Mrs. Everything (29 page)

Bethie wiped her eyes. Jo looked like she’d gotten taller on her trip, and her hair was longer than normal, pulled back in a twist that showed off the graceful length of her neck. Without raising her gaze from the bedspread—the same pink gingham check Sarah had bought when she was five—Bethie said, “I went to Newport. I took acid, and I had a bad trip, and there were these guys in a tree.”

“Wait. What? Guys in a tree?”

“They’d climbed up there to see the stage,” Bethie said. “One of them had a guitar, and one of them had some hash. They took me back to their tent. They had blankets and sleeping bags spread out on the ground, and I thought . . . I thought they were nice guys, you know?” Her voice cracked. “I thought that they wanted to help me.”

Jo pulled Bethie close, until her sister was leaning against her, and put her arm around Bethie’s shoulders. “Do you know someone?” Bethie asked. “Or do you think Shelley does?”

Bethie felt her sister’s back stiffen. “Shelley and I had a bit of a falling-out,” Jo said.

“Oh,” said Bethie, feeling sorry for her sister and sorrier for herself.

“But I know other people,” Jo said. “Let me make some calls.” She got to her feet, with her familiar, athletic grace, and for the first time since she’d come back from Rhode Island, Bethie began to feel like maybe things would be all right.

*  *  *

Three days later, she and her sister were waiting in the lobby of the Atheneum Hotel in the Greektown neighborhood in Detroit. They sat on a love seat upholstered in some shiny, slippery fabric, red with gold stripes. Jo wore cuffed jeans and sneakers and a U of M T-shirt. Bethie had showered and pulled her hair into a ponytail. She wore espadrilles, a madras skirt that felt snug at the waist, and a light-blue blouse. She sat with her feet crossed at the ankles and her hands folded in her lap, looking prim and virginal.
As if it makes any difference
, she thought.
As if it matters now.

The lobby was long and dimly lit, with a bar at one end, doors to a ballroom at the other, and the check-in desk in between. It smelled like smoke and the previous night’s drinks. In the open area between the front doors and the reception desk were groupings of furniture, chairs and couches and low-set tables. Bethie imagined that, later in the day, the bar would be bustling. Waitresses would move through the room, offering cocktails; businessmen would sit at the tables and the couches, eating salted peanuts with their martinis, and the rumble of their voices would fill the cavernous room, but for now, the place felt abandoned, like a stage felt after a show. A single bored-looking clerk in a white shirt and a green vest stood behind the desk. A bellman, similarly uniformed, leaned against the wall just inside the revolving door. A man in a hat and a trench coat, with a suitcase in his hand, got off the elevator and walked through the lobby, his footfalls echoing. He tipped his hat to Bethie and Jo, returned the bellman’s “Good morning,” and pushed through the door.

Bethie sat, hands plucking at her skirt. The elevator doors slid open again. Heels clicked across the marble as a middle-aged woman approached. Her white hair was teased high around her head, and so thin that the weak light of the lobby shone right through it, and her pinkish-white skin was pleated with wrinkles around her eyes. She wore a brown skirt and a yellow sweater, and her stubborn, bulldog-like face and cat-eye glasses reminded Bethie of the vice principal back at Bellwood High. She looked the sisters over. “Which one?” she asked.

Bethie got to her feet. Jo also rose. “Can I come?”

The woman shook her head. “Wait here. I’ll bring her down in an hour.”

“Why don’t you go for a walk,” Bethie suggested, hoping that she didn’t look as frightened as she felt. “I’m sure . . .” Her throat worked as she swallowed. “I’m sure I’ll be fine.”

“I’ll be right here,” said Jo.

The woman stood, waiting wordlessly until Jo realized what she wanted. Jo reached into her purse and handed her an
envelope full of cash. It was, Bethie knew, the money Jo had planned on spending on her trip, visiting Goa and Udipalya, Jaipur and Dharamsala, Pushkar and Nepal. Jo had told her the names of the places, pronouncing each one with reverence and care.
I can’t wait
, Jo had told her.
I can’t wait to get out of here.
The woman opened the envelope and peeked at the money. Bethie couldn’t look. She imagined that each bill in the fat stack represented a different city, a day or two that Jo could have been somewhere else. She imagined stretching out her hand, grabbing the money, driving Jo to the airport and telling her,
Go
. But then what? She couldn’t imagine past that point. Where would she go? What would she do? How would she manage, alone with a baby?

