In the park, said Aunt Lydia, lying on blankets, men and women together sometimes, and at that she began to cry, standing up there in front of us, in full view.
I’m doing my best, she said. I’m trying to give you the best chance you can have. She blinked, the light was too strong for her, her mouth trembled, around her front teeth, teeth that stuck out a little and were long and yellowish, and I thought about the dead mice we would find on our doorstep, when we lived in a house, all three of us, four counting our cat, who was the one making these offerings.
Aunt Lydia pressed her hand over her mouth of a dead rodent. After a minute she took her hand away. I wanted to cry too because she reminded me. If only he wouldn’t eat half of them first, I said to Luke.
Don’t think it’s easy for me either, said Aunt Lydia.
Moira, breezing into my room, dropping her denim jacket on the floor. Got any cigs, she said.
In my purse, I said. No matches though.
Moira rummages in my purse. You should throw out some of this junk, she says. I’m giving an underwhore party.
A what? I say. There’s no point trying to work, Moira won’t allow it, she’s like a cat that crawls onto the page when you’re trying to read.
You know, like Tupperware, only with underwear. Tarts’ stuff. Lace crotches, snap garters. Bras that push your tits up. She finds my lighter, lights the cigarette she’s extracted from my purse. Want one? Tosses the package, with great generosity considering they’re mine.
Thanks piles, I say sourly. You’re crazy. Where’d you get an idea like that?
Working my way through college, says Moira. I’ve got connections. Friend of my mother’s. It’s big in the suburbs, once they start getting age spots they figure they’ve got to beat the competition. The Pornomarts and what have you.
I’m laughing. She always made me laugh.
But here? I say. Who’ll come? Who needs it?
You’re never too young to learn, she says. Come on, it’ll be great. We’ll all pee our pants laughing.
Is that how we lived then? But we lived as usual. Everyone does, most of the time. Whatever is going on is as usual. Even this is as usual, now.
We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.
Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it. There were stories in the newspapers, of course, corpses in ditches or the woods, bludgeoned to death or mutilated, interfered with as they used to say, but they were about other women, and the men who did such things were other men. None of them were the men we knew. The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others. How awful, we would say, and they were, but they were awful without being believable. They were too melodramatic, they had a dimension that was not the dimension of our lives.
We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom.
We lived in the gaps between the stories.
From below, from the driveway, comes the sound of the car being started. It’s quiet in this area, there isn’t a lot of traffic, you can hear things like that very clearly: car motors, lawn mowers, the clipping of a hedge, the slam of a door. You could hear a shout clearly, or a shot, if such noises were ever made here. Sometimes there are distant sirens.
I go to the window and sit on the window seat, which is too narrow for comfort. There’s a hard little cushion on it, with a petit-point cover: FAITH, in square print, surrounded by a wreath of lilies. FAITH is a faded blue, the leaves of the lilies a dingy green. This is a cushion once used elsewhere, worn but not enough to throw out. Somehow it’s been overlooked.
I can spend minutes, tens of minutes, running my eyes over the print: FAITH. It’s the only thing they’ve given me to read. If I were caught doing it, would it count? I didn’t put the cushion here myself.
The motor turns, and I lean forward, pulling the white curtain across my face, like a veil. It’s semi-sheer, I can see through it. If I press my forehead against the glass and look down, I can see the back half of the Whirlwind. Nobody is there, but as I watch I see Nick come around to the back door of the car, open it, stand stiffly beside it. His cap is straight now and his sleeves rolled down and buttoned. I can’t see his face because I’m looking down on him.
Now the Commander is coming out. I glimpse him only for an instant, foreshortened, walking to the car. He doesn’t have his hat on, so it’s not a formal event he’s going to. His hair is grey. Silver, you might call it if you were being kind. I don’t feel like being kind. The one before this was bald, so I suppose he’s an improvement.
If I could spit, out the window, or throw something, the cushion for instance, I might be able to hit him.
