Dolores Claiborne

  He was never a man to let certain kinds of opportunity pass him by, I told you, and this was just more of the same. He'd told Tommy Anderson one kind of story; the one he told his daughter was in a different pew but the same church. I don't think there was anything in his mind at first but spite; he knew how much I loved Selena, and he must have thought tellin her how mean and bad-tempered I was--maybe even how dangerous I was--would be a fine piece of revenge. He tried to turn her against me, and while he never really succeeded at that, he did manage to get closer to her than he'd been since she was a little girl. Why not? She was always tender-hearted, Selena was, and I never ran up against a man as good at the poor-me's as Joe was.

  He got inside her life, and once he was in there, he must have finally noticed just how pretty she was getting, and decided he wanted somethin more from her than just to have her listen when he talked or hand him the next tool when he was head-down in the engine compartment of some old junk truck. And all the time this was goin on and the changes were happenin, I was runnin around, workin about four different jobs, and tryin to stay far enough ahead of the bills to sock away a little each week for the kids' college educations. I never saw a thing until it was almost too late.

  She was a lively, chatty girl, my Selena, and she was always eager to please. When you wanted her to fetch somethin, she didn't walk; she went on the run. As she got older, she'd put supper on the table when I was workin out, and I never had to ask her. She burned some at first and Joe'd carp at her or make fun of her--he sent her cryin into her room more'n once--but he quit doin that around the time I'm tellin you about. Back then, in the spring and summer of 1962, he acted like every pie she made was pure ambrosia even if the crust was like cement, and he'd rave over her meatloaf like it was French cuisine. She was happy with his praise--accourse she was, anyone would have been--but she didn't get all puffed up with it. She wasn't that kind of girl. Tell you one thing, though: when Selena finally left home, she was a better cook on her worst day than I ever was on my best.

  When it came to helpin out around the house, a mother never had a better daughter ... especially a mother who had to spend most of her time cleanin up other people's messes. Selena never forgot to make sure Joe Junior and Little Pete had their school lunches when they went out the door in the mornin, and she covered their books for em at the start of every year. Joe Junior at least could have done that chore for himself, but she never gave him the chance.

  She was an honor roll student her freshman year, but she never lost interest in what was goin on around her at home, the way some smart kids do at that age. Most kids of thirteen or fourteen decide anyone over thirty's an old fogey, and they're apt to be out the door about two minutes after the fogies come through it. Not Selena, though. She'd get em coffee or help with the dishes or whatever, then sit down in the chair by the Franklin stove and listen to the grownups talk. Whether it was me with one or two of my friends or Joe with three or four of his, she'd listen. She would have stayed even when he and his friends played poker, if I'd let her. I wouldn't, though, because they talked so foul. That child nibbled conversation the way a mouse'll nibble a cheese-rind, and what she couldn't eat, she stored away.

  Then she changed. I don't know just when that change started, but I first saw it not too long after she'd started her sophomore year. Toward the end of September, I'm gonna say.

  The first thing I noticed was that she wasn't comin home on the early ferry like she had at the end of most school-days the year before, although that had worked out real well for her--she was able to get her homework finished in her room before the boys showed up, then do a little cleanin or start supper. Instead of the two o'clock, she was takin the one that leaves the mainland at four-forty-five.

  When I asked her about it, she said she'd just decided she liked doin her homework in the study-hall after school, that was all, and gave me a funny little sidelong look that said she didn't want to talk about it anymore. I thought I saw shame in that look, and maybe a lie, as well. Those things worried me, but I made up my mind I wasn't going to push on with it no further unless I found out for sure something was wrong. Talking to her was hard, you see. I'd felt the distance that had come between us, and I had a pretty good idear what it all traced back to: Joe half outta his chair, bleedin, and me standin over him with the hatchet. And for the first time I realized that he'd prob'ly been talkin to her about that, and other things. Puttin his own spin on em, so to speak.

