Vinegar Hill (13 page)

“So did James take off again today?” Barb says.

“Yes.”

Barb turns down the music. “Well?”

“Well what?”

“Doesn't it stink, him leaving you stuck with his parents like that?”

“I guess I've gotten used to it,” Ellen says, surprised.

“No you haven't,” Barb says. “No one gets used to anything, they just get numb. That's what's happened to you. You let him get away with anything he wants, him and his parents, too.”

Ellen sees a white flash of rage. “What?”

“Now, look,” Barb says, “we're friends, right? So I'm trying to help you stick up for yourself. Just because you married James doesn't give him the freedom to run your whole life.”

“Not in front of my children,” Ellen says, hating Barb fiercely.

“Oh, c'mon,” Barb says. “Kids know these things before the rest of us do.”

“No we don't,” says Amy.

“
I
take my marriage vows seriously, even if
some
people don't,” Ellen says; it slips out before she can stop herself.

Barb pulls over to the side of the road. Ellen wishes helplessly for another car to pass by, a deer to stray into the field, a dog to trot over from a nearby farm—anything to distract Barb, who wears the same look of fierce concentration she gets whenever she zeros in on a child's problem at school. Her teeth are sunk into her lower lip; her eyes are glittering, snake eyes. In another moment she will unhinge her jaws, swallow Ellen whole, crush her shell against her ribs, and digest whatever secrets spill out.

“This isn't the Dark Ages,” Barb says. “Women have choices. I don't care what a priest will tell you, you shouldn't have to stay with a man who's hurting you.”

“This is none of your business,” Ellen says. “Maybe you better just take me home.”

“I look at you and I see myself. You think it's going to get better somehow, but it won't. Baby, it just won't.”

“Stop it!”

“Sometimes marriages don't work out.”

“Take me home,” Ellen says.

“Sure,” Barb says. “Fine. Hide your head in the ground.” She pulls the keys out of the ignition, tosses them into Ellen's lap. “But you're going to drive.”

“I can't drive a car like this.”

“What do you mean,
a car like this
?”

“With gears.”

“You mean, you can't drive
stick
.”

Ellen glares at her.

Barb says, “Well, you're going to learn. When was the last time you did anything new, for Christ's sake?” She gets out of the car, walks around to Ellen's side. When Ellen doesn't move, she opens the door, pulls her out by the arm. The keys fall into the road and Ellen starts to hiccup. “Hold your breath,” Barb suggests, but Ellen can't stop. The hiccups are shrill, painful. She bends over, hands on her hips, trying to catch her breath. “I'll crash,” she says, her shoulders jerking. “I'll end up killing us all.”

“You wanted to kill me a second ago, didn't you?”

“I still do.”

“Drive,” Barb says, and she picks up the keys, presses them into Ellen's hand.

They stall out twice before Ellen gets the Camaro into gear.
“Push forward to find first,” Barb says, but the gearshift sneaks to the left and Ellen, still hiccuping, throws them into reverse. The Camaro scoots backward into the ditch, stalls again.

“I can't do this,” Ellen says.

The kids are holding each other's hands. “Don't flood it,” Barb says. “Go easy now,” and Ellen starts it up again, kicks up dust, then lurches onto the road.

“Use your clutch. Shift.
Shift
,” Barb says, and they almost stall but then they don't. Ellen peeks at the speedometer; they're steady at thirty miles an hour. She keeps both hands on the wheel. She hiccups, checking the rearview mirror, but there are no other cars in sight.

“I thought you wanted to go home,” Barb says after a while.

“I do.”

“You're going the wrong way.”

“I
know
that! I don't want to have to turn around.”

“You could turn around in a driveway somewhere.”

“No! There's not enough room.”

Barb turns up the radio again, settles back. “What are you going to do, then?”

“I'm going to turn around in the parking lot at the beach where I won't hit anything. Turn that noise off so I can think.”

“Do you think I'd let you drive my car if I thought you were going to wreck it?
You
turn down the music,” Barb says, but Ellen doesn't want to take her hands from the wheel. She hiccups three times in rapid succession. She has read in the
Guinness Book of World Records
about a man who hiccuped for seventeen years straight before he died, and she wonders if this is how something like that starts. Barb turns to the kids and says, “Your old ma's a pretty good driver, hm?”

Ellen checks the mirror again and sees the children look at each other as if they think both she and Barb are crazy.

Five miles and fifteen minutes later, Ellen coasts into the beach parking lot and the Camaro stalls again. Before she can start it up, Barb has the keys. She says, “Say, kiddos, why don't you play on the beach while your mom and me have a chat?”

