Slut Lullabies (18 page)

Things progress quickly. Within several weeks, Sloane has broken most of his mother's china collection, and Violet and Tamara both have bruises on their legs. Victoria writes them notes to excuse them from gym class, relieved that they are not at the same school so that no one will become suspicious. She is confused by this new recklessness; he has only broken her things in the past. She calls up his psychiatrist on the sly and says even the Lithium isn't working anymore. He says he will call Sloane to request a “routine” check-in, but that he can't fit him in until next week.

At La Petite Ecole nursery school, Rose falls behind in planning this year's benefit, because all Victoria does is cry about her fear of poverty should she snap and resort to a divorce. Victoria gives her a key to the school so she can work late typing up invites and lock up when she is done.

In the week before Sloane's appointment with his psychiatrist, Victoria's dreams return for the first time since her daughters were born. Now, though, it is Sloane's hand between her legs in the bushes, Sloane's tongue in her mouth on the doorstep. Sloane in the hospital with gangrene infected legs, diabetic and near death. She signs the papers to amputate, then leaves without seeing him, the doctor calling after her, “He's your father, he's asking for you, he's your father,” and her laughing in the rain, her raincoat blowing maniacally around, thinking,
No, you fool, get it right, he's my husband
. Once, Sloane's face turns into Ned's, and she wakes up sweating and with a pounding heart. Two nights pass before she can sleep again.

When he is calm, he puts his head on her breast and cries. Whispers, “I'm so sorry, I promised myself I'd never act like this, my poor mother would turn over in her grave if she could see me, just like him.” Victoria holds him tight, says, “It's all right, you just need a change in meds. You're not like your father; you're not.” But sometimes no sooner than the words are out, he is already restless, bounding up and pacing the room, and she can see the frantic energy rising in him, pain and anger building at the surface of his skin and clawing to get out. She leaves him with the kids, even though she knows she shouldn't, and retreats to the room that used to be his study, where he never goes anymore since he can't stand to be alone. Amid the mahogany wood smell, she sits in the dark looking at old photographs of summers on the Cape. Summers still years away from illness, back when Sloane's occasional bouts of depression endeared him to her, brought out her motherly instincts and made her feel she was married to somebody deep. In one photo Sloane is alone, grinning in front of a seafood restaurant with prices so low they wanted to show their friends the menu. “A whole lobster for seven bucks,” Sloane boomed after she'd snapped the picture, slinging his arm around her, the chilly wind from the sea in their faces. “Tell me the truth, will you, sweetheart? I mean, it doesn't get any better than this.”

Six months go by, or maybe it is a year. The outbursts grow worse so that Victoria and Sloane can no longer even
attend
cocktail parties or charity balls. Victoria would not want to go now anyway, since she has gained twenty-two pounds and none of her gowns fit. Tamara, too, has gained weight, and this distresses Victoria more than her own weight gain. She decides that divorce is impossible until Tamara takes off the weight—her daughter will never make a good marriage if she is both poor and fat. Rose tells her if she would just leave Sloane, she and Tamara would probably both lose weight right away. Victoria says, “Sure, the poverty diet,” and laughs. She has started to think more about Sloane's father, who checked out by his own hand when Sloane was twenty-two. With some of the remnants of what Sloane saved before losing his job last spring, she takes out a larger life insurance policy on him—in case he still has enough presence of mind to consider what is best for his family. And to do it in a way that nobody would catch on.

Finally, Dr. Fairley says, “Huntington's Disease. It is probably what his father had, too. I'm surprised his psychiatrist didn't order tests long ago.” Victoria sits staring down at her Pierre Deux bag. She says, “I adopted a son who turned out to be mildly retarded. I can't possibly have a husband with a terminal disease, too.” Dr. Fairley says, “Ned is a good boy, Victoria.” Victoria says, “He eats like a rabid horse. Sloane hasn't made any money in a year, and now you tell me I'll be supporting Ned alone for the rest of my life. Don't tell me what a good boy he is!” Dr. Fairley clears his throat, the way doctors do, the way her father's doctor did. “The girls,” he says. “You'll have to have them tested. Ned's OK because it's hereditary, but Violet and Tamara will need to be tested.” Victoria stares at her purse, crying softly, until Dr. Fairley begins to rustle some papers around on his desk. Then she looks up, says, “You son of a bitch,” and leaves.

