Daughter Doom

“Mother,” Gloria said at breakfast, “I believe there is something wrong with my knees.”

Gloria’s mother, Gail Hermans, buttered her toast, and said, “Indeed?”

“Oh yes.” Gloria leaned across the table and touched her mother’s arm. “You’ll remember this conversation later and say, ‘I wish I had paid more attention to my daughter when she spoke of her knees. If we’d only caught it in time …’ That sort of thing.”

“Well, what about your knees?” said Mrs. Hermans, taking a small bite from her toast and brushing crumbs from the newspaper spread out before her. “Are you feeling an odd numbness in them? Are there small needles of pain just under the skin? Are they hot? Are they cold? Do they feel—let’s see—as though someone were breathing on them? Are they making noises, squeaking perhaps like rusty hinges?”

Gloria brushed her jet black hair back, frowned, sat up straight in her chair, and replied, in her coolest voice, “Your words will burn like red-hot pokers when I’m dead and gone, Mother. I want you to know, right now, that I forgive you.”

“That’s a comfort,” said Mrs. Hermans. “But I am listening, Gloria. Please proceed.”

Gail Hermans and her daughter looked much alike, sitting across the table in the small breakfast room, crisp fall sunlight illuminating their pale faces. They both possessed large brown eyes, delicate, heart-stopping eyebrows, and fine, imperious cheekbones. Mrs. Hermans—with a charity luncheon to attend—was already dressed elegantly, her small diamond earrings full of bright assurance. Gloria was in a blue bathrobe, her nine-year-old body whippet-thin and brittle with indignation.

“Well,” said Gloria, learning forward. “I don’t know the medical term for it of course.” Gloria frowned again. “I don’t know where our Merck Manual is these days. I suspect it’s been thrown out. Anyway, what seems to have happened is that my kneecaps have become detached, somehow, and actually, well, move. I can push them about with my fingers.” Gloria stopped and studied her mother, who was smiling. “Well?” Gloria said, with some vehemence. “Well?”

Mrs. Hermans sighed. “Gloria, that’s perfectly natural.”

Gloria snorted her disdain, “Mother, you are not a doctor, are you?”

Mrs. Hermans paused, as though trying to remember if she had, in fact, acquired a medical degree at some point in her life. “No, I’m not a doctor, but I have kneecaps of my own, and if I were a morbid person, I could sit around all day and push them around. It is the nature of kneecaps to be somewhat mobile.”

“Oh Mother,” Gloria said, throwing her napkin down on her plate, “you are no comfort. All you’re saying is that it’s genetic. I’ve inherited it from you. That’s great, just great.” And Gloria jumped up and left the table.

Mrs. Hermans shouted after her daughter. “The bus will be here in twenty minutes, honey. Don’t dawdle. And please, dear, no sunglasses in class. I don’t want to talk to Mrs. Childress again; that woman and I are on different wave-lengths.”

On the bus, Rod Markley sat next to her. “How come you always wear sunglasses?” he wanted to know. He was a blond, fat boy with freckles.

“I’m not supposed to look directly at people without them on,” Gloria said. “My doctor says my eyes are too strong. If I look at someone, they might get leukemia. Do you know what leukemia is?”

Rod Markley narrowed his eyes and said nothing.

“It’s when your blood dies,” Gloria said. “It’s rotten. It feels like there are hundreds of spiders in your veins.”

“That’s not true,” Rod Markley said.

Gloria whipped her glasses off and leaned over, staring into the fat boy’s blue eyes. Gloria spoke in a detached, clinical voice: “Do you feel any itching on the inside of your eyes? Or do you feel as though your brain were floating in cold water?”

Rod Markley pushed her away and stood up. “You’re crazy,” he said, and he marched off to the back of the bus.

Gloria went into a trance when Mrs. Childress began talking about the Industrial Revolution. Mrs. Childress was always boring, but when she talked about the Industrial Revolution, she was so powerfully dull that it hypnotized Gloria.

“I can’t feel my hands,” Gloria thought, and the next thing she knew it was lunch.

After lunch they all watched a long movie about democracy and it was even more powerfully boring than the Industrial Revolution. Gloria amused herself by pretending she had died at her desk. Once dead, you could not move, so the way her head lay against the desktop, squashing her left arm, had to be endured. Death, she realized, might be remarkably uncomfortable. Or worse. She thought about the time Tim Wesley, a weak-minded, over-large boy, fished the dead turtle out of the creek and carried it around by its tail. Being dead, it had had to endure all sorts of indignities without protest. Death, Gloria realized, was not being able to make a fuss.

While Gloria was thinking of death, her mother, older and more philosophically advanced, was thinking of God. “What,” she asked Father Macomb, “keeps God from despairing?” Father Macomb, who was in the process of tugging on his pants, leaned back in the bed and planted a kiss on Gail Hermans’ forehead. “Why love, Mrs. Hermans, flat-footed, hot-blooded, holy-roaring love.”

