Vinegar Hill (12 page)

Last night, as she got into bed, she noticed her rosary on the nightstand. She picked it up and held the crucifix tightly in her hand, letting its sharp bones dig into her skin. James was already in bed, and, when she closed her eyes, still squeezing the crucifix, she did not think about how it would look to him, because she knew he would not notice. For years, she had looked at rosaries without thinking, but tonight, when she opened her eyes and looked into her palm, she saw not the crucifix but a man,
a dead man
, his face stretched in agony. A sudden feeling of nausea shook her; the rosary slithered away, falling to the floor with a clatter that made James turn his head. She saw herself as a young girl, lined up in church with Heidi and Julia, Mom and Gert, uncomfortable in her stiff black shoes and woolen stockings. It was Good Friday, and
they were waiting to kiss the feet of the huge crucifix Father Bork cradled as gently as an infant. The line moved jerkily, step by step. As people touched their lips to Christ's feet, the altar boy rubbed a white cloth dipped in alcohol over the painted pink flesh to kill the germs, although Mom had assured them that that wasn't even necessary: no germs could survive on blessed items. When Ellen's turn came, she froze, her lips already pursed, at the sight of those thick pink toes. She stared at the nail driven into His feet; blood oozed from the hole, and although Julia stood behind her whispering, “Kiss it! Kiss it!” Ellen could not. It was Father Bork who lifted those awful toes to her lips; Ellen herself never moved.

“What's wrong?” James said. His breath smelled of onions. She remembered how after they were first married he kept a tube of toothpaste beside the bed so his breath would be clean and sweet. At night, after he put out the light, Ellen waited eagerly for his hand to find her breast beneath the sheets. When he first realized how much she liked their sex, he'd laughed and shaken his head. Stunned, hurt, she grabbed her pillow and moved out to the couch; it was several weeks before she slept in his bed again. And after that, she always held back, unable to trust him fully, resenting how her new shyness seemed to excite him more. Now the thought of sex with him filled her with revulsion. She pointed at the crucifix that hung above the bed.

“Do you know what that is?” she said, and before he could answer, because she knew he would answer wrong, she said, “That's a dead man, James, a
corpse
.”

Kiss it! Kiss it!
Julia had said. Those thick pink toes.

James shrugged, rolled away.

“You think too much,” he said.

 

Saturday morning, Ellen gets up before dawn to help James pack. He is going to Minnesota this time, to a sellers' convention that will
last three days. He sits on the bed in his boxer shorts; she can feel him watching her as she moves around the dark room, filling the battered brown suitcase with his good pants, his casual pants, four crisp white shirts, socks, and underwear. He doesn't move to turn on a light and neither does she. She imagines that her back feels warm where he's been staring at it. A faint glow from the children's night-light in the hallway tinges the air like a scent.

“You better dress,” she finally says, wishing he were already gone. She no longer suggests that he look for a job with regular hours. He was home sick for four weeks in March, and his presence surrounded the house like a shroud. He sided with Mary-Margaret whenever she complained about Ellen's poor cooking, Ellen's wastefulness, the inadequate way Ellen ran the house. He fussed at the children. He brooded in front of the TV. Now that he's traveling again, Mary-Margaret is subdued. She eats Ellen's cooking with a sigh but nothing more. Afternoons she sleeps on the daybed while Fritz plays cards at Senior Citizens', and when she wakes up she takes too many of the small yellow pills she keeps in a mother-of-pearl pillbox.

Ellen has her own supply of pills, though she is careful to conceal them. After several months of insomnia, she went to Dr. Heich for a checkup. “You're fine,” he said in a way that let her know he wasn't really listening. Afterward, when she went to pay her bill, the receptionist handed her a prescription.

“Isn't this addictive?” Ellen asked.

“Doctor knows what he's doing,” the receptionist said sternly. “It's something to help you sleep.”

Now Ellen takes one every night, an hour before she goes to bed. Sometimes she takes an extra one because it doesn't seem like the first one is working, and she frequently takes one in the afternoon to smooth away what she feels when she thinks about going home, fixing dinner, cleaning up whatever mess Fritz and Mary-
Margaret have made during the day. Dr. Heich has extended her prescription; she may take up to four pills per day, as needed, and the new bottle allows three refills. She looks forward to each pill, the vague dizzy warmth that follows. She tries not to imagine saving them up, filling each new prescription until she has enough so she can swallow them all and completely disappear.

