Proud Flesh (17 page)

Then she saw Archie. Saw him in her mind as clearly as if he were standing before her. His head was bowed. He would not look at her. Wait a minute, he seemed to be saying, and she would know why. Then she heard Mr. Clyde telling him that he would pick her up at school today and bring her home. She heard Archie say thanks, but he had other things to do in town this afternoon anyway, he could get her. She heard Mr. Cyde say no, he would pick her up this afternoon. She saw Archie straighten, stiffen. She saw him lock looks with Mr. Clyde. She held her breath. It was not for herself that she was in suspense. She had been shown what was fixing to happen to her; it was as if it had already happened. It was her brother for whom she held her breath, though she had been shown already what had happened to him, too. As when two men join hands and each tries to force the other's hand down to the tabletop, when her brother's look was forced down she saw two things at once, for they were one and the same thing: that she had lost her brother and that her brother had lost himself. He would never be able to look her in the face again because he would never again be able to look himself in the face.

Next she saw her mother waiting now for her to come home. She saw the two of them meeting when she got home late from school today, Friday, for the first time ever. She saw her mother trying not to plead with her eyes to be told it was not so. Then it was Monday and she heard herself tell her mother that she was not going to school today and she heard her mother not ask why. Then it was Tuesday and again she told her mother she was not going to school today. She was never going back to school: the silence between them after that would be lifelong. And hearing herself say that, it was as though her mind were a blackboard and an eraser had just been drawn across it, and all those shorthand symbols she had worked to memorize were wiped away and her mind was a slate-colored blank.

Again she saw in her mind those boys not waving goodbye to her from the schoolhouse steps. They seemed forever caught in that pose. Already they looked like an old faded snapshot with people in it who had once meant something to you but whose names you can no longer recall. None of those boys would ever come near her again. They would know better than to. Around her would be a fence with signs saying to them, “Posted. No trespassing.” She would never have a husband, a home of her own—things she had been too young to want until now that she was too old ever to have them. The boss had singled her out to be his. His mark would be on her like a brand for all to see, or as if she wore a collar with a tag saying, “If strayed notify Clyde Renshaw, Prop.”

Neither of them had said anything. When he turned the car off the highway and down a side road and then down a dirt road and when he stopped the car and switched off the engine they still said nothing. They sat in the car staring out the windshield, not looking at each other, waiting for it to happen. There was a clock on the dashboard and the minute hand did not sweep smoothly like the hand on other clocks but jerked itself forward to the new minute with a little click each time. It was probably not noticeable ordinarily but now each click was as loud as a faucet dripping in the night, and with each one she made an uncontrollable little click in her throat. She could remember thinking that if she could just break the crystal and grab hold of that minute hand and hold it, then the time would never come for what was fixing to happen to happen. She knew how foolish a notion that was and yet she had felt the urge to do it.

Then she commenced to cry. She made no noise, just shed her tears silently. She was already somebody else, not herself any more, somebody she did not know and was afraid to be, and she was crying for the girl that in a minute she would never be again. She too was now like an old snapshot in an album. She was somebody she used to know.

And still they sat there just looking out the windshield at the low woods, the brown fields, the crows in the leafless trees. It was as if both knew it had to happen but neither knew how to get it started. She was waiting for him to do the first thing. Finally she sighed and dried her eyes and laid her half-eaten apple on the dashboard as if she meant to finish it afterward and blew her nose on the handkerchief he lent her. She was the one to get out of the car first.

It all happened in silence. He gave her no commands; there was no need for him to. She made no protest; it would have done no good. There was nothing to say. They might have been two deaf mutes. Or they might have been actors in a silent film. It was more like that. She could almost see it happening to two other people as she looked on, like watching a silent film on television. The only sound anywhere at all was the cawing of the crows as they flapped by overhead.

Did she now pretend that she had not also been flattered? He could have had any he wanted and he had chosen her. Her brother's boss, her mother's boss, the boss of that gang that came each year to work his land, an older man, married, rich, white, and he had chosen her, who had never been farther from home than Barry's Gap. She had not known that he had ever even noticed her.

