The Funhouse (13 page)

Seesaw.

Seesaw.

Abruptly she was aware, once more, of how drunk she was. Rubber-jointed. Unsteady. Dizzy and
vulnerable.

Beyond the vague glow of the night-light, the darkness pulsed and shifted and edged nearer, as if it were a living creature.

Ellen turned away from the bed and quickly left the room, weaving through the shadows. She closed Joey’s door behind her and stood for a moment in the upstairs hallway. Her heart was slamming like a loose, windblown shutter in a storm.

Am I mad? she asked herself. Am I just like my own mother—seeing the work of the Devil in everyone, in everything, in places where it doesn’t really exist? Am I
worse
than Gina?

No, she told herself adamantly. I’m not crazy, and I’m not like Gina. I’ve got good reason. And at the moment . . . well . . . maybe I’ve had too much to drink, and I’m not thinking straight.

Her mouth was dry and sour from the booze, but she wanted another drink. She longed to recapture that feeling of floating, that bright, pleasant mood she had enjoyed before Joey had scared her with his Halloween mask.

She already felt the omens of a hangover: a faintly queasy stomach that would gradually succumb to a growing, roiling nausea; a dull throbbing in her temples that would become a splitting headache. What she needed, before she felt any worse, was some hair of the dog that had bit her. A whole lot of hair. Several glassfuls of hair from that funny old dog, the dog that came in a clear bottle, the dog that was distilled from potatoes. Wasn’t vodka made from potatoes? Potato juice—that was what would make her feel right again. Lubricated by some potato juice, she would be able to slip back into that comfortable mood just as easily as slipping into a soft, fluffy old robe.

She knew she was a sinner. Pouring down the booze like she did was unquestionably sinful, and when she was sober she could see the spiritual stain that alcohol had left on her.

God help me, she thought. God help me because I just can’t seem to help myself.

She went downstairs to get another drink.

* * *

Joey stayed in
bed for ten minutes after his mother left the room. Then, when he felt it was safe to move, he snapped on the lamp and got up.

He went to the wastebasket by the dresser and stared down at the pile of monster models. They overflowed the can, a tangle of snarling, reaching plastic creatures. Dracula’s head had been knocked off. A couple of the others also appeared to be damaged.

I won’t cry, Joey told himself firmly. I won’t start bawling like a baby. She would enjoy that. I’m not going to do anything she would enjoy.

Tears continued to slide down his cheeks, but he didn’t call that crying. Crying was when you wailed your head off and got a runny nose and blubbered and got red in the face and just totally lost control of yourself.

He turned away from the wastebasket and went to his desk, from which Mama had removed all of the miniature monsters he had collected. The only thing left was his bank. He picked that up and carried it to the bed.

He saved his money in a one-gallon Mason jar. Most of it was in coins, squeezed bit by bit from his small weekly allowance, which he earned by keeping his room neat and by helping around the house. He also earned quarters by running to the 7-Eleven for Mrs. Jannison, the old lady who lived next door. There were several dollar bills in the jar, too; most of those were birthday gifts from his Grandma Harper, his Uncle John Harper, and his Aunt Emma Williams, who was Daddy’s sister.

Joey emptied the contents of the jar onto the bed and counted it. Twenty-nine dollars. And a nickel. He was old enough to know that it wasn’t a fortune, but it still seemed like a lot of money to him.

You could go a long way on twenty-nine dollars. He wasn’t sure exactly how far you could go, but he figured at least two hundred miles.

He was going to pack up and run away from home. He
had
to run away. If he stayed around much longer, Mama was going to come into his room one night, really drunk, really pissed, and she was going to kill him.

Just like she had killed Victor.

Whoever Victor was.

He thought about what it would be like, going off on his own to some strange town, far away. It would be lonely, for one thing. He wouldn’t miss Mama. He wouldn’t even miss his father very much. But he sure would miss Amy. When he thought of leaving Amy and never seeing her again, he felt his throat tighten, and he thought he was going to bawl.

Stop it! Be tough!

He bit his tongue until the urge to cry subsided and he was sure he was in control of himself.

Running away from home didn’t mean he would never see Amy for the rest of his life. She would be leaving home, too, in a couple of years, going away to live on her own, and he could join up with her then. They could live together in an apartment in New York City or someplace great like that, and Amy would become a famous painter, and he would finish growing up. If he showed up on Amy’s doorstep a couple of years from now, she wouldn’t turn him in to Mama; not Amy.

He felt better already.

He put his money back in the big Mason jar and screwed the lid on tight. He returned the jar to his desk.

He would have to get coin wrappers from the bank and package his nickels, dimes, and quarters into rolls, then trade them in for folding money. He couldn’t run away from home with his pockets stuffed full of loose, jangling change; that would be childish.

He slipped into bed again and turned off the light.

