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“I did what you wanted. I kept my mouth shut. I smiled. I was the window-dressing. But Laura was going too far. He should have left Laura out of it.”
“All of that was just spite, spite, spite! You owed us everything, and you couldn’t stand it. You had to get back at him! You killed him dead between the two of you, just as if you’d put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.”
“Who killed Laura, then?”
“Laura killed herself, as you know perfectly well.”
“I could say the same of Richard.”
“That is a slanderous lie. Anyway, Laura was crazy as a coot. I don’t know how you could ever have believed a word she said, about Richard or anything else. Nobody in their right mind would have!”
I couldn’t say another word, and so I hung up on her. But I was powerless against her, because by then she had a hostage. She had Aimee.
In 1936, however, she was still affable enough, and I was still her protegee. She continued to haul me around from function to function—Junior League meetings, political bun-fests, committees for this and that—and to park me on chairs and in corners, while she did the necessary socializing. I could see now that she was for the most part not liked, but merely tolerated, because of her money, and her boundless energy: most of the women in those circles were content to let Winifred do the lion’s share of whatever work might be involved.
Every now and then, one of them would sidle up to me and remark that she had known my grandmother—or, if younger, that she wished she’d known her, back in those golden days before the Great War, when true elegance had still been possible. This was a password: it meant that Winifred was an arriviste —new money, brash and vulgar—and that I should be standing up for some other set of values. I would smile vaguely, and say that my grandmother had died long before I was born. In other words, they couldn’t expect any kind of opposition to Winifred from me.
And how is your clever husband? they would say. When may we expect the big a
Oh, I would smile, I expect I’ll be the first to know. I did not believe this: I expected to be the last.
Our life—Richard’s and mine—had settled into what I then supposed would be its pattern forever. Or rather there were two lives, a daytime one and a nighttime one: they were distinct, and also invariable. Placidity and order and everything in its place, with a decorous and sanctioned violence going on underneath everything, like a heavy, brutal shoe tapping out the rhythm on a carpeted floor. Every morning I would take a shower, to get rid of the night; to wash off the stuff Richard wore on his hair—some kind of expensive perfumed grease. It rubbed off all over my skin.
Did it bother him that I was indifferent to his nighttime activities, even repelled by them? Not at all. He preferred conquest to cooperation, in every area of life.
Sometimes—increasingly, as time went by—there were bruises, purple, then blue, then yellow. It was remarkable how easily I bruised, said Richard, smiling. A mere touch would do it. He had never known a woman to bruise so easily. It came from being so young and delicate.
He favoured thighs, where it wouldn’t show. Anything overt might get in the way of his ambitions.
I sometimes felt as if these marks on my body were a kind of code, which blossomed, then faded, like invisible ink held to a candle. But if they were a code, who held the key to it?
I was sand, I was snow—written on, rewritten, smoothed over.
The ashtray
I’ve been to see the doctor again. Myra drove me there: in view of the black ice caused by a thaw followed by a freeze, it was too slippery for me to walk, she said.
The doctor tapped my ribs and eavesdropped on my heart, and frowned and then cancelled his frown, and then—having already made up his mind about it—asked me how I was feeling. I believe he has done something to his hair; surely he used to be thi
Nonetheless he was offensively jocular. At least he doesn’t say, How are we today? He never calls me we, the way some of them do: he does understand the importance of the first person singular.
“I can’t sleep,” I told him. “I dream too much.”
“Then if you’re dreaming, you must be sleeping,” he said, intending a witticism.
“You know what I mean,” I said sharply. “It’s not the same. The dreams wake me up.”
“You’ve been drinking coffee?”
“No,” I lied.
“Must be a bad conscience.” He was writing out a prescription, no doubt for sugar pills. He chuckled to himself: he thought he’d been quite fu
Myra sat reading out-of-date magazines in the waiting room while I was in the i
I told her I could hardly be said to suffer from stress, as there was no stress in a vacuum. As for raw cabbage, it bloated me up like a dead cow, so I would skip the beneficial effects. I said I had no wish to go through life, or what remained of it, stinking like a barrel of sauerkraut and sounding like a truck horn.
Crude references to bodily functions usually put a stop to Myra. She drove the rest of the way home in silence, with a smile hardening on her face like plaster of Paris.
Sometimes I am ashamed of myself.
To the task at hand. At hand is appropriate: sometimes it seems to me that it’s only my hand writing, not the rest of me; that my hand has taken on a life of its own, and will keep on going even if severed from the rest of me, like some embalmed, enchanted Egyptian fetish or the dried rabbit claws men used to suspend from their car mirrors for luck. Despite the arthritis in my fingers, this hand of mine has been displaying an unusual amount of friskiness lately, as if tossing restraint to the dogs. Certainly it’s been writing down a number of things it wouldn’t be allowed to if subject to my better judgment.
Turn the pages, turn the pages. Where was I? April 1936.
In April we got a call from the headmistress of St. Cecilia’s, where Laura was attending school. It concerned Laura’s behaviour, she said. It was not a matter that could best be discussed over the telephone.
Richard was tied up with business affairs. He proposed Winifred as my escort, but I said I was sure it was nothing; I myself would handle things, and would let him know if there was anything of importance. I made an appointment to see the headmistress, whose name I have forgotten. I dressed in a ma