"But it"s the Yes that matters," Cal said. "It"s the Yes she"ll come back to in the end."
I lifted my head and squinted out at the bright blue plate of the sea--a bright blue plate with a dirty rim. A big round gray rock, like the upper half of an egg, poked out of the water about a mile from the stony headland.
"What was she going to kill him with? I forget."
I hadn"t forgotten. I remembered perfectly well, but I wanted to hear what Cal would say.
"Morphia powders."
"Do you suppose they have morphia powders in America?"
Cal considered a minute. Then he said, "I wouldn"t think so. They sound awfully old-fashioned."
I rolled over onto my stomach and squinted at the view in the other direction, toward Lynn. A gla.s.sy haze rippled up from the fires in the grills and the heat on the road, and through the haze, as through a curtain of clear water, I could make out a smudgy skyline of gas tanks and factory stacks and derricks and bridges.
It looked one h.e.l.l of a mess.
I rolled onto my back again and made my voice casual. "If you were going to kill yourself, how would you do it?"
Cal seemed pleased. "I"ve often thought of that. I"d blow my brains out with a gun."
I was disappointed. It was just like a man to do it with a gun. A fat chance I had of laying my hands on a gun. And even if I did, I wouldn"t have a clue as to what part of me to shoot at.
I"d already read in the papers about people who"d tried to shoot themselves, only they ended up shooting an important nerve and getting paralyzed, or blasting their face off, but being saved, by surgeons and a sort of miracle, from dying outright.
The risks of a gun seemed great.
"What kind of gun?"
"My father"s shotgun. He keeps it loaded. I"d just have to walk into his study one day and," Cal pointed a finger to his temple and made a comical, screwed-up face, "click!" He widened his pale gray eyes and looked at me.
"Does your father happen to live near Boston?" I asked idly.
"Nope. In Clacton-on-Sea. He"s English."
Jody and Mark ran up hand-in-hand, dripping and shaking off water drops like two loving puppies. I thought there would be too many people, so I stood up and pretended to yawn.
"I guess I"ll go for a swim."
Being with Jody and Mark and Cal was beginning to weigh on my nerves, like a dull wooden block on the strings of a piano. I was afraid that at any moment my control would snap, and I would start babbling about how I couldn"t read and couldn"t write and how I must be just about the only person who had stayed awake for a solid month without dropping dead of exhaustion.
A smoke seemed to be going up from my nerves like the smoke from the grills and the sun-saturated road. The whole landscape--beach and headland and sea and rock--quavered in front of my eyes like a stage backcloth.
I wondered at what point in s.p.a.ce the silly, sham blue of the sky turned black.
"You swim too, Cal."
Jody gave Cal a playful little push.
"Ohhh." Cal hid his face in the towel. "It"s too cold."
I started to walk toward the water.
Somehow, in the broad, shadowless light of noon, the water looked amiable and welcoming.
I thought drowning must be the kindest way to die, and burning the worst. Some of those babies in the jars that Buddy Willard showed me had gills, he said. They went through a stage where they were just like fish.
A little, rubbishy wavelet, full of candy wrappers and orange peel and seaweed, folded over my foot.
I heard the sand thud behind me, and Cal came up.
"Let"s swim to that rock out there." I pointed at it.
"Are you crazy? That"s a mile out."
"What are you?" I said. "Chicken?"
Cal took me by the elbow and jostled me into the water. When we were waist high, he pushed me under. I surfaced, splashing, my eyes seared with salt. Underneath, the water was green and semi-opaque as a hunk of quartz.
I started to swim, a modified dogpaddle, keeping my face toward the rock. Cal did a slow crawl. After a while he put his head up and treaded water.
"Can"t make it." He was panting heavily.
"Okay. You go back."
I thought I would swim out until I was too tired to swim back. As I paddled on, my heartbeat boomed like a dull motor ill my ears.
I am I am I am.
That morning I had tried to hang myself.
I had taken the silk cord of my mother"s yellow bathrobe as soon as she left for work, and, in the amber shade of the bedroom, fashioned it into a knot that slipped up and down on itself. It took me a long time to do this, because I was poor at knots and had no idea how to make a proper one.
