Marguerite (part six)
I am with June, my Alexander therapist. She has coaxed the muscles across my neck and shoulders into relaxation. She asks how I feel. I tell her my mouth has disappeared. I have no idea of where it is or how it's shaped. June says that’s like a fetus; perhaps being so relaxed across your neck and shoulders reminds you of being a fetus. I feel the silken curving of my head, smooth and lowered slightly to my chest. I feel a gentle support all around me. No mouth.
The next day in meditation, I purse my lips to release the muscle of my jaw. Suddenly they thrust forward in an exaggerated pout. I’m sucking! The long shaft of the nipple is between my lips. It fills my mouth. I’m completely bound to this shaft; it is me; it is mine … and also mine, the round whiteness rising above it. I suck with all my strength, powerful, competent, and satisfied. That was at the beginning. We couldn’t keep it up.
They used to call it a failure: “Having failed at breast feeding, alternatives must be sought…” The mother has lost. The cracked nipple has left dark streaks of blood in the funnel-shaped shield of glass. She holds it up to the doctor. “Is this what you want her to have?” she challenges. He is outraged.
“You surely wouldn't have been giving that to the child!” She flushes. So it's not a sacrifice but a crime. Her sister helps her get the bottles ready. They are expensive. Each time she feeds the baby she is reminded. Soon she props the bottle on a pillow and goes about her daily chores. It really is better this way; no time wasted. Her mother is silent.
Mamma gets up very early Monday mornings and starts the washing machine. It's still dark when she puts the first sheets through the wringer and brings the basket to the clothes line, a white rope strung from tree to tree. A long stick with a nail at the end props up the line where the trees are too far apart. She hangs up the sheets and the good towels on the outside lines and peers through the pre-dawn gloom with satisfaction. No one else is out yet.
There’s a space between the big white walls just wide enough for me to reach with my hands stretched out. I slide my fingers lightly along the damp, soap-smelling cloth. I’ve learned to say, “Don’t touch.” I lay my fingers on bad things and say “Don’t touch.” Everybody laughs but Mamma. The sheets are don’t touch; your hands are dirty!
I hide between the big white sheets. Nobody can see me here. Nobody can hear me. It’s all very quiet everywhere. I go up and down with my arms stretched out feeling the cool wetness on both sides with my fingertips. I feel where my arms join up in the middle of me! Suddenly I have forgot which way is out. I go back and forth and back and forth, starting to be scared a little bit. This time I go farther on and get to where the clothes are smaller. I can see Mamma’s legs at the end of the row, dipping and standing, with the dolls’ heads of the clothes pins in her mouth.
She has seen me, too, but pretends not. She used to be by herself all day before I came to live here. Daddy was in the field and she ran over the grass with lunch in a basket for him and they sat and ate it together under the big tree at the end where the spring is. And he came in at the end of the day and they ate together again and loved one another and on Saturdays they went to a party or everyone came to our house. And she was pretty and young with green eyes and red curly hair and he was handsome and strong with a mustache and leather boots like Clark Gable and they did all the work and never got tired. Now I am here all the time. There was a short while between her mother and me when she was the only girl. I make the clothes pin dolls talk to one another. She likes that because I’m not talking to her.
Her name was Iris. She leaned down to tell me. Iris came out of the woods near my house. She is a big girl. After she talked to my mother, Iris took hold of my hand and we went in the woods. “Going fishing!” she said. I didn’t know what fishing was but Iris was happy so it must be something good.
Iris knows where there is a creek in the woods! The water goes very fast and you can see stones on the bottom. Growley roots stick out where it goes around the trees. She says I can put my feet in. It’s cold! Iris finds sticks for us and ties on strings from her pocket. She puts some bent pins on and we roll up pieces of bread to be hard balls and stick the pins through. The breads break in half and fall off but we don’t mind and finally a couple stay on.
“Here’s where we catch fish!” she says and dangles her line-pin-bread in the water. I do whatever she does.
My arm is getting tired holding the stick up when I see a shadow in the water under my feet. I shrink up my feet and watch it slide by. Suddenly I’m in the water! It’s up to my chest and pushing on me. I lean hard against it so I won’t fall over. Iris reaches for my hand. Our hands are slippery and the edge is high but she’s not worried. We hang on! Mud gets all over my dress. We tell Mamma a fish pulled me in the creek. That’s what Iris says. I'm not sure what put me in the water. We didn’t catch any fish because I got wet and we had to go home then.
