Eileen (9 page)

One day I went out back to hang the laundry and found the dog belly-up in the uncut grass, tall and dried and dead in the bleaching sun. Perhaps God took the wrong soul, I thought in a freak moment of sentimentality, and I cried quietly, back pressed up against the house. I left the wet laundry in the basket, but draped a sopping pillowcase over Mona's body. It took a day for me to muster the courage to go back out there. By then the laundry had congealed and dried, and the sight of the dead dog when I lifted the pillowcase made me gag and spill the contents of my stomach—chicken, vermouth—into the dry dirt. It took me several hours to dig a sufficient hole with a trowel, push Mona in with my foot—I couldn't bring myself to touch her with my hands—and cover the body with the brittle earth. A week later, when my father kicked over the dog's dish of stale and smelly kibble, he simply said, “Damn dog,” and so I threw the whole thing out, and told no one. A few days later my mother
was dead, and I let the tears flow openly at last. It's a romantic story and it may not be accurate at this point since I've gone over it again and again for years whenever I've felt it necessary or useful to cry.

Looking out over the icy backyard that night, I cried again for my dog, sorry that she would have to stay there in X-ville for all of eternity. I considered digging up her bones so I could take her with me. I really considered putting on my ski pants, a heavy wool sweater, snow boots, mittens, the tight knit cap, and going out there with a shovel. I hadn't marked the grave with anything, but I felt that Mona would call to me, that I would intuitively know where to break ground. Of course I didn't even try. I'd have needed some kind of pickax, the kind they use in graveyards. Imagine the labor necessary to bury a whole person without a machine to do the digging. It's not like in the movies. It's not that easy. How did they bury people in the winter in the old days, I wondered. Did they leave the bodies out to freeze until the spring? If they did do that, they must have kept them somewhere safe, in the basement perhaps, to lie in silence in the dark and cold until the thaw.

I
remember the shower I took that morning because the hot water ran out while I dillydallied at the mirror inspecting my naked body through the wafting steam. I'm an old lady now. Like it does to everyone, time has blurred my face with lines and sagging jowls and bulging bags under my eyes, and my old body's been rendered nearly sexless and soft and wrinkled and shapeless. So just for laughs, here I am again, my little virginal body at age