  I thought if I chaffed Selena too hard on why she was stayin late at school, my trouble with her might get worse. Every way I thought of askin her more questions came out soundin like What have you been up to, Selena, and if it sounded that way to me, a thirty-five-year-old woman, how was it gonna sound to a girl not quite fifteen? It's so hard to talk to kids when they're that age; you have to walk around em on tiptoe, the way you would ajar of nitroglycerine sittin on the floor.

  Well, they have a thing called Parents Night not long after school lets in, and I took special pains to get to it. I didn't do as much pussyfootin around with Selena's home-room teacher as I had with Selena herself; I just stepped right up n asked her if she knew any particular reason why Selena was stayin for the late ferry this year. The home-room teacher said she didn't know, but she guessed it was just so Selena could get her homework done. Well, I thought but didn't say, she was gettin her homework done just fine at the little desk in her room last year, so what's changed? I might have said it if I thought that teacher had any answers for me, but it was pretty clear she didn't. Hell, she was probably scat-gone herself the minute the last bell of the day rung.

  None of the other teachers were any help, either. I listened to them praise Selena to the skies, which wa'ant hard work for me to do at all, and then I went back home again, feelin no further ahead than I'd been on my way over from the island.

  I got a window-seat inside the cabin of the ferry, and watched a boy n girl not much older'n Selena standin outside by the rail, holdin hands and watchin the moon rise over the ocean. He turned to her and said somethin that made her laugh up at him. You're a fool if you miss a chance like that, sonny-boy, I thought, but he didn't miss it--just leaned toward her, took her other hand, and kissed her as nice as you please. Gorry, ain't you foolish, I said to myself as I watched em. Either that or too old to remember what it's like to be fifteen, with every nerve in your body blastin off like a Roman candle all of the day and most of the night. Selena's met a boy, that's all. She's met a boy and they are probably doin their studies together in that room after school. Studyin each other more'n their books, most likely. I was some relieved, I can tell you.

  I thought about it over the next few days--one thing about warshin sheets and ironin shirts and vacuumin rugs, you always have lots of time to think--and the more I thought, the less relieved I was. She hadn't been talkin about any boy, for one thing, and it wasn't ever Selena's way to be quiet about what was goin on in her life. She wasn't as open and friendly with me as she'd been before, no, but it wasn't like there was a wall of silence between us, either. Besides, I'd always thought that if Selena fell in love, she'd probably take out an ad in the paper.

  The big thing--the scary thing--was the way her eyes looked to me. I've always noticed that when a girl's crazy about some boy, her eyes are apt to get so bright it's like someone turned on a flashlight behind there. When I looked for that light in Selena's eyes, it wasn't there... but that wasn't the bad part. The light that'd been there before had gone out of em, too--that was the bad part. Lookin into her eyes was like lookin at the windows of a house where the people have left without rememberin to pull down the shades.

  Seein that was what finally opened my eyes, and I began to notice all sorts of things I should have seen earlier--would have seen earlier, I think, if I hadn't been workin so hard, and if I hadn't been so convinced Selena was mad at me for hurtin her Dad that time.

  The first thing I saw was that it wasn't just me anymore--she d drawn away from Joe, too. She'd stopped
goin out to talk to him when he was workin on one of his old junks or somebody's outboard motor, and she'd quit sittin beside him on the couch at night to watch TV. If she stayed in the living room, she'd sit in the rocker way over by the stove with a piece of knittin in her lap. Most nights she didn't stay, though. She'd go in her room and shut the door. Joe didn't seem to mind, or even to notice. He just went back to his easy-chair, holdin Little Pete on his lap until it was time for Pete to go to bed.

  Her hair was another thing--she didn't warsh it every day like she used to. Sometimes it looked almost greasy enough to fry eggs in, and that wasn't like Selena. Her complexion was always so pretty --that nice peaches n cream skin she prob'ly got from Joe's side of the family tree--but that October pimples sprang up on her face like dandelions on the town common after Memorial Day. Her color was off, and her appetite, too.

  She still went to see her two best friends, Tanya Caron and Laurie Langill, once in awhile, but not anywhere near as much as she had in junior high. That made me realize neither Tanya nor Laurie had been over to our house since school let back in ... and maybe not durin the last month of the summer vacation, neither. That scared me, Andy, and it made me lean in for an even closer look at my good girl. What I saw scared me even more.

