Lizzie Borden (28 page)

Right now, she thought, as she rocked, she ought to be talking with her Lustful Self.

“What are you sitting here looking so smug about?”

Emma had walked through the door and Lizzie hadn’t even noticed.

“Nothing.” Emma always put Lizzie on the defensive.

“I swear, that man will have us all murdered in our sleep one day.”

“What man?”

“Your father.”

“Emma.” Lizzie turned away.

“You didn’t hear that man, that Eye-talian man. I tell you, Lizzie, we haven’t heard the last of that. Something difficult, something violent will befall us because of your father’s ridiculous business practices. Mark my words.” Emma began pacing in Lizzie’s room. Lizzie hated it when Emma paced in her room. She wanted to tell her that if she had to pace, to go pace in her own room. But Emma had started to rub her knuckles across her upper lip again, and Lizzie knew that she was lost to all logic and reason.

Fear rose in Lizzie as Emma burbled up from the sludge pool in the back of her mind and began to materialize in front of her  face. Emma was about to enter a rage, and the only end to it was when she went to New Bedford and came home half dead. This would make three times this year and the year was not yet two-thirds over.

“. . .he drives us to consider murdering him, doesn’t he?”

“Emma!”

“He does, Lizzie, he does, you know it.” Lizzie flushed, because she
did
know it. “We all think of murdering him, he’s such a terrible, terrible man, and if his actions can do that to members of his family, think what some of his tenants think. And those poor people who have to work for him! No, Lizzie, something terrible has begun here, and it’s not going to stop until something really ugly happens.” Emma’s lip had begun to bleed, and two little dabs of pink froth appeared at the corners of her mouth. “And I can’t be here when it happens. I can’t. Someone will come in here and murder us all as we sleep, Lizzie, can’t you see that? I can’t stand by and let everything just be put down like that, do you understand? Oh God, I wish I could just smack him in the head with a hammer. Just once and end it all. Just put an end to his whole miserable life. How happy we would all be if he were only dead!”

Lizzie was dumbfounded.

Suddenly, Emma fell to her knees and grabbed Lizzie’s hands in her own. Lizzie felt Emma’s hard, cold, bony hands grip hers so tightly it hurt. “Lizzie, we’ve got to get out of here. We’ve got to get away. Far, far away. And we’ve got to do it now. Soon. Fast. Something is going to happen, I feel it in my bones, and we’ll be powerless to stop it. Please.”

Emma stopped raving and her face was twisted with fear and anxiety. But she wasn’t mad, not yet. There was still sanity in her eyes.

“All right, Emma. We’ll leave. You go lie down now for a while and I’ll see if I can make some arrangements.”

A wild look of hope transformed Emma’s face. She looked like a child about to be rewarded for doing something particularly difficult. It was such a new experience, it caught Lizzie totally by surprise. For once she was the older sister, the parent-sister, taking care of Emma. That had never happened before. For once, Emma sought her help and depended on her to see the project through.

“All right? You
will
go lie down for a while?”

Emma looked at her with distrust, and Lizzie could see that what sanity Emma still had left fluttered like a distant and indistinct flag.

“No one will come this afternoon, Emma. We’re safe for the time being. Now you go to your room and lock your window and your door. I’m going out tonight, and I’ll make all the arrangements.”

“All right.” Emma released her hold on Lizzie’s hands, then pulled herself up off her knees. She stood shakily, uncertainly. Then, as if trying to regain a drop of dignity, she walked, back straight, to her bedroom door, unlocked it, opened it, entered and shut it behind her without a backward glance.

Perspiration ran down the side of Lizzie’s face.

She felt in danger of sliding backwards into the pit. She could almost feel it oozing up over the rockers of her chair. She sat stock still, staring straight ahead, her mind empty. She didn’t know what to do, she didn’t know what to think. Soon her mind began to grapple with words to describe the experience, and her fists began to clench. And suddenly, the struggle was full force. She desperately clutched for meaning as her thoughts and images from the pool merged and swirled, faces and slices of conversation, embarrassments, taunts.

