Alice Sebold Read online

  I made no noise. I could feel the soapy water seep from the sponge and roll down my arm from wrist to elbow. The small splash of a drop back into the old sick bowl was like a bomb exploding in an open field.

  The knocker sounded again. This time there was a rhythm to it, like a friendly, half-familiar song.

  In the silence that followed, I was aware of my muscles as I sometimes was when modeling. To hold a pose for a long time, the body had to work its way into stillness—it couldn’t be frozen suddenly and kept that way. I tried, as I sensed the person standing on the other side of the door, to imagine myself at Westmore, on top of the art studio’s carpeted platforms. My toes burrowed into the mottled brown shag while my elbows, long since inured to carpet burns, supported me.

  Again the knocker sounded. Again the happy tune. It was “shave and a haircut, two bits,” but this time it was followed by an insistent bang, bang, bang.

  I realized whoever it was had been giving my mother time to get to the door between knocks one and two, and even between knocks two and three. It was late, after all. She was an old woman. I stared down at her. She could be sleeping with her gown pushed up around her hips.

  “Mrs. Knightly?”

  It was Mrs. Castle.

  “Mrs. Knightly, it’s Hilda Castle. Are you in there?”

  Where else would she be? I thought with annoyance. She’s lying on her kitchen floor. Go away!

  Then I heard a rattling on the front window in the living room. The noise of her heavy platinum wedding band against the glass. I had asked her once why she continued wearing it after her divorce. “It reminds me not to remarry,” she said.

  Only when I heard her voice—a loud whisper—did I realize she had pushed the window open from the outside.

  “Helen,” she whispered loudly. “Helen, can you hear me?”

  Bitch! I immediately thought in solidarity with my mother. What right had she to lift the window sash?

  “I know you’re here,” she whispered. “I see your car.”

  How very Lord Peter Wimsey of you, I thought.

  But my muscles relaxed as I heard the window closing. A few seconds later, I heard Mrs. Castle regain the concrete pathway. I looked at my mother’s feet and legs.

  “What did you have to give away to her?” I asked. I wasn’t thinking of possessions but of the privacy that had always been so precious to my mother. That she had exchanged for the security of Mrs. Castle’s daily visit.

  I knew that Mrs. Castle would be back in the morning. I knew it as surely as her whispers had caught at my ankles like ropes.

  It was obvious that I needed help. I got up slowly and stepped over my mother’s body to the phone. I breathed in and closed my eyes. I could see, projected, a reel of film in which the sped-up figures of neighbors and police all clambered into the house. There would be so many of them that they would get stuck in the doors and windows, their limbs jutting out in bent, awkward poses like a group of Martha Graham dancers, only squished together by doorjamb and window sash, and dressed in uniforms or perma-creased tweeds.

  I have never liked the phone. Ten years ago, during a misguided fit of self-improvement, I pasted smiley-face stickers on the phone in my bedroom and on the one in the kitchen. Then I typed out two labels and taped them to the handsets. “It’s an opportunity, not an attack,” they read.

  The last address I had for Jake was at a college in Bern, Switzerland, but that had been a temporary teaching post at least three years ago. The easiest way to find Jake was to follow his former students, his acolytes, his day laborers, his worshippers. I knew it might take hours, but I also knew Jake was my only hope. A body changed rapidly even in the span of a cool October evening, and I could not dispose of my mother by myself.

  I hovered near the phone for what seemed like thirty minutes before I picked it up. Knightlys never called for help, and Corbins, my mother’s blood, would rather use forks to stab out their throats. We dealt with things in private. We cut off our fingers and feet—our hands, our legs, and our lives—but we did not, no matter what, ask for help. Need was like a weed, a virus, a mold. Once you admitted to it, it spread and ruled.

  As I lifted the receiver, I could feel myself as a little girl again, walking into the snow and disappearing, lying down in a giant snowdrift and listening to my mother and father calling for me—liking the sensation as I began to freeze.