The woman tucked the envelope into her purse. “Good luck,” Jo whispered, and squeezed Bethie’s hand. Bethie tried to smile before following the woman to the far end of the lobby, where the elevator swallowed them up.

The woman didn’t speak on their ride to the eleventh floor. In silence, she led Bethie to a room in the middle of the hall. There was a bed with a sheet spread out on top of the dull gold comforter, and two chairs set up at its base, with towels draped over their tops. The wallpaper was light-brown, with a repeating pattern of a bundle of stalks and fringes that Bethie thought was meant to be a sheaf of wheat. “Take off your skirt and your underpants, and lie back on the bed,” said a man. He wore a blue jacket and a beige-and-red tie, and a white shirt, old but neatly pressed. His hands were bare. Bethie wondered if he’d washed them, and if he really was a doctor, like Jo’s friend Shelley had said. “Legs up here,” he said, indicating the chairs. He picked up a metal instrument, long and thin, and Bethie closed her eyes and wished she’d dropped acid, or smoked pot, or even had a gulp of vodka, anything to take herself out of her body, away from this moment.

“Hold still,” said the man. “You’ll feel a sting and a pinch.” That, Bethie hoped, was the anesthesia.
She says it’s a real doctor
, Jo had told Bethie, after Shelley had finally given her a name.
He’ll take good care of you.
She felt the promised sting, felt the pinch, felt a faraway cramping sensation, like someone rummaging deep inside of her. “Please stop crying,” she heard the man say. His voice was angry, but the woman just sounded bored when she told Bethie, “He needs you to hold still, hon.”

An eternity crawled by. Bethie closed her eyes and tried not to hear or to feel. Finally, when it was over, the woman gave her a thick sanitary napkin and a bottle of pills, with the instruction to take one in the morning, one at night. If she developed a fever, she was to go to the hospital, and to tell them that she’d just started bleeding, that nothing had been done to her. “You were never here,” the man said as the woman helped her to her feet. He looked her up and down, and Bethie called on her theater training.
Act like you’re brave
, she told herself. She stood up straight and made herself meet his gaze, taking in his greasy hair and his small, squinting eyes. “Thank you,” she said.

The man’s face was expressionless. “Next time, try keeping your legs together,” he said. Bethie gasped, but he’d already turned away to grab the edge of the blood-stippled sheet and pull it off the bed. The woman took Bethie by the elbow and led her back down the hall, back into the elevator, back to the lobby, where her sister was sitting on the love seat, holding Saul Bellow’s
Herzog
, with her thumb marking her place. Jo got to her feet as soon as she saw Bethie, and hurried to take her sister’s arm.

“Are you okay?” she asked, and Bethie nodded, leaning against her.

“I’m fine.”

“I’ve got aspirin.” She settled Bethie on the couch, got her a glass of water and a glass of Coke from an unfriendly bartender, and gave her sister aspirin to swallow. Bethie said that she was fine to walk, but Jo made her wait inside while she pulled the car right up to the door.

The whole way home, Bethie was quiet. She pressed her purse against her stomach and leaned her head against the window. The radio played, the Beatles singing “Ticket to Ride” and the Beach
Boys singing “Help Me Rhonda” and Bob Dylan singing “Mr. Tambourine Man.” As soon as Bethie heard his voice she reached down and clicked the radio off.

“Bethie?”

“I’m fine.” Bethie’s voice sounded like it was coming from a radio station whose signal they were losing. She felt that way, like she was fading in and out.

“Did you pick a major yet?” Jo’s voice was cheerful. “Last time we talked, you were leaning toward English.”

“I think I’m going to take some time off. At least a semester.” Bethie didn’t tell Jo that she wasn’t going back to the U of M, not after this semester, not ever. She couldn’t imagine walking the same paths she’d walked, strolling through the Diag, having a burger at the Union, sitting in the same classrooms in the Fishbowl where she’d sat as Devon Brady’s girlfriend, a girl who was pretty and admired, a girl who hadn’t been spoiled, raped, ruined.

“You’re dropping out?”

In Bethie’s head, the voice of the doctor—if that’s what he had been—was loud as a shout.
Next time, try keeping your legs together.
She knew she’d be hearing that voice, those words, on an endless loop in her brain, maybe for the rest of her life.

“I can take some business classes at Wayne State. There’s always a job for a girl who can type,” she said, repeating the mantra of Mrs. Sloan, who’d taught Business Typing at Bellwood High. “You should go back on your trip,” Bethie said.

