You Have the Wrong Man (18 page)

Saturday morning the women had assembled in the downstairs parlor for their meeting. Terrell was happy in his crib, batting bright, felt zoo animals which hung from a dowel
duct-taped to the railing. Carol brought Iris down to join the group. “If he cries you can hear him on the baby monitor. We’ve got two speakers downstairs.” Iris followed Carol into the front parlor, where there was a coffee urn on the sideboard. Carol gave Iris a coffee mug. “This is your personal mug.” Iris saw that each woman was holding one of these oversized cups with the S.O.S. logo printed in red script across the white ceramic. “Just wash and dry it for yourself and keep it with your personal possessions. Take it with you when you leave. It’s a reminder,” Carol told her.

Iris looked at the new cup in her hands. It was a token she didn’t think she would cherish when she was ready to leave the shelter. She walked over to the coffee urn and turned the plastic handle. She filled her mug and spooned sugar over the lip, spilling the silky granules into the waffle place mat, where she couldn’t sweep it up with the palm of her hand.

A woman named Leslie was explaining her week to the group, reviewing the final days before she came to the shelter to get away from her husband. She listed events in the order of their specific chronology rather than for their shock value. Her husband had whacked her across the chops on Monday—but he never touched her again. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, he refrained from using his brute strength.

“You were waiting for him to hit you another time? You came here when you couldn’t stand it anymore?”

“No. I think he was finished hitting me.”

“Then what?”

“He started to say things,” Leslie said.

“He said things,” another resident underscored the detail.

“Sure he did,” a third woman said. “The episode’s not over without his verbal say-so. She’s cornered and he can say whatever comes into his head. She can’t get her back up about it.”

“She’s knocked down.”

“He hates seeing the damaged goods.”

“Yeah, with her tail between her legs.”

“He can be as vile as he wants. Isn’t that the long saga?”

“That’s right.”

Carol was pleased by how well the group was running itself. She no longer had to prod them. Yes, their mates have said terrible things. Neutral words, words that normally have useful and productive meanings, can be defiled. An ordinary verb can be transformed by an act of violence. Rick was just a toddler. She had not yet cut his hair, ever, and it fell to his shoulders in golden ribbons. She brought a scissors and a fine-toothed comb outside to the wading pool where the hose was still filling the tiny luscious circle on the first hot day of June. Just that morning Carol had purchased the plastic wading pool at Kmart, tugging it loose from a nested stack of preformed plastic shells. She set it up in the narrow, fenced backyard of the duplex. The surface of the water shivered as a light breeze shifted directions. Its chalk-blue disc looked irresistible against the newly seeded grass which already needed mowing. The water churned from the hose until the bright vessel was brimming.

Carol decided to let the water heat up in the sun before
she let the baby get in, so she started to cut Rick’s hair, saving a few of his long curls in a number-ten envelope.

Her husband came outside. He had been sleeping in the dark living room and the bright sun annoyed him. He visored his eyes with his hand, in a frozen salute to his wife.

“What the hell is this?” he said, looking at the wading pool. “That’s got to be bad for the grass.”

“Do you think so?”

“It’s too full. That’s a lot of weight on my grass.”

It was Carol, herself, who had sprinkled the seed mix over the shabby patches in the lawn. “Oh, you think it will hurt the baby grass?”

“Dump it,” he told her.

Her husband had no landscaping interests. Carol recognized his mood; he was going to pick a fight if he could find a reason. The novelty of the little pool was an easy target.

“I’m not going to empty it yet. Rick hasn’t been in it.”

“Let’s put him in for a second.” He went over to the sand box and lifted the toddler.

“Wait, the water’s still too cold,” she told her husband.

He lowered the baby into the pool, until he was immersed to his waist; when he sat down, the water was up to his collarbone. The toddler squealed with the abrupt sensation. He started to wail, then changed his mind. He splashed his hands and chortled.

Carol glared at her husband.

“What’s the matter? You have a problem?” he said.

She kneeled by the side of the pool and sifted the water through a plastic strainer to engage the baby. Her husband walked over to her and put his hands on her shoulders. “Got a problem?” he said. She didn’t answer his question.
Her lack of a comment finalized her husband’s half-formed idea. He pushed her face into the water and weighted her neck with his forearm. She struggled. He kept her head under the water. She opened her eyes and saw her baby’s chubby legs and bottom.

He let her up once.

“I can’t breathe,” she screamed.

He pushed her under again.

She tried to sit up but he had his weight against her. She saw her husband’s hand reach for the strainer and he stirred the water near the baby. Carol took a little water down her windpipe. She coughed and took in more. “Breathe,” she heard him saying.

“Go ahead. Breathe,” he told her again.

The water in her ears didn’t entirely cushion his voice, and she tried to gauge at what point he was in his typical arc of madness. He allowed her to turn her cheek to the side to gulp air, before shoving her under again. The baby tugged her wet ropes of hair whenever it drifted near him. She reached for his tiny foot to reassure him.

Rick strolled into the room with two boxes of doughnuts. He opened the boxes and put them on the sideboard, slamming down some loose dollars. He flipped open the boxes and stole two crullers before going outside.

The women closed in on the sweets and returned to their chairs.

“My husband said terrible things,” the woman named Leslie repeated.

The circle drank their coffee and nibbled the sweets with the unselfconscious, let’s-get-down-to-brass-tacks
poise of NASA specialists or a corporate think tank as they initiate the critical phase of a serious discussion.

But Iris sipped the metallic coffee and shrugged. She said, “Well, what
did
he say?”

The women turned to look at Iris. She was rushing into it. She should give Leslie’s problem a little more skirt. “I mean,” Iris said, “if you want to tell us what he said—we’re all
ears
.”

The women watched Carol to see if she took offense.

