Movement (21 page)

“Will you stay with me?” Sara whispered.

“How long?” Susan wanted to ask, but instead she pulled off her dress and slid between the cold white sheets wondering if goose bumps on her flesh would make her more sexy. She watched Sara drop the long, woven skirt from her waist. Her bottom was round, full. Her legs were sturdy. She longed for Sara's experience and at the same time worried that she could not satisfy the older woman. Sara seemed to know what she wanted, running her hands softly over Susan's breasts and stomach, licking and sipping from her vagina, circling and tapping with her tongue, licking and sipping. Then she moved Susan's hands over her own body with gentle encouragement. Gentleness. Susan couldn't remember such gentleness even from childhood. Rocking each other, stroking each other. The child is mother of the woman. Rocking with the train. First class compartment from Brighton to London, tired after a Sunday on the beach. Slow, hollow coach from Amoy to Hong Kong, with Japanese POW's silent in their healed wounds. The sleeper to Edinburgh. The commute to Manchester. Toronto to Chicago to Shanghai to Montreal to Victoria to San Francisco to Antigua to Canterbury to Maputo to Vancouver.

Susan woke from a jolt of the train and felt that Sara's arms were still around her. Still. Perfect stillness. She worried that the motionlessness might waken Sara, might disconnect them. They turned together, Susan making a cave around Sara's body. The train began to move again. Susan fell back to sleep.

“First call for breakfast,” a harsh disembodied voice. “Vancouver in an hour-and-a-half.”

Sara's arms held her as they crossed the Frazer Canyon. Susan turned to Sara's open eyes. They kissed.

Sara said she could postpone Victoria for a few days. Would Susan like to stay in Vancouver together? Of course Susan wanted to stay, to rest safely here above the border. But she told Sara that she had to catch a Greyhound for the States today. Maybe Sara could come down to California for a visit?

Whistles. Squeaking wheels. Baggage calls. “Vancouver in five minutes.”

“Will you write to me Sara?”

“Will you write about me, Susan?”

Rain railed as the train skidded into Vancouver. They lost each other in the shuffle for bags and coats and tickets. Susan tried to find Sara outside the station. But everyone was turtled under black umbrellas. At the corner, Susan hailed a cab for the Greyhound depot. It was pouring so hard, she might have drowned just waiting for the light to change.

Well Past
the Weird Hour

It was well past the weird hour, she thought, as she rode the escalator down to the BART platform. She hadn't always been this paranoid. No, the word was “cautious.” Then her friend Clara was beaten and raped. Indeed, a woman couldn't be too cautious nowadays. She watched a delicate man with purple punk hair running his hand along a pointed object in his back pocket. Three jiving boys heckled all the girls as they walked by the car. A strange old lady carrying two Macy's shopping bags, Christmas 1976, was mumbling angrily. Well past the weird hour, all right. She spotted a dumpy kid studying the jackets of two classical LP's. He looked pretty innocuous. She squeezed near him.

“Hey, who are you pushing around?” said a meanlooking woman in a cowboy hat.

“Oh, excuse me, I didn't notice.”

“Fuck that,” said the cowboy hat. “Back of the line, babe.”

He was pretty dumpy looking. Probably no one else would want to sit next to him anyway. A safe refuge from all points of view.

She was right. There he sat crumpled next to the window, reading the liner on his Bach cantatas. She felt sorry for him, so lonely looking. Sometimes San Francisco did seem like a big city. She pulled out a copy of
Time
and turned to the movie reviews.

“Do you live in San Francisco?”

She looked around. The boys were snickering to themselves. The old woman was slumped in the front seat, humming. It was him, Mr. Crumple.

She nodded—no reason to be nervous she told herself—and turned the page.

“What part?” he asked like he was making wedding reception conversation.

“Sixteenth” she lied, hoping he would get off the train before her stop on twenty-fourth.

“What street?”

She gave him a long look—which neither discouraged him nor gave her any clues about his intentions. He still looked like the honest schmuck she saw at the BART station.

