The End of Always: A Novel (18 page)

We sat on white wicker chairs on her front porch. She served lemonade in tall glasses that she carried out onto the porch on a silver tray. Each glass was topped with a sprig of mint and a stick that pierced a slice of canned peach. She had done the canning herself. She offered me a plate of sugar cookies, each cookie shaped like a heart. She laughed and said how fortuitous it was that she had baked these cookies, in this shape, just that morning.

“Isn’t being married wonderful?” she said.

I smiled. I thought of August and the way I felt when he touched me. I thought of our love like a bottomless well, always ready to swamp us with joy. It was more wonderful than I could hope to put into words.

She grinned. “No one ever tells you how good it’s going to be,” she said. “It’s like one big fat riddle that you can’t figure out until you’ve said I do. But the thing is, everyone knows. They all keep it to themselves but they know. I don’t know why they don’t tell us beforehand.” She stretched her arms over her head and then dropped her hands back into her lap. She gestured at the plate. “Have a cookie,” she said. She picked up a heart and made a big show of taking a bite. “Delicious!”

I looked out at her manicured yard, where nothing dared step out of line. My own house had crabgrass running up to the foundation. No curtains at the windows. Dissipated gravel on the drive.

Bertha raised her glass and offered a toast to the coming summer. To our great happiness and joy, newly married as we were, starting life together in this good place. We clinked glasses. She picked up the plate of cookies and held it out to me again. “These are so good,” she said. “Completely sinful. You should try one.”

I shook my head. My dirty clothes stuck to me as if shaped by sweat. I wondered if I smelled.

“You are far too good,” she said. “I see I can’t corrupt you.” She set the plate down and then picked up a second cookie and took a tiny bite. Sugar flaked into the air. “I hope you don’t mind,” she said. “I’m going to be very bad today. Just don’t let my husband find out. He’d hand me a fate worse than death.” She laughed.

There was no food in the house and I had no money so I set to work sorting my clothes into the wardrobe. I hung one skirt on one hook and one blouse on another and I hung the green dress with the fading black velvet ribbons on a hook by itself. I left my nightgown and my spare chemise and my underwear and my stockings rolled together in little balls in the valise. I slid the valise under the bed. I took my shoes off and stepped out onto our porch and slapped the soles together so that dust flew. When I got back to the bedroom I took my blouse and skirt off and shook them out hard and hung them from the wardrobe door. I thought about hot water for a bath but I hadn’t seen a coal scuttle, nor had I seen a washtub or a bucket. I was very tired. These questions seemed too much for me to answer. I lay down on the bed and rolled over on my side and hugged the pillows. August’s scent came to me in a rich wave and happiness rose in me like a tide rushing to shore. I buried my face in the pillow and lay there and breathed him in.

When I woke, it was well past dark. I could see lights on in Bertha’s house, and through the filmy sheers over her windows, I watched a man walk from one room into the next and then come back to the first room, where he sat down in an easy chair and picked up the newspaper from where it had fallen to the floor. He spread the pages out before him. I watched for a time but could not see Bertha. Eventually, the man stood and stretched and walked out of my view and did not come back. I imagined the two of them having dinner together in Bertha’s gleaming dining room, where she would use her luminous pale china, the plates trimmed with wide gold bands, painted flowers decorating the centers. And there would be a roast and dumplings and a platter of sausages and a big tureen of beets. Afterward she would give him brandied peaches and that plate of sugar cookies and make fresh coffee. They would sit at the table together and talk. He would hold her hand and tell her that he loved her, there in the bright light of that very clean room.

I rolled over and sat up and hugged myself. I was very hungry and the room had grown cold. When I pressed the light switch, no lights came on. When I looked in the icebox, the shelves were empty. I walked back into the bedroom and sat on the bed in the dark and picked up the pillow that smelled of August. I hugged it. I set it down. I picked it up again. Then I threw it across the room.

