them

  His car smelled of leather and metal. It smelled of some cologne she’d dabbed on herself, her mother’s stuff in a pale blue bottle. Her hands lay limp on her knees, a schoolgirl’s hands with long fingers and knobby knuckles and a few ink stains. Her hands were very cold. She tested her feet and discovered that they too were very cold. But it was not winter any longer—no lopsided dirty mounds of snow remained—it was well into spring, people walked out on the street in their shirt sleeves, without coats, and yet it seemed to her very cold. She stared out. She could not think which street this was. Gates were lifting slowly in front of them—they had been waiting for a train to pass. Maureen stared at the lifting gates and felt terror.

  “Hey, what’s wrong? You sick or something?”

  “No.”

  He took hold of her hand, concerned. He switched off the car radio, which Maureen hadn’t heard until he switched it off. She began shaking her head, no, it was always no regardless of what he asked her, she lied automatically and without spirit. Then, reversing herself and lying again, she said, “I have a little headache. It’s nothing.” He squeezed her hand. He pressed it against her thigh. She looked down at his big hand, at the hairs on it, and wondered why women gave themselves to men when it only came to this: a hand or another part of the body.

  At her high school girls ran around with boys their own age, wild kids. They did anything and they got no money in return. She could not understand them; their excited talk in the washroom was as incomprehensible to her as another language. The girls were always saying, “Oh, I love him so, I’m crazy about him”—and Maureen, curious, vaguely repulsed, could hear through their words a ragged tenderness that was mysterious. They were like creatures of another element, these girls, wild and pretty, with their hair teased high on their heads and their lips bright red, their stockings, their shoes, their clothes bought tight to show the trim bulk of their bodies. They wore identification bracelets that left dull green marks on their wrists. They wore boys’ rings on chains around their necks, chains that left faint green marks. Sisterly in their passion, their need to fall into the maniacal grasp of some boy and give up everything to him, they gathered in nervous, delighted groups and talked. Sometimes they talked in whispers, as if in church. The regulation jumpers of the school could not contain their excited breathing. Their hands flurried in identical gestures, showing helplessness, a stricken delight, a crazy, extravagant falling. It was incomprehensible.

  Maureen stared at this man’s hand, his fingers entwined with hers. She did not understand why human beings willingly entwined their bodies together, what need had to be so greedily and violently satisfied, why there was such a rush at the last moment to come together, to get it done…His skin was coarse. Yet there was something tender and vulnerable about it. Beneath the surface of the skin were three large blue veins, looking swollen, and four bones that led out from his knuckles, raising the surface of his skin. Maureen stared down at his hand. She felt that she was going insane….

  He was a man, a stranger, looking up at her over a copy of a magazine. His eyes continued on her the way they had run along the line of print, pointing her out, assessing her.

  She was walking home from school and a car passed her. The car slowed. She did not slow her walk or quicken it but continued along the sidewalk. A prickly feeling began on the side of her face. What danger?

  Her mother and another woman chattering: about the Negro man who sold Bibles and got into women’s homes and slashed at their breasts with a knife. He wore a trench coat and dark glasses and was well groomed. He attacked both white and Negro women. He himself had light skin. He was attractive. He wore a trench coat. He was on foot. He could turn up at anyone’s door, selling Bibles. Behind his dark glasses there were probably ordinary eyes, though no one had seen them. He carried a paring knife.

  They were driving near the expressway construction. The expressway was cutting its way north through the city. Everywhere there were mud and giant orange girders. Some were erected over the expressway, some lay in the mud. Men worked in the mud. There were several steam shovels and trucks and many men. Maureen saw a man who looked like Furlong, standing by the side of the street, staring out, smoking.

  She was scrubbing at the kitchen floor, the linoleum. You could never get those black and white squares clean. The soap had a harsh, pleasant smell. The floor dried unevenly; some parts shone, others dried and looked dirty right away. The white blocks of linoleum were yellowish.

