Dolores Claiborne (10 page)

There were times when he raised his hand to me, but then he’d think better of it. Sometimes when the hand was up, wantin to hit but not quite
darin
to hit, I’d see in his eyes that he was rememberin the cream-pitcher... maybe the hatchet, too. And then he’d make like he only raised that hand because his head needed scratchin, or his forehead wipin. That was one lesson he got the first time. Maybe the only one.

There was somethin else come out of the night he hit me with the stovelength and I hit him with the cream-pitcher. I don’t like to bring it up—I’m one of those old-fashioned folks that believes what goes on behind the bedroom door should stay there—but I guess I better, because it’s prob’ly part of why things turned out as they did.

Although we were married and livin under the same roof together for the next two years—and it might have been closer to three, I really can’t remember—he only tried to take his privilege with me a few times after that. He—

What, Andy?

Accourse
I mean he was impotent! What else would I be talkin about, his right to wear my underwear if the urge took him? I never denied him; he just quit bein able to do it. He wasn’t what you’d call an every-night sort of man, not even back at the start, and he wasn’t one to draw it out, either—it was always pretty much wham, bam, and thank you, ma‘am. Still n all, he’d stayed int’rested enough to climb on top once or twice a week... until I hit him with the creamer, that is.

Part of it was probably the booze—he was drinkin a lot more durin those last years—but I don’t think that was
all
of it. I remember him rollin offa me one night after about twenty minutes of useless puffin and blowin, and his little thing still just hangin there, limp as a noodle. I dunno how long after the night I just told you about this would have been, but I know it was after because I remember layin there with my kidneys throbbin and thinkin I’d get up pretty soon and take some aspirin to quiet them down.

“There,” he says, almost cryin, “I hope you’re satisfied, Dolores. Are you?”

I didn’t say nothing. Sometimes anything a woman says to a man is bound to be the wrong thing.

“Are
you?” he says.
“Are
you satisfied, Dolores?”

I didn’t say nothing still, just laid there and looked up at the ceilin and listened to the wind outside. It was from the east that night, and I could hear the ocean in it. That’s a sound I’ve always loved. It soothes me.

He turned over and I could smell his beer-breath on my face, rank and sour. “Turnin out the light used to help,” he says, “but it don’t no more. I can see your ugly face even in the dark.” He reached out, grabbed my boob, and kinda shook it. “And this,” he says. “All floppy and flat as a pancake. Your cunt’s even worse. Christ, you ain’t thirty-five yet and fuckin you’s like fuckin a mudpuddle.”

I thought of sayin “If it
was
a mudpuddle you could stick it in soft, Joe, and wouldn’t
that
relieve your mind,” but I kep my mouth shut. Patricia Claiborne didn’t raise any fools, like I told you.

There was some more quiet. I’d ’bout decided he’d said enough mean things to finally send him off to sleep and I was thinkin about slippin out to get my aspirin when he spoke up again ... and that time, I’m pretty sure he was cryin.

“I wish I’d never seen your face,” he says, and then he says, “Why didn’t you just use that friggin hatchet to whack it off, Dolores? It would have come to the same.”

So you see, I wasn’t the only one that thought gettin hit with the cream-pitcher—and bein told things was gonna change around the house—might have had somethin to do with his problem. I still didn’t say nothing, though, just waited to see if he was gonna go to sleep or try to use his hands on me again. He was layin there naked, and I knew the very first place I was gonna go for if he did try.

Pretty soon I heard him snorin. I don’t know if that was the very last time he tried to be a man with me, but if it wasn’t, it was close.

None of his friends got so much as a whiff of these goins-ons, accourse—he sure as hell wasn’t gonna tell em his wife’d whopped the bejesus out of him with a creamer and his weasel wouldn’t stick its head up anymore, was he? Not him! So when the others’d talk big about how they was handlin their wives, he’d talk big right along with em, sayin how he laid one on me for gettin fresh with my mouth, or maybe for buyin a dress over in Jonesport without askin him first if it was all right to take money out of the cookie jar.

How do I know? Why, because there are times when I can keep my ears open instead of my mouth. I know that’s hard to believe, listenin to me tonight, but it’s true.

