Flesh of My Flesh: Short Story Read online

  Flesh of My Flesh

  Barbara Gowdy

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Flesh of My Flesh

  About the Author

  Also by Barbara Gowdy

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Flesh of My Flesh

  The bed that Marion is lying on has a huge red Leatherette headboard in the shape of a heart. Marion remembers the headboard from when she and John Bucci came here. She remembers that the wallpaper—in this room, anyway, in the honeymoon suite—was turtle-doves. It’s Eiffel Towers now, supposedly to go along with the new name, Bit O’ Paris, except nobody calls it that. Everybody still says the Meadowview Motel, and when Marion went to the bathroom she saw they still had the old towels with the entwined M’s on them.

  There’s cable tv, though—that’s new. And this red duvet looks right out of the package. Marion has wrapped herself in the duvet because she suspects she’s in shock. From owning a pet store she knows that if an animal goes into shock, the first thing you do is cover it with a blanket or your coat. Then you raise its hindquarters to counteract internal bleeding.

  “Not that I’m in danger of internal bleeding,” Marion thinks. “Lord knows.”

  She lets out a short, incredulous laugh. The kitten on her stomach rides the movement. It is completely black, black lips, pads, black inside its ears. Every three hours Marion feeds it formula with an eye dropper, then she puts it in the bathtub and tries to make it pee. Sam was the one who said they should bring it along. “You can’t expect anyone else to get up twice in the night,” he said, and she thought, What a wonderful man. Now she thinks that this was just him leaping at the prospect of diversion.

  Where is he? He’s been gone almost two hours, but she didn’t hear the car starting up. She imagines him standing on the wooden footbridge where they stood after supper and waved at their fluttering shadows way down on the river. She asks the kitten, “Do you think he’s okay?” and runs a finger down its spine. It frantically licks where she touched. Even its tongue has black on it—two black spots and a black tip.

  “In the movie of my life,” she tells it, “you can cross my path.”

  Marion had just turned nineteen when her mother was murdered. About a week after the funeral a white-haired secretary bearing two rabbit pies showed up from the school where Marion’s mother had taught grade three. “Nothing this terrible will happen to you again,” the woman said with such conviction that Marion snapped out of her hysterics, and from then on, whenever she found herself presented with some death-defying risk, she was inclined to take it.

  Why she had become hysterical was that as she was putting the pies down, she saw a piece of skin stuck to the side of the refrigerator. She knew immediately what it was, although up until that moment her imagination had steered clear of the smithereens her mother was blown into. She’d been away when it happened, visiting her grandparents in Ayleford, and then, by the time she got home, the police and detectives had come and gone, and the kitchen had been scrubbed down by Mrs. McGraw, who had heard the shots across three fields and claimed she knew from the sound it was no regular shotgun.

  The murderer was a man named Bert Kella. He was the janitor at Marion’s mother’s school. At about eleven o’clock on Saturday morning, when Marion’s father was in Garvey pricing wheelbarrows, Bert Kella drove to the house in his nephew’s ‘67 Mustang, kicked in the door, shot Marion’s mother twice from behind as she stood peeling potatoes at the sink, then shot out a living-room window and drove back to the school to drink a bottle of whiskey and have a nap. When he woke up he stole a tape recorder from the office and drove to the Catholic cemetery on Highway IO. He pulled over and started confessing. Marion never heard the tape, but her father did and there were excerpts in the papers. It was mostly a deranged ramble about all the stuck-up, cold-hearted “bitches” Bert Kella had ever met. It seems that he wrote Marion’s mother a love letter, which she never mentioned to anybody and which, on the morning of the murder, Bert Kella discovered ripped to shreds in one of the school’s garbage pails.

  “That did it,” he said on the tape. “It was like a concussion really. I am a bit scared now.” Then there was the explosion of him shooting himself in the mouth.