  A friend of Loretta’s, talking in the kitchen with her: “His father is dying of cancer, so I said we’d like the car when he dies, and the old bitch got mad. Who else deserves the car more than us, with Bob working all the way out to Ford’s?”

  Some hillbillies were standing on the sidewalk waiting to cross the street. Maureen could tell them by their pale, strained, sleepy, suspicious faces; they were lean and yet clumsy. A man of about thirty stared toward her. His face was pale, as if finely powdered, a soft, rodent-like face. She wondered if he was someone’s brother….

  The motel was made of concrete blocks painted beige. A neon sign with large looping letters stuck out toward the street. Because of an overpass nearby the motel looked sunken, and a large puddle had formed in front of its driveway. Two cars were parked at one end of the court, license plates from New York and Ontario, Canada. There were beige drapes of a synthetic material, fireproof, in the room. Maureen drew them. The bedspread was tan with strips of red and black. It looked familiar. The man was unbuttoning his shirt, looking down. Maureen shook her head to get her vision clear: she was thinking about the girls at school, huddled in the restroom, smoking forbidden cigarettes and talking with joy of forbidden things…she was thinking about the Negro Bible salesman who carried a paring knife.

  The man came to her and embraced her. She put her arms around him. She was deathly afraid but could not remember why.

  They were driving back home, along the expressway. Overpasses were half constructed; the expressway itself ended, suddenly. Great chunks of the city had been taken out, houses and earth. Trees lay toppled over where they had fallen, still. Their roots were a cluster of thin threads and clods of mud. Maureen realized slowly where she had gotten the idea of an earthquake from. Beyond the houses that still remained standing, beyond the trees that had not yet been plowed over, the sky had turned a late afternoon pink, stained by smoke from downriver. Maureen’s eyes took this all in and tried to appreciate it; it was precarious enough, any kind of beauty.

  The man said, “I wish they’d get this damn expressway finished!”

  “Sometimes we could keep on going maybe,” Maureen said. Her voice was weak and shrill. “For a ride, a long ride.”

  He glanced at her. “Sure. A good idea.”

  “I’d like to go for a long ride sometime, maybe over to the bridge and into Canada, and along in there—I’ve never been to Canada.”

  “Sure, we’ll do that sometime.”

  He let her out a block from home and she hurried home. She was carrying her schoolbooks. Her body had become numb. Halfway there she saw a girl in jeans jump out of a doorway; it was her sister.

  “Hey, Reeny,” Betty said, “what the hell gives? The old guy is mad as hell. He’s waiting for you up there. You’d better not go up.”

  Maureen stared at her. She hugged her schoolbooks against her chest.

  “What’s it all about?” Betty asked, frank and curious. “Ma says to tell you to come where she is, at Ginny’s. I’m going to spend the night there too. You better not go home first, he’s mad as hell. He’s drunk.”

  Maureen went on by.

  “Reeny, why is he mad at you? Is he just drunk? He was knocking some stuff around in our room, the bastard, and he found some money in a book of yours. Where’d you get all that money, Reeny?”

  “Never mind.”

  Maureen was hurrying toward the corner where they lived. She wondered if Furlong was looking out th
e window, waiting for her.

  “Did you steal it, Reeny? Where’d you get it all from? Them big bills?”

  “Never mind. Shut up.”

  Maureen got away from her and went up the stairs to the apartment. She walked slowly. She heard nothing.

  Betty shouted up at her, “You’re crazy! Come back down! He’s madder than hell—you want your teeth kicked out? Says he’s gonna turn you over to the cops, on account of that money…”

  As Maureen pushed the door to the apartment it swung open.

