Dolores Claiborne

her he’d keep his end quiet as long as she kep hers quiet… “But,” he told her, “you have to understand, baby, that if some comes out, all comes out.”

She didn’t know what he meant by all, and she didn’t understand how bringin him a glass of iced tea in the afternoon and tellin him about Laurie Langill’s new puppy had given him the idear that he could reach between her legs n squeeze her there whenever he wanted, but she was convinced she must have done somethin to make him act so bad, and it made her ashamed. That was the worst of it, I think—not the fear but the shame.

She said she set out one day to tell the whole story to Mrs. Sheets, the guidance counsellor. She even made an appointment, but she lost her nerve in the outside office when another girl’s appointment ran a little overtime. That had been less than a month before, just after school let back in.

“I started to think how it would sound,” she told me as we sat there on the bench by the aft companionway. We were halfway across the reach by then, and we could see the East Head, all lit up with the afternoon sun. Selena was finally done her cryin. She’d give out a big watery sniffle every now n then, and my hanky was wet clear through, but she mostly had herself under control, and I was damned proud of her. She never let go of my hand, though. She held it in a death-grip all the time we was talkin. I had bruises on it the next day. “I thought about how it’d be to sit down and say, ‘Mrs. Sheets, my Dad is trying to do you-know-what to me.’ And she’s so dense—and so old —she’d probably say, ‘No, I don’t know-what, Selena. What are you talking about?’ Only she’d say TAWkeen about, like she does when she gets up on her high horse. And then I’d have to tell her that my own father was trying to screw me, and she wouldn’t believe me, because people don’t do things like that where she comes from.”

“I think it happens all over the world,” I said. “Sad, but true. And I think a school guidance counsellor would know it, too, unless she’s an out-and-out fool. Is Mrs. Sheets an out-and-out fool, Selena?”

“No,” Selena says, “I don’t think so, Mommy, but—”

“Sweetheart, did you think you were the first girl this ever happened to?” I asks, and she said something again I couldn’t hear on account of she talked so low. I had to ask her to say it again.

“I didn’t know if I was or not,” she says, and hugs me. I hugged her back. “Anyway,” she went on at last, “I found out sitting there that I couldn’t say it. Maybe if I’d been able to march right in I could have gotten it out, but not once I had time to sit and turn it over in my mind, and to wonder if Daddy was right, and you’d think I was a bad girl—”

“I’d never think that,” I says, and give her another hug.

She gave me a smile back that warmed my heart. “I know that now,” she said, “but then I wasn’t so sure. And while I was sitting there, watching through the glass while Mrs. Sheets finished up with the girl that was before me, I thought up a good reason not to go in.”

“Oh?” I asked her. “What was that?”

“Well,” she says, “it wasn’t school business.”

That struck me funny and I started to giggle. Pretty soon Selena was gigglin with me, and the giggles kep gettin louder until we was settin there on that bench, holdin hands and laughin like a couple of loons in matin season. We was so loud that the man who sells snacks n cigarettes down below poked his head up for a second or two to make sure we were all right.

There were two other things she said on the way back—one with her mouth and one with her eyes. The one she said out loud was that she’d been thinkin of packin her things and runnin away; that seemed at least like a way out. But runnin won’t solve your problems if you’ve been hurt bad enough—wherever you run, you take your head n your heart with you, after all—and the thing I saw in her eyes was that the thought of suicide had done more’n just cross her mind.

I’d think of that—of seein the thought of suicide in my daughter’s eyes—and then I’d see Joe’s face even clearer with that eye inside me. I’d see how he must’ve looked, pesterin her and pesterin her, tryin to get a hand up under her skirt until she wore nothin but jeans in self-defense, not gettin what he wanted (or not all of what he wanted) because of simple luck, her good n his bad, and not for any lack of tryin. I thought about what might’ve happened if Joe Junior hadn’t cut his playin with Willy Bramhall short a few times n come home early, or if I hadn’t finally opened my eyes enough to get a really good look at her. Most of all I thought about how he’d driven her. He’d done it the way a bad-hearted man with a quirt or a greenwood stick might drive a horse, and never stop once, not for love and not for pity, until that animal lay dead at his feet… and him prob’ly standin above it with the stick in his hand, wonderin why in hell that happened. This was where wantin to touch his forehead, wantin to see if it felt as smooth as it looked, had gotten me; this was where it all come out. My eyes were all the way open, and I saw I was livin with a loveless, pitiless man who believed anything he could reach with his arm and grasp with his hand was his to take, even his own daughter.

