Milk (27 page)

The urge is irresistible. How can I not?

Slashing them out of their casings, I cut a couple of the napkins to get them started—snip and rip, a snarling sound.

Scissors are too civilized. I bite a tablecloth to get it started and I'm about to rip it in half, when I stop. I feel my mother's presence, as when she comes to me in my sleep, kneeling in the corner. Only now she's bent over completely, her head turned away in shame. My mother with her dowry of wounds and sorrows and orifices, bands of metal on her teeth. She wants to be freed and only I can free her. She's watches me now as I'm about to rend this tablecloth in two, which I will do again and again until the tablecloth is in shreds, and she's glad. She doesn't ask to be forgiven, that's not what's important. What's important is the truth. That I tell the truth. She's waiting, as the doll with no hair is waiting. It's like attending a hanging. I think maybe the doll with no hair wouldn't like a hanging, so I turn her to the wall. My mother continues to watch.

As I destroy her linens set by set, in my head I begin a dialogue with her:

Me: He raped you
.

Her: I don't know what you're talking about
.

Me: He raped you. Why don't you admit it?

We're sitting on a low garden wall. We're girls, the same age. We've not reached puberty, who knows how long this has been going on? Forever. For as long as we've known.

Me: He would have raped me, Charlotte too
.

Her: (she sighs) Yes
.

She demonstrates what she does on such occasions. She lies on her side, drinks milk from a wineglass. Then she asks me what I do.

Me: You know what I do. You've seen me do it
.

Her: Show me
.

Me: The trick with the fingers. Numb from the waist down. You know. You were the one who taught me. When you raped me
.

I want her to admit what she did to me, face to face. Maybe I want an apology. We're grownups now, around the same age or perhaps I'm older than her. We're talking in a basement and it's summer, hot outside, cool down here. She's perched on a step stool and I stand before her.

Me: But that's just the beginning. That's nothing in comparison. Don't you remember?

Her: Remember what?

Me: What you did to Charlotte
.

Her: I didn't mean to
.

Me: But you did. You murdered her. You would've murdered me. How could you do that? Murder a baby
.

Her: I suppose. You're right
.

Me: You say so yourself in your letters
.

Her: (in a tired voice) It's true
.

She's like a child. Her eyes won't meet mine.

Me: It's because of him that you did it. Isn't that right?

Her: I suppose
.

We're getting nowhere. She doesn't mean to be elusive; it's that her mind is damaged beyond repair and she is counting on me now. I have to be the mother. Her mother, my own mother, my baby's mother.

“Charlotte!” I cry. My sister. The thin white arm I'll never touch again. I kneel like my mother, bent over at the waist, and weep.

A peacock screeches, waking me.

I've fallen asleep, for a moment, for an hour, I'm not sure, my head resting on a stack of tea towels. All about me are doilies hacked to bits, torn up placemats, napkins, tablecloths, reduced to ragged strips, threads. My arms ache from driving in the scissors, the nail file, the X-acto knife; my palms are blistered pink. The baby in my belly is asleep so I remain very still, surveying the wreckage, the recipes and little bitty plates, tiny ransacked furniture, dolls with their legs up in the air, blind eyes staring up into the blazing lights of the pool house.

Outside it's pitch black still, though it feels close to dawn.

I must've been asleep because now I remember a dream. It's about my mother, so I savor it, as I always do. My mother in Nordic dress, a dagger upheld in her hand. I'm afraid to look in her eyes. Somebody tells me to look,
look
. When I do horrible things spew forth—snakes, blackened metal, wet trash, clods of dirt, slime, vomit; my stomach churns, now as in the dream.

Then the dream is gone and I remember my haircut from when I was thirteen years old.