  The week before, Marion had signed her name to a Southwestern University application that her mother had filled out and more or less written the essay for. Her father had said he’d sever a couple of acres to pay the tuition. Her brother, Peter, who had graduated from the same university two years earlier and was now a vet in Morton, had phoned to say he’d show her around the campus.

  That was the plan, but after the shooting nobody ever mentioned it again. Marion didn’t even get an acknowledgement from the university, and none of her teachers tried to talk her into returning to high school and finishing her final year. In other words, and for reasons that weren’t clear to her, she was off the hook, although she had trouble admitting this to herself until she was packing up her mother’s suits and blouses for the Salvation Army. “They wouldn’t have fit me anyway,” she wept as if, otherwise, she’d have reapplied to Southwestern. As if the only thing standing between her and a professional calling was the plain fact that all these career-woman outfits were two sizes too small.

  Not going to school meant she didn’t have to get up at six-fifteen to catch the bus into town. Now she slept until a quarter to seven, when she heard her father in the bathroom coughing up phlegm. She went downstairs and let out the dogs. After breakfast she did the dishes, made two sandwiches for her father’s lunch, then had her shower. By eight-fifteen she was out the door. At four-thirty she came home and cleaned up the house a bit. Sometimes she saddled her mother’s horse, Daphne, and rode her down to the highway and back. At five-thirty she started supper. On Tuesday nights her father went to the Legion Hall, so at some point on Tuesday she ironed a good shirt for him. After supper, on the other weeknights, she sat in her mother’s La-Z-Boy chair and she and her father watched TV. When there was a commercial her father stood up because sitting was bad for his back. “Your mother was born with a hole in her back,” he came out with one night. “Size of a penny.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Marion said.

  “Above her hip.” He indicated the place on his own back. “Right where the second bullet went in, as it happens.”

  A few minutes later, after he had sat down, he said, “That was just a fluke.”

  He was a big, sleepy-looking man, smart with machines and animals and not much of a talker. (Of course, Marion’s mother had never let him speak. She’d say, “You tell it, Bill,” and then carry on telling the story herself.) Because of a mild palsy, his head shook, normally only a little, but at the funeral it shook so emphatically that the minister stopped the eulogy and said, “Correct me if I’m wrong, Bill.”

  “You’re doing just fine, Herb,” her father told him in a calm voice, and he’d been talking calmly ever since. As devoted as Marion was to making sure he didn’t break down in grief, she expected him to at any moment. She saw him standing in the middle of the yard one morning, his head bowed, his hands up at his face, and she thought, “This is it.” Then he dropped his left hand and she saw the cigarette he’d been lighting against the wind, and she released her breath and returned to making his sandwiches, which is what her mother would have been doing right about then. Mrs. McGraw had told her that the police drew chalk outlines of her mother’s remains on the kitchen floor, and every once in a while Marion was struck by the strangely comforting sensation that those outlines were fitted along her own skin.

  During the hours that her mother would have been at school, she killed time by
driving her mother’s red Toyota on the concession roads, up one road, down the next, pretending that it was a job, a dire responsibility. Day after day she did this. Sometimes she drove at five miles an hour. Sometimes (remembering what the white-haired secretary who brought the rabbit pies said) she hit ninety.

  Twice a week she visited Cory Bates, who had also dropped out of school and who lived with her parents in Garvey, in an apartment above a pet store. After saying, “I don’t get what Bert Kella saw in your mother,” Cory never again made any direct reference to the murder, and the last thing she did was treat Marion as if she were an object of pity. The opposite was true. “At least you’ve got a car,” she said enviously. She said, “At least your parents aren’t at each other’s throats all night.”

  All day, Cory’s parents slept. Occasionally one of them got up and used the toilet or ate something standing in front of the refrigerator. Their light red hair and Mrs. Bates’s tallness and shifty green eyes seemed to discredit Cory’s claim that she was adopted, but as Cory pointed out, paediatric nurses have an edge when it comes to finding a good match. A couple of years ago Mrs. Bates had switched to looking after old people, and now she worked two nights a week in a retirement home. Mr. Bates was on disability. When Marion was there he never said a word, but Mrs. Bates was a complainer.

