Stony River (31 page)

Frankenstein grabbed her ankles and yanked them till she was flat on the bed, nightie scrunched around her waist. “Don't move,” he said in a monster-perfect voice and made his face go blank. He straddled her, put his hands around her neck and squeezed gently. It scared her a little but it felt good, too. His dick rose through his skivvies like a tent pole. She waited for him to rip her nightie off. But he kept squeezing her neck, harder and harder, until she thought her eyes would pop out. When a little strangling sound came from her throat he pulled his hands away. He flopped onto her like a dying fish and rubbed his dick up and down against her leg.

True Confessions
had stories about guys who liked doing it crazy
ways. Dearie said her wedding night had been full of surprises. You had to have an open mind.

JULY 9, 1957.
Linda would get to tell tomorrow's flannel-board story at Summer Vacation Bible School. Eleanor Judge, the minister's young wife, who had the loveliest honey-colored hair and didn't need a lick of makeup, had already coached her to focus on the lesson, not the figures.

“Don't say, ‘Look at Noah's bright robe and his big beard.' Say, ‘See how Noah obeyed God and went into the ark.'” To Mrs. Judge, Bible lessons all came down to this: when we get too full of ourselves and forget God's in charge, it turns out badly.

Today's lesson was about the pitiful Job. Because the Sundayschool rooms trapped the heat, leaving her charges whiny and listless, Mrs. Judge had taken the eight boys and twelve girls into the cooler sanctuary where they sat, cross-legged, on the burgundy-carpeted dais below the altar. Linda and Mrs. Judge presided on altar chair thrones, the flannel board on an easel between them. Had Linda known they'd be entering the sanctuary, she would've worn a dress like Mrs. Judge, not her irreverent Bermuda shorts and peasant blouse.

As Mrs. Judge recited Job's story, Linda placed the flannelbacked paper people, animals and objects on the soft cloth board. Some figures appeared in more than one story. Add paper crown and sword to Joseph, for example, and he doubled as the clever King Solomon whose proposal to slice a baby in half made children gasp in horror. The figure Linda put up now, a kneeling man in a loincloth whose paper face was spotted with boils and whose hands were raised to Heaven in perpetual anguish, could only be Job.

“Ooh,” the children's sad voices said when God let Satan take away all the animals that had made Job the richest man in the land.
They had to pretend that the single woolly sheep Linda placed on the board was equal to seven thousand, the camel to three thousand, the ox and donkey to five hundred each. “Yay!” they said at the end when God rewarded Job with twice as many animals as he'd lost. All because he finally got it: don't question God. He's the most powerful being in the universe. He gives and takes away because He can.

“Twice as many,” Mrs. Judge said with awe in her voice. “Can anyone imagine such a number?” The nine-year-old daughter of Hungarian refugees the church had sponsored last year raised her hand. “Bless your heart,” Mrs. Judge said.

Old Mrs. Lambert banged away at the ancient upright's sticking keys—the organ was only for Sundays—as everyone sang “This Is My Father's World.” The words
in the rustling grass I hear him pass; he speaks to me everywhere
made Linda tear up because God had never spoken to her and she wanted Him to so badly.

Job's lesson, Mrs. Judge said, was that we should accept suffering with patience, trust and humility. “God lets us suffer because He loves us and wants us to be lovable to others, too,” she told the children. “Imagine your mom and dad gave you a puppy.”

A boy in the front row clapped.

“Thank you Jeffrey. Now, if you didn't train it to behave, no one but you would love your puppy and want to be near it. So, if you're suffering, it's because God's training you to become more lovable.”

Was God training Betty Wise?

The two weeks of Vacation Bible School were up Friday. Linda would be stuck at home listening to things that made her want to cut her ears off:

He seemed happy enough to leave, didn't he?

When you're married, men have certain demands. They don't care if it hurts
.

Mom stayed upstairs when Daddy visited, and would later ask, “What did your father have to say for himself tonight?” Linda would
shrug, go to her room, eat cookies she'd stashed under the bed and add to her list of those worse off than her: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg's kids, Anne Frank, the Hungarian refugees River Street Methodist
wasn't
able to sponsor, most colored people, lepers, kids with polio. All worse off than Betty Wise, too. Linda had tried to nudge her mother toward more positive thinking with magazine articles about people who'd overcome terrible odds, like the armless woman who painted landscapes holding a brush in her teeth, until Mom had said, “I know what you're doing. You and your father think everyone has to be useful, like a potato peeler. Well, I'm not a potato peeler.”

After the flannel-board lesson, Linda herded the kids into the main hall where they drew pictures of Job's animals until their parents arrived to pick them up. Mrs. Judge sent Linda off with Rice Krispies squares left over from the mid-morning snack. Yesterday it had been chocolate chip cookies; the day before, brownies. “For your mom,” Mrs. Judge would say, but Linda would gobble them all on the way home.

