It was June in northern Alabama. Upstairs Rhoda’s small sons lay sleeping. Somewhere in North Carolina her young husband sulked because she’d left him.
Rhoda had the name. She had fucked her fat, balding gynecologist all Wednesday afternoon to get the name. She had fucked him on the daybed in his office and on the examining table and on the rug in the waiting room. Now all she needed was five hundred dollars.
No one was going to cut Rhoda’s stomach open again. She had come home to get help. She had come home to the one person who had never let her down.
She went into the downstairs bathroom, washed her face, and went up to his room to wake him.
“I have to talk to you, Daddy,” she said, touching him on the shoulder. “Come downstairs. Don’t wake up Mother.”
They sat down together in the parlor, close together on the little sofa. He was waking up, shaking sleep from his handsome Scotch face. The old T-shirt he wore for a pajama top seemed very dear to Rhoda. She touched it while she talked.
“I have to get some money, Daddy,” she said. “I’m pregnant again. I have to have an abortion. I can’t stand to have another baby. I’ll die if they keep cutting me open. You can’t go on having cesarean sections like that.”
“Oh, my,” he said, his old outfielder’s body going very still inside. “Does Malcolm know all this?” Usually he pretended to have forgotten her husband’s name.
“No one knows. I have to do this right away, do you understand? I have to do something about it right away.”
“You don’t want to tell Malcolm?”
“I can’t tell Malcolm. He’d never let me do it. I know that. And no one is going to stop me. He got me pregnant on purpose, Daddy. He did it because he knew I was going to leave him sooner or later.”
Rhoda was really getting angry. She always believed her own stories as soon as she told them.
“We’ll have to find you a doctor, honey. It’s hard to find a doctor that will do that.”
“I have a doctor. I have the name of a man in Houston. A Doctor Van Zandt. A friend of mine went to him. Daddy, you have to help me with this. I’m going crazy. Imagine Malcolm doing this to me. He did it to keep me from leaving . . . I begged him not to.”
“Oh, honey,” he said. “Please don’t tell me all that now. I can’t stand to hear all that. It doesn’t matter. All that doesn’t matter. We have to take care of you now. Let me think a minute.”
He put his head down in his hands and conferred with his maker. Well, Sir, he said, I’ve spoiled her rotten. There’s no getting around that. But she’s mine and I’m sticking by her. You know I’d like to kill that little son of a bitch with my bare hands but I’ll keep myself from doing it. So you help us out of this. You get us out of this one and I’ll buy you a stained-glass window with nobody’s name on it, or a new roof for the vestry if you’d rather.
Rhoda was afraid he’d gone back to sleep. “It’s not my fault, Daddy,” she said. “He made me do it. He did it to me on purpose. He did it to keep me from leaving . . .”
“All right, honey,” he said. “Don’t think about any of that anymore. I’ll take care of it. I’ll call your Uncle James in the morning and check up on the doctor. We’ll leave tomorrow as soon as I got things lined up.”
“You’re going with me,” she said.
“Of course I’m going with you,” he said. “We’ll leave your mother with the babies. But, Rhoda, we can’t tell your mother about this. I’ll tell her I’m taking you to Tennessee to see the mines.”
“It costs five hundred dollars, Daddy.”
“I know that. Don’t worry about that. You quit worrying about everything now and go on and try to get some sleep. I’m taking care of this. And, Rhoda . . .”
“Yes?”
“I really don’t want your mother to know about this. She’s got a lot on her mind right now. And she’s not going to like this one bit.”
“All right, Daddy. I don’t want to tell her, anyway. Daddy, I could have a legal abortion if Malcolm would agree to it. You know that, don’t you? People aren’t supposed to go on having cesarean sections one right after the other. I know I could get a legal abortion. But you have to have three doctors sign the paper. And that takes too long. It might be too late by the time I do all that. And, besides, Malcolm would try to stop me. I can’t take a chance on that. I think he wants to kill me.”
“It’s all right, honey. I’m going to take care of it. You go to bed and get some sleep.”
Rhoda watched him climb the stairs, sliding his hand along the polished stair rail, looking so vulnerable in his cotton pajama bottoms and his old T-shirt, with his broad shoulders and his big head and his tall, courteous body.
He had been a professional baseball player until she was born. He had been famous in the old Southern League, playing left field for the Nashville Volunteers.
