Against the Ruins Read online

  She pauses for effect—

  “And do you know—I looked it up—it happened right where your house sits.”

  You crawl out from under the table and lean against me, and I shiver despite myself. You ask to go back to tell the elephant story to the bathtub ladies. You’re so fascinated with that bathtub decal you now kiss the ladies goodnight before going to bed.

  Uta and I talk a while more. Later, walking back to our front door, she glances into the living room. “You have a piano, I take it.”

  I say no. I don’t say that my stepmother offered the one from Brantley but William said it would cost too much to move it.

  “Well, you must have music, my dear. Please come to my house and play mine. I heard you singing. A very fine voice you’ve got.”

  I blush again. When was I singing that she could hear me?

  “That’s another thing—my husband Henry didn’t like music. Reason enough by itself.”

  She hesitates, eyes me soberly. “You have to be careful about what husbands do.” With that, she shakes her ringlets off her neck, waves, heads out the door.

  You’re back, Lyra. I can tell by your scent—always a little whiff of linseed oil in your hair. I love that. I always imagine my mother in you. You’re asking if I’m in pain. For the most part I’m not. I feel like I’m floating, like when my parents took my brothers and me to Folly Beach and I’d lie on a rubber raft in the ocean when the tide was coming in and let the sea send me back home. Only now the tide is going out. A tired metaphor, but true.

  A minute ago I was thinking about our first months in Columbia. That first summer was lovely. You’re flopping about in your blow-up swimming pool and it’s hot but not too hot yet, and the world seems reinvented. Joseph McCarthy of the scare tactics died a week ago, and yesterday Martin Luther King stood on the Washington Mall to tell the world that “there is something in the soul that cries out for freedom.” It’s your sixth birthday, you in the ruffled one-piece bathing suit with the pint-size hula hoop, and your father is playfully squirting rings of water around you. He’s wearing the unaccustomed Bermuda shorts, and you run over and jump up and almost knock him down, and he drops the garden hose and it snakes around and soon he’s soaked and laughing. I’m happy to see him playing with you, he seems so serious lately. I get the Brownie camera and shoot a picture of the two of you, which years later you will stare at as if you don’t believe it’s real.

  We looked so—well, normal.

  Later that day you and I plant azaleas in the backyard and gather honeysuckle—I love those tiny aromatic flowers. They’re the smell of my childhood, they grow wild and unruly in the cemetery where my parents are buried. Suddenly overwhelmed, I kick off my shoes and grab you into my arms—I’m wearing a flowered spring dress and holding my baby close, your golden hair twining through a mother’s darker locks, whirling you around in the soft grass, barefoot under the pecan trees, singing to my child, this living light. This cup always running over, this dream where to give love is so much better than receiving it. In my perfect alto (if I do say so myself) I sing a hymn of thanksgiving, waltz my darling into the light of old trees, waiting for the best of all possible worlds to come for us. Soon we’ll have a home of our own, our own garden. It’s just around the corner, fruition, pinnacle, all the hills of Olympus. A smart, handsome husband and this gorgeous child—how did I get so lucky?

  When we’re both giggling and dizzy, I put you down gently and place a bouquet of blooming honeysuckle in your hand. This child, I vow silently, will always know she is loved and beautiful. As long as I breathe, nothing awful will happen to this child.

  Nurses come and go. I hear an intercom. I think it’s nearly lunchtime.

  No, around eleven a.m. I’m sitting in the living room, sewing. Really just holding the shirt with the loose button. My hands are shaking too badly to sew. I’m trying to decide what I should do. What is wrong with him? Why would he do such an awful thing? When he wakes up, I’ll call—

  A crash reverberates through the house. I throw William’s shirt down and hurry into our bedroom.

  He’s rummaging in his bureau drawer, tossing socks, undershirts, handkerchiefs onto the floor. He dumps out the contents of another drawer. Seven transistor radios in unopened boxes fall out. I’ve never seen them before. He bought seven radios when he’s out of work and we barely have enough money for Christmas?