Later on, in the real summertime, Mamma took me to swim in the creek. This time it was soft and smooth and the water was a round-shaped pool warm from the sun and with a bottom of little round stones. She already had on her bathing suit when she came out of the house and said to go get mine. I couldn’t believe it! I had never went swimming before and Mamma was going with me! Some men were there for the threshing. She stood on the front steps and talked to them in her swimming suit while I got mine on. I hurried fast as I could. When we got to the pool, she laid herself down to soak up the warmness and I waved my hands back and forth under the water so the upside-down trees came apart in jaggery pieces and put themselves back together again. I liked playing with the pictures; it was like when I could shift from one eye to the other and make things jump across the room.
The sunroom was the only room Mom really liked. In summer it was very much hot with the wall of windows facing South. But in winter, when all the rest of the house was dark and cold, this room was yellow bright and I played where the sunlight puddled out across the floor, feeling it warm through my thick brown stockings. She came in once in a while to get a rest from housework. There were a lot of plants and a special green glass bowl with flowers enameled along one side and filled with cotton bolls just as they had been picked from the field, with the stickery part still on. I don't think she had ever been to Florida yet but they were a kind of promise that a magical place like that did exist. She liked the bowl and the cotton and the possibility.
Everything else was sort of colorless, being left over from the man who had lived there before Dad. Grandma McCann had turned up shortly after the wedding with boxes full of curtains from her attic trunks and pieces of old carpet faded and worn right through in a spot or two, leftovers that had long ago been replaced but nothing thrown away. They'll only need mending, she said. Indeed some had already been pulled together across the tears or coarsely darned. Not at all what my mother had in mind, tired of being poor!
Dad's family definitely had more. Dad himself spent money easily. But it all came from his father's pocket. The young couple was allowed to use some of the potatoes and the corn they raised, the rest to be sold and proceeds handed over. They could grow what they liked in the garden. Peaches and apples from the main farm were shared around the family as well as mutton after the sheep had been shorn. They raised their own chickens for eggs and Sunday dinners and their own beef and pork. There was no provision for curtains.
Mom fought back. She would not let the old woman win. She would not submit. She never had. The argument was about her.
“Get that old witch out of here. You tell her or I’ll tell her myself.” Mamma marched up and down the kitchen, hands on hips. “And she can take her rags back to Guilford with her!” They heard a slight rustle and looked at one another. The door to the hallway was open. Mamma gestured with her chin and Dad went over to take a look. The old woman was tucked in behind it.
“I heard that,“ said Grandma, stepping out before the two of them.
“Good!” spat out Mom.
“That’s the pity; there’s nothing good about it,” retorted the old woman. “A flirt, nothing but a little flirt!” she repeated her former accusation. "That's what they all say!" This Grandma was not in love with words. Her voice quavered and her terribly blue eyes brightened with tears. But she had hit her mark. (My mother's face stiffened as she told me.) She'd glared at Dad. He sighed.
“You better go on home,“ he had said looking down at his mother. “I guess we won’t be needing any curtains and things right now.” Grandma turned and spoke to the men in the midst of their carrying.
"Back it all goes." She waved a dismissive hand toward the piles of goods. They didn't understand for a moment, but then, Mrs. McCann did not make jokes. The look on her face confirmed that! They shrugged their shoulders and went to work, carrying bundles back out to the truck while she guided herself carefully down the back steps by the handrail and went and sat in the car. It was a warm September in the afternoon and the men loaded the rugs and curtains and blankets onto the truck and when they were finished, the truck and the car went slowly over the bumps and down around the curve in the long driveway and turned left on Georgetown Road. Grandma McCann didn't come any more to our house. Only to the cottage the day Daddy got hurt.
I went one time to Iris’s house to stay all night. She took me to see everything, like the cats in the barn. One was orange tiger with a white neck and her fur was warm on one side from sitting in the sun. There was a vine on the fence where you could pull off as many grapes as you like and squeeze them so the insides would pop slippery into your mouth and a giant tree with fuzzy green balls hanging all over it. Some of the balls had fallen on the ground and turned brown. She said they were walnuts! But I didn't believe it and she had to show me the shell inside and her fingers all brown like her mamma’s and daddy’s because they had to get all the walnuts out. I shrunk up so they wouldn’t touch me.
Breakfast was at a round table with a white cloth on and bright sun shining in. Iris’s mamma brought out a plate of fried eggs and put two down for me. She said she’d been careful to cook them just right but I can see right through them! She gives me toast and sausages and rolled oats with cream. They say I’m too skinny. They want to see me eat. I think they are too big and they do things funny. The daddy should be outside working when the sun is bright. The mommy stays sat down, too.
I slide down from the cushions on my seat. "Anyway, I don’t eat breakfast any more."
