At one point Loraine sees this couple holding each other for the longest time by the far wall. Later, when they part, she recognizes Chris and Melody. In fact, driving home later, they sit in the back seat while Loraine plays the chauffeur. They whisper and push at each other. It’s harmless, Loraine wants to believe. Then, remembering that letter, she almost asks Melody if she has protection; Loraine doesn’t want the girl hurt, she likes her spunk. She remembers what it’s like to be faced with the prospect of sex at this age, all excitement and clumsiness and mishap. Like sticking your nose into a gopher hole and being bitten.
She plays some music softly and, pulling into Lesser, thinks the two children in back must be sleeping, it’s so quiet. She sneaks a look in the rear-view mirror and in the light of a street lamp sees her son entangled in Melody’s arms, his head pressed against her chest. Lights flash from a passing car and Melody’s face flares and disappears. For a moment Loraine sees how perfectly happy she is and this, for some reason, makes Loraine sad.
In the morning Chris has a low-grade fever.
“My tongue hurts,” he says. He touches his mouth. His speech is thicker today as if he were fighting words past a rag.
Loraine feels his forehead and offers him juice and toast. She goes out to work in the barn and when she returns to the house at noon Chris’s fever has gone up. His lips are dry, his tongue fatter.
Loraine says, “Your tongue’s infected.”
The boy just stares, he doesn’t speak.
“You put that in yourself? That hole?”
Chris nods.
“Was the needle, or punch, or whatever, clean?”
“Yeah. I think so. Melody used it but I washed it.”
“Boiled it?”
“No, washed it. It was just Melody, it’s not like it was this bum.”
“Well, there you go. Just curious. What did she pierce?”
“Her nipple.” Chris says this and winces. His tongue is growing. The fever has made him yielding and honest. He’s telling Loraine stuff he normally wouldn’t. Loraine shakes her head and wonders if she should call Mrs. Krahn and have her check out Melody’s breasts, just to show her what’s happening—the woman’s naive.
In the afternoon Loraine drives Chris to Emergency in Steinbach. They sit side by side surrounded by a worried mother holding a hot baby, a middle-aged man reading the paper, and a Holdemann couple with six
children. Four girls, two boys. The girls are wearing these polka-dot kerchiefs. Loraine stares and watches the eldest daughter, who is close to Chris’s age, tend her baby brother. She’s a big patient girl with thick calves. The little boy toddles past Loraine, grabs a magazine, and gurgles. The Holdemann girl hovers, hands ready. Loraine, so close, sights the pale skin at her nape. Unblemished. She wonders if Chris has noticed this girl. How pleasing. Loraine wants to touch the hem of her dress. She thinks that if she were to be given another life she would choose to be this girl. Walk a path where doubt does not exist, where the rituals consist of dressing and eating and praying and having babies and standing in a large kitchen with several other women, bending before a yeasty dun-coloured bowl, laughing at some tidy joke, flour on the cheek. Nothing dirty there. No fear.
The little one cries. The girl scoops him up. Her dress sticks between her legs and she pulls it free. Loraine turns to her son, whose head lolls. Later the doctor shakes her head, prescribes penicillin, and says to Loraine, “Watch him. Something like this shouldn’t be ignored. You especially have to monitor his breathing, swollen tongue and all.”
That night Loraine dreams she is swallowing an eel and choking on it. She wakes, her fists clenched, and goes to check on Chris. His breathing is light and fast. His forehead is hot, his lips dry. Loraine sits by his side and when he stirs, offers him water. He drinks quickly, still groggy. Before he lies down again he kisses Loraine on the cheek. His eyes are on fire; he is mad. Loraine kisses him back quickly, feeling as if she is taking advantage of her boy.
Chris’s mouth moves. He garbles a sentence and says, “Oops!” Then he says, clearly, in whispers as if confessing a private sin, “Melody doesn’t believe.” He slides back onto the pillow and sleeps.
Loraine watches him; the hall light falls across his face. She would like to trade places with her son. She could so easily take his pain, his confusion and say, “There, you are healed. Go now.”
She strokes his cheek. His mouth is big, like Jim’s was; stretched now, pulled by the weight of sleep, it is grotesque. Beautifully so. Ugly is beautiful sometimes. Loraine knows that and this is what attracts her to Johnny. He can be so ugly. Inside too, but there’s also a purity there; he’s raw and furious, and this makes him less elusive, more honest. She would like to hold him now. Just that. She lies down beside her hot son and holds him instead.
