Eileen (17 page)

“I'm leaving early today,” she said. “I'll call you tomorrow. We'll have fun.”

I pictured a lavish table spread with gourmet dishes, a tuxedoed butler pouring wine into crystal goblets. That was my fantasy.

By noon I was grateful to have to drive out to the nearest grocery store to buy my lunch. It meant I could hold the gun again, let the Dodge coast, feel the wind in my hair. My hunger that day was like no hunger I'd ever felt. I purchased a carton of milk and a box of cheese crackers. I ate them voraciously sitting in my car in the Moorehead parking lot—stink of vomit still strong—then gulped the milk like a football player. Nothing had ever tasted so delicious. The gun, a hard weight in my lap, seemed to have something to do with my appetite. At any moment I could have pointed it at someone and demanded his wallet, his coat, that he do something to please me, sing a song or dance or tell me I was beautiful and perfect. I could have made Randy kiss my feet. The Beach Boys came on the radio. I didn't understand rock 'n' roll back then—most rock songs made me want to slit my wrists, made me feel there was a wonderful party happening somewhere, and I was missing it—but I may have jiggled a little in my seat that day. I felt happy. I hardly felt like myself.

Out in the parking lot, I ground my heels into the rocky salt, took in the view of the whole of the children's prison. It was an
old, gray stone building which, from afar, reminded me of a rich person's summer home. The carved stone details, the rolling sand dunes beyond the fenced gravel, might have looked beautiful under different circumstances. The place felt like it was meant to be restful, peaceful, to inspire contemplation, something like that. As I understood from the odd display case of historical drawings, maps and photographs in the front corridor, the place had been built more than a hundred years earlier, first as a temperance boardinghouse for seamen. Then it was expanded and converted to a military hospital. The sea breeze was refreshing, after all, good for the nerves. At some point it was used as a boarding school, I think, when that part of the state was prosperous, full of smart, wealthy people who preferred quiet lives outside the big city. Once there was a monument to Emerson out front, a circular drive, a fountain with an English garden, as I recall. Later the place turned into an orphanage, then a rehabilitation hospital for ailing veterans, then a school for boys, and finally, twenty-something years before I got there, it became the boys' prison. If I'd been born a boy, I probably would have ended up there.

Leaning out the open window of my car, ears bright red from the cold, I powdered my nose in the side-view mirror and watched a corrections officer escort a young man out of the back of his cruiser and into the prison. I was especially excited when a new inmate arrived, which was only about once a week. There would be paperwork for me to process. There would be fingerprinting. There would be photographs to take.

The office ladies gave me the stink eye when I walked in late
from lunch that day. My mood and health feeling much improved, I whirled my coat off onto my chair, used my teeth to pull off my useless gloves, fingered the sleep out of the corners of my eyes and rubbed my hands together. Mrs. Stephens chatted with the corrections officer while the new boy fidgeted with his handcuffs. He was a pudgy blond teenager with an upturned nose, large, fleshy hands, but small, girllike shoulders. I remember him. He squeezed his eyes shut in an effort not to cry, which touched me. He sat across from me, handcuffed and sedated. I asked his name and wrote it down, took his height, his weight, noted his eye color, checked for facial scars, handed him the starched blue uniform. I felt like a nurse, dry and caring and untortured. I talked to him quietly, took his picture. I remember the look on his face in the viewfinder, the strange passive mix of resignation and rage, the tender sadness. Like when I'd peek at that dead mouse in my glove box, the boy's picture bolstered me. “Glad I'm not you,” was my sentiment. All the while the corrections officer stood behind the boy with crossed arms, waiting to witness his signature. Two guards milled around in case the boy tried to make a run for it or attack me, though none of them ever did. He couldn't have been older than fourteen, as I recall. My heart went out to him, I guess, because I was in a good mood and he was rather short and plump for his age, and from his sorrow I gathered that, like me, he was an odd child, deeply pained by the hard world around him, tender, distrustful. When I put his file away in the cabinet I read his charge: infanticide by drowning.

