She bit harder than she meant to then, and the hand jerked suddenly away. Still sleeping, Steve opened his eyes and looked straight at her, confused, unseeing, caught within his dreams. “What is it?” he said, putting his hand on her heart, his warm fingers like a fan against her skin. “What’s happening?” Then his panic eased; he rolled over and drew himself to the far side of the bed, leaving Claire with a smooth expanse of sheet on either side. Above, the ceiling fan whirred and clicked. Yes, Claire thought, listening to Steve breathe, and listening beyond to what might have been palm leaves rustling, or the faint scratching of rats in the walls. Tomorrow he would run his thumb across the dull ache in this finger. He would look at her, uncertain. Let him wonder, Claire thought. In the morning, let him wonder. This was another story she would not tell.
The Story of My Life
YOU’D KNOW ME IF YOU SAW ME. MAYBE NOT RIGHT AWAY. But you’d stop, lots of people do. I bet you’d look back twice at me, and wonder. I’d be an image lingering in your thoughts for days to come, nagging, like a forgotten name on the edge of your mind, like an unwelcome memory twisting up through dreams. Then you’d catch a glimpse of me on television, or gazing at you from a poster as you hurried down the sidewalk, and you’d remember. I’d come into your mind like a vision then, a bright and terrifying light.
Some people see it in an instant. They call out to me and stop me on the street. I have felt their hands, their vivid glances, the demanding pressure of their embraces. They have kissed my fingertips, have fallen to their knees and wept, have clustered around me, drawing the attention of a crowd. Once a girl even grabbed my arm in the parking lot at school. I still remember the darkness in her eyes, the panic clinging to her skin like mist, the way she begged me to give her a blessing, to relieve her of her great sin, as if I had a direct line right to God.
“Hey no,” I told her, shrugging her away. “You’ve got that wrong. You’re thinking of my mother.”
YOU’VE SEEN MY MOTHER too, guaranteed. See her now, the star of the evening news, standing with several hundred other people in a parking lot in Buffalo. It is hot for May, the first fierce blast of summer, and heat waves rise around these people, making them shimmer on the screen. But that, of course, is pure illusion. The truth is, these people never waver, they never miss a step. Theirs is a holy path, a righteous vision, and if they must stand for twelve hours a day in the blinding heat, thirty days in a row, then they will do it like a penance, they will not think twice. This Buffalo clinic is at the edge of the university, and the protestors with their graphic signs draw increasing crowds. For days we have watched the news clips: ceaseless praying, bottles of red paint splattering brick walls, scared young women being escorted through the hostile crowd by clinic workers in bright vests. Mounting tension, yes, the sharp edges of impending violence, but still it has been a minor protest, something witnessed by motorists on their way to work, then forgotten until the evening news.
It is nothing compared to what will happen now that my mother has arrived.
See her. She is young still, long-boned and slender, with blond hair that swings at the level of her chin. She favors pastels, crisp cottons, skirts that brush against the calf, shirtwaist dresses and sweater sets. On the evening news the cameras pick her out, her pale yellow dress only a few shades darker than her hair, the white collar setting off her tan face, her sapphire eyes. Unlike the others with their signs, their chanting anger, my mother is serene. It is clear right away that while she is with this crowd, she is not of it. Her five assistants, surrounding her tightly like petals on a stamen, guide her slowly to the steps. The banners rustle in the hot wind, fluttering above the famous posters.
See me, then, my sweet smile, my innocence. It is a black-and-white shot, a close-up, taken three years ago when I was just fourteen. My mother strides before these posters, passing in front of one of me after another, and when she pauses alone at the center of the steps, when she turns her face to the cheering crowd and smiles, you can see it. The resemblance was striking even then, and now it is uncanny. In the past three years my cheekbones have become more pronounced, my eyes seem wider. We could, and sometimes do, pass for sisters. My mother waves her hand and starts to speak.
“Fellow sinners,” she says, and the crowd roars.
