Something Rising (Light and Swift) Read online

  He was talking with the girl who called herself Anastasia, and the boy, Romeo. Both of them were slight and dirty, dressed in layers of vintage black clothing and combat boots laced tight against thin legs. It was the new look—for Indiana, anyway—the bat cave death look. Peter Murphy was worshiped here (if you loved Bauhaus, you were too old), and the Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Nick Cave; all the thin and wasted boys and girls who might have been junkies but at least had mastered the fashion. These were children who believed—at fifteen, sixteen, seventeen—that they were falling from a great height, and that what would save them was love and drama. They saw the planet they hurtled toward as having a breakaway skin, like the warm swimming pool of a rock star. Cassie and Puck had talked about it many times since Emmy left for college, Cassie shaking her head against their doom, Puck gleeful.

  “He not here,” Romeo was saying, “he in love. He leave with that mean spider-looking girl, call herself Maleficent. She harsh on him night and day, tell him to leave her alone, go get her some jelly beans.”

  Puck rubbed his chin thoughtfully, looked up at Cassie, who was listening. “I fear,” he said, “I know not of this Maleficent. Do you know her, Cassandra?”

  Cassie shook her head.

  “She new,” Romeo said, taking Anastasia’s hand. “From California, where she used to write songs on a guitar and own a cat call Tragedy. I haven’t seen no cat with her.”

  “Well, then,” Puck said, standing up and brushing off his thighs, “I am ready to celebrate Halloween without distraction.”

  They gathered around the fire and finished Emmy’s bottle, and then someone produced some dark rum and they drank that, too, Cassie watching. When the fire began to wane, someone would duck into a cottage and steal another piece of abandoned furniture and toss it on. Old desk chairs burn a long time, a child’s desk a long time, too. Someone had located a spool of copper wire that they broke off a foot at a time and tossed into the fire to watch the flames burn darker blue.

  We found a box of bones, Cassie heard someone say. A big box, it was in a locked closet in the hospital building. There were long bones, like from your thigh, and little tiny ones like a hand or a finger. But no heads.

  “Does anybody have any food?” Anastasia asked, swaying. She was so small, Cassie noticed, tucked inside her layers of clothes like a two-word note in an envelope.

  A sigh rose up, food. She could do it again, Cassie could face it again, maybe, taking Wally’s van and driving in to Jonah and loading up.

  “I do,” Wally said, heading toward the van.

  A cheer: hooray for … what’s his name again?

  “Wallace,” Puck answered, who sought always to restore dignity.

  Cassie’s eyes scanned the gathering, landing on first one sleepy face and then another, but no Emmy. Emmy had taken her helmet head and was gone. Cassie turned and looked behind her, moved slowly toward the trees. No one. She was walking to the van, taking careful steps on the uneven ground, when she saw Wally coming back with two rabbits, the black and white and the dark brown, and from his belt hung a skinning knife, sixteen inches long from the look of it. He was holding the rabbits by the scruff of the neck, and they seemed relaxed, not kicking or fighting. She watched him go without a word. Every day was open season on rabbits. They had trained themselves, as a species, to die of heart attacks when necessary, a clever adaptation if every day meant death. Laura called this Evolution Knows Best. Would the people around the fire watch the killing and eating of the rabbits? They were not brutes themselves; they were gossamer, trapped in their culture, bound by its conventions.

  Cassie’s flashlight beam illuminated the side of the white van; it squatted at the edge of the grass, cold and silent. It looked like a photograph, admissible evidence. She called Emmy’s name softly, in case she was sleeping and didn’t want to be disturbed, and heard a soft sound in reply, like someone dreaming, coming from the screened porch of the cottage. Keeping the beam low to the ground, Cassie walked toward it. At the hedge she raised the light and saw Jeff’s back, rising and falling, a ship at sea, and then Emmy’s hands flat and delicate on him, her voice murmuring like water. Even with the flashlight beam, even with Wally capturing rabbits, they were unaware. They were alone.