The only thing bad about running away was that he would miss the county fair in July. He had been looking forward to it for nearly a year.

Mama didn’t approve of going to the fair and mixing with those carnival people. She said they were dirty and dangerous, a bunch of crooks.

Joey didn’t put much faith in what Mama said about anyone. So far as Mama was concerned, there was hardly a person in the whole world who was free of sin.

Some years his father took him to the carnival on Saturday, the last day of the fair. But other years there was too much work at the law office, and Daddy couldn’t get away.

This year Joey had intended to sneak off to the carnival on his own. The fairgrounds were less than two miles away from the Harper house, and he had to travel only two streets to get there. It was an easy place to find, high up on the hill. Joey had planned to tell his mother that he was going to the library for the day, which he occasionally did; but then he was going to take his bicycle out to the fairgrounds and have himself a real ball all morning and afternoon, getting home just in time for supper, without Mama being any the wiser.

He especially hated to miss the fair this year because it was going to be bigger and better than ever. The midway would be run by a different outfit from the one that had always come to Royal City in the past. This carnival was supposed to be humongous, the second largest in the world, two or three times bigger than the rinky-dink carnival that usually came to town. There would be a lot more rides than there had been in other years, a great many new things to see and do.

But he wouldn’t see or do any of them if he was two hundred miles away, starting a new life in a strange city.

For almost a full minute Joey lay in the darkness, feeling sorry for himself—and then he sat bolt upright, electrified by a brilliant idea. He could leave home and still get to see the fair. He could do both. It was simple. Perfect.
He would run away with the carnival!

8

Wednesday morning the
test results came back from the lab. Amy was officially pregnant.

Wednesday afternoon she and Mama went to the bank and withdrew enough money from Amy’s savings account to pay cash for the abortion.

Saturday morning they told Amy’s father that they were going shopping for a few hours. Instead, they went to Dr. Spangler’s clinic.

At the admissions desk Amy felt like a criminal. Neither Dr. Spangler nor his associates, Dr. West and Dr. Lewis, nor any of his nurses was Catholic; they performed abortions every week, month in and month out, without attaching any moral judgment to the act. Nevertheless, after so many years of intense religious instruction, Amy felt almost as if she were about to become an accomplice to a murder, and she knew that at least a residue of guilt would remain with her for a long, long time, staining any happiness she might be able to achieve.

She still found it difficult to believe that Mama had agreed to let her abort the fetus. She wondered about the fear in her mother’s eyes.

The operation was done on an outpatient basis, and a nurse took Amy to a room where she could undress and put her clothes in a locker. Mama remained in the waiting room.

In the prep room, after a nurse had taken a blood sample, Dr. Spangler came in to chat with her for a moment. He tried to put her at ease. He was a jovial, chubby man with a bald head and bushy gray sideburns.

“You’re not very far gone,” he said. “This will be a simple procedure. No serious chance of complications. Don’t worry about it, okay? It’ll be over before you realize it’s begun.”

In the small operating room, Amy was given a mild anesthetic. She began to drift out of her body as if she were a balloon rising into a high, blue sky.

In the distance, beyond a haze of light and a curtain of whispering air, Amy heard a nurse talking softly. The woman said, “She’s a very pretty girl, isn’t she?”

“Yes, very pretty,” Dr. Spangler said, his voice fading syllable by syllable, almost inaudible. “And a nice girl, too. I’ve been her doctor since she was a little tot. She’s always been so polite, self-effacing . . .”

Soaring up and away from them, Amy tried to tell the doctor that he was wrong. She wasn’t a nice girl. She was a very bad girl. He should ask Mama. Mama would tell him the truth. Amy Harper was a bad girl, evil inside, loose, wild, untrustworthy, just no damned good. She tried to tell Dr. Spangler how worthless she was, but her lips and tongue wouldn’t respond to her urging. She couldn’t make a sound—

—until she said, “Uh,” and opened her eyes in the recovery room. She was on a wheeled cart with railed sides, flat on her back, staring at an acoustic-tiled ceiling. For a moment she couldn’t figure out where she was.

Then she remembered everything, and she was amazed that the abortion had been such a quick and easy procedure.

They kept her in the recovery room for an hour, just to be sure she wasn’t going to hemorrhage.

By three-thirty she was in the Pontiac with her mother, on the way home. During the first half of the short drive, neither of them spoke. Mama’s face looked like a stone carving.

Finally Amy said, “Mama, I know you’ll want me to keep a curfew for a couple of months, but I hope you’ll let me work evenings down at The Dive, if that’s the shift Mr. Donnatelli gives me.”

“You can work whenever you want to work,” her mother said coldly.

“I’ll come home straight from work.”

“You don’t have to,” Mama said. “I don’t care what you do. I just don’t care anymore. You won’t listen to me anyway. You won’t behave yourself. You’ve loosened the reins on that thing inside of you, and now there’s no holding it back. There’s not a thing I can do. I wash my hands of you. I wash my hands.”

