Wolf at the Table, page 13
“Oh, please,” Fiona says. “Was he not fair game? He was clearly interested in me.”
“Because you were throwing yourself at him! Do you have any dignity at all?”
“Now there’s a word.”
“I thought you were a lesbian,” Myra says, knowing as the word leaves her mouth that it’s a cheap, hollow blow.
“Well, tonight I wasn’t,” Fiona says, and backs into the living room, where she collapses onto the sofa, her legs spread, her chin tucked into her neck.
“You’re drunk,” Myra says.
“And you should be too.” Fiona stares at her sister for a long moment, then unleashes a long, hectoring laugh. “Myra Lee Larkin, always the good girl,” she says through the laughter. “You’re twenty-eight years old. Have you ever done a bad thing in your fucking life?”
Myra doesn’t respond. She reaches over for Fiona’s glass of wine, downs nearly the whole thing.
“I was in an orgy in New York,” Fiona continues, “with five other people. One of them was a sixty-year-old man. And one of them was blind.”
“And look where it’s gotten you,” Myra says, though even with what she knows of her sister she is a little shocked at the admission.
“I fucking loved it,” Fiona says.
Myra could throttle her. The impulse twitches in her wrists. She’s never physically fought with Fiona. Growing up, Myra was her protector, always defending her from school bullies. But now Myra could seize the ungrateful opportunist by the throat, she really could. Instead, she turns and starts to clean up. As she’s clearing the table she drops the serving dish of lemon chicken. Clumps of rice and sauce spill onto the floor.
“If you’re so crazy about him go dock on his goddamn noor,” Fiona says, sinking further into the sofa cushions.
“You can’t even speak,” Myra says, using a wet sponge to clean up the mess. “This is all just a game to you, isn’t it? Everything’s one big lark.”
But Fiona doesn’t reply because she’s passed out. She begins snoring loudly.
Myra crosses to her in the living room and rolls her onto her side, off the sofa and into the overstuffed chair. She removes the sofa cushions and pulls out the convertible bed, then manages to get Fiona situated back on the pullout mattress, whose fitted sheet barely clings to its opposite corners.
“Stay on your left side,” Myra says.
Fiona smacks her lips.
“Can you hear me, Fiona? If you’re going to be sick please try and make it to the bathroom, okay?”
Fiona nods and a bemused look passes over her. She indeed possesses a beautiful face. Those lustrous lashes. Those lips. That perfect, unsullied chin. How could Denny have resisted her?
After Myra finishes cleaning the kitchen, she gulps yet another glass of wine, forcing it down as if it’s medicine, then heads down to the second floor and knocks on Denny’s door. It’s late now—well past midnight.
“Myra,” Denny says after he opens the door. He’s wearing boxer shorts and a white T-shirt. His calves are so muscular.
“Were you sleeping?” she says.
“No,” he says. “I was awake.”
“I can’t sleep either,” she says. She knows she is drunk. Her face feels lopsided, her tongue bloated. Each word is large in her mouth.
“Come in,” Denny says. He closes the door behind her and turns the deadbolt. “I managed to pry one of the windows open,” he says.
And before he can get out another word Myra has come around to face him and forces her mouth onto his. She can taste the salt from his sweat, the peppermint from his toothpaste. Less than a minute later they have traveled into his dark bedroom, their faces still joined, their bodies moving as if by their own intelligence, and fall onto a full-size mattress laid out on the floor. The sheet is quickly dispatched to the corner, along with their clothes, and they make love clumsily, with a kind of gentle, animal will.
This first time hurts more than Myra thought it would, but it is also magical. Tears of joy stream from her eyes. When he is inside her she feels as if she is also inside him. She loses herself completely. She has the sense that she has been turned into something finer than dust. She is pollen. She is the absolute, indivisible particles of love. A kind of vapor. She can make out shapes, sounds, the muscles in his back, the combined spice of their breath, the heavy pulse in his lower abdomen, the swollen horn of him coming into her…
When it is over Denny curls into a ball, as if somehow bereft. Myra arranges herself around his broad back and shoulders, comforting him, and in doing so discovers a thick scar between his upper left bicep and his armpit. He is covering it with his right hand, as if guarding it. Myra pries his fingers loose and gently grazes the scar with her fingertips. It is grisly, raised. Denny allows her to touch it. He is a child, lost. It seems as if he’s forgotten who he is, what they just shared.