  Under a tree a little way up the lane, Cassie found Emmy’s helmet. She sat down on it, rested her head on her knees. Emmy would at some point remember or realize that Cassie had seen her, she would recall the breeze of light passing over Jeff’s back and know who had stood there. Emmy’s marriage to Brian had already been ordained: by her secret domesticity, her wish for legitimacy, her wish to stand inside a blameless life and cast a stone against the world. Cassie was the world. She closed her eyes, thought of Diana, with her pointed collars and questions. And Brian, in engineering school at Purdue, his amiable scorn for everything Emmy had left behind.

  At some point she realized that all talk around the fire had ceased. She stood and walked back toward Puck, smelling, for the first time, a current of the lives the bat-cave children were living. They might not keep their teeth, they might be spreading disease. In a year there would be a group of babies given interesting names, and a few months later their parents would part. Little poets in the making, a bumper crop.

  But for now, Cassie saw, there were two rabbits on a spit, quite competently skinned and skewered, and everyone was quiet. Puck’s hands were in his pockets, and his helmet was gone. The smell of meat began to rise into the trees, and the smoke hung there like a banner proclaiming the holiday, a welcome to all who were hungry and heavy-laden.

  Wally dropped them off one at a time. Cassie, who lived farthest away, was last. As she got out of the van, saying thank you, she asked, “Where were you going when you stopped for us?”

  Wally shrugged and said, “The video store.”

  Edwin and Poppy had been there for tea and Chinese checkers earlier in the evening, and there were little sugar-dusted cookies with jam in the center on a plate on the table, and a bowl of apples. Cassie was suddenly ravenous, but there was a stiffness in her mother’s gestures that wouldn’t allow her to eat. Laura moved to the sink, carrying cups and saucers, then emptied her ashtray and put it in the sink with the dishes. The water she ran looked scalding, a cloud of steam rising into her eyes. Cassie sat on the counter and waited for her mother’s swift glance, well aware of what Laura might have seen: the grass-stained blue jeans worn sheer in the butt and the knees; the cowboy boots clocked down at the heel; the black Harley-Davidson T-shirt under a brown cardigan that had belonged to Jimmy. Laura, thin and sharp, still wearing the cashmere sweater sets and peg-legged pants of her youth, her dark brown bob going white in a stripe above her forehead, was an elegant woman for these parts.

  “Is that your costume?” Laura asked, and Cassie didn’t know how to answer. She shrugged.

  “Well, when you look in the mirror, do you recognize yourself?”

  Cassie nodded, unsure if she was telling the truth.

  “Do you feel you celebrated the holiday appropriately?” Laura put the cookies in a tin, slid it into a cabinet.

  Cassie thought about what had happened at the very end of the night, after they’d left the state hospital. She traced the words on her palm. “I don’t know. I don’t know what’s appropriate.”

  Laura finished the dishes and reached for her leather cigarette case, unsnapping the tarnished gold top and shaking out a single cigarette expertly. Out of the front pocket she pulled the thin lighter Cassie had won in a long game at fourteen. She always tilted her head to the right when lighting a cigarette, as if she had become accustomed to keeping her hair out of a high flame.

  “Well, let’s see,” Laura said, blowing smoke at the yellowed kitchen ceiling. “It’s the summer’s end, correct? and the day of the dead. As I understand, the, how should we say it, the seam between this world and the Other is very thin, and it’s easy to cross over. We’re between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice, a time of slaughter in s
ome countries.”

  “Then yes,” Cassie said, rubbing her eyes. “I did everything correctly.”

  “Of course you did,” Laura said, “smart girl.”

  Cassie tucked a strand of Laura’s hair behind her ear, studied the gold earrings Laura wore almost every day, a gold ball connected to a thin seashell, the gold gone rose with time.

  “Did you consider the dead?” Laura asked.

  Cassie thought a moment. “I think they considered me.”

  Laura laughed, took a long draw on her cigarette. “I spent some time thinking of your father.”

  “Jimmy’s dead?”

  “Tonight he is. He’s dead to me.”

  This was an answer Cassie understood; grief is grief. Only last winter she had awakened the morning after a winter storm and found the whole of their property, all seven acres, covered in a thick, undisturbed whiteness. The early sunshine on the expanse caused her eyes to ache. Instinctively, she had looked for the place her father, arising earlier than anyone else, would have distressed the walk between the back porch and Poppy’s trailer, going over in the predawn hours for a hand of cards and a cup of chicory coffee. But there was nothing.