  The way she'd changed her clothes, for instance. Not just one sweater for another, or a skirt for a dress; she'd changed her whole style of dressin, and all the changes were bad. You couldn't see her shape anymore, for one thing. Instead of wearin skirts or dresses to school, she was mostly wearin A-line jumpers, and they was all too big for her. They made her look fat, and she wasn't.

  At home she'd wear big baggy sweaters that came halfway to her knees, and I never saw her out of her jeans and workboots. She'd put some ugly rag of a scarf around her head whenever she went out, somethin so big it'd overhang her brow and make her eyes look like two animals peerin out of a cave.

  She looked like a tomboy, but I thought she'd put paid to that when she said so-long to twelve. And one night, when I forgot to knock on her door before I went into her room, she just about broke her legs gettin her robe offa the closet door, and she was wearin a slip--it wasn't like she was bollicky bareass or nothin.

  But the worst thing was that she didn't talk much anymore. Not just to me; considerin the terms we were on, I coulda understood that. She pretty much quit talkin to everybody, though. She'd sit at the supper-table with her head down and the long bangs she'd grown hangin in her eyes, and when I tried to make conversation with her, ask her how her day had gone at school and things like that, all I'd get back was "Umkay" and "Guesso" instead of the blue streak she used to talk. Joe Junior tried, too, and run up against the same stone wall. Once or twice he looked at me, kinda puzzled. I just shrugged. And as soon as the meal was over and the dishes was warshed, out the door or up to her room she'd go.

  And, God help me, the first thing I thought of after I decided it wasn't a boy was marijuana... and don't you give me that look, Andy, like I don't know what I'm talkin about. It was called reefer or maryjane instead of pot in those days, but it was the same stuff and there was plenty of people from the island willin to move it around if the price of lobsters went down ... or even if it didn't. A lot of reefer came in through the coastal islands back then, just like it does now, and some of it stayed. There was no cocaine, which was a blessing, but if you wanted to smoke pot, you could always find some. Marky Benoit had been arrested by the Coast Guard just that summer--they found four bales of the stuff in the hold of the Maggie's Delight. Prob'ly that's what put the idear in my head, but even now, after all these years, I wonder how I ever managed to make somethin so complicated outta what was really so simple. There was the real problem, sittin right across the table from me every night, usually needin a bath and a shave, and there I was, lookin right back at him--Joe St. George, Little Tall Island's biggest jack of all trades and master of none--and wonderin if my good girl was maybe out behind the high-school woodshop in the afternoons, smokin joy-sticks. And I'm the one who likes to say her mother didn't raise no fools. Gorry!

  I started thinkin about goin into her room and lookin through her closet and bureau drawers, but then I got disgusted with myself. I may be a lot of things, Andy, but I hope I ain't never been a sneak. Still, even havin the idear made me see that I'd spent way too much time just creepin around the edges of whatever was goin on, hopin the problem would solve itself or that Selena would come to me on her own.

  There came a day--not long before Halloween, because Little Pete'd put up a paper witch in the entry window, I remember--when I was supposed to go down to the Strayhorn place after lunch. Me and Lisa McCandless were going to turn those fancy Persian rugs downstairs--you're supposed to do that every six months so they won't fade, or so they'll fade even, or some damned thing. I put my coat on and got it buttoned and was halfway to the door when I thought, What are you doin with this heavy fall coat on, you foolish thing? It's sixty-five degrees out there, at least, real Indian Summer weather. And this other voice come back and said, It won't be sixty-five out on the reach; it'll be more like fifty out there. Damp, too. And that's how I come to know I wasn't goin anywhere near the Strayhorn place that afternoon. I was gonna take the ferry across to Jonesport instead, and have it out with my daughter. I called Lisa, told her we'd have to do the rugs another day, and left for the ferry landin. I was just in time to catch the two-fifteen. If I'd missed it, I might've missed her, and who knows how different things might have turned out then?

