Dolores Claiborne

night I just told you about this would have been, but I know it was after because I remember layin there with my kidneys throbbin and thinkin I’d get up pretty soon and take some aspirin to quiet them down.

“There,” he says, almost cryin, “I hope you’re satisfied, Dolores. Are you?”

I didn’t say nothing. Sometimes anything a woman says to a man is bound to be the wrong thing.

“Are you?” he says. “Are you satisfied, Dolores?”

I didn’t say nothing still, just laid there and looked up at the ceilin and listened to the wind outside. It was from the east that night, and I could hear the ocean in it. That’s a sound I’ve always loved. It soothes me.

He turned over and I could smell his beer-breath on my face, rank and sour. “Turnin out the light used to help,” he says, “but it don’t no more. I can see your ugly face even in the dark.” He reached out, grabbed my boob, and kinda shook it. “And this,” he says. “All floppy and flat as a pancake. Your cunt’s even worse. Christ, you ain’t thirty-five yet and fuckin you’s like fuckin a mudpuddle.”

I thought of sayin “If it was a mudpuddle you could stick it in soft, Joe, and wouldn’t that relieve your mind,” but I kep my mouth shut. Patricia Claiborne didn’t raise any fools, like I told you.

There was some more quiet. I’d ’bout decided he’d said enough mean things to finally send him off to sleep and I was thinkin about slippin out to get my aspirin when he spoke up again… and that time, I’m pretty sure he was cryin.

“I wish I’d never seen your face,” he says, and then he says, “Why didn’t you just use that friggin hatchet to whack it off, Dolores? It would have come to the same.”

So you see, I wasn’t the only one that thought gettin hit with the cream-pitcher—and bein told things was gonna change around the house—might have had somethin to do with his problem. I still didn’t say nothing, though, just waited to see if he was gonna go to sleep or try to use his hands on me again. He was layin there naked, and I knew the very first place I was gonna go for if he did try.

Pretty soon I heard him snorin. I don’t know if that was the very last time he tried to be a man with me, but if it wasn’t, it was close.

None of his friends got so much as a whiff of these goins-ons, accourse—he sure as hell wasn’t gonna tell em his wife’d whopped the bejesus out of him with a creamer and his weasel wouldn’t stick its head up anymore, was he? Not him! So when the others’d talk big about how they was handlin their wives, he’d talk big right along with em, sayin how he laid one on me for gettin fresh with my mouth, or maybe for buyin a dress over in Jonesport without askin him first if it was all right to take money out of the cookie jar.

How do I know? Why, because there are times when I can keep my ears open instead of my mouth. I know that’s hard to believe, listenin to me tonight, but it’s true.

I remember one time when I was workin part-time for the Marshalls—remember John Marshall, Andy, how he was always talkin about buildin a bridge over to the mainland?—and the doorbell rang. I was all alone in the house, and I was hurryin to answer the door and I slipped on a throw-rug and fell hard against the corner of the mantel. It left a great big bruise on my arm, just above the elbow.

About three days later, just when that bruise was goin from dark brown to a kind of yellow-green like they do, I ran into Yvette Anderson in the village. She was comin out of the grocery and I was goin in. She looked at the bruise on my arm, and when she spoke to me, her voice was just drippin with sympathy. Only a woman who’s just seen something that makes her happier’n a pig in shit can drip that way. “Ain’t men awful, Dolores?” she says.

“Well, sometimes they are and sometimes they aren’t,” I says back. I didn’t have the slightest idear what she was talkin about—what I was mostly concerned with was gettin some of the pork chops that were on special that day before they were all gone.

She pats me kinda gentle on the arm—the one that wasn’t bruised—and says, “You be strong, now. All things work for the best. I’ve been through it and I know. I’ll pray for you, Dolores.” She said that last like she’d just told me she was gonna give me a million dollars and then went on her way upstreet. I went into the market, still mystified. I would have thought she’d lost her mind, except anyone who’s ever passed the time of day with Yvette knows she ain’t got a whole hell of a lot to lose.

