“Gwen,” she said to herself, “you worry too much.”
That had to be true. If she were really a nut she would be able to scrap all the memories and be fashionably neurotic with the rest of the world. If anything, she was too sane. She couldn’t even drink enough to forget what she was doing. When she got too high she invariably suffered the agonies of the damned and felt suicidal over some drunken, relatively innocent escapade. Not that she was a wild one. Not Gwen Ferrier. But she was a talker when she was drinking and she said things like, “Ruthie, there is a certain responsibility involved in having pets.” Ruthie, a neighbor, had a nice, friendly beagle which was left outside in the coldest weather and which, in the fall, was always laden with huge, hulking, gray, sick, puky ticks. And Ruthie wouldn’t be insulted, she’d just laugh, but next morning Gwen would remember and feel exposed, for she kept herself, mostly, giving of her inner thoughts only to George.
So if you remember things like that and let them fester inside you and make you feel as if you should run over to Ruthie’s and apologize, how do you forget Mama?
“You don’t try to forget her,” George said. “You try to understand her. Gwen, she was a young woman. She had a bad break.”
“But my father loved her so,” Gwen would say. “I remember how he’d kiss her and tell her she was pretty.”
“She was pretty,” George said. “And sexy.”
Yes, she was that.
After her father died they lived in an apartment in the nice section of Winston-Salem, if Winston-Salem can be said to have a nice section. It was a small apartment with one bedroom, a sitting room, and a kitchen with a dining alcove. Gwen’s bed was a pull-out couch in the sitting room, next to the bedroom door and sometimes they forgot even to close the door. And it was always a different man and, as George put it, her mother was a noisy lay, panting, moaning, crying out.
“Your mother does it,” the boys would say. “What’s wrong with you?”
She was a skinny child with weak arches which pained her. The insurance money wasn’t plentiful enough to buy clothing for her mother and two bottles of vodka a week and still have enough left over for the orthopedic shoes for Gwen. While not drinking or making love, her mother sewed, cutting down fancy party dresses for school clothing so that, in Gwen’s mind, she always looked freaky.
“She was just a lonely broad,” George would say. “Don’t condemn her for wanting to get something out of life.”
It took her a long time to learn that her mother wasn’t in pain when she would cry out and sob-laugh at the same time. And everyone knew. The kids in school laughed at her, the dark-haired, skinny, rather homely little girl in the cut-down red party dress with the lace and frilly sleeves, the girl whose mother put out.
“George”—she wept as she said it one spring night when she was a sophomore in college at Chapel Hill—“I can’t marry you.”
“Why?”
“I can’t, that’s all.”
He insisted. “All right,” she said grimly. “If you must know. I’m frigid.”
He laughed. “You’ll have to prove it to me.”
She’d known him for over a year. His smile and his ease of manner had lured her into rare dates with him, had worked on her until, although she told herself that she didn’t love him, could never love a man, she looked forward to seeing him, saw him with a quick little flip of delight deep next to her heart, let him kiss her.
“You’re a nice girl, Gwen,” he told her. “The marrying kind.”
She knew the flip words. Her affliction was a hidden thing. “Aren’t you the hypocritical one? I’ve heard about you.”
“Experience is important in a man,” he said, grinning. “Women don’t need experience. It’s an instinctive act with them.”
He was warm, obviously sensual, but he never tried to handle her, never forced her to indulge in the college ritual of making out. When he asked her to marry him, she’d never felt a male hand on her breast, had not even used Tampax, not able to bear even the thought of having a sanitary tube inserted into that virginal tract. Gwen the prude. Gwen the nut.
So she told him and he listened. “I wouldn’t be good for you,” she concluded. “You deserve a warm, exciting woman. Not me. You can have any girl you want. Why me?”
That grin. “I always promised my mother I’d marry a good girl, and you’re the only virgin in North Carolina above three years old.”
“Gee,” she said flippantly, “what a solid foundation for a marriage.”
She refused to see him for months. When the year was ending, he cracked up his motorcycle coming up the hill from Durham, whammed into a series of pine trees, demolished the bike, lay in the hospital with a severe concussion.
“God, Gwen,” he said, seeing her there when he regained consciousness, “I feel like a seven-acre boil.”
“You’re Gwen,” his mother said. “We’ve heard so much about you. And I’m so pleased you’ve come. George was asking for you while he was delirious.”
Asking for her.
When he was ambulant, they drove in a borrowed car to Raleigh, checked in nervously at a Holiday Inn. “I won’t marry you,” she told him, bleeding inside but making the sacrifice, “but I will show you why.”
He thought a drink would relax her. But when he undressed her, she felt as if her body were made of steel and ice. His hands caused her to cringe. He was kind, patient, gentle. His heated breathing made her hate him, made him the embodiment of all that long parade of faceless men who breathed and grunted and wallowed with her mother. She lay stiff as oak, suffering his hands, his kisses.
“We’ll stop,” he said.
“No,” she said, tears running down her cheeks. “I have to prove to you.”
“Why?”
“Because I love you and I want you to understand.”
“Can’t you relax?”
“Yes.”
She was limp. She did not cry out when he penetrated her. She was dry and it was painful. She was pleased that it hurt her so. She wanted to be punished, for she was hurting him, too. He loved her, wanted her. And she had nothing to give—nothing, that is, which would compensate him for devoting his life to her. She lay limply as he worked in her and he stopped.
“Don’t you feel anything?”
“I feel dirty,” she said cruelly.
“God,” he said, stopping his movement. He lay there for a long time. He talked to her, told her she was beautiful. She was not. She had mouse-brown hair which was fine as baby hair and completely unmanageable. She had a nose too long for her face. Her skin was mottled by dark, frecklelike blemishes. Had they been freckles, they would have been cutely attractive, but as blemishes they were just disfiguring. She was small-breasted. Her thighs did not meet, giving her a bow-legged look as she stood before her mirror naked. Her ankles, because of her weak arches, tended to touch, her feet splaying outward. Her two front teeth showed a large gap. No, she was not beautiful.
“You have a great ass,” he said. “And I love your titties.”
She was sick with shame, feverish with disgust.
“We could work on it,” he said. “It’s normal, Gwen, sex is.”
“I know. I’m not normal, though.”
“Does it make any difference that I love you, that I want to help you?”
Apparently it did. His patience, his gentleness, paid off. Not the first time. The first time his youthful eagerness pushed him over the brink and she felt his seminal fluid rush into her. She felt nauseous, hating his sweating body, his gasping breathing, his clinging.
“You see,” she said, “as I told you, I feel nothing. Do you believe me now?”