Lamma's Night (anthology)

'It's going to be like him,' Greta had said, and her voice had been hoarse, husky as, no doubt, Jimmy had wanted it to be when he had demanded that she ask for what he was going to give her in any case, demanded that she ask in the accents of a seductress who would take anything he had to give, who would ask for his arrogance and his manhood in the way that only a woman who had been weaned and raised on the saccharine milk of motion pictures and syndicated television could ask; or maybe he had not wanted that at all, maybe he had wanted instead exactly what he had gotten: a terrified acquiescence, a hoarseness and a huskiness as sexless as fear. 'It's going to be just like him. He said—' And Mrs. Gavin, taking her strawberry phosphate that was as dated and as deceptively simple as herself, sipping at it, and then holding the cold, dripping glass against her hot cheek

'They all say that. My Tom was the same way.' Another sip. 'And I believed him. And so...'

And with fifteen minutes to closing time at the library (and the librarian at the desk not looking up every minute or two, because she had given the only hint she was going to give and that was that), Greta was kneeling at a bottom shelf in a dark corner, pulling out a book that, according to the stamped date on the library form pasted on the flyleaf, had not been pulled out for twenty years (and the card in the pocket, she saw, bore among its five or six antique signatures that of Mrs. Gavin herself), standing and opening it to the color plates, turning page after page until she found what she was looking for, thereafter closing the book and taking it up to the desk as she fumbled in her purse for her library card.

Mrs. Gavin had put aside her empty phosphate glass and had leaned toward her. 'They all say it. And we all believe them. Sometimes we believe them until it's too late.' And Greta, as though her hands were suddenly around something of which she had not dreamed five minutes before, something of which she had not dreamed since that April evening with the scratch of what she thought was her cat on her sash window

'Ma'am?' And Mrs. Gavin, shaking her head, taking out her handkerchief to dab once more at her temples

'You'll have to learn, too. Just be careful. Don't take too much.'

They all say it. And we all believe them. And the next day, when she called Mr. McCoy and told him that she was not feeling well and could not come to work, and when she lied to her mother and told her that she was feeling quite well and was going to work, she found that she could not forget even a particle of Mrs. Gavin's words, could not forget either the precious or the (seeming) dross of what had been said over the table in the soda shop, the two having become so commingled that the second had taken on the nature of the first, the knowledge of a certain weed growing in a certain place and steeped in boiling water in a certain way (and it was imperative that she have the book, because one weed might look much like another, and only the right one would do) infusing with something of a quintessential imperative the knowledge that all men believed that they were magic, that all of them believed that their offspring would be boys when they wanted them to be boys and girls when they wanted them to be girls, believed, too, that their boys would be like them down to the last baseball glove and bottle of hair tonic and even desire for women.

But if that were true, then Jimmy's belief was indeed one with his father's and his grandfather's, one with, in fact, the belief of all men; and Mrs. Gavin had said that it was belief only, that experience, (and she had sixty childless years of it) had taught her that the belief was unfounded. And, suddenly, the fluttering in Greta's belly (even as, book in hand and knee on the warm forest floor, she was finding what she was looking for, finding it and gathering it in, filling a paper bag that had, three days before, brought ice cream home from the supermarket) took on a different meaning, for all men thought they were magic, and none of them were, and Jimmy's now-dead thumbs hooked in the pockets of his jeans and his driving and his words seemed to be now no more than a small part of the continuing protestations of men everywhere, no more than a few urgent but obscure words in that unspoken language of masculinity that attempted to deny what was, that tried, with every resource, to declare what was not: that children belonged to them and to them alone, that fantasy would make reality kneel to them as Jimmy had made Greta, shaking and in her nightgown, kneel to him before he had reached down and lifted her and carried her to her own bed.

And, taking the filled bag home, walking along the road and knowing that, as her father would be at work when she returned, so her mother would also be out of the house {playing bridge and drinking tea at Mrs. Sandhurst's), she found that she could not but dismiss Jimmy's statements and predictions as untruths that had not so much sullied his mouth as confirmed him in his place: that as he was man and she was woman, so it was his lot to believe, and it was hers to know. And she did know. Even with the water boiling in the white kitchen of her father's house, even with the weeds lying rinsed in the tin colander, ready to go into the water for the precisely three minutes of boiling needed to produce an infusion that was neither too weak nor too lethal, she knew, and she knew that she knew.

But then, Jimmy's surety shown for the dust that it was, the poison cup brewed and waiting for the touch of her lips, that deliverance in which she had not dared to believe for almost four months (for the doctors in town all knew her and her father and her mother, and she could not, could not ask for such a thing or reveal what had to be revealed in order to ask for it) within the reach of an arm, she realized that there were other possibilities. No, she knew with all of her fertile womanhood that there were other possibilities, possibilities inherent in the basic, vivific mixing of sperm and egg that no high-school biology textbook, no matter how explicit in its descriptions or protested against by Mr. Burke's Baptist congregation, could adequately or even partially reveal; for as there was falsehood in Jimmy White's cocksurety, so there was also truth, for he was magic, as all men were magic, and therein lay the real magic: the magic of women, of children, and of nurture, of men who worked a job and came home one day to find a baby turned into a child or a child turned into a woman or a man with no help or interference or even faint suggestion from them.

But it was his. And she had not asked for it or wanted it. What grew within her belly came not from love, not from even a passing acquaintance, but only from the lust of a young man now dead twelve hours and an April night that had given him the opportunity he had wanted.

And yet, still. And still. And maybe. And then, again, maybe. And in her mind she saw Jimmy at her window, and Jimmy in the soda shop; and she saw, too, Mrs. Gavin, childless and alone save for the money her husband had left in trust for her, the money she would never own but only use until she died, and all of it out of her own choice and a book she had, by chance, found in the public library forty years ago, the same book that now lay on the kitchen counter beside the still-steaming pot and the tin colander and the cup that would make her one with Mrs. Gavin, even as Jimmy White had insisted that he was one with his father and his grandfather.

And so, after looking at the cup with its cooling poison for a long time, she picked it up, and she

[yep it ends like this]