“What was that?”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes.”
She didn’t venture out of her room for the next two days and she didn’t care whether she starved or not. She heard them below, going about their business. The sun striped the wall behind her, faded, came back in the morning and faded again. At dinner on the second day, there was a knock at her door and Ida was there, a tray in her hand and the aroma of tomato and barley soup running on ahead of her. Her face was unreadable, as if she’d paused to slip on a mask in the hallway, and whose side was she on in this? What had he told her? Had he sent her? “Here,” Ida said, setting the tray down on the night table, “you just take a taste of this now.”
But she wouldn’t, though she hadn’t eaten in nearly three days, not since the morning of her aborted flight. Her stomach rumbled. She swallowed involuntarily.
“Sure you’re going to have to eat something if you intend to remain amongst the living.”
“I don’t. I just want to die. I want to be with my mother.”
“You can’t mean that.”
“I hate him,” she said. “I hate him with all my heart.”
Ida was standing there in the middle of the room, the light from the hallway spilling her shadow across the floor till it reached the foot of the bed and climbed up the wall beside it. She didn’t say anything in response, but after a moment she went to the lamp on the table by the window and lighted it.
“He killed my mother. And now he wants to kill me too.”
If she expected Ida to contradict her, she was mistaken. Instead, Ida came round the bed and eased herself down beside her. “Edith,” she murmured, the lamplight feathering her hair and settling in her features so that she took on its glow. “Here,” she said, “put your hand here,” and she took hold of Edith’s hand and laid it palm down on her stomach. The room was very still. Edith could feel the warmth there beneath the fabric of her dress and her stays and underthings, Ida’s flesh, the beat of her heart: it was the most intimate thing that had ever happened between them. “Do you feel that?”
She was confused. Ida’s face was right there, inches from her own. She could smell the powder she wore, count the minute divisions of her lashes. “What do you mean? Feel what?”
“I’m going to have a baby.”
“A baby?” She was joking, she had to be — she wasn’t even married. “But how, how can that be?”
Ida only shook her head, very slowly, side to side. She began to say something, then caught herself. “I’ll be going back north, to my mother,” she said finally, and she dropped her eyes.
And why was she thinking in that moment of herself, only herself? Because she was going down in a darkening swirl of wind-beaten waves and clutching at anything to pull herself back up and out, because she was a girl still whose only experience of the world was a stolen kiss with a boy from St. Basil’s by the name of Thomas R. Landon and the feel of Jimmie’s lips on her thigh and the way it made her blood rush, but Jimmie was nothing and she was nothing too. Ida was going to have a baby. There was a male organ, that was how it started — she knew that, everyone did, the girls whispering in the dark after lights out, one lewd thing paraded after another — but nothing could happen without the sacrament of marriage, no babies, that is… but then she herself had been an orphan and how had that come about? Had her parents died? Or had her mother, her true mother, been someone like Ida, who just somehow happened to have a baby in a time like this when everything was confusion and all the world had a dark shade thrown over it?
“You’ll be coming back,” she said, and she was breathing hard now, as if she’d been running uphill, “after, that is, once the baby… and the father, the baby’s father…”
But Ida kept on shaking her head. In a whisper so soft she had to strain to hear: “The baby’s father doesn’t want me. He doesn’t want the baby.”
Then the bed rocked beneath her and Ida was on her feet, her shoulders hunched and her hair looping free of the bun at the back of her head. Then she was framed in the doorway and then the door pulled shut and Edith refused to think of the nights on the island or in this very house — this house, this one — when there were noises in the dark, the faintest watery sigh and suck of movement in the rippling depths, as if the dolphins were at play beneath the moonlit waves. She thought of herself, of herself only. And when the door had closed, she picked up the spoon and began to eat.
* * *
She came up on deck when the anchor dropped in the harbor, feeling as if she’d been singled out and sentenced for some crime as yet unnamed. The sky was overcast, the island a dun fortress hammered out of the waves. Wind drove at her on a stinging whiplash of spray, and even then, even in the first moments of her sentence that could stretch on for months or years even, it carried the stink of sheep to her and the distant racketing of the seals and sea elephants. Nothing had changed. Miss Everton’s Seminary had never existed, nor her mother, nor San Francisco, nor the rented rooms or the house in Santa Barbara. This was all there was, world eternal, the quality of mercy is not strained, but it is, it is.
Jimmie there on the beach with his leering eyes and the mule perched like a statue behind him. Harsh words from her stepfather, commands, and no, she wouldn’t be riding the sled up the hill, she would be walking — and carrying her own load too. Then there was the house, the paint all but gone, the smell of it, cold grease, colder ash, five p.m. and almost dark and her stepfather taking her by the arm and thrusting her into the kitchen. “There’s the food,” he said. “There’s the stove.”
Jimmie
She stood just inside the door, slumped against the wall. The cold was in her feet, in her bones. She could hear her stepfather pounding through the house in a rage, cursing the one-armed man and his wife for the state of the place, everything in disarray, every step he took and corner he turned a fresh outrage and an affront and a keen winnowing disappointment that set him off all over again. He shouted at Jimmie and Adolph. Gutter language. Goddamn and Jesus Christ. Fuck this, fuck that. They ran the mule up and down the road that had washed out so many times it was just a glorified gulley now and they crashed through the door at regular intervals to dump the foodstuffs on the kitchen floor in a heap of crates, sacks, cans and bottles. The house boomed and echoed. The gutters rattled in the wind.
For a long while she merely stood there, sunk in despair. The place reeked like a garbage dump — it was a garbage dump, trash heaped to the windows and every stained and cracked cup, plate, saucer and bowl crammed into the washbasin in a cold puddle of swimming grease and putrid water, in the center of which the corpses of two drowned mice floated with their naked feet clenched on nothing. It was disgusting. Degrading. She wanted to sit, wanted to use the toilet, but her body was paralyzed and her mind had shut down, the past colliding with the present till she hardly knew where she was. Still, when the light faded out of the windows she found herself crossing the room to light the lantern and clear a space for it on the table. And then she went down on her knees and tried to light the stove too, if only to take the chill off, but the flue must have been stuck or the pipe stopped up because every time she touched a match to the crumpled paper and sticks of kindling, it wouldn’t draw.
Her arm — her left arm, just above the elbow — gave a sudden sharp stab of pain where her stepfather had taken hold of her to shove her through the door in his impatience, this hulking bellicose red-faced man who was the only father she’d ever known and who’d been wounded in the war and never let anyone forget about it. Captain. That was what people called him. Not Mister, but Captain. And he expected her to call him father, yet he wasn’t acting like a father but a coward and a bully and all she could think was that if she had a gun she would press it to her temple and shoot herself right there on the spot — or no, shoot him, shoot Jimmie and Adolph too, and then all the sheep, every last stupid staring one of them. “Cook,” he’d demanded. “But I don’t know how,” she’d protested, talking now, talking finally, if only to get the words out no matter how deaf the world around her might be. “Then learn by doing,” he said.