In the morning, pastel light gave shape to the wobbly washstand and the iron bedstead and my valise now open on the floor. I buttoned my old blouse and fastened my skirt and walked out to the door to pick up my shoes. I sat on the edge of the bed and fastened them hook by hook. My chest felt light and open with anger and fear. I had no idea where August was. I walked back and forth from the wardrobe to the bed and folded my clothes back into the suitcase. I smoothed the tattered fabric and thought of my mother, who must have brought the valise with her from Rügen. What had she really carried and what had she tried to leave behind? She always looked away whenever we asked her about her life before. She just told stories about the horrible dwarves who stole the miller’s daughter and kept her locked up and laboring underground. For years and years, underground and in the dark, alone except for the dwarves, who owned her exactly as if she had been a slave.

None of this mattered now. When I thought of August, I felt a doubt that I could not quite manage just by remembering the way I felt when he touched me. For a brief moment, it struck me that Martha might have been right. There was some small possibility that I had not known him well enough to marry him. The idea flickered through me like a flame I did not want to fuel. But it was impossible to ignore. How could he promise to come home and make love to me and then never show up? How could he be the August I loved and also be this other August, a boy who stayed away?

I did not understand anything. I can perhaps be forgiven for my naïveté. There are two things that all seventeen-year-old girls have in common, and one is their naïveté and the other is their belief that they are not naïve. When I was with August, I was like a honey-drunk bee, a dog that has gotten into the beer. When he was gone, I was blank as a bedsheet. His absence was like a nail pounded through a board that had seemed perfect and true. It felt new, an unwelcome surprise that I could not have seen coming.

I closed the valise and buckled its straps and lifted it and carried it to the front door.

He came up to me as soon as I stepped out of the house. He put his arms around me and fell to his knees sobbing. He begged me not to leave. The sun had just begun to rise. I stood in the driveway and let him put his arms around my legs. I let him bury his face in my skirt. I let him cry and say things I could not understand. Finally he looked up at me, his eyes running with tears, his mouth swollen and sticky. He clutched my skirt. He said that he would love me forever.

He was so drunk he could barely walk. He pitched up the steps to our door and fell hard against the railing. I had to grab the back of his shirt to keep him from going down. He stood breathing heavily and swaying by the door so I reached past him and turned the knob. He stumbled into the room and staggered to the couch. He tried to sit on the couch but sat down hard on the floor instead. He fell back and lay there.

Outside, birds had begun to call. Early light made the room gray and then the gray brightened.

“Marie,” he said. He slurred the word and gestured at the air over his stomach.

I wavered at the sound of his voice and my anger migrated to a distant place, leaving only a little trail behind, like it was already just a memory of anger and the memory itself would soon be gone. But then I decided I must be firm.

“I am hungry,” I said tightly. “I am cold. You left me here alone. I have no money. I have nowhere to go. You are responsible for me. Do you understand?”

He put his hand over his eyes. “It will not happen again,” he said.

His words ran together. I could barely understand him.

He dropped his hand to the floor. His hair was matted and plastered to his head. One eye was swollen and glittered through a slit in his purple skin. “Marie,” he said.

“Stop saying that,” I said sharply. The boy I loved lost in this sloppy man who stank of whiskey and cigarette smoke.

He raised his head and squinted at me. Then he pushed his palms into the floor and lurched to his feet. He stood swaying and breathing before me, one hand balled into the cupped palm of the other, the look in his eyes flat and unfocused, as if he was a man in a walking trance. He took two staggering steps to steady himself. Then he leaned forward and pointed his finger at me, his swollen eye oozing, his good eye hooded and dim. He had dried blood on his mouth. He had dried blood on his hand.

“August,” I said. “Stop it.”

He breathed in harshly and straightened, like a man who has to steady himself before he speaks.

“August,” I said. I stepped back.

He staggered a little, his good eye flat and blank, the other swollen and gone.

“August,” I said. “Stop.” I put my hand up.

He wrenched the valise from my hand. “You are not going anywhere without me,” he said. His words gurgled together like water running down the drain. He threw the valise at the sofa.

“August.”

“Shut up,” he said.

“Please.”

“Stupid bitch,” he said. His chin was down and his words came out low and garbled.

