Thief of Dreams (12 page)

She nodded soberly, distantly, as though she hadn't even heard him. “But I think I would like to go home,” she said. “I'm very tired.”

Leslie helped her into her coat, and outside under the stars, he helped her into his car, but she was aware of these things only in the most remote and abstract sort of way. For most of the ride from Blowing Rock to Cedar Hill it was this way, as though she were too exhausted even to think; but after a while she found herself looking at Leslie's profile and wondering—in a strangely dispassionate sort of way—what it would be like to be married to such a gentle, reasonable, and successful man, to have the nice things he could give her simply as a matter of course, to be treated with consideration. She'd had such thoughts before, but never with so little emotion.

Before she quite realized where they were, he had slipped into the parking space beside her small gray coupe and given her hand a squeeze and her forehead a chaste, gentle kiss. She watched him pass in front of his car to help her out as if she'd never quite seen him before. Why he'd never really even made a pass at her, she realized, not really. Only once had he even kissed her on the lips, and although she hadn't resisted exactly, she hadn't responded either. She hadn't quite had time to gauge her feelings, as she recalled, before he'd begun to dissemble and apologize.

“Let me know how it goes tomorrow,” he said when he'd guided her to her little coupe, “just don't—”

She put her arms about his neck, kissed him, and slowly, deliberately, tilted her pelvis into his body. If he was surprised, and she knew he must be, he couldn't have been more surprised than she was. She couldn't believe she'd done such a thing, and what she was thinking, she didn't know herself. When, at last, she withdrew, she laid her palm against his cheek, searched his eyes for a moment, and then she was in her car and the motor was running and she was backing up. Leslie was standing just where she'd left him, apparently struck dumb and unable to speak; and she was almost out of town before she realized her vagina was wet.

She was not quite sane, she knew that much. From the moment she'd left Leslie at the table back at the restaurant, she had not been herself and seemed to look at whoever she had become from a great distance and with cool disinterest, as though she were watching a sleepwalker. But no, she'd felt a kind of wonder and sadness too, as though her life were over, say, and she were only a spirit, a ghost, looking back on it with nothing more than washed-out and ghostly emotion.

Strangely calm, as though she couldn't be held in the least responsible for her behavior, she drove down the mountain, oddly bemused, surprised, and perplexed by turns. It wasn't until she pulled into the driveway behind her sister's car that she seemed to reach a deeper understanding. Well no wonder she didn't feel responsible, she thought, since she'd just been given to understand that she had no power, no control whatever, which was just about the same thing as having no will, since there wasn't any way to express it. Except …

She sat staring at the dark, hulking shape of her sister's car in front of her, the dark shape of the house and post office, the surrounding trees and shrubs looming darkly in the faint light of the new moon and distant stars. Such a small arena for choice and will…. It seemed so new to her. Was she a stupid woman? Did other women always know? Had they made peace? Had her mother always … It was sobering, but in some way she did not quite understand, both sad and freeing.

A little at a time she seemed to come to herself as though descending stairs from her thoughts into her physical body. She was bitterly cold, and she got out of her car, crossed the lawn, climbed the stile, and shaking head to foot, let herself into the trailer, which was mercifully warm. James had the little gas furnace going, and, rolled into his blanket on the couch, he scarcely stirred when she came in. He had left on the small, dim lamp beside her bed, and she went into her bedroom and got undressed, feeling strangely fascinated with herself, as if she hadn't yet got all the way back inside Madeline Tally and maybe never would. When she came out again in her gown and robe to brush her teeth and run a basin of water to wash her face, even James was new and different to her. Sunk into sleep on his uncomfortable couch, he seemed more than merely her son, but himself too, whoever in the world that might be. She supposed she'd always known that, but never quite so clearly as she saw it now. And in the next moment she seemed to understand that she had never been merely a wife, or before that, merely a daughter. Funny, but she hadn't seemed quite able to understand that before. She wasn't just Edward's wife, whom he could disappoint and make angry and sad; she was herself. Whoever in God's world that might be.