Jo didn’t answer.

“I’ll pay you back,” said Bethie. Just like that, a plan was forming. “I’ll work at Hudson’s this semester. Mom can get me a job. I’ll earn enough money to give you back whatever it cost. You can go on your trip. You should go on your trip.” The image of Jo’s money in that awful woman’s hands, the idea of Jo missing out on her chance to escape, the chance she’d wanted so much and had worked so hard for, tore at Bethie’s heart. She could feel all her shame and sorrow gathering into a heavy knot at her center, an iron weight where her heart had once been.

“Don’t worry about it,” her sister said. “It turned out Shelley couldn’t come after all. So, you know, it wasn’t going to be what I’d thought.” She was staring at the road, not meeting Bethie’s eyes.

Bethie adjusted her grip on her purse, closing her eyes as her insides cramped. “Thank you,” she said when Jo had pulled into the driveway. “Thank you for everything.” She got out of the car, moving slowly, hunched over like Bubbe. It was the end of August, the air thick and humid and buzzing with the noises of lawn mowers and sprinklers and cicadas, those good, familiar summer sounds, beneath the wide, innocent Midwestern sky. Soon, school would begin. Kids would laugh and call in the early-morning light, mothers would pop their curlered heads out of front doors and yell at stragglers to hurry, or call kids back for homework and permission slips. Halloween would come, and costumed kids would knock on their door for candy. Then Thanksgiving, Chanukah, and Christmas. Snow would fall, snow would melt, grass would grow, be mowed, grow again. Mrs. Johnson across the street would bring over her squash and peppers and pumpkins, and Sarah would offer her roses and snapdragons and hydrangeas in return, and Bethie would always feel the way she was feeling, dirty and ashamed and unclean.

She went into the bedroom, pulled the shades to blot out the daylight, crawled into bed, and pulled her pillow over her head. She slept for an interval that could have been an hour, or eight hours, or a day. She woke, shuffled to the table, ate food she didn’t taste, slept again. One morning, Sarah appeared in the doorway. “Bethie, you have to get up. You’ve got an interview in Housewares at eleven.”

Bethie pulled herself out of bed, into the shower, and into the only dress she had that still fit, an old one of Jo’s, green polyester with long sleeves. She couldn’t fix her pasty complexion or the circles under her eyes, but she washed and set her hair, and put on lipstick and blush, and rode downtown with her mother, and promised the manager, one Mr. Breedlove, that she would work hard, and that she’d be grateful for the opportunity. When Mr.
Breedlove smiled at her with yellowed teeth and said, “Happy to have you on the team,” she felt a great weariness.
Time for another ride on the carousel
, she thought. Round and round again.

At lunch, Bethie ate cheeseburgers or fried chicken or the meatloaf special, while Terri and Marcy and Liz, the other girls on the floor, had salads or cottage cheese with pineapple. What was the point of watching her weight now? Once, she’d thought beauty was power, but now she could see that it was just trouble. A pretty face, a cute figure, a smile, all of those were weak spots. They were ways in, and Bethie wanted to be armored, defended, unbreakable. At home, she would poke and pick at her dinner, and when her mother and Jo were asleep, she’d pull ice cream out of the freezer, or a box of Bisquick from the pantry, add eggs and milk, and make pancakes, which she’d smear with margarine and douse with syrup and eat in big gobbling bites. The ice cream left her with headaches that made her feel like someone was driving an ice pick into her forehead, and the pancakes burned her tongue, and she knew that none of it was good for her, but she couldn’t stop. Food filled her and soothed her, and even feeling stuffed to the point of sickness, even getting sick, was better than feeling the shame, remembering the abortionist’s sneer as he told her to keep her legs together next time.

Another four bottles of Metrecal appeared in the pantry. Sarah began serving chef’s salads for dinner and Jo, who’d gotten a job teaching history at a middle school in Detroit, would try to get Bethie to go on walks with her, or on bike rides, or to hit tennis balls at the park. One morning at Hudson’s, Bethie’s old high school friend Laura Ochs walked right past her, on her way to the semi-annual White Sale, and didn’t even recognize her, and Bethie, her face burning with shame, locked herself in the break room for the twenty minutes she figured it would take Laura to buy discounted sheets or towels. She studied herself in the mirror. Her face was round and pale as the moon; her hair hung in lank strands against her cheeks. There were circles under her eyes, and her expression was exhausted, the look of a girl who knew that
things were bad and that they would never get better.