The Final Confession of Mabel Stark: A Novel (An Evergreen book) (4 page)

For instance-there I was, trying to bake some sticky monstrosity called a baclava, when it caught fire and I started shrieking and
Georgina had to jam wooden spoons into the handles and rush to
the window and shout "Gardyloo" before hurling it to the street. She
leaned out, haunches wide as a baker's oven, a smouldering spoon in
each hand, worried the flames might spread to the wooden stalls
of Seventh Street, before finally saying, "Oh, the pot, it didn't
break, maybe dent a little, nothing to worry about, fire is out...." When
she turned I was slumped in a kitchen chair, face in my hands, aching
all over, ashamed. She came over and put her arm around my shoulder,
a kindness that loosened my guard and made me feel a hundred
times worse.

"Oh do not have worry!" she said. "Please do not have ... is very
difficult making baclava. Do not cry, it will be better next time...."

So I sat there, hiding my face, letting her think what was bothering me was the fear of disappointing my husband, when what I was
really thinking was, Why didn't anyone tell me marriage was just another form of busy-making? Why didn't anyone tell me a name change doesn't change things that've already happened?

Those were my days. Every night at six Dimitri came up the stairs
whistling. I'd put his hands in warm water and massage them, so as to
get the crimps out. When finished, I'd present him with whatever creation Georgina had helped me with that afternoon. Like all lanky men, he ate enough to feed a platoon, and no matter how singed or dry or
oversalty the food he'd polish it off while making delighted little snorting noises. Was a little like listening to a Pomeranian trying to breathe.

"Is good," he'd say, "is so good," the problem being he'd say this
no matter how bad the food was (and many a night it was pretty bad)
so that after a while he started sounding more like a father being patient
with a child than a man discussing things with his wife. Generally, I
ate little.

Next was the evening's recreation, Dimitri being fond of reading
newspapers, listening to oud music recorded onto cylinders or having
people over for games of cards. All this I would've enjoyed, as I do like
music and've never had a quarrel with a spirited hand of whist, the
problem being it was during this portion of the evening I'd start to
worry about our nightly congress, which still wasn't proceeding in a
way I figured was even close to natural. Mind you, I wasn't positive,
my not having enough nerve to raise the subject with Georgina:
could've been all women had to be elixired to the gills before dealing
with husbandly randiness. I had no way of knowing, my own mother
not being alive to ask, and I guess that's why I put up with it as long as
I did; for all I knew I was being unreasonable.

Dimitri wanted children, you see. Wanted them the way a man
lost in the Kalahari wants water. He craved them. Yearned for them.
He'd wasted so much time setting up in America he worried he'd never
have them, which to a Greek is as embarrassing as a forehead boil.
What I'm saying is, he wanted to do it every night. And while we
didn't do it every night-he was gentlemanly if I pleaded a headache
or a case of the monthlies-we came pretty close. A routine developed.
I'd tense up, his long loggedness wouldn't go where God had meant it
to go, there'd be an excess of prodding, until finally he'd suggest I take
a Chinaman bottle. After a couple of months we learned to skip the first
two steps and springboard straight to the third, so that within fifteen
minutes I'd be flat on my back, giggling and watching those damn tin soldiers on manouevres across our shimmering bedroom ceiling. I'd
wake up sometime in the middle of the next day, feeling foggy and
headachy and a little more like my grip on things was loosening.

Understand there were things I liked about Dimitri. He brought
me flowers, often, one arm crooked behind his back as he came
whistling up the stairs. He wasn't the type of man you had to follow
around and clean up after, his having been a bachelor for so long, and he
didn't drink, other than the odd glass of retsina. Plus, he'd given me a
place to go, and at eighteen years of age it isn't hard to mistake gratitude
for affection. It was just I was starting to mistrust his motives a little.

One night he suggested that different ways of coupling might
make baby-making easier for us. "Do not have worry," he said. "I read
in a book."