When I was conducting these little intake exams, I felt
normal, just a regular person going about her day. I enjoyed having a set of clean instructions, following protocol. It gave me a sense of purpose, an easiness. It was a brief vacation from the loud, rabid inner circuitry of my mind. I'm sure people found and still find me odd. I've changed considerably over the last fifty years, of course, but I can make some people very uncomfortable. Now it's for entirely different reasons. These days I'm afraid I am too outspoken, too loving. I'm a sap, too passionate, too effusive, too much. Back then I was just an odd young woman. An awkward youngster. Angst wasn't quite so mainstream back then. My old deadpan stare would terrify me if I saw it in the mirror today. Looking back I'd say I was barely civilized. There was a reason I worked at the prison, after all. I wasn't exactly a pleasant person. I thought I would have preferred to be a teller in a bank, but no bank would have taken me. For the best, I suppose. I doubt it would have been long before I stole from the till. Prison was a safe place for me to work.

Visiting hours came and went. It delighted me to see the ugly brown leather purse now hanging by its worn strap from the back of my desk chair. If I or anyone jostled it, the gun inside the purse would clank against the chair's hollow metal backing. What would Rebecca think, I wondered, if she knew I was thus armed? I had the vague notion that bearing arms was in poor taste. Unless you were terribly wealthy, hunting was for the brutish lower class, uncivilized country folk, primitive types, people who were dumb and callous and ugly. Violence was just another function of the body, no less unusual than
sweating or vomiting. It sat on the same shelf as sexual intercourse. The two got mixed up quite often, it seemed.

For the rest of the day, I did my duties mechanically. I tried to fixate again on Randy, as usual glancing over at him as he sat on his stool, but my fascination fell flat. Like a favorite song you've heard so many times it begins to annoy you, or like when you scratch an itch so hard it begins to bleed, Randy's face now seemed common, his lips childishly plump, almost feminine, his hair silly and pretentious. There was nothing mesmerizing about his crotch, nor did his arms seem at all special—the magic of his muscles had vanished. I even felt a bit sick when I imagined him coming toward me in the dark, his breath smelling of sausage, burnt coffee, cigarettes. The heart is a moody, greedy thing, I suppose. He really was special, though. I wish I'd just told Randy I loved him when I had the chance, before Rebecca came along. He had captivated me. It's rare to meet someone who can do that to you. Randy, wherever you may be, I saw you, and you were beautiful. I loved you.

 • • • 

I
left Moorehead for the last time that afternoon, though I couldn't have predicted that. I left my desk a mess. The vermouth and chocolates sat in my locker, a library book in my drawer. I don't recall my last moments in that prison, and I occasionally wondered what became of my belongings, or what the office ladies had to say about me when I didn't show up for work after the holidays. Mrs. Stephens was probably put back in charge of visitation, Mrs. Murray intake. I doubt much fuss was
made. If Rebecca went back there, maybe she tried to cover for me. “She's visiting family,” she might have lied. I don't care. I haven't lost any sleep thinking about what I left behind at Moorehead.

I was exhausted on the drive home that evening, and already suffering from the powerful wrenching pain that usually accompanied my period on the third day. I was too tired to stop by Lardner's on my way home that night. If my father needed something, that was his problem. It wouldn't kill him to drink a glass of milk, spend a single night sober, I thought. Or perhaps it
would
kill him. Either way, I didn't care. I suppose it was at that moment, with the weight of the gun in my purse on my lap, turning into the dark and icy driveway between the tall walls of piled up snow, that I thought of trying to put him out of his misery. I could have shot him, but that would have been messy and might get me in trouble. My mother's pills were a better idea, but there were only a few left in the bottle. She had taken them to alleviate the pain of dying, as the doctor had prescribed. She said, however, that she took them to protect her daughter, poor me, from having to hear her moan and yelp and gripe and complain all day. I took one, too, from time to time as I waited for her to finally “kick the bucket.” This was how I described what had happened when I called Joanie on the phone the morning after she died. I'd spent the night before in the blackness those good pills provided, then woke up to a cold dead body in the bed beside me, my mother's angry corpse.

