“The pool died.”
Amy groans inwardly. He’s chewed another hole in his plastic pool, she knows. “Never mind. It’s almost supper time. Rhoda is going to pick you up today.”
“I think Daddy’s coming home tomorrow,” he says as his lips move against the screen.
Amy feels an ache of sadness for Richard. His pile of “magic” stones has grown considerably over the past two months but she knows that Hank will not return as long as she continues to work at the Lounge. She steps back to view the kitchen wall. Pale blue semi-gloss enamel, to give the room the suggestion of ethereal airiness, of
floating, of space. And to get her ass out of the sling with the landlord. She had stripped the scorched wallpaper off and now she’s run out of paint so that a two-foot strip is left at the bottom. Her hands sting and have turned white and rough from turpentine. “Get your things together and come in,” she tells Richard. His narrow silhouette drops away from the screen. She doesn’t have the energy to go out and buy more paint or search for holes in his pool to mend them.
Richard enters the kitchen trailing a wet bath towel and bits of grass. “It smells funny in here,” he says and pinches his nose.
“Yeah, well, this is pretty much your doing. Remember? So don’t complain.”
Richard goes off into the living room. She hears wheezy music and Popeye stating “I duz what I can. …” The refrigerator clunks, and hums to life, vibrating at a pitch that always makes her feel weary. She decides that what she needs is to soak in the tub.
She trickles rose-scented bath oil into the rushing water and watches it become a puff of crimson smoke turning the water pink. She lies back in the pink froth, sinking down until she feels it climb up the back of her neck, and she closes her eyes. “When is Daddy coming home?” he asks constantly. The bubbles pop, the sound an irritating one that makes her clench her teeth. She stays in the tub only minutes and then leaps up, suds sliding down her legs and belly as she reaches for a towel. She tries not to think about Hank spying on her. Creepy. Weird. She thinks instead what to make Richard for supper.
At five past six, Amy is in the kitchen slamming cupboard doors. She smacks a plate down on the table, hoping it will shatter. “Supper’s ready,” she calls. “Come and get it. Now.”
Richard enters the kitchen looking downcast as he slides in behind the table. “Yuck,” he says. “I would rather eat dirt than french fries. I hate french fries.”
They go through this “I hate” routine each night she works.
“You liked them before.”
“But I don’t now.” His cheeks are flushed – too much sun? A fever? She touches his forehead. Then she rubs his arms and discovers that they too are warm. Don’t be sick, she pleads silently. She looks at their meal: swollen waterlogged wieners, overcooked fries, brown and tough. Her stomach closes down and, like Richard, she nibbles halfheartedly at her food. Several times a car passes by in the lane, and, unable to stop herself, she turns to the window; her movement only a slight shift; imperceptible, she thinks, but Richard notices it every time.
“I want Daddy,” he says. “Why isn’t Daddy at home?”
“I have told you,” Amy says sharply, “I don’t know.” She hears herself in his question, Margaret in her answer. Hank’s absence is a separation in Richard’s chest, she knows, a wrenching open of the ribs. She pats his hand. She loves her son’s hands, his long, narrow fingers, which shift and slide across the table, touch, move away, return, tap, jiggle, poke, investigate. “You like it at Rhoda’s,” she says and squeezes his hand.
“No, I don’t.”
She kisses the pout of his wet mouth and says he doesn’t need to finish his supper and she sends him into the bedroom to undress for his bath while she rinses off their dishes. Richard is only five years old, she thinks, he needs an answer to his question, “When is Daddy coming home?” No more evasions or lies. It is time to confront it, she thinks, to break the news and make it real. She shakes her hands over the kitchen sink, reaches for the telephone, and dials her mother’s number.
Margaret sounds cheerful and surprised. “Hello, dear. It’s nice to hear from you,” she says as though she’s reading lines from a script. “How have you been?”
Amy’s heart thuds. “I’m okay. What have you been up to?”
Margaret lists her week’s activities. The visits she’s made to the sick, the lame, the elderly, and the broken-hearted. She has delivered talks to “Women Aglow” clubs, speaking to women about the message in the booklet she has written,
The Angels Among Us
, which, she says, is selling out faster than it can be printed. She blesses these women with her presence. She teaches them how to study passages of scripture that will give them hope and courage or enlighten. She explains how the gifts of the Holy Spirit are still for this time and this day. She encourages all whom she can to be born again, only this time “in the spirit”; to raise their hands and pray with their new language, the tongues of angels. At healing services, she lays hands on the supplicant and too-short legs grow longer, arthritic aches and pains vanish, and nervous bladders become calm. What she does for Amy is pray. Every day.