There was a scrapbook full of his old clippings. Rhoda and her brothers had worn it out over the years. DUDLEY MANNING HITS ONE OVER THE FENCE; MANNING DOES IT AGAIN; DUDLEY LEADS THE LEAGUE.
You couldn’t eat headlines in the 1930s, so when Rhoda was born he had given in to her mother’s pleadings, quit baseball, and gone to work to make money.
He had made money. He had made two million dollars by getting up at four o’clock every morning and working his ass off every single day for years. And he had loved it, loved getting up before the sun rose, loved eating his quiet lonely breakfasts, loved learning to control his temper, loved being smarter and better and luckier than everyone else.
Every day he reminded himself that he was the luckiest son of a bitch in the world. And that made him humble, and other men loved him for his humility and forgave him for his success. Taped to his dresser mirror was a little saying he had cut out of a newspaper, “EVERY DAY THE WORLD TURNS UPSIDE DOWN ON SOMEONE WHO THOUGHT THEY WERE SITTING ON TOP OF IT.”
He was thinking of the saying as he went back to bed. As long as nothing happens to her, he told himself. As long as she is safe.
Breakfast was terrible. Rhoda picked at her food, pretending to eat, trying to get her mother in a good mood. Her mother, whose name was Ariane, was a gentle, religious woman who lived her life in service to her family and friends. But she had spells of fighting back against the terrible inroads they made into her small personal life. This was one of those spells.
This was the third time in two years that Rhoda had run away from her husband and come home to live. Ariane suspected that all Rhoda really wanted was someone to take care of her babies. Ariane spent a lot of time suspecting Rhoda of one thing or another. Rhoda was the most demanding of her four children, the only daughter, the most unpredictable, the hardest to control or understand.
“What am I supposed to tell your husband when he calls,” she said, buttering toast with a shaking hand. “I feel sorry for him when he calls up. If you’re leaving town I want you to call him first.”
“Now, Ariane,” Rhoda’s father said. “We’ll only be gone a few days. Don’t answer the phone if you don’t want to talk to Malcolm.”
“I had an appointment to get a permanent today,” she said. “I don’t know when Joseph will be able to take me again.”
“Leave the children with the maids,” he said. “That’s what the maids are for.”
“I’m not going to leave those babies alone in a house with maids for a minute,” her mother said. “This is just like you, Rhoda, coming home brokenhearted one day and going off leaving your children the next. I don’t care what anyone says, Dudley, she has to learn to accept some responsibility for something.”
“She’s going with me to the mines,” he said, getting up and putting his napkin neatly into his napkin holder. “I want her to see where the money comes from.”
“Well, I’ll call and see if Laura’ll come over while I’m gone,” Ariane said, backing down as she always did. Besides, she loved Rhoda’s little boys, loved to hold their beautiful strong bodies in her arms, loved to bathe and dress and feed them, to read to them and make them laugh and watch them play. When she was alone with them she forgot they were not her very own. Flesh of my flesh, she would think, touching their perfect skin, which was the color of apricots and wild honey, flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone.
“Oh, go on then,” she said. “But please be back by Saturday.”
They cruised out of town in the big Packard he had bought secondhand from old Dr. Purcell and turned onto the Natchez Trace going north.
“Where are we going?” she said.
“We have to go to Nashville to catch a plane,” he said. “It’s too far to drive. Don’t worry about it, honey. Just leave it to me. I’ve got all my ducks in a row.”
“Did you call the doctor?” she said. “Did you call Uncle James?”
“Don’t worry about it. I told you I’ve got it all taken care of. You take a nap or something.”
“All right,” she said, and pulled a book out of her handbag. It was Ernest Hemingway’s new book, and it had come from the book club the day she left North Carolina. She had been waiting for it to come for weeks. Now she opened it to the first page, holding it up to her nose and giving it a smell.
“Across the River and into the Trees,” she said. “What a wonderful title. Oh, God, he’s my favorite writer.” She settled further down into the seat. “This is going to be a good one. I can tell.”
“Honey, look out the window at where you’re going,” her father said. “This is beautiful country. Don’t keep your nose in a book all your life.”
“This is a new book by Ernest Hemingway,” she said. “I’ve been waiting for it for weeks.”
“But look at this country,” he said. “Your ancestors came this way when they settled this country. This is how they came from Tennessee.”
“They did not,” she said. “They came on a boat down the river from Pennsylvania. Momma said so.”
“Well, I knew you’d have something smart-alecky to say,” he said.
