“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.”
“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.