1978
Early on, when Craig first came to live with them, she wondered whether he was having sex with her mother. She said nothing about this—not to Dan, not to anyone. She chased away the thought but it came back, parking itself inside her head.
June was plump and motherly. These were traits that she’d heard Craig speak against many times. He’d once told Bobbie that being a mother ruined a woman’s vagina for sex, that it was too stretched to be of much use. This had disturbed her because she could not imagine a happy marriage between a man with his perfectly intact body and a woman whose weary sexual parts could no longer satisfy him after their firstborn, but now she hoped it meant he’d leave her mother alone.
June was also overweight and Craig insisted upon women with slender torsos and long legs. Svelte, nubile. He spoke these words as though they lent sophistication to his observations, pronouncing the word nubile in a lurid way. He felt himself to be a better judge of the female form than others. He talked about the shape of a woman’s ass in the same manner that a wine connoisseur might speak of bouquet or finish. There were heart-shaped butts (good) and beetle butts (bad). He had standards. He had minimum conditions.
What Bobbie discovered eventually was that Craig’s conditions were difficult to meet if a woman were even halfway through her teenage years. Craig held in high esteem the shape she’d had as a thirteen-year-old. That was perfect, he’d told her, remembering the year he’d met her, before they’d begun having sex. Though you are still good now, he’d admitted, sitting on the mattress and turning her around slowly, judging her from all sides. He wanted her hips to be confined and neat. They could not be so big that they were breeder’s hips. He needed the stomach to be taut and smooth, like the inside of the arm. Hair needed to have gloss and be long (always long) and straight and flowing; the face should be bland and simple, the cookie-cutter face of a doll. She’d worried about this, believing she only had a few good years before becoming tainted by her condition, that of being female, of being somehow reduced because she could no longer look like a child and have the shape of a child.
For all her fretting over these past matters—Craig’s requirements, his carping and exactitude regarding which women were fuckable and which were unfuckable—she was not able to feel any comfort from her mother’s failure to come up to Craig’s “standards.” Despite everything he’d said about women with round figures and wobbly bellies and character-filled faces no longer wrapped in the pleasant vanilla beauty of youth, he was doing something with her mother she could not bring herself to imagine. At night, in the house now decorated with Thanksgiving colors, as the year came closer to an end, she’d hear the noises—not those from her mother but those from him. He would groan and call out and she knew that he did this on purpose, not out of pleasure but to show her that he had won. Her mother was his, as she was his.
SHE PREPARED HER escape. She folded two pairs of jeans into a duffel bag, added a week’s worth of underwear, several shirts and sweaters. She tucked into her bag a little porcelain set of bears her mother had once given her, a father bear, mother bear, and baby bear glued onto a piece of gold cardboard and protected by clear plastic. It seemed too large a decision and not really her own to make—whether she would leave on this day or that—so she prepared almost daily for what she knew would happen soon. She put in one thing—a book, a bracelet, a bathing suit—then took out another, changed her mind about a sweater, added heavy socks. She removed the bears (in case they became broken during transit), then put them back (in case they became lost over time in the house). Thought about which hairbrush, what shoes.
She lay awake at night, every night the same, a sea of worry rising with the moon. She could hear her mother. She could hear Craig. During the day she was distracted, her brain zipping along at so great a speed that none of her thoughts were useful. There were times when the world seemed clouded, as during certain evenings in summer when a combination of hot dust and dying light dulls the atmosphere to a haze. In such a state, she’d taken a math test, suddenly forgetting the formula for the area of a trapezium and what to do with an exponent when dividing. She hadn’t even attempted the word problems: If a train leaves St. Louis at 10:06, traveling at 82 mph…And when she came out of the exam, pressing her fingers to her temples and holding them there, she’d looked down the long corridor of the school hall and seen her classmates as though from behind a distorting glass. She’d thought then—she really had—that she had to leave, to run away, that tonight might be the night. Because some part of her had already gone.
Who could she tell about the sex and the sounds and the whole preposterous existence? She asked herself this question all the time. She might be able to tell a stranger, but then the stranger would tell someone she knew, and probably tell her mother. So she told no one, not even Dan. She kept the duffel bag hidden behind a board in her bedroom wall. Stuck into the trunk of a tree in her front yard was the money. She had everything ready.