This morning, it is hard to keep her eyes open as she fingers James's clothes. She hears him stand up and begin to dress. When she turns to face him, he has put on his shirt; his arms and chest, which were invisible, glow white. It startles her briefly; he looks like a ghost. He says, “Do you believe that the Pope is never wrong?”

Ellen's thoughts have already drifted to the weather, because if today turns out nice, Barb will take her and the kids for a ride in the Camaro. Perhaps they'll drive up to Herring Bone Beach; the kids will amuse themselves finding gull feathers and driftwood while she sits with Barb on a flat, cold stone, bundled together in a blanket. James's question does not belong at the beach with the sound of the water, the weak gold sun, the throaty calls of the gulls.

“I don't know,” she says after a moment. The question doesn't seem real.

“I want to know what you think.”

“I'm not sure any of that stuff is true,” she hears herself say. She kneels on the suitcase, snaps the locks. James gets up and pulls on his trousers, and the sound of the zipper sends a chill up the back of her neck, it is so filled with rage. He says, “You shouldn't have said that.”

The darkness breathes between them.

He says, “The Pope knows what's best for the Church just like I know what's best for this family. Living with my parents makes the most sense, even if you don't like it.” He steps past her, picks up the suitcase, and carries it down the hall in his sock feet. Al
ways, Ellen has fixed him a hot bowl of oatmeal, followed him to the door, kissed him good-bye, and then lingered in the cold air to wave. In Illinois, she had eaten with him, watching carefully as he traced his route in red marker on the map.
By noon, I'll be to Watertown. By six, I'll be at the Holiday Inn in Westdale
. His face would be flushed, still sleepy, and she'd kiss beneath his chin to feel the roughness there, despite his fresh shave, and he'd tilt back his head because he liked that, liked her special way of kissing him. Now she can feel that he is waiting at the end of the hallway, thinking to himself,
In a minute she'll come
. Perhaps he is remembering those mornings, too, when he would lean his chin on her shoulder as she washed the breakfast dishes; she felt his breathing, sad and slow, and she'd pause with her hands in the soapy water, matching her breaths to his own. Although he never spoke of it, she knew how nervous he got before he traveled. She knew that as he stood there, his chin digging into her shoulder, he was telling himself who he was—the husband, the father, the man—and because his fear did not fit those roles it evaporated into the morning air.

But she had said,
I'm not sure any of that stuff is true
. Surely he can sense what this might mean. Like Heaven, he is part of the natural order of things, something not to be questioned. And like Heaven, he has become more distant, more unknowable; like God, James has been slipping away.

Ellen has tried to be more religious, to recapture what she used to feel when she prayed. Some days, even now, she gets up early and goes to Mass before work. The wooden pews hold her erect, at attention; the Host rises up above the altar and magic surrounds her like a damp cloud. Then she eats God, swallows Him into her, waits for him to fill her up like those nights after work when she buys candy bars in the teachers' lounge and eats them, all of them, one by one, that bright forbidden sweetness. She tries to feel the smugness of faith, to know she is important and that her life has
great, if hidden, meaning. But the more she has tried to claim God, the more He has rejected her. She wants to be lost in Him, but He vomits her out again and again, and each time He asks even more from her before He'll permit her return. She is proud, she is defiant, she is selfish, she is sinful. There is too much of Ellen in Ellen for God; she sticks in His throat like a bone. And perhaps James, too, finds her unpalatable, sour.
You should not have said that. You should not feel that. You should not be as you are
.

Across the hall, Fritz coughs in his sleep and begins to snore. It is growing light; James is no longer waiting. The front door opens, closes with a click. Even if she wanted to catch him, she could not, and reminding herself of that brings relief. She gets back into bed, settling into the still-warm sheets, and sleeps suddenly, soundly, completely, the way she did when she was a child. When she wakes up it is almost eight. The sun is a yellow slice beneath the curtains, and Herbert is tucked under her arm.