Though the fever subsides a little by the evening of the next day, Chris remains dull and listless and his forehead and chest are blotchy. He is weak, too weak to eat properly. He drinks ice water and lets the cubes rest on his tongue. In this state he forgets who Loraine is and allows her entrance to his body. She helps him walk to the washroom, his legs wobbly and unfamiliar, and she holds his hips from behind as he stands and pees into the bowl.
“I’m not looking,” she says. She runs a bath for him and helps him undress, guides him into the tub. He makes a half-hearted attempt to cover himself but once prone in the water simply sighs and closes his eyes. Loraine splashes water across his chest and watches his penis float. It’s shaped like Jim’s; remembering Jim like this loosens a shard into her throat and the quick pain makes her eyes water, as if that innocuous little muscle were a tunnel to her past, to a time before Johnny. Johnny’s penis, when limp, is long and thin and when Loraine talks to it she mocks it. Then she puts her mouth on Johnny’s chest and says, “You’re teeny, teeny.” He doesn’t like that.
“You can go now,” Chris says. His eyes are open and he’s watching Loraine stare at him. He draws a cloth over his crotch.
Loraine reddens. “Okay, if you need help, call me.”
Later, they watch TV together and though Chris’s eyes are still grey and wet and weak, he seems revived. He eats some soup that Loraine makes—and he talks.
“You know this stuff Johnny talks about? About being saved?”
“Yeah?”
“Well, I’m thinking it makes sense, somehow. You know, like we’re all lost in a way.”
“You think so?”
“Yeah, sometimes.”
“I see.” Loraine pauses, then says, “Johnny’s a little hysterical at times.”
“What do you mean?”
“He goes overboard.”
“‘You think you’re better than him?” Chris asks. Loraine can sense that the testiness and resentment still exist in the dark corners of his mouth. But she doesn’t answer, knowing he’s frail and unable to damage her.
His eyes close and he sleeps. She stays, is tickled by the thought of him needing her. He is not himself. Soon, maybe tomorrow, he will lash out again, his voice resentful, his thin shoulders sharp with anger. However, at this moment, he is frail.
He chants and rambles, drifts into sleep and then reports back to her. Loraine cannot be sure but she thinks he speaks of beauty and kisses, of the sweet tongue of Melody, of a pierced nipple which resembles a ring through the snout of a pig, of the first inkling of death, and of a baby roaring at its mother, mouth open.
At one point he startles and says, “I like Melody, she’s funny.”
“Funny?”
“Yeah, like she doesn’t care. Nothing’s important.” A pause. “That’s her line.”
Loraine nods and Chris slides back into a silent reverie. His mind is a weightless insect, a butterfly rising and tumbling, brushing up against a stone wall here, a tree there. The slightest commotion makes it jerk and falter. For the moment Loraine wants to capture that dizziness, cup it in her palms, and keep it safe.
Though she plans on going to work Friday morning, Charlene doesn’t even manage to get dressed. She sits naked on the toilet and groans into her hands. The room is cold. The furnace must have cut out during the night or the wood stove needed stoking. Her dress and stockings are laid out on the bed. She put them there last night, before opening the bottle and dipping into the heat that slid down her throat so easily. She stands, turns, and throws up into the bowl. Not much there.
“God,” she says, wiping her mouth with a towel. On all fours now she studies the green growth at the base of the toilet. “Clean it,” she says. She bends her neck and confronts her breasts which hang and swing. She can see her crotch way down there, an intricate forest at the end of a passage. Lying down on the throw rug she pulls a bath towel on top of herself. She squeezes herself tightly. A memory comes to her of when she was young and sick and her mother served her lunch in bed, soup and crackers and ginger ale, but she threw it up. She had been afraid that she would choke on her own vomit. Her mother held her head and washed her face. Then together they lay in bed and both fell asleep. That was a happy moment. Rare.
At ten o’clock Charlene manages to dial the Credit Union. The receptionist,
Judy Penner, is curt and prissy. “Mr. Wohlgemut’s been asking about you,” she says. “Here, I’ll put you through.”
Charlene’s head aches. Her mouth puckers and then she slides back into her boss’s life, bowing to him, telling him that her life has not been pretty lately.
The man is terse, yet cloyingly patient, as if informing her that she has erred but will now be forgiven. Charlene wants to hang up but instead she says, “My husband’s been seeing this other woman, you might know her, Loraine Wallace, and until I get this sorted out in my brain I’ll have to stay away from work.”
“Oh,” Mr. Wohlgemut says. “Yes. Mrs. Wallace. I just loaned her money for a new generator. I’m sorry.”
Charlene thinks about how when she is called into this man’s office, or she meets him by the vault, she pictures holding him like a child, and he lays his head on her breast and smiles up into her face.
Charlene says, “Loraine’s going to have a baby.”
“Oh.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Wohlgemut. Forgive me. Will you take me back Monday morning?”
Charlene can hear the man’s pencil tapping on the desk. She knows what he’s thinking. There’s all this sexual stuff twisted into her story and in some way he’s excited and wants to take care of her. “Yes, shh, listen,” he says. “Could one of the girls from here help you out? It’s slow today and Luisa could come.”
“I’m fine. Thanks. That’s awfully sweet.”
“Don’t hesitate to call.”
“Yes.”
After Charlene hangs up she stares at the ceiling and then gets up and takes three Tylenols. There is a half-full bottle of rye on her bedside table. She studies the bottle for a long time. Her teeth are chattering. Her whole jaw shakes. She hasn’t eaten for days. Johnny tried to serve her toast and coffee the other morning, Thursday it was, but Charlene just pushed it away.
Finally, she sleeps.
In the afternoon she wakes sweaty and confused and lies with her eyes closed until she has grasped who and where she is. There is a fly banging against the windowpane. Odd, she thinks, this time of year. It is windy; she can hear the trees creaking, the eaves whistling. She calls Loraine, listens to the hum of the phone and imagines Loraine walking, reaching out for the receiver; there is that second, just before the conversation, which cradles the unknown.
Loraine’s voice is careful, almost unsure. Charlene doesn’t say anything. Just listens to Loraine’s breath, little sharp noises.
Loraine again. Voice rising. Louder now.
Charlene wants to giggle.
“Who is this?” Loraine asks. “Hello?”
Charlene can hear chickens in the background so Loraine must be in the refrigerator room off the barn. Did they do it in there? she wonders. Did he lay her out on a flat of white eggs? Charlene does giggle now; a noise from the back of her throat.
“Hello,” Loraine says again.
“Bitch,” Charlene says, and hangs up. She sits and watches the phone, as if it will ring, or leap up and strangle her. Her hands are shaking again.
She finishes the bottle of rye that afternoon. She manages to read at the same time. It’s something she’s supposed to finish for her book club which is meeting Saturday night. That’s tomorrow. She wants to go but isn’t sure if she’ll make it.
The book is a thin collection of poetry written by a woman who’s obviously in love with her father. It’s not like they’re having sex but this girl’s definitely got problems, Charlene thinks. Talking about her father’s cock; sick, in a way. Charlene reads that particular poem three times. It was Avi Heath who suggested this poet. Mona, who’s part of the club, announced that Avi was pronounced “Eh-vee”; she smirked when she said this. Anyways, Avi is new at the club and doesn’t realize poetry is not well accepted by the other women. Still, no one wanted to hurt Avi’s feelings, so they agreed. Charlene wonders if Avi has problems with her
own father. She doesn’t understand why writers need to do this, cut open and spread themselves out, battered and bloody, between the pages. Everybody craps, so what? There is another good one though, where the writer’s having sex with her husband or lover or whomever, and reading it, Charlene thinks, That’s me. The poet is remembering the night before and marvelling at what she actually did: all fours and her rump in the air like a flower. That’s nice, Charlene thinks, a flower.
She eats crackers and drinks apple juice around five in the afternoon. A square of sun is falling onto the counter. It’s so silent out here, in this house, planted on this yard, at the edge of a quarter section. Sometimes she hates it; today it’s pretty. You look out the window and there’s a wind-break of trees and beyond that the flat earth which eventually disappears. Perhaps it’s the liquor but at the moment she’s proud of where she lives. She feels hopeful and calls Agnes at Lesser Beauty Salon; makes an appointment for late Saturday afternoon. A trim. And her nails too. By eight o’clock she’s thirsty again. She looks for more liquor but there is none. She sniffs at the bottle she finished in the afternoon, licks the neck, sticks her tongue inside. “Fine,” she says, stashing the empty bottle under the counter. “Better that way.”