“TURN IT OFF, why don’t you?” Sam says. We are sitting together on the sofa, drinking Coca-Cola and eating animal crackers. We’ve lined the elephants up, trunk to tail, across the coffee table. Sam’s eyes are the same deep blue as my mother’s, and the dark curls on his head are repeated, again and again, down his wide chest. When I don’t answer he turns and presses his hand against my cheek, then kisses me, hard, until I have to pull away from him.
We look at each other for a long moment. When Sam finally speaks, his voice is deliberately grave and pompous, twisting the scriptures to his own advantage.
“Nichola,” he says, drawing a finger slowly down my arm. “Your body is such a mystery to me.” There is longing in his voice, yes, but his eyes are teasing, testing. He knows I know these verses, the ones my mother always uses to begin. My body is no mystery to Thee, for Thou didst knit me together in my mother’s womb. He must also know that it seems near sacrilege to me, what he says, the way he says it. And truly I am flushed with his audacity, the breathless danger of his words. I am thrilled with it. Sam watches my face, smiles, runs his hand down my bare arm.
“You know what comes later,” I remind him, hearing my mother’s voice rising in the background. “Deliver me from evil men. Remember?”
He laughs and leans forward to kiss me again, his hand groping for the remote control. I get to it first and sit up straight, keeping a distance between us. I am saving myself, I am trying to, though Sam Rush insists there is no need because one day we will marry.
Not now,” I tell him, inching up the volume. “She’s just about to tell the story of my life. It’s the best part.”
Sam catches my wrist and pulls the remote control from my fingers. The TV snaps off and my mother disappears to where she really is, 257 miles away.
“You’re wrong,” he says, sliding his hands across my shoulders, pressing his lips against my collarbone.
“What do you mean?”
“That’s not the story of your life,” he whispers. I feel his breath on my skin, insistent, pressing the words. “This is.”
MY MOTHER WORRIES, or ought to. After all, I have her looks, her blond beauty, her narrow hips. I have her inclinations. But my mother has a high and shining faith. This is what she tells me every time she leaves the house. She holds my face in her two hands and says, You’ll be good, Nichola, I know that. I have the strongest faith in you, I know you are not a wild girl like I was.
Well, it is true in a way, I am not a wild girl like she was. Sam Rush is the only boyfriend I have ever had. And for a long time I was even good like she means. Those were the days when she used to take me with her, traveling around the country from one demonstration to another, standing in the rain or snow or blazing heat. There are snapshots of my mother and me from those days. In many of them I am just a toddler perched on her hip, while she squints into the camera, gripping half a banner in her free hand. She wore pantsuits, all creaseless polyester, with wide cuffs at the wrists and ankles. She had maxi-skirts and shiny boots and her hair was long then, falling down her back like the thin silk of corn. For years she was just a part-time protestor, like anybody else. But then she got religion, and got famous, all in a single afternoon.
I was five years old that day. I remember it, the heat and the crowd, my mother’s pale blue dress, and the way she held me tightly when the preacher started speaking. “Amen,” my mother said. “Amen, oh yes, AMEN.” I remember the expression on her face, the way her eyes closed shut and her lips parted. I remember how we moved so suddenly toward the steps where the preacher stood with his microphone, leading everyone in prayer. Another moment and we were up there with him. My mother put me down and turned to the crowd. When she
took the microphone from the startled preacher and began to speak, something happened. She called my name and touched my hair, and then she said, I am a sinner, I have come here today to tell you about my sin. People sighed, then, they drew in closer. Their faces filled with rapture.
