“My poor Tildie.”
“Do you want to know something? I feel safe now, Mama. He won’t hit me anymore and I never have to worry about him leaving me. He can’t leave me, can he?” Something caught in my throat. “Oh, and he’ll never hold me again, either. In the circle of his arms.”
I broke then, and it was Mama who held me, stroking my forehead, soothing me. I was all right then, and I stood up straight and told her she had better call the police.
“Livia’ll be up any minute now,” she said. “I think she’s awake, I think I heard her fussing a minute ago. Change her and bring her down and feed her her breakfast.”
“And then?”
“And then put her in for her nap.”
After I put Livia back in her crib for her nap Mama told me that we weren’t going to call the police. “Now that you’re back where you belong,” she said, “I’m not about to see them take you away. Your baby needs her mama and I need you, too.”
“But Dan—”
“Bring the big wheelbarrow around to the kitchen door. Between the two of us we can get him down the stairs. We’ll dig his grave in the back, we’ll bury him here on our land. People won’t suspect anything. They’ll just think he went off, the way men do.”
“The way my daddy did,” I said.
Somehow we got him down the stairs and out through the kitchen. The hardest part was getting him into the old wheelbarrow. I checked Livia and made sure she was sleeping soundly, and then we took turns with the barrow, wheeling it out beyond the kitchen garden.
“What I keep thinking,” I said, “is at least I broke the pattern.”
She didn’t say anything, and what she didn’t say became one of her famous silences, sucking up all the sound around us. The barrow’s wheel squeaked, the birds sang in the trees, but now I couldn’t hear any of that.
Suddenly she said, “Patterns.” Then she didn’t say anything more, and I tried to hear the squeak of the wheel.
Then she said, “He never would have left you. If he left he’d only come back again. And he never would have quit hitting you. And each time would be a little worse than the last.”
“It’s not always like it is on Oprah, Mama.”
“There’s things you don’t know,” she said.
“Like what?”
The squeaking of the wheel, the song of birds. She said, “You know how I lost the hearing in the one ear?”
“You had an infection.”
“That’s what I always told you. It’s not true. Your daddy cupped his hands and boxed my ears. He deafened me on the one side. I was lucky, nothing happened to the other ear. I still hear as good as ever out of it.”
“I don’t believe it,” I said.
“It’s the truth, Tildie.”
“Daddy never hit you.”
“Your daddy hit me all the time,” she said. “All the time. He used his hands, he used his feet. He used his belt.”
I felt a tightening in my throat. “I don’t remember,” I said.
“You didn’t know. You were little. What do you think Livia knows? What do you think she’ll remember?”
We walked on a ways. I said, “I just remember the two of you hollering. I thought you hollered and finally he left. That’s what I always thought.”
“That’s what I let you think. It’s what I wanted you to think. I had a broken jaw, I had broken ribs, I had to keep telling the doctor I was clumsy, I kept falling down. He believed me, too. I guess he had lots of women told him the same thing.” We switched, and I took over the wheelbarrow. She said, “Dan would have done the same to you, if you hadn’t done what you did.”
“He wanted to stop.”
“They can’t stop, Tildie. No, not that way. To your left.”
“Aren’t we going to bury him alongside Grandma Yount?”
“No,” she said. “That’s too near the house. We’ll dig his grave across the stream, where the walnut grove is.”
“It’s beautiful there.”
“You always liked it.”
“So did Dan,” I said. I felt so funny, so light-headed. My world was turned upside down and yet it felt safe, it felt solid. I thought how Dan had itched to cut down those walnut trees. Now he’d lie forever at their feet, and I could come back here whenever I wanted to feel close to him.
“But he’ll be lonely here,” I said. “Won’t he? Mama, won’t he?”
The walnut trees lose their leaves early in the fall, and they put on less of a color show than the other hardwoods. But I like to come to the grove even when the trees are bare. Sometimes I bring Livia. More often I come by myself.
I always liked it here. I love our whole 220 acres, every square foot of it, but this is my favorite place, among these trees. I like it even better than the graveyard over by the pear and apple orchard. Where the graves have stones, and where the women and children of our family are buried.
Some Days You Get the Bear
Beside him, the girl issued a soft grunt of contentment and burrowed closer under the covers. Her name was Karin, with the accent on the second syllable, and she worked for a manufacturer of floor coverings, doing something unfathomable with a computer. They’d had three dates, each consisting of dinner and a screening. On their first two dates he’d left her at her door and gone home to write his review of the film they’d just seen. Tonight she’d invited him in.
And here he was, happily exhausted at her side, breathing her smell, warmed by her body heat. Perhaps this will work, he thought, and closed his eyes, and felt himself drifting.
Only to snap abruptly awake not ten minutes later. He lay still at first, listening to her measured breathing, and then he slipped slowly out of the bed, careful not to awaken her.
She lived in one room, an L-shaped studio in a high rise on West Eighty-ninth Street. He gathered his clothes and dressed in darkness, tiptoed across the uncarpeted parquet floor.
There were five locks on her door. He unfastened them all, and when he tried the door it wouldn’t open. Evidently she’d left one or more of them unlocked; thus, meddling with all five, he’d locked some even as he was unlocking the others. When this sort of dilemma was presented as a logic problem, to be attacked with pencil and paper, he knew better than to attempt its solution. Now, when he had to work upon real locks in darkness and in silence, with a sleeping woman not ten yards away, the whole thing was ridiculous.
“Paul?”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“Where are you going? I was planning to offer you breakfast in the morning. Among other things.”
“I’ve got work to do first thing in the morning,” he told her. “I’d really better get on home. But these locks—”
“I know,” she said. “It’s a Roach Motel I’m running here. You get in, but you can’t get out.” And, grinning, she slipped past him, turned this lock and that one, and let him out.
He hailed a taxi on Broadway, rode downtown to the Village. His apartment was a full floor of a brownstone on Bank Street. He had moved into it when he first came to New York and had never left it. It had been his before he was married and remained his after the divorce. “This is the one thing I’ll miss,” Phyllis had said.
“What about the screenings?”
“To tell you the truth,” she said, “I’ve pretty much lost my taste for movies.”
He occasionally wondered if that would ever happen to him. He contributed a column of film reviews to two monthly magazines; because the publications were mutually noncompetitive, he was able to use his own name on both columns. The columns themselves differed considerably in tone and content. For one magazine he tended to write longer and more thoughtful reviews, and leaned toward films with intellectual content and artistic pretension. His reviews for the other magazine tended to be briefer, chattier, and centered more upon the question of whether a film would be fun to see than if seeing it would make you a more worthwhile human being. In neither column, however, did he ever find himself writing something he did not believe to be the truth.