The gun was heavy in my purse on my shoulder as I walked up the front steps that night. I let myself in through the front
door, careful under the dripping daggers of ice. Even through the dimness, it was apparent that the foyer had been cleared of old newspapers and bottles, even swept. The cool shape of a white circular tablecloth on the kitchen table told me that someone had been cleaning. Perhaps the station had sent over a rookie after word got around that my esteemed father had been living in a pigsty. Or maybe my father had cleaned up on his own—boiled a strong pot of coffee, got industrious, sober for a day. He had undertaken projects to improve the home in the past—building a shelf to organize the basement, insulating the attic—projects he always abandoned as soon as the coffee got cold and he figured he deserved a beer. None of his pledges to get off the bottle lasted more than an afternoon. When I left, there were still bright pink rolls of insulation stuffed in the slanted corners of the attic. I'd stared at them for years every night as I fell asleep.

My father's coat was hanging on the hook by the front door. When I turned the light on in the kitchen, I found his chair empty. I pulled out two slices of bread from the refrigerator, slathered some mayonnaise on one, slapped the two pieces together, and let each bite melt on my tongue. That was my dinner. It took me years to learn how to feed myself properly, or rather it took years to develop the desire to feed myself properly. Back there in X-ville, I desperately hoped I could avoid ever having to resemble a grown woman. I didn't see that any good could come of that.

When I went upstairs, I saw there was a light on in my mother's bedroom, the door closed. Through it I heard the loud,
irregular breathing of my sleeping father. My mother's old pills were in a drawer of the bedside table, but I dared not go in there and risk waking him. A half-empty bottle of gin lay at the top of the stairs. I took it up to the attic with me. The previous summer, my father had fallen down the attic stairs one morning on his way up to wake me, yelling that there were mobsters in the cellar planning to kill us. I was barely awake when I heard him trip and thunder down the steps, splinters cracking like lightning until his body hit the landing with a low thud. I had to get dressed and help him limp to the car. I drove him to the emergency room, where they pumped him full of liquids, measured his liver, and a doctor told me the bad news, which was that if he stopped drinking he might die, and if he continued, it would surely kill him. “It's quite a quandary,” the doctor told me, looking down at my bruised knees. “Eat a can of spinach, young lady,” he said. I went home. I did the laundry. I took a bath. The house without my father in it felt as though it belonged to strangers. All my belongings were there, but the rooms all felt so empty, unfamiliar. It irked me. Eventually my father was sent home with a cane and a bandage on his ankle, a stitch on his chin. He wore his wound proudly, cleaning it meticulously at first, then excessively, with rubbing alcohol, of which he demanded more and more. I liked the smell of it, too, and when my father wasn't looking, I took a sip of it and nearly choked.

That night I took the gin and my purse to the attic, changed into pajamas, and slipped the gun under my pillow. Doing that felt like a prayer, or like when my first tooth fell out as a child and I placed it there before I went to sleep. I recall waking up to
two shiny nickels under my pillow once. What shocked me was not the transformation from tooth to silver, but the idea that I had slept through the disturbance of my mother or father sneaking in during the night, that I had been unconscious, completely unaware, vulnerable. I remember my question that morning—what else had they done to me in my sleep? I've often wondered about everything I may have slept through, what arguments, what secrets. When I think back on my childhood, not much appears but the house itself, the furniture and its arrangements, the change of seasons in the backyard. There are no faces on people, only their shadows slipping out of sight as they leave the room. What I remember most about my mother is the slight weight of her in the bed the morning she died, her cold hands when I held them, perhaps for the first time since I'd been a child, the give of her shoulder when I leaned into it and cried.

I drank for a while that night, remembering. Then I put down the bottle, pulled out my reading materials. I must confess that amidst my stack of
National Geographic
s were hidden several issues of my father's pornographic magazines. I pulled one of them out and leafed blithely through its pages until I fell
asleep.

