had meant no harm.
"I'm sorry. I didn't realize. I guess I just suddenly .. . kind of... grew."
"A woman must be aware of her body."
"Forgive me."
"It's not up to me to forgive you, Louise. Try to be more \ careful." She wore her coat for the rest of the day, feeling her face! flame whenever anyone glanced at her, wondering which of] them had been talking about her, wishing that she had had one friend who might have told her. Avoiding her grandmother's half-lidded stare at the coat on a warm September day, she hurried to the bathroom and closed the door. The only mirror in the house was over the chipped basin, and she had to climb on the edge of the tub to view herself from the shoulders down. Balancing with one hand on the window ledge, she pulled up her blouse with the other.
8
It was true. Her breasts had bloomed, plump pillows of white flesh, centered with salmon-colored nipples that seemed much larger than she remembered. They looked peculiar to her; she was so thin and they were so big. They seemed not to be a part of her body at all. She turned from one side to the other, getting used to them. In a way, she thought, they looked nice. Movie stars had big breasts, and nobody complained. Still teetering on the tub's rim, she pulled her blouse off and draped it around her, forming a vee of material in the center of her chest. They did look nice. They looked like her mother's breasts in the snapshot she carried. She pulled the material tighter and two round half circles popped up over the top. She was amazed that they had grown so quickly, that she had barely noticed. She smiled at herself in the mirror. No wonder the boys watched her from their side of the gym. No wonder. She felt just the slightest sensation of power, something she had never felt before.
The bathroom door opened so quietly that she heard no sound at all. She didn't hear the old woman until she was beside her, spitting out a word of Polish that Louise didn't understand. Still, she felt the force of it, and the vehemence behind it. Her feet lost their tentative perch on the tub, and she fell, crashing against the toilet stool. The floor there smelled sharply of urine and she turned her head away, tasting blood in her mouth.
"Get up, and cover yourself. What you doing in here?" Louise stood up slowly, lifting a hand to her mouth to wipe away the blood there. "They said at school that I need a brassiere." "Who said? Who thinks he has to mind our business?" "A lady in the principal's office. She says I flop." Lena jabbed a bony finger at her and poked her breasts. "Ahh, she's right. You're as big as a cow. Come." Louise followed her grandmother into the living room where the old lady pulled a flesh colored harness-like garment from the cedar chest there. She wrapped it around Louise's chest, tugging, pulling and lacing until Louise could barely breathe. She looked down at her breasts and
saw that they were flattened now, the bulk of them pushed against her rib cage and back under her arms. She tried to take in a lungful of air and couldn't.
"I can't wear this," she protested. "I look like a freak and I can't breathe."
"You wear it. I will go to Sears and buy you some brassieres. Now, you pull this very tight and your boobies won't stick out like you was a whore. You are like her, your mother who ran away. Big breasts. She didn't even feed you with them, too afraid they wouldn't be so big after." Louise closed her eyes and turned away; she hated to hear Lena talk about Dorothy, hated the flat, closed look that passed over her grandmother's face when her mother's name was mentioned. She'd seen Lena naked once and had been horrified at the slack, empty breasts that hung down over her corrugated belly. She could not imagine that Lena had ever been a young girl. Lena avoided mention of anything having to do with the body, and she wondered if it was because Lena's own body was so ugly.
Still, having breasts seemed not to be as repulsive to her grandmother as having periods. Nobody had prepared Louise for the sudden rush of hot blood that had coursed down her legs six months before. That had been the worst day of her life. The terror. She had walked into the kitchen with her shoes literally full of blood and looked at Lena with a plea for help.
Lena had responded with rage, pulling Louise into the bathroom where she filled the tub with water. "Wash yourself. That is not clean blood. It is blood from the curse, and you have to wash it away." What had she done to deserve such a curse? Lena had talked of evil spirits often, of things that happened in the old country, but Louise could not imagine what sin she herself had committed. Lena had not explained. Instead, she'd reached into the towel closet and brought out a length of flannel sheeting which she tore into squares and then folded into oblongs. Louise thought that the old lady had finally gone completely off her rocker.
