“First, don’t try to do anything about this credit card. Don’t call the company or try to cancel or anything. For the moment we don’t want to alert this woman to the fact that we know about the card. When the investigation is over the card will be canceled, and you won’t be responsible for any debts. Can I count on you for that?”
“Sure.” Laura didn’t sound sure.
“The other thing I need is to have you tell me everything you can remember about meeting this woman, everything she said to you, the way she looked, what she was wearing. There is no detail that’s too small to be useful.”
48
Judith opened her eyes and listened to the rain outside her apartment window. She liked it when the rain came down for two or three days at a time. It always seemed to her to be the world cleaning itself of the dirt and dead things, the unhappiness and mistakes. It rained almost half of the days of the year here.
Judith sat up in bed and looked at the window. The rain was running down past it from somewhere above, and she could hear it hitting below, splashing like a tiny waterfall. She got up, pushed the button on the coffeemaker, then padded out to the bottom of the carpeted stairs, where the manager left her newspaper every morning, and brought it back with her.
She sipped the coffee, sat cross-legged on the couch, and ignored the newspaper. Sitting here listening to the water outside made her feel very warm and safe. It was a feeling that she had not experienced until she had grown up. She had never liked rainy days when she was just Charlene.
In Wheatfield it sometimes rained for days like this in the spring and fall. Her mother hated the rain, hated ever being cold or wet, so she never went out. She hated being trapped in the house too, so she would wake up already irritated. Her blond hair would be in a network of ringlets that Charlene could hardly imagine having happened in the short time between last evening when she had gone out and the very next day. It looked like an unraveled rope.
Her mother’s pretty, childlike face would be warm and pink from being pressed against her pillow, and it would carry impressions from the folds in the pillowcase. She would get up and stand beside the percolator and scowl at the sight of the coffee gurgling up into the little glass cap on top. She would find the green-and-white pack of menthol cigarettes on the counter, light one on the stove burner, and leave it in the corner of her mouth while she poured her coffee and went to the front window to stare out.
Years later, Charlene had realized that her mother behaved exactly like a cat. Even though she knew it was raining—had seen the water streaming down the outside of the bathroom window, had maybe even been awakened by it as it poured from the gutters out the downspout near her corner of the house, she still had to go to the front window to see if it was raining out there too.
After a few minutes of silence while she glowered at the rain and built her mood, Charlene’s mother would begin. She would look at Charlene with frank curiosity. “Have you rehearsed for the pageant next week?” Charlene would say she had spent most of the time doing homework, but she had rehearsed. Her mother would say, “Let’s hear the seashore song.”
Charlene would sing it, maybe not as well as she could, because she could see from the first seconds that her mother’s expression was not admiring or pleasant. Singing for her was like pleading a case while walking up the steps of the gallows.
Her mother would hear the end of the song as a signal to respond. “How could I have spent thousands of dollars and thousands of hours of my time on you? You sound like a trained parrot. You dance like a cow. How can you possibly be anything but embarrassing by next week? God, I should see if I can get my entry fee back. And look at your skin. Have you ever thought of eating a vegetable instead of a candy bar? You look like the ghost of a ghost.”
When she had talked enough about the next pageant, which she had trained Charlene to believe was the last boat out of poverty, she would move on to a variety of new topics. “Your room . . .” “Your clothes . . .” “Your . . .” As the morning got started, her voice would rise in pitch and volume until, during a pause for breath, Charlene would hear the current boyfriend creaking the springs in the bedroom, jingling his belt as he put on his pants. There would be a heavy thump as he put a toe in his shoe and stamped it to get his foot in.
A short time later he would appear, walking through on his way out, sometimes pausing to make some excuse, and sometimes just preferring the rain to the noise. Then her mother would blame her. “You always make me look like I’m the big bitch. I wouldn’t have to raise my voice if you’d just listen and do what you’re supposed to. My God, look at that hair. I spend hundreds of dollars on cut-and-colors, shampoos and conditioners, and you have to look like the bride of Frankenstein. I’ll tell you, if you don’t do well on this pageant—either Miss Hennepin County or at least first runner-up—I’m through with you. You can be your own coach and manager and teacher and maid and chauffeur. Then where will you be? Miss Nothing. Miss Ugly Little Zero.” She would sit on the couch with her arms folded and put Charlene through a series of chores or a series of rehearsals, depending on her mood and the state of the little house.
Her mother would be distracted from her when the boyfriend returned, and there would be a fight. Usually the fight made it better for Charlene, but not always. She remembered one boyfriend named Donny, who was tall and thin and quiet, with long arms and legs. He was from somewhere in the South—was Tennessee right?—and he had an accent. He came in during one of her mother’s tantrums on a Sunday, around one in the afternoon.
Her mother had heard the door and spun her head around to face Donny. She shrieked, “And you too. You worthless—”
Donny’s arm moved so fast that Charlene wasn’t sure whether she saw it or only heard the slap and her imagination supplied the abrupt motion, the forearm bringing the backhand across her mother’s mouth. Her mother went backward onto the kitchen floor, either because she had seen the movement at its start and tried to save herself, or was actually propelled by the force of the blow.
She could remember Donny’s face while it was happening. When he heard what Charlene’s mother was saying he might have narrowed his eyes slightly, but otherwise his face remained impassive. The long arm just swung, and there was something in it of the routine. It was like a horse twitching its tail to brush a fly away.
Charlene watched her mother. After a second or two, she raised herself on one elbow, staring, her nose and mouth bleeding. Her expression of anger and contempt was gone. She just lay there blinking, her mouth open, eyes empty and surprised, no more ready for thought than a person who had been hit by a truck.
Donny kept going toward the bedroom, and Charlene realized that the whole episode had not interrupted his progress for more than two seconds. He went in and closed the door. After a minute, her mother managed to sit up. Ten minutes later Charlene could hear Donny snoring.
Her mother had withdrawn to the couch, lying there and crying for an hour or so, feeling sorry for herself. Charlene wanted to stand over her and ask, “What did you expect? Are you blind and deaf? Did you live with him, sleep with him, drink yourself sick with him, and imagine that anything but this could possibly happen?” But she did not.
Charlene had liked Donny better than most of the others, because he had a kind of forthright simplicity. He had none of the willingness to struggle for advantage that made the others pathetic victims of her mother’s manipulation. For most of her childhood, her mother’s rainy-day scenes were acted out with a boyfriend of the other sort: Paul, or Mike. She would turn on the boyfriend, practically spitting venom, and he would respond. He would act exactly the way she did, as though he were not another person, really, but just her mirror and echo. Within a few minutes they would be simultaneously shouting different versions of what had caused the argument, then a list of bad things that each of them had done on other occasions, then bad qualities and habits, and, finally, there would just be an apportioning of ugly names.
It would go on all through the long, rainy day and into the evening, because her mother would not go out on a rainy night. If the weather didn’t clear, Charlene would get two days of it. Between attacks on the boyfriend, Charlene’s mother would deliver harangues against her for everything she was and everything she should be but wasn’t.
It had taken changing herself into Tanya Starling and moving into the high-rise apartment in Chicago with Carl to teach her that there were pleasures to a rainy day. Carl had been an expert at enjoying himself. On a rainy day, if he wasn’t involved in a legal case that had something urgent about it, he would sometimes stay home. They would lie around in bed and make love.
