Slop jar, outhouse toilet, metal washtub, broke-down scratchy couch for a month? Bride started to cry, and they let her while Rain and Evelyn went on preparing a meal.
Later, after the family finished eating, Bride tried to overcome her embarrassment and accepted a basin of cold water to rinse her face and armpits. Then she roused herself enough to smile and take the plate Evelyn held before her. Quail, as it turned out, not chicken, with thick mushroom gravy. Following the meal, Bride felt more than embarrassed; she was ashamed—crying every minute, petulant, childish and unwilling to help herself or accept aid gracefully from others. Here she was among people living the barest life, putting themselves out for her without hesitation, asking nothing in return. Yet, as was often the case, her gratitude and embarrassment were short-lived. They were treating her like a stray cat or a dog with a broken leg that they felt sorry for. Sullen and picking at her fingernails, she asked Evelyn whether she had a nail file or any nail polish. Evelyn grinned and held up her own hands without speaking. Point taken—Evelyn’s hands were less for holding the stem of a wineglass and more for chopping kindling and wringing the necks of chickens. Who are these people, wondered Bride, and where did they come from? They hadn’t asked her where she was from or where she was going. They simply tended her, fed her, arranged for her car to be towed for repair. It was too hard, too strange for her to understand the kind of care they offered—free, without judgment or even a passing interest in who she was or where she was going. She wondered on occasion if they were planning something. Something bad. But the days passed with boredom unbroken. Steve and Evelyn occasionally spent time after supper sitting outside singing songs by the Beatles or Simon and Garfunkel—Steve strumming his guitar, Evelyn joining him in tuneless soprano. Their laughter tinkling between wrong lines and missed notes.
In the following weeks of more visits to the clinic, leg exercises and waiting for the Jaguar to be repaired, Bride learned that her hosts were in their fifties. Steve had graduated from Reed College, Evelyn from Ohio State. With constant bursts of laughter they described how they met. First in India (Bride saw the light of pleasant memories shining in the looks they exchanged), then London, again in Berlin. Finally in Mexico they agreed to stop meeting that way (Steve touched Evelyn’s cheek with his knuckle) so they got married in Tijuana and “moved to California to live a real life.”
Bride’s envy watching them was infantile but she couldn’t stop herself. “By ‘real’ you mean poor?” She smiled to hide the sneer.
“What does ‘poor’ mean? No television?” Steve raised his eyebrows.
“It means no money,” said Bride.
“Same thing,” he answered. “No money, no television.”
“Means no washing machine, no fridge, no bathroom, no money!”
“Money get you out of that Jaguar? Money save your ass?”
Bride blinked but was smart enough to say nothing. What did she know anyway about good for its own sake, or love without things?
She stayed with them for six difficult weeks, waiting until she could walk and her car was repaired. Apparently the single automobile-repair place had to send away for hinges or a completely new door for the Jaguar. Sleeping in a house of such deep darkness at night felt to Bride like being in a coffin. Outside the sky would be loaded with more stars than she had ever seen before. But in here under a filthy skylight and no electricity she had a problem sleeping.
Finally Dr. Muskie returned to remove her cast and give her a removable foot brace so she could limp about. She glimpsed the disgusting skin that had been hidden underneath the cast and shivered. Even more than having the cast removed, the best thing was Evelyn, true to her word, pouring pail after pail of hot water into a zinc tub. Then she handed Bride a sponge, a towel and a bar of hard-to-lather brown soap. After weeks of bird-washing Bride sank into the water with gratitude, prolonging the soaping until the water had cooled completely. It was when she stood to dry herself that she discovered that her chest was flat. Completely flat, with only the nipples to prove it was not her back. Her shock was so great she plopped back down into the dirty water, holding the towel over her chest like a shield.
I must be sick, dying, she thought. She plastered the wet towel above the place where her breasts had once upon a time announced themselves and risen to the lips of moaning lovers. Fighting panic she called out to Evelyn.
“Please, do you have something I can wear?”
“Sure,” said Evelyn, and after a few minutes brought Bride a T-shirt and a pair of her own jeans. She said nothing about Bride’s chest or the wet towel. She simply left her to get dressed in private. When Bride called her back saying the jeans were too large to stay on her hips, Evelyn exchanged them for a pair of Rain’s, which fit Bride perfectly. When did I get so small? she wondered.