“The first book I read by Ernest Hemingway was last year when I was nursing Malcolm,” she said. “It was about this man and woman in Paris that loved each other but something was wrong with him, he got hurt in the war and couldn’t make love to her. Anyway, she kept leaving him and going off with other men. It was so sad I cried all night after I read it. After that I read all his books as fast as I could.”
“I don’t know why you want to fill up your head with all that stuff,” he said. “No wonder you don’t have any sense, Rhoda.”
“Well, never mind that,” she said. “Oh, good, this is really going to be good. It’s dedicated ‘To Mary, With Love,’ that’s his wife. She’s terrible looking. She doesn’t wear any makeup and she’s got this terrible wrinkled skin from being in the sun all the time. I saw a picture of her in a magazine last year. I don’t know what he sees in her.”
“Maybe she knows how to keep her mouth shut,” he said. “Maybe she knows how to stay home and be a good wife.”
“Oh, well,” Rhoda said, “let’s don’t talk about that. I don’t feel like talking about that.”
“I’m sorry, honey,” he said. “You go on and read your book.” He set the speedometer on an easy sixty miles an hour and tried not to think about anything. Outside the window the hills of north Alabama were changing into the rich fields of Tennessee. He remembered coming this way as a young man, driving to Nashville to play ball, dreaming of fame, dreaming of riches. He glanced beside him, at the concentrated face of his beautiful spoiled crazy daughter.
Well, she’s mine, he told himself. And nothing will ever hurt her. As long as I live nothing will ever harm her.
He sighed, letting out his breath in a loud exhalation, but Rhoda could not hear him now. She was far away in the marshes near Tagliamento, in northern Italy, hunting ducks at dawn with Ernest Hemingway. (Rhoda was not fooled by personas. In her mind any modern novel was the true story of the writer’s life.)
Rhoda was reading as they went into the Nashville airport and she kept on reading while they waited for the plane, and as soon as she was settled in her seat she found her place and went on reading.
The love story had finally started.
Then she came into the room, shining in her youth and tall striding beauty, and the carelessness the wind had made of her hair. She had pale, almost olive colored skin, a profile that could break your, or anyone else’s heart, and her dark hair, of a thick texture, hung down over her shoulders.
“Hello, my great beauty,” the Colonel said.
This was more like it, Rhoda thought. This was a better girlfriend for Ernest Hemingway than his old wife. She read on. Renata was nineteen! Imagine that! Ernest Hemingway’s girlfriend was the same age as Rhoda! Imagine being in Venice with a wonderful old writer who was about to die of a heart attack. Imagine making love to a man like that. Rhoda imagined herself in a wonderful bed in a hotel in Venice making love all night to a dying author who could fuck like a nineteen-year-old boy.
She raised her eyes from the page. “Did you get Uncle James on the phone?” she said. “Did you ask him to find out about the doctor?”
“He told me what to do,” her father said. “He said first you should make certain you’re pregnant.”
“I’m certain,” she said. “I even know why. A rubber broke. It was Malcolm’s birthday and I was out of jelly and I told him I didn’t want to . . .”
“Oh, honey, please don’t talk like that. Please don’t tell me all that.”
“Well, it’s the truth,” she said. “It’s the reason we’re on this plane.”
“Just be quiet and go on and read your book then,” he said. He went back to his newspaper. In a minute he decided to try again.
“James said the doctor will have to know for certain that you’re pregnant.”
“All right,” she said. “I’ll think up something to tell him. What do you think we should say my name is?”
“Now, sweetie, don’t start that,” he said. “We’re going to tell this man the truth. We’re not doing anything we’re ashamed of.”
“Well, we can’t tell him I’m married,” she said. “Or else he’ll make me get my husband’s permission.”
“Where’d you get an idea like that?” he said.
“Stella Mabry told me. She tried to get an abortion last year, but she didn’t take enough money with her. You have to say you’re divorced.”
“All right,” he said. “I’ll tell you what, honey. You just let me talk to the man. You be quiet and I’ll do the talking.”
He lay back and closed his eyes, hoping he wasn’t going to end up vomiting into one of Southern Airlines’ paper bags.
He was deathly afraid to fly and had only been on an airplane once before in his life.
A taxi took them to the new Hilton. Rhoda had never been in such a fancy hotel. She had run away to get married when she was seventeen years old and her only vacations since then had been to hospitals to have babies.