“August,” I said. He started to fall and I grabbed his sleeve. He held my arms and steadied himself. Then he straightened and batted my hands away. He jabbed his finger into my chest. “Stupid,” he said. He stopped and just stood swaying in front of me, breathing hard. Spittle crusted at the corners of his mouth.

My hand went to my chest. I kept it flat over the spot where he had poked me.

He stabbed his finger at me again. I tried to push his hand away and he grabbed my hand and held it. His fingers crushing mine, as if the bones could be ground to dust at his touch, the veins flattened until the life had run out of them. He leaned down to look me square in the eye and jerked my hand behind my back.

“You are a cunt,” he said. “You know that?”

The smell of whiskey, his breath close to my hair, his hand on mine.

“You are hurting me,” I said, but he just squeezed my hand tighter.

I put my other hand on his chest and tried to push him back. It is not possible to argue with a drunk. I knew the best thing to do was to try to keep my head down and get out of the way. But he would not let go. He looked at me and I might as well have been some stranger who had crossed him in the road. He stabbed his finger into my chest again and wobbled and took one step to keep from falling. Then he raised the flat of his hand and slapped me hard, a blunt thump I felt deep in my skull, like pulpy meat had shaken loose and now lay shuddering against bone. Tears sprang to my eyes and I fell to the floor.

“Cunt,” he muttered again. Then he went into the bedroom. I heard his boots hit the floor as he pulled them off, first one, then the other. The bedsprings creaked as he lay down.

I stayed on the floor for a long time. When the sparkles behind my eyes faded I lay there and cried. Later, when I knew he was asleep, I got to my feet and went into our room. I looked at him laid out before me in the clean morning light, just a man, his face bloodied, one eye bulging and blue, and his face slack. I listened to him breathe. Then I searched his pockets until I found the wallet that had been stuffed with cash. It was empty. I walked back into the sitting room and sat on the couch and pulled my knees up under my chin. My cheek hurt when I touched it. I put my head down on my knees and wept. Sunlight spread in a flat wash across our yard.

Bertha worked in her garden with her back to me and I watched her, her apron strung over her dress, her trowel in her gloved hand, her hair tied back with a pretty blue ribbon. She knelt at the edge of the flower bed. When the breeze blew exactly the right way, I could hear her humming to herself.

The step where I sat was warm in the sunlight. A wagon rolled along the street and then stopped. A man in white pants and a white shirt jumped down and came up the walk. Bertha looked up from her garden when he spoke to her. He wrote on a pad of paper and then turned and walked back to the wagon. He climbed up and slapped the reins and the horse pulled the wagon down the street.

All of this happened as if far away, the world fractured by the geometrics of a kaleidoscope. I did not want Bertha to turn around. I did not want her to see my hair haphazardly pinned in place, my filthy dress. Instead I wanted to lie down and disappear in a hole with no bottom. But I could not. So I sat on the step with my arms around my knees and my chin on my arms and watched Bertha in her yard. I thought of William Oliver and the feel of his weight as he collapsed against me. I thought of Inge, who would have pushed me into boiling water if she had had the chance. I thought of Martha, who I was sure had no comfort for me, nor any sympathy, and who herself slipped away to walk with George in the shadows under the trees in the park. I thought of my father, who terrified me beyond all reason and who terrified her, and our terror sheared away any bond that might have grown between us and left us alone in our common loss. I thought of Hattie and of the way she danced in the rain. She seemed to move in a place that my father had not yet reached. I thought of August when he first came to me. He had felt familiar for reasons I could not explain. His light eyes and dark grin. His hands on my skull when he kissed me. His words in my mother’s accent. His love raining down like blows.

For better or for worse, the justice of the peace had said. We had stood in the long rectangle of sunlight on the red carpet and had made promises and taken vows. I thought of August’s body on mine. His head resting on my naked belly. The weight of him and the wind in the trees and the darkness and the two of us the center of the world. I could not bear the idea that I would be cast out from that. Even now I feel embarrassed and ashamed to admit this, but I wanted him with me: a man to whom I would always lay myself open completely.