  FOUR

  I was eighteen and in my freshman year of college when I met Jake. He was twenty-seven and the teacher of my art history class.

  He could pinpoint the moment, he said, when his heart started helplessly charting a course to my groin.

  He had been lecturing on Caravaggio and the idea of lost work when he turned from the board and saw me fumbling with my new glasses. I handled their gold-wire rims like I might a praying mantis, they seemed so strange and delicate to me.

  “That night, I dreamed about you. I came into my bedroom, and you were sitting up, reading, with your gold-wire glasses on and all that long black hair. When I reached out for you in the dream, you disappeared.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, squeezed tightly beside him in the twin bed of my dorm room.

  “Then this dog, whom I named Tank and whom my parents wouldn’t let me keep, replaced you.”

  “Woof!” I said.

  But I did not know about his dreams until after I’d first posed for him.

  I remember the pink wool dress I wore and how soft the mohair felt against my skin. I had dressed up in my best outfit only to go to a room in the art building that smelled of burning coils from an old space heater, and take it off again. Eventually, my camisole and half-slip ended up in Jake’s hands as he helped me dress so we could return to my dorm and undress yet again. His fingers, wide like spatulas, were capable of incredible delicacy, but when he held out the satin camisole and slip, they seemed strangely alien to me—the chewed ends of his fingernails, blackened with charcoal and paint, looked harsh against the lace trim I had coveted in Marshall Field’s. This was the image I often connected with the loss of my virginity.

  When it was time to paint Emily’s first bedroom, Jake remembered the donkey that his grandfather had painted on the wall of his own childhood room. Riding on the donkey was a swarthy-looking man with crude features, and strapped over the animal’s back was a large double basket that held flowers. What Jake remembered was the fact that, despite the bit in its mouth, the donkey seemed to be smiling, its eye closed in a sort of wakeful sleep.

  While Emily lay curled inside me, occasionally kicking, he made the initial steps for the painting—sketching on the walls with charcoal. We had yet to get married and refused to admit that we both secretly worried to do so might be a mistake.

  “They say that large, colorful shapes are best,” I instructed Jake. “They stimulate the infant brain but don’t overtax it.”

  Jake had dragged our mattress to the middle of the floor so I could lie there and expound such theories while he drew. He had become obsessed with the size of my belly—how Emily announced her presence, inch by inch.

  “Total power,” he said when he put his hand against me. “And it isn’t even here yet. Sometimes I think it’s mocking us.”

  “It is,” I said matter-of-factly. “Rounded edges are soothing to baby,” I read aloud from a book Mr. Forrest had sent.

  “Why are we suddenly following rules?” Jake asked.

  “Okay,” I said, throwing the book on the floor, where it slid a few feet and then stopped. “Jagged edges make baby happy.”

  “That’s the spirit.”

  “Knives and guns and depictions of brutality lead baby into the land of nod.”

  Jake came over to the mattress and joined me.

  “Lizzie Borden is a favorite cartoon character for baby. Why not make baby happy and draw her covered in blood?”

  “Keep going,” he said.

  “Pad baby’s walls, if needed. Chintz is always nice. And nails. Lots of them.”

&nb
sp; “I want to fuck you,” Jake said.

  “Draw.”

  After we married, in that brief time when I pretended I liked to cook, I would cut the white fat off a slippery chicken breast and spread the flesh out flat on the broiler pan, only to imagine holding my mother’s heart. Then I would stare out the window of the house we rented in Madison and see the cars lined up at the traffic light, leading away from campus like humming corpuscles lined up in an artery. It was all I could do to get my mind back and slide the broiler into the oven, knowing that one of the cars on its way to temporary faculty housing contained my husband and that he was coming home.

  I was always careful to wash the knife and the cutting board and to hold my hands underwater until they ached red from the heat, so fearful was I of poisoning Jake or of accidentally touching the rim of Emily’s baby bottle or blue applesauce bowl.