The bellboy took them upstairs to a suite of rooms. There were two bedrooms and a large living room with a bar in one corner. It looked like a movie set, with oversize beige sofas and a thick beige tweed carpet. Rhoda looked around approvingly and went over to the bar and fixed herself a tall glass of ice water.
Her father walked out onto the balcony and called to her. “Rhoda, look out here. That’s an Olympic-size swimming pool. Isn’t that something? The manager said some Olympic swimmers had been working out here in the afternoons. Maybe we’ll get to watch them after a while.”
She looked down several stories to the bright blue rectangle. “Can I go swimming in it?” she said.
“Let’s call the doctor first and see what he wants us to do.” He took a phone number from his billfold, sat down in a chair with his back to her, and talked for a while on the phone, nodding his head up and down as he talked.
“He said to come in first thing in the morning. He gets there at nine.”
“Then I’ll go swimming until dinner,” she said.
“Fine,” he said. “Did you bring a swimsuit?”
“Oh, no,” she said. “I didn’t think about it.”
“Well, here,” he said, handing her a hundred-dollar bill. “Go find a gift shop and see if they don’t have one that will fit you. And buy a robe to go over it. You can’t go walking around a hotel in a swimsuit. I’ll take a nap while you’re gone. I’ll come down and find you later.”
She went down to the ground floor and found the gift shop, a beautiful little glassed-in area that smelled of cool perfume and was presided over by an elegant woman with her hair up in a bun.
Rhoda tried on five or six swimming suits and finally settled on a black one-piece maillot cut low in the back. She admired herself in the mirror. Two weeks of being too worried to eat had melted the baby fat from her hips and stomach, and she was pleased with the way her body looked.
While she admired herself in the mirror the saleslady handed her a beach robe. It was a black-and-white geometric print that came down to the floor.
“This is the latest thing in the Caribbean,” the saleslady said. “It’s the only one I have left. I sold one last week to a lady from New York.”
“It’s darling,” Rhoda said, wrapping it around her, imagining what Ernest Hemingway would think if he could see her in this. “But it’s too long.”
“How about a pair of wedgies,” the saleslady said. “I’ve got some on sale.”
Rhoda added a pair of white canvas wedgies to her new outfit, collected the clothes she had been wearing in a shopping bag, paid for her purchases, and went out to sit by the pool.
The swimming team had arrived and was doing warm-up laps. A waiter came, and she ordered a Coke and sipped it while she watched the beautiful young bodies of the athletes. There was a blond boy whose shoulders reminded her of her husband’s and she grew interested in him, wondering if he was a famous Olympic swimmer. He looked like he would be a lot of fun, not in a bad mood all the time like Malcolm. She kept looking at him until she caught his eye and he smiled at her. When he dove back into the pool she reached under the table and took off her wedding ring and slipped it into her pocketbook.
When she woke up early the next morning her father was already up, dressed in a seersucker suit, talking on the phone to his mine foreman in Tennessee.
“I can’t believe I’m going to be through with all this today,” she said, giving him a kiss on the forehead. “I love you for doing this for me, Daddy. I won’t ever forget it as long as I live.”
“Well, let’s just don’t talk about it too much,” he said. “Here, look what’s in the paper. Those sapsuckers in Washington are crazy as loons. We haven’t been through with Korea four years and they’re fixing to drag us into this mess in Vietnam. Old Douglas MacArthur told them not to get into a land war in Asia, but nobody would listen to him.”
“Let me see,” Rhoda said, taking the newspaper from him. She agreed with her father that the best way to handle foreign affairs was for the United States to divide up the world with Russia. “They can boss half and we’ll boss half,” he had been preaching for years. “Because that’s the way it’s going to end up anyway.”
Rhoda’s father was in the habit of being early to his appointments, so at eight o’clock they descended in the elevator, got into a taxi, and were driven through the streets of Houston to a tall office building in the center of town. They went up to the fifth floor and into a waiting room that looked like any ordinary city doctor’s office. There was even a Currier and Ives print on the wall. Her father went in and talked to the doctor for a while, then he came to the door and asked her to join them. The doctor was a short, nervous man with thin light-colored hair and a strange smell about him. Rhoda thought he smelled like a test tube. He sat beside an old rolltop desk and asked her questions, half-listening to the answers.