What a strange, lonely sort of dignity there was in this knowledge, comforting when she thought of Edward, or any man, since it kept some part of her separate and intact. But looking at James asleep on the couch, she knew that what was true for her was also true for him. She had never before understood how modest a claim motherhood really was. He wasn't, after all, an extension of her, anymore than she was an extension of Edward Tally or Bertha Marshall. Somehow, from this day forward, she would have to earn motherhood, and her claim on her son seemed all the more precious for being so tenuous. In another mood she might have gathered him in her arms to tell him she loved him, waking him in the process, confusing him. But this night she would let him sleep.

She felt tender and wise. Looking back on what she had been, she was surprised that losing her virginity, say, hadn't taught her more. Or bearing a child. But those things seemed only to have happened to her; and, if not altogether without her consent, then as though she had been mindlessly following some blueprint laid down long ages before she was born. It was as though, at the restaurant, she'd watched herself all but cease to exist. Still, what little of her remained had acted shamelessly and on a whim and brought her wisdom. Oh it had looked like a humble package at first, but nature abhorred a vacuum, and it had filled her up. It had opened her eyes and brought her comfort. Just now it was a gentle thing, and if she could hang on to it, she could keep herself inviolate. And maybe she could not rule the world, but she knew, at last, that she could rule herself, and if she did not wish to be gentle, she could rule a man or two. Yes she could, she thought, and blushed.

Once again she came back to herself. She brushed her teeth and washed her face, and exhausted as she was, she realized she did not wish to yield up her consciousness to sleep for fear these new feelings, so hard won, would vanish. But she gave James one last, fond look and took herself off to bed. She didn't think she'd be able to sleep in any case, but the very next thing she knew, it was daylight, and James, dressed for Sunday school, was standing in the doorway saying, “Momma? Momma? Everybody's ready for church. They said I should get you up, so you can stay by the phone.”

“All right,” she told him. Still half-asleep, she heard him go out of the trailer, and in the next moment she began to realize how sick she was.

Forty-five minutes later, having vomited in the trailer sink and again by the fence—hanging on to the stile until her stomach was empty even if the retching went on and on and on—she sat in the empty kitchen of the farmhouse, rocking herself gently back and forth in the straight-backed kitchen chair. The telephone had been ringing as she'd come up the flagstones to the back door, but she'd been unable to get to it before it stopped. It was their ring all right, two longs and three shorts, but since she'd gotten inside, the phone had rung only once, and that had not been their ring. Her eyes hot and alien in their sockets and her joints aching with fever, she waited for it to ring again.

How damned ironic it was to wake up sick. She'd thought she was being so profound last night, but maybe she'd just been feverish. And maybe she'd just gotten sick to punish herself for thinking the way she had. Even though she knew there was nothing left in her stomach, the powerful urge to throw up remained, and even the smallest joints of her toes ached. She hugged herself and rocked. Her new wisdom had lost some of its sparkle, and she was no longer sure exactly how she was supposed to put it into practice. In fact, it didn't even seem new, but rather silly and old and obvious. Maybe the only thing new was her way of seeing it, her attitude. She could have seduced Leslie if she'd wanted to, and she might have wanted to if she'd only caught up to herself in time. And who was to say she wouldn't?

She moaned and rocked. The clock over her momma's cook stove told her they would be out of Sunday school and filing into church now for the regular service. She did not want her family around when she talked to Edward. She didn't want them to hear what she had to say. She wasn't even sure she wanted Edward to hear it, as though it were too personal even for his ears.

Please let him call before they come home, she thought, but a second later when the phone began to ring, sick as she was, the sound of it went through her like electricity.

Before it started through its ringing sequence a second time, she'd shouted “Hello” into a confabulation of static, buzzing, and the faint, tinny conversation of two strangers.

“Hey, sugar? Is that you?” Edward's voice asked, broken but understandable and riding over the Lilliputian voices on the line.

