Dolores Claiborne

don’t know why—how her arms were crossed over her bosom like that. I went over and hugged her and she felt my arms around her middle and hugged me back. Then she took the dishtowel off her face and used it to wipe her eyes and told me to go out back and ask Daddy if he wanted a glass of cold lemonade or a bottle of beer.

“Be sure to tell him there’s only two bottles of beer,” she said. “If he wants more’n that, he better go to the store or not get started at all.”

I went out and told him and he said he didn’t want no beer but a glass of lemonade would hit the spot. I ran to fetch it. Mum was gettin his supper. Her face was still kinda swole from cryin, but she was hummin a tune, and that night they bounced the bedsprings just like they did most nights. Nothing else was ever said or made of it. That sort of thing was called home correction in those days, it was part of a man’s job, and if I thought of it afterward at all, I only thought that my Mum must have needed some or Dad never would have done what he did.

There was a few other times I saw him correct her, but that’s the one I remember best. I never saw him hit her with his fist, like Joe sometimes hit me, but once he stropped her across the legs with a piece of wet canvas sailcloth, and that must have hurt like a bastard. I know it left red marks that didn’t go away all afternoon.

No one calls it home correction anymore—the term has passed right out of conversation, so far as I can tell, and good riddance—but I grew up with the idear that when women and children step off the straight n narrow, it’s a man’s job to herd them back onto it. I ain’t tryin to tell you that just because I grew up with the idear, I thought it was right, though—I won’t let myself slip off that easy. I knew that a man usin his hands on a woman didn’t have much to do with correction… but I let Joe go on doin it to me for a long time, just the same. I guess I was just too tired from keeping house, cleanin for the summer people, raisin m’family, and tryin to clean up Joe’s messes with the neighbors to think much about it.

Bein married to Joe… aw, shit! What’s any marriage like? I guess they are all different ways, but there ain’t one of em that’s what it looks like from the outside, I c’n tell you that. What people see of a married life and what actually goes on inside it are usually not much more than kissin cousins. Sometimes that’s awful, and sometimes it’s funny, but usually it’s like all the other parts of life—both things at the same time.

What people think is that Joe was an alcoholic who used to beat me—and probably the kids, too —when he was drunk. They think he finally did it once too often and I punched his ticket for it. It’s true that Joe drank, and that he sometimes went to the A.A. meetins over in Jonesport, but he was no more an alcoholic than I am. He’d throw a drunk every four or five months, mostly with trash like Rick Thibodeau or Stevie Brooks— those men really were alcoholics—but then he’d leave it alone except for a nip or two when he come in at night. No more than that, because when he had a bottle he liked to make it last. The real alkies I’ve known in my time, none of em was int‘rested in makin a bottle of anythin last—not Jim Beam, not Old Duke, not even derail, which is antifreeze strained through cotton battin. A real drunk is only int’rested in two things: puttin paid to the jug in the hand, and huntin for the one still in the bush.

No, he wasn’t an alcoholic, but he didn’t mind if people thought he’d been one. It helped him get work, especially in the summer. I guess the way people think about Alcoholics Anonymous has changed over the years—I know they talk about it a lot more than they used to—but one thing that hasn’t changed is the way people will try to help somebody who claims he’s already gone to work helpin himself. Joe spent one whole year not drinkin—or at least not talkin about it when he did—and they had a party for him over in Jonesport. Gave him a cake and a medallion, they did. So when he went for a job one of the summer people needed done, the first thing he’d tell em was that he was a recoverin alcoholic. “If you don’t want to hire me because of that, I won’t have any hard feelins,” he’d say, “but I have to get it off my chest. I been goin to A.A. meetins for over a year now, and they tell us we can’t stay sober if we can’t be honest.”

And then he’d pull out his gold one-year medallion and show it to em, all the while lookin like he hadn’t had nothin to eat but humble pie for a month of Sundays. I guess one or two of em just about cried when Joe told em about how he was workin it a day at a time and takin it easy and lettin go and lettin God whenever the urge for a drink hit him… which it did about every fifteen minutes, accordin to him. They’d usually fall all over themselves takin him on, and at fifty cents or even a dollar an hour more than they’d intended to pay, like as not. You’d have thought the gimmick would have fallen flat after Labor Day, but it worked amazin well even here on the island, where people saw him every day and should have known better.

