The Four Ms. Bradwells (13 page)

Damn. How am I ever going to sleep here without my pills?

Betts asks about the flat screen television hanging over the mantel just as Laney says, “Look, Mia. Faith has that first news piece you wrote.” She’s picked up a small black frame from a shelf by the miniature books: Mia’s damned “The Curse of the Naked Women.” After she and Andy
split, Mia took off in her car for South America and who knows where else before somehow snagging a visa to visit her brother, a geologist working for an American oil company in Nigeria. There, she saw a group of African protesters, and called Mother, and the next thing we knew Mia had a byline and a job as a foreign correspondent, and Mother had herself a brand fucking new pseudo-child. Six paragraphs that didn’t even run in a major paper, but Mother has kept a framed copy ever since.

Mia takes the frame, smiling slightly, doubling her chin.

Betts reads over her shoulder, mock-dramatically:

“Early dawn, the entire womenfolk of Ogharefe, Nigeria, have laid siege to the offices of the United States multinational oil company Pan Ocean. Their mission: payment for lands seized and for damage to health and property caused by pollution. These women want only a very few basic things—reliable drinking water, and perhaps electricity—from a foreign corporation selling millions of dollars worth of crude oil extracted cost-free from oilfields here.”

Betts says, “You do a great job of describing it, Mi: the dawn light and the shine of the women’s breasts, the dancelike quality of their protest. It’s just … thousands of women stripping naked to make a point?”

“Their well water was laced with heavy metal, and the ash from the natural gas flares dissolved their corrugated iron roofs,” Mia says. “Their kids were getting sick. Wouldn’t you do anything to stop something from making Izzy sick?”

“Turns out all they had to do was take off their clothes,” I say dismissively.

“Exactly!” Mia says, undismissed. “And honestly, it was one of the most moving sights I’ve ever seen, all those …” Christ, she’s tearing up.

“… all those women standing naked together, saying this is who we are at our very cores, and we are powerful, too.”

“And we are powerful, too,” Betts repeats, rolling the phrase around in her own voice, admiring it.

“Why do you think the piece didn’t get more exposure?” I ask.

Laney shoots me a look; she thinks that’s my way of digging at Mia, saying the article was not very widely read. Which, okay, it is. I turn my back to them all, setting about finding the Sexton
Transformations
that
Mother left for Aunt Margaret. The book, when I find it, falls open to an envelope and a photograph stuck in the pages, Trey and me in hunting gear.

“It doesn’t take an Einstein to figure out that thousands of naked women protesting you is a public relations fiasco,” Betts says. “The oil company wasn’t stupid. They caved immediately to keep it from becoming a story.”

In the awkward silence, I suppose we’re all thinking the same thing: we should have caved immediately at the Hart Building this afternoon. Is it too late to cave?

Betts takes the frame from Mia and continues theatrically:

“A woman’s exposure of her body in this society is believed to cast a lifetime curse on those to whom the nakedness is directed, a curse related to productivity and fertility. This curse, used by women in South Africa, Kenya, and elsewhere, is one no local man would dare provoke. Any foreigner upon whom the curse is believed to be cast—and any corporation with which he is affiliated—would find his ability to transact business in the Nigerian oilfields severely compromised. So the sight of thousands of naked women did the trick: the local officials and police all fled to avoid the curse, leaving the company with little option but to—”

“A little sensationalist, I know,” Mia interrupts. She takes the frame from Betts and sets it back on the shelf. “We could turn on the news, Betts,” she says.

“Or not.” Betts’s tone evoking Katie Couric’s voice as she might begin this story:
In what was expected to be a quiet final day of Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Elsbieta Zhukovski …
“Unless you want to, Laney?”

“Or not,” Laney agrees.

“Music,” I suggest. I set the Sexton volume on Mother’s desk, find the iPod I gave her last Christmas plugged into the Bose cube speakers I also gave her. It’s surprising how much it touches me to know that she used them, that she hasn’t, as she so often does, regifted them to some women’s shelter. When I hit the play button, an almost unbelievably gentle piano piece begins, a few notes that call to mind the bay at sunrise, the Law Quad in moonlight after a new snow, Mother reading by the fire just
before she realizes I’m there. When Mia asks what the music is, I realize I don’t know. Ted is the one who puts together the playlists. This music I like to think I chose for Mother is in truth music Ted chose for me, that I copied for her.

“That’s a long way from the Bee Gees, Ginge,” Betts says. “Gymnopédie Number One by Erik Satie. It was inspired by a poem: ‘Les Antiques.’ ”

“ ‘The Ancients,’ ” Laney says.

“I don’t remember the poem exactly, but there was something about a fire in it,” Betts says.

Fire longs to meet itself / flaring, longing wants a multiplicity of faces
. Not the lines that inspired the music, but from Mark Doty’s “Fire to Fire.” The book it’s from,
School of the Arts
, is the kind of book Mother ought to have collected, but Mother never had much use for new books, or for the kind of desire Doty explores. Most of what she read was the news, actually, with a preference for the kind of things Mia writes, pieces about crazy people doing crazy things to try to change the world in whatever crazy way they think it needs to be changed.

Mia and Betts and Laney and I sit on the floor around the Scrabble board, the way we used to in Laney’s and my suite in the Law Quad and in the living room of the Division Street house.

“Why did you call my mother, Mia?” I ask.

Taking her time / she looks the bus over, / grandly, otherworldly
, like Bishop’s moose.

“With the naked women thing,” I say.

“The women made me think of her,” she says, as if it’s just that simple.