She meant to lie down just for a minute, to quiet the terror, collect her thoughts and figure out what was happening to her shrinking body, but without any drowsiness or warning she fell asleep. There out of that dark void sprang a vivid, fully felt dream. Booker’s hand was moving between her thighs, and when her arms flew up and closed over his back he extracted his fingers, and slid between her legs what they called the pride and wealth of nations. She started to whisper or moan but his lips were pressing hers. She wrapped her legs around his rocking hips as though to slow them or help them or keep them there. Bride woke up moist and humming. Yet when she touched the place where her breasts used to be the humming changed to sobs. That’s when she understood that the body changes began not simply after he left, but because he left.
Stay still, she thought; her brain was wobbly but she would straighten it, go about as if everything was normal. No one must know and no one must see. Her conversation and activity must be routine, like an after-bath washing of hair. Limping to the kitchen sink she poured water from the standing pitcher into a bowl, soaped then rinsed her hair. As she looked around for a dry towel Evelyn came in.
“Ooh, Bride,” she said, smiling. “You got too much hair for a dish towel. Come on, let’s sit outside and we can dry it in sunlight and fresh air.”
“Okay, sure,” said Bride. Acting normal was important, she thought. It might even restore the body changes—or halt them. She followed Evelyn to a rusty iron bench sitting in the yard bathed in bright platinum light. Next to it was a side table where a tin of marijuana and a bottle of unlabeled liquor sat. Toweling Bride’s hair, Evelyn chatted away in typical beauty-parlor mode. How happy living here under stars with a perfect man made her, how much she had learned traveling, housekeeping without modern amenities, which she called trash-ready junk since none of it lasted, and how Rain had improved their lives.
When Bride asked her when and where Rain came from, Evelyn sat down and poured some of the liquor into a cup.
“It took a while to get the whole story,” she said. Bride listened intently. Anything. Anything to stop thinking first about how her body was changing and second how to make sure no one noticed. When Evelyn handed her the T-shirt as she stepped out of the tub, Evelyn didn’t notice or say a word. Bride had spectacular breasts when rescued from the Jaguar; she had them in Whiskey Clinic. Now they were gone, like a botched mastectomy that left nipples intact. Nothing hurt; her organs worked as usual except for a strangely delayed menstrual period. So what kind of illness was she suffering? One that was both visible and invisible. Him, she thought. His curse.
“Want some?” Evelyn pointed to the tin box.
“Yeah, okay.” She watched Evelyn’s expertise and took the result with gratitude. She coughed with the first toke, but none thereafter.
They were silently smoking for a while until Bride said, “Tell me what you meant by finding her in the rain.”
“We did. Steve and I were driving home from some protest, I forget what, and saw this little girl, sopping wet on a brick doorstep. We had an old Volkswagen back then and he slowed down, then put on the brakes. Both of us thought she was lost or her door key was. He parked, got out and
went to see what was the matter. First he asked her name.”
“What did she say?”
“Nothing. Not a word. Drenched as she was, she turned her head away when Steve squatted down in front of her, but wow! when he touched her on her shoulder she jumped up and ran splashing off in wet tennis shoes. So he just got back in the car so we could continue our drive home. But then rain started really coming down—so hard we had trouble seeing through the windshield. So we called it quits and parked near a diner. Bruno’s, it was called. Anyway, rather than wait in the car we went inside, more for shelter than for the coffee we ordered.”
“So you lost her?”
“Then, yes.” Evelyn, having exhausted the joint, replenished her cup and sipped from it.
“Did she come back?”
“No, but when the rain let up and we left the diner, I spotted her hunched up next to a Dumpster in the alley behind the building.”
“Jesus,” said Bride, shuddering as though it were she herself in that alley.
“It was Steve who decided not to leave her there. I wasn’t so sure it was any of our business but he just went over and grabbed her, threw her over his shoulder. She was screaming, ‘Kidnap! Kidnap!’ but not too loud. I don’t think she wanted attention, especially from pigs, I mean cops. We pushed her into the backseat, got in and locked the doors.”