And then, suddenly, she was in the backyard. The light was sizzling bright. Everything seemed highly polished.  Lizzie sat in her rocking chair in the upstairs bedroom, her hands in her lap, and she was also in the back yard, running her hand along the weather-splintered boards of the fence. She looked into the neighbor’s yard, saw their young son sitting on the step eating something with his hands.  She walked over to the barn, slowly, gently, as if she had all the time in the world, as if leisure were her only virtue. Her fingers trailed from the fence to the tops of the weeds, some flowering, some about to flower. She trailed her fingers across the front of the barn, not minding the dirtiness of it, whereas usually Lizzie needed to keep her hands very clean indeed. She moistened a dirty finger in her mouth and made a long mark across the dirty barn window, then continued on.

And all the while, Lizzie could see her dresser, her bed, her washbowl, dimly lit, as if a background set on a stage.

The outside Lizzie stopped and leaned her back against the barn, put one foot up on its side as she looked down at her hands. And then the maid, hair plastered to her scalp with perspiration, opened the kitchen door with a pot of dirty dishwater, looked at her and nodded.

The outside Lizzie spoke. “Is there a dessert, Maggie?”

“Emma made blackberry tarts,” Bridget answered, then threw the dishwater onto the lawn and disappeared back into the kitchen, the door slamming shut behind her.

Just as suddenly, Lizzie was wholly in her room. The other Lizzie was gone. She looked at her hands. They were clean. They were damp. They ached from being wrung.

She jumped up and ran down stairs, through the dining room, through the monstrously hot kitchen, out the back door.

There was a long mark on the dusty barn window. Fresh.

Lizzie slowly walked back up to the house.

“Just where had you got to, Miss Lizzie?” Bridget asked.

Lizzie didn’t answer her. She suddenly had no words. She took a tart from the cooling tray and went back up to her room, locking her bedroom door. She put the tart on her bedside table and then lay down on the bed. She had no words, she had no ideas, she had no feelings. She only yearned for the days that used to be.