I had my shoppin half done when it hit me. I stood there watchin Skippy Porter weigh my chops, my marketbasket over my arm and my head thrown back, laughin from way down deep inside my belly, the way you do when you know you can’t do nothing but let her rip. Skippy looked around at me and says, “You all right, Missus Claiborne?”

“I’m fine,” I says. “I just thought of somethin funny.” And off I went again.

“I guess you did,” Skippy says, and then he went back to his scales. God bless the Porters, Andy; as long as they stay, there’ll be at least one family on the island knows how to mind its business. Meantime, I just went on laughin. A few other people looked at me like I’d gone nuts, but I didn’t care. Sometimes life is so goddam funny you just have to laugh.

Yvette’s married to Tommy Anderson, accourse, and Tommy was one of Joe’s beer-and-poker buddies in the late fifties and early sixties. There’d been a bunch of them out at our place a day or two after I bruised my arm, tryin to get Joe’s latest bargain, an old Ford pick-em-up, runnin. It was my day off, and I brought em all out a pitcher of iced tea, mostly in hopes of keepin em off the suds at least until the sun went down.

Tommy must have seen the bruise when I was pourin the tea. Maybe he asked Joe what happened after I left, or maybe he just remarked on it. Either way, Joe St. George wasn’t a fella to let opportunity pass him by—not one like that, at least. Thinkin it over on my way home from the market, the only thing I was curious about was what Joe told Tommy and the others I’d done—forgot to put his bedroom slippers under the stove so they’d be warm when he stepped into em, maybe, or cooked the beans too mushy on Sat’dy night. Whatever it was, Tommy went home and told Yvette that Joe St. George had needed to give his wife a little home correction. And all I’d ever done was bang off the corner of the Marshalls’ mantelpiece runnin to see who was at the door!

That’s what I mean when I say there’s two sides to a marriage—the outside and the inside. People on the island saw me and Joe like they saw most other couples our age: not too happy, not too sad, mostly just goin along like two hosses pullin a wagon… they may not notice each other like they once did, and they may not get along with each other as well as they once did when they do notice each other, but they’re harnessed side by side n goin down the road as well’s they can just the same, not bitin each other, or lollygaggin, or doin any of the other things that draw the whip.

But people aren’t hosses, n marriage ain’t much like pullin a wagon, even though I know it sometimes looks that way on the outside. The folks on the island didn’t know about the cream-pitcher, or how Joe cried in the dark and said he wished he’d never seen my ugly face. Nor was that the worst of it. The worst didn’t start until a year or so after we finished our doins in bed. It’s funny, ain’t it, how folks can look right at a thing and draw a completely wrong conclusion about why it happened. But it’s natural enough, as long as you remember that the inside and outside of a marriage aren’t usually much alike. What I’m gonna tell you now was on the inside of ours, and until today I always thought it would stay there.

Lookin back, I think the trouble must have really started in ‘62. Selena’djust started high school over on the mainland. She had come on real pretty, and I remember that summer after her freshman year she got along with her Dad better than she had for the last couple of years. I’d been dreadin her teenage years, foreseein a lot of squabbles between the two of em as she grew up and started questionin his idears and what he saw as his rights over her more and more.

Instead, there was that little time of peace and quiet and good feelins between them, when she’d go out and watch him work on his old clunkers behind the house, or sit beside him on the couch while we were watchin TV at night (Little Pete didn’t think much of that arrangement, I can tell you) and ask him questions about his day durin the commercials. He’d answer her in a calm, thoughtful way I wasn’t used to… but I sort of remembered. From high school I remembered it, back when I was first gettin to know him and he was decidin that yes, he wanted to court me.

At the same time this was happenin, she drew a distance away from me. Oh, she’d still do the chores I set her, and sometimes she’d talk about her day at school… but only if I went to work and pulled it out of her. There was a coldness that hadn’t been there before, and it was only later on that I began to see how everything fit together, and how it all went back to the night she’d come out of her bedroom and seen us there, her Dad with his hand clapped to his ear and blood runnin through the fingers, her Mom standin over him with a hatchet.

He was never a man to let certain kinds of opportunity pass him by, I told you, and this was just more of the