M
y mother never packed lunches for me to take to school when I was growing up. I'd sit and stare down at my knees while the other children ate their sandwiches, my stomach empty and rumbling. As soon as I'd get home in the afternoon, I filled my belly with bread and butter, all that I could find to eat in my mother's messy kitchen. When I was a child, Dunlop dinners around the kitchen table were hardly nourishing. Mealtimes were brief and uncomfortable. My parents only ever fought in front of Joanie and me, as though they'd needed our audience to discuss their private matters. Our mother would whine and our father would groan, throw his fork across the table, eye his Smith & Wesson, which lay next to his plate. If Joanie or I fussed, Mom would whip a rag at the floor to make a popping sound, sudden and loud, like lightning, like a firecracker. I don't remember what they were always arguing about. I'd just chew my food fast and bring my plate to the sink and run up the stairs. Furthermore, the meals my mother cooked
were awful. I didn't eat good food until my second husband. He explained that steak was not a leathery flap of sinew burned in a frying pan, but a thick, fragrant, lovely thing, the best of which could be eaten with a dull spoon. I gained ten pounds, I think, the first month we were together. Back in X-ville, Dunlop dinners had been, at best, dry chicken, mashed potatoes from a box, canned beans, limp bacon. Christmas was little different. A store-bought sponge cake was all I remember enjoying year to year. The Dunlops were never big eaters.

But the booze always flowed freely over the holidays. Of course it did. Imagine the festivities: Mom getting the cocktail shaker down—“Let's do this properly!”—to make drinks she called Diplomats and Stormy Weathers. Those old drinks had great names. Maggie Mays, Old Fashioneds. She made hers and Dad had me make his, Blue Blazers and highballs, with the good stuff he'd get every Christmas from his so-called friends on the force. We had a little book with different recipes. I took sips no doubt, chewed up half the bottle of maraschino cherries on my way back and forth to the kitchen, where I mixed Lee Burns, Mamie Taylors, Manhattans. Whiskey Milk Punch was my favorite since it tasted like a milkshake. I remember another one, the Morning Glory, had me cracking eggs like some kind of short order cook. Those are fun memories: records playing, fire roaring, me, offstage and dutiful, slurping the foam off a cocktail in the kitchen and still expecting something good for Christmas—a microscope, a set of paints—and Joanie entertaining in the living room, twisting her limbs in time to Elvis.

Christmas was one of the few times a year my parents had guests over. My aunt Ruth, my only aunt, took little interest in Joanie and me as children—something I've never understood or forgiven—and drank only gin martinis. There was gin running through the Dunlop bloodline for generations, I'm sure. Perhaps Aunt Ruth just got down to her destiny sooner than my father did. Those martinis never seemed to do her much good. She was always frowning, skin so waxy, her face so flat it almost looked wet, shiny as a puddle. Bitterly is the best way to describe the manner in which she displayed her affections. For Christmas she'd bring over something like a canned ham or a jar of peanuts, cheap scotch for Dad, maybe some chocolates for my mother. She was childless and bossy and the only one to insist we pray before we ate. My mother, drunk already, would roll her eyes, pinch me under the table, make me laugh. Mom wasn't so bad, it seemed, at Christmas. My hopes were always high as I got into bed, drunk and full of sponge cake. Inevitably, Christmas mornings Dad would give Joanie and me each a dollar bill, wadded up and stuffed with lint from the pants pocket of his uniform. A few times our mother gave us new socks or pencils. That was all.

My father and I had silently agreed to do away with Christmas when my mother died. Only one year I did give him a gift—something cruel in its uselessness, given his predicament—a tie. Joanie would send a card if she thought of it. She'd have Christmas parties of her own, I knew, but she never invited me. I don't hold it against her. I wasn't much fun.

 • • • 

W
hen I woke up on that fateful Christmas Eve, the last one of my life in X-ville, I had six hundred forty-seven dollars stashed in my jewelry box. That was quite a sum of money at the time. My life's savings. And I had a gun. Pulling it out from under my pillow, I really felt quite cool. Its strange provenance did not elude me. My father had used it first as a prop of power in the line of duty, and then as a threat to the invisible criminals only he could see. Those phantasms, he claimed, understood he would shoot to kill. One begins to think in terms of grandiose self-conceit when there's a gun in one's hand, that is true. I shall use the gun to clear my path to freedom, I thought that morning, aiming at invisible obstacles. I'm embarrassed remembering how easily that thing filled me with confidence and seemed to open up a world of possibility. I thought about showing it to Rebecca that evening. Perhaps I would suggest we go out to the woods and shoot at trees. Or we could go out to the frozen lake and stand and shoot at the moon. Or to the beach, lie on our backs, make angels in the snow, shoot at the stars. Such were my romantic ideas for the evening with my new best friend.

