Labrador Read online

  From downstairs came the sound of ice cubes clinking in Daddy’s highball, and the rising pitch of his voice, almost as if he were about to break into song. “Don’t pay any attention to him,” I told Amy. “He’s just had a hard day.”

  “My dad never drinks,” she said. “In our family my mom is the one who drinks. Vanilla extract, rubbing alcohol, you name it. Once, we found her trying to fry a hamburger right on the electric burner. When she’s really drunk she calls Dad ‘Heathcliff.’”

  “But doesn’t it make you feel awful?” I asked.

  “Mowbrey, they’re jerks,” Amy said. “What else can I say?”

  We could hear Mama sniffling, moving down the hallway, slamming the door to the bedroom. Then the porch door creaked open and we could see Daddy moving stiff-legged, like an old dog, through the meadow where saplings now grew, crowding in on the house. When he got to the middle of the meadow he turned around and looked back: there were our faces in the lit window and he began waving his arms and yelling.

  “Don’t do it,” Amy said, but I ignored her. The window was stuck and I had to pound on it to get it loose.

  “Maybe he needs help,” I said.

  “Sure,” Amy said, backing away from the window and rolling onto the bed. “Maybe he needs someone to freshen his drink.”

  I got the window up and pressed my face to the screen. The air was cool and fresh and smelled like mock-orange; I could see the thick clustering of those blossoms, hanging in the darkness like sweetly deceptive ghosts.

  “Kathleen!” Daddy yelled. “What’re you doing cooped up in your room on a night like this? Life is for the living! Why don’t you and your little friend grab your sweaters and join me?”

  “Amazing,” Amy said. “He didn’t slur a single word. My mom should take lessons.”

  “Come on!” he continued. “Throw caution to the winds!”

  “No thanks, Daddy,” I said. Then I slammed the window back down, sending a shower of dark green paint chips across the bedspread. “I don’t believe it,” I said, and Amy shook her head.

  “How many times do I have to tell you, Mowbrey?” she asked. “When they’re like that, you’ve got to ignore them. It’s the only way.”

  One day, not too long after my birthday, I woke up to find my sheets stained with blood. Of course I knew what this was, having been instructed by all the other girls at school about the process—as the school nurse put it—of “becoming a woman.” I knew, as well, that I wanted to wash out the sheets myself. This was a Wednesday, the day on which Mrs. McGuire assumed control of the house: cleaning, ironing, and introducing me to the rules of a queer and sneaky universe.

  The washtubs were in the cellar, set against the far wall, adjacent to the shelves on which we’d stacked the canned goods. No one had bothered to bring those cans back upstairs: they remained there in their jackets of dust, and I couldn’t avoid noticing the truffle, that tiny harbinger of doom. It was August and the world outside was hot and filled with the chirping of birds, while, in the cellar, the clinical odor of bleach mixed with the smell of mold, making me think of the laboratory in which the egocentric scientist created his monster out of cast-off body parts.

  I began to fill one of the tubs with hot water, and then I poured in an enormous quantity of detergent. As soon as I dumped in the sheets the water turned pink but, no matter how much I sloshed them around, the stains wouldn’t go away. In fact, if anything, they seemed to get bigger. The detergent stung the places where I’d bitten my nails to the quick, and my pain, as well as my frenzied scrubbing, preoccupied me, so that I didn’t hear the footsteps on the cellar stairs, nor the footsteps moving towards me across the dirt floor.

  “Ah, there you are! Such a darling child to be helping out her poor sainted mama with the washing!” Mrs. McGuire nosed up, close and confidential, as if she was about to hand me a religious pamphlet. “What’s this?” she exclaimed. “Can it be that the female sickness is upon my own darling child?” She peered at me out of her rheumy round eyes; it was like being looked at by snails. “And the pangs?” she asked. “Are they very strong?”

  “What?”

  Mrs. McGuire reached down and poked at my stomach. “Here,” she said. “I suppose the pain must be unendurable. How well I remember my own dear mama helping me through the suffering.” She paused. “That is why it is called the curse, Kathleen, and it’s the curse of all womankind to go through their lives at the mercy of their bodies. Ah, but it’s a lucky thing for you I have a trick or two up my sleeve.”