  “And how was he, in your thoughts of him?”

  “He was a villain, a rogue, and a coward.”

  “Was he wearing Poppy’s ring, the one he stole, or had he hocked it?”

  Laura gave a rueful smile. “You have to ask?” She let water run over her cigarette, mixed herself a drink. “Tomorrow is All Saints’ Day at home. It’s a strange feeling, to be one place in your heart and another in your life. I’m always there, in New Orleans, in my mind. I think it’s a feeling you’ll never know, Cassie.”

  They sat down at the table, Laura with a gin gimlet in a frosted glass, Cassie with a beer.

  They had been driving down Old 7, Cassie in the passenger seat, Puck in the back chasing rabbits, Emmy somewhere even farther back with Jeff, a fact about which no one spoke. Wally’s high beams were on, and they saw a man walking along the shoulder of the road far ahead, and something wasn’t right. This was the story Cassie thought she might tell Laura, if the time came.

  “Do you know,” Laura said, tracing the lip of her glass with her fingertip, “that we live our lives and trade our days for lies invented thousands of years ago, Cassie? I’ve been thinking about this all day. We no longer recall or question the source. The lies are that we must attend school, we must excel, we must take our place in the factory line applying, I don’t know, plastic to the tips of shoelaces, or slicing the throats of chickens. We used to rise early to collect food, and go to bed early in preparation for the next day, but now we do it because we’re told to by banks and accountants and the government. I’m not paranoid; I know reality is a tide that forms out of a collective agreement, right?”

  Cassie nodded, looked down at her beer bottle. Laura’s eyes were hot, gleaming.

  “I’ve accepted it, all of it, Cassie, but there is one lie that troubles me every day, it makes—it’s making me angry—I pray for a revolution, a manifesto, violence in the streets, I’d take to the streets and let the police spray me with tear gas and attack me with dogs and choke me with nightsticks, anything, but no one will join me. You’d join me, I suppose, for any cause, am I right?”

  Cassie nodded.

  “It’s marriage, family, home, sentimentality, continuity, these are the lies that eat women like a machine.” Laura smacked the tabletop with her open palm, then smiled. “A Woman-Chipper, can you imagine how that would sell? Everyone, anywhere on the political spectrum, would want one. Republicans? Oh my God! Line up black welfare mothers and crackheads, the ex-wives of senators who want the house in Aspen, Jane Fonda, lesbians, feminists—pop ’em in the Chipper! And then ask Andrea Dworkin to face those silent, furious, fundamentalist homeschooling moms, and Phyllis Schlafly, and those crazies—Chip ’em! And the televangelists! Well, they’d probably put almost all women in the hot seat, wouldn’t they, I mean, first they’d probably have sex with them, and then: fire up the Chipper!”

  They had seen a man walking along the shoulder of the road, and something wasn’t right. His pants were light green, and his shirt? or his jacket? was white.

  “It starts with an invading army, Cassie.” Laura walked to the counter and mixed herself another drink. “A new movement, a cult of death, and the lie is forced upon women like a rape, and within a few generations the women are the perpetuators, daughter to daughter. I taught you by example, after being taught by my mother, who was taught, et cetera. It’s like this: do you know that once I had a friend, one friend? a woman who lived down the road, in the years after I first moved here, you girls were small. I learned from that, I never mingled again.” Laura had been reading The Chalice and the Blade, carrying it with her from room to room.

  His shirt or jacket had been white, and his arms seemed to be behind his back, and too long. His arms were hanging loose and too long. Laura was going to tell the story of Shirley, who Cassie had seen last week at the grocery store, and who spoke warmly and asked after her mother.

