Chapter II. 1953 #2
“Oh,” she said, her hands dropping limply to her sides as the baby reached for her, its tiny face scrunched in fury.
“Well, hold on to the handkerchief, Mary. Don’t just stand there. And tip your head back.”
She tried to move, to take the handkerchief from him, but her body would not respond, and the white fabric slipped through her fingers as the blood crept over her lips and chin.
The baby caught at her hair and tugged, and a thick heat bloomed in her chest. Her blood tasted of summer.
Of grass after it’s mown. Of rain. Of the deep acid that burned in her throat those first few months of pregnancy.
Abnormal and wrong. As if whatever hand had stitched her had not been God’s but something darker.
She shivered, and the tightness in her chest broke as the first sob crested over her, and then the next and the next, and her body was a thing separate from her.
She knelt, the gravel digging into her knees as she retched, the emptiness in her stomach mixing with the blood as she spat.
It was almost beautiful. A light pink that made her think of the smooth interiors of shells, or those early morning skies when she’d been a girl and risen before the house had come awake, just so she could pretend she was the only person in the world.
“The hell?” Robert stepped backward, and she could have laughed.
He wouldn’t want to get any of it on his shoes.
But if he did, she would be the one to clean it, so what did it really matter?
She’d spend the rest of her life shining his shoes and fetching his dinners—an endless line of casseroles and puckered fingers from washing dishes.
She gasped, the air burning in her lungs as the words she wasn’t supposed to say fell out of her. “Take them back. I don’t want them.”
“What do you mean, you don’t want them? They’re top of the line, Mary.” There was confusion in his voice. And a hesitation. He didn’t understand her like this. His role as a husband suddenly cast as something he’d not rehearsed.
She curled her fingers into the gravel and stared up at him. At her baby. At love and duty and boredom all tangled together in the dying sunlight. She wanted to scream until her throat went raw.
“I said I don’t want the damn things,” she hissed. “Take them back.”
“Don’t curse.” He recoiled, his face pinching as if the word was some foul-smelling thing.
She did laugh then, and his face went slack, as if he couldn’t decide which emotion was the right one. “I’m dying in there, Robert. Every day inside that house. It’s like there’s broken glass shoved inside me. Every time I move, I bleed, and then I mop it up and start all over again.”
“You’re not talking sense.”
It would be better to force her breathing to slow.
To settle herself, fix her face, smile at him, and tell him she was thrilled.
How lucky she was to have such a thoughtful husband.
How blessed by God. To take the baby and go back into the house and serve their dinner.
She’d heard the stories of what happened to women who left their babies crying in the crib, the roasts to burn in the oven as they stared drooling out a window.
Doctors and small rooms and medications.
But she couldn’t do it. What had come apart inside her could not be put together again.
It had been three years of marriage making Robert’s breakfasts and kissing him goodbye and telling herself not to look at her magazines.
Another two of trying for a baby, each month another disappointment when she’d go to the restroom and see that rusted red on her underwear.
A slow progression that stretched into a future made up of washers and dryers that made her want to walk into the closest body of water with stones in her pockets. Her mother would be so disappointed.
“Come on. Up you go.” Robert grasped her arm and hauled her upright, the baby still wailing as he guided her toward the house. Inside, the air was stale and smelled of the carrots she’d boiled earlier. Her stomach heaved again, but she swallowed and kept moving.
“Sit there,” he said before plopping the baby in the playpen and vanishing into the kitchen. She tipped her head back and closed her eyes, listening to the tap turn on, the tinkle of ice in a glass, and then Robert was before her, a damp washcloth in one hand and a glass of brandy in the other.
“Drink this. It’ll make you feel better.”
She sipped slowly while he wiped at her face with a delicacy she hadn’t known he possessed. As if he understood to go slowly so he wouldn’t frighten her, so she wouldn’t run like prey.
“I’ll take them back if that’s what you want.” Robert cupped her cheek as he went to his knees before her. “But that wasn’t just about the washer and dryer.”
“I have to get out of this house. I feel like I’m losing my mind.”
“Is it the baby? I can get my mother to come and stay for a bit—”
“No. The baby is wonderful. You’re wonderful.”
