This voice was also clear-clear enough to raise a small, wistful smile on her face.
I liked Nora. I liked her a lot.
Had she, Jessie, known that at the time? She was moderately astounded to find she couldn’t exactly remember, any more than she could exactly remember why she had quit going to see Nora on Tuesday afternoons. She supposed that a bunch of stuff Community Chest, the Court Street homeless shelter, maybe the new library fund drive-had just all come up at once. Shit Happens, as another piece of New Age vapidity passing for wisdom pointed out. Quitting bad probably been for the best, anyway. If you didn’t draw the line somewhere, therapy just went on and on, until you and your therapist doddered off to that great group encounter session in the sky together.
Never mind-go ahead and do the count, starting with your toes. Doit just the way she taught you.
Yes-why not?
One is for feet, ten little toes, cute little piggies, all in a row.
Except that eight were comically croggled and her great toes looked like the heads on a pair of ball-peen hammers.
Two is for legs, lovely and long.
Well, not that long-she was only five-seven, after all, and long-waisted-but Gerald had claimed they were still her best feature, at least in the old sex-appeal department. She had always been amused by this claim, which seemed to be perfectly sincere on his part. He had somehow missed her knees, which were as ugly as the knobs on an apple tree, and her chubby upper thighs.
Three is my sex, what’s right can’t he wrong.
Mildly cute-a little too cute, many might say-but not very illuminating. She raised her head a little, as if to look at the object in question, but her eyes remained closed. She didn’t need her eyes to see it, anyway; she had been co-existing with that particular accessory for a long time. What lay between her hips was a triangle of ginger-colored, crinkly hair surrounding an unassuming slit with all the aesthetic beauty of a badly healed scar. This thing this organ that was really little more than a deep fold of flesh cradled by crisscrossing belts of muscle-seemed to her an unlikely wellspring for myth, but it certainly held mythic status in the collective male mind; it was the magic vale, wasn’t it? The corral where even the wildest unicorns were eventually penned?
“Mother Macree, what bullshit,” she said, smiling a little but not opening her eyes.
Except it wasn’t bullshit, not entirely. That slit was the object of every man’s lust-the heterosexual ones, at least-but it was also frequently an object of their inexplicable scorn, distrust, and hate. You didn’t hear that dark anger in all their jokes, but it was present in enough of them, and in some it was right out front, raw as a sore: What’s a woman? A life-support system for acunt.
Stop it, Jessie, Goodwife Burlingame ordered. Her voice was upset and disgusted. Stop it right now.
That, Jessie decided, was a damned good idea, and she turned her mind back to Nora’s ten-count. Four was for her hips (too wide), and five her belly (too thick). Six was her breasts, which she thought were her best feature-Gerald, she suspected, was a bit put off by the vague tracings of blue veins beneath their smoothly sloping curves; the breasts of the gatefold girls in his magazines did not show such hints of the plumbing beneath. The magazine girls didn’t have tiny hairs growing out of their areolae, either.
Seven was her too-wide shoulders, eight was her neck (which used to be good-looking but had grown decidedly chicken-y in the last few years), nine was her receding chin, and ten-
Wait a minute! Wait just one goddamned minute here! the no-bullshit voice broke in furiously. What kind of dumb game is this?
Jessie shut her eyes tighter, appalled by the depth of anger in that voice and frightened by its separateness. In its anger it didn’t seem like a voice coming from the central taproot of her mind at all, but like a real interloper-an alien spirit that wanted to possess her the way the spirit of Panzuzu had possessed the little girl in The Exorcist.
Don’t want to answer that? Ruth Neary-alias Panzuzu-asked. Okay, maybe that one’s too complicated. Let me make it really simple foryou, Jess: who turned Nora Callighan’s badly rhymed little relaxationlitany into a mantra of self-hate?
No one, she thought back meekly, and knew at once that the no-bullshit voice would never accept that, so she added: The Goodwife.It was her.
No, it wasn’t, Ruth’s voice returned at once. She sounded disgusted at this half-assed effort to shift the blame. Goody’s a littlestupid and right now she’s a lot scared, hut she’s a sweet enough thing atthe bottom, and her intentions have always been good. The intentions ofwhoever re-edited Nora’s list were actively evil, Jessie. Don’t you see that? Don’t you-
“I don’t see anything, because my eyes are closed,” she said in a trembling, childish voice. She almost opened them, but something told her that was apt to make the situation worse instead of better.
Who was the one, Jessie? Who taught you that you were ugly andworthless? Who picked out Gerald Burlingame as your soulmate andPrince Charming, probably years before you actually met him at thatRepublican Party mixer? Who decided he wasn’t only what you neededbut exactly what you deserved?
With a tremendous effort, Jessie swept this voice-all the voices, she fervently hoped-out of her mind. She began the mantra again, this time speaking it aloud.
“One is my toes, all in a row, two is my legs, lovely and long, three is my sex, what’s right can’t be wrong, four is my hips, curving and sweet, five is my stomach, where I store what I eat.” She couldn’t remember the rest of the rhymes (which was probably a mercy; she had a strong suspicion that Nora had whomped them up herself, probably with an eye toward publication in one of the soft and yearning self-help magazines which sat on the coffee-table in her waiting room) “and so went on without them: “Six is my breasts, seven’s my shoulders, eight’s, my neck…”
She paused to take a breath and was relieved to find her heartbeat had slowed from a gallop to a fast run.
“… nine is my chin, and ten is my eyes. Eyes, open wide!”
She suited the action to the words and the bedroom jumped into bright existence around her, somehow new and-for a moment, at least-almost as delightful as it had been to her when she and Gerald had spent their first summer in this house. Back in 1979, a year which once had the ring of science fiction and now seemed impossibly antique.
Jessie looked at the gray barnboard walls, the high white ceiling with its reflected shimmers from the lake, and the two big windows, one on either side of the bed. The one to her left looked west, giving a view of the deck, the sloping land beyond it, and the heartbreaking bright blue of the lake. The one on her right provided a less romantic vista-the driveway and her gray dowager of a Mercedes, now eight years old and beginning to show the first small speckles of rust along the rocker-panels.
Directly across the room she saw the framed batik butterfly hanging on the wall over the bureau, and remembered with a superstitious lack of surprise that it had been a thirtieth-birthday present from Ruth. She couldn’t see the tiny signature stitched in red thread from over here, but she knew it was there: Neary,'83. Another science-fiction year.