Leslie looked back at Iris and told her, “He says I’m dried up.”

Iris said, “That’s not bad. That’s almost got manners.”

“No, honey. He says I’m as dry as a
bone.
That’s different.” Leslie leaned forward. “Like a desiccated morsel. Like a freeze-dried breakfast berry.”

Iris blinked but she kept her eye-to-eye with Leslie.

“After the change,” Leslie said, “I got sore as hell. I started to tear. I was bleeding. I had to avoid Roy until I healed. Then it would happen again the next time.”

Iris remembered the sign outside the front door: “Nothing Is Permanent But Change.” She didn’t think this was the reference Leslie was making.

A resident told Leslie, “You need a patch.”

“What’s the point? Estrogen isn’t the issue. Why rebuild a bridge between warring nations,” another woman said.

“For your own sake. A patch is good for your general health, your heart, your posture—”

“He really call you that? Freeze-dried—”

“—breakfast berry.”

The residents looked at the floor in a stunned meditation on the simile.

Iris understood, at last, that the women were discussing the mysterious, unpredictable humidity of the female zone. Maurice often remarked on this bloom of moisture when he tested her interest with just a little talk, his fingers prowling her neckline, his lips sucking her collar bone, until he started biting the caps of her shoulders.

These women were discussing a time line Iris had not yet imagined, nor would she ever need to. She stood up and went over to the coffee urn. Suddenly, the women started shrieking. Each one screamed by her lonesome, as if cued, until they had all joined in.

A common brown bat had squeezed through a cellar floor grate before their eyes. It found itself in the tight, crowded room. It dipped from one corner to the other, circling the crouched women, eliciting individual shrieks. It flew out the parlor door. The group ran after it to see that it didn’t enter their own rooms. It flew up the stairwell, where it became trapped in the second-floor hallway. It pumped its wings, a ratcheting, erratic W. It turned up and down in the confined space without touching lintel, doorpost, or ceiling. The bat’s expert maneuvering seemed proof of its mysterious gifts. Its weightless reversals in flight were an attraction to the women; and yet, their attraction only heightened their repulsion.

Two of the residents were truly frightened and together had wrapped themselves in the full-length drapes, winding the fabric tight until they looked like a shivering cigar. Others locked themselves in their rooms and called out their nervous inquiries through the hinges. Iris climbed the stairs to her room and was laughing in her doorway. When the bat flew past her she tried to whack it down with a foam slipper.

It escaped past Iris and flew into her tiny room. It was clinging to the rolled window shade above the baby’s crib. Iris wheeled the crib away and Carol stepped up to the window to remove the child-guard screening. She pushed down the window sash to release the bat, but it clung to the rolled vinyl. Carol saw its diminutive rib cage heaving as it breathed through its tiny nostrils. The bat didn’t escape into the sunlight but flew back into the hallway. By the time they followed it out of Iris’s room, it was out of sight.

“It’s gone,” Carol announced. The women protested. The evidence was inconclusive; they claimed they could not rest until they had seen it banished or had its actual carcass as proof. For another half-hour they sorted through the throw pillows, opened all the cupboards, knocked the tin wastebaskets, and carefully jimmied open bureau drawers. The flying rodent had vanished. Iris wasn’t alarmed and she borrowed nail polish from an Irish girl in order to paint not only her fingernails, but the tiny gray wafers of her toenails. The glowing red polish had an artificial cherry scent. She told the girl who gave her the polish, “This is the first time in ages.”

“Yeah. We forget we have toes.”

Iris agreed. She had neglected these extremities, letting her nails blanch and chip, ignoring her cuticles until a thin membrane grew over the half moons on all her fingers. Having long fingernails didn’t advance the diapering routine and interfered with other services she was constantly required to do for Terrell, whose own fingernails were difficult to clip. She had to nibble his fingertips to remove their ragged ends.

Carol sent Rick to the True Value to buy some screening for the cellar windows. He spent Saturday afternoon in the alley between the two houses cutting measured oblongs from a roll of screen and tacking the mesh to the old casement windows. The cement walk was warming in the sun and he didn’t mind lying down on it to tack the mesh to the hard-to-reach moldings. The window casements had substantial dry rot and dissolved into powder where he hammered. He moved the tacks around to find solid wood.

The women had opened the upstairs windows for air and he could hear their conversations, their kids chattering. He placed his Panasonic on the concrete beside him and turned up the volume. The station he usually listened to wasn’t airing his New Wave favorites and was holding forth with “a full day of Gaye.” He tacked the screen.

The girl with the blond hair stuck her head out of a second-floor window and said, “Can you shut that fucking thing off.”

He sat up and leaned back on his hands to look up at her. She didn’t appear as beautiful in the daylight as she had looked in the street light, but she was beautiful. She sat against her windowsill, her hip jutting over the ledge, her baby in her lap.

“You putting screens on those windows?” she said.

“Just about done,” he told her, feeling his face glow. He looked down at his tools and lined them up another way. He waited to feel the heat in his face wash away before looking up again.

She was telling him, “You sure that bat is gone? You might be locking him inside instead of keeping him out.”

“I’m doing what they want.” He pointed to the office window on the first floor.

“Nobody saw that bat leave the house.”

“I guess you’ll find out.”

She chuckled.

Rick recognized the idleness in her voice. She was enjoying her respite. Lots of these girls liked talking to him in the first days after they arrived at the shelter. They’re chatty and friendly in their little oasis; then they get restless. If no one shows up to protest their absence, they think they have to turn around in their tracks. They start to miss their own surroundings and they run back home. This girl was dangling one leg out the window, swinging it back and forth, as if she was sitting on a school wall. Her baby was scrubbing his gums with a hollow plastic rattle like a tiny white barbell, teething on it.