“You were
sleeping
,” he says in his funny way when he sees her eyes are open. His breath smells like peanuts. He sticks his thumb back into his mouth and sighs contentedly.

 

At breakfast, Mary-Margaret knocks the orange-juice pitcher to the floor. A piece of flying glass cuts Amy across the top of her bare foot, but no one notices this, not even Amy, until Ellen, on her hands and knees wiping up the mess, sees blood.

“Somebody needs a Band-Aid,” she announces cheerfully; although a vein of blood trails across the floor, she is hoping it's not as bad as it seems. The kids look down, checking themselves out. Mary-Margaret glances at Amy's foot and faints, clattering forward into her plate. It happens so suddenly that, for a moment, nobody moves.

“
Ach
,” Fritz says, “she always faints at blood. How 'bout you, missy? You gonna faint on us, too?”

Amy looks at him disdainfully. “It doesn't even hurt,” she says.

Ellen gets up and lifts Mary-Margaret by the shoulders, leaving damp marks on her pale pink bathrobe. Bits of stewed prune are smeared in Mary-Margaret's hair, and a bruise is forming on the bridge of her nose. A blue vein stiffens between her nose and upper lip.

“Is she dead?” Amy says, voicing Ellen's thought, but then Mary-Margaret opens her eyes.

“
Blut
,” she says, and as Fritz laughs, she begins to cry, horrible choking sobs. Between breaths, she speaks in German, slapping Ellen's hands away. Then she gets up and goes down the hallway toward the bathroom, patting the wall ahead of her as if she has forgotten the way.

“Never could stand the sight of blood.” Fritz chuckles, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “Good thing Jimmy ain't here or he'd keel right over with her.”

“I
like
blood,” Amy says firmly. Ellen washes her foot with witch hazel. The cut is deep but clean. She lets Amy bandage it herself while Herbert looks on, properly impressed.

“How come I never felt it?” Amy says.

“Stepped on a nail once, drove it into my foot,” Fritz says, “through my shoe right up between the bones. Now all day I thought to myself,
I got something in my shoe
, but you know, I was so durn busy, I couldn't be bothered to take a look. Come nightfall, I couldn't get my shoe off. I'd nailed my goddamn foot to my shoe.” He laughs, showing all six of his teeth, which are stained a cheerful gold.

“What happened?” Amy says cautiously.

“My foot turned black and dropped right off. That's why I got this here false one.”

“You have a false foot?” Herbert says while Amy rolls her eyes.

“No he doesn't,” she says.

“You don't?” Herbert says, and he looks from one to the other.

Fritz laughs and laughs. From the bathroom come the soft soft sounds of Mary-Margaret crying.

 

Barb stops by for Ellen and the kids in the afternoon. Ellen hears the horn in the driveway and scrambles the kids into their coats. Barb, like Ellen's mother, like Ellen's sisters, does not come inside.

On the way to Herring Bone Beach, Barb fiddles with the radio until she finds a Beatles song; she turns the volume way up. “I'm gonna clean out the gas line,” she shouts, accelerating past eighty. Ellen marvels at the way Barb can talk about car things like a man. Logically, she knows that most human beings can pick up a manual and learn about transmissions and carburetors, but to Ellen they sound like the names of foreign countries in which she would be terribly, hopelessly lost. As Holly's Field fades behind them, the blue shine of the lake stretches far and flat to their right. There are no islands, only water that lifts to meet the horizon, the precise seam concealed by mist. She stares out across the rich lake farms, the edges of the fields still trimmed with snow. Ring-billed gulls litter the darkest soil for warmth, heads pointed north toward the farm where James grew up. The barn burned mysteriously five years ago, and the old stone house stands alone beside the deep, blackened hole, without even a shade tree for comfort. As they pass by, a red-tailed hawk lifts away from a weathered fence post, its shadow floating over the highway.

“How beautiful,” Ellen says, but Barb hasn't seen it. Ellen glances back at the kids; they are both lost in the music booming from the speakers behind their ears, something with a steady, driving beat. James's departure seems like a dream, and she relaxes
deeper into her seat, enjoying the way Barb controls the car, speeding up at just the right moments as they fly through the curves by the old grain mill.