They leave the car like sparks darting away from a fire. Amy yanks up Bert's hood before they walk down to the ice along the edge of the water. There they stand, shoulders touching, two small dark figures on a wide gray surface. “I'm sorry about what I said before,” Ellen says to Barb. “Hey, my hiccups stopped,” and she starts to cry. Barb passes her a tissue, another tissue, another. She strokes her hair. She finds a linty roll of Life Savers in the bottom of her purse and tries to get Ellen to take one. She offers Ellen blush, rouge, cherry-flavored Chap Stick. Green eye shadow. The blunt cap of an acorn. A pen. Ellen cries and cries.

“I just wanted you to talk to me,” Barb keeps saying. “I just wanted you to know that you're not all alone.”

 

That night, Amy takes Ellen by the hand and pulls her into the bedroom. Herbert is already in bed, his thumb wedged into his mouth. Ellen expects to be bombarded with questions:
Why did Barb say those things about Daddy? Why were you crying in the car?
But Amy closes the door behind them and puts her finger to her lips. “Shh,” she says. “Look what she gave me.”

She lifts her pillow and there is Mary-Margaret's piano-shaped bottle that used to stand beside the empty ballerina on the top bathroom shelf, the bottle Amy has always loved.

“She gave you this?” Ellen says.

“Can I hold it again?” Herbert says.

Amy picks it up and turns it over and over in her hands before handing it carefully to Herbert. Ellen listens to the musical flow of the perfume inside it.

“She said she didn't mean to hurt me,” Amy says. “She said I
could have bled to death and then it would be her fault. She said I could have
died
,” Amy says, and her eyes are huge.

“No one dies from a little cut, honey. Your grandma was just upset.”

“I know that,” Amy says. “It was really, really weird.” Herbert returns it and she tucks it back under her pillow. “You know,” she says, “I don't even want it now. I'm too old for it. I don't know what to do with it. And besides, she doesn't even like me.” She doesn't look at Ellen; Ellen feels her tense, as though she expects to be contradicted.

“But you're going to keep it,” Ellen says.

“Yes,” Amy says seriously. “I have decided to keep it.”

A
t night, when her hunger becomes tangible, thick and cold as iron in her gut, Salome dreams of a small house filled with many small doors. It is a cozy house strewn with hand-braided rugs. A fire burns in the fireplace; family pictures line the walls, and the solemn faces look familiar, although Salome can't place where she's seen them before. On the floor, two children, twin boys, play naked with their toes. Salome picks them up and walks from room to room, a baby clutched beneath each arm, calling out,
Is there anyone here?
She doesn't quite hear the sound of something pattering behind her. When she turns to look, it's too late: a wolf, yellow-eyed and icy-toothed, leaps out at her with the silence of a cloud, and in that silence Salome begins to run, scattering rugs and crashing into furniture, the babies banging her hips. She dashes through door after door, until she reaches the last one, which is locked. Then she falls on the babies and devours them herself—

The wolf disappears—

Salome swallows, blinks her yellow eyes—

She awakens with the taste of blood in her mouth; she has bitten
her lip again, the chapped flesh split pink. As she sits up, the odor of her body wafts from beneath the quilts. On New Year's Day she caught a bad cold and for months it has lingered in her chest and throat, the long ache of fever nesting in her limbs. Now, after walking to Mass in the morning, it is too much of an effort to bathe, to shop, to go to the Laundromat, to clean the gritty plates piled up in the sink. She turns on the light, and shadows scatter across the walls of her tiny apartment, slip away into the darkness through the single window overlooking the water treatment plant. There is no place lonelier than the night, even with the Lord keeping watch, even with His gift of dreams and the promise of His reward. She watches a mouse dart along the windowsill, dark eyes bulging velvet; she sings to it softly, an old lullaby of Mama's.

Braun' Kuh, schwarze Kuh, mach' die Augen zu
—

When Salome was twelve, she awoke in the night and knew something was very wrong. She lay perfectly still in the cold, dark room, feeling the warmth of Mary-Margaret's small body beside her own, listening to the ragged snores of her brothers in the room across the hall. Slowly, she moved her hand across her neck and shoulders, over her chest, and down toward the hot aching core of her belly. She rolled on her side and her thighs stuck together; the sheets were moist, and she recognized the smell of slaughter and sickness, of birth and death. She sat up, shivering as the air licked the tops of her arms, and she lit the candles on the nightstand. Shadows opened their eyes on the walls and stretched their long dark limbs. The shadow of the rocker by the window was a man; the shadow from the lip of the water pitcher was the sickle that he carried, and Salome believed Death had come for her.

When she pulled the Rosary from beneath her pillow, she saw the white sleeve of her nightgown was stained with blood. The blood was the color of pine pitch and it was everywhere, streaked on her thighs and hips, the sheets, her gown. Mary-Margaret
stirred sleepily and opened her eyes. When she saw Salome, she sat up too. Her shadow on the wall wavered beside the man, who stopped and let his sickle fall to his side.

