Please God don't let me drop it now. Don't let me dr--
A cramp knotted her left arm, making her jerk back against the headboard. Her face knotted as well, pinching inward until the lips were a white scar and the eyes were agonized slits.
Wait, it will pass ... it will pass ...
Yes, of course it would. She'd had enough muscle cramps in her life to know that, but in the meantime oh God it hurt. If she had been able to touch the biceps of her left arm with her right hand, she knew, the skin there would have felt as if it had been stretched over a number of small smooth stones and then sewn up again with cunning invisible thread. It didn't feel like a Charley horse; it felt like rigor-fucking-mortis.
No, just a Charley horse, Jessie. Like the one you had earlier. Wait it out, that's all. Wait it out and for Christ's sweet sake don't drop that glass of water.
She waited, and after an eternity or two, the muscles in her arm began to relax and the pain began to ease. Jessie breathed out a long harsh sigh of relief, then prepared to drink her reward. Drink, yes, Goody thought, but I think you owe yourself a little more than just a nice cool drink, my dear. Enjoy your reward... but enjoy it with dignity. No piggy gulping!
Goody, you never change, she thought, but when she raised the glass, she did so with the stately calm of a guest at a court dinner, ignoring the alkali dryness along the roof of her mouth and the bitter pulse of thirst in her throat. Because you could put Goody down all you wanted--she practically begged for it sometimes--but behaving with a little dignity under these circumstances (especially under these circumstances) wasn't such a bad idea. She had worked for the water; why not take the time to honor herself by enjoying it? That first cold sip sliding over her lips and coiling across the hot rug of her tongue was going to taste like victory ... and after the run of lousy luck she'd just been through, that would indeed be a taste to savor.
Jessie brought the glass toward her mouth, concentrating on the wet sweetness just ahead, the drenching downpour. Her tastebuds cramped with anticipation, her toes curled, and she could feel a furious pulse beating beneath the angle of her jaw. She realized her nipples had hardened, as they sometimes did when she was turned on. Secrets of female sexuality you never dreamed of, Gerald, she thought. Handcuff me to the bedposts and nothing happens. Show me a glass of water, though, and I turn into a raving nympho.
The thought made her smile and when the glass came to an abrupt halt still a foot away from her face, slopping water onto her bare thigh and making it ripple with gooseflesh, the smile stayed on at first. She felt nothing in those first few seconds but a species of stupid amazement and
(?huh?)
incomprehension. What was wrong? What could be wrong?
You know what, one of the UFO voices said. It spoke with a calm certainty Jessie found dreadful. Yes, she supposed she did know, somewhere inside, but she didn't want to let that knowledge step into the spotlight which was her conscious mind. Some truths were simply too harsh to be acknowledged. Too unfair.
Unfortunately, some truths were also self-evident. As Jessie gazed at the glass, her bloodshot, puffy eyes began to fill with horrified comprehension. The chain was the reason she wasn't getting her drink. The handcuff chain was just too fucking short. The fact had been so obvious that she had missed it completely.
Jessie suddenly found herself remembering the night George Bush had been elected President. She and Gerald had been invited to a posh celebration party in the Hotel Sonesta's rooftop restaurant. Senator William Cohen was the guest of honor, and the President-elect, Lonesome George himself, was expected to make a closed-circuit "television call" shortly before midnight. Gerald had hired a fog-colored limo for the occasion and it had pulled into their driveway at seven o'clock, dead on time, but at ten past the hour she had still been sitting on the bed in her best black dress, rummaging through her jewelry box and cursing as she hunted for a special pair of gold earrings. Gerald had poked his head impatiently into the room to see what was holding her up, listened with that "Why are you girls always so darned silly?" expression that she absolutely hated on his face, then said he wasn't sure, but he thought she was wearing the ones she was looking for. She had been. It had made her feel small and stupid, a perfect justification for his patronizing expression. It had also made her feel like flying at him and knocking out his beautifully capped teeth with one of the sexy but exquisitely uncomfortable high-heeled shoes she was wearing. What she had felt then was mild compared to what she was feeling now, however, and if anyone deserved getting their teeth knocked out, it was her.
