of all places-and once woreyour alligator shoes on his ears at a New Year’s Eve partythatman is dead. So just why in the hell are you whispering?
“Gerald!” This time she screamed his name. “Gerald, wake up!”
The sound of her own screaming voice almost sent her into another panicky, convulsive interlude, and the scariest part wasn’t Gerald’s continued failure to move or respond; it was the realization that the panic was still there, still right there, restlessly circling her conscious mind as patiently as a predator might circle the guttering campfire of a woman who has somehow wandered away from her friends and gotten lost in the deep, dark fastnesses of the woods.
You’re not lost, Goodwife Burlingame said, but Jessie did not trust that voice. Its control sounded bogus, its rationality only paint-deep. You know just where you are.
Yes, she did. She was at the end of a twisting, rutted camp road which split off from Bay Lane two miles south of here. The camp road had been an aisle of fallen red and yellow leaves over which she and Gerald had driven, and those leaves were mute testimony to the fact that this spur, leading to the Notch Bay end of Kashwakamak, had been used little or not at all in the three weeks since the leaves had first begun to turn and then to fall. This end of the lake was almost exclusively the domain of summer people, and for all Jessie knew, the spur might not have been used since Labor Day. It was a total of five miles, first along the spur and then along Bay Lane, before one came out on Route 117, where there were a few year-round homes.
I’m out here alone, my husband is lying dead on the floor, and I’mhandcuffed to the bed. I can scream until I turn blue and it won’t do meany good; no one’s going to hear. The guy with the chainsaw is probablythe closest, and he’s at least four miles away. He might even be onthe other side of the lake. The dog would probably hear me, but the dogis almost certainly a stray. Gerald’s dead, and that’s a shame-I nevermeant to kill him, if that’s what I did-but at least it was relativelyquick for him. It won’t he quick for me; if no one in Portland starts toworry about us, and there’s no real reason why anyone should, at leastfor awhile…
She shouldn’t be thinking this way; it brought the panic-thing closer. If she didn’t get her mind out of this rut, she would soon see the panic-thing’s stupid, terrified eyes. No, she absolutely shouldn’t be thinking this way. The bitch of it was, once you got started, it was very hard to stop again.
But maybe it’s what you deserve-the hectoring, feverish voice of Goody Burlingame suddenly spoke up. Maybe it is. Because you didkill him, Jessie. You can’t kid yourself about that, because I won’t letyou. I’m sure he wasn’t in very good shape, and I’m sure it would havehappened sooner or later, anyway-a heart attack at the office, or maybein the turnpike passing lane on his way home some night, him with acigarette in his hand, trying to light it, and a big ten-wheeler behindhim, honking for him to get the hell back over into the right-hand laneand make some room, But you couldn’t wait for sooner or later, could you?” Oh no, not you, not Tom Mahout’s good little girl Jessie. Youcouldn’t just lie there and let him shoot his squirt, could you? CosmoGirl Jessie Burlingame says “No man chains me down.” You had to kickhim in the guts and the nuts, didn’t you? And you had to do it whilehis thermostat was already well over the red line. Let’s cut to the chase,dear: you murdered him. So maybe you deserve to be right here, handcuffedto this bed. Maybe-
“Oh, that is such bullshit,” she said. It was an inexpressible relief to hear that other voice-Ruth’s voice-come out of her mouth. She sometimes (well… maybe often would be closer to the truth) hated the Goodwife voice; hated it and feared it. It was often foolish and flighty, she recognized that, but it was also so strong, so hard to say no to.
Goody was always eager to assure her she had bought the wrong dress, or that she had chosen the wrong caterer for the end-of-summer party Gerald threw each year for the other partners in the firm and their wives (except it was really Jessie who threw it; Gerald was just the guy who stood around and said aw shucks and took all the credit). Goody was the one who always insisted she had to lose five pounds. That voice wouldn’t let up even if her ribs were showing. Never mind your ribs!” it screamed in tones of self-righteous horror. Look at your tits, old girl! And if they aren’tenough to make you barf a keg, look at your thighs!
“Such bullshit,” she said, trying to make it even stronger, but now she heard a minute shake in her voice, and that wasn’t so good. Not so good at all. “He knew I was serious… he knew it. So whose fault does that make it?”
But was that really true? In a way it was-she had seen him deciding to reject what he saw in her face and heard in her voice because it would spoil the game. But in another way-a much more fundamental way-she knew it wasn’t true at all, because Gerald hadn’t taken her seriously about much of anything during the last ten or twelve years of their life together. He had made what almost amounted to a second career out of not hearing what she said unless it was about meals or where they were supposed to be at such-and-such a time on such-and-such a night (so don’t forget, Gerald). The only other exceptions to the general Rules of Ear were unfriendly remarks about his weight or his drinking. He heard the things she had to say on these subjects, and didn’t like them, but they were dismissible as part of some mythic natural order: fish gotta swim, bird gotta fly, wife gotta nag.
So what, exactly, had she expected from this man? For him to say, Yes, dear, I will free you at once, and by the way, thanks for raising my consciousness?
Yes; she suspected some naive part of her, some untouched and dewy-eyed little-girl part, had expected just that.
The chainsaw, which had been snarling and ripping away again for quite some time, suddenly fell silent. Dog, loon, and even the wind had also fallen silent, at least temporarily, and the quiet felt as thick and as palpable as ten years of undisturbed dust in an empty house. She could hear no car or truck engine, not even a distant one. And now the voice which spoke belonged to no one but herself. Oh my God, it said. Oh my God, I am all alone out here.I am all alone.
Jessie closed her eyes tightly. Six years ago she had spent an abortive five-month period in counselling, not telling Gerald because she knew he would be sarcastic… and probably worried about what beans she might be spilling. She had stated her problem as stress, and Nora Callighan, her therapist, had taught her a simple relaxation technique.
Most people associate counting to ten with Donald Duck trying to keephis temper, Nora had said, but what a ten-count really does is gives youa chance to re-set all your emotional dials…and anybody who doesn’tneed an emotional re-set at least once a day has probably got problems alot more serious than yours or mine.
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-