  William fumbles in the compartment filled with ironed shirts.

  “Darling, what are you looking for? How do you feel?”

  His voice is surly. “I’ve got to find it.”

  “Would you like some breakfast? Hadn’t we better put on a clean bandage?”

  He stops and stares at the bandage. “What did you do to me?”

  I flinch. “You had an accident, remember?

  “I don’t remember any accident.”

  He turns and runs into the living room, calling, “I’ve got to find it.” He ransacks the hall bookshelves, spills books onto the floor, hurls three across the room. He runs back to the bedroom, tears open dresser drawers again, runs into the living room, searches the secretary desk and jerks bills and letters out of the wooden cubbyholes and throws them on the floor. He lopes back to the kitchen and heads toward the side door. I think, Oh dear, he’s still in his pajamas, as he flings open the door and runs down the steps to the driveway.

  I sprint outside as he heads toward the car. When he gets in, I cry, “Darling, come in the house, you’re in your pajamas, you’ll get a chill.”

  “Stay away. I know what you’re doing.”

  He starts the car and throws it into gear. I jump out of the way—he’s backing up way too fast, isn’t looking where he’s going. A loud craccck. The ten-foot dogwood falls over, just misses the side stairs.

  He gets out, stares through me and walks away as though nothing has happened. At the steps he turns back to me.

  “I’d like breakfast now,” he says calmly and disappears inside.

  Uta is on her side porch staring—I barely hear her as she calls to ask if I need help. I stare at the dented fender, then at the upended dogwood. There’ll be no white blooms at Easter; this tree is beyond salvation. I go over and kneel beside it, wondering what to do.

  Over the years I’ve asked myself—what was the first sign that something was wrong, what did I miss? That crazy car? We’d only been in Columbia for a few weeks when William became obsessed with whether our 1949 hump-fendered Chevy was safe in the city. He’s pacing through the house, fuming over this for hours, heavy leather shoes striking heart-pine floors. Then he announces he’s taking a bus to New York City to buy a new car.

  This seemed odd—we had a few used cars in the South—but William had always been eccentric. He explained that he’d have a better selection in a big city, so three days later you and I drive him to the bus station. In those days a woman dressed up to go downtown—Sunday dress, stockings with seams, heels, gloves. Can you imagine? No matter how I dressed, though, I was self-conscious. And this was before I gained so much weight. My oldest brother, who knew I was insecure, often told me I was beautiful, which I didn’t believe, but when I look back at old photos I realize I did look better than I thought I did. My brother called my deep-set eyes (yours are bluer) “mystical” and my hair “black satin”—such a charmer he was, a lot like our father.

  Once seated on the bus, William—who never wore a hat—smiles at us through the window. His perpetually hesitant, uncertain smile: its vulnerability always went straight to my heart. After the bus pulls away, you and I amble past the historic First Baptist Church where the Confederate Secession Convention met. I gaze at the white portico, the thick round columns—your father could recite arcane details about South Carolina’s history, which I liked before I realized it could become a liability. Driving us home, I think about the first time I saw him—at a funer
al, in his dress uniform, firing a rifle into the air for a fellow soldier whose body had just come back from Europe. Watching him across a flag-draped coffin, I sensed that this handsome stranger was different in some way. Of course I never told anyone I picked out my husband at a funeral—they might think it bad luck.

  That night, with William away, our new house feels lonely. You’re sprawled on your bed studying the tongue-and-groove walls. Yesterday you’d counted the boards—age five was your counting phase. Also the year you began writing regular letters to Rin Tin Tin. Your other great joy remained the bathtub ladies; you’d given them all names now. The next morning I missed your father whistling as he shaved, his footsteps thudding against the wood floors. People are sound, everyone has an auditory thumbprint, a personal pitch, a melody—harsh or harmonious—that follows them around like an aura. Your father is a fast-paced staccato.

  Two mornings later, while we’re eating breakfast, a car pulls into the driveway. I peer out a window. A boxlike taxi has stopped at the wrong house. I go outside to tell the driver he’s made a mistake when William emerges.