I’d got just about that far in my thinkin when the thought of killin him crossed my mind for the first time. That wasn’t when I made up my mind to do it—gorry, no—but I’d be a liar if I said the thought was only a daydream. It was a lot more than that.

Selena must’ve seen some of that in my eyes, because she laid her hand on my arm and says, “Is there going to be trouble, Mommy? Please say there isn’t—he’ll know I told, and he’ll be mad!”

I wanted to soothe her heart by tellin her what she wanted to hear, but I couldn’t. There was going to be trouble—just how much and how bad would probably be up to Joe. He’d backed down the night I hit him with the creamer, but that didn’t mean he would again.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” I said, “but I’ll tell you two things, Selena: none of this is your fault, and his days of pawin and pesterin you are over. Do you understand?”

Her eyes filled up with tears again, and one of em spilled over and rolled down her cheek. “I just don’t want there to be trouble,” she said. She stopped a minute, her mouth workin, and then she busts out: “Oh, I hate this! Why did you ever hit him? Why did he ever have to start up with me? Why couldn’t things stay like they were?”

I took her hand. “Things never do, honey—sometimes they go wrong, and then they have to be fixed. You know that, don’t you?”

She nodded her head. I saw pain in her face, but no doubt. “Yes,” she said. “I guess I do.”

We were comin into the dock then, and there was no more time for talk. I was just as glad; I didn’t want her lookin at me with those tearful eyes of hers; wantin what I guess every kid wants, for everything to be made right but with no pain and nobody hurt. Wantin me to make promises I couldn’t make, because they were promises I didn’t know if I could keep. I wasn’t sure that inside eye would let me keep em. We got off the ferry without another word passin between us, and that was just as fine as paint with me.

That evenin, after Joe got home from the Car-stairs place where he was buildin a back porch, I sent all three kids down to the market. I saw Selena castin little glances back at me all the way down the drive, and her face was just as pale as a glass of milk. Every time she turned her head, Andy, I saw that double-damned hatchet in her eyes. But I saw somethin else in them, too, and I believe that other thing was relief. At least things are gonna quit just goin around n around like they have been, she musta been thinkin; scared as she was, I think part of her musta been thinkin that.

Joe was sittin by the stove readin the American, like he done every night. I stood by the woodbox, lookin at him, and that eye inside seemed to open wider’n ever. Lookit him, I thought, sittin there like the Grand High Poobah of Upper Butt-Crack. Sittin there like he didn’t have to put on his pants one leg at a time like the rest of us. Sittin there as if puttin his hands all over his only daughter was the most natural thing in all the world and any man could sleep easy after doin it. I tried to think of how we’d gotten from the Junior-Senior Prom at The Samoset Inn to where we were right now, him sittin by the stove and readin the paper in his old patched bluejeans and dirty thermal undershirt and me standin by the woodbox with murder in my heart, and I couldn’t do it. It was like bein in a magic forest where you look back over your shoulder and see the path has disappeared behind you.

Meantime, that inside eye saw more n more. It saw the crisscross scars on his ear from when I hit him with the creamer; it saw the squiggly little veins in his nose; it saw the way his lower lip pooched out so he almost always looked like he was havin a fit of the sulks; it saw the dandruff in his eyebrows and the way he’d pull at the hairs growin out of his nose or give his pants a good tug at the crotch every now and then.

All the things that eye saw were bad, and it come to me that marryin him had been a lot more than the