  “The dishes aren’t done,” she said.

  “I’m going to do them later!” Cory yelled in her amazingly thunderous and infuriated voice. Marion admired Cory for not sleeping all day herself, since she was always saying how tired she was.

  “I’m an insomniac,” Cory said. “It started when I was pregnant.”

  Her baby, a boy, was born a year ago and given to a couple who, by sheer coincidence, was also called Bates. When he grew up Cory said she was going to visit him and tell him what an asshole his father was. Although she didn’t know where he lived she wanted to send him the German shepherd puppy from the pet store downstairs.

  “A boy needs a dog,” she said.

  The puppy was the runt of the litter, the only one left. At night, when Cory’s father and mother were fighting, it barked and cried.

  “Its cage is right below where my bed is,” Cory said. “And I swear to God,” she said, “the minute it starts whimpering, my breast milk starts dripping.”

  Before going out, they usually stopped in to see the puppy. “Don’t you want to just eat it?” Cory said. Marion poked two fingers into the cage and scratched its head. “Don’t you want to just squeeze it to death?” Cory said, getting her entire slim hand through the mesh and wiggling the puppy’s hindquarters.

  They drove to the new Garvey Mall. Twenty-five stores sandwiched between a Woolworth’s and a supermarket. At the Snack Track they ordered Coke sodas and fries and carried them to the mall’s eating area. Most of the tables were occupied by retired farmers who smoked cigarettes and nursed a single cup of coffee all afternoon. Some of the farmers Marion knew, and normally they’d have asked her how she was bearing up, but one look at Cory and they left it at a nod. Cory was theatrically tall and thin, and she wore thigh-high black leather boots and jeans so tight she had to unzip the fly to sit down. When there weren’t any empty tables she said “Fuck” loud enough to turn heads. Marion imagined Mr. Grit, who borrowed her father’s Rototiller every spring, going home and saying to Mrs. Grit, “Bill Judd’s girl is headed for trouble.”

  Marion didn’t care. If anything, it touched her to imagine these decent men quietly grieving for her future. It comforted her. It was one of the mall’s homely comforts, along with the slow, murmuring parade of shoppers and the light-hearted music and the intermittent rumble of the men’s voices. Usually this atmosphere sent her into the same sweet trance that having her hair cut did, and so the fact is she hardly registered Cory’s savage commentary on most of the women who walked by. The only time she really paid attention was when Cory used her as her point of reference—”Oh, my God, I can’t believe it … that girl’s wearing the same ugly sweater you have”—and even then (because a raving beauty to anyone else was an eyesore to Cory), she was never aroused or offended enough to make anything of it.

  They sat there for at least two hours. Sometimes they got up and wandered through Woolworth’s and the women’s clothing store, but Cory didn’t like to since she had no money to buy anything. If a newspaper had been left near their table, Cory turned to the classifieds and, in her loud voice, read the ads from the Help Wanted section.

  “ ‘Experience in bookkeeping would be an asset. Must have a cheerful personality.’ Yeah, right. So they can walk all over you and gang bang you at office parties.”

  One day she picked up the paper but immediately threw it down again. “I should have kept the baby,” she said. “At least then I’d be collecting mother’s allowance.”

  “What about working for John Bucci?” Marion said from her reverie. John Bucci stopped by their table whenever he walked by. He managed the Elite Shoe Store, plus he was a partner in a gas station somewhere out on Highway 10 and he had an interest in a gravel pit.

  “Forget it,” Cory said.

  “He seems like a nice fella,” Marion observed.

  “Nice fella,” Cory mimicked. “Mafia drug boss, you mean. No way a guy his age—what, twenty- five, twenty-six?—no way he’s tied in with all these businesses unless they’re fronts for selling drugs.”

  This woke Marion up. “Oh, for heaven’s sakes,” she laughed.

  “Okay, he’s full of shit,” Cory said. “One or the other. Anyway, I don’t trust short, pretty guys.”

