State of Grace (25 page)

I was told you could help me, I had said. How green her garden grew. The boy finished eating and went into the little cleared yard, picking up the eggs the hens had laid. Sue was making a brine, throwing salt into the water. I was still running with the momentum of reaching the cabin. I had had a plan and the plan seemed perfect but I could not think on it for long. If I could lose the baby, would there still be something in me that would tell, that would talk on and on in punishment?

You are nothing but trouble, she had said. I could see the first time you were nothing but hard times.

Then give me something I had said.

Suicides were buried on the highways and nothing stopped for them.

You can just take a lot of anything that’s handy, she had said. It probably won’t make no difference but you just keep eating on a quantity of something and get sick and keep eating a quantity more. She shrugged. Sugar, she called to the boy, You bring Momma an egg here for her brine. You got it all wrong from somewheres, she had told me, I ain’t never done it, not even once. I haven’t never stopped a baby.

Her boy came in, holding an egg gracefully in each hand, between thumb and forefinger. She took one and eased it into the pan. She added more salt until the egg floated up. The
boy was holding the remaining egg carefully enough but he somehow stuck his thumbnail into the shell. Blood swelled up over his finger as though he’d been sliced and he dropped it, the thing spreading dismally outward on the floor all broken up and scattered, all its colored jellies and beads trembling in a small and violet pool.

Ahhh, Sugar, Sue had said. One of the dogs came in to lap it up. I stepped off the last orangey steppingstone back into the woods and was back in the trailer by eleven o’clock. Hours still, before Grady would return. I had several drinks but nothing in excess. Whenever I closed my eyes, I could see the baby floundering out of the womb. I didn’t close my eyes for several days that I can recall and when I did at last, I could see the curve in the road flaunting my Grady. It was not my thought that it was a curve at the time. It was just the shape my dreams took thereafter until now.

Here, it is quarter past noon. All the clocks say this, more or less, on the third floor. The sisters have eaten lunch and are all coming back up here for song practice. I hear their babble as they tramp up the stairs. I realize quite clearly that I am, at present, in the sorority, in my bunk bed. Soon, I will get up and go to Grady who is in Room 17, Section C. I realize this, nevertheless, something untoward happens, my head whirrs and it is Grady touching my shoulder, waking me up. I am so happy. I shudder with relief. It is Grady, saying,

“Miss, the movie’s over.”

And it is. Everything’s shut off. Kinugasa’s
Crossways
, I think it was, or more likely, something with Tom Mix. There
was a chase and an open air setting. Something was resolved. I see the screen for the first time and am annoyed to note that things I believed to have been imperfections in the film were, in fact, freckles and streaks upon the screen.

“They’re closing up.”

He says. It’s true. They’re locking all the doors. Someone has pulled a sheet over the concessions. I’m sore all over. I have a cramp. And he must help me up the aisle for I’m hobbling. My leg is still asleep. They won’t be showing another picture for hours and there’s nothing to do except go off with Grady. He’s barefoot but his feet are remarkably clean. He takes me to his car which is moored directly beyond the door shimmering like a yacht in the heat. We drive to a liquor store. It’s almost night but everything is still hot to the touch. Grady takes off his sunglasses and exposes to me two dim rims around his eyes.

He leaves but returns immediately with a bottle of gin, a bag of ice cubes and two paper cups. We sit in the liquor store parking lot and drink. I request some bubbly water. It’s filling up. Men and women, single women, men and men. We’re all sitting in our allotted slots, watching each other and drinking. It’s very pleasant. Four carpenters drink pints of peppermint schnapps. A tanned lady, very pretty, an older lady, refined, drinks brandy. Potato chips fall out of her mouth. Someone kisses me. It’s an awkward moment, but we have another glass of gin. I can remember it all. Every detail. It gets dark. The sky was a patched-up tent. The lot is lit indirectly from the liquor store on one side and a nursery on the other. A green growing thing for everyone and something for every place, for sand, muck, marl and rocky soil. A sprinkler works its whippety way across the plants and dribbles water across the hood of our car. Beside us, a few children in the back of a truck protect their candy bars from the spray.