“Mama, please. Please. Don’t hate me.”

“I don’t hate you. I just feel numb, blank. I don’t feel much of anything for you right now.”

“Don’t give up on me.”

“There’s only one road to Heaven,” Mama said. “But if you want to go to Hell, you’ll find a thousand roads that’ll take you there. I can’t block all of them.”

“I don’t want to go to Hell,” Amy said.

“It’s your own choice,” Mama said. “From here on it’s your own doing. Do whatever you want. You’ll never listen to me anyway, so I wash my hands.” As she spoke she pulled the car into the driveway of the house on Maple Lane. “I’m not coming in with you. I’ve got to do some grocery shopping. If your father’s back from the office, tell him the reason you look so pale is because you ate a hamburger for lunch, while we were shopping at the mall, and it didn’t agree with you. Go to your room and stay out of his way. The less he sees of you, the less likely he is to get suspicious.”

“All right, Mama.”

When Amy went in the house she found that her father hadn’t returned from the office yet. Joey was still playing at Tommy Culp’s house. She was alone.

She changed into pajamas and a bathrobe, then called Liz Duncan. “It’s over.”

“Really?” Liz asked.

“I just got home.”

“You’re all scraped out?”

“Do you have to put it so crudely?” Amy asked.

“That’s what they do,” Liz said blithely. “They scrape you out. How do you feel?”

“Scraped out,” Amy admitted miserably.

“Sick in the tummy?”

“A little. And I ache . . . down there.”

“You mean you’ve got a sore cunt?” Liz asked.

“Do you have to talk that way?”

“What way?”

“Gross.”

“That’s one of my most charming qualities—my complete lack of inhibitions. Listen, other than your tummy and your cunt, how are you feeling?”

“Very, very tired.”

“That’s all?”

“Yes. It was easier than I thought it would be.”

“Gee, I’m relieved. I was worried about you, kid. I was really, really worried.”

“Thanks, Liz.”

“Are you grounded for the summer?”

“No. I thought there’d be a curfew for a while, but Mama says she doesn’t care what I do. She’s washed her hands of me.”

“She said that?”

“Yes.”

“My God, that’s terrific!”

“Is it?” Amy wondered.

“Of course it is, you silly ass. You make your own rules now. You’re
free
, kid!” Liz put on a phony Southern Negro dialect: “Yo’ massah have done turned yo’ loose, chile!”

Amy didn’t laugh. She said, “Right now, all I care about is getting some sleep. I was awake all last night and most of the night before. And with this business today . . . well, I’m dead on my feet.”

“Sure,” Liz said. “I understand. I won’t keep you on the phone for an hour. Get some rest. Call me tomorrow. We’ll make plans for the summer. It’s going to be a blast, kid. We’ll make some memories and blow out all the candles for our last summer together. I’ve already got a couple of guys in mind for you.”

“I don’t think a guy is exactly what I need right now,” Amy said.

“Oh, not in the next ten minutes,” Liz agreed. “But after you’ve had a couple of weeks to recover, you’ll be ready to get back in the swing of things.”

“I don’t think so, Liz.”

“Sure you will. You’re not going to become a nun, for God’s sake. You need to get some of that old salami once in a while, kid. You need it the same way I need it. We’re two of a kind in that respect. Neither of us can do without a guy for long.”

“We’ll see,” Amy said.

“Only this time,” Liz said, “you’re going to do what I tell you. You’re going to get a prescription for the pill.”

“I really don’t think I’ll need it,” Amy said.

“That’s what you thought the last time, dope.”

A few minutes later, in her room, Amy knelt at the side of her bed and started to say her prayers. But after a minute or two she stopped because, for the first time in her life, she had the feeling that God wasn’t listening. She wondered if He would ever listen to her again.

In bed she cried herself to sleep, and no one woke her for dinner or for Mass the next morning. When she opened her eyes again, it was eleven o’clock Sunday morning, and scattered, white clouds were racing like great sailing ships across the sea-blue sky beyond her window. She had slept eighteen hours straight through.

As far as she could remember, this was only the second time she had missed Sunday Mass since she was a few months old. The other time had been when she was nine and in the hospital, recovering from an emergency appendectomy. She had been scheduled to be discharged on Monday, and her mother had argued with the doctor about letting her out one day early so she could be taken to church, but the doctor had said that church wasn’t the best place for a child recuperating from surgery.

She was relieved that Mama hadn’t forced her to go to church this morning. Apparently Mama didn’t think that her wicked daughter belonged in a church anymore.

And maybe Mama was right.

* * *

The following day,
Monday, May 26, two sign painters went to work on the large billboard at the entrance to the county fairgrounds, just outside the Royal City limits. By midafternoon they were finished.