  “She could be kind, Shirley, and so funny, and sort of rigid, smart but rigid, her ultimate faith was in her own sanity and rightness, even though she’d never gone to college, didn’t read extensively, I don’t know where she thought her authority came from. That’s a sort of confidence some people have, some don’t, Shirley looked inside herself and saw two categories, right (herself), and wrong (everyone else), and she wasn’t afraid to lay out your crimes and failings. Her husband suffered the brunt of it, but I didn’t feel any sympathy for him then and I don’t now, because he was participating in the lie with the same fervor she was, and my feeling was, well, good luck, fella. For a while I passed muster, mostly because I was quiet and pregnant. Pregnancy is good, pregnancy gives you carte blanche in Lie Land. There is no better, more beautiful woman than a pregnant one, because she’s immobilized, she’s weakened and frightened and must turn every moment to her mate, who tucks her inside the wagon, wraps her in bear hide, and goes out to kill in her name.”

  The man’s arms were hanging loose and too long. Wally had slowed down, leaned forward. Cassie had leaned forward, squinted. As they got closer, they could see the man’s hair, black, standing up in matted clumps. His cheeks were hollow, his eyes were dark, and his white jacket was a straitjacket, his feet were bare. This was the moment Cassie kept seeing in her mind, the moment he came clear.

  “And Shirley and I got on famously, we made light of our humiliations, the swollen places, the leaking, we couldn’t sleep, we had to pee all the time”—Laura laughed, lit a cigarette—“we were short of breath, we felt faint, we were fat, we threw up, we had hemorrhoids, we were exposed to medical students and sadistic nurses. Pregnancy and then breast-feeding made us too stupid—it makes you too stupid, Cassie—to read or to talk about much of anything at all, and then when you were three and Belle was five, I decided to leave your father, and Shirley was the first person I went to.”

  Cassie rubbed her forehead. How could she ever explain to Laura that hearing this story still caused a shimmer in her belly, she was still afraid that Jimmy would leave and she’d lose her family even so long after he’d left and she’d lost?

  “And basically, Shirley looked around frantically and said, Where’s the Chipper? She said I couldn’t destroy my home, that my children were more important than I was, that I had made my commitment and I had to keep it. I said, Where is this commitment, hand it to me, I’ll tear it up. I felt like she was saying I had to honor her double-dog dare. There was no thought to the fact that we were bankrupt, that I was borrowing money from Poppy for groceries, that he and Buena Vista had given up and done without to take care of us, that I couldn’t say a word to Jimmy because he simply left, he said he had to go, and left. I saw what was happening, that our life was on the downward spiral and would only get worse and worse until we were penniless and living in a shelter, or until someone was in jail. Or we would hang on and hang
on and wake up old. Things would get worse, and we would get old.”

  His white jacket was a straitjacket and his feet were bare. Cassie gasped, they had just passed him when police cars came flying over the hills, and the man heard the sirens and saw the lights and turned in to the cornfield next to him and began to run across the stubble, a scuttling sort of run that caused the arms of the straitjacket to dance like two drunken men.

  “Shirley called me selfish,” Laura said, taking a drink, “she said I was sick, I would cause permanent damage to my children, I couldn’t accept that with your births I had been replaced and my needs no longer mattered. She said Jimmy was a good man, a kind and loving and generous man, funny, she said, Does he ever hit you? And of course I said no, because he was, yes, sweet as a ripe peach. I said, Hitting isn’t the point. She said, Does he yell at you, yell at the kids, break things, kick the dog? I said, No he doesn’t do anything at all like that, he has a girlfriend, he’s irresponsible and not a grown man, he doesn’t live in relation to me at all, he won’t pay bills, he won’t hold down a job, he doesn’t take care of the house or keep the cars running, I am living in an advanced state of entropy, and soon I will wake up and everything will be falling down, lost, broken, repossessed, I’ll be insane and the children will be feral, and I want to move on and take care of us myself without the black hole of his needs. I want to go home.”

  Cassie stood up from the table, rinsed out her beer bottle, set it down quietly on the kitchen counter. She stared out the kitchen window at the yard, at the bird feeder where the finches would be, if it were morning and if there were finches.

  “I didn’t say this,” Laura continued, “I didn’t say the bottom line, which was that I wanted to go to college, I wanted to study something hard and beautiful, like philosophy or astronomy or art history or literature. And Shirley not only said no, I don’t support you, you aren’t my friend, she persecuted me, she sent me hate mail, she talked about me to everyone in town, she told your teachers, year after year, that I was mentally ill, and when Jimmy finally left us, she said I’d driven him away.”