Lying there on my cot, I agonized over what to wear. I imagined Rebecca would be dressed comfortably—no elaborate gown or expensive jewelry, it was her house after all—but beautifully, perhaps in a thick cashmere sweater and fitted trousers, like Jackie Kennedy on a ski vacation. As for Rebecca's house, I pictured dark rolling Oriental carpets, sumptuous couches with
velvet pillows, a bearskin rug. Or maybe it was more modern and austere, dark wood floors, cold glass coffee table, burgundy drapes, fresh-cut roses. I was excited. I dozed, mentally taking stock of the garments in my mother's wardrobe and piecing together what I would wear that evening. I knew every item of clothing inside out. Nothing fit me right, as I've said, so I often wore layers of sweaters or long underwear just to fill things out. Lying there, I had a bad habit of drumming my fists on my stomach and pinching the negligible amount of fat on my thighs. I sincerely believed that if there were less of me, I would have fewer problems. Perhaps it was for this reason that I wore my mother's clothes—to be vigilant in my mission never to reach even her minor proportions. As I've said, her life, the life of a woman, seemed utterly detestable to me. There was nothing I wanted less back then than to be somebody's mother, somebody's wife. Of course, I'd already become just that for my father by the tender age of twenty-four.

“Eileen!” my father yelled, stomping up the attic stairs sometime later that morning. “The store's open already. Come on, get down!” When I opened the door, he was dressed, had his hands on his hips. “Isn't it Christmas Eve?” he asked.

“No, Dad,” I lied. “You missed Christmas. Christmas was yesterday.”

“Smart ass,” he said. “I'll spare you my hell if you get down now, quick.”

“All right,” I said. “But who's driving?”

“You're driving. Now get in the car and let's go. I'm coming with you.”

It was rare that my father dared to make an appearance outside the house like a normal person, but he was adamant about it that morning. Perhaps he sensed somehow that I was going to abandon him. More likely he was afraid of shops closing over the holidays and didn't trust me to buy him enough booze to get him through. He never explained his choice to move from the kitchen chair to the bed upstairs. It might have been a strategic move. Without his gun, he was defenseless against the hoodlums and was better off hiding. My mother's deathbed was just as good a place as any to die, he may have thought. Not that he had surrendered, that was clear. He seemed just as on guard as ever. “Hurry now!” he yelled, busting open the front door to the bright, sparkling morning. “Before they sell out. It's Christmas Eve. Wine for wolves. Get out there. You got the keys? Lock up. People are crazy this time of year. Crime spikes. It's a proven fact, Eileen. Jesus Christ.” I went and got his shoes, threw them up on the porch. He kept talking. “Everybody out, probably leaving their doors wide open. Stupid. Idiots. Don't they know this town is full of thieves?” He slid into the shoes and shuffled out to the car, wincing in the sunlight like a man crawling out of a cave, arms held feebly above his head, shielding his eyes. On the passenger seat beside me he lifted his feet one by one, had me lean over and tie his shoelaces.

The roads on the drive to the liquor store glittered with fresh snow once again. The streetlamps were wrapped in ribbon and holly, store window displays were festive, pretty. Along the sidewalks people hustled, dressed up in hats and plaid wool coats and boots and mittens. The hems of women's skirts skimmed
the shelves of snow along the sidewalks. People balanced stacks of brightly colored packages in their arms, piling them in the trunks of their cars. There was almost music in the air. Children built snowmen in their front lawns, played in the yard of the public library. I would miss that old library. I couldn't realize at the time how those books had saved me. I rolled my window down.

“It's cold,” said my father. I hadn't ever told him about the exhaust problem.

“The air in here is stale,” I said. In fact it still smelled of vomit in there, but my father couldn't detect it. The gin reeking through his skin and on his breath obliterated all other smells around him, I assumed.

“Stale? Who cares about stale?” He reached over my lap, brushing my thighs, then stuck an elbow haphazardly between my knees as he rolled the window back up. I just looked ahead calmly. He had no respect for my comfort or privacy. When I was younger and just beginning to develop, he sometimes sat at the kitchen table at night drinking with my mother and called me over to assess my progress, to pinch and measure.