“Sanchez,” she said, recalling the street where her boyfriend of twenty years ago, a quarterback, had lived.

“Oh, that's nice,” he said, adjusting the plastic satchel on his lap. She realized that he probably had a sawed-off shotgun in there. Come to think of it, he did look a little weird. Maybe he was one of those XXY chromosome types.

He was silent. She returned to the article on pornography.

“You have a New York accent,” he said.

She nodded.

“Do you mind if I ask what part you're from?”

“Near Houston Street,” she said, sensing that he was also Lower Eastside Irish.

“Me too,” he said. “Did you go to St. Mike's?”

“Yeah.” She wondered if he were Tommy Dunnigan grown up or Bobby Driscoll, those creeps who used to beat up her little brother George. “Did you go to St. Mike's too?” she asked.

“No,” he said.

She looked around, but saw no other free seats. And no old people standing. The train was only halfway through the tunnel. What if he pulled something right here in the tunnel?

“You like it in California?” he asked.

“It's OK,” she said.

“How long have you lived here?”

“Twenty-five years,” she said, in a louder voice, hoping to attract attention to them just in case. That punk rock guy looked like he could take care of Mr. Crumple if he wanted. Lord, she was always such a bad judge of character.

“Do you work in the city?”

“Yes,” she said. She fancied telling him she was a ballistics expert in the San Francisco Police Department. But even joking, she couldn't call herself a cop.

“I'm just here on vacation,” he said.

“Having a nice time?” she said, in spite of herself.

“Oh, my, yes,” he said. “And I find you Californians so friendly.” He stood up. “Well, this is my stop. Thanks for the conversation.”

She watched him get off the train and walk to the escalator, confused, and weighed down by his airline satchel and his classical records. What kind of world was it where a big strong woman like herself was afraid of a little Mr. Crumple? She looked around to see the kids at the back of the car smoking and yelling to the fancy girls carrying opera programs. The punk man was engrossed in his fanzine, running a blue comb through his purple locks. The old woman had her head on her bosom, snoring.

XII

Novena

It all came back to Susan like the rosaries, one decade after another. First her mother Mary's story and then Susan's own story. Sometimes Susan confused the two stories, in the sense that we are all each other's memories and premonitions.

Mary

Pubic hair, dark curls against blue white skin, is all she remembered of her own mother. Mary was seven-and-a-half when the “doctor” left her mother dead on the kitchen table. They said her mother was a blonde, but Mary didn't remember. They said her mother was French. Mary appreciated that when she was older. (Stuart romance in Edinburgh's dour back streets.) The pubic hair, she did remember, was flecked with grey.

Susan

The blood on the sheets of the double bed came from her toes, Susan's mother said. From clipping her toenails too close. But it smelled of sex and she couldn't fool Susan with this fairy tale. Susan was already eight, so she knew she was too old to be an orphan and she remembered more than pubic hair. Susan remembered that when her father was at sea and her mother slept alone, there was blood on the ironed muslin sheets. She would crawl in next to Mom, snuggling away from the nightmares. Her mother never revealed her own dark dreams. But Susan knew, even then, that the blood was too high up for toes.

Mary

Mary's mother's photograph stood on the bookcase for four years after her death. Later, Mary could never remember her mother's face, but she did remember all the books, each by place. Fifty years later. The Everyman volumes of Scott, the red leather Burns. And the Milton. Mary's father would bring down
Paradise Lost
and read her the order of the world. He would leave her oatmeal bubbling on the stove each morning. Mary always came straight home from school and prepared his supper. They took care of each other this way after her mother's death. But there was never enough warmth for his cough.

Susan

Susan's grandma, her father's mother, lived in the upstairs bedroom and never cried. Sometimes the “Jesus, Mary and Joseph” under her breath was more expletive than prayer, but Susan never saw the tears. Urine bottle on the lace doily. “Would you empty it dear?” Susan pretended it was orange juice and never smelled the difference. She took care of her father's mother the way she would have taken care of her father if he had ever been home. Yellow pus oozed from her grandma's leg ulcer as Susan changed the muslin dressings. She washed yesterday's blood from these remnants. They dried outside on the line, slightly yellower than the double bed sheets, the stains gone from both. Susan never heard her mother
or
her grandma cry. Not even over onions.

