Dolores Claiborne

days a week. As her paid companion, I had to eat it around the clock.

She had her first stroke in the summer of 1968, while she was watchin the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on her television. That was just a little one, and she used to blame it on Hubert Humphrey. “I finally looked at that happy asshole one too many times,” she said, “and I popped a goddam blood-vessel. I should have known it was gonna happen, and it could just as easily have been Nixon.”

She had a bigger one in 1975, and that time she didn’t have no politicians to blame it on. Dr. Freneau told her she better quit smokin and drinkin, but he could have saved his breath—no high-steppin kitty like Vera Kiss-My- Back-Cheeks Donovan was going to listen to a plain old country doctor like Chip Freneau. “I’ll bury him,” she used to say, “and have a Scotch and soda sitting on his headstone. ”

For awhile it seemed like maybe she would do just that—he kept scoldin her, and she kept sailin along like the Queen Mary. Then, in 1981, she had her first whopper, and the hunky got killed in a car-wreck over on the mainland the very next year. That was when I moved in with her—October of 1982.

Did I have to? I dunno. I guess not. I had my Sociable Security, as old Hattie McLeod used to call it. It wasn’t much, but the kids were long gone by then—Litt!e Pete right off the face of the earth, poor little lost lamb—and I had managed to put a few dollars away, too. Living on the island has always been cheap, and while it ain’t what it once was, it’s still a whale of a lot cheaper than livin on the mainland. So I guess I didn’t have to go live with Vera, no.

But by then her and me was used to each other. It’s hard to explain to a man. I ‘spect Nancy there with her pads n pens n tape-recorder understands, but I don’t think she’s s’posed to talk. We was used to each other in the way I s‘pose two old bats can get used to hangin upside-down next to each other in the same cave, even though they’re a long way from what you’d call the best of friends. And it wasn’t really no big change. Hanging my Sunday clothes in the closet next to my housedresses was really the biggest part of it, because by the fall of ’82 I was there all day every day and most nights as well. The money was a little better, but not so good I’d made the downpayment on my first Cadillac, if you know what I mean. Ha!

I guess I did it mostly because there wasn’t nobody else. She had a business manager down in New York, a man named Greenbush, but Greenbush wa’ant going to come up to Little Tall so she could scream down at him from her bedroom window to be sure and hang those sheets with six pins, not four, nor was he gonna move into the guest-room and change her diapers and wipe the shit off her fat old can while she accused him of stealin the dimes out of her goddam china pig and told him how she was gonna see him in jail for it. Greenbush cut the checks; I cleaned up her shit and listened to her rave on about the sheets and the dust bunnies and her goddam china pig.

And what of it? I don’t expect no medal for it, not even a Purple Heart. I’ve wiped up a lot of shit in my time, listened to even more of it (I was married to Joe St. George for sixteen years, remember), and none of it ever gave me the rickets. I guess in the end I stuck with her because she didn’t have nobody else; it was either me or the nursin home. Her kids never came to see her, and that was one thing I felt sorry for her about. I didn’t expect them to pitch in, don’t get that idear, but I didn’t see why they couldn’t mend their old quarrel, whatever it was, and come once in awhile to spend the day or maybe a weekend with her. She was a miserable bitch, no doubt about it, but she was their Ma. And by then she was old. Accourse I know a lot more now than I did then, but—

What?

Yes, it’s true. If I’m lyin, I’m dyin, as my grand-sons like to say. You just call that fella Greenbush, if you don’t believe me. I expect when the news gets out—and it will, it always does—there’ll be one of those soppy articles in the Bangor Daily News about how wonderful it all is. Well, I got news for you—it ain’t wonderful. A friggin nightmare is what it is. No matter what happens in here, folks are gonna say I brainwarshed her into doin what she done n then killed her. I know it, Andy, n so do you. There ain’t no power in heaven or on earth that can stop people from thinkin the worst when they want to.