In her night table were biographies she’d borrowed from the library, and she thought she had to return these books before she left. Meanwhile, she read how Helen Keller brushed her fingers over paper and learned to read, how a young Winston Churchill escaped capture by soldiers by climbing a high wall, then crossed the desert with a pistol and a pair of sturdy shoes. What interested her was how you get from here to there, how one moved across the rough and dangerous landscape of life to higher ground. What do you take with you, she wanted to ask, and what do you leave behind? And when—this is what she wanted to know—when do you do the actual leaving?
AND THEN ONE DAY she had her answer. She came home from school on a stormy afternoon and Craig was waiting for her. As she approached the front step, he pushed the door open and there he was, standing on the oval rug in the hall, leaning on his crutches, his body filling the entrance. She felt for the first time that the house belonged to him and that she was entering his home. He pulled her indoors with a quick jerk, his face alive with anger. She flew forward, dropping her books on the rug.
“You really did fucking lose it, didn’t you?” he said. His body arched away. He was standing at his full height, his bad leg angled to the side, balancing his weight against the door and on the crutch beneath his arm.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She was trying to pick up her notebook without letting all the papers fall loose of the three-ring binder that had opened.
“The money,” he said, his face suddenly inches from her own. “I’ve torn this place apart and it isn’t here! You really did lose it, didn’t you?”
“I don’t—I don’t know what—”
“Where is it? If you haven’t lost it, tell me where the hell it is.”
“Don’t you remember? I gave it to you! I gave you it all!”
He breathed out a heavy sigh, swung his head toward her like a snake, and said, “Oh Jesus, do I remember! I remember how we tore through the state trying to get the damned money back before my show. I remember having to drive like a stunt man! I remember thinking you were so stupid you’d leave five hundred bucks in a room! I remember all of it, Barbara! You took that money out of the goddamned car and walked off, leaving me for dead! You got the whole grand! You’ve hidden it somewhere, so where the hell is it?”
The contents of the hall closet were strewn across the wooden floor. Jackets, windbreakers, dusty shoes, a tangle of scarves, a long-outgrown winter coat. She looked into the living room and saw the chaos there, too, evidence of Craig’s searching. Drawers hung open, papers her mother kept in a bureau scattered across the floor, books pulled from the shelves, their pages thumbed through in case she’d placed the bills inside.
She could imagine the kitchen, where the contents of the messy cupboards would be in heaps on the countertops, and where every cereal box and coffee can would have been scrutinized. Had he toppled the linen closet, searching for the money inside all their clean sheets? Had he turned over the mattresses? Gone through all her clothes?
“What’s the matter, Barbara? Can’t you remember where you put it?”
He tapped her head hard with his finger and she suddenly remembered a film he’d had her watch starring Marlon Brando and a bewildered young actress. Brando’s character had hit the girl with the heel of a shoe while she was naked in a bath. I wouldn’t do that to you, Craig had said as she gazed wretchedly at the film. He was making a point about his gentleness. I wouldn’t rap your skull with a shoe. Years later, she would remember Last Tango in Paris all over again, but for different reasons. She would wonder what had been wrong in the 1970s that such a film could have existed, with Maria Schneider being only nineteen in real life. With Brando being deep into his forties. Why did the public not protest such a thing? It had been a terrible time, the ’70s. At least a terrible time for girls like her.
“Is this how you treat me?” Craig was saying. “Stealing? Does it never occur to you, Barbara, that you broke up with me. You never had to say it, but I felt it. I felt it here!” He slammed his fist across his chest. “I felt it right here!” he said again, and hit himself harder. “You broke up with me, left me for dead, and now you just sit there and smile!”
“I’m not smiling.”
He grabbed her arm and squeezed. “Get my money and we’ll be friends, okay? Sound like a deal? We’ll be pals.”
“Let go of me.”
“I’ll let go of you all right! You don’t mean a thing to me!”
He squeezed her arm harder. Then he suddenly dropped his hold.
She rushed up to her room, praying he wouldn’t follow. She began to put away all the clothes strewn on the floor from his searching, and her mattress and sheets and jewelry box and all the things he’d rifled through in her closet. She was shaking, not with fear as much as with adrenaline. She pushed socks into drawers, books into shelves. She thought, Forget it, I am going.
It was decided. She’d leave all this crap behind and get gone.