I remember one time when I was workin part-time for the Marshalls—remember John Marshall, Andy, how he was always talkin about buildin a bridge over to the mainland?—and the doorbell rang. I was all alone in the house, and I was hurryin to answer the door and I slipped on a throw-rug and fell hard against the corner of the mantel. It left a great big bruise on my arm, just above the elbow.

About three days later, just when that bruise was goin from dark brown to a kind of yellow-green like they do, I ran into Yvette Anderson in the village. She was comin out of the grocery and I was goin in. She looked at the bruise on my arm, and when she spoke to me, her voice was just
drippin
with sympathy. Only a woman who’s just seen something that makes her happier’n a pig in shit can drip that way. “Ain’t men
awful,
Dolores?” she says.

“Well, sometimes they are and sometimes they aren’t,” I says back. I didn’t have the slightest idear what she was talkin about—what I was mostly concerned with was gettin some of the pork chops that were on special that day before they were all gone.

She pats me kinda gentle on the arm—the one that wasn’t bruised—and says, “You be strong, now. All things work for the best. I’ve been through it and I know. I’ll pray for you, Dolores.” She said that last like she’d just told me she was gonna give me a million dollars and then went on her way upstreet. I went into the market, still mystified. I would have thought she’d lost her mind, except anyone who’s ever passed the time of day with Yvette knows she ain’t got a whole hell of a lot to lose.

I had my shoppin half done when it hit me. I stood there watchin Skippy Porter weigh my chops, my marketbasket over my arm and my head thrown back, laughin from way down deep inside my belly, the way you do when you know you can’t do nothing but let her rip. Skippy looked around at me and says, “You all right, Missus Claiborne?”

“I’m fine,” I says. “I just thought of somethin funny.” And off I went again.

“I guess you did,” Skippy says, and then he went back to his scales. God bless the Porters, Andy; as long as they stay, there’ll be at least one family on the island knows how to mind its business. Meantime, I just went on laughin. A few other people looked at me like I’d gone nuts, but I didn’t care. Sometimes life is so goddam funny you just
have
to laugh.

Yvette’s married to Tommy Anderson, accourse, and Tommy was one of Joe’s beer-and-poker buddies in the late fifties and early sixties. There’d been a bunch of them out at our place a day or two after I bruised my arm, tryin to get Joe’s latest bargain, an old Ford pick-em-up, runnin. It was my day off, and I brought em all out a pitcher of iced tea, mostly in hopes of keepin em off the suds at least until the sun went down.

Tommy must have seen the bruise when I was pourin the tea. Maybe he asked Joe what happened after I left, or maybe he just remarked on it. Either way, Joe St. George wasn’t a fella to let opportunity pass him by—not one like that, at least. Thinkin it over on my way home from the market, the only thing I was curious about was what Joe told Tommy and the others I’d done—forgot to put his bedroom slippers under the stove so they’d be warm when he stepped into em, maybe, or cooked the beans too mushy on Sat’dy night. Whatever it was, Tommy went home and told Yvette that Joe St. George had needed to give his wife a little home correction. And all I’d ever done was bang off the corner of the Marshalls’ mantelpiece runnin to see who was at the door!

That’s what I mean when I say there’s two sides to a marriage—the outside and the inside. People on the island saw me and Joe like they saw most other couples our age: not too happy, not too sad, mostly just goin along like two hosses pullin a wagon ... they may not notice each other like they once did, and they may not get along with each other as well as they once did when they
do
notice each other, but they’re harnessed side by side n goin down the road as well’s they can just the same, not bitin each other, or lollygaggin, or doin any of the other things that draw the whip.

But people aren’t hosses, n marriage ain’t much like pullin a wagon, even though I know it sometimes looks that way on the outside. The folks on the island didn’t know about the cream-pitcher, or how Joe cried in the dark and said he wished he’d never seen my ugly face. Nor was that the worst of it. The worst didn’t start until a year or so after we finished our doins in bed. It’s funny, ain’t it, how folks can look right at a thing and draw a completely wrong conclusion about why it happened. But it’s natural enough, as long as you remember that the inside and outside of a marriage aren’t usually much alike. What I’m gonna tell you now was on the inside of ours, and until today I always thought it would stay there.