  It was impossible for me to connect Mrs. McGuire with anything remotely female. “I feel all right,” I said. “Really.”

  “The child is so brave,” she said. “Leave the sheets be, my darling.” She thrust her bony finger into the small of my back and propelled me up the stairs. “If this were the wintertime we’d have some red-hot coals on hand. That is by far the best cure for the pain, but we shall have to make do.” She filled the kettle with water and set it on the stove. “Just sit down, my precious, while I boil up some ginger tea. Do you know where your mama keeps her garden trowel?”

  “Coals?” I asked. Panic sat inside of me: large and white and shaped like myself, covered with thorns.

  “Ah, if only we had some,” Mrs. McGuire mourned. “Then we could put them into a bucket and you could pee onto them. It’s the steam, you see, that works on the organs.” She grated ginger root into a teacup. “We shall have to go out and buy you napkins, I suppose,” she said.

  “I found some in Willie’s drawer,” I said.

  “A belt?”

  “That, too.”

  “Kathleen, you must never, under any circumstances, burn up your monthly cloths. Do you understand me, my darling? When I was just a slip of a thing in Sligo, I knew a girl—my third cousin, I think. Edna was her name—and she always burned her monthly cloths, and she got so thin and sick they had to call for the doctor. ‘Do you mean to tell me,’ he told Edna’s mama, ‘that you don’t know what is wrong with this child? Well, she is burning up her cloths every month and she is just burning up her life. If she doesn’t stop, she will die; and I can’t do a thing for her as long as she does.’ Do you understand, Kathleen?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  After she made the tea we went outside to where the garden used to be, and Mrs. McGuire handed me the teacup. “Don’t drink from it yet,” she warned. Then she got down on her hands and knees and dug seven holes in the dirt, in a row. “We need grapevine, not yet one year old. Ah, it’s a sorry thing, my darling, what has become of this garden.” Eventually she found what she was looking for; she put a length of vine in each hole, ceremoniously lit a match, and set the leaves on fire. Finally, she made me take the tea and sit by each hole and drink a little, until, at the seventh hole, I was instructed to say: “Let me recover.”

  “The relief,” she said, “is so sudden as to make your poor head spin, is it not? How well I remember.” She took the teacup and checked to make sure I’d finished drinking all the fiery shavings. “Now we must go back into the house and tell your mama the news.”

  “Oh,” I said, “not now. I don’t have time. I have to meet Amy at the lake.”

  Mrs. McGuire stood up very straight: the posture of pronouncement. “There are, Kathleen, five important events in a woman’s life. There is, of course, her own birth; there is her marriage to her beloved husband; there is the birth of her first precious baby; there is her death. These are four—the fifth is, my darling, the day on which she becomes a woman.”

  Willie, this synopsis made me want to go right out and kill myself. “I’ll tell her later,” I said. Then I got on my bike and rode as fast as I could to the lake. In a way I think of that ride as the first leg of my impending journey—the one about which I knew nothing at the time—into the world of men.

  I slept late the next day and, when I finally woke up, the bedclothes were damp and wrapped around my arms and legs like the snakes around the man and his sons in the reproduc
tion of Laocoön which Daddy kept on his desk. I understood, momentarily, the horrible density of stone, and I smelled a smell which I thought I was giving off myself: slightly sour and hinting at pathos. Then, through the bedroom door came Mama, bearing in her hands the pale green metal tray on which was set a pink bowl filled with farina. I knew that this was not intended as an ironic gesture. Of all the members of our family, Mama was the only one incapable of irony.

  “How are you feeling, sweetheart?” Mama asked.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “Why shouldn’t I be?”

  “I thought you might like to have your breakfast in bed today. As a special treat.”

  “I don’t want a special treat,” I said. “I told you, I feel fine.”

  Mama unfolded the legs of the tray and put it in place over my stomach. “Mrs. McGuire told me,” she said.

  “Told you what?” I hoped my nastiness would drive her away, before the word “menstruation” could drop like partly-chewed cud from her mouth, mortifying us both.