And then, there he was again, standing in the doorway. When she turned to look, he came toward her, leaning on his crutches. She noticed once again how tall he was and how much space he took up and how his shirt sleeves never fit, pulling up before meeting his big wrists.
He swung on his crutches, crossing the room. The naked half of his face with its absent eye loomed a foot above her. The expressionless landscape of his face made it difficult for her to read.
“I’m feeling like we need to sort things between us.” He spoke calmly, slowly. “We used to be so close.”
She felt the blood rising to her neck, then her throat, now her face.
“I got a present for you,” he said.
She thought how nobody was home; nobody would be home soon; nobody was outside; nobody would hear.
“What’s the matter, don’t you want a present? It’s a peace gesture.”
She was holding a pair of jeans she’d intended to change into. She stood still, clutching the jeans to her chest. He guided her wrist to one side and lifted them away. She felt a flutter of panic. Behind him, through the open door, was the narrow hall and a flight of steps. She saw that he was looking down the V-neck of her blouse, with its plastic snap buttons and the western design that was in style at her school. She thought she might be able to get out of the bedroom and downstairs. She could rush out the door and from there keep running. She wished she’d hidden the duffel bag she’d so carefully packed somewhere outside under a tarp instead of in her bedroom. She wished she’d left the night before.
She gauged that his newly mended arm could not yet take too much pressure; she judged the angle of his stance and saw he was still favoring his right leg, too. He could not get quickly down the chipped brick steps to the yard, then over the clumpy, wet ground. If she were to run, he would not catch her. But she wouldn’t run, and they both knew that.
“Don’t you want the present?” he said again. He was breathing near her. The injury to his face had done something to his sinuses. She could hear the air moving through his nostrils and the gentle rumbling inside that reminded her of an animal’s slow, deep respiration. Where the eye had been was the dark hole she’d grown used to, loose skin. Nerve damage meant that the entire side of his face had eroded inward a fraction of an inch.
“Open your hands,” he said to her now. “Close your eyes and open your hands.”
She put her hands out, shivering. He stared hard at her breasts and she angled her elbow across her chest.
“Close your eyes,” he said again.
She could tell by the sound of the wind and the sudden drop in the house’s temperature that the front door had been left open. She could run straight through, she thought, but she couldn’t imagine how to get around him now that he was so close. And so she stood still. Then, finally, she fluttered her eyes closed and wondered if he would touch her breasts and that would be her “present.”
To her surprise, she felt the weight of a little box in her palm. A gust of wind howled through the hall downstairs. She heard Craig make a sound like a grunt and realized he was laughing.
She opened her eyes. The box was an egg carton, split down the middle so it was now a half-dozen box. On the top, Craig had drawn on the cardboard in ballpoint pen a picture of a little ribbon and bow.
“Open it,” he said, as though talking about a jewelry box with a ring inside.
She slid her thumb to the cardboard tab to lift the lid. It seemed to her that there really were eggs inside; she felt the weight of them in the hollows of the box, and she wondered if they were chocolate eggs and how he’d have managed to find chocolate eggs in November.
She heard her voice around her before she realized it was her own light, girlish scream. Inside the carton, lined up in the manner of grocery store eggs, were half a dozen glass eyes. They stared up at her as though they were living things, extracted from a still-warm body and placed in the carton like something out of a horror film. She began backing away, the carton still in her hand, and as she moved the eyes began to rattle inside the hollows in which they sat, and she lost her footing and banged her head on the closet door and the eyes dropped onto the floor and rolled. She could hear them, jigging across the floorboards. She could hear her heart pounding in her ears. Just then, the wind changed, slamming the front door shut, and the whole house seemed to darken and go quiet.
“Barbara!” Her name like a thunderclap, his voice rising. “I wanted you to help me pick one. Now look what you’ve done!”
She leaned against the wall, standing on the tips of her toes as the eyes rolled across the bare floor. Her heart drummed against her ribs. Her hands, over her face as though to protect herself, dampened with sweat. “Oh God!” she said. “Oh God, oh God…”
The eyes were samples, each one carefully painted to correspond with an existing eye. Intricate, with a kind of taxidermy beauty to them, they were whole and exact. Craig was to choose one, apparently, to be his new eye.
“What is the matter with you?” he said. He seemed genuinely perplexed, shocked even, by her fear, by her revulsion. “Are you going to pick them up for me now that you’ve nearly broken them all?”