Gail Hermans lay back on the bed and studied the ceiling. “I wouldn’t think love was much of a match for eternity.”

“Spoken like a true lost soul, my dear.” Father Macomb said as he patted her hip. He smiled his roguish, pulpit-swooning smile.

When Gloria was seventeen, Allen Stevens told her he would die for her. He was an earnest young man with red lips and two deep creases between his eyebrows.

Gloria told young Stevens that there was no need for him to kill himself to prove his love for her. All she required was the first joint of his little finger—the left hand would do. If he would cut it off, she would know his love was true, and she would abandon all reticence and be his completely in body and soul.

“Hah hah,” said Allen Stevens, straightening his tie.

“I’m not asking much,” Gloria replied, in a tone that suggested she was not joking. “You offer me your life, and I am willing to settle for a mere sliver of flesh. And yet you seem to hesitate. Really, Allen, I think you have been toying with my affections. I am coming to doubt your sincerity.”

Allen Stevens did not become Gloria’s lover, and later in life, remembering how Gloria had looked that evening, virginal and radiant under an autumn moon, he would study his little finger with something like disgust before taking the trash out and settling down to a solitary dinner.

“I once had an affair with a priest,” Mrs. Hermans said to her psychiatrist. The psychiatrist tapped a cigarette out of the pack on the nightstand and sat up in bed.

“Really,” he said. “I had no idea you were religious.”

Gail Hermans plucked the cigarette from her lover’s lips and took a long drag. “I think having children makes one think in spiritual terms. I may not have a soul, but I’m certain Gloria has one. I only have to look into her eyes, and I see it moving about.”

“This is the love of mothers,” Dr. Geis said.

“I hope I’m not paying you for that sort of insight,” Gail Hermans said.

The doctor assured her that he had ceased billing her long ago.

When Gloria was eighteen, she fell in love with a self-destructive young man named Bobby Winston who was a freshman at the college Gloria attended.

Bobby Winston wrote poetry that went like this:

“Death is a ziplock bag

full of worms

in a dirty refrigerator

in a crack-house

about to be raided.”

“My mother worries about growing old,” Gloria told him.

“Yeah, it’s a thing with old dudes, growing old,” said Winston. They had just made love, and he was bleeding a bit from the loss of his thumb, despite the layers of gauze.

Gloria sighed. “Yeah. I told her not to worry. You are either dead or alive, that’s all. What are wrinkles? I mean, human beings are pretty flimsy things and yet they go on and on, really. I mean, think about eyes, for instance. They are sort of like grapes—and nobody expects a grape to last eighty years. One little slip with a sharp object and that’s it, but people act like they are untouchable.”

“People are weird,” Bobby Winston said. He put the spoon under the flame and leaned forward. He drew the clear fluid into the syringe with great care. “They don’t know what a crapshoot it is,” he said.

Gloria agreed and snuggled close. She was holding him close when he died, when the bad dope vandalized his breath. Gloria woke—alerted by cold, unresponsive flesh—and finding him dead, she held him tighter and tried to sleep again. She dreamed.

She dreamed that she was crawling through a tunnel, a tunnel that smelled of rancid earth and blistering heat. The tunnel grew smaller as she wriggled forward on her stomach pursuing some small, pale sun in front of her. And then something caught her legs, and she peered down and saw her father’s ancient face—for he had always been ancient, a mummy in a bed, unshaven, mired in plastic tubing, there in the back bedroom where the nurses lived—and he was trying to speak, but his tongue, purple and oddly animated, as though it were the carapace of—why, yes—a dead, a drowned, turtle, his tongue could form no words. And then, up ahead, she heard her mother’s voice, saying, “Just take the pillow, darling. Just cover him with the pillow.”

Mrs. Hermans lay on the couch. “Did I ever tell you I killed my husband?” she asked.

“Many times,” the psychiatrist said.

Mrs. Hermans sighed. “I’m a broken record, I suppose. You know, my last psychiatrist, Dr. Geis, refused to believe me.”

Dr. Morris smiled. “You sleep with a man, he is naturally less inclined to believe anything you say. I see no reason to doubt you, Gail. Your guilt is genuine. As far as I’m concerned, it is your guilt that validates your statement.”

“I smothered him with a pillow. I only wish … I wish …”

Dr. Morris nodded. “You wish your daughter had not seen.”

“Do you suppose she remembers? She was only three.”

Dr. Morris leaned forward. “I think we remember everything,” the old man said. “It’s not the remembering that’s critical; it’s how we assimilate it.”

Gloria was aware of the dawn; the darkness had drained away leaving a cold, gritty ache. She lay on her side. She was not fully awake, and the rude, thick corpse of her lover had yet to startle her heart. The big, communal house, inhabited by students, was beginning to stir. She heard running water, a clatter of pans from the kitchen. To keep the brutal dawn at bay, Gloria sucked her—no actually, her lover’s—thumb as it lay clutched like a talisman in her small and unforgiving fist.