  “About your period, sweetheart,” she said. “If you have any questions, don’t be afraid to ask me.”

  Oh, sure, I thought.

  Mama didn’t move, but stood there looking at me, baffled and hopeful, as if waiting to see settle over me the transfiguring mantle of womanhood. “We’re leaving now,” she said. “Your father and I are going to town to pick up Willie, and then we’re going to do some shopping. Will you be all right?”

  “Of course I’ll be all right,” I said.

  Still, she didn’t move. “I remember the day you were born,” she said. “I remember how the nurse put you in my arms. It was dinnertime, but it was still light out. All you wanted to do was eat. You were so little!”

  And now look at me, I thought. I could see the big bumps of my knees on the far side of the tray.

  “I was the happiest woman on the face of the earth,” Mama said wistfully.

  I put a spoonful of farina in my mouth: she had sweetened it with honey and sprinkled it with nutmeg, and I felt such a longing to be a new thing—was it possible that time could bang up against a wall and start inching backwards? Without swallowing the cereal, I removed the spoon carefully, and set it back in the bowl, trying very hard to duplicate, in reverse, all of my movements. Had the small handprints of light on the blanket slid back a notch? And I waited for her to say it again: “I was the happiest woman on the face of the earth.” I held my breath. Then Daddy began beeping the car horn and the moment was over—the planets in their slots sprang forward, and a large round cloud appeared in my window, across which a robin flew with a worm in its beak.

  “We’ll be back soon,” Mama said. “Mrs. McGuire’s downstairs, if you need anything.”

  After she was gone I sat there, perfectly still, as if a spell had been cast over me. I looked at the pictures of birds taped to my walls: scarlet tanager, yellow-shafted flicker, American golden plover, hermit thrush. Maybe if I could fly, I thought. But I knew it would make no difference. Even the birds—so high up that the only sign of their passage was the restless, minute shadows wavering through the grass or across the walls of buildings—even the birds couldn’t leave this world.

  Even Kathleen Mowbrey, a fourteen-year-old girl in a bedroom in New Hampshire, could be changed by the simplest thing—her body’s sloughing off of the red tissue in which a tiny egg was hidden—into one figure among many in the common landscape. I thought of the women sitting in the Conway laundromat, their babies drooping out of strollers or packed into dark carriages; I thought of the sleek women in the magazines, staring up from the laps of those other women, oblivious to the banging of the washing machines or the tumbling prattle of buttons and metal snaps against the insides of the dryers. And each one, I thought—the sleek and the exhausted alike—had inside her body a chamber the size of a fist, into which an egg was falling, was about to fall, had fallen.

  Nor did it stop there. I thought of the men, busy with their particular jobs and strategies. I thought about how it might happen that, one day, from high up in the sky, as if in a shower of gleaming spears, penetrating the fragile network of birds, clouds, the nethermost twigs and buds of trees, would drop the bombs. And then it would be, for everyone and everything, the same end—just hoods of light where the bodies had been, where the hand had been turning over the magazine page, or setting into place, like a lozenge on a tongue, the coin that would make the machine fill up with water.

  The farina turned to a cold lump in the bowl. She was there, Willie, in the corner of my room, her body hidden by the open closet door. I could hear her breathing and hear the way the floorboards shifted under her weight. Perhaps the iron had been too hot, pressing the fabric of her housedress flat, pressing flat the cabbage roses, like those tokens of long-ago love that fall out of old books—she smelled burnt.

  “It’s all the same pudding,” she said. “I ought to know.”

  “Go away,” I said, and she laughed.

  “Eat, eat,” she said, and my eyes leaped backwards into my head, to stare at the black folds of my brain.

  And there he was, fanning his wings, a white thing like a moth. “You can’t get me,” I said. “Because of the angel.”

  “Ah,” she said, “the angel. How could I forget?” I heard the jingling of hangers, like sly ideas forming in her head. “Of course, the angel. Tell me, Kathleen, which came first, the angel or the nurse?”

  I suddenly felt relieved, because I knew the answer. “The angel,” I said. “You were just a thing in his story.”