Yes, it’s very nice. There were three children. Three candy bars. I could tell by the wrappers that they were Zeros.

The last time my very best friend saw me, she said.

I’m fine I’m fine but where is the grapefruit you promised to send.

?, and this was in a dream. Things that I have loved have vanished into acts I can only accept. Someone lays his tongue between my breasts. I am falling, falling, and kiss the belted hip of the man I love, but everything is controlled for I know how it goes.
We are not to rely on what we can do to insure our acceptance with God. We are to accept God’s acceptance of us
. There are boundaries within which the worst can work. And I’m working. Yes, I was made to work, if nothing else.

I’m in a controlled fall for how far can an orgasm take you? My chum on the airwaves said only to me,

“An orgasm and seventy-five cents will get you into the silent pictures …”

We return to the movies. The gin is all gone. Upon going back, we pass a pimpled boy, running. And then a gentleman in a white smock and elevator shoes. We piece it together, Grady and I. The gent’s a druggist, making a prescription. Everyone is yelling. The boy skids around a corner and a bar of soap falls out of his sock. The pursuers seem satisfied with this and turn back, although no one picks up the soap.

As Grady parks the car, I slip behind the pneumatic door of the movie theatre. Everything is holy and works upon the principle of exhaustion. In and out. Open and close. Win or lose.
No one can gain from this experience
. The door closes behind Grady too. We can’t see; the floor slopes. Once again I’m guided to my seat. I feel smug but nervous for I didn’t have to pay. I came in after the show had started. The cashier had turned her head. I never paid for anything.

And there on the screen is an empty beach. Blurred. High green water. Puddle of dark pine trees on the sand. There may even be some snow, strings of ice in the grasses. A crib is set up beneath one of the pines. Solidly constructed. Fine
craftsmanship. Brahm’s First Piano Concerto is playing. The part that goes

What a foundation that crib has! The legs are set in concrete that lies buried but may very well run the entire length of the coast. This was made to last! It’s very cold. Of course you cannot feel this, but you can tell simply by observing the elderly Dürer hare at the lower left, in the wind slough behind a dune. His eyes are frozen shut. There’s no one there. Everything is white, brown and green—indigestible colors. There’s nothing in the crib but surely with a little imagination, a baby could be placed there.

The film has been terribly preserved. It’s Delluc’s
The Silence
. And something’s wrong with the projector. At this rate it will be tomorrow before we get out of here. And how do we get out of here? Ingress or egress. Who’s to give permission? Ahhh, what I thought was the cause is instead the consequence. Here.

The sisters assemble themselves in the middle of the room, obliterating the Persian rug. I stay in my bunk even though I will be fined for this. Fifty cents for the first absence, one dollar thereafter. I owe the sisterhood a fortune. The girls would like to send this money to the Indians in the Everglades but they don’t. They bought a Waring blender. Before that it was a fake brass fixture for the jane. Sweet God, the “jane.” Some things I refuse to bear.

The girls link arms and start to chant

It’s all a lie of course. Doreen’s a dish and brainless as a cracker box. She comes leaping out in a rattan bikini and does a few bumps and grinds. The skit is very flashy, very complex.
Cords created every detail. It involves extensive props, including a rented leopard and a burning bush. Ha. Pardon. A gyneco-holy term. A smutty synergism. Rather it’s a burning hoop or something through which Doreen will emerge while the sisters wail

I slip out of bed unnoticed and go down to the kitchen. The room is cool and empty. The floor’s waxed. The day’s recipes are taped to the butcher block table. There are some fresh greens there with dirt still on them. Very nice. And some red and green peppers. And a bull’s tongue, all black with trauma at the tip.

I go outside and ask directions to the hospital from a passerby. As the days go on, I am able to find shorter routes.

Good-by, good-by.

