What was inside her, she knew, were worse scars. They ran deep, and they had ravaged her soul.
Mary remembered when her body had been young and tight. He hadn't been able to keep his hands off her. She remembered the hot thrust of him inside her, when they were both flying on acid and the love went on forever. She remembered candles in the dark, the smell of strawberry incense, and the Doors – God's band – on the record player. Long time past, she thought. The Woodstock Nation had become the Pepsi Generation. Most of the outlaws had surfaced for air, had served their time in the cages of political restitution, put on the suits of the Mindfuck State, and joined the herd of cattle marching to the slaughterhouse.
But not him. Not Lord Jack.
And not her, either.
She was still Mary Terror down beneath the soft fast food-puffed flesh. Mary Terror was sleeping inside her body, dreaming of what was and what might have been.
The alarm clock went off in the bedroom. Mary silenced the jangle with a slap of her palm, and she turned on the cold water tap in the shower and stepped into the bitter flood. When she had finished showering and drying her hair, she dressed in her Burger King uniform. She'd been working at Burger King for eight months, had reached the level of assistant day manager, and beneath her was a crew of kids who didn't know Che Guevara from Geraldo Rivera. That was all right with her, they'd never heard of the Weather Underground, or the Storm Front either. To those kids she was a divorced woman trying to make ends meet. That was all right. They didn't know she could make a bomb out of chicken shit and kerosene, or that she could fieldstrip an M16 or shoot a pig in the face with as little hesitation as flicking a fly.
Better that they stay dumb than be dead.
She turned off the TV. Time to go. She picked up a yellow Smiley Face button from atop her dresser and pinned it to the front of her blouse. Then she put on her brown overcoat, got her purse with its credentials that identified her as Ginger Coles, and opened the door into the cold, hated outside world.
Mary Terror's rusted, beat-up blue Chevy pickup was in the parking lot. She caught a glimpse of Shecklett, watching her from his window, pulling back when he realized he'd been seen. The old man's eyes were going to get him in trouble someday. Maybe real soon.
She drove away from the apartment complex, merged with the morning traffic heading into Atlanta from the small country towns around it, and none of the other drivers guessed she was a six-foot-tall time bomb ticking steadily toward explosion.
Part I – Scream of the Butterfly
1: A Safe Place
The baby kicked. 'Oh!' Laura Clayborne said, and touched her swollen belly. 'There he goes again!'
'He'll be a soccer player, I'm telling you.' Across the table, Carol Mazer picked up her glass of chardonnay. 'So anyway, Matt tells Sophia her work is shoddy, and Sophia hits the roof. You know Sophia's temper. I swear, honey, you could hear the windows shake. We thought it was Judgment Day. Matt ran back to his office like a whipped puppy, but somebody's got to stand up to that woman, Laura. I mean, she's running the whole show over there, and her ideas absolutely – pardon my French – but they absolutely suck.' She took a sip of wine, her dark brown eyes shining with the pleasure of a gossip well told. Her hair was a riot of black ringlets, and her red fingernails looked long enough to pierce to the heart. 'You're the only one she's ever listened to, and with you off the track the whole place is falling to pieces. Laura, I swear she's out of control. God help us until you can get back to work.'
'I'm not looking forward to it.' Laura reached for her own drink: Perrier with a twist of lime. 'Sounds like everybody's gone crazy over there.' She felt the baby kick once more. A soccer player, indeed. The child was due in two weeks, more or less. Around the first of February, Dr. Bonnart had said. Laura had given up her occasional glass of wine the first month of her pregnancy, way back at the beginning of a long hot summer. Also forsaken, after a much harder struggle, was her habit of a pack of cigarettes a day. She had turned thirty-six in November, and this would be her first child. A boy, for sure. He'd displayed a definite penis on the sonogram. Some days she was almost stupid with happiness and other days she felt a dazed dread of the unknown perched on her shoulder, picking at her brain like a raven. The house was filled with baby books, the guest bedroom – once known as Doug's study – had been painted pale blue and his desk and IBM PC hauled out in favor of a crib that had belonged to her grandmother.