When he got done she lay on the ground and could not get up. She wanted never to go home again. She wanted never to see her mother and Archie again. She wanted to beg him to send her away somewhere so she would never have to see them again. She could not bring herself to look down at herself. She had sensed before it happened that she was about to be taken from her family, her friends, her own people—now she learned that she had been taken from herself. She did not belong to herself any more. She was his. Until now she had been her own to give to some man of her own choosing one day.

At her wedding she wore her mother's gown. No private ceremony before a justice of the peace for her; a girl got married only once. She was a storybook bride—a sad story. Just seventeen and marrying a man nearly three times her age. Her husband had been a mystery man at first, although actually well known, a man about town. Of the people who got announcements none could place him. Until she took it, nobody knew he even had a last name.

So sad, said everybody, to see a young girl throwing herself away like that. She had a family—self-respecting people—how could they have let her do it? Their disapproval of the match and their unhappiness was plain for all to see. Why had they not set their foot down and forbidden it?

The bride was given away by her brother. When the preacher said, “Do you, Walter, take this woman—” the groom himself had not known for a moment who was meant. Until then nobody knew he had a first name, either.

If only he had touched her as she lay there unable to get up that day. Just touched her. Not kissed her. She never expected that. She knew better than that. Just touched her. Shown her that she was not ugly to him. Maybe then she would not have been so ugly to herself. If only he had not just pulled away and rolled off and stood up, as he still did every time, as if he never wanted to see her again. Like a man with the taste in his mouth of the cigarette he has just crushed out, one who would like to break the habit but lacks the will and despises himself for his weakness.

Lying there on her back while the crows flapped and cawed overhead she heard something hit the ground softly, like a ripe, a rotten-ripe fruit falling from a tree, and turned her head to look. At first she did not know what the thing was. It looked like a toy balloon with its air gone out of it. Not like a balloon that has never been blown up but wrinkled like one that has been and its air gone out. Then, though it was the first one she had ever seen, she knew what it was, and what the stuff was that came oozing out of it. Until then she had been a child herself and had not known that she might want children. There on the ground lay her children, like a gob of spit.

When the knock she was awaiting sounded softly on the back screen door she rose and went to answer it. She could see no one, nothing, in the shadows.

“Who is it?” she asked.

Her trick did not work. He said, “Who is it! What you mean, who is it? Who would it be?”

What was this one's name? Quick! Luther? Buck? Leroy? Henry? No matter. “Come in this house, tiger,” she said, unhooking the latch.

XXI

All the windows and windowshades were raised, for the heat was stifling. When the last light in the house had been put out only the dim blue light of the sickroom was left to burn through the night like a pilot light for all the extinguished lights.

The blue sickroom light: an ordinary bulb wrapped around with the paper covering from a roll of absorbent cotton. Indigo blue. Soft on sensitive or sleeping eyes, inspiring silence, tiptoes, whispers. Traditional. It colored all Amy's childhood memories of sickness. Nowadays it was confined to farm families, or, among her patients, to families not long off the farm. Her childhood association of it with pain and fear had never left her. Yet that sickly blue light had been the beacon that drew her to her life's work. How many nights she had spent in near-darkness at the bedside of some sick or dying person! Sometimes when she left home on a case and moved in with a patient, the dim light of the sickroom was the only light she saw by for weeks, even months. She had learned to see like a cat in that half-light. It had become her habitat. Here in this indigo obscurity was where it had all begun.

What she was doing now was what Amy did all the time: private night nursing in patients' homes. It was the best paying kind of nursing because in all other ways it was the least rewarding kind, and most nurses refused to do it. It was lonely work, monotonous, generally depressing. Most of your patients were old people, many of them terminal cases, sent home to die from hospitals crowded for beds. But the main reason most nurses refused the work was that the hours made it impossible to have any family life. She and Ira rarely saw each other. Fortunately Ira was very self-sufficient.