“What happened here?” Myra whispers, still touching the scar.
Denny makes no response except to cover the scar with his hand.
Not wanting to push things, Myra simply continues embracing him and he allows it. She has never felt anything like this for anyone. Denny Happ will become her destiny, the end of everything she was before him. The beginning of everything new that will happen to her. She knows this with a certainty as powerful as the blobs of blood marking the mattress ticking. Even now she can feel his semen inside her, its warm, sluicing inevitability. The blood on the mattress has expanded, its color deeper, purplish.
MYRA WAKES WITH THE troubled sense that something terrible has happened. She overslept! It’s past nine a.m. She’s two hours late for work! Denny is sound asleep, breathing deeply. Even in slumber his beauty astounds her. Morning light from the bare window silvers the edges of his body. Aside from her one question about his scar, they have said nothing to each other since she entered his apartment. Her groin is sore and achy. It is a pleasurable ache, though. She is no longer a virgin. The blood looks like evidence of a stabbing.
Myra gets out of bed, quietly dresses, then finds a pen and writes a note on the back of a torn packing slip, which she leaves on the kitchen table.
Denny,
Thank you for a lovely night.
I had to leave for work.
I didn’t want to wake you.
Myra
Holding her sneakers, she exits through his back door, which opens onto the building’s wooden fire escape. Even through the morning sunshine the flashing blue and red of police lights are visible on the wall of another apartment building in the alleyway. Out on East 100th Street, an ambulance and two police cars are parked before an area cordoned off with yellow tape. It appears that all the yellow tape has been arranged in front of the nurses’ town house where Myra used to live. She is troubled by the scene but she simply doesn’t have time to stand there and watch.
Myra returns to her apartment to find Fiona sleeping on the pullout, still turned onto her left side, just as she’d left her, her face bemused, guiltless. She calls her boss, Mrs. Denton, the head nurse, and lies about the power going out in her building, how it caused her to sleep through her alarm. The second lie in less than twenty-four hours. Will they start piling up? Will they cause more teeth to start going loose?
Mrs. Denton is stern but understands. “Get here as soon as you can,” she says.
As she prepares for work, while listening to the radio, Myra learns that late last night eight young nursing candidates were tortured and murdered after returning home to their town house on 2319 East 100th Street. One of the victims is Myra’s friend, Gloria Davy, with whom she was planning on taking a trip to the Indiana Dunes this weekend. The thought of Gloria being dead knocks the wind out of her. Myra has to sit. She lowers herself all the way down on the linoleum floor.
WHILE ABOARD HER NORTHBOUND bus that will drop her at the elevated train stop, Myra can’t quite fathom the truth of the murders. How could one person commit so many atrocities? Did the nurses fight back? Myra has always known Gloria to be tough and self-sufficient. She wouldn’t back down without a fight. She grew up in Chicago, after all. Did the murderer have a gun? A knife? Did he drug them?
On the elevated train Myra is lucky to find a seat. She tries to let her mind go blank, to not think about Gloria or her sister or everything that happened the previous evening with Denny, for that matter. It’s simply too much to hold in her head. Instead, she closes her eyes and begins humming to herself. It’s the Simon and Garfunkel song she longed to hear during dinner, “April Come She Will.” Myra wonders why they decided to only sing about six of the twelve months, April through September. What’s the significance of this? She finds herself quietly singing aloud the July section of the song:
July, she will fly
And give no warning to her flight
It’s July fourteenth, after all. She probes the song’s poetry. July, she will fly. Is there a secret meaning in its spare lyrical arrangement? A puzzle? Is she, Myra Lee Larkin, hidden somewhere in the shadows of this song?