What followed was him suggesting I climb on top, a proposition
akin to my trying to engulf a bedpost. Not wanting to disappoint, I
agreed to give it a whirl. This turned out to be a mistake, as it gave
Dimitri a green light to suggest other means of copulation, some of
them more befitting barnyard animals than human beings. Over the
next few weeks I watched those damn tin soldiers march not only across
the ceiling but across the headboard, the wall opposite the foot of the
bed, the pillow supporting my chin and, one night, when I somehow
ended more out of bed than in, the chipped pine floorboards. What
made it worse was Georgina had stopped coming, and though I'd always
found her sugariness annoying I missed her fiercely nonetheless. Alone,
I did a lot of sniffling and wondering how on earth everything was
going to work itself out.

My answer came one day in the new year. We'd just moved to the
bedroom, and I was about to unstopper a little brown bottle when
Dimitri put a hand on my forearm and said, "Wait, I have other idea to
make things easier."

With this, he took the bottle from my hands and went over to the
bureau. He stooped and opened the drawer reserved for socks and handkerchiefs. He then pulled out a large packet, which surprised me
for as late as that morning his sock-and-handkerchief drawer had contained nothing but socks and handkerchiefs (my having put them there,
folded and de-lintified, myself). He sat beside me and unwound the
string wrapping the packet. "This will help," he kept muttering, "I am
sure," though he had difficulty unsealing the paper as his hands had
gone shaky and unto-operative. Finally, he pulled out what looked like
a breadboard-sized photograph, though I couldn't tell for sure seeing as
he kept the face of it angled away from me.

Silence passed between us. Dimitri was reconsidering, I could
tell, and he might've put the thing away had I not been so infernally
curious. "Show me," I said, tugging his arm. "Give me a look." Finally
he took a deep breath and rotated the sepia so I could see what'd been
photographed. Which was: a woman, perhaps beautiful, perhaps not,
wearing French stockings and a string of pearls, bare backed, kneeling
before a nude man.

I couldn't move, couldn't say a thing, forgot to breathe, even; I
could only look at that browny-bronze image and wonder what on
earth possessed that woman to do what she was doing. Extreme thirst,
was the only thing came to mind. In fact, I was so stunned it took a few
seconds for it to sink in why Dimitri might've been showing it to me.
Now this was a terrible moment, for all along I'd thought I'd been putting up with his nightly rutting so we could have a baby. And while I
couldn't so much as summon a name for what that woman was doing,
I knew for damn sure a baby wasn't going to come of it.

I suppose it was hurt and frustration that came geysering up, for
the next thing I knew I was hitting him and slapping him and calling
him a horny old goat born in hell, Dimitri having to throw me on my
back and pin my hands over my head to defend himself. He was trying
to calm me by apologizing and saying he loved me and promising to get
rid of the photograph forthwith and heretofore. Had someone been listening in the next apartment (which someone probably was, the walls being thin as onion peels) they would've heard words like "Oh my precious petal" being yelled over words like "Let go my hands, you sweaty
Greek son of a bitch!" Finally, he had no choice but to leap off the bed
and race across the room to grab the Chinaman bottle. By the time he
got back, the fight had pretty much gone out of me, and he didn't so
much have to force the oozing brown contents down my throat as tip
the bottle for me while I drank.

The next day, when it was clear I wasn't planning on getting out
of bed anytime soon, Georgina came. She eased the door open and crept
toward my bed, where I lay feeling low as an earthworm. Meanwhile
she was crying and crossing herself and saying, "Oh my baby, this happen,
this happen, is so difficult to adjust to early days of marriage. Is so difficult." Then she propped me up and wrapped her warm, yeast-scented
arms around me, squeezing me and saying over and over how everything was going to be okay, just to wait and see, just to wait and see.

Georgina tended me over the next few days, bringing me cups of
sasparilla and hot ox-tail broth, placing cool compresses on my forehead and cheering me up by telling me how normal this all was, despite
it clearly being anything but. Still, if I hadn't felt so putrid I might've
actually enjoyed my convalescence, for it was the first time since my
parents died I didn't feel like I had to be somewhere, making up for who
I was. I'd collapsed, and that was the person I was: someone who'd hit
the floor and wasn't about to do anything but stay there. As for Dimitri,
I had no idea where he'd gone to and was too tired to ask. All I knew
was we were no longer sharing our marital bed, something that
should've been a relief but, given my state, wasn't.