“Where’s Richard?” she breaks off the recitation to ask. “Is he enjoying this warm weather? Is he getting lots of the sun?” Richard stands at Amy’s side, naked, waiting for his bath.
“Oh, he’s great,” Amy says, then leaps in with a bright voice, “I was just calling to see if you’ve seen Hank. Talked to him. That’s all.”
“Why would he be here?”
“I thought he might have come by. To tell you the news.”
“Oh? What news?” Margaret asks, wary but at the same time Amy hears a hopeful tone.
“He’s left me. Us.” There, that’s done, she thinks.
Margaret doesn’t speak for several moments. Amy hears her sigh. “I’ve been praying and praying ever since you got married. I was afraid this might happen.”
Have you been praying for Mel too? Amy wants to ask. Mel, who has lived with three different women. Mel, who, whenever Amy speaks to him on the telephone or meets him for lunch down at the
Grain Exchange, is more often drunk than sober. What about Mel? she wants to ask.
“Hank is against your working, isn’t he?” Margaret asks, her voice taking on an accusing tone.
“
You
worked.”
“That was different. It was only one day a week and, besides, your father wasn’t against it. You kids never suffered.”
No, Amy thinks, that’s true. But it might have been better if you had worked full-time.
“What about Richard?”
“A friend babysits for me.”
“A friend? Just what kind of person is this friend?”
“My friend Rhoda is just great,” Amy tells Margaret.
Kids should be kept off balance, Rhoda once remarked. Go out without telling them where you’re going. A little uncertainty breeds creativity. Otherwise they’ll turn out to become lawyers, doctors, actuaries: boring people. Amy wanted to – but didn’t – point out to Rhoda that it was her boring accountant husband whose income provided her with the time and freedom to doodle and throw pots. But it was Rhoda who talked and Amy who listened. “I know,” Rhoda had said when Amy told her Hank had left, “how do you explain it, eh? He doesn’t beat you, he doesn’t drink, he isn’t a womanizer. People will think you’ve chucked out a perfectly good husband. You’ve got to make up something.”
“I don’t care how
great
she is,” Margaret says, “a babysitter is no substitute for a mother. Why do you want to work? Hank is a good provider. Just think of the women who
have
to work. You should be grateful.”
The word “grateful” explodes in Amy’s head.
“Hank’s a good person,” Margaret says. “I’ll pray for you. You know, it could be the Lord’s way of speaking to you, Amy. Think
about it. And if it’s His will that Hank comes back, you should consider whether the job’s worth it.”
“If Hank has the guts to show his ugly face around here, I’ll kick him in the knackers, that’s what I’ll do.” Amy hangs up.
She turns away from the telephone, seething. She’s vaguely aware of Richard kneeling as though in prayer in front of the freshly painted wall. She’s puzzled by this. Then she sees him place his palms against it. “Richard!” He turns, startled. His face is smudged here and there with pale blue paint and his bare stomach is covered with hand prints.
“Richard!”
Richard rears up from his knees, his eyes jumping with fear. She raises a clenched fist, and he scrambles around her, across the hallway, heading for the bathroom. “Don’t you run away from me!” she screams, and chases after him. She grabs him by the arm, catching him before he can close the door, and swings him around so that she can spank his buttocks. “Don’t,” he pleads. Her hand stings as it meets his naked backside. “Don’t.” She slaps him again and again with her open hand. “Don’t,” he cries as they move in a circle, Amy slapping, feeling the heat of the blows in her palm. “Don’t,” Richard says, and she sees the flesh of his buttock jerk as her hand meets it and he twists away, one hand clutching his penis, holding it tightly as she slaps. “Don’t,” he gasps. “It’s going to fall off, it’s going to fall off!”
But Amy is strong when anger flows in her body. She picks Richard up, sits down on the toilet seat, and flings him across her knee. She grabs the hairbrush. It smacks sharply against his body and he begins to scream. He keeps squirming and so sometimes the brush hits the back of his legs, his shoulders. Her scalp feels tight and the blood pounds into the top of her skull.
Richard, Richard
. She can’t believe that it’s her hand holding the brush, her voice saying, “You little bastard. It’s all your fault.” The brush snaps then and the end of it flies across the room. She cannot stop now. She looks
around, her rage careening wildly through the sound of his screams. As she looks for something else to hit him with he twists loose and falls to the floor, writhing at her feet, still clutching his penis, his pale child’s body set against the brown tiles. A severed earthworm, Amy will think later. She will remember always her son’s silent mouth, the impotent O-shape of it as he struggled to breathe. But, then, her only thought was to find something else to hit him with.