I don't want to think about this and shut my eyes and hold my breath, to keep the image away. I'm thirsty, terribly thirsty. The X-acto knife is near my thigh and I hurl it across the room, not a good idea to have it so close. I'm thirsty and my bladder hurts but I'm pinned to the floor—

My hair is cut badly, unevenly, as though with a butter knife. I do it myself in front of the mirror every day, every time I'm in front of the mirror, in fact, shorter and shorter, I can't stop, shaving it up the back of my neck with my father's electric shaver, bristles of hair inside my clothes, scratching me, annoying me. It's supposed to be a pixie cut, but my hair is too curly so I tape it down at night, snipping off anything that curls or offends—

I've taken to shaving my arms as well, not just under my arms. Any single hair that stands out, doesn't lie down straight: first I trim it with the scissors, then I go after it with Daddy's shaver, hovering just over the skin at first so that the hair is almost sucked into the shaver, then I move in closer and closer until I'm shaving my arms, wrist to elbow—

Until somebody says at school one day, eyeing me in gym class—we have to wear sleeveless shirts, she must see the bristles on my arms like five o'clock shadow—“Do you shave your arms?”

I glance at them as if for the first time. “Yes.”

“Why?”

“I don't know.”

The doll with no hair.

A baby.

Charlotte.

I vomit and vomit, there's no end to it. I hold my belly as if to keep the baby in, and vomit again, but for once I'm not frightened, the toilet is just a toilet.

I've crawled to the bathroom and now I crawl back, my fingers alternately twitching and claw-like. I'm worried about the baby—what if I miscarry? Too late for that, but what if I have the baby early? Is three-and-a-half-weeks early too early? This is what drives me to the phone. I have to call someone. Maggie, my friend and midwife, but what will I say? I'm not contracting, I'm not cramping, I don't hurt, I'm just having a nervous breakdown. That must be what this is: look at this room, wall-to-wall destruction and a toilet filled with vomit. People have been committed for less.

My mother's words:
Why would God let this happen to a girl? To anyone?
As I crawl across the room I'm listening inside myself, for the baby.
Are you all right, little one? Are you all right?

I pick up the phone.

It's still dark out, must be earlier than I think. Maggie is here now, shoving debris out of the way, laying me down on the futon, pressing pillows to me and a blanket, cool cloths to my forehead and wrists. She lifts my shirt, pressing the Doppler to my belly.

“Good heartbeat, perfect. Not too fast, not too slow. As for you, your pulse is racing.” She pumps the blood pressure cuff. “Blood pressure on the low side. I suspect it's the shock. We'll check it again in a while.”

She pulls off my pants, my underwear—I'm a rag doll, limp—and checks me inside. “Everything is as it should be. Cervix ripening a bit, nothing abnormal about that. As far as the baby is concerned, as far as I can tell, everything is fine, Theo. You're a good mother.”

“I doubt that.” My voice is hoarse, as though I've been screaming all night. For all I know I have been screaming. In any case I can't talk in a normal tone of voice; my words evaporate halfway out of my mouth and I gaze at the ceiling as if expecting to find them there. “Not possible to be a good mother,” I say.

“You're taking good care of your baby,” Maggie says firmly. “Now drink your water. Rest.”

Water. Maggie's cure-all. She's poured me a pitcher of it and expects me to drink every last drop. I sip the water, let my eyes close for a moment. An image of my mother rising from her knees, walking toward me, her hand extended. Suddenly I'm very, very cold. Shaking.

A blanket appears, is tucked around me.

“It's the blood pressure,” Maggie says.

“Will I have to go to the hospital?”

“I doubt it. Unless you want to.”

Panic. Which hospital are we talking about—the mental kind? “No hospitals,” I say.

“If that's the way you feel, then, drink.” She lifts me to a half-reclining position, fits the glass to my mouth. “Come on, a little more.” I feel like a whale, my bladder pinches and aches, like somebody's standing on it.

“I have to pee.”

“Good,” she says. “That's wonderful news.” She helps me to the bathroom, ignoring the stench. She flushes down the vomit before I sit. It takes a long time to even start, my bladder is so swollen. Maggie turns on the faucet at the sink, fetches me a cup of warm water to splash on myself. When finally I do go, it's one drip at a time for a while, then it's a torrent, endless.

Maggie walks me back to the room; I'm leaning on her hard. “I feel like I'm in labor.”

“What?”

“No, no. Not labor. I meant, you escorting me around like this.” A feeble attempt at a joke. “Like the husbands in birth movies.” Oh, husbands. Let's not think about that.