  After I was sure I had washed every utensil and dried it, and the smells of whatever spices I’d culled from the full professor’s wife who took pity on us had begun to fill the kitchen, I would have my reward and go into Emily’s room. There, I would sit and wait for my new family to come alive when Jake walked in. Emily would be in her crib, facedown in the dead man’s pose she most preferred, her diaper peeking up in back like a badly made paper hat. It was in that silence that I relaxed the most, in the short interval between baby sleeping and husband arriving, when I had finished, to the best of my ability, the wifely tasks. School itself seemed far away by then, the diploma I hadn’t earned something I would never care about.

  I dialed the phone with my back to my mother’s body. For some reason I felt disloyal to her. I worried, if I were to turn, that her corpse would be sitting up and raging at me while pulling her skirt back down.

  I had read in the paper that Avery Banks, one of the last of Jake’s graduate assistants at U–Mad, was now an associate professor of sculpture at Tyler in Philadelphia. I racked my brain for the town the article had said he and his wife bought a house in. He had two children—daughters, I remembered—but in order to find him, I was going to have to engage in random-patterned directory-assistance hell. I called information three times. Finally, in Germantown, there was a listing.

  “Is this Avery Banks?” I said when a voice greeted me.

  “Who may I say is calling?”

  “Helen Knightly,” I said. I took my finger and lightly touched the numbers on the phone’s base, counting inside my head to calm myself.

  “I don’t know a Helen Knightly,” he said.

  “So this is Avery then?”

  He was silent.

  “You knew me as Helen Trevor, Jake Trevor’s wife.”

  “Helen?”

  “Yes.”

  “Helen, it’s so good to hear from you. How are you?”

  “I need to eat,” I said. In the hours since I had come over to my mother’s and killed her, I hadn’t eaten anything.

  “Are you all right, Helen?” he asked. I imagined him standing by his phone with a ski mask on. Avery had favored full-body coverage when he went out in the cold with Jake.

  “Something’s gone wrong,” I said. I could feel my desire to collapse, to blurt out to someone what I had done, where I was, what lay behind me on the floor. “Hold on a minute, Avery.”

  I turned sharply around, set the receiver on the taped-up high chair, and walked to my mother’s body. I was relieved to find that she didn’t move. Not even a twitch. I walked back to the phone and turned on the overhead light before picking the receiver back up. Mrs. Leverton would be sleeping now. I needed the chastening effect of the light switched on. As the fluorescent halo buzzed to life above my mother’s head, I breathed in deeply and took control. I did not want him to hear so much as a quaver in my voice.

  “I need to get in touch with Jake,” I said.

  “I haven’t talked to him in a while,” he said. “I do have a number for him, if you like.”

  “I’ll take it.”

  Avery told me the number, and methodically, I repeated it back. I did not recognize the area code.

  “Thank you. I really appreciate it,” I said.

  “I hope you don’t mind my saying this, Helen,” he said, “but it wasn’t your fault Jake didn’t get tenure. I’ve always worried you might have blamed yourself.”

  I thought of Avery standing in our living room in Madison. How he and Jake packed boxes and carried them silently out to Avery’s Ford. I saw Avery going toward the white pickup, carrying the hand-me-down bassinet.

  “Sarah, our youngest, is singing jazz at a nightclub in New York,” I lied. “She’s quite accomplished at what she does.”

  “That’s great.”

  There was a silence on the line that neither of us filled.

  “Thank you again, Avery.”

  “Be well,” he said. I heard the beep of his phone as he hung up.

  I closed my eyes and kept the phone to my ear until a recorded voice came on, informing me that the phone was off the hook. I saw myself in Wisconsin, walking out from behind the scrim of trees that surrounded Jake’s ice dragon. All the full professors from the college had gathered to see it before the thaw set in, even the dean. I had ruined it by inadvertently breaking the transparent spine along its back. Later that night, the fight that unraveled us began. Suddenly, I could not imagine calling him.