“Get Ma,” Salome whispered, afraid to move.

Mary-Margaret looked at Salome's bloody lap and leaped out of the bed with a shriek. Her breath left a white twist hanging in the air. When she saw blood on her own gown, she screamed again, louder, dancing up and down on her small bare feet. The motion of her shadow consumed the ghost upon the wall, abandoning Salome and her shame to the world of living people, of fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, where no one ever forgets.

It was the boys who came into the bedroom first; they clogged the doorway with their tousled heads and wide-awake staring eyes. Mary-Margaret was sobbing, wiping at her gown with the washstand towel. “We should tell Ma,” one of the boys said, but Mama was already there, pushing them aside. Salome bent her head, waiting for Mama's sharp slap, for she knew by this time where the blood was coming from. But instead of hitting her, Mama poked her fingers into Salome's back and belly.

“Hurts here?” she said briskly. Her nightgown was sprinkled with small yellow flowers, each like an eye, harsh and accusing. Salome nodded.

“Anywhere else?”

When Salome shook her head, Mama leaped at the boys. “Out!” she told them. The boys slunk into the hallway, averting their eyes, for the voice Mama used was a familiar one. It was the voice that answered the indecent questions of the younger ones and scolded the impure thoughts that were written on the faces of the oldest. It was the voice that said,
You don't look at your sister that way
, and
You come away from that wash line
, and
You throw them drawings in the trash barrel
. The boys crept away to their beds without speaking and soon Salome stood numbly clean, lost in a fresh white
gown that belonged to Mama. Between her legs, thrusting forward like a pouch beneath her belly, was the cloth bundle Mama had given her. The bleeding would come back every month, God's curse upon all women since the time of sinful Eve. Mary-Margaret sat quietly in the rocking chair, still flushed from crying, dressed in a gown of cherry-colored wool that had belonged to Salome when she was just an innocent girl, not a grown woman like she was now.

“Wash your cloths in cold water,” Mama said as she finished making up the bed with fresh linens. “Let them soak in the covered bucket behind the backhouse.”

“Yes, Ma.”

“Don't talk about this to nobody. When you get like this, stay away from the boys.”

“Yes, Ma.”

“Mary-May, I hope you're listening. This'll happen to you someday, though I hope you'll be older than your sister here.”

“It will
never
happen to me,” Mary-Margaret said fiercely. “Do I still have to sleep next to her?”

“Silly little cricket,” Mama said, and she kissed Mary-Margaret affectionately. “Go to sleep quick and the angels will bring you good dreams.” She scooped Mary-Margaret up and plunked her into the bed, drawing the quilts up over her nose. “You too,” she said to Salome, and Salome lay down awkwardly, feeling the cloth bundle shift between her legs. She hesitated, then felt with her hand to make sure it was still in place. She did not know if it was wrong to touch herself that way or not. Mama pinched her cheek and blew out the candles. “Try not to think about it,” she said. As soon as she was gone, Mary-Margaret rolled as far away from Salome as she could get.

Sometimes at night, as they were falling asleep, Mary-Margaret played a game of make-believe, waving her small, ringed finger in the air as if it were a magic wand and everything she said would
come true. “Someday I'm going to live in my own house on the lake with a porch made out of stone. Guess how many horses I'll have?”

Then Salome had to guess, and she always guessed wrong, because Mary-Margaret changed her mind each time they played.

“Every day I will choose a different horse to ride, and some will be yellow and some will be green and some will be purple and some will be blue. In the afternoon I will practice on my own piano so big that I'll keep it in a special room. I'll travel all over the world and give concerts until I'm famous and rich. Guess how many dresses I'll have?”

And she would describe each of the dresses, one by one, using the beautiful words Mama taught her,
magenta, alabaster, incarnadine
, weaving them with her voice until Salome could see them hanging on hangers made of ivory, the smallness of Mary-Margaret's hands and waist, the lace twisted through Mary-Margaret's hair, and Salome would forget it was a sin to think that way, to be filled with pride and vanity, and she'd secretly imagine such dresses for herself, though she never said so aloud because she knew she was too plump and plain to wear such beautiful things.

But this night, Mary-Margaret said nothing. Salome thought she had fallen asleep when suddenly Mary-Margaret said, “When I'm grown up, I'm not going to bleed and stink up the bed with my smell.”

Salome closed her eyes, feeling the weight of the darkness on her eyelids.

“Nothing like this is ever going to happen to me,” Mary-Margaret said. “I'm going to be famous and rich. I'm going to travel all over the world. Say it,” Mary-Margaret said.

Salome said nothing.

“I will
never
be anything like you! Say it! Say it!”