"Now stand up," she'd barked. "See? See—this is how 10
you do." Lena had lifted up her own black skirts and gestured between her legs. "It is to soak up the bad blood. You mustn't let anyone know. When the rag is full, then you wash it and hang it in the basement behind the furnace. You don't let your father see it, and don't let the boys smell the fish smell. They will know you are a bad girl. They will try to get you—to do the bad thing to you. The bad thing hurts. It is full of hurt; you must not let them close to you."
Louise had had no idea what the bad thing was, and boys never got close to her—no one did—but she obediently held the flannel rag between her legs. She'd been afraid to ask Lena for more explanation. She'd spent the next four days taking baths and washing the bloodsoaked rags until the skin on her hands peeled off.
The bleeding stopped then, and one of the girls at school told her about Kotex. She threw the soiled rags into the furnace. The next month the bleeding came again, and she realized that it would come and go and that it happened to all women, not just her. But the boys did come around her, like dogs who had caught a scent. Their sudden interest disturbed and fascinated her at the same time.
Louise felt some stirring that she had not felt before; she had always longed to have someone hug her, but what she felt was different. It felt good and bad at the same time, and she wondered what she could do to make it stop. It was like listening to a song she liked and then having the music end before it was time. She felt empty, with a compelling need to be filled. She knew it had something to do with the place between her legs. When she leaned against the washing machine, she could feel it in her belly too, and sometimes the machine's vibrations made her think that the elusive ending of the song was almost within her grasp. Louise had not the faintest notion of the sexual act. If she had been able to read, she might have found out. The movies told her nothing; the characters kissed and held each other, and then the scene always dissolved, leaving her puzzled and frustrated.
Louise came home from school on a frozen January day when she was sixteen and found Lena sitting still as a rock
1 1
in the easy chair, her hands clasped around the spew of tatting. She was dead. She had been dead so long that she was stiff, and Louise could not release the chain of knots from her hands. She screamed for the old woman next door, and someone called Pete home from the steel mill. Her father had fallen to his knees in front of his mother and begun to sob. Louise had never been more astonished, filled with wonderment at the sight of Pete rocking back and forth as tears made rivulets in the mill grime on his face. Her father had never demonstrated any emotion, nothing more intense than annoyance, and here he knelt in front of Lena and wept like a baby. Lena's laced black shoes were planted in a puddle of her own urine.
Louise began to laugh. She had never seen a man cry. In this house empty of feelings for all the years of her life she could not deal with this rush of emotion, and she could not stop laughing. She saw her father turn slowly and warn her with his eyes, and she laughed. Still kneeling, Pete raised his hand and caught her in the face. Then he fell sideways on the cracked linoleum, scrabbling at it with his hands and sobbed louder.
She ran. Past the arms raised to hold her back, beyond her father's shocked command, skittering down the ice-crusted porch steps, hardly touching them. It was only when she reached the sidewalk and drew a breath of crystalline air that she realized how nauseating it had smelled inside.
Old fool. The old fool was dead.
Louise felt no grief because she hadn't really lost anything. She wasn't sure what she felt, perhaps a renewed hope that her mother would come for her at last, now that there was no woman to care for her. Maybe it had been Lena who kept Dorothy away for all the years. She could hear them inside, their voices rising and falling in choruses of mourning and indignation, punctuated by groans from her father, the keening of an animal left alone in the woods. She ran down the hill toward the Lincoln Highway, anywhere to get away from that sound and the smell. She would have to go back in there sometime, but not soon. 12
She ran past the corner where the drugstore was, only vaguely aware
"of the whistles and catcalls from the high school boys who lounged against a window displaying trusses and surgical collars, pock-faced guys with duck's-ass haircuts and cigarettes hanging from their lips. The cold air froze her throat and hurt her lungs. A cramp seized her beneath her ribs, drawing her gut inward until she had to slow to a walk.