“Did she quiet down?”
“Oh no. She kept hollering ‘Let me out,’ and kicking the back of our seats. I tried to talk to her in a soft voice so she wouldn’t be frightened of us. I said, ‘You’re soaking wet, honey.’ She said, ‘It’s raining, bitch.’ I asked her if her mother knew she was sitting outside in the rain and she said, ‘Yeah, so?’ I didn’t know what to do with that answer. Then she started cursing—nastier words in a little kid’s mouth you couldn’t imagine.”
“Really?”
“Steve and I looked at each other and without talking we decided what to do—get her dry, cleaned and fed, then try to find out where she belonged.”
“You said she was about six when you found her?” asked Bride.
“I guess. I don’t really know. She never said and I doubt she knows. Her baby teeth were gone when we took her. And so far she has never had a period and her chest is flat as a skateboard.”
Bride shot up. Just the mention of a flat chest yanked her back to her problem. Had her ankle not prohibited it, she would have run, rocketed away from the scary suspicion that she was changing back into a little black girl.
One night and a day later Bride had calmed down a little. Since no one had noticed or commented on the changes in her body, how flat the T-shirt hung on her chest, the unpierced earlobes. Only she knew about unshaved but absent armpit and pubic hair. So all of this might be a hallucination, like the vivid dreams she was having when she managed to fall asleep. Or were they? Twice at night she woke to find Rain standing over her or squatting nearby—not threatening, just looking. But when she spoke to the girl, she seemed to disappear.
Helpless, idle. It became clear to Bride why boredom was so fought against. Without distraction or physical activity, the mind shuffled pointless, scattered recollections around and around. Focused worry would have been an improvement over disconnected, rags of thought. Minus the limited coherence of a dream, her mind moved from the condition of her fingernails to the time she walked into a lamppost, from judging a celebrity’s gown to the state of her own teeth. She was stuck in a place so primitive it didn’t even have a radio while watching a couple going about their daily chores—gardening, cleaning, cooking, weaving, mowing grass, chopping wood, canning. There was no one to talk to, at least not about anything she was interested in. Her determined refusal to think about Booker invariably collapsed. What if she couldn’t find him? What if he’s not with Mr. or Ms. Olive? Nothing would be right if the hunt she was on failed. And if it succeeded what would she do or say? Except for Sylvia, Inc., and Brooklyn, she felt she had been scorned and rejected by everybody all her life. Booker was the one person she was able to confront—which was the same as confronting herself, standing up for herself. Wasn’t she worth something? Anything?
She missed Brooklyn whom she thought of as her only true friend: loyal, funny, generous. Who else would drive miles to find her after that bloody horror at a cheap motel then take such good care of her? It wasn’t fair, she thought, to leave her in the dark as to where she was. Of course she couldn’t tell her friend the reason for her flight. Brooklyn would have tried to dissuade her, or worse, taunt and laugh at her. Persuade her how ill-advised and reckless the idea was. Nevertheless, the right thing to do was to contact her.
Since she couldn’t call, Bride decided to drop her a note. When asked, Evelyn said she didn’t have any stationery but she offered Bride a sheet of the tablet paper used to teach Rain to write. Evelyn promised she would get Steve to mail it.
Bride was expert at company memos but not personal letters. What should she say?
I’m okay, so far…?
Sorry to leave without telling…?
I have to do this on my own because…?
When she put down the pencil she examined her fingernails.
Usually the sound of Evelyn’s weaving at the loom soothed her, but this day the click, knock, click, knock of the shuttle and pedal was extremely irritating. Whatever road her thoughts traveled, the possibility of shame waited at the end. Suppose Booker wasn’t living in a town called Whiskey. And if he was, what then? What if he was with another woman? What did she have to say to him anyhow, besides “I hate you for what you did” or “Please come back to me”? Maybe she could find a way to hurt him, really hurt him. Muddled as her thoughts were, they coalesced around one necessity—an unrelenting need to confront him, regardless of the outcome. Annoyed and irritated by the “what-ifs” and the sound of Evelyn’s loom, she decided to hobble outside. She opened the door and called, “Rain, Rain.”