She did not wish to answer to “sugar.” It started the whole conversation off on the wrong foot, but there was nothing for it, and she shouted “Yes” into the mouthpiece. He wanted to know how she was, and she told him she was just fine. He wanted to know how James was, and she told him James was happy. In the interstice between Edward's remarks and hers, a tiny conversation, clear as rain, declared that Millie had had a car wreck and broken some ribs and her wrist.

“I've had a lot of time to think things over, sugar,” Edward told her, and even though static blotted out some of what he said, she understood him perfectly. “This is just a piss-poor way to live,” he told her. “It don't make sense. It's unnatural. I love you, honey, and I miss you.”

How could he sound so cheerful, as though he'd just untangled a terrible snarl by pulling on an obvious thread? She was certain she'd heard him laugh.

“I want my family back. Working like a dog don't make any sense otherwise,” he said.

It was awful what the sound of his voice did to her. It was so familiar, like home, but a barren home with a cold hearth. It was like getting the Christmas spirit in February after a season that had been all wrong and false and perfunctory. Still, his voice sounded like home.

He was waiting for her to say something, she knew. But she was so sick she ached all over. He had talked so much. Been so pleased with himself. But she couldn't say anything. Instead, through the buzz and crackle of long distance, she heard the Lilliputian conversation going on and on:
Tobacco wasn't so good, but they Lord have mercy, you should have seen the crop of apples, never seen such an awful mess of apples, split that big tree out by the barn clean to the roots
. As though it had a sound as well, she could hear Edward's need to hear her speak, his anticipation of her forgiveness, her joy at what he had decided. And she could hear it turn into something else, bitterness maybe, even before he spoke again. “Dammit, Madeline, this is nonsense. What the hell do you want me to say? You can't be happy either. …”

“I am!” she shouted. “I am happy!”

Edward didn't say anything, and neither did the tiny voices that had spoken of Millie's accident and tobacco and apple crops, as though she had shouted them down also.

“I want a divorce,” she told him, and for a long time all she heard was a long sigh of static.

“That's horseshit, Madeline, and you know it,” Edward said at last.

“I've spoken to a lawyer, and I want you to give me a divorce,” she told him, her voice full of the burrs and awkward notes of weeping.

So sick she thought she might faint, holding the receiver to her ear and her hand over the mouthpiece so he couldn't hear her crying, she waited. If the floor had opened up beneath her feet and swallowed her, she wouldn't have been surprised. If her heart had turned literally to ice and ceased to beat, she wouldn't have been surprised.

“If that's the goddamned way you want it,” Edward said, and in the next moment the noise of long distance, all the complicated confabulation of it, simply vanished.

JAMES TALLY

When he came home from church, the trailer smelled faintly of Lysol and vomit and was smotheringly hot.

“Momma?” he said when he discovered her in bed with her face turned to the wall.

“Keep away,” she told him in a shaky voice, “I've got the flu.”

He was taken aback. All through Sunday school and church he'd tried to imagine what she and his father would be saying to each other. Finally he'd decided that she would be falsely cheerful when he came home. Yes, and then she'd sit him down on the couch and try to convince him that living in Pittsburgh wouldn't be so bad. But he hadn't expected this at all. He looked at her pale face and the damp tendrils of hair stuck to her cheek.

“Can I do something?” he asked at last.

She turned to face him then, her eyes huge and dark and full of something he'd seen in them many times before. “Everything's going to be all right,” she told him in her shaky voice. “I'm just a little sick.”

He knew she had talked to his father. He saw it in her eyes. And he knew that nothing was all right.

“I need to rest now,” she said and turned her face to the wall again.

He went up to the house and told them she was sick, and Lily came down to check on her and came back to say that she had the flu and couldn't hold anything on her stomach, so they ate Sunday dinner without her. After dinner he went down and changed his clothes as quietly as he could without knowing if she was asleep or awake, and went out to mope around the barn for a little while before he took the new slingshot he'd made from its hiding place and a handful of round, smooth pebbles he'd collected from the creek and walked up the ridge behind the barn. It had grown raw and misty, and it was very quiet, and all at once he began to feel seriously guilty about the slingshot.