  He was coming toward her. She could see a mess behind him—the sofa wrenched sideways away from the wall, a cushion on the floor, the coffee table knocked over. He was wearing the same jacket he’d worn a few hours before, out on the street. It was still zipped up tight. He came toward her and seized her by the neck and dragged her into the room. He was shouting something she couldn’t catch. She heard the words but they were so close to her, battering her, that she could not make them out. With his free hand he began striking her. He held her up so that she couldn’t fall and struck her, again and again, while she tried to get away, to fall backward, away from his hand. She screamed. He began to strike her body. He let go of her and she fell. She put her arms up over her head and screamed against the floor, the linoleum floor, while he bent over to pound her flat on the back with his fists.

  II

  TO WHOSE COUNTRY HAVE I COME?

  The air thickens suddenly. She shuts her eyes. A haze sweeps upon her, a horn sounds close by. MAUREEN,WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING! Someone takes her arm. Good. To be held safe, good. Her arm is held tight, impatiently, and she feels her body emptying out, her head emptying out…her body turns into a delicate, fleshly shell and is very thin. A man’s voice is saying something near her ear. The tinkle of coins. Traffic, horns. The smell of exhaust smoke. She is already on the bus, with her mother still gripping her, when she turns and sees her self step out of her body, with a sudden convulsive movement, freeing itself, escaping. This self is her. It steps down to the sidewalk again, pushing past other people who want to get on the bus. It glances back up at her. Everything rushes out of Maureen now and joins that other body, that free body, running away…it is like the terrible pressure of water wanting to burst free. How she yearns to join that body, get loose, scream with the pain and terror of getting loose…

  SIT HERE, SIT STILL. FOR CHRIST’S SAKE, says her mother.

  She sits. She turns wildly to look through the window, to where her other self stands on the sidewalk. Crowds pass. People, strangers, seem to break around her, not touching her. They pass around her. They become invisible while she herself, that other self, becomes vivid and dazzling, standing on the sidewalk with her head turned back at a painful angle, looking at Maureen on the bus, her face guilty and wild.

  1

  Jules was sitting in the kitchen of the small cluttered apartment, staring into his coffee cup. On the table beside him was a potted plant with large dyed pink flowers.

  “Don’t worry, she’s going to be all right,” Loretta was saying. “She’s getting a lot of rest, she’s feeling low and broken-down, but who the hell doesn’t? A woman grows up to take all the shit she can from men, then she breaks down, that’s the way it is but kid I am not going to break down. He can rot in jail.”

  “Four months isn’t any rotting in jail.”

  “Four months! Four lousy shitty months!”

  Jules acknowledged this with a twist of his mouth. He was eighteen now and carried himself up into this apartment like a man carrying something breakable, with a look of regret and apprehension. He loved his mother. He loved his sister. He hated fearing them and their contamination, thinking it showed up a weakness in himself, and so he sat stiff at the kitchen table, aware of his mother’s angry, heavy breathing and the ticking of the eternal clock on the refrigerator. He longed to jump up and break into a routine of horseplay. Most of the time he was kidding around. Why not imitate Furlong’s apish smile, that forlorn try of his at being a good man? Why not dance around the table the way he did with other people, showing off, a bright young kid who never took himself seriously? People said to him, “Jules, you’re crazy!” as they rocked with laughter, or they said, “Jules, you ought to be on television!” But now he could not imagine why anyone thought him amusing. He sat in his mother’s latest little apartment, on edge with the prospect of seeing what was in the next room, clothed in being a son, a brother, someone dragged to the bottom of the river by chains of blood and love….

  “You think it isn’t too bad then?” Jules said, stirring. “I was talking to Betty the other day—”

  “The hell with her. What she knows goes on the head of a pin. I’m about ready to wash my hands of that little brat, let me tell you.”