On day four Dr. Michaels came. He took my temperature, felt for
my pulse, placed the back of his hand on my forehead and then turned
me over and unbuttoned my nightie and thumped my back like it was
one of Georgina's eggplants.

"Hmmmmmm," he said to Georgina, "looks to me like this is
nothing too serious. An enervated system, due to mild nervous distress. I understand she's an orphan? That she's just married? Not surprising,
then. Not surprising at all. I think we can treat this here."

He gave her a jar of Carter's Little Nerve Pills and told her to see
to it I took one every twelve hours on the hour. He then said he had
other patients to see, though before he left he also handed her a black
box about the size of a squared-off bread loaf, with a winding handle
on the front and two long black thin cords leading from the sides. These
wires connected to a pair of dangling black pads, each one shaped like
a shoe sole. Georgina held it a little nervously, tipping it from left to
right as if to examine it.

Seeing this, the doctor said, "I take it you haven't seen one
before?"

Georgina put a hand to her mouth and turned the thing right the
way upside down, inspecting its underside. Her eyes were big as spring
potatoes.

"It's called a Faradizer. Sit the patient on the side of the bed, put
her feet on the pads and give the handle a half-dozen good turns. Simple
as that. I'd say one half-hour, three times a day, until she's feeling better. Understand?"

Georgina said yes, though as she did her lips trembled slightly.

"Good. I'll take my leave, then. Good day."

As soon as Dr. Michaels left, Georgina said, "All right, Mary, you hear
the doctor." With that, she yanked on my hands till I was in a sitting
position. Then she swung my legs around, heels landing on the floor. A
few seconds later, the black pads were in place and buzzing away, jiggling the soles of my feet. This was relaxing, and I admit I didn't mind
my Faradization sessions in the least, except afterwards my legs from
the knee on down were tingly and unco-operative.

The nerve pills were another matter as I swore not to take them,
having decided I'd had it with any sort of bottled remedy. Whenever
Georgina gave me one-eight in the morning and eight at night, like clockwork, even if it meant waking me-I'd hide it in the back of my
mouth, between teeth and cheek. When she left, I'd spit it out and push
it into the soil of one of the pepper plants growing on our bedroom
windowsill. Course, this could've been the reason all that bedrest and
Faradization wasn't taking, for I was still interested in doing nothing
but sleeping and having the occasional bawl; all I knew was I hadn't
rested up when I should've five years earlier and that the tiredness had
piled up inside me, forming layer upon layer, until I had no choice but
to snooze my way through them, all of which would've been fine
except this was 1906 and a dangerous time to take a long nap if you
were a woman. Half-asleep, I'd hear them, gathered outside my room,
discussing my condition. They'd keep their voices down, certain words
jumping out in the low carrying rumble of voices gone deep with concern. Hysteria. Neurasthenia. Daementia Praecox. Paraphrenia Hebetica.
Undifferentiated Psychosis. Always they were spoken as though followed by question marks. Meanwhile, Georgina would be crying away
in the background.

How long was I laid up? Hard to say, though given the injustices
being thought up in the other room I'd say it had to be a while, for you
don't cook up that kind of spitefulness overnight. Call it two weeks.
Maybe a little more. One day the door opened and in came Dr. Michaels,
though this time he was followed by Dimitri, who couldn't look at me.
Given the grave executioner's look on both their faces, I knew my goose
was good as cooked. The only question in my head was how.

Dr. Michaels pulled up a chair and sat beside the bed. Dimitri
hung back, staying near the door. As the good doctor went through the
usual battery of tests-pulse, temperature, back thumping, saying
aaaaaaaaaah-he directed a steady train of questions at Dimitri.

"She's been neurasthenic this whole time?"

"Yes, Doctor."

"And the treatment hasn't helped?"

"No, Doctor, I am afraid no."

"And you say she attacked you? She struck you with her hands
and feet."

"It was terrible, Doctor."

"Hmmmmmmm."

(A long pause, Dr. Michaels sitting and thinking, Dimitri taking
little shuffling steps near the doorway, me lying there trying to convince myself this was just one of the dreams I'd been having lately.)