  Using my fingers, I felt along the wall to switch off the buzzing halo. I knelt once more to my task, and with the dripping sponge in hand, I hovered at the edge of my mother’s underwear.

  I peeled down her old-fashioned panties. They came away in my hands, the elastic shot through on both legs. I had grown used to the smell of her by now, a sort of fecal-mothball combo, with a sprinkle here and there of talc.

  In order to remove her underpants, I ripped them open, and her body jiggled just a bit. I thought of the bronze statues that artists cast to resemble people doing everyday things. A bronze golfer to meet you on the green. A bronze couple to share a bench with you in a city park. Two bronze children playing leapfrog in a field. It had become a cottage industry. Middle-Aged Woman Ripping Underpants off Dead Mother. It seemed perfect to me. One could commission it for a schoolyard, where students ran from the building after working all morning with numbers and words. They could climb on the two of us at recess or drown flies in the dew that pooled in my mother’s eyes.

  And there it was, the hole that had given birth to me. The cleft that had compelled the mystery of my father’s love for forty years.

  This was not the first time I’d been face-to-face with my mother’s genitalia. In the last decade, I had become my mother’s official enema-giver. She would lie down, in a position not dissimilar to the one she now held, and after massaging her thighs and reassuring her that it would not hurt, I would open her legs. Working quickly, I would execute the doctor’s orders and then descend the stairs alone, walking like a robot to the refrigerator, where I scarfed down leftover cubes of lime Jell-O and stared out the window into the backyard.

  I placed the sponge back in the aqua-green sick bowl and rose from the floor. I drained the old water out and refilled it with fresh hot water, squirting in more soap. Then I took the kitchen scissors down from the magnetized knife rack above the sink and knelt again to my work.

  The green night-light above the stove and the light of the moon coming through the window were my only companions. With the scissors, I sliced my mother’s skirt from hem to waist. I laid it open on either side of her. I began, ever so gently, to bathe her hips and belly, her thighs and the virtually hairless cleft. I dipped the cloth and sponge repeatedly into the scalding soapy water and stopped over and over again to change it, wishing for the bathtub in the work shed, for a place we could lie together, as if I were a child again and she was stepping in behind me in the tub.

  Finally, when I had removed all evidence of her accident and retrieved a fresh sponge from where they were kept above the fridge, I unbuttoned my mother’s loose cotton shirt. I sliced away the straps of h
er old putty-colored bra. I squeezed out clean water from the sponge onto her breastbone.

  Without the bra supporting it, my mother’s remaining breast had fallen so far to the side that her nipple almost grazed the floor. Her mastectomy scar, once a dark slash, was now barely a wrinkled whisper of flesh. “I know you suffered,” I said, and after kissing the fingertips of my hand, I traced them along her scar.

  I must have been a teenager. It was still years before my father’s death. Years before she called me over to feel the hard mass just beneath her armpit. I was standing in the doorway, watching them.

  “You know how hard it is for me,” my mother said to my father, tears streaming down her face. “Only you know.”

  She had unbuttoned her shirt and held it open to him. “Clair!” he gasped. She had rubbed a bloody wound in the center of her chest. I always thought of it as an adult’s version of chicken, which was a game we played at school. Another kid would rub his nail across the inside of your wrist two hundred times. If you couldn’t bear it after the benign rubbing turned into a ribbon of blood, you yelled, “Chicken!” and were known by the name.

  “Get your mother a warm towel,” my father said to me, and I bowed my head down. Getting the key to the linen closet from its secret place, I retrieved a fresh towel and ran the water in the bathroom until it grew warm.

  The scar from what Jake had called her “martyr’s stigmata,” I would neither bathe nor touch.

  I lifted her arms and cleaned the hairless armpits. I swept the sponge over the cap of her shoulders as I lowered her arms back down. I took my free hand and placed it under the drifting solitary bosom. What once was part of the glory she carried was now a lonely sack with the weight of feathers packed in the droopy corner of an old pillow. A surge of lust shot through me as I held it, as pure as an infant’s appetite.