OH THAT MINE HEAD WERE WATERS AND MINE EYES A FOUNTAIN OF TEARS THAT MIGHT WEEP DAY AND NIGHT …

But the stupor was all that was mine. Only the stupor.

Now Daddy … always … told me that my ruinous life was quickly and immediately determined. He did not elaborate. Now I wouldn’t say that I agreed. I was a simple child! Daddy used to say,
Beware the wrath of the Lamb
but daddys say that, you know. It was just a little joke. But I was a simple child. I was always straightening my drawers, for instance. I
was always arranging, arranging … Now it’s true I suffered from lack of sleep. I dreamed but did not sleep. Daddy was mistaken there. He saw me pretending, I suppose. They say all children maintain this, but I want to tell you, I never slept. I would be the last to say I saw it all, but never was I sleeping.

It’s true I often had fevers. Daddy told me I had fevers but he always brought me back to health. It was the house that did it. The house was always cold and I was chilled. The elements were always falling in the rooms. Or some of the rooms. The rooms I liked to play in. Snow, and in the summer it was rain that fell on me.

But I was a simple child. One incident is very clear. I was swimming with Daddy, splashing in the shallows while he watched, and little fish swam into my hair and caught there, you know, in my tangled hair, for Father did not always brush my hair, and the little fish had died by the time that we discovered them. It’s very clear. It seems I was unconsolable.

But I was tired, so tired. It seems I could hardly keep my eyes open. All night, I would walk through the rooms. And I would hear the sounds of living, those unmistakable sounds of growing, you know, as all things do, toward their death. Obscure, obscene sounds. None of it ever spoke to me. They told me I would walk through the rooms the way that Mother used to. It surprises me now. What did we think was possible? What chance of finding anything that was ours? I’d never do it now, I’ll tell you. I wasn’t much of a child, to be truthful, even then.

There was nothing in the house then as I walked. Daddy had taken it all away. They tell me Daddy wanted to encourage no bad memories. But isn’t that the hope of the smallest of us … to become another’s memory? But, regardless, everything was nothing in those rooms. So much broken and so little repaired … The snow, as I’ve said,
would fall in on us while we danced, melting on our faces …

And things were always out of my hands. I have always been grateful for that.

The dream is always the same.

A woman is riding sidesaddle. There is no space involved, no scenery. Just a woman in a long black gown and sweet old-fashioned beribboned hat riding a galloping horse. She is holding a baby in one arm and there is a dog running beside them. It is quite apparent that the dog is going to leap upon the child and eat it. I always imagine that if I could successfully preclude this intimation, I could alter everything. The dog jumps upon the infant and eats it. Or rather, he rests on the woman’s lap and tears busily at the blanket in which the infant is held. Everyone seems calm about this. That is, the woman seems calm and I, who dream the woman.

It never varies. If I were not so knowledgeable about what was going to happen, the next scene would not result. It is obviously Dream Number Fifty-Eight with its natural sequel Forty. A hand extends a bunch of balloons to a figure whose face is turned away from me. The figure reaches for the bright balloons but fails to grasp them. They float up and out of the dream’s framework. No one dares to follow them with their eyes, least of all me.

It is obviously my non-viable dream. Although it always wakes me up, it brings me calm. Not any satisfaction and not my approbation but a calm. Certainly a calm of sorts.

I turn on the radio. Someone has changed the station.

I garrote the song with a twist, but cannot find my chum, my crush, my sweetness, my answer action man. I twiddle with the dial for hours. I cannot pick him up. At last I hear an old man’s voice. A very old man. He is polishing stones in his rock tumbler. He refuses to turn it off while speaking. That is why the transmission is so bad.

“Yes,” “Action Line” says. “In answer to your question. The differences between rising every morning at 6 and at 8 in the course of 40 years amounts to 29,200 hours or 3 years, 121 days and 16 hours which are equal to 8 hours a day for 10 years. So that rising at 6 will be the equivalent to adding 10 years to your life.”

He seems a little repulsed at the thought.