Your sister isn't strong
, Mama always warned Salome, and
You mustn't upset your sister
. Salome helped Mary-Margaret with her simple house chores; she bathed her and dressed her and on Saturday mornings she wrapped her hair in rags so she would have curls for Sunday Mass. Mama had lost both girls born before Mary-Margaret, and Mary-Margaret herself had almost died several times.
Mary-May is a gift from God
, Mama liked to tell people.
God has spared her so many times I am convinced He has saved her for a special purpose in this world
.

“You will bleed between your legs just like me,” Salome said. “You will have babies and they'll hurt you, there, when they come out from inside you.”

Mary-Margaret reached across the space between their bodies. She pinched Salome's thigh as hard as she could, twisting the skin between her fingers. “Take it back!” she hissed, pinching and twisting. “Take it back!” but Salome would not. In the morning, Salome had a bruise that stretched down her thigh like a beautiful tapestry, swirls of magenta, alabaster, incarnadine. Her leg felt wooden when she walked. By the time the last trace of color had faded, it was late summer, August, the season of tornadoes. Mary-Margaret never touched Salome after that. Even today she is careful when she hands Salome a curler, a bobby pin, so that their fingers do not accidentally meet. Salome takes special care of Mary-Margaret's hair; she curls it, trims it, tints it the faintest shade of blue. Her fingers move by rote over the familiar landscape of her sister's scalp, wrapping each thin lock of hair into its own sweet nest. Her touch is brisk, certain, the touch of someone from whom there are no secrets. The touch of a confessor, or even a lover. A mother's touch.

 

Mama said Salome's dreams were the Devil's mark, but Salome knew they came from God because her dreams always spoke the
truth, and truth comes from Heaven alone. She had just turned thirteen when the dreams first came; on a sticky August night she dreamed God's fingers reached down from the sky and walked across the land. Winds blew and trees fell. A hollow roar swelled from within the earth, like the groan of an old and angry woman. Her brother Quinnie shook her awake.

“Tornado,” he shouted. “Get down cellar with the others. Don't you have a lick of sense?”

Mary-Margaret's side of the bed was empty, still faintly warm, musty sweet.
She could've woke me
, Salome thought.
But she left me here to die
. She lay motionless, feeling the weight of the hurt that swelled in her chest and stomach. She saw God's fingers whirling like dancers, picking her up lightly, carrying her away.

“Come on!” Quinnie screamed. “Wake up!” He shook Salome until she struggled out of the arms of the dream and followed him down into the cellar. The other boys were perched in a clump with Pa; Mary-Margaret sat holding her little gray cat in Mama's lap, wrapped in a blanket, her beautiful hair like yellow paint in the light of the lantern. The cellar was square and small, with a packed-dirt floor and crates stacked high for shelves. Three dead hens were strung from the low ceiling; another had fallen but no one moved to pick it up. Salome stepped over it carefully and crouched between the watermelons and the rough woven basket of eggs.

“You could've woke me,” she said to Mary-Margaret, but Mary-Margaret didn't open her eyes.

“She's just a little girl,” Mama said. “She was frightened, she didn't know better.”

“I could've got killed,” Salome whispered.

“Hush.”

“You better put out that light,” Pa said, and Mama snuffed their faces into darkness. Then there was only the sound of the thunder and wind, the smell of damp earth and the sauerkraut barrel. In the
brilliant eye of her mind Salome saw the window beside her bed burst into diamonds and knew that she would have died horribly had the Lord not chosen to spare her. She saw the dogs, huddled under the porch; the sheep matted together into one wide card of wool; the whites of the horses' eyes. She saw the trees Pa had planted for a windbreak bend over neatly, a row of tottering children touching their toes.

“We'll be lucky to keep the roof,” Mama said after a while.

“Our place will be fine,” Salome said without thinking. “But all that's left of Ubbinks's is the cellar hole.”

“The girl thinks she's a prophet,” Mama said, but in the morning they found the Ubbinks's had been blown clean away. The only thing ever recovered was the butter churn, which had landed in the schoolyard; when the children opened it, a small bird flew out and disappeared into the trees. One of the cows gave birth to dead triplet calves, each of them white with blood-pink eyes. A flock of starlings descended on the currants: too gut-swelled to fly, drunk on the fermenting juice, they skittered around the barnyard, frightening the horses, drowning in the water troughs. A distant cousin died; then a not-so-distant cousin. There were rumors of tuberculosis and Mama thumped their chests and hung garlic wrapped in burlap around their necks.

On the day the goats climbed the fence to get into the cabbage plot, Mama fixed her calculating gaze on Salome. “What have you done that the Devil finds you so interesting? You with your unholy dreams. All I need is my oldest gal running after some craziness in her head.”

“There's nothing in my head, Ma,” Salome said.