Then I hunted around for a place to attach the rope.
The trouble was, our house had the wrong kind of ceilings. The ceilings were low, white and smoothly plastered, without a light fixture or a wood beam in sight. I thought with longing of the house my grandmother had before she sold it to come and live with us, and then with my Aunt Libby.
My grandmother"s house was built in the fine, nineteenth-century style, with lofty rooms and st.u.r.dy chandelier brackets and high closets with stout rails across them, and an attic where n.o.body ever went, full of trunks and parrot cages and dressmakers" dummies and overhead beams thick as a ship"s timbers.
But it was an old house, and she"d sold it, and I didn"t know anybody else with a house like that.
After a discouraging time of walking about with the silk cord dangling from my neck like a yellow cat"s tail and finding no place to fasten it, I sat on the edge of my mother"s bed and tried pulling the cord tight.
But each time I would get the cord so tight I could feel a rushing in my ears and a flush of blood in my face, my hands would weaken and let go, and I would be all right again.
Then I saw that my body had all sorts of little tricks, such as making my hands go limp at the crucial second, which would save it, time and again, whereas if I had the whole say, I would be dead in a flash.
I would simply have to ambush it with whatever sense I had left, or it would trap me in its stupid cage for fifty years without any sense at all. And when people found out my mind had gone, as they would have to, sooner or later, in spite of my mother"s guarded tongue, they would persuade her to put me into an asylum where I could be cured.
Only my case was incurable.
I had bought a few paperbacks on abnormal psychology at the drugstore and compared my symptoms with the symptoms in the books, and sure enough, my symptoms tallied with the most hopeless cases.
The only thing I could read, besides the scandal sheets, were those abnormal-psychology books. It was as if some slim opening had been left, so I could learn all I needed to know about my case to end it in the proper way.
I wondered, after the hanging fiasco, if I shouldn"t just give it up and turn myself over to the doctors, and then I remembered Doctor Gordon and his private shock machine. Once I was locked up they could use that on me all the time.
And I thought of how my mother and brother and friends would visit me, day after day, hoping I would be better. Then their visits would slacken off, and they would give up hope. They would grow old. They would forget me.
They would be poor, too.
They would want me to have the best of care at first, so they would sink all their money in a private hospital like Doctor Gordon"s. Finally, when the money was used up, I would be moved to a state hospital, with hundreds of people like me, in a big cage in the bas.e.m.e.nt.
The more hopeless you were, the further away they hid you.
Cal had turned around and was swimming in.
As I watched, he dragged himself slowly out of the neck-deep sea. Against the khaki-colored sand and the green sh.o.r.e wavelets, his body was bisected for a moment, like a white worm. Then it crawled completely out of the green and onto the khaki and lost itself among dozens and dozens of other worms that were wriggling or just lolling about between the sea and the sky.
I paddled my hands in the water and kicked my feet. The egg-shaped rock didn"t seem to be any nearer than it had been when Cal and I had looked at it from the sh.o.r.e.
Then I saw it would be pointless to swim as far as the rock, because my body would take that excuse to climb out and lie in the sun, gathering strength to swim back.
The only thing to do was to drown myself then and there.
So I stopped.
I brought my hands to my breast, ducked my head, and dived, using my hands to push the water aside. The water pressed in on my eardrums and on my heart. I fanned myself down, but before I knew where I was, the water had spat me up into the SWl, the world was sparkling all about me like blue and green and yellow semi-precious stones.
I dashed the water from my eyes.
I was panting, as after a strenuous exertion, but floating, without effort.
I dived, and dived again, and each time popped up like a cork.
The gray rock mocked me, bobbing on the water easy as a lifebuoy.
I knew when I was beaten.
I turned back.
The flowers nodded like bright, knowledgeable children as I trundled them down the hall.
I felt silly in my sage-green volunteer"s uniform, and superfluous, unlike the white-uniformed doctors and nurses, or even the brown-uniformed scrubwomen with their mops and their buckets of grimy water, who pa.s.sed me without a word.