Well, not one goddam word of it’s true. I didn’t force her to do nothing, and she sure didn’t do what she did because she loved me, or even liked me. I suppose she might have done it because she thought she owed me—in her own peculiar way she could have thought she owed me plenty, and t’wouldn’t have been her way to say anything. Could even be what she done was her way of thankin me… not for changin her shitty diapers but for bein there on all the nights when the wires came out of the corners or the dust bunnies came out from under the bed.

You don’t understand that, I know, but you will. Before you open that door and walk out of this room, I promise you’ll understand everything.

She had three ways of bein a bitch. I’ve known women who had more, but three’s good for a senile old lady mostly stuck in a wheelchair or in bed. Three’s damn good for a woman like that.

The first way was when she was a bitch because she couldn’t help it. You remember what I said about the clothespins, how you had to use six of em to hang the sheets, never just four? Well, that was just one example.

There were certain ways things had to be done if you worked for Mrs. Kiss-My- Back-Cheeks Vera Donovan, and you didn’t want to forget a single one of them. She told you how things were going to go right up front, and I’m here to tell you that’s how things went. If you forgot something once, you got the rough side of her tongue. If you forgot twice, you got docked on payday. If you forgot three times, that was it—you were down the road, and no excuses listened to. That was Vera’s rule, and it sat all right with me. I thought it was hard, but I thought it was fair. If you was told twice which racks she wanted the bakin put on after it came out of the oven, and not ever to stick it on the kitchen windowsills to cool like shanty Irish would do, and if you still couldn’t remember, the chances were good you wasn’t never going to remember.

Three strikes and you’re out was the rule, there was absolutely no exceptions to it, and I worked with a lot of different people in that house over the years because of it. I heard it said more’n once in the old days that workin for the Donovans was like steppin into one of those revolvin doors. You might get one spin, or two, and some folks went around as many as ten times or a dozen, but you always got spat out onto the sidewalk in the end. So when I went to work for her in the first place—this was in 1949—I went like you’d go into a dragon’s cave. But she wasn’t as bad as people liked to make out. If you kept your ears open, you could stay. I did, and the hunky did, too. But you had to stay on your toes all the time, because she was sharp, because she always knew more of what was going on with the island folk than any of the other summer people did… and because she could be mean. Even back then, before all her other troubles befell her, she could be mean. It was like a hobby with her.

“What are you doing here?” she says to me on that first day. “Shouldn’t you be home minding that new baby of yours and making nice big dinners for the light of your life?”

“Mrs. Cullum’s happy to watch Selena four hours a day,” I said. “Part-time is all I can take, ma’am.”

“Part-time is all I need, as I believe my advertisement in the local excuse for a newspaper said,” she comes right back—just showin me the edge of that sharp tongue of hers, not actually cuttin me with it like she would so many times later. She was knittin that day, as I remember. That woman could knit like a flash—a whole pair of socks in a single day was no problem for her, even if she started as late as ten o’clock. But she said she had to be in the mood.

“Yessum,” I said. “It did.”

“My name isn’t Yessum,” she said, putting her knitting down. “It’s Vera Donovan. If I hire you, you’ll call me Missus Donovan—at least until we know each other well enough to make a change—and I’ll call you Dolores. Is that clear?”

“Yes, Missus Donovan,” I said.

“All right, we’re off to a good start. Now answer my question. What are you doing here when you’ve got a house of your own to keep, Dolores?”

“I want to earn a little extra money for Christmas,” I said. I’d already decided on my way over I’d say that if she asked. “And if I’m satisfactory until then—and if I like working for you, of course—maybe I’ll stay on a little longer.”

“If you like working for me,” she repeats back, then rolls her eyes like it was the silliest thing she’d ever heard—how could anybody not like working for the great Vera Donovan? Then she repeats back, “Christmas money.” She takes a pause, lookin at me the whole time, then says it again, even more sarcastic. “Kuh-risss-mas money!”

Like she suspected I was really there because I barely had the rice shook out of my hair and was havin