  Sunlight glistening in his shaggy forelock, he smiles and points at the vehicle. “Look what I got us.”

  The car is yellow, a fat breadbox on wheels, with checkerboard squares and a dent in the back fender. A black and white roof sign blares: Off Duty.

  “It’s a genuine New York Checker cab,” he says. He hauls open a heavy back door, which groans. “Bet you haven’t seen a jump seat in years. It’s like the one in my old roadster, before the war.”

  “You bought us a taxicab?”

  He’s walking around kicking the tires. “Taxis are specially made to withstand all road conditions. I got a great deal.”

  “Our family car is going to be a taxicab? A taxicab?” My voice is in the upper registers. “People will think we’ve lost our minds. It’s so—yellow.”

  “Maybe I’ll get a yellow suit to go with it.”

  “I don’t think this is funny.”

  He shakes his head back and forth. “You don’t understand cars or what the highways are like, you can hit this thing with a tank and it’ll come out the winner. It came with snow tires too—remember that dangerous ice storm a few years ago?”

  I remember that it snows twice a decade. Maybe we should get a sleigh too.

  He’s smiling like he’s won a Cadillac. “The neighbors will be jealous of this beauty.”

  “Then let’s give it to them” slipped out before I realized I’d spoken.

  “What’s got into you—don’t I take good care of you and the child?”

  “The child?”

  I look around, hoping our new neighbors won’t see us arguing. As I head to the front door, his voice trails me: “I’ll have it painted.”

  He has the cab painted burgundy and gets the roof sign cut off, though a tell-tale bump remains. A car with a brain tumor, not exactly what I’d been dreaming of. He waxes the thing, shines the chrome, presents the reincarnation to me. A week later, yellow paint begins leaching through the burgundy—soon the cab is a striped, polka-dot affair. I can assure you that no one ever missed us coming down the street.

  Lyra, I know you’ve wondered—especially given how things became later—why I stayed with your father through so much. Why I so often kept still. You can’t imagine what women were taught when I was young. You’ve grown up in a completely different world, but I was born into one where women couldn’t even vote. When your father and I got engaged, divorce was still illegal in South Carolina. Not just frowned upon, but illegal. Women like Elizabeth Cady Stanton had stood up for our rights fifty years earlier, but these voices—with no media yet—scarcely got to the South, where the idea of the proper “Southern Lady” held on like an ink stain. After the 1940s war, when women built airplanes in factories but were tossed out when the men returned, a terrible backlash was aimed at us, magazine articles that compared our maturity to that of preadolescents. Books calling us weak—I remember one, The Lost Sex. Many men were apparently afraid of how capable women proved to be in those factories. Now women were instructed—often by a minister wielding a Bible—that we were subordinate to our husbands and that if something was wrong in a marriage it was our fault and our duty to fix it.

  Though embarrassed, I dismissed the taxi episode as harmless eccentricity.

  Several weeks later I’m humming along with “I Could Have Danced All Night” and “Que Sera, Sera” on the radio and emptying the last moving box, which I’d deliberately saved for when the house was organized. I take out a delicate glass bud vase and hold it up to a lamp. Swirls of blue glass, which I press to my throat like perfume. It belonged to my real mother. My mother Elizabeth, who died when I was a toddler. Next I unearth a large vase, ugly really, a patchwork of broken china shards glued to a heavy pitcher. I study the haphazard pieces—old patterns, mostly roses, Havilland, some blue Delft.

  You walk in and ask why the vase looks like that.

  “It’s what happened to our neighbors when I was a little girl. Their house burned down and Mrs. Llewellyn, bless her heart, was walking through the ruins crying. The house had been in the family for three generations. She started picking up the broken china—people had two or three sets of dishes then. She glued the broken pieces to the only vase that survived.”

  “It’s not pretty like the blue one.”

  “I know, sweetie. But it’s—it’s special too. She was my piano teacher and all that family is dead. I’m their memory now.” I run a hand through your silky hair. “I’m gluing myself to you, you’re my memory. Want to help me unpack?”