The truth is most of the times Joe hit me, he was cold sober. When he had a skinful, he didn’t much mind me at all, one way or the other. Then, in ‘60 or ’61, he come in one night after helpin Charlie Dispenzieri get his boat out of the water, and when he bent over to get a Coke out of the fridge, I seen his britches were split right up the back. I laughed. I couldn’t help myself. He didn’t say nothin, but when I went over to the stove to check on the cabbage—I was makin a boiled dinner that night, I remember like it was yesterday—he got a chunk of rock maple out of the woodbox and whacked me in the small of the back with it. Oh, that hurt. You know what I mean if anyone’s ever hit you in the kidneys. It makes them feel small and hot and so heavy, like they’re gonna bust loose from whatever holds them where they’re supposed to be and they’ll just sink, like lead shot in a bucket.

I hobbled as far as the table and sat in one of the chairs. I woulda fallen on the floor if that chair’d been any further away. I just sat there, waitin to see if the pain was gonna pass. I didn’t cry, exactly, because I didn’t want to scare the kids, but the tears went rollin down my face just the same. I couldn’t stop them. They were tears of pain, the kind you can’t hold back for anybody or anythin.

“Don’t you ever laugh at me, you bitch,” Joe says. He slang the stovelength he hit me with back into the woodbox, then sat down to read the American. “You ought to have known better’n that ten year ago.”

It was twenty minutes before I could get outta that chair. I had to call Selena to turn down the heat under the veg and the meat, even though the stove wasn’t but four steps away from where I was sittin.

“Why didn’t you do it, Mommy?” she asked me. “I was watchin cartoons with Joey.”

“I’m restin,” I told her.

“That’s right,” Joe says from behind his paper, “she ran her mouth until she got all tuckered out.” And he laughed. That did it; that one laugh was all it took. I decided right then he wasn’t never going to hit me again, unless he wanted to pay a dear price for it.

We had supper just like usual, and watched the TV just like usual afterward, me and the big kids on the sofa and Little Pete on his father’s lap in the big easy-chair. Pete dozed off there, same as he almost always did, around seven-thirty, and Joe carried him to bed. I sent Joe Junior an hour later, and Selena went at nine. I usually turned in around ten and Joe’d sit up until maybe midnight, dozin in and out, watchin a little TV, readin parts of the paper he’d missed the first time, and pickin his nose. So you see, Frank, you’re not so bad; some people never lose the habit, even when they grow up.

That night I didn’t go to bed when I usually did. I sat up with Joe instead. My back felt a little better. Good enough to do what I had to do, anyway. Maybe I was nervous about it, but if I was, I don’t recall. I was mostly waitin for him to doze off, and finally he did.

I got up, went into the kitchen, and got the little cream-pitcher off the table. I didn’t go out lookin for that special; it was only there because it was Joe Junior’s night to clean off the table and he’d forgotten to put it in the refrigerator. Joe Junior always forgot something—to put away the cream-pitcher, to put the glass top on the butter dish, to fold the bread-wrapper under so the first slice wouldn’t get all hard overnight—and now when I see him on the TV news, makin a speech or givin an interview, that’s what I’m most apt to think about… and I wonder what the Democrats would think if they knew the Majority Leader of the Maine State Senate couldn’t never manage to get the kitchen table completely cleared off when he was eleven. I’m proud of him, though, and don’t you ever, ever think any different. I’m proud of him even if he is a goddam Democrat.

Anyway, he sure managed to forget the right thing that night; it was little but it was heavy, and it felt just right in my hand. I went over to the woodbox and got the short-handled hatchet we kep on the shelf just above it. Then I walked back into the livin room where he was dozin. I had the pitcher cupped in my right hand, and I just brought it down and around and smacked it against the side of his face. It broke into about a thousand pieces.

He sat up pretty pert when I done that, Andy. And you shoulda heard him. Loud? Father God and Sonny Jesus! Sounded like a bull with his pizzle caught in the garden gate. His eyes come wide open and he clapped his hand to his ear, which was already bleedin. There was little dots of clotted cream on his cheek and in that scraggle down the side of his face he called a sideburn.

“Guess what, Joe?” I says. “I ain’t feelin tired anymore.”