It had been a strange time. Laura had been hearing the ticking of her biological clock for the last four years, and everywhere she looked it seemed she saw women with strollers, members of a different society. She was happy and excited, yes, and sometimes she did think she actually looked radiant – but other times she simply found herself wondering whether or not she'd ever play tennis again, or what she was going to do if the bloat didn't melt away. The horror stories abounded, many of them supplied by Carol, who was seven years her junior, twice married, and had no children. Grace Dealey had ballooned up with her second child, and now all she did was sit around and wolf down boxes of Godiva chocolates. Lindsay Fortanier couldn't control her twins, and the children ran the household like the offspring of Attila the Hun and Marie Antoinette. Marian Burrows had a little red-haired girl with a temper that made McEnroe look like a pansy, and Jane Fields's two boys refused to eat anything but Vienna sausages and fish sticks. All this according to Carol, who was glad to help soothe Laura's fear of future shock.
They were sitting at a table in the Fish Market restaurant, at Atlanta 's Lenox Square. The waiter came over, and Laura and Carol ordered lunch. Carol asked for a shrimp and crabmeat salad, and Laura wanted a large bowl of seafood gumbo and the poached salmon special. 'I'm eating for two,' she said, catching Carol's faint smile. Carol ordered another glass of chardonnay. The restaurant, an attractive place decorated in seagreen, pale violet, and pink, was filling up with the business crowd. Laura scanned the room, counting the power ties. The women wore their dark-hued suits with padded shoulders, their hair fixed in sprayed helmets, and they gave off the flashes of diamonds and the aromas of Chanel or Giorgio. This was definitely the BMW and Mercedes crowd, and the waiters hustled from table to table heeding the desires of new money and platinum American Express cards. Laura knew what businesses these people were in: real estate, banking, stockbrokerage, advertising, public relations – the hot professions of the New South. Most of them were living on plastic, and leasing the luxury cars they drove, but appearance was everything.
Laura suddenly had an odd vision as Carol talked on about the calamities at the newspaper. She saw herself walking through the doors of the Fish Market, into this rarefied air. Only she was not as she was now. She was no longer well-groomed and well-dressed, her nails French-manicured and her chestnut-brown hair drawn back with an antique golden clip to fall softly around her shoulders. She was as she had been when she was eighteen years old, her light blue eyes clear and defiant behind her granny glasses. She wore ragged bellbottom jeans and a blouse that looked like a faded American flag, and on her feet were sandals made from car tires, like the sandals the Vietnamese wore in the news films. She wore no makeup, her long hair limp and in need of brushing, her face adamant with anger. Buttons were stuck to her blouse: peace signs, and slogans like STOP THE WAR, IMPERIALIST AMERIKA, and POWER TO THE PEOPLE. All conversations of interest rates, business mergers, and ad campaigns abruptly ceased as the hippie who had once been Laura Clayborne – then Laura Beale – strode defiantly into the center of the restaurant, sandals thwacking against the carpeted floor. Most of the people here were in their mid- thirties to early forties. They all remembered the protest marches, the candlelight vigils, and the draft card burnings. Some of them, perhaps, had been on the front lines with her. But now they gaped and sneered, and some laughed nervously. 'What happened?' she asked them as forks slid into bowls of seafood gumbo and hands stopped halfway to their glasses of white wine. 'What the hell happened to all of us?'
The hippie couldn't answer, but Laura Clayborne knew. We got older, she thought. We grew up and took our places in the machine. And the machine gave us expensive toys to play with, and Rambo and Reagan said don't worry, be happy. We moved into big houses, bought life insurance, and made out our wills. And now we wonder, deep in our secret hearts, if all the protest and tumult had a point. We think that maybe we could have won in Vietnam after all, that the only equality among men is in the wallet, that some books and music should be censored, and we wonder if we would be the first to call out the Guard if a new generation of protesters took to the streets. Youth yearned and burned, Laura thought. Age reflected, by the ruddy fireplaces.
'… wanted to cut his hair short and let one of those rat-tail things hang down in back.' Carol cleared her throat. 'Earth to Laura! Come in, Laura!'