As her train clatters past Wrigley Field, Myra realizes that she’s wearing her white nursing uniform and holding her RN cap in her lap. She can feel other commuters’ eyes on her. Do they know about the murders? she wonders. Do they think she’s playing some cruel joke, donning a nurse’s uniform on public transportation after such horrible, tragic news? They all hate her, no doubt. She does her best to keep her eyes cast down. She can’t bear the thought of anyone confronting her.
Myra briefly peers up at a man who is reading the sports section of the Chicago Tribune. He breaks from the newspaper, looks directly at her. His jowly face has the consistency of Spam, with broken blood vessels spidering across a bulbous, carbuncular nose. Myra looks down. For the rest of the commute she will fix her gaze on her lap.
A FEW HOURS LATER, in the fourth-floor lounge of the pediatrics ward of Saint Francis Hospital, while Myra is gathered in front of the large console color television with several other nurses and orderlies, an anchorman on the local news reports to the greater Chicagoland area that more information has come out about the murders. It turns out that Myra’s friend, Gloria, was also raped. The killer had raped and then strangled her, and then stabbed her several times. Something goes slack inside Myra and she has to sit on a chair, which she nearly misses. It takes a moment for her to catch her breath. Gloria’s family must be devastated. How will they survive this terrible day?
The one piece of good news about the grisly murders is that there was a survivor at the nurses’ residence at 2319 East 100th Street, a young woman named Corazon Amurao, who managed to keep hidden under her bed while a man tortured and murdered eight other nursing students. One time while visiting Gloria at the town house, Myra met Corazon. She remembers that Corazon didn’t drink alcohol. She was very pretty and very Catholic. They talked about possibly attending Mass together at St. Joseph Parish up in Back of the Yards. At that point it had been weeks since Myra had gone to confession and she felt guilty. She had been slipping, as her mother would say.
According to the anchorman, Corazon Amurao, one of the three Filipino exchange students who lived at the residence, described the still-at-large killer to police authorities as being tall and white, with measles scars marking his cheeks, greasy brown slicked-back hair worn in the style of Elvis Presley, and a distinctive BORN TO RAISE HELL tattoo crudely rendered in the pale flesh of his upper right forearm.
BORN TO RAISE HELL.
Myra tries to push from her mind the familiar tattoo, which belonged to that strange man who was so crude to her at the laundromat. Is this the same man who raped and killed Gloria? Is that possible? She feels as if she will be sick and forces herself to swallow.
As the news report continues Myra finds herself clinging to images of her time with Denny: his shoulders poised over her; his bare bedroom window, that perfect rain-flecked square of moonlight; the look on his face as he entered her; how surprisingly inevitable their conjoined flesh felt; the peace she experienced after the act; the deep, intense care she felt for him while they embraced.
5
SALEM, MASSACHUSETTS
FALL 1970
FIONA
Dearest Myra,
It’s hard to believe it’s been years since we last spoke. I’m not writing to ask for money, or for your help in any way, so please don’t tear this up. Please keep reading.
So much has happened since Chicago. New York and Chicago are two chapters in my life I wish I could erase, or somehow rewrite, but the ink has dried on all that and I’m afraid I’ll have to live with those shameful months for the rest of my days. You taking me in was incredibly charitable. As Mother would say, you were a Saint and I know I showed you zero appreciation. If anything I was a belligerent, unappreciative mess. For those two months you fed me, got me back on my feet, put up with my lack of hygiene (your poor sofa!) and you never asked for anything in return. And for all of this I will always be grateful.
Saint Myra, the Patron Saint of Charitable Works for Awful Siblings.