Amy disliked her work for other reasons than the separation from her husband and being deprived of a family of her own. To sit all night long night after night in light too dim to read by, in silence and alone, without a radio or television set and unable to walk about for fear of disturbing the patient, with nothing to distract your mind and keep you alert and yet having to keep alert for any change in the patient's condition, required the self-discipline of a yogi, the serenity of a saint. People asked her how she stood it, why she did it. She did it because somebody had to do it, and because the appreciation she got from her patients and their families helped a little to make up for feeling unappreciated by her mother and taken for granted by her sisters and brothers. And because it was how she earned the money to help out her insufficiently grateful sisters and brothers and keep them from going to their mother whenever they needed help.

To sleep while the world went about its business and wake while the world slept turned everything topsy-turvy. And the silence and the dimness and the isolation of those sickrooms made her waking hours into a kind of sleepwalking. She had forgotten how to speak above a sickroom whisper. Sometimes she felt that she hardly lived on the same planet as other people.

Today she had seen her shadow. For her that was a thing to notice. To most people their shadows were a part of themselves. She came out into the sunshine so seldom that seeing her shadow was about like the groundhog's seeing his. The sight of it today had prompted her again to wonder whether her contrary way of living had had its origin in a contrariness in her origin. Had her parents conceived her during the daytime? Was she, their first, when they were new to each other, young and ardent, the child of an urge that could not wait until nightfall, and had this had an influence upon her? By turning night into day was she seeking to right their turning day into night when they begot her? It was a silly notion, like astrology, like your horoscope, yet she wondered about it and would have liked to ask her mother about it. Strange to think that one's conception was a private matter between strangers, one's parents, and that one might not ask about it, must blush for being curious about it.

All those many long, lonely nights in other sickrooms had been in preparation for this night. It seemed to Amy now that this was the occasion for which she had become a nurse. She had saved, or helped save, many lives, all strangers to her; now had come the time to save the life that meant the most to her. The family was depending upon her. They slept, knowing that Amy was at her post.

All her professional life had been in preparation for this—and never had she felt so unprepared. It was as if all that she had been taught, all that she had learned through practice, had been erased from her mind, leaving it as blank and gray as a clean blackboard. Like a nurse fresh out of internship and on her first case alone, she imagined every complication in the textbooks about to arise all at once and she tried to think what she should do and all she could think to do was cry for help. One of her untrained sisters or one of the house servants could cope as well with any emergency that might now arise as Amy felt herself able to do.

She was doing what she knew how to do, what she had had years of experience in doing, and doing it for the person whom she was most eager to do it for, most grateful to be able to do it for: why, she wondered, was she so anxious, so apprehensive—and then wondered why she had wondered. Had she not reason enough to be anxious and apprehensive? What greater calamity could befall her than to lose Ma? Yet she felt a sense of foreboding not entirely to be accounted for by her dread of her mother's death. Terrible as that was to contemplate, she felt a foreboding that her mother's death would be succeeded by something else, something equally terrible, though she could not imagine what that might be and was appalled to find that she could suppose anything might be equally terrible. A feeling of great oppression weighed upon her. She had difficulty drawing her breath. Her heart was in constant tension. Moments of dizziness, of faintness would come over her, moments when she did not know where she was or who she was or why she was who she was and not somebody else. Soul-sickening moments of dislocation when she would have to reach out and grasp the nearest thing to steady herself, to recover herself. This would be followed by a feeling that she could only call “disgust,” though why disgust, disgust at what, she could not explain. But it was disgusting. She felt as if she had been turned inside out. As if her very soul had soured and risen like gorge in her mouth. She kept feeling an urge to confess to something, so strong an urge that she would have confessed to anything, but she did not know what to confess to. She did not know what she meant by it, yet she said to herself, “I am ready. I have done all I can do. If that is not enough …” and along with this a panicky sense that she was not ready at all and that she had not done all she could do—but what was it she had not done?