Today she'd take the longer route past the A&P. They were out of bread and tea bags. She'd rather get Job's boils than shop at Rolf's. The A&P was next to a soda fountain where she planned to sit at the marble counter on a swively red-padded stool and order a cherry Coke. She wasn't in a hurry.

When Linda got home, Mom would be in her room, lying primly on her chenille bedspread, ankles crossed, fanning herself with
The Ladies' Home Journal
. She'd moan about how “boiling hot” it was, as she'd done for the past three days. Linda would have to adjust her eyes to the dim light; the drawn curtains created a permanent dusk. She'd sit on the dressing table bench while her mother went into revolting detail about constipation and stool softeners. She'd count the hours until Daddy stopped by for their nightly chat. He'd hug her as though he hadn't seen her for weeks. They hardly ever ran out of things to say to each other; when they did, they watched TV.

It would take forty minutes to get to her front door.

Forty minutes to remind herself God was in charge.

BETTY SPRAWLED
on the sagging couch, one shoeless foot on the floor. She was recovering from taking the bus in boiling heat to and from Lou's office and having talked him into giving her a job. Golly, where she'd gotten the gumption she didn't know. Her heart was still banging around in her chest.

She hadn't gone to her appointment with a job in mind. But while Lou Pierce's nurse, Rose, was taking her blood pressure and complaining about having to work overtime, the idea leaped up and shook hands with Betty's brain. “He pays me for the time,” Rose said, “but I'm a nurse, not a bookkeeper. And I need to be home with my kids more.”

“Why doesn't he hire someone else?”

“He's tried. Can't find anyone willing to come in the odd hours he needs them.”

Betty had worked as church secretary after she came to New Jersey. That was how she'd met Roger. “Why not hire me?” she asked Lou later, quaking inside at her own temerity. “I can type, keep accounts. And I'm free to come in anytime you want, provided the bus is running.”

“Heart's good. Lungs are clear,” he said, pulling the stethoscope from his fleshy ears. “What about the pain?”

“You told Roger it's all in my head, right? Maybe I just need to be busy. How about it, Lou? Put your money where your mouth is.”

She got him good with that one. His wide, normally pale face went strawberry.

She'd start on Thursday. Wouldn't Linda be surprised!

Betty had known Lou for years; he'd seen Mother Wise through
her cancer. She'd only come to like him since Roger left. She got so much more out of talking to him without Roger circling about, jumping in to contradict her. As if she didn't know her own pain or how little she slept. She'd convinced Lou to stop giving her pills that made her dopey. She needed to be alert for Linda's sake, get her back to eating better.

When Roger left, a great silence had fallen over the house, awful and swell at the same time. For the first few days, Betty was afraid she'd balled up the works for Linda and herself. But something she couldn't name had been writhing to get out of her. She'd dreaded Roger's footsteps on the stairs to their room when he got home from work, the twist of the doorknob, his infuriating “How's my Sleeping Beauty today?” He knew she rarely slept, even at night. The certainty of pain kept her as vigilant as a new mother. Even now the area around her rib cage was tight, causing her to take baby breaths and pant like a dog. She never knew when the tightness would work its way down to her pelvis and turn into fire.

Reverend Judge had come to pray over her shortly after Roger moved out. He said pain's divine purpose was to shatter the illusion that we were self-sufficient, to remind us we must submit to God's will. His words were no comfort at all.

She checked her wristwatch. Linda would be home soon. She pulled herself up and tried to slow her breathing. Fingered the worn spot on the arm of the drab brown couch that had been Mother Wise's. She'd wanted to replace it for years but Roger always found some sentimental memory stuck behind a cushion. She wouldn't earn much at Lou's but surely enough to buy slipcover material. She hadn't used the Singer in a while, had made most of Linda's clothes until fifth grade when it embarrassed the child to be seen in homemade duds.

Roger stopped in nightly to see Linda. He never came upstairs, which was just fine. It irked Betty to hear him clomping around as if
he still lived there, opening the Frigidaire or the cookie jar Linda kept filled, the racket of him rising through the register in Betty's room.

She hadn't told her parents yet or her sister and brothers out in Kansas. They wouldn't approve. But Betty couldn't think anymore with Roger around; she didn't know where he ended and she began. She reckoned she shouldn't have married at all, but what choice did a woman have? Roger phoned each morning to see if she and Linda needed anything. He would have taken her to the doctor's but darned if she'd ask. She had Linda call if the toilet overflowed or anything else went wrong in the house. It was like being sprung from a girdle not having to hear the exasperated patience in Madge Bryson's voice: Are you sure you want me to interrupt him, Mrs. Wise?

She looked at her watch again, a Bulova, a gift from Roger for their fifth anniversary. She'd been hinting for a hope chest. Most girls got one before they were married, but her parents couldn't afford such a thing. She'd asked Roger if what he was getting her needed two people to carry it and he said yes. So didn't he go and carve two men from plywood, nail them to a board and put the watch box between them. She hadn't thought of that in years.