Then Maggie is scooping up armfuls of torn linens, recipe cards, papers, bits of splintered dollhouse furniture and other wreckage, and without really looking at any of it, thank God, she dumps them in mounds against the wall and covers them with sheets and towels from my closet, so I won't have to be reminded, I guess, only now the mounds resemble corpses, exhumed bodies.

I turn my head away, toward Maggie and my nest of blankets and pillows. “I'm so ashamed.”

Maggie says, while feeding me bites of yogurt, “Never mind, Theo. We'll talk about it tomorrow.”

All this attention—Maggie moving about so efficiently, like women do. Women at feasts, women at funerals, lifting, carrying, wiping up the juices of food, of death.

“Maggie,” I say. She's by my side, holding my hand.

“What, honey?”

“I was looking for my mother's recipe for cold fruit soup. Can you believe it?” I gesture at all the crap piled against the walls. “That's how this all began. You know, I feel awfully sleepy,” I tell Maggie. “How come I'm shaking so much?”

“Low blood pressure. Shock. Have you eaten lately?”

“Is this what it's like to have a nervous breakdown?”

“I wouldn't know,” Maggie says, “but you seem lucid. Even if you weren't, the last place you'd want to go is a hospital. Now let's stop talking. I want you to drink. Rest. In five minutes we'll check your pressure.”

I lay there breathing in and out, trying to ignore the sound of my own breathing. I feel utterly like a child. A child in the nurse's office at school. Somebody come and pick me up. An adult. My father can't, he's beyond hope, always was. He stammers, he hesitates; who knows what he really feels or believes? Well, then, there's Evan, who talks too much and says all the wrong things—and who is probably dead now anyway. Aunt Lyla, she would come in a pinch, in her stiletto heels and Lana Turner sunglasses. Too glamorous to fill the shoes of my parents, but she would try. The Aunt Lyla of old, that is. And my mother, where is she? I'm lying on my side pregnant as a cow, I'm going to be a mother myself; where is she? Who is she? Swathed in scarves, a mystery, a casualty. A suicide, a victim, a sadist, a murderer, the murdered, a savior, an angel, a ghost. She is good, she loves me. She is bad, she hurts me. And I will never really know who she is or why she had to die. Why she had to kill my sister. Charlotte's death. My mother's suicide. The stones I would have to push uphill all my life. But now I've reached the crest, the other side; the stones are about to roll downhill, a rockslide, and I'm standing on top of the mountain, unscathed. Mostly. I'm alive, aren't I? Sane, or so they say. A slightly dented but improved specimen about to release her genes into the next generation.

T
WENTY
-F
IVE

Maggie brings her sleeping boys over for the rest of the night. Come morning, I throw everybody out, insist I'm fine. No, I don't want to talk about what happened. Not now. Maybe later. Yes, I'll drop by Maggie's office around two this afternoon so she can check me again.

They leave and I call Corb. His business line, I don't want to talk to his wife. He answers on the first ring, “This is Corb Mapes. Hello?” he says. “Hello, hello—” Impatiently.

An imagined sound like a helicopter in my ears, or maybe it's my heart pounding. “It's me.”

“Hi, what's up? How did Pinks go?” I picture him dressed in a shirt with a soft collar, the hair on his arms curling at the base of his black watch. Like our father, so much hair. Men. A wave of revulsion rides over me until I'm flat. I see I'm lying on the floor again, mirrored in the sliding glass door of the poolhouse. Mirrors—no wonder I fear them so. In them I see my mother's face, beckoning, whispering, solutions that are chemical, lethal.

“Theo?” Corb says, cautiously.

“I was going through our mother's recipe box yesterday and I found some letters from her.”

“Oh.” Said so casually, as if I'd announced I'd gotten a bill in the mail. “And what did they say?”

“Letters from our mother, Corb. Awful stuff. Insane.” I stare at my reflection, hateful and bulbous, like a snake that has eaten a cow.

“Well, she
was
, Theo. Mentally ill. I don't like to use that term, but yes, she was out of touch.”

“Are you stating that from memory? What do you mean she was out of touch?”

“She used to weep and weep at the dinner table.”

“That's crazy?”