Storm of Fortune

clinch. Dots, who was small-boned, and about fifty pounds lighter (Bernice weighed two hundred), was getting the worse of it. A madness went into Bernice’s eyes. Hoarse noises started to come from both women: not words, but sounds which represented words. Dots’s dress was ripped from the neck. When Bernice saw this advantage, she shook her more violently; and her madness took complete possession of her, and she ripped Dots’s dress right down to the navel. Dots’s breasts cascaded out, in full view, visible. They were large. They were black. And they had blacker circles round the nipples. And just at that moment, Bernice did a curious thing. She stopped shaking Dots. She actually dropped her hands. And a moment later, in a completely independent action, altogether strange for the meaning of the struggle, she held Dots close to her. She held her in an embrace of violence and rape and love. And when she saw that Dots did not resist, could not because of the pressure against her slender body, Bernice kissed her full on her lips. She rolled her tongue inside Dots’s mouth. And with one hand, she squeezed Dots on her left breast. And even then, Dots did not resist. Bernice walked her across the room, as if she was transferring a mannequin from one side of a show-window to another. She threw her roughly on the chesterfield, and lay on top of her. Her mouth was covering Dots’s mouth all this time. And the only sounds they were making were the hoarse noises, as loud as the desires in their groins, as loud as the groans of their struggling. But they were noises of a different colour, and of a completely different feeling.

Bernice was ashamed to visit Estelle in the hospital because she was in a public ward. All the women in this ward had various problems of the womb. “Female problems,” somebody called them. They had either caused them themselves, by attempted abortions, or else they had inherited them, in the genes and veins of their birth. Not all the women in this ward were single. There were more married women here; and it was to one of these, a large jovial woman from Halifax, Nova Scotia, that Bernice found Estelle talking, when finally she had enough courage to brook her embarrassment about visiting. And even when she entered the ward she was like a schoolgirl entering school for the first day. Estelle was sitting on this woman’s bed, Mrs. Joseph Macmillan’s; and she was following Mrs. Macmillan’s stubby fingers as she pointed out certain passages in a pulp novel she was reading aloud, and which she enjoyed because it was “sexy as hell, you hear me, darling?” And Estelle was laughing. She was laughing in a way that Bernice had never known. She seemed merry and at home in this public ward of women of common female problems. When she did finally see Bernice, looking round as if she wanted to be invisible, she touched Mrs. Macmillan’s demonstrative finger, the finger of sexy sections, and she guided it in the direction of Bernice.

“Look! Bernice! My sister!”

Mrs. Macmillan laughed as if she was still laughing at the sex in the book, and her whole body heaved under its heavy weight, overburdened by her breasts that were now no longer restricted by her large brassiere. And she slid down off the bed like a seal sliding into water, and went to Bernice, and shook her hand. She also embraced Bernice.

Looking back at Estelle, who could not move around so easily because she was still bedridden, Mrs. Macmillan said cheerfully, still heaving from unexplainable laughter and from the exhaustion of walking, “So this is Estelle’s sister! You look just like Estelle, you hear me, darling? Identical as twins, you hear me?” Bernice was not only blacker than Estelle, she was obviously less beautiful. But the strong bond of friendship which had formed between the two convalescing women had failed to permit Mrs. Macmillan to see or to recognize this obvious difference. “Estelle there, she’s been making me wet my pants with laughter. From the moment she came out of that coma she was in, two or three days ago.”

Estelle had climbed off Mrs. Macmillan’s bed by this time. She limped over, and showed Bernice to her own bed, with Mrs. Macmillan following them. Estelle had not yet introduced her to Bernice, by name. “This is …” she began. But Mrs. Macmillan beat her to it.

“The name is Macmillans,” she told Bernice. “Gloria Macmillan.” She grabbed Bernice’s hand, and shook it as strongly as a man would. Bernice tried to present a pleasant face. She smiled and said, “I am Bernice. Estelle’s sister. I am pleased to make your acquaintance.” Mrs. Macmillan beamed. She admitted, “Darling, had it not been for Estelle here, this sister of yours, you hear me, darling, well I tell you, this slaughter-house … I call it a slaughter-house because every bitch you see on this ward, every single woman except those two over there, the one in the pink housedress and the other one there lying down talking to her bloody self as if she is off her bloody rocker, every single woman except those two have been under the doctor’s knife … or else they wouldn’t be here, would they now, eh, darling?” Mrs. Macmillan then gave Bernice a guided tour of the illnesses and reputations and social positions of every woman in this ward. She talked about every woman except Estelle, whose medical history she presumed Bernice to be already acquainted with. There was a woman, “a Catholic I think she is, because when I sneaked up on her bed to read her history off her chart, I find out that she is this big and proper Catholic person, a real going-to-mass type, too — judging by the number of rosaries she keeps under her bloody pillow. Well, I laughed like hell, you hear me, darling? Ask Estelle, here. I find out that that woman already