She thrust her head as far forward as she could, pooching her lips out like the heroine of some corny old black-and-white romance movie. She got so close to the glass that she could see tiny sprays of air-bubbles caught in the last few slivers of ice, close enough to actually smell the minerals in the well-water (or to imagine she did), but she did not get quite close enough to drink from it. When she reached the point where she could simply stretch no farther, her puckered kiss-me lips were still a good four inches from the glass. It was almost enough, but almost, as Gerald (and her father as well, now that she thought about it) had been fond of saying, only counted in horseshoes.
"I don't believe it," she heard herself saying in her new hoarse Scotch-and-Marlboros voice. "I just don't believe it."
Anger suddenly woke inside her and screamed at her in Ruth Neary's voice to throw the glass across the room; if she could not drink from it, Ruth's voice proclaimed harshly, she would punish it; if she could not satisfy her thirst with what was in it, she could at least satisfy her mind with the sound of it shattering to a thousand bits against the wall.
Her grip on the glass tightened and the steel chain softened to a lax arc as she drew her hand back to do just that. Unfair! It was just so unfair!
The voice which stopped her was the soft, tentative voice of Goodwife Burlingame.
Maybe there's a way, Jessie. Don't give up yet--maybe there's still a way.
Ruth made no verbal reply to this, but there was no mistaking her sneer of disbelief; it was as heavy as iron and as bitter as a squirt of lemon-juice. Ruth still wanted her to throw the glass. Nora Callighan would undoubtedly have said that Ruth was heavily invested in the concept of payback.
Don't pay any attention to her, the Goodwife said. Her voice had lost its unusual tentative quality; it sounded almost excited now. Put it back on the shelf, Jessie.
And what then? Ruth asked. What then, O Great White Guru, O Goddess of Tupperware and Patron Saint of the Church of Shop-by-Mail?
Goody told her, and Ruth's voice fell silent as Jessie and all the other voices inside her listened.
10
She put the glass back on the shelf carefully, taking care to make sure she didn't leave it hanging over the edge. Her tongue now felt like a piece of #5 sandpaper and her throat actually seemed infected with thirst. It reminded her of the way she had felt in the autumn of her tenth year, when a combined case of the flu and bronchitis had kept her out of school for a month and a half. There had been long nights during that siege when she had awakened from confused, jangling nightmares she couldn't remember
(except you can Jessie you dreamed about the smoked glass; you dreamed about how the sun went out; you dreamed about the flat and tearful smell that was like minerals in well-water; you dreamed about his hands)
and she was drenched with sweat but felt too weak to reach for the pitcher of water on the bed-table. She remembered lying there, wet and sticky and fever-smelling on the outside, parched and full of phantoms on the inside; lying there and thinking that her real disease was not bronchitis but thirst. Now, all these years later, she felt exactly the same way.
Her mind kept trying to return to the horrible moment when she had realized she wasn't going to be able to bridge the last sliver of distance between the glass and her mouth. She kept seeing the tiny sprays of air-bubbles in the melting ice, kept smelling the faint aroma of minerals trapped in the aquifer far beneath the
lake. These images taunted her like an unreachable itch between the shoulder-blades.
Nevertheless, she made herself wait. The part of her that was Goody Burlingame said she needed to take some time in spite of the taunting images and her throbbing throat. She needed to wait for her heart to slow down, for her muscles to stop trembling, for her emotions to settle a bit.
Outside, the last color was fading from the air; the world was going a solemn and melancholy gray. On the lake, the loon lifted its piercing cry into the evening gloom.
"Shut your yap, Mr. Loon," Jessie said, and chuckled. It sounded like a rusty hinge.
All right, dear, the Goodwife said. I think it's time to try. Before it gets dark. Better dry your hands again first, though.