  But half an hour later, when he came by their table, she pulled him onto a stool and asked if his gravel pit needed someone to answer the phone.

  “Maybe, maybe,” he said, nodding, twisting the gold ring on his baby finger and glancing around. “Not till after Christmas, though.”

  “I’ll have slit my wrists by then,” Cory said.

  “Hey,” he said. “I black out at the sight of blood.”

  “So I won’t do it here,” Cory said.

  “Why don’t you work in the store?” he said. His eyes were on the open zipper of her jeans. “This Saturday. One day, try it out. I need somebody this Saturday. Commission plus salary.”

  “Forget it,” Cory said. “I hate other people’s feet.”

  “It’s their socks I can’t stomach,” John said. He looked at Marion. “How about you?”

  “I like socks,” she said.

  Cory snorted.

  “I mean, do you want to work in the store Saturday?” he asked.

  “Oh.” Marion was mortified by her mistake. “No, no,” she said. “Saturdays I can’t. Saturdays—”

  “Hey.” John patted her arm. “No problem.” For the first time she noticed how black and sad his eyes were. Sad from his own mother dying, she thought. He had talked about coming to Canada with his mother and sisters, about helping his mother swab the ship’s deck to pay their passage, even though he was only five at the time.

  “Bullshit,” Cory had said.

  “It’s true, I swear to God,” he’d said. “My mother had arms like this”—he flexed his muscled arm—”from scrubbing other people’s floors. When she was my age, she looked fifty. But she was beautiful, like a rose.”

  “Everybody thinks their slag-heap mothers are so beautiful,” Cory had said.

  It’s midnight. Their car is still there. On the other side of the parking lot, outside the opened back door of the motel’s bar, two waiters whip at each other with dish towels. A dog snaps at the towels. The dog, Marion decides, is an Irish setter/Saint Bernard cross. She knows dogs. Dogs are one thing she knows.

  She closes the curtains, goes over to the dresser and reaches for the eye dropper and the bottle of formula. In the light from the dresser lamp she sees two bruises on the underside of her wrist. She checks her other wrist, and it has one big bruise. When she and Sam were standing just here, and she was starting to unbuckle his belt, he seized her wrists and said, “I don’t have
a real penis.”

  She laughed.

  “Listen to me!” he said, and there was such a feverish, lunatic look on his face that she went still and then, disoriented, she swayed, and he tightened his grip. She said he was hurting her. “Sorry,” he said, but his fingers didn’t loosen.

  “I’m listening,” she whispered.

  He said, “Okay,” and took a breath.

  While her hands turned white he told her the whole story, going back to when he was eight and lived in Delaware. “He’s memorized this,” she thought at one point. She couldn’t catch it all. There was only the astonishing crux. “Wait,” she said finally.

  “What?” he said.

  “I want to see it.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “I want to see it,” she repeated calmly.

  “It’s a dildo, okay? You’ve seen a dildo before.”

  “I want to see it.”

  He released her wrists, turned around and opened his fly. She heard two clicks and then his fly zipping back up. When he turned back round he was holding it down along his thigh, concealed by his forearm. She glanced at his crotch, but he was wearing baggy pants—there was no confirmation of anything there.

  “Let me see,” she said.

  He opened his hand.

  They both looked at it.

  “It’s rubber,” she said.

  “Silicone, I think. I’m not sure, actually.”

  “How do you keep it on?”

  “It attaches to a strap.” He folded his fingers around it and dropped his hand. “I hardly ever wear it.”

  “I’m going to be sick,” she murmured. Instead her legs gave out and she fell to her knees while he tried and failed to catch her, first with his free hand and then with both hands, dropping the dildo on the dresser, but it rolled off and down the side.

  “Oh, my God!” she said.

  Since the dresser was bolted to a panel at the back and couldn’t be moved, he had to unbend a hanger to coax the dildo within his reach, an absurdly long and frustrating exercise that she watched in silence from where she had landed on the floor.