  Now the hangers were crashing into each other, and the noise they made got louder and louder—I could hear my shoes beating against the walls of the closet. “I wouldn’t be so sure, Kathleen,” she said. But she couldn’t hide the anger in her voice and I thought—believe me, Willie—I thought she was lying.

  The night before you moved out, Mama prepared a special dinner in your honor: all of your favorite foods, although we could barely afford such an extravagance as a leg of lamb, since Daddy was out of work. Do you remember? We were waiting in the west room, Mama knitting in her chair, Daddy feeding split lengths of apple-wood into the first fire of the season; I lounged across the rug with boyish diffidence, rolling a marble back and forth between my two index fingers. And then you walked into the room.

  When I shut my eyes I can see you as you were then—very grown up, I thought—with your hair arranged in a French twist; your lips painted with opalescent lipstick, pale like the inside of a seashell; your eyes outlined in black, so that they appeared lidless, unblinking. You were wearing a very short black velvet dress, its square-cut neckline revealing a fullness of cleavage belied by your lean arms and legs. I could not get over how beautiful you were.

  “I’ll be going out later,” you said. Then you reached your arms way up over your head, stretching, so that we all could see the entire length of your body from the waist down, reticulate and snaky in black-patterned tights. “Madame’s throwing a going-away party,” you explained.

  Daddy could not take his eyes off you. You sat down on the love seat, your spine customarily straight, as if to brace yourself against the assault of his longing. Did you feel it? Is that why you shivered a little?

  “I was hoping you’d spend your last night with us,” Mama said, her fingers busy, busy; the bone needles oscillating. She was making you a sweater, and I thought of the poor girl in the fairy tale, spinning flax from nettles, her whole heart bent on denying her brothers the gift of flight.

  “Can I get you something to drink?” Daddy asked.

  “Some Dubonnet would be nice,” you said.

  “You’re going to be so far away,” Mama said. “My little girl.”

  “For God’s sake, Mom, I’m almost eighteen years old.” You sighed and leaned over to tap me on the shoulder. “I want you to promise to come and visit,” you said. “We can go out and do the town.”

  I wasn’t sure if you really meant what you said, or if you were just trying to upset Mama. “Su
re,” I said.

  “One of these days you’ll understand, sweetheart. One of these days you’ll have a little girl of your own and you’ll know just how I feel.”

  “Don’t hold your breath,” you said. Then you turned to Daddy, who was standing in front of the fireplace, brushing wood chips off his trousers. “Dubonnet,” you reminded him, “with a twist.”

  “Isn’t that some kind of sweet wine?” he asked. “I don’t think we have any, Willie. How about a little crème de menthe?”

  “Forget it,” you said. You got off the love seat and sat beside me on the rug, braiding through my dirty, spatulate fingers your long white ones. “Kitty,” you whispered, and I thought I would burst into tears, because your breath still smelled the way it had so many years ago, as if you had just finished lapping milk up from a saucer—as if the next thing I would feel would be your tongue lapping against my cheek. “While I’m gone,” you whispered, “be careful. Okay? Don’t let them turn you into a ghoul. Don’t let them trick you, no matter what. Do you understand?”

  “You used that word before,” I said. “I don’t think I know what it means.”

  Daddy cleared his throat. “I could crack some ice, if that would make a difference,” he said. “Crème de menthe over cracked ice is very refreshing.”

  “I said forget it, Dad.” You squeezed my fingers tightly. “Flesh-eaters,” you hissed. “The first symptom is, you start to feel sorry for them. And the next thing you know, they’ve got their teeth sunk in your skin. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about, Kitty. They go straight for your heart.”

  I lost my appetite. By the time we were seated at the table, all I could do was tug a leaf or two from my artichoke, pricking my fingers on the spiny tips. I watched Mama and Daddy as they cut into their slices of lamb, raised their forks to their mouths, and chewed.

  “I hate to tell you this, Constance,” Daddy said, “but the lamb is underdone.”

  Mama looked at you, supplicating, but you merely smiled and continued lifting to your parted lips a goblet filled with wine.