“Then what’s this all about, Mary?”
“I made three loaves of bread today. Three. No one needs that much bread. It’s obscene to have that much bread. I ironed your shirts that I already ironed yesterday. I rescrubbed the breakfast dishes.”
“You don’t have to make that much bread, honey.”
Her mother would have had a fit if she saw her.
These were secrets meant only for wives and mothers.
You did not share the trials of domestic life with your husband.
To do so was to be an abject failure. They were daughters of Hawthorne Springs, after all.
Born to a set of unspoken expectations. Of what it meant to be a good Christian wife and mother.
As much as her mother’s antiquated ideals grated on her, she found herself falling into the rhythm of them.
“That’s not what I mean.”
He gripped her face between his hands, firmer now than the previous gentle touches he’d given her. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know.” She sobbed again, but there was no rawness in it. Only a sort of defeat as she realized he would never fully understand the extent of the tedium that dominated her daily life. Her world would never belong to him. It was too small, too insular, for the bulk of him.
“I can’t help you if you don’t talk.”
She drew in a ragged breath and let the fear flood out of her.
Robert was a good man. Kind and understanding.
He would not condemn her. He was not her mother or any of her mother’s like-minded friends.
“I know I should be happy. And I am. I am. But … it’s like I’m stuck in a spider’s web, and I’m fighting and fighting, and I know I can’t get out. ”
“Oh, sweetheart,” he chuckled, and drew her into his chest. She breathed in his cologne—vetiver and saffron and the darker note of his sweat. “That’s all?”
She stiffened, and he tugged her closer.
“I’ll call my mother. She can come and watch the baby a few days a week.
She’s been practically begging me anyway.
And you remember John Letting? He’s looking for typists.
You studied that for a bit, right? He doesn’t normally hire married women, but I can put in a word.
Just a couple days a week out of the house, and you’ll be right as rain. ”
“But the baby—” Panic froze the words in her throat. She couldn’t admit to wanting time away from her child and to what that meant about the sort of mother she was. What it would look like to any of the other women in Hawthorne Springs.
“Momma will be ecstatic. Don’t you worry about the baby. She’ll be just fine. The house isn’t going to fall apart without you. At least not for two days a week.”
She should be melting. All that ice she’d been carrying around in her heart and chest pooling at her feet because Robert had swooped in and saved her.
A knight in a three-piece suit come bearing a new washer and dryer and a dim promise of salvation as a typist in Atlanta.
She reminded herself that she was away from her mother’s influence.
A married woman with a child and her own house.
She could do as she pleased, and it had been Robert, after all, who had suggested it.
Even in the truth of all those reassurances, the anxiety running in her blood did not ease in the way she’d hoped it would.
Maybe it wasn’t the house or the expectations of being a wife and mother at all. Maybe it was her.
She pushed the thought away. She had to try.
“You’ll see, darling. Everything will be just fine,” Robert said and turned to the baby, who’d finally quieted down and was cooing from the playpen. “And you, my beauty, will be the most spoiled girl in all of Hawthorne Springs. Your grandmother has been waiting for the chance.”
“Yes.” Mary delicately wiped away the tears that still stained her face. “Just fine.”
“SO IT’S DEFINITE then? He said he’d hire you?”
Vera Stephens placed a teacup in front of Mary and poured before offering the sugar bowl, which Mary waved away.
“I start next Monday.” Mary took a Lorna Doone cookie from the bone china Vera used for company regardless of whether they were close friends or not and nibbled at the edge, wishing all the while she could shove three into her mouth at once.
And take two teaspoons of sugar in her tea.
The still-present tightness at her waistline kept her from it.
“It’ll be good for you. To have some time to yourself.”
“It’s a job, not a vacation,” she said, unable to keep the smile from her face. She had never thought it was possible for work to feel like freedom, but every breath felt lighter than the last.
“Did your mother have an absolute fit?” Vera settled across from her and took a sip of her tea.
Mary grinned. “You should have seen how red she got. I thought her head was going to pop clean off.”
“What I would give to have been a fly on the wall.” Vera settled her teacup in her saucer. “I’ve thought about it, you know? Getting work in the city. I don’t know where I’d find the time.”