After I left your apartment, I took the money from the clothes (and the money I stole from your purse), and I boarded a Greyhound bus heading for Milwaukee, where I got a job in the cafeteria of a boys Military Academy in Delafield, Wisconsin of all places. Apparently the St. John’s campus is an exact replica of West Point, with little castle-like buildings made of stone. (Denny might have flashbacks!) The cafeteria gig didn’t last long and there’s no need to go into detail about that. Let’s just say I got involved with one of the teachers there—a young English teacher (younger than me—he was 24) named Perry—and he was married and I sort of got involved with his wife too. (Her name was Eden. They were high school sweethearts from Kenosha and they both had such perfect skin!) And then things got particularly ugly and three months later I was on another bus, this time heading to Detroit, where I got another job in the food service industry, this time at Wayne State University, but it was the middle of winter and I came down with a terrible bronchitis—I nearly coughed up a lung—and I missed almost a month of work. Well, understandably, I didn’t have a job when I got my health back. As I was gathering my things and walking away from campus I happened upon a bulletin board with a simple index card that was very humbly advertising an opportunity to work as a farmhand in Massachusetts, so I called the number and three hours later I was on yet another Greyhound, this time heading east.
Many, many hours later I was greeted at a small bus station in northeast Massachusetts by two women wearing white bonnets. And that’s when everything changed.
For these last few years I’ve been living with a community of women on a working farm. The farm is set on ten acres, half of which are dedicated to agriculture. There is an old clapboard house and a converted barn. There is a former corncrib where various chores are done. There is also a fishpond, a majestic willow tree, three chocolate Labs, innumerable cats, more hummingbirds than you could imagine in the spring and summer (Mother would be jealous!), and an old white swaybacked spotted mare that sleeps standing up.
We don’t believe in Time in the classic sense. We believe in seasons, however. And weather, of course. Weather is truer than the news, after all.
As I write this it is the fall, probably somewhere between late September and mid-October. Whether my birthday has passed, I’m not entirely sure. If it has, I am thirty-one. The leaves are amazing here. So many stunning shades of reds, oranges, golds. There are forty-eight Sisters and we come from all over the country. Three are from Galveston, Texas. One is from McCall, Idaho. One girl is even from Ghana, Africa. Sister Laine is from Canastota, New York, which, as you know, is only a couple of hours north of Elmira. Laine and I are very close. (Yes, “very close” is code for what you think it is.) You would like her a lot. She’s tall like Mother (although not quite that tall!), has sparkling blue eyes and long blond hair. She was in her second year of graduate school at Brown (she was getting her Master’s in Anthropology), when she came to the Farm. Laine and I wear matching bonnets, which signifies that we choose to be identified as a couple. Our leader, Mother Emily, would like to Join us after the first snowfall. Joining is sort of like a marriage ceremony. I know Dad and Mother will have simultaneous strokes when they hear about this. And I’m fine with you telling them, by the way. It’s all going to come out eventually anyway. I can just see Mother’s face now. Her beauty drawn in by those severe lines of judgment. Her quiet bitterness squeezing her eyes closer together.
I think about you and Alec often. Myra, I know that you’ll always be fine. You always were fine. So steady, so independent, so reliable. And now that you’ve found someone, your life is even more solid. A happy life has always been in the cards for you. It’s been your fate since you were little. But Alec is a different story. Poor Alec. There is something lost about him. Something loose in his center. It’s not so much that he’s a thief and a liar; there’s something subtler going on. Even though I haven’t seen him in years I get the sense that he’s fading away; that each city or town he flees to (and eventually from) keeps some residue of him. The more Alec runs, the more of him gets rubbed away, bit by bit, layer by layer. Soon his skin will barely be able to contain him and his insides will spill out into the streets and dribble down some curbside drain. He will eventually dissolve into vapor, into nothingness. I don’t know where he came from, Myra. Maybe it’s the dark eyes and olive skin. Sometimes I wonder if Mother found him in a parking lot and faked her third pregnancy.
As far as the other Larkins are concerned I don’t think much about Lexy. Like you, she will be fine. She’ll wind up a lawyer or a doctor or maybe even a U.S. Senator. She’ll live in a four-story house that will survive tornadoes. She’ll have three kids and a husband who calls her “Babe” and pats her on the rump when she walks by him holding a casserole. She’ll become a vigorous hiker. Once a year she’ll climb to the top of some impossible summit and declare something triumphant in another language. And she’ll love every minute of her life.