The girl was lying in the grass watching a trail of ants going about their civilized business.
“What?” Rain looked up.
“Want to go for a walk?”
“What for?” By the tone of her voice it was clear the ants were far more interesting than Bride’s company.
“I don’t know,” said Bride.
That answer seemed to please. She jumped up smiling and brushing her shorts. “Okay, if you wanna.”
The quiet between them was easy at first as each appeared to be deep in her own thoughts. Bride limping, Rain skipping or dawdling along the verge of bushes and grass. Half a mile down the road Rain’s husky voice broke the silence.
“They stole me.”
“Who? You mean Steve and Evelyn?” Bride stopped and watched Rain scratch the back of her calf. “They said they found you, sitting in the rain.”
“Yep.”
“So why did you say ‘stole’?”
“Because I didn’t ask them to take me and they didn’t ask if I wanted to go.”
“Then why did you?”
“I was wet, freezing too. Evelyn gave me a blanket and a box of raisins to eat.”
“Are you sorry they took you?” I guess not, thought Bride—otherwise you would have run away.
“Oh, no. Never. This is the best place. Besides there’s no place else to go.” Rain yawned and rubbed her nose.
“You mean you don’t have a home?”
“I used to but my mother lives there.”
“So you ran away.”
“No I didn’t. She threw me out. Said ‘Get the fuck out.’ So I did.”
“Why? Why would she do that?” Why would anybody do that to a child? Bride wondered. Even Sweetness, who for years couldn’t bear to look at or touch her, never threw her out.
“Because I bit him.”
“Bit who?”
“Some guy. A regular. One of the ones she let do it to me. Oh, look. Blueberries!” Rain was searching through roadside bushes.
“Wait a minute,” Bride said. “Do what to you?”
“H
e stuck his pee thing in my mouth and I bit it. So she apologized to him, gave back his twenty-dollar bill and made me stand outside.” The berries were bitter, not the wild sweet stuff she expected. “She wouldn’t let me back in. I kept pounding on the door. She opened it once to throw me my sweater.” Rain spit the last bit of blueberry into the dirt.
As Bride imagined the scene her stomach fluttered. How could anybody do that to a child, any child, and one’s own? “If you saw your mother again what would you say to her?”
Rain grinned. “Nothing. I’d chop her head off.”
“Oh, Rain. You don’t mean that.”
“Yes I do. I used to think about it a lot. How it would look—her eyes, her mouth, the blood shooting out of her neck. Made me feel good just thinking about it.”
A smooth ridge of rock jutted parallel to the road. Bride took Rain’s hand and led her gently to the stone. They both sat down. Neither saw the doe and her fawn standing among the trees on the other side of the road. The doe watching the pair of humans was as still as the tree she stood next to. The fawn nestled her flank.
“Tell me,” said Bride. “Tell me.”
At the sound of Bride’s voice, mother and child fled.
“Come on, Rain.” Bride put her hand on Rain’s knee. “Tell me.”
And she did, her emerald eyes sometimes sparkling wide other times narrowed to dark olive slits as she described the savvy, the perfect memory, the courage needed for street life. You had to find out where the public toilets were, she said; how to avoid children’s services, police, how to escape drunks, dope heads. But knowing where sleep was safe was the most important thing. It took time and she had to learn what kinds of people would give you money and what for, and remember the back doors of which food pantries or restaurants had kind and generous servers. The biggest problem was finding food and storing it for later. She deliberately made no friends of any kind—young or old, stable or wandering nuts. Anybody could turn you in or hurt you. Corner hookers were the nicest and the ones who warned her about dangers in their trade—guys who didn’t pay, cops who did before arresting them, men who hurt them for fun. Rain said she didn’t need reminding because once when some really old guy hurt her so bad she bled, her mother slapped him and screamed, “Get out!” then she douched her with a yellow powder. Men scared her, Rain confessed, and made her feel sick. She had been waiting on some steps at the Salvation Army truck stop when it began to rain. A lady on the truck might give her a coat or shoes this time like other times when she had slipped her food. That’s when Evelyn and Steve came along, and when he touched her she thought of the men who came to her mother’s house, so she had to run off, miss the food lady and hide.