The telephone rings sharply, several times; the sound penetrates and stops her dead. Hank, she thinks.
“Amy? That was an awful thing to say!” It is Margaret. “Amy? Why is Richard crying?”
The anger begins to ebb and then flow from Amy’s body, away through her limbs, making her suddenly weak and shaky. She slides down onto the floor beside the kitchen table still cupping the telephone receiver to her mouth.
“Say something. Talk to me,” Margaret says.
Amy tries to speak, but the words won’t come.
“When your father left I thought I would die,” Margaret says, her voice becoming thin and pinched-sounding. “But let me tell you, there’s nothing worse than losing a child. Absolutely nothing. But I made it. Me and the Lord, we managed. And you can, too, if you’d just –”
“Why don’t you give up,” Amy says. She leaves the receiver dangling and crawls through the living room and down the hall to her bedroom. She kneels, face pressed into the bedspread to muffle the sound of her crying. After a few moments she hears Richard gasping and goes into the bathroom where he huddles in a corner wedged between the clothes hamper and the door, his knees drawn up against his stomach, his hands covering his face. Amy sees the marks of her hand and the hairbrush, angry red welts rising on her son’s shoulders. She sees the half-moon shape where her fingernails have gouged into his arm. She kneels beside him and encircles him in her
arms. “Baby, baby, baby,” she croons and rocks him against her. She scoops him up in her arms and carries him into his room and gently sets him down onto the bed. She brings ointment and rubs it into his skin. “I got paint on me,” he says through his sobbing. “I got paint on me. I got paint on me.”
Amy lies down beside him and gathers him into herself. “It’s okay,” she says. “It’s okay. You’re not bad. It’s Mommy. Mommy’s bad.” She pulls his square of flannel from beneath his pillow and he grabs at it, bringing it up against his nose. She holds him tightly against her body to still his shuddering, and waits for his breathing to become normal. “I’m sorry, so sorry,” she whispers into his hair.
“I don’t want you to go to work,” Richard says.
She kisses the nape of his sweaty neck. “I’m not going to go, don’t you worry. Not tonight.” She leaves him to call Rhoda and the Lounge and then returns to help him into his pyjamas. “Stay,” he says as he climbs beneath the blankets.
“I’ll stay,” she says and lies back down beside him.
Amy falls asleep before Richard does. They lie curled together, asleep for several hours, and the darkness of the night is complete. At one point she hears a noise and wants to rise to it but fatigue pulls her under again. Later she hears something else and thinks vaguely that she should open her eyes. She dreams that she is getting up, but she’s lying pinned to the bed by sleep, unable to move. Suddenly, she’s gripped by terror. She feels the pressure of sleep holding her fast to the bed, and yet she’s stumbling around the room, crashing into walls, floating down to the floor, tumbling over and over. Her eyes fly open in darkness. She’s bathed in cold sweat.
Richard
, she thinks wildly. Richard is not in bed beside her. Freed from sleep now she dashes through the house, calling his name. The light is different. The light in the hall. The front door is wide open and moonlight shines in through the screen. The front gate gapes open, too, and Richard’s tricycle and the wagon hitched to it are no longer on the sidewalk.
She begins to whimper with fear as she runs outside, down to the busy intersection in the dead of night, looking for her son, Richard.
I’m going to Grandma’s, I’m going to Grandma’s, I’m going to Grandma’s, Richard’s feet said as the pedals turned and turned and his “magic” stones rattled about in the wagon behind him, wheels jolting against cracks and holes in the sidewalk. He’d taken the stones, his toothbrush, and a candle from a drawer in the kitchen; to keep him warm, he said. But no matches, he was not allowed to play with matches. I’m going to Grandma’s, I’m going to Grandma’s. Around and around his feet went, pushing the pedals. He knew the way to Grandma’s, he said. A garage and then he would turn onto another street. He was going fast, a hundred miles an hour. The streetlights were spread far apart and he had to rush through the darkness between them. Ahead, the road ducked down under a bridge, on which a train creaked slowly along the tracks. I’m going to Grandma’s, I’m going to Grandma’s. A dog barked. A dog might bite me, Richard thought. I have to hurry and get to Grandma’s. Richard, Richard, he heard his mother’s faint calling. I’m going to Grandma’s, his feet said on the pedals. Hurry. Richard! Richard! she called, closer now. Richard! I know the way, I know the way. Hurry. Richard! she cried. His feet on the pedals began to slow down. The stones stopped rattling. He turned and saw her running towards him, barefoot. His terrible, beautiful mother
.