“Those women didn’t bare their asses to draw attention.”

Mia shrugs. “Didn’t they? Anyway, it seemed so like something your mom would do.”

The way she glances at Betts leaves me sure they’ve talked about this in a way that has something to do with me. Leaves me imagining Mother’s hands wrapped around the telephone as she talked not to me but to Mia or Laney or Betts.

My mother’s hands are cool and fair, / They can do anything
.

“I didn’t expect everything that came after, Ginge,” Mia says gently. “You can’t possibly think that when I called her I meant for her to write it down and send it to her newspaper contacts.”

“Have her
secretary
write it down.”

Mia flips a Scrabble tile from inside the cardboard lid: a one-point
E
. She won’t be going first.

“She liked the part about the curse,” she says. “She said she was going to use the idea of the curse sometime and get naked for a cause.”

“The curse of the naked feminist!” Betts says as she flips over a
J
(eight points), winning the right to play first.

We flip the tiles back over and mix them around, then pull our seven. When Betts plays her first word, “jargon,” I eye the
J
with suspicion, sure she kept an eye on it after she flipped it back over. But I don’t challenge her because even as I think it I know it isn’t true. Betts would never cheat at anything, much less at something that doesn’t matter. I’m the one of us who would cheat at a Scrabble game.

“ ‘Jargon’ with the
J
on the double letter score. And the whole word doubled!” she says. “That, friends, is forty-four points.”

If she can set aside that awful senator and his awful questions, surely I can ignore the looming presence of the shelves and shelves of Mother’s books.

“I think Ted wants to retire and move here,” I say.

Laney looks around the library as if I might intend to move our king-sized bed into this very room. “He’s only, what? Fifty-five?”

“Work isn’t fun for him anymore, if it ever was.”

“Could you live out here, do you think?” Laney asks.

Mia plays “raw” on the
R
, the four-point
W
on a triple letter square giving her fourteen points for what really is a pathetic effort, but I don’t complain because I play next. I’ve got “ember” with the
E
next to her
W
so I get “we” as well. A pretty nice play even if does only get me one point more than Mia’s “raw.” And the placement will make it hard for anyone to use the triple word box that falls below and to the right of my
R
for more than a two-letter word.

“Shit,” I say when Laney lays out “choose” with the
S
falling at the end of “ember,” the
E
on the triple word score. I look around at the books as if they might be as appalled at my language as Mother forever was. Never mind that I learned to swear from her.

“Shit,” I repeat. The word feels as good as it ever has in my mouth, here in her library.

“Ten for ‘embers’ plus fifteen tripled to forty-five for ‘choose.’ ” Laney
grins at Betts. “Fifty-five makes your forty-four look awful shabby, doesn’t it?”

Betts settles for “teeth” and Mia plays “anger,” leaving me gleefully close to the bottom left triple word score space. I sink into the warmth of the fire as I work like hell for something that uses my ten-point
Z
on the double letter space above the
A
in Mia’s “anger.” “Zap” is a word, but I need four letters to get to the triple word space. I have another
P
, but “zapp” with two
Ps
isn’t a word, much as I want it to be. Zape? Zaep? Zare? If I had an
F
, I could play “faze,” but I don’t. I consider playing “zap,” taking the twenty-four points, but then if Betts has an
S
she can play “zaps,” which would be forty-five points for a single tile, a play she would gloat about for the rest of her life.

The sand is falling fast as I give up on the
Z
and look for another way to use the triple word score. I focus on the
P
which, at three points, is the next-highest-point tile I have.

“Tick, tick, tick,” Mia says.

I see it then: a word I can’t possibly play.

I pull the tiles, set them on the board in a different order: “pear.” Six points. Which is fine. I’m fine with six points.

Laney counts the points, adding the six to my fifteen for twenty-one, but Mia is watching me, her little mind spinning, wondering how I missed snagging the damned triple word score, if only as a defensive move. She sees the better play too, then. She hesitates, looking from me to Betts, then to Laney. She has never been a good bluffer, at least not with us.

“Your go, Laney,” I say.

Mia’s expression makes Laney and Betts study my play again, too. Maybe they see it or maybe they don’t; I’m distracted because I see now what I ought to have played: “Pare!” Like with a knife. With the three-point P on the double letter space and the
E
on the triple word.

Mia begins rearranging the tiles, though, forming the word I simply could not play. “We’ve managed to stick our heads in the sand for almost thirty years, but the nasty little grains are filling our lungs now,” she says. “We need to talk about this.”

“We weren’t ever going to talk about it,” I say quietly.

“We didn’t start the conversation,” Mia says as we all sit staring at the tiles, which now read R-A-P-E.

PART II

The sexual assault exam began at 6:30 a.m.… Two clean sheets were spread on the floor.… Patty stood over these and removed her clothes … provided a urine sample … was asked to lie naked on a table for a head to toe examination. Her knees were up high, her legs spread apart, her feet in stirrups.… Patty’s pubic hair was combed, and pubic hair samples collected.

Poarch examined Patty’s vagina with a Wood’s lamp, which casts ultraviolet light to detect body fluids like semen. She did a “wet mount exam,” which involved taking a swab from Patty’s vagina … inserted a medium speculum into Patty’s vagina to search for evidence of internal injury. Lastly, she used a colposcope—a kind of sophisticated magnifying glass attached to a video camera—to probe Patty’s vagina and rectal areas.

—from
Cry Rape: The True Story of One Woman’s Harrowing Quest for Justice
, by Bill Lueders

GINGER