“Not so good, Eileen,” he would say. “You've got to try harder.”

“Come on now,” Mom said, laughing. “Don't be cruel.” And then once she said instead, “She's too old for you to touch now, Charlie,” and clucked her tongue.

It could have been much worse, of course. Other girls got rubbed and grabbed and violated. I just got poked and ridiculed. Still, it hurt and angered me, and made me lash out later
in life when I felt I was being measured and judged. A man I lived with for a time suggested I secretly wished I'd been big breasted, that I felt bad because I'd disappointed my father with my “small rack. Every girl wants daddy's hands on her tits,” that man had said. What an idiot. He was just a mediocre musician from a wealthy family. I put up with him for a while because I thought maybe he was pointing to some dark truth about myself, and I suppose he was. I was a fool to be with a man like him. I was a fool about men in general. I learned the long way about love, tried every house on the block before I got it right. Now, finally, I live alone.

“Where in hell are you going?” my father hissed, going stiff and sliding down across his seat as I turned a corner. He wasn't quite right in the head, as I've said. He was scared of his own shadow. I think that's clear by now. “This is not the way. There are bad people here, and goddammit, Eileen, I didn't bring my gun.”

“We can throw snowballs,” I laughed. The gun was in my purse, of course. My father seemed to prefer to believe he'd just misplaced it. I didn't care. Nothing could disrupt my good mood. Finally, with Rebecca to celebrate it, I would have a Christmas I could enjoy. My father could strip me nude and pelt me with shards of glass, for all I cared. Nothing was going to get to me that day. Soon I'd be at Rebecca's house where I'd be treated like a queen.

“Get me out of here,” he whined as he pulled the collar of his coat up over his head. Stopped at a light, he gestured with his thumb over his shoulder. “Hoodlums,” he whispered, eyes
cloudy with fear. I just chuckled, coasted through the city streets, past the cemetery, past the police station, then back around, looping through the elementary school parking lot. I guess I was trying to torture him. “Tell me what you see,” he said. “Are they following us? Did they see me? Act natural. Don't speak. Just drive. And roll down the windows, yeah, that's a good idea. That way if they shoot at us the glass won't shatter.”

I rolled down my window gladly. I enjoyed my father's madness that day. He was a comic figure, slapstick almost. When we got to Lardner's he spoke in hushed tones to Mr. Lewis behind the counter, ordered up a case of gin and pulled a few bags of potato chips off the shelf. I bought a bottle of wine for my evening at Rebecca's. Dad didn't ask questions. On the ride home he lay across the backseat, shaking and sweating. And when I pulled into our driveway he crawled out of the car, swam through the snow to the front porch, begging for me to “come faster, open the door, let me in. It's not safe out here.” I calmly carried the box of booze up the front walk to the porch, but he was impatient, scrambled through the living room window, chiding me for leaving it unlocked—“Are you crazy?” When he opened the door from the inside, he ripped the top off the box of gin and pulled out two bottles, slung one under each armpit. “I've raised a fool,” he said. I watched him scuttle inside, kick off his shoes. “Two days old!” he yelled, and cleared his throat, settling into his easy chair with the newspaper he'd found frozen on the porch. I was too concerned with my own plans to bother to lock his shoes back up in the trunk right away.

Upstairs, I found my mother's pills and put them in my purse
but didn't take any. I wanted to save them. If I had to spend Christmas Day at home with my father after he got back from Mass, I wanted to spend it in deep twilight sleep. I went back to my cot and returned to my fantasies of my evening at Rebecca's. I imagined her saying things like, “I've never met anybody like you before.” And also, “I've never felt this close to someone before. We have so much in common. You're perfect.” And I pictured hours of rapt conversation, delicious wine, a warm fire, Rebecca saying, “You're my best friend. I love you,” and kissing my hand the way you'd kiss the hand of an oracle or a priest. I pulled my hand out from under me, red and cramped, and kissed it reverently. “I love you, too,” I said to it, and laughed at my own silliness, pulling the covers over my head. I waited for Rebecca's phone call. Somehow I slept. I don't remember those dreams, the last dreams I'd ever have in that house. I wish I could. I hope they were good ones.