Mary

Mary bawled with anger. On a sunny Saturday morning riding the Princes Street trolley down toward Leith and Portabello Beach. She was going home alone from the Royal Infirmary. When they had registered the night before, him alternately choking and spitting blood, he told her not to worry. God would take care of them both. He reminded Mary that HE would always be with her. And these people on the trolley, what right did they have to live, to laugh? She would never forget him, never. He would always be with her.

Susan

He came back periodically. Susan didn't remember much about her father, but she did remember the Japanese stamps, the Easter cablegram and a telephone call from Argentina just to say hello. Her mother polished the Swiss music box, dusted the ivory elephant carvings from India and the fat ceramic god Ho Tai. Susan remembered her mother being happy for days before he returned. Once he brought back three bronze busts, of women in the traditional coiffures of Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, cut off just before the nipples. He would stay home for two or three months at a time.

Mary

Broken chocolate and the
News of the World.
Mary would run down Leith Walk for their treats and race back home for the two evening hours before the coal fire. Her little brother Peter was there, too. Beautiful, blond Peter. (It must have been true about her mother being a French blonde.) But
she
was his daughter. “Remember you're a Gibson and I love you,” her father would say. She knew that, even the day he chased her out of St. Mary's Cathedral with a switch. All right to play with Maria Ciotti, to eat her mother's spaghetti, but never let him catch her again in that Papist sanctuary. She remembered for a long time afterward because the switching was so unlike him.

Susan

Susan's mother taught her the Hail Mary, the Our Father, the Glory Be. Susan brought home the classroom rosary beads in the belly of the statue of the Infant of Prague which opened at the bottom like a piggy bank. Sister Matthew told them that the family that prays together stays together. But one afternoon when Susan was sitting with her father watching the Dodgers smash the Giants, he told her that her mother wasn't Catholic. She screamed and demanded he tell her she wasn't Jewish. (Sister Matthew had warned about the Jews.) “Go ask your mother,” he teased, “go tell her you thought she was a Jew.” “Protestant,” Mary said heavily. She put her arms around Susan and told her God loved everyone. But Susan knew, then, that her mother Mary would not be saved.

Mary

After his death, Mary's half sisters were always around—like faded aunts, somewhere in the background. They were kind to her but restrained. Their mother, who was her mother, had run away to live with her father, who was not their father. Jennie, Kate, Patsy were older sisters who treated her kindly, especially after everyone's mother died. Mary. She was sweet, wee Mary. But neither Mary nor her sisters could forget she was a Gibson.

Susan

When Susan told Ann Crisillo that her family was moving all the way to Seattle for her father's shore job, Ann let Susan into the clique. Susan was invited to play in the family room which Dr. Crisillo had panelled and hung with the heads of dead animals. There was an all-color gumball machine. In June, Ann Crisillo came around to the house and pressed her nose on the warm back door screen. “Mrs. Campbell, will you see Eskimos in Seattle?” Susan was mortified by the question. She dreaded her mother's honest, boring answer. “There are snowy mountains,” said her mother, “and the Pacific Ocean.” The Pacific Ocean! Ann and Susan regarded each other seriously. They were passionate friends those last three weeks in New Jersey on the Atlantic Ocean.

Mary

Now, Mary always thought of her favorite teacher, Miss Mackie, when she started her shift at Fairley's Café. It was a kind of magic insurance policy against Miss Mackie coming in and discovering that she wasn't going to be a bookkeeper after all. That day, two years before, when Miss Mackie treated her to lunch at Fairley's had been the high point of Mary's entire life. Better than being Top Student. Better than getting married which Mary would never do anyway because she was going to be a career woman like Miss Mackie, as she had promised her father.

Susan