She cupped both hands around the bedposts this time, rubbing them up and down until they produced squeaks. She held up her right hand and wiggled it in front of her eyes. They laughed when I sat down at the piano, she thought. Then, carefully, she reached just beyond the place where the glass stood on the edge of the shelf. She began to patter her fingers along the wood again. The handcuff chinked against the side of the glass once and she froze, waiting for it to overturn. When it didn't, she resumed her cautious exploration.
She had almost decided that what she was looking for had slid down the shelf--or entirely off it--when she finally touched the corner of the blow-in card. She tweezed it between the first and second fingers of her right hand and brought it carefully up and away from the shelf and the glass. Jessie steadied her grip on the card with her thumb and looked at it curiously.
It was bright purple, with noisemakers dancing tipsily along the upper edge. Confetti and streamers drifted down between the words. Newsweek was celebrating BIG BIG SAVINGS, the card announced, and it wanted her to join the party. Newsweek's writers would keep her up to date on world events, take her behind the scenes with world leaders, and offer her in-depth coverage of arts, politics, and the sporting life. Although it did not come right out and say so, the card pretty much implied that Newsweek could help Jessie make sense of the entire cosmos. Best of all, those lovable lunatics in Newsweek's subscription department were offering a deal so amazing it could make your urine steam and your head explode: if she used THIS VERY CARD to subscribe to Newsweek for three years, she would get each issue AT LESS THAN HALF THE NEWSSTAND PRICE! And was money a problem? Absolutely not! She would be billed later.
I wonder if they have Direct Bed Service for handcuffed ladies, Jessie thought. Maybe with George Will or Jane Bryant Quinn or one of those other pompous old poops to turn the pages for me--handcuffs make doing that so dreadfully difficult, you know.
Yet below the sarcasm, she felt a species of odd nervous wonder, and she couldn't seem to stop studying the purple card with its let's-have-a-party motif, its blanks for her name and address, and its little squares marked DiCl, MC, Visa, and AMEX. I've been cursing these cards all my life--especially when I have to bend over and pick one of the damned things up or see myself as just another litterbug--without ever guessing that my sanity, maybe even my life, might depend on one someday.
Her life? Was that really possible? Did she actually have to admit such a horrid idea into her calculations after all? Jessie was reluctantly coming to believe that she did. She might be here for quite awhile before someone discovered her, and yes, she supposed it was just barely possible that the difference between life and death could come down to a single drink of water. The idea was surreal but it no longer seemed patently ridiculous.
Same thing as before, dear--slow and easy wins the race.
Yes ... but who would ever have believed the finish-line would turn out to be situated in such weird countryside?
She did move slowly and carefully, however, and was relieved to discover that manipulating the blow-in card one-handed was not as difficult as she had feared it might be. This was partly because it was about six inches by four--almost the size of two playing cards laid side by side--but mostly because she wasn't trying to do anything very tricky with it.
She held the card lengthwise between her first and second fingers, then used her thumb to bend the last half-inch of the long side all the way down. The fold wasn't even, but she thought it would serve. Besides, nobody was going to come along and judge her work; Brownie Crafts Hour on Thursday nights at the First Methodist Church of Falmouth was long behind her now.
She pinched the purple card firmly between her first two fingers again and folded over another half-inch. It took her almost three minutes and seven fold-overs to get to the end of the card. When she finally did, she had something that looked like a bomber joint clumsily rolled in jaunty purple paper.
Or, if you stretched your imagination a little, a straw.
Jessie stuck it in her mouth, trying to hold the crooked folds together with her teeth. When she had it as firmly as she thought she was going to get it, she began feeling around for the glass again.
Stay careful, Jessie. Don't spoil it all with impatience now!
Thanks for the advice. Also for the idea. It was great--I really mean that. Now, however, I'd like you to shut up long enough for me to take my shot. Okay?
When her fingertips touched the smooth surface of the glass, she slid them around it with the gentleness and caution of a young lover slipping her hand into her boyfriend's fly for the first time.
Gripping the glass in its new position was a relatively simple matter. She brought it around and lifted it as far as the chain would allow. The last slivers of ice had melted, she saw; tempus had gone fugiting merrily along despite her feeling that it had stopped dead in its tracks around the time the dog had put in its first appearance. But she wouldn't think about the dog. In fact, she was going to work hard at believing that no dog had ever been here.