Anyway, I already have a friend. Her name is Aunt Cissa.
So Mom had moved in up at the farm, having collected her few boxes from home. Her mother brought out a couple sets of curtains that were from a younger sister who'd married into money. In lieu of actual monetary support for their mother, Great grandma Cole, Eloise now and then sent superseded household supplies, like the old lace curtains when she redecorated. They required only a little mending at the bottom corner, and along the center hem where they'd had been pulled aside to peer out at passersby. Rachel had restored the broken threads before laying the curtains away in dark paper, her tiny stitches perfectly parallel so that they were a pleasure to look at themselves. If you could find them!
Dad had lived on the farm by himself, planting and harvesting potatoes, some corn, some wheat, since Grandpa'd bought it so he couldn’t be drafted. I felt Dad’s twitchiness whenever war veterans were around, even the ones who were his friends! As if they knew about something he could never be part of. They seemed to protect him from it, like you protect your younger brother, but then he's never quite initiated. I remember Mom telling me that Ross had given Marian syphilis when he got back from France. Said he’d got it because they all sat on the same branch to do their business. She said, “Do their business.” She looked at me from under her brows, to see if I thought that was right. She wanted mostly to believe that our men were trustworthy and honorable. A little bit she wanted to believe it was Ross and Marian's own fault they had no children. I said s’pose so. I was still reeling in amazement that old Ross had ever been a soldier and who was I to spoil the story?
You can see Dad up there with the cows, you know, and the mules and the black dog that followed him everywhere. Big black shepherd, knowing the routine, anticipating his every move, bounding on ahead tail high, ears up, feet scarcely touching the ground. Animals were like that with him. He used to take one of the piglets from the litter and make a pet of it. Next thing there’s tick-a, tick-a, tick-a every morning down the path behind him! Fast as it could go. It worked the other way, too. When it came time to butcher the young steer we had raised, I found him down by the barn talking away to it just like another person as he rubbed his hands all along the creamy brown sides. He told me to get back in the house but I still saw him crying.
The dog came to meet the truck halfway down the mile-long lane as usual. They pulled up at the house and Dad lifted her down in her yellow-flowered camisole and high heeled shoes. The dog’s tail paused and he drew in his lolling tongue. Dad leaned down with his hand on the dog’s ruff to introduce them again; again she didn’t bend or reach out. Her green eyes stayed clear. Like Gene Tierney. The dog crouched.
“Hey there!” Dad was irritated and waved him away. “He’ll get used to you,” he said. But he didn’t. He poised ready for action whenever he saw her. The woman was inside the house with her suitcases and boxes and he was kept out, barred from the newly waxed linoleum. No more lying close to the man’s feet under the single hanging light bulb in front of the warm kitchen stove. Dad tapped him in the side with his foot when he started the low rumble in his throat.
She was afraid. Big black shepherd watching, stalking. Who knows what he’ll do; he’s a dog, for goodness sakes! Dad took him along when he went into town or left him chained to a log at home. He'd chew right through rope. Dad swore. The dog lay there with the chain stretched out, eyes riveted on the back door of the house.
Mom didn’t like it.
"What if he gets loose when you're not here? I can't even go to the garden without his eyes on my back!" Dad put a piece of meat in her hand and led her arm out to offer it. The black nose ever so slightly withdrew.
“Eat it,” growled Dad, and he did, with a long slow tongue, lowering his head and looking up from under reproachful brows, Dad softly chiding, rubbing his big black head.
“Come on, boy; it’s okay.”
But it was spoiled. Dad couldn't stand it that the dog wouldn't mind. He kicked it and it trailed after him, tail down, but still froze whenever the woman came outside. Just couldn’t give it up.
They had to shoot the dog. The yellow and brown and red leaves were falling and sticking together on the path into the woods. A light drizzle added to the metallic shine. They walked along the slippery surface, the two of them, with the rifle and the spade, the dog jogging on ahead, looking back over his shoulder, smiling at the routine he is familiar with. It only takes a minute once you reach the back fence; you have to do it fast if you're going to. You can talk out-loud afterward, explaining while you dig him in. That way he doesn't have to see it. The ground is not yet frozen. Llew smooths it over and leaves begin already to drift across the bare soil. Deliberately, one by one he places his feet on the returning path, looking up through the sketches of black tree limbs against the sky. He feels stiff and sore. Leaning the gun against the grain bin, he pulls down a bottle from the low rafter overhead. A couple of swigs before he goes inside.
This is not the story they told me. The dog’s name was Rex. Dad pointed to an old photograph in the box of old photographs. “Good ol’ Rex,” he said.
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