If I had been getting paid, no matter how little, I could at least count this a proper job, but all I got for a morning of pushing round magazines and candy and flowers was a free lunch.
My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you, so Teresa had arranged for me to sign on as a volunteer at our local hospital. It was difficult to be a volunteer at this hospital, because that"s what all the Junior League women wanted to do, but luckily for me, a lot of them were away on vacation.
I had hoped they would send me to a ward with some really gruesome cases, who would see through my numb, dumb face to how I meant well, and be grateful. But the head of the volunteers, a society lady at our church, took one look at me and said, "You"re on maternity."
So I rode the elevator up three flights to the maternity ward and reported to the head nurse. She gave me the trolley of flowers. I was supposed to put the right vases at the right beds in the right rooms.
But before I came to the door of the first room I noticed that a lot of the flowers were droopy and brown at the edges. I thought it would be discouraging for a woman who"d just had a baby to see somebody plonk down a big bouquet of dead flowers in front of her, so I steered the trolley to a washbasin in an alcove in the hall and began to pick out all the flowers that were dead.
Then I picked out all those that were dying.
There was no wastebasket in sight, so I crumbled the flowers up and laid them in the deep white basin. The basin felt cold as a tomb. I smiled. This must be how they laid the bodies away in the hospital morgue. My gesture, in its small way, echoed the larger gesture of the doctors and nurses.
I swung the door of the first room open and walked in, dragging my trolley. A couple of nurses jumped up, and I had a confused impression of shelves and medicine cabinets.
"What do you want?" one of the nurses demanded sternly. I couldn"t tell one from the other, they all looked just alike.
"I"m taking the flowers around."
The nurse who had spoken put a hand on my shoulder and led me out of the room, maneuvering the trolley with her free, expert hand. She flung open the swinging doors of the room next to that one and bowed me in. Then she disappeared.
I could hear giggles in the distance till a door shut and cut them off.
There were six beds in the room, and each bed had a woman in it. The women were all sitting up and knitting or riffling through magazines or putting their hair in pin curls and chattering like parrots in a parrot house.
I had thought they would be sleeping, or lying quiet and pale, so I could tiptoe round without any trouble and match the bed numbers to the numbers inked on adhesive tape on the vases, but before I had a chance to get my bearings, a bright, jazzy blonde with a sharp, triangular face beckoned to me.
I approached her, leaving the trolley in the middle of the floor, but then she made an impatient gesture, and I saw she wanted me to bring the trolley too.
I wheeled the trolley over to her bedside with a helpful smile.
"Hey, where"s my larkspur?" A large, flabby lady from across the ward raked me with an eagle eye.
The sharp-faced blonde bent over the trolley. "Here are my yellow roses," she said, "but they"re all mixed up with some lousy iris."
Other voices joined the voices of the first two women. They sounded cross and loud and full of complaint.
I was opening my mouth to explain that I had thrown a bunch of dead larkspur in the sink, and that some of the vases I had weeded out looked skimpy, there were so few flowers left, so I had joined a few of the bouquets together to fill them out, when the swinging door flew open and a nurse stalked in to see what the commotion was.
"Listen, nurse, I had this big bunch of larkspur Larry brought last night."
"She"s loused up my yellow roses."
Unb.u.t.toning the green uniform as I ran, I stuffed it, in pa.s.sing, into the washbasin with the rubbish of dead flowers. Then I took the deserted side steps down to the street two at a time, without meeting another soul.
"Which way is the graveyard?"
The Italian in the black leather jacket stopped and pointed down an alley behind the white Methodist church. I remembered the Methodist church. I had been a Methodist for the first nine years of my life, before my father died and we moved and turned Unitarian.
My mother had been a Catholic before she was a Methodist. My grandmother and my grandfather and my Aunt Libby were all still Catholics. My Aunt Libby had broken away from the Catholic Church at the same time my mother did, but then she"d fallen in love with an Italian Catholic, so she"d gone back again.
Lately I had considered going into the Catholic Church myself. I knew that Catholics thought killing yourself was an awful sin. But perhaps, if this was so, they might have a good way to persuade me out of it.