  “Ma, you feel all right yourself, don’t you?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  Since Maureen’s beating back in April, and Furlong’s arrest, and the various stages of the divorce, Loretta had changed: she had a haggard look all the time. Sometimes, Jules thought, she looked almost intelligent, as if this suffering had taught her something. He leaned forward against the table and rested his chin in his hands. Energetic elsewhere, almost feverish with energy, he felt tired and old in his mother’s presence. He felt that he was gradually aging while she remained the same age; he wanted this to come about, simply so that he could guide her life. They’d been together so long, Jules and his mother, he’d known her consciously before she had even noticed him, he was shrewder than she, he could see around corners and Loretta of course could barely see in front of her. This morning her face had a subdued, cautious look to it, and her thin eyebrows, above her sharp eyes, gave her a delicate look. Jules could see a ghostly image of Maureen’s face in her. Maureen would grow up into this face.

  “Well, can I talk to her?”

  “She’s probably asleep.”

  “Last time I came she was asleep. Does she sleep all the time?”

  “No, not all the time,” Loretta said impatiently. She picked her baby up from a kind of crib in which it had been lying. Its face and arms were reddened, as if with a rash. Jules looked at his half-brother without much interest, wondering why he had no interest. “She watches television. I talk to her, we get along, it’s just when that brat Betty makes trouble that things get bad. Look, Jules, I had a talk about Reeny with a doctor down at the clinic, and he says she’ll snap out of it.”

  “When was that?”

  “The end of April.”

  “Well, it’s June now—is she any better?”

  “She’s lots better.”

  “Why won’t she come out of that room?”

  “She’s resting. She’s getting back her strength. She eats everything I make for her, so she’s all right. She’s got a real good appetite, Jules, and a nurse told me that was a good sign.”

  “Which nurse where?” Jules said impatiently.

  “Oh, a real nice woman I met on the bus, a registered nurse. We got to talking, and I told her a little about Maureen—”

  “Jesus, a nurse on the bus!”

  “What’s wrong with a nurse on the bus? What do you want? You want me to get your sister dumped in some nuthouse somewhere, you want me to forget her? What the hell do you know about it? My father wasn’t crazy until they got hold of him, then after that he went to pieces, he was always sitting around in dirty underwear and he stank and they were all like that, up there. Besides, do you know that women get pregnant in those places—yes, they do—there are only a few nurses and what-d’ya-call-it, attendants, and a couple of doctors, and at night all kinds of crazy things happen. It’s a dump, that place, all those places!” Loretta said, drawing anger out of herself as if to justify everything to Jules. “All kinds of things go on! Dirty things! Things you wouldn’t believe! All he did was beat her up, kid, but in that dump she’d get a lot worse and she’d never get back to normal again. I know. The things a woman h
as to take from men can drive her crazy, and Maureen needs to stay away from them until she can figure them out.”

  “But Betty told me—”

  “The hell with her! She’s like you, running around! She spends half her time with so-called friends and one of them is a nigger girl seventeen years old!”

  “Ma, don’t interrupt me, please,” Jules said. He tried to smile. There was always some weakness in his mother for a smile, for a touch of courtesy. “What Betty said was that there was a lot of money in her room, Maureen’s money. That’s what she said, she told me.”

  “That wasn’t Maureen’s money, it was his money.”

  “Betty said it was Maureen’s. She kept it in a book.”

  “No, it was his money he was hiding from me. He hid it, the bastard, and got drunk and tried to say that Maureen had stole it from somewhere—he said that both of them, Maureen and Betty, had stole it—that’s exactly what he said—”

  “Betty’s story is different.”

  “She’s lying! She’s a goddam brat on her way to jail, and when they come around with her I’m going to tell them to lock her up and throw away the key! Her and her goddam nigger friend and her ugly face! No, he tried to say it was Maureen’s money that she stole, but it was his own money that he got from some place and was hiding from me.”

  “Then it isn’t true what Betty says that…that Maureen was out on the street?”

  “Jesus! Of course that isn’t true,” Loretta said.

  Jules looked over toward the closed door that led to Maureen’s room. He could hear his mother breathing quickly. He said after a moment, “Well, I didn’t believe it exactly but…”

  “But what?”

  “But Betty said, and also another kid….”