She tried to relax her hands, her neck, her shoulders. She floated Emma away, and Kathryn, and Andrew, and everybody, and everything, and surrounded herself with the cool green of a spring morning on the bank of a deep, swiftly moving stream.

~~~

She woke up one half hour before she was to be at Enid’s for supper. She flew from the bed, took her towel and ran down the stairs, through the dining room and kitchen, then pounded heavily down cellar. She went to the toilet, then let cold water into the tub, undressed, stood in the tub and soaped herself down and rinsed, all with the frigid well water. She had no time to deal with her hair.

She dried off quickly, feeling the soap still on her skin, knowing it would give her a rash before she bathed again, then dressed hurridly in a housecoat, threw her soiled clothes into a pile on the dirt floor and ran back up to the kitchen. The cellar had a summer smell, an unpleasant sour odor, that went away in the winter as the wood furnace dried everything out down there. But in the summer it smelled of rot, not to mention the stench of the privy, and the flies that hovered above it. How on
earth
could Beatrice bathe down here?

The Borden house irritated Lizzie more and more each day, but she couldn’t think of it now. Now she had an appointment, and she musn’t be late.

Back in her room, she ate the tart as she dressed. She chose a light blue summer weight skirt, as it was broiling hot outside, and a soft white silk blouse. She carefully donned her dress shields, or the blouse would be ruined in less than the ten minutes it would take to walk to Enid’s.

She brushed out her hair, parted it down the middle, then wrapped it up in a long coil and pinned it down. Not the best job, but not bad.

She popped the last of the tart in her mouth, and as she did, a glob of berries fell out, ran down her blouse and came to rest on the lap of her skirt.

Lizzie closed her eyes and clenched her fists. Slowly, she picked up the offensive fruit and then took her clothes off, wadding them up, knowing they would be ruined forever if she didn’t take the time to care for the stain. She shoved the wad under the bed. She opened the closet. Nothing else was presentable. Nothing else was ironed.

She pulled out another white blouse, this one cotton, and a little bit too tight, and put it on. She found another skirt, this one darker and heavier, but still light enough for a scalding July evening. She smoothed herself out, looked in on the sleeping Emma, then took her house keys in her pocket and left. Late.

The heat outside hit her like a blast furnace. She briefly wondered why the “outside Lizzie” hadn’t seemed to feel the heat. It was definitely too hot to hurry, she would really spoil her clothes, but at least her wrinkled appearance would not seem out of the ordinary.

She walked as quickly as she dared, without bringing down streams of perspiration, trying to remember Enid’s directions to her little house which was on the Hill, tucked in behind another, larger house. She cursed her faulty memory and wished that she’d not been so vain as to impress Enid that she could remember everything and had just written the instructions down.

But, there it was, a little tiny house, shaded by huge maple trees, tucked away in the back yard of a large house, a house that Lizzie had somehow never noticed before, even though it looked like it belonged somewhere in the South.

She stood for a moment in the shade of the big house, patting her hair and her clothes, and then walked up to Enid’s door and knocked.

Enid wore men’s pants. And a man’s shirt with buttons up the front tucked into her pants, showing off her tiny waist. Her short hair was brushed back and she kind of looked like a man, almost, a little tiny man with a big grin.

“Lizzie! Come in.” She opened the door wide.

It was cool inside. It was very, very cool inside. Cool and filled to the rafters with books, newspapers and magazines. “Here,” Enid said, and she picked up a pile of magazines from the end of the sofa and dropped them onto the floor. “Sit down. Or, maybe you’d rather freshen up? I know it’s a scorcher out there. The bath is down the hall.”

Lizzie couldn’t believe that Enid had not cleaned house in preparation for her visit. Lizzie could not believe that Enid lived like this. “Bath? Yes, I think I. . .” She followed Enid’s gesture down the hall.

It was a bathroom. It had a bathtub. Lizzie turned the faucet and water came out, right into the tub. And there was a flush toilet. And a sink. And a large mirror framed in wood. She looked at herself. She looked monstrous, huge, red-faced. She ran cold water into the sink and splashed her face. The bathroom was spotless.

“There,” Enid said. “You look a little better. Sorry about the house. It’s always this way. I find the older I get the more interested I am in everything. I read all the time.”

Suddenly, Enid was the delightful person Lizzie had come to love and covet, not a stranger who lived in a mess.

“I’ve just made us a salad for dinner. I hope you weren’t expecting anything hearty.”

Salad? Lizzie thought. There had never been a salad served in the Borden house. Meat, potatoes and gravy. Every night.  Enid handed her a cool glass of lemonade.

“Sit. Relax. Tell me about yourself.”

Lizzie settled back into the sofa, setting her drink on top of yet another stack of books on the coffee table. Enid sat at a little desk chair turned around, and she crossed her legs.

“Tell me about your family,” she said.

Just as Lizzie was about to open her mouth, she noticed that Enid had gone just a little bit out of focus. She blinked, then blinked again, but the center of her vision was furred, and that meant only one thing. She closed her eyes and the sparkly fuzz was still there. Disappointment, despair, anger thrummed at her. She covered her face with her hands.

“Lizzie? Lizzie, dear, what is it?”

The stack of newspapers next to her slid onto the floor and then Enid was next to her, stroking her arm. “It’s the heat, it’s the damned heat,” Enid said.

Lizzie had never heard a woman swear before, but the profundity of it was lost in the fact that within ten minutes she would be lost in the depths of a soul-tormenting headache.

She put down her hands and lifted her face. The whole center of Enid’s face was distorted. Soon the spot would grow, and then hollow out, becoming an ever-widening ring. When the ring reached just past the outer edges of her vision, the pounding pain would begin.

“Headache coming on,” she said. “I get these terrible, terrible sick headaches, and now one is coming on.” Tears of frustration leaked through, and Lizzie clamped down hard on them. She didn’t want Enid to see her crying on top of everything else.

“I’m sorry,” Enid said. “Can I get you something?”

“No, there’s nothing, but I could never make it home, and they sometimes last for. . . hours.”

“Are they. . .”

“Dreadful.”

“Should you eat?”

“I’d vomit it back up, I’m afraid.”

“Well, then. You’re my guest and we’ll just have to make the best of it.”

“I’m sorry, Enid. I’m terribly sorry. I feel like an invalid.”

“We’ll put you down in my bed, and I’ll go to your house. . .”

The sparkling ring had hollowed out and Lizzie saw something peculiar on Enid’s face. She put her hand on Enid’s.

“I’ll go to your house and tell your family that you won’t be home tonight. You’ll sleep here and in the morning I’ll fix you a breakfast instead of supper and you’ll be on your way, good as new.”