In the wake of the diagnosis, there are many things to do. There is the psychiatrist to sue and nursing homes to look into (but they are too expensive) and a full-time “keeper” to hire to keep Sloane from going after Violet, who he is jealous of for being the youngest and having more of Victoria's attention. He is always either clingy or violent now, crying in bed and getting confused, forgetting where things are and how to use them. She comes home one day to find him cooking creamed corn in a skillet filled with olive oil. Dr. Fairley says this is only the beginning.

The keeper is a Polish doctor who is unable to practice medicine in the United States. He is a few years younger than Victoria and quite handsome. “He is not, however,” Victoria tells Rose the day after hiring him, “exactly the strong arm of authority I had been hoping for.”

“What do you mean?” Rose says. So Victoria tells her about how, for their first outing, they took Sloane to Ben & Jerry's for ice cream, and Sloane escaped from the car and went running down the street hollering until the Polish doctor and Victoria caught up with him and dragged him forcibly back to the still-running Volvo that fortunately no one had stolen. “Even after all that, though, he still left Sloane unattended so he could walk to my side of the car and open my door. Thanks to his Old World manners, we spent another fifteen minutes chasing Sloane through a maze of Rollerbladers. It was like a scene from
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
.”

“Maybe when Sloane kicks the bucket you should marry that Polish doctor,” Rose says. “God knows you could use a gentleman.”

Victoria smiles, but secretly she is offended. The Polish doctor has no money, and he smells like cabbage soup. “I don't think so,” she says. “He's sweet, but he's not like us, if you know what I mean.”

That night, Rose stays at the school until eight thirty, typing the applications for next year into the computer. Victoria, not wanting to be seen in public unescorted, forgoes a cocktail party at The Drake Hotel and sits at home on an antique settee, watching the news until she falls asleep.

On advice from Dr. Fairley, Victoria goes to see a counselor. The woman is young and black and wears a long, gypsy skirt and dangly turquoise earrings. Victoria says, “You see, I asked Dr. Fairley for sleeping pills, but he thought I should come see you instead, because of the stress of my husband's illness. All I really want, though, is to be able to sleep. I've been having nightmares about my father. Dr. Fairley thinks they must be due to all the pressure I'm under.”

The counselor says, “Why don't you tell me about your nightmares?” Victoria looks over her head at a Monet print on the pink wall and pretends not to hear her. Finally, she says, “My parents got divorced when I was very young, but I still saw my father through my teen years. When I was about twelve, he started to do strange things like putting his tongue in my mouth when he kissed me good-bye. He said, ‘Now that you are growing up, I will give you a grown-up kiss.' I didn't like it, of course, but I never told my mother. Basically, that's all the dreams are about. I don't see why I should be having them all the time now.”

The counselor writes things down while Victoria speaks. When she is finished writing, she says, “So how long did your father sexually abuse you?” Victoria jumps a little in her chair. The image of her father leading her to the bushes fills her mind. His hand moving up under her skirt, pulling her panties down around her thighs while she stood upright. The first time Sloane touched her there, she had said, “I don't want you to do that anymore with your fingers. I don't like it.” They weren't even engaged yet, and she was worried Sloane would be annoyed, not want to see her anymore. But he proposed only a few weeks later. The subject never came up again.

Victoria looks at the counselor and says, “My father died when I was twenty-one. He was a diabetic and he drank too much. His legs were amputated—I had to sign the permission slips. He died in less than a month. I don't think he wanted to live.” She pauses. “When Sloane and I met two years later, our fathers were both dead. It drew us together. A common sense of loss or something like that. Though neither of us liked our fathers much.”

The counselor says, “Let's not talk about your husband just yet. Tell me more about what it was like for you growing up.”