Moira and I, with paper bags filled with water. Water bombs, they were called. Leaning out my dorm window, dropping them on the heads of the boys below. It was Moira’s idea. What were they trying to do? Climb a ladder, for something. For our underwear.
That dormitory had once been co-educational, there were still urinals in one of the washrooms on our floor. But by the time I’d got there they’d put the men and women back the way they were.
The Commander stoops, gets into the car, disappears, and Nick shuts the door. A moment later the car moves backwards, down the driveway and onto the street, and vanishes behind the hedge.
I ought to feel hatred for this man. I know I ought to feel it, but it isn’t what I do feel. What I feel is more complicated than that. I don’t know what to call it. It isn’t love.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Yesterday morning I went to the doctor. Was taken, by a Guardian, one of those with the red armbands who are in charge of such things. We rode in a red car, him in the front, me in the back. No twin went with me; on these occasions I’m solitaire.
I’m taken to the doctor’s once a month, for tests: urine, hormones, cancer smear, blood test; the same as before, except that now it’s obligatory.
The doctor’s office is in a modern office building. We ride up in the elevator, silently, the Guardian facing me. In the black mirror wall of the elevator I can see the back of his head. At the office itself, I go in; he waits, outside in the hall, with the other Guardians, on one of the chairs placed there for that purpose.
Inside the waiting room there are other women, three of them, in red: this doctor is a specialist. Covertly we regard each other, sizing up each other’s bellies: is anyone lucky? The nurse records our names and the numbers from our passes on the Compudoc, to see if we are who we are supposed to be. He’s six feet tall, about forty, a diagonal scar across his cheek; he sits typing, his hands too big for the keyboard, still wearing his pistol in the shoulder holster.
When I’m called I go through the doorway into the inner room. It’s white, featureless, like the outer one, except for a folding screen, red cloth stretched on a frame, a gold eye painted on it, with a snake-twined sword upright beneath it, like a sort of handle. The snakes and the sword are bits of broken symbolism left over from the time before.
After I’ve filled the small bottle left ready for me in the little washroom, I take off my clothes, behind the screen, and leave them folded on the chair. When I’m naked I lie down on the examining table, on the sheet of chilly crackling disposable paper. I pull the second sheet, the cloth one, up over my body. At neck level there’s another sheet, suspended from the ceiling. It intersects me so that the doctor will never see my face. He deals with a torso only.
When I’m arranged I reach my hand out, fumble for the small lever at the right side of the table, pull it back. Somewhere else a bell rings, unheard by me. After a minute the door opens, footsteps come in, there is breathing. He isn’t supposed to speak to me except when it’s absolutely necessary. But this doctor is talkative.
“How are we getting along?” he says, some tic of speech from the other time. The sheet is lifted from my skin, a draft pimples me. A cold finger, rubber-clad and jellied, slides into me, I am poked and prodded. The finger retreats, enters otherwise, withdraws.
“Nothing wrong with you,” the doctor says, as if to himself. “Any pain, honey?” He calls me honey.
“No,” I say.
My breasts are fingered in their turn, a search for ripeness, rot. The breathing comes nearer, I smell old smoke, aftershave, tobacco dust on hair. Then the voice, very soft, close to my head: that’s him, bulging the sheet.
“I could help you,” he says. Whispers.
“What?” I say.
“Shh,” he says. “I could help you. I’ve helped others.”
“Help me?” I say, my voice as low as his. “How?” Does he know something, has he seen Luke, has he found, can he bring back?
“How do you think?” he says, still barely breathing it. Is that his hand, sliding up my leg? He’s taken off the glove. “The door’s locked. No one will come in. They’ll never know it isn’t his.”
He lifts the sheet. The lower part of his face is covered by the white gauze mask, regulation. Two brown eyes, a nose, a head with brown hair on it. His hand is between my legs. “Most of those old guys can’t make it any more,” he says. “Or they’re sterile.”