I know my memory on these points is pure, not a story that was told to me, or one that I saw much later on a film. We have a copy of the newsreel now, down in the archives, and it is still a shock each time I watch it and see how many things I missed. I felt so safe, standing up there with my mother, but I was too young to really understand. I didn’t see the anger on the preacher’s face as my mother wooed his congregation. I don’t remember how the crowd changed beneath her voice and followed her, forming a circle before the clinic doors and lying down. I did not even notice when the police arrived and began hauling them away. But on the film, it happens. My mother and the preacher pray while the circle around them is steadily eroded. I see myself, as the circle shrinks, lifted up and handed blindly into the crowd, to a woman with a patchwork skirt who smelled very clean, like lemons. And then, I see on film the most important thing I missed that day. I see the way my mother rose to power. She stands right by the preacher, praying hard, until just he and she are left. That handsome preacher glances at my mother, this interloper, this surprise. It’s clear he’s thinking that she will be taken first. He expects her to be humble, to concede the stage to him. My mother sees his look and her voice lifts. She closes her eyes and takes a step back. Just a small step, but it’s enough. The police reach the preacher first. He stops praying, startled, when they touch his arm, and suddenly it is just my mother speaking, her eyes open now, sustaining the crowd with the power of her voice alone.
People rise up sometimes, start their lives anew. That day it happened to my mother. She burned pure and rose high above the others, like ash borne lightly on a flame. When they came for her she did not cease her prayers. When they touched her she went limp and heavy in their arms. Her dress swept the ground and her sweet voice lifted, and on the news that night she seemed almost angelic. They carried her away still praying, and the crowd parted like a sea to let her pass.
People rise up, but they fall down too. That preacher, for instance, fell so far that he disappeared completely. Others are famous one month, gone the next. They hesitate when boldness is required, they grow vain and self-important and go too far. Sometimes, they sin. In those days before she rose herself, my mother watched them, and she learned. She is smart, careful, and courageous, and her story gives her power when she steps before a crowd. Still, she says, it is a brutal business we are in. There are always those who would like to see her slip. She trusts no one, except for me.
Which is why, when I hear raised voices in her office one afternoon, I pause in the hallway to listen as they talk.
“No, it’s too much,” Gary Peterson, her chief assistant says. He is a young man with a thin mustache and a great ambition, a man who is a constant worry to my mother. “If we go that far we’ll alienate half the country.”
I glimpse my mother, standing behind the desk with her arms folded, frowning. “You saw what happened in Florida,” she insists. “A clinic closed, and not a soul arrested.”
A cleared throat then, a low and unfamiliar voice I can’t quite hear. I know what they are talking about, however. I watched it with my mother on TV. In Florida they piped butyric acid through holes in the clinic walls. Soon everyone spilled out, doctors and nurses, secretaries and patients, vomiting and choking, the building ruined with that smell of sewer gas and rancid meat. My mother watched this happen, amazed and also envious. “That’s bold,” she said, turning off the TV and pacing across the office. “That’s innovative. We’re losing ground, I’m afraid, with the same old approach. We have to do something stunning before we fade away entirely.”
And so I wonder, standing there, what idea she has asked them to consider now.
“It’s too risky,” another voice insists.
“Is it?” she asks. “When we consider the children who would be rescued?”
“Or lost,” Gary Peterson interjects. “If we fail.”
They go on. I lean against the wall, listening to their voices, and press my hand against my lips. It smells of Sam, a clean salty smell of skin, the old vinyl of his car. In another week or so my mother goes to Kansas City, and Sam has put it to me clearly: He wants to come and stay with me while she’s away. He’s going crazy, that’s what he says, he can’t wait any longer. He says it’s now or never. I told him I would think about it, let him know.
“Anyway,” I hear Gary Peterson say. “Your plan involves Nichola, who isn’t exactly reliable these days.”
The men laugh and I go still, feeling myself flush bright with anger. They are talking about a year ago in Albany, about the day Gary Peterson made children block the clinic driveway. “Go on,” he said to me, though I was sixteen, older than the others. He put his arm around me. Gary Peterson, tall and strong and slender, with his green eyes and steady smile. I felt his hand on my shoulder. “Go on, Nichola, please, these little boys and girls need someone like you to be a leader.” The pavement was hot and dusty, scattered with trash, and the cars barely slowed when they swept in from the street. I was scared. But Gary Peterson was so handsome, so good, and he leaned over and whispered in my ear. “Go on, Nichola,” he said. “Be a leader.” And he kissed me on the cheek.