“I’m getting a divorce right away,” Rhoda babbled, “my husband forced me to make love to him and I’m not supposed to have any more babies because I’ve already had two cesarean sections in twelve months and I could have a legal abortion if I wanted to but I’m afraid to wait as long as it would take to get permission. I mean I’m only nineteen and what would happen to my babies if I died. Anyway, I want you to know I think you’re a real humanitarian for doing this for people. I can’t tell you what it meant to me to even find out your name. Do you remember Stella Mabry that came here last year? Well, anyway, I hope you’re going to do this for me because I think I’ll just go crazy if you don’t.”
“Are you sure you’re pregnant?” he asked.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “I’m sure. I’ve missed a period for three and a half weeks and I’ve already started throwing up. That’s why I’m so sure. Look, I just had two babies in thirteen months. I know when I’m pregnant. Look at the circles under my eyes. And I’ve been losing weight. I always lose weight at first. Then I blow up like a balloon.” Oh, God, she thought. Please let him believe me. Please make him do it.
“And another thing,” she said. “I don’t care what people say about you. I think you are doing a great thing. There will be a time when everyone will know what a great service you’re performing. I don’t care what anyone says about what you’re doing . . .”
“Honey,” her father said. “Just answer his questions.”
“When was your last period?” the doctor said. He handed her a calendar and she picked out a date and pointed to it.
Then he gave her two small white pills to swallow and a nurse came and got her and helped her undress and she climbed up on an operating table and everything became very still and dreamy and the nurse was holding her hand. “Be still,” the nurse said. “It won’t take long.”
She saw the doctor between her parted legs with a mask tied around his face and an instrument in his hand and she thought for a moment he might be going to kill her, but the nurse squeezed her hand and she looked up at the ceiling and thought of nothing but the pattern of the tiles revolving around the light fixture.
They began to pack her vagina with gauze. “Relax,” the nurse said. “It’s all over.”
“I think you are wonderful,” she said in a drowsy voice. “I think you are a wonderful man. I don’t care what anyone says about you. I think you are doing a great service to mankind. Someday everyone will know what a good thing you’re doing for people.”
When she woke up her father was with her and she walked in a dream out of the offices and into the elevator and down to the tiled foyer and out onto the beautiful streets of the city. The sun was brilliant and across the street from the office building was a little park with the sound of a million crickets rising and falling in the sycamore trees. And all the time a song was playing inside of her. “I don’t have to have a baby, I don’t have to have a baby, I don’t have to have a baby.”
“Oh, God, oh, thank you so much,” she said, leaning against her father. “Oh, thank you, oh, thank you so much. Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you.”
He took her to the hotel and put her into the cool bed and covered her with blankets and sat close beside her in a chair all afternoon and night while she slept. The room was dark and cool and peaceful, and whenever she woke up he was there beside her and nothing could harm her ever as long as he lived. No one could harm her or have power over her or make her do anything as long as he lived.
All night he was there beside her, in his strength and goodness, as still and gentle as a woman.
All night he was there, half-asleep in his chair. Once in the night she woke up hungry and room service brought a steak and some toast and milk and he fed it to her bite by bite. Then he gave her another one of the pills, put the glass of milk to her lips, and she drank deeply of the cold, lush liquid, then fell back into a dreamless sleep.
The plane brought them to Nashville by noon the next day, and they got into the Packard and started driving home.
He had made a bed for her in the back seat with pillows for her head and his raincoat for a cover and she rode along that way, sleeping and reading her book. The wad of gauze in her vagina was beginning to bother her. It felt like a thick hand inside her body. The doctor had said she could remove it in twenty-four hours, but she was afraid to do it yet.
Well, at least that’s over, she thought. At least I don’t have to have any more babies this year.
All I have to do is have one more and they’ll give me a tubal ligation. Doctor Greer promised me that. On the third cesarean section you get to have your tubes cut. It’s a law. They have to do it. It would be worth having another baby for that. Oh, well, she thought. At least I don’t have to worry about it anymore for now. She opened her book.
“You are not that kind of soldier and I am not that kind of girl,” Renata was saying to Colonel Cantrell. “But sometime give me something lasting that I can wear and be happy each time I wear it.”
“I see,” the Colonel said. “And I will.”
“You learn fast about things you do not know,” the girl said.
“And you make lovely quick decisions. I would like you to have the emeralds and you could keep them in your pocket like a lucky piece, and feel them if you were lonely.”
Rhoda fell asleep, dreaming she was leaning across a table staring into Ernest Hemingway’s eyes as he lit her cigarette.