  I was the first one off the ferry--they was still slippin the last moorin rope over the last post when I stepped down onto the dock--and I went straight to the high school. I got the idear on my way up that I wasn't going to find her in the study-hall no matter what she and her home-room teacher said, that she'd be out behind the woodshop after all, with the rest of the thuds ... all of em laughin and grab-assin around and maybe passin a bottle of cheap wine in a paper bag. If you ain't never been in a situation like that, you don't know what it's like and I can't describe it to you. All I can say is that I was findin out that there's no way you can prepare yourself for a broken heart. You just have to keep marchin forward and hope like hell it doesn't happen.

  But when I opened the study-hall door and peeked in, she was there, sittin at a desk by the windows with her head bent over her algebra book. She didn't see me at first n I just stood there, lookin at her. She hadn't fallen in with bad comp'ny like I'd feared, but my heart broke a little just the same, Andy, because it looked like she'd fallen in with no comp'ny at all, and could be that's even worse. Maybe her home-room teacher didn't see anything wrong with a girl studyin all by herself after school in that great big room; maybe she even thought it was admirable. I didn't see nothing admirable about it, though, nor anything healthy, either. She didn't even have the detention kids to keep her comp'ny, because they keep the bad actors in the lib'ry at Jonesport-Beals High.

  She should have been with her girlfriends, maybe listenin to records or moonin over some boy, and instead she was sittin there in a dusty ray of afternoon sun, sittin in the smell of chalk and floor-varnish and that nasty red sawdust they put down after all the kids have gone home, sittin with her head bent so close over her book that you'd've thought all the secrets of life n death was in there.

  "Hello, Selena," I says. She cringed like a rabbit and knocked half her books off her desk turnin around to see who'd told her hello. Her eyes were so big they looked like they filled the whole top half of her face, and what I could see of her cheeks and forehead was as pale as buttermilk in a white cup. Except for the places where the new pimples were, that is. They stood out a bright red, like burn-marks.

  Then she saw it was me. The terror went away, but no smile come in its place. It was like a shutter dropped over her face... or like she was inside a castle and had just pulled up the drawbridge. Yes, like that. Do you see what I'm tryin to say?

  "Mamma!" she says. "What are you doin here?"

  I thought of sayin, "I've com
e to take you home on the ferry and get some answers out of you, my little sweetheart," but somethin told me it would have been wrong in that room--that empty room where I could smell the thing that was wrong with her just as clear as I could smell the chalk and the red sawdust. I could smell it, and I meant to find out what it was. From the look of her, I'd waited far too long already. I didn't think it was dope anymore, but whatever it was, it was hungry. It was eatin her alive.

  I told her I'd decided to toss my afternoon's work out the door and come over and window-shop a little, but I couldn't find anything I liked. "So I thought maybe you and I could ride back on the ferry together," I said. "Do you mind, Selena?"

  She finally smiled. I would have paid a thousand dollars for that smile, I can tell you... a smile that was just for me. "Oh no, Mommy," she said. "It would be nice, having company."

  So we walked back down the hill to the ferry-landin together, and when I asked her about some of her classes, she told me more than she had in weeks. After that first look she gave me--tike a cornered rabbit lookin at a tomcat--she seemed more like her old self than she had in months, and I began to hope.

  Well, Nancy here may not know how empty that four-forty-five to Little Tall and the Outer Islands is, but I guess you n Frank do, Andy. Most of the workin folk who live off the mainland go home on the five-thirty, and what comes on the four-forty-five is mostly parcel post, UPS, shop-goods, and groceries bound for the market. So even though it was a lovely autumn afternoon, nowhere near as cold and damp as I'd thought it was gonna be, we had the aft deck mostly to ourselves.

  We stood there awhile, watchin the wake spread back toward the mainland. The sun was on the wester by then, beatin a track across the water, and the wake broke it up and made it look like pieces of gold. When I was a little girl, my Dad used to tell me it was gold, and that sometimes the mermaids came up and got it. He said they used those broken pieces of late-afternoon sunlight as shingles on their magic castles under the sea. When I saw that kind of broken golden track on the water, I always watched it for mermaids, and until I was almost Selena's age I never doubted there were such things, because my Dad had told me there were.