I was drawn in then. I remember thinking that my mother was a leader, and I would be one too. Plus I could feel his lips on my skin long after he had stepped away. I looked to where my mother was speaking on the steps. The protest was going very badly, just a few stragglers with signs, and I knew she needed help. And so I did it. I spread myself out on the asphalt in a line with all the others. The sun beat down. Some of the little ones started crying, so I led them in a song. We sang “Onward Christian Soldiers.” It was the only song I could remember all the words to. Everyone got excited, and someone called in the TV crews. I could see them arriving from the corner of my eyes, circling us with their black cameras. That film is in the archives now, thirty of us lying there, singing. All those sweet small voices.
The camera crew was well established by the time the first doctor got back from lunch. She cruised into the driveway, determined to speed past the growing group of protestors, and almost ran over the smallest child, who was lying at the end of the row. Her car squealed to a stop near that girl’s left arm. She got out of her car, livid and trembling, and went right up to my mother, grabbed her arm. I stopped singing so I could listen. That doctor was so angry.
“What in the name of heaven,” she said, “do you think you are doing? If you believe in life, as you claim, then you do not put innocent lives at risk. You do not!”
My mother was calm, in a white dress, angelic. “Close your doors,” she said. “Repent. The Lord will forgive even you, a murderess.”
“And if I had hit that child?” the doctor demanded. She was a small woman, delicate, with smooth gray hair to her shoulders, and yet she shook my mother’s arm with a power born of fury. “If my brakes had failed? Who would have been a murderess then?”
Lying there on the hot asphalt, I saw her point. The others were too little to understand, but I was sixteen, and suddenly I saw the danger very clearly. Other cars were pulling up, and there we were, a pavement of soft flesh. Their tires could flatten us in a second. Gary Peterson was hovering near the cameras, talking to the reporters. More crews had come, and the crowd was growing, and I could see that he was very pleased. If one of us were hit, I thought, we would make the national, maybe the international news. I was suddenly very frightened. I waited for my mother to recognize this, to understand the danger, but she was intent on making her point in front of the doctor and a dozen TV cameras.
“Repent,” my mother yelled. “Repent and save the children!”
As she spoke another car drove up, too fast and unsuspecting, and bumped the back of the first. The doctor’s car jerked forward
a foot, so that the last little girl was lying with her arm against the doctor’s tire, the bumper hanging over her face. She was crying hard, but without making a sound, she was so scared. That was when I stood up. “Hey, Nichola.” Gary Peterson was shouting, and then he was standing next to me, grabbing my arm. “Get back down,” he hissed at me, still smiling. “No one’s going to get hurt.” But already I could feel him fixing bruises on my arm. “No,” I said, “I won’t.” And when he tried to force me, I screamed. That’s all it took—the cameras were on us. He let me go, he had to, and stood there while I helped those children up, one by one, brushed them off, and led them out of danger. We made the national news that night after all. My mother was upset for days, but Gary Peterson, who made the front page of several papers, was quite pleased.
It’s because I am so angry that I step into the doorway.
“Nichola!” my mother says. She must see from my face that I have overheard the conversation. She nods at me seriously and asks me to come in. “There you are, honey. Come say hello to Mr. Amherst and Mr. Strand and of course to Gary. They are here to discuss the upcoming work in Kansas City.” She glances at them then, and smiles, suddenly calm, almost flirtatious, all the tension gone from her face. “We’re having a little disagreement,” she adds.
They smile at this small joke, and look soberly at me. We get all kinds of people here, from the real religious freaks to the bored rich ladies from the suburbs, and I can tell which is which by the way they react whenever I show up. The religious people, they get all emotional. They say, So that’s your little girl, your baby that was saved, oh she is sweet. Some of the ladies even weep to see me, the living embodiment of all their strivings and beliefs. These men, though, are not moved. In fact, they seem uncomfortable, as if I remind them of something they’d rather not know. My mother calls me her secret weapon when dealing with such people. Against these men, with their college degrees, their congregations, their ways of doing things, I am my mother’s strength. Because there is no one who can argue when they see me, the walking, talking evidence of my mother’s great sacrifice for life.