“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.
Not far from the butterfly (and clashing like mad, although she had never quite summoned enough nerve to point this out to her husband), Gerald’s Alpha Gamma Rho beer-stein hung from a chrome peg. Rho wasn’t a very bright star in the fraternity universe-the other frat-rats used to call it Alpha Grab A Hoe-but Gerald wore the pin with a perverse sort of pride and kept the stein on the wall and drank the first beer of the summer out of it each year when they came up here in June. It was the sort of ceremony that had sometimes made her wonder, long before today’s festivities, if she had been mentally competent when she married Gerald.
Somebody should have put a stop to it, she thought drearily. Somebodyreally should have, because just look how it turned out.
In the chair on the other side of the bathroom door, she could see the saucy little culotte skirt and the sleeveless blouse she had wore on this unseasonably warm fall day; her bra hung on the bathroom doorknob. And lying across the bedspread and her legs, turning the tiny soft hairs on her upper thighs to golden wires, was a bright band of afternoon sunlight. Not the square of light that lay almost dead center on the bedspread at one o'clock and not the rectangle which lay on it at two; this was a wide band that would soon narrow to a stripe, and although a power outage had buggered the readout of the digital clock-radio on the dresser (it flashed 12:00 a.m. over and over, as relentless as a neon barsign), the band of light told her it was going on four o'clock. Before long, the stripe would start to slide off the bed and she would see shadows in the corners and under the little table over by the wall. And as the stripe became a string, first slipping across the floor and then climbing up the far wall, fading as it went, those shadows would begin to creep out of their places and spread across the room like inkstains, eating the light as they grew. The sun was westering; in another hour, an hour and a half at most, it would be going down; forty minutes or so after that, it would be dark.
This thought didn’t cause panic-at least not yet-but it did lay a membrane of gloom over her mind and a dank atmosphere of dread over her heart. She saw herself lying here, handcuffed to the bed with Gerald dead on the floor beside and below her; saw them lying here in the dark long after the man with the chainsaw had gone back to his wife and kids and well-lighted home and the dog had wandered away and there was only that damned loon out there on the lake for company-only that and nothing more.