It was impossible; she could do no such thing. The idea of touching one appalled her, as though Craig were asking her to touch some part of him inside his own head, to reach into his empty socket and touch where the eye had once been. But the notion that they were still on the floor, temporarily resting by a leg of her bed, or the baseboard, but at any moment able to roll again, horrified her, too.
“Do you know what an oculist is?” Craig asked her. She shook her head. He said, “You give him money and he makes you an eye. An eye like one of these. You know what I need so that I can get him to make me an eye?” She didn’t answer, so he went on. “Do you know what he wants in return for one of these nice eyes?”
She shook her head.
“Money. The same as I need to move out and get my own place. Isn’t that what you want, Barbara? For me to have my own place? That way, we don’t have to hide from your mother and sneak around.”
So it was back to that. He wasn’t done with her. He’d said he was, but no.
“I need my money,” he continued. She felt his fingers on her cheek. She smelled the sulfur from matches he had struck, a little burn to the fingernail. “I’d love to have a nice-looking face. It could never be as nice as yours—”
“I don’t have your money,” she said, and her voice seemed to sink to the floor.
“Don’t lie, it’ll make your nose grow long,” he said, and took her nose between two fingers. “What I need you to do right now, Barbara, is pick up what you’ve thrown everywhere, these valuable things that you’ve chucked on the floor. And then tell me where the money is. Would you do that for me, Barbara? Give me back my money so I can get an eye?” he asked in his sweetest voice. It was so easy to believe he only wanted what was due him: his own money, an artificial eye.
“I…don’t—” she began, her words two gusts of breath.
He gave her nose a little tweak. “You don’t what, Barbara?”
“Have it,” she said. “I don’t have it.” Her shoulders were shaking now. “I don’t have any of your damned money. Your goddamned money!”
“There’s no use crying about facts, Barbara. You have it. The only money you have is my money.”
She forced herself to stop crying; she stood straight in front of Craig with her shoulders back, her fists clenched. “It was left in the car!”
He shook his head. “The police say no.”
“Then they are lying!”
Craig dropped his hand and took in a deep breath, considering this. “Maybe,” he said. “But I think you are lying.”
“Fuck you,” she said.
“Dirty little mouth.” He breathed out audibly. “You gave me half what you really had—just five hundred—when you thought you could get away with that. And then, when I was dying in the car you stole all of it back, didn’t you? That, little darling, was a much bigger fuck-you than anything you can say now.”
“It wasn’t your money!”
“I paid for the motel. I paid for the room.”
“The police took it!”
“Oh, if you hadn’t stolen it, they would have. They’d have taken it all right, which is why I’m not mad at you. You saved it. You did a good thing to keep it from the cops. But now it’s time to give it back.” He moved toward her. She could feel his breath on her. She could smell his skin. “I’m not mad at you, Barbara. You did a good job, an admirable job. I might have done the same. Tell you what, why don’t I give you a little reward for that? Give me back my money, and I’ll give you a reward. Say, a hundred bucks. A hundred is a lot for a girl. You could even run away with it. That’s what you are planning isn’t it? To run away?”
She stood with her mouth open. She wondered how long he’d known her plan.
“Oh, yeah, that’s what girls like you do, isn’t it? Run away? Blow truckers? See if I care. Be a whore for truckers if that floats your boat.”
She could feel his anger like a cushion of fire between them. She wondered if he would hit her and decided that if he tried to, she would push away his crutches. She would topple him.
“I’m being very nice, really,” he said gently. “A lot of people wouldn’t be so nice. People do crazy things for money.”
“No,” she said, as though fending off the next thing. What was coming now. What she knew was already on its way.
“You read about it in the papers,” he said.
She stared at the floor. She heard a voice in her head: When do you leave? You leave now.
He said, “You give me back my money and we will be friends again.” A pause, a long sigh from him. “You know I still love you, don’t you? But I can’t abide a woman who steals from me. I can’t put up with that kind of shit.”
“I don’t have it,” she said, and then she heard the roar rise within him, the anger almost like a thing outside of him, swirling between them, circling her. She knew that if she tried to run, he would grab her, and whatever invisible barrier had prevented him touching her would have been broken and she would be his. But she did not move. He did not touch her. She did not give him the money, nor look out the window to the tree where the jam jar of bills was hidden, nor down to the floor where the eyes lay, staring up, staring into the corners of the room, at her, at them both.