You're good at unhappening things, aren't you, tootsie-wootsie?
Hey, Ruth--I'm trying to keep a grip on myself as well as on the damned glass, in case you didn't notice. If playing a few mind-games helps me do that, I don't see what the big deal is. Just shut up for awhile, okay? Give it a rest and let me get on with my business.
Ruth apparently had no intention of giving it a rest, however. Shut up! she marvelled. Boy, how that takes me back--it's better than a Beach Boys oldie on the radio. You always did give good shut up, Jessie--remember that night in the dorm after we came back from your first and last consciousness-raising session at Neuworth?
I don't want to remember, Ruth.
I'm sure you don't, so I'll remember for both of us, how's that for a deal? You kept saying it was the girl with the scars on her breasts that had upset you, only her and nothing more, and when I tried to tell you what you'd said in the kitchen--about how you and your father had been alone at your place on Dark Score Lake when the sun went out in 1963, and how he'd done something to you--you told me to shut up. When I wouldn't, you tried to slap me. When I still wouldn't, you grabbed your coat, ran out, and spent the night somewhere else--probably in Susie Timmel's little fleabag cabin down by the river, the one we used to call Susie's Lez Hotel. By the end of the week, you'd found some girls who had an apartment downtown and needed another roomie. Boom, as fast as that ... but then, you always moved fast when you'd made up your mind, Jess, I'll give you that. And like I said, you always gave good shut up.
Shu--
There! What'd I tell you?
Leave me alone!
I'm pretty familiar with that one, too. You know what hurt me the most, Jessie? It wasn't the trust thing--I knew even then that it was nothing personal, that you felt you couldn't trust anyone with the story of what happened that day, including yourself. What hurt was knowing how close you came to spilling it all, there in the kitchen of the Neuworth Parsonage. We were sitting with our backs against the door and our arms around each other and you started to talk. You said, "I could never tell, it would have killed my Mom, and even if it didn't, she would have left him and I loved him. We all loved him, we all needed him, they would have blamed me, and he didn't do anythi
ng, not really." I asked you who didn't do anything and it came out of you so fast it was like you'd spent the last nine years waiting for someone to pop the question. "My father," you said. "We were at Dark Score Lake on the day the sun went out. " You would have told me the rest--I know you would--but that was when that dumb bitch came in and asked, "Is she all right?" As if you looked all right, you know what I mean? Jesus, sometimes I can't believe how dumb people can be. They ought to make it a law that you have to get a license, or at least a learner's permit, before you're allowed to talk. Until you pass your Talker's Test, you should have to be a mute. It would solve a lot of problems. But that's not the way things are, and as soon as Hart Hall's answer to Florence Nightingale came in, you closed up like a clam. There was nothing I could do to make you open up again, although God knows I tried.
You should have just left me alone! Jessie returned. The glass of water was starting to shake in her hand, and the makeshift purple straw was trembling between her lips. You should have stopped meddling! It didn't concern you!
Sometimes friends can't help their concern, Jessie, the voice inside said, and it was so full of kindness that Jessie was silenced. I looked it up, you know. I figured out what you must have been talking about and I looked it up. I didn't remember anything at all about an eclipse back in the early sixties, but of course I was in Florida at the time, and a lot more interested in snorkeling and the Delray lifeguard--I had the most incredible crush on him--than I was in astronomical phenomena. I guess I wanted to make sure the whole thing wasn't some kind of crazy fantasy or something--maybe brought on by that girl with the horrible burns on her bazooms. It was no fantasy. There was a total solar eclipse in Maine, and your summer house on Dark Score Lake would have been right in the path of totality. July of 1963. Just a girl and her Dad, watching the eclipse. You wouldn't tell me what good old Dad did to you, but I knew two things, Jessie: that he was your father, which was bad, and that you were ten-going-on-eleven, on the childhood rim of puberty ... and that was worse.