2
Candy George didn’t know exactly what change had come over her relationship with her husband Reggie, but she did know when the change had started to happen, and it intrigued her. Candy had rehearsed for the part of Mary in the Bethlehem Nativity Celebration play for months. Aside from giving her something else to think about besides her own misery—which was a relief—it hadn’t changed anything at all. What had was the experience of her first performance in public before real people. She had expected to be frightened, and she was. She had expected to be paralyzed, but she wasn’t. Candy George had indulged in a drug or two over the years, marijuana and beer, cocaine and animal tranquilizers. Sometimes the relentless pressing weight of her life got so bad, drugs were a form of medication, a temporary relief, like the morphine fed in small doses to men whose limbs had to be amputated on battlefields. Sometimes the night terrors got so bad she needed drugs simply to sleep. Night terrors were what she called the half-waking dreams she had, lying at Reggie’s side in the dark, neither in this place nor in any other, when her stepfather’s hand would come up out of the blackness and reach for the cleft between her legs, the tips of his fingers as rough as sandpaper, the warts on his knuckles hardened into razor-edged marbles made of pumice and steel. She would try to sit up and not be able to. She would try to call out and not be able to. She would tell herself it was a dream and find it made no difference. When it was over, she would get up and go into the kitchen and smoke a couple of joints. If Reggie caught her at it, he would beat her up. Like everything else in the house, the marijuana was supposed to belong to Reggie alone. He was allowed to dole it out but she was not allowed to take it without permission. That was true even of her own clothes. He told her what she could wear in the morning. He told her what to put on before she went to bed. He put his belt across her back if she tried to argue with him.
What had changed on that stage that first night of the Celebration was Candy George’s assessment of her possibilities in life, and she didn’t think she would ever be the same again. She had heard of heroin highs and cocaine highs and crack euphoria. She had tried heroin and cocaine and crack without ever being able to figure out what everybody else was talking about. Either her body put up too much resistance, or her mind did. That was why she had never become addicted, although a couple of her friends had. That was why she had never become an alcoholic, either, although from everything she’d heard she ought to be one. Her mother was one and her father was one and her stepfather was one and Reggie was definitely on the way. She could easily become addicted to the way she felt on stage. It was like stepping out of her life and into another one, Mary’s life. It was like going from being one of those girls who was so little use to anyone she had no right to anything at all, to being the most important woman in the history of creation. That was what her Sunday School teachers had taught her. Candy hadn’t paid much attention at the time. Now she thought they must have been right. From this day all generations shall call me blessed, for God has done great things for me. Candy had to say that every night right after the angel came to announce the birth of Christ, and from the first night of the first performance she had believed it absolutely. It swelled up in her like a molten silver champagne. It changed the shape of her body and the contents of her mind. It rearranged the bones of her face, so that instead of the ugliness she saw every morning in her mirror, she looked like what Peter Callisher said she looked like. She wasn’t particularly religious and didn’t want to be. She didn’t know if the world was controlled by a benevolent Father, a swirling mass of auras or nothing at all. She didn’t much care. All she knew was that somebody somewhere was about to do great things for her, that she was no longer the person she used to be, and that it was only a matter of time. A matter of time for what, she hadn’t figured out yet.
Neither had Reggie, but he had figured out that something was different, and therefore wrong, and he had been worrying at it for the whole of the last two weeks. Today he had stayed home sick from work, which he never did, and Candy suspected the reason was the argument she had had yesterday with Cara Hutchinson. In the old days, Candy would never have had an argument of any kind with Cara Hutchinson. She would have let Cara push and push, and if Cara had pushed hard enough and long enough, Candy would have given her what she wanted. Then if Reggie hadn’t liked it, he would have had the argument with Cara. That was how it was all supposed to happen, but yesterday it hadn’t. Yesterday she had told Cara Hutchinson no—in a voice that wasn’t too strong and wasn’t too firm and wasn’t too sane, either, now that she thought about it—and in spite of everything, she felt good about it. The everything she had to feel good about it in spite of included the position she was in now, at three o’clock in the afternoon on Monday, December 16th, and had been in since eight o’clock this morning. Eight o’clock was when Reggie decided she had ruined his breakfast, overcooked his eggs, undercooked his sausage, turned his coffee into goat’s piss. That was when he had leaped up from the table and grabbed the front of the dress he had told her to wear and ripped it right off. His nails had cut into the skin between her breasts and his fingers had caught on the underwire of her bra. Her bra had come off with the front of her dress. The snaps in the back had popped—which had made Reggie even more furious; he hated bras that snapped in back; he preferred the ones that fastened in the front, even though it was hard to get them in Candy’s size—and then the metal underwire had come loose and whipped across her nipples like an electric prod. By the time Candy had gotten her breath back, Reggie had gotten his belt off. He was standing over her like a robot sentinel, the belt pulsing through the air like a rattlesnake defying gravity. Reggie grabbed the collar tab on the back of the dress and ripped at that too, tearing what was left of blue cotton and elastic into shreds, bringing the belt down first on Candy’s back and then on the back of her legs. Candy knew what it was about. Even in her dizziness she couldn’t forget, and usually when she got dizzy enough she forgot everything. Reggie had come to hate having her in that damned Nativity play, but he was stuck. He cared so much about his public image. The police had been called to this house once because of their fighting. He didn’t dare do anything to make it obvious they might have been right to come. He was stuck with her in this play and with what being in this play was doing to her, and he hated it.