When they got to the edge of town he woke her. “How are you feeling, honey,” he said. “Do you feel all right?”
“Sure,” she said. “I feel great, really I do.”
“I want to go by the house on Manley Island if you feel like it,” he said. “Everyone’s out there.”
It’s the Fourth of July, she thought. I had forgotten all about it. Every year her father’s large Scotch family gathered for the fourth on a little peninsula that jutted out into the Tennessee River a few miles from town.
“Will Jamie be there?” she asked. Jamie was everyone’s favorite. He was going to be a doctor like his father.
“I think so. Do you feel like going by there?”
“Of course I do,” she said. “Stop and let me get into the front seat with you.”
They drove up into a yard full of automobiles. The old summer house was full of cousins and aunts and uncles, all carrying drinks and plates of fried chicken and all talking at the same time.
Rhoda got out of the car feeling strange and foreign and important, as if she were a visitor from another world, arriving among her kinfolk carrying an enormous secret that they could not imagine, not even in their dreams.
She began to feel terribly elated, moving among her cousins, hugging and kissing them.
Then her Uncle James came and found her. He was an eye surgeon. Her father had paid his tuition to medical school when there was barely enough money to feed Rhoda and her brothers.
“Let’s go for a walk and see if any of Cammie’s goats are still loose in the woods,” he said, taking hold of her arm.
“I’m fine,” she said. “I’m perfectly all right, Uncle James.”
“Well, just come walk with me and tell me about it,” he said. They walked down the little path that led away from the house to the wild gardens and orchards at the back of the property. He had his hand on her arm. Rhoda loved his hands, which were always unbelievably clean and smelled wonderful when they came near you.
“Tell me about it,” he said.
“There isn’t anything to tell,” she said. “They put me up on an examining table and first they gave me some pills and they made me sleepy and they said it might hurt a little but it didn’t hurt and I slept a long time afterwards. Well, first we went down in an elevator and then we went back to the hotel and I slept until this morning. I can’t believe that was only yesterday.”
“Have you been bleeding?”
“Not a lot. Do you think I need some penicillin? He was a real doctor, Uncle James. There were diplomas on the wall and a picture of his family. What about the penicillin? Should I take it just in case?”
“No, I think you’re going to be fine. I’m going to stay around for a week just in case.”
“I’m glad you came. I wanted to see Jamie. He’s my favorite cousin. He’s getting to be so handsome. I’ll bet the girls are crazy about him.”
“Tell me this,” he said. “Did the doctor do any tests to see if you were pregnant?”
“I know I was pregnant,” she said. “I was throwing up every morning. Besides, I’ve been pregnant for two years. I guess I know when I’m pregnant by now.”
“You didn’t have tests made?”
“How could I? I would have had to tell somebody. Then they might have stopped me.”
“I doubt if you were really pregnant,” he said. “I told your father I think it’s highly unlikely that you were really pregnant.”
“I know I was pregnant.”
“Rhoda, listen to me. You don’t have any way of knowing that. The only way you can be sure is to have the tests and it would be doing your father a big favor if you told him you weren’t sure of it. I think you imagined you were pregnant because you dread it so much.”
Rhoda looked at his sweet impassive face trying to figure out what he wanted from her, but the face kept all its secrets.
“Well, it doesn’t matter to me whether I was or not,” she said. “All I care about is that it’s over. Are you sure I don’t need any penicillin? I don’t want to get blood poisoning.”
(Rhoda was growing tired of the conversation. It isn’t any of his business what I do, she thought, even if he is a doctor.)
She left him then and walked back to the house, glancing down every now and then at her flat stomach, running her hand across it, wondering if Jamie would like to take the boat up to Guntersville Dam to go through the locks.
Her mother had arrived from town with the maid and her babies and she went in and hugged them and played with them for a minute, then she went into the bathroom and gingerly removed the wad of bloody gauze and put in a tampon.
She washed her legs and rubbed hand lotion on them and then she put on the new black bathing suit. It fit better than ever.
“I’m beautiful,” she thought, running her hands over her body. “I’m skinny and I’m beautiful and no one is ever going to cut me open. I’m skinny and I’m beautiful and no one can make me do anything.”
She began to laugh. She raised her hand to her lips and great peals of clear abandoned laughter poured out between her fingers, filling the tiny room, laughing back at the wild excited face in the bright mirror.