Victoria squirms in her Laura Ashley dress. She is itchy beneath her floral-patterned arms. A sudden curiosity about the counselor's past pops into her mind, and she cannot get it out. She imagines her like a character Diana Ross might have played in a 1970s movie: struggling her way out of the ghetto to become a success. She does not want to talk about her childhood to this movie heroine, does not want to tell her about the apples she and her sister spent hours digging worms out of after Goodwill dropped them off, or about the free milk she received at school because she was so pale and thin. She would like to make a joke about her father pouring his family into the car in the middle of the night to drive for hours to the horse races in the next state, but she doesn't know what to say to make that memory funny, and she knows the counselor would not laugh. She smoothes out her skirt and says, “I had a pretty uneventful childhood. We had some financial troubles until my mother remarried when I was thirteen. After I married Sloane, I didn't think I'd ever have to worry about money again, but since he's been sick, it's all I think about.”

“Except your father,” the counselor says.

“No,” Victoria says, her voice surprisingly hard. “I do not
think
about my father, I dream about him. And I fail to see how talking about that will in any way alleviate my very realistic fear of bankruptcy now. Will talking about my father ensure that neither of my daughters is carrying the gene for Huntington's Disease? Will it make sure that they live to give me grandchildren?”

The counselor says, “It's interesting that your fear of your daughters' possible illness manifests as a fear of being deprived of grandchildren. Can you say more about that?”

Victoria sighs. By her watch, she has forty minutes left. She crosses her legs, but they have grown too thick, and she uncrosses them again.

“Yes,” she says, and for some reason begins to giggle. “You see, I'm a very selfish person. I don't care about anything but myself.” The laughter attacks like bubbles rising to the surface of the cherry sodas she drank at the dime store as a girl, ordered with the grilled cheese sandwiches that she ate in order to be like Heidi, who ate toasted cheese in the Alps. The counselor looks at her curiously, then uncomfortably, but it is too late. By now, she is pounding on the couch choking out the words, “Grandfather, Grandfather,” thinking of her crush on Peter the sheepherder, thinking she may wet her pants. Sloane is at home railing at the Polish doctor; her daughters may be carrying a gene that will stop their lives short; her adopted son has failed out of yet another allegedly “lenient” trade school that might have given him some hope of a job. At La Petite Ecole, the phones ring off the hook with irate parents who are trying to reach her. Rose fends them off saying, “Mrs. Fenton is attending to personal business today.” Victoria clutches her stomach, tears running down her face, but no matter how much it hurts, she cannot stop laughing.

The pounding on the closet door fills her young ears. Victoria leans against the wood yelling, “Mommy, Mommy!” The sound of his hand follows, making contact with her mother's body, slamming her head into the door. Victoria struggles with the handle, but she is locked in, the closet both a prison and a refuge from what is going on outside. Her mother is whining now, sounding like the dog when it is left out on the back porch in the rain, whimpering and scratching at the door. Victoria huddles into a ball as though the scratching of her mother can hurt her. She listens to the thuds, crying, her fist shoved in her mouth to stay quiet. Later, he will eat Limburger cheese and pumpernickel bread and offer her a boiled potato. The closet smells like the cheese, and she eats, fast, fast, trying to swallow the smell. Hands grab her suddenly, and she screams.

“Mom.” It is Ned, crawling into the bed, pushing his face up against her bosom. “Daddy's in my bed. I can't make him leave.”

Tamara stands at the door, her once lithe frame blocking the light from the hallway. Her pale blue eyes seem to glow in the dark.

“It's him or us,” Tamara says. “Choose.”

Victoria wakes with a start. Next to her, Sloane is twitching in his sleep, like he did the first year that they were married. She strokes his back until he stops.

The house in Wisconsin is on the market for less than three weeks before it sells at full asking price. Victoria had undervalued it for fear of not finding a buyer, the bill for Sloane's first month in the nursing home hanging over her head. Once again there is money to play with, and she and the girls go shopping, but both Victoria and Tamara are too heavy now to be enthusiastic about their appearance, and Violet is too young to care about clothes. They go home in defeat.