  You help for all of five minutes, go say hello to the bathtub ladies, then escape into the yard. I put the vase on the oak sideboard and straighten myself up, check to make sure your father is around, and head for the local store. It was so nice when you could walk to buy groceries. On the way I pass a young woman with dull brown eyes sweeping her front porch; the right porch column is missing, a two-by-four holds the roof up, and four children—one in a sagging diaper—are squealing in a wooden sandbox. I wave to her, feel for how hard her life must be. At the store I ask the owner, Mrs. Flo, who seems younger than the silver hair pinned up in a bun, about the two neighborhood schools—you’ll soon go to one, I to the other.

  I buy supplies and head home. A few minutes later, when I come through our front door, I stop sharply. A child screaming. My child—I’ve never heard you cry like that before—never. I drop the groceries and run to your room. You’re in the bathroom, in the green sundress I made last summer, alternately wailing and sucking your thumb, which you’ve not done in two years.

  William is leaning over the tub. “Obscene,” he cries in a high unnatural voice. In his hand gleams a silver razor blade. He slashes at the decal, edges the razor under a dancing woman and tears through her until she’s halved, until her breasts and disembodied smile fall onto the floor. Shredded pieces of other women already lie there, severed necks, broken legs, torn and mangled arms.

  “Don’t hurt them,” you scream, sobbing, stamping your feet. “Please please don’t hurt them!”

  I grab you, pull you to me, say, “There, there, sweetie.” You tremble, cry against my stomach. William holds the razor blade aloft; a triangle of plastic blonde woman still hangs from it. I turn sharply and lead you into the kitchen and say it’s time to make dinner. I take a fryer out of the refrigerator. As you sit at the table sobbing, I tell you everything will be all right.

  William has never even used the word “obscene” before. Doesn’t he realize Lyra loves those dancing women?

  I hum nervously as I fry the chicken. Realize I’m off-key.

  You bolt out of the house and run down the back steps and flail into the backyard. I stand transfixed at the kitchen window, watching. Why am I not following you, comforting you? Why am I not telling you it was unkind of your father
to take away something you loved? Why don’t I march back there and tell him the decal was a little cheap but wasn’t hurting anyone?

  My feet want to move. I stop them with a trained head. A good wife does not contradict or criticize her husband, especially in front of the children.

  I turn on the radio, listen to someone talk about the Cold War as I move the chicken around in sizzling grease. The radio chatter grates on my nerves—I have to get a record player. Maybe there’ll be enough Green Stamps before long. I turn the dial and Frank Sinatra croons as I keep picturing a razor blade.

  I’ve never seen him quite that—angry. Over a bathtub decoration?

  Hot grease splatters onto my skirt. I burn the chicken.

  It’s so many years later now, Lyra—lifetimes and decades—as you sit in this hospital room and listen to me struggle for each breath. Even though I knew something was wrong that day, I didn’t know what, or what to do about it.

  You’re touching my hair—I’m proud of my thick white crown, downy soft, not a hint of yellow. I hope you know how much I love you. We take so much for granted: time, a voice, breathing itself. The air of life enters and departs my body urgently now, preparing for the only unpaired breath a human being ever takes. The last time we exhale is the last moment we feel the love we’ve known. Our history stands still after that.

  Can love, can happiness, with the finality of a last breath, disappear like a decal scraped from porcelain? Can one moment shred a lifetime?

  It can. Did. On the day I learned the difference between chance and choice. Choice is what you get if chance leaves you alone.

  Chapter Three

  I’ve often wondered what would have happened had we stayed in Summerville. I loved that small town, especially the yellow shoebox cottage where we lived when you were a baby. I didn’t want to move to Columbia. I had a good job in Summerville and the romantic in me loved the town’s sprawling old houses on stilts, the garlands of Spanish moss on crepe myrtle trees, the nearby meandering marshes. You’ve painted those dusty roads canopied by live oak branches as claustrophobic, but I felt safe beneath the ancient oaks, protected. Geography, I’ve come to believe, can be destiny.