into the mirror again.
She raised the hand holding the eyebrow pencil with the blunt
end towards her, and slowly began to push it into the hole in her
forehead. No, she moaned to herself, stop it, 'Becka, you don't want to
do this
But apparently part of her did, because she went right on doing
it. There was no pain and the eyebrow pencil was a perfect fit. She
pushed it in an inch, then two, then three. She looked at herself in the
mirror, a woman in a flowered dress who had a pencil sticking out of
her head. She pushed it in a fourth inch.
Not much left, 'Becka, be careful, wouldn't want to lose it in
there, I'd rattle when you turned over in the night, wake up Joe
She tittered hysterically.
Five inches in and the blunt end of the eyebrow pencil had
finally encountered resistance. It was hard, but a gentle push also
communicated a feeling of sponginess. At the same moment the
whole world turned a brilliant, momentary green and an interlacing
of memories jigged through her mind sledding at four in her older
brother's snowsuit, washing high school blackboards, a '59 Impala
her Uncle Bill had owned, the smell of cut hay.
She pulled the eyebrow pencil out of her head, shocked back to
herself, terrified that blood would come gushing out of the hole. But
no blood came, nor was there any blood on the shiny surface of the
eyebrow pencil. Blood or ... or ...
But she would not think of that. She threw the pencil back into
the drawer and slammed the draw shut. Her first impulse, to cover the
hole, came back, stronger than ever.
She swung the mirror away from the medicine cabinet and
grabbed the tin box of Band-Aids. It fell from her trembling fingers
and cluttered into the basin. 'Becka had cried out at the sound and
then told herself to stop it, just stop it. Cover it up, make it gone. That
was the thing to do; that was the ticket. Never mind the eyebrow
pencil, just forget that she had none of the signs of brain injury she
had seen on the afternoon stories and Marcus Welby, M.D., that was
the important thing. She was all right. As for the eyebrow pencil, she
would just forget that part.
And so she had, at least until now. She looked at her half-eaten
dinner and realized with a sort of dull humor that she had been wrong
about her appetite she couldn't eat another bite.
She took her plate over to the garbage and scrapped what was
left into the can, while Ozzie wound restlessly around her ankles. Joe
didn't look up from his magazine. In his mind, Nancy Voss was
asking him again if that tongue of his was as long as it looked.
She woke up in the middle of the night from some confusing dream in
which all the clocks in the house had been talking in her father's
voice. Joe lay beside her, flat on his back in his boxer shorts, snoring.
Her hand went to the Band-Aid. The hole didn't hurt, didn't
exactly throb, but it itched. She rubbed at it gently, afraid of another
of those dazzling green flashes. None came.
She rolled over on her side and though: You got to go to the
doctor, 'Becka. You got to get that seen to. I don't know what you
did, but
No, she answered herself. No doctor. She rolled to her other
side, thinking she would be awake for hours now, wondering, asking
herself frightened questions. Instead, she was asleep again in
moments.
In the morning the hole under the Band-Aid hardly itched at all,
and that made it easier not to think about. She made Joe his breakfast
and saw him off to work. She finished washing the dishes and took
out the garbage. They kept it in a little shed beside the house that Joe
had built, a structure not much bigger than a doghouse. You had to
lock it up or the coons came out of the woods and made a mess.
She stepped in, wrinkling her nose at the smell, and put the
green bag down with the others. Vinnie would be by in Friday or
Saturday and then she would give the shed a good airing. As she was
backing out, she saw a bag that hadn't been tied up like the others. A
curved handle, like the handle of a cane protruded from the top.
Curious, she pulled it out and saw it was an umbrella. A
number of moth-eaten, unraveling hats came out with the umbrella.
A dull warning sound in her head. For a moment she could
almost see through the inkstain to what was behind it, to what had
happened to her
(bottom it's in the bottom something heavy something in a box
what Joe don't remember won't)
yesterday. But did she want to know?
No.
She didn't.
She wanted to forget.
She backed out of the little shed and rebolted the door with
hands that trembled the slightest bit.
A week later (she still changed the band-Aid each morning, but
the wound was closing up she could see the pink new tissue filling
it when she shone Joe's flashlight into it and peered into the bathroom
mirror) 'Becka found out what half of have already either knew or
surmised that Joe was cheating on her. Jesus told her. In the last
three days or so, Jesus had told her the most amazing, terrible,
distressing things imaginable. They sickened her, they destroyed her
sleep, they were destroying her sanity ... but were they wonderful?
Weren't they just! And would she stop listening, simply tip Jesus over
on His face, perhaps scream at Him to shut up? Absolutely not. For
one thing, he was the Savior. For another thing, there was a grisly
sort of compulsion in knowing the things Jesus told her.
Jesus was on top of the Paulsons' Zenith television and He had
been in that same spot for just about twenty years. Before resting atop
the Zenith, He had rested atop two RCAs (Joe Paulson had always
bought American). This was a beautiful 3-D picture of Jesus that
Rebecca's sister, who lived in Portsmouth, had sent her. Jesus was
dressed in a simple white robe, and He was holding a Shepard's staff.
Because the picture had been created ('Becka considered "made"
much too mundane a word for a likeness which seemed so real you
could almost stick your hand into it) before the Beatles and the
changes they had wreaked on male hairstyles, His hair was not too
long, and perfectly neat. The Christ on 'Becka Paulson's TV combed
His hair a little bit like Elvis Presley after Elvis got out of the army.
His eyes were brown and mild and kind. Behind Him, in perfect
perspective, sheep as white as the linens in TV soap commercials
trailed away into the distance. 'Becka and her sister Corinne and her
brother Roland had grown up on a sheep farm in New Gloucester,
and 'Becka knew from personal experience that sheep were never that
white and uniformly woolly, like little fair weather clouds that had
fallen to earth. But, she reasoned, if Jesus could turn water into wine
and bring the dead back to life, there was no reason at all why He
couldn't make the shit caked around a bunch of lambs' rumps
disappear if He wanted to.
A couple of times Joe had tried to move that picture off the TV,
and she supposed that now she new why, oh yessirree Bob, oh yes
indeedy. Joe of course, had his trumped-up tales. "it doesn't seem
right to have Jesus on top of the television while we're watching
Three's Company or Charlie's Angels" he'd say. "Why don't you put it
up on your bureau, 'Becka? Or ... I'll tell you what! Why not put it
up on your bureau until Sunday, and then you can bring it down and
out it back on the TV while you watch Jimmy Swaggart and Rex
Humbard and Jerry Falwell? I'll bet Jesus likes Jerry Falwell one hell
of a lot better than he likes Charlie's Angels."