Lookin back, I think the trouble must have really started in ‘62. Selena’djust started high school over on the mainland. She had come on real pretty, and I remember that summer after her freshman year she got along with her Dad better than she had for the last couple of years. I’d been dreadin her teenage years, foreseein a lot of squabbles between the two of em as she grew up and started questionin his idears and what he saw as his rights over her more and more.

Instead, there was that little time of peace and quiet and good feelins between them, when she’d go out and watch him work on his old clunkers behind the house, or sit beside him on the couch while we were watchin TV at night (Little Pete didn’t think much of
that
arrangement, I can tell you) and ask him questions about his day durin the commercials. He’d answer her in a calm, thoughtful way I wasn’t used to ... but I sort of remembered. From high school I remembered it, back when I was first gettin to know him and he was decidin that yes, he wanted to court me.

At the same time this was happenin, she drew a distance away from me. Oh, she’d still do the chores I set her, and sometimes she’d talk about her day at school... but only if I went to work and pulled it out of her. There was a coldness that hadn’t been there before, and it was only later on that I began to see how everything fit together, and how it all went back to the night she’d come out of her bedroom and seen us there, her Dad with his hand clapped to his ear and blood runnin through the fingers, her Mom standin over him with a hatchet.

He was never a man to let certain kinds of opportunity pass him by, I told you, and this was just more of the same. He’d told Tommy Anderson one kind of story; the one he told his daughter was in a different pew but the same church. I don’t think there was anything in his mind at first but spite; he knew how much I loved Selena, and he must have thought tellin her how mean and bad-tempered I was—maybe even how
dangerous
I was—would be a fine piece of revenge. He tried to turn her against me, and while he never really succeeded at that, he did manage to get closer to her than he’d been since she was a little girl. Why not? She was always tender-hearted, Selena was, and I never ran up against a man as good at the poor-me’s as Joe was.

He got inside her life, and once he was in there, he must have finally noticed just how pretty she was getting, and decided he wanted somethin more from her than just to have her listen when he talked or hand him the next tool when he was head-down in the engine compartment of some old junk truck. And all the time this was goin on and the changes were happenin, I was runnin around, workin about four different jobs, and tryin to stay far enough ahead of the bills to sock away a little each week for the kids’ college educations. I never saw a thing until it was almost too late.

She was a lively, chatty girl, my Selena, and she was always eager to please. When you wanted her to fetch somethin, she didn’t walk; she went on the run. As she got older, she’d put supper on the table when I was workin out, and I never had to ask her. She burned some at first and Joe’d carp at her or make fun of her—he sent her cryin into her room more’n once—but he quit doin that around the time I’m tellin you about. Back then, in the spring and summer of 1962, he acted like every pie she made was pure ambrosia even if the crust was like cement, and he’d rave over her meatloaf like it was French cuisine. She was happy with his praise—accourse she was, anyone would have been—but she didn’t get all puffed up with it. She wasn’t that kind of girl. Tell you one thing, though: when Selena finally left home, she was a better cook on her worst day than I ever was on my best.

When it came to helpin out around the house, a mother never had a better daughter ... especially a mother who had to spend most of her time cleanin up other people’s messes. Selena never forgot to make sure Joe Junior and Little Pete had their school lunches when they went out the door in the mornin, and she covered their books for em at the start of every year. Joe Junior at least could have done
that
chore for himself, but she never gave him the chance.

She was an honor roll student her freshman year, but she never lost interest in what was goin on around her at home, the way some smart kids do at that age. Most kids of thirteen or fourteen decide anyone over thirty’s an old fogey, and they’re apt to be out the door about two minutes after the fogies come through it. Not Selena, though. She’d get em coffee or help with the dishes or whatever, then sit down in the chair by the Franklin stove and listen to the grownups talk. Whether it was me with one or two of my friends or Joe with three or four of his, she’d listen. She would have stayed even when he and his friends played poker, if I’d let her. I wouldn’t, though, because they talked so foul. That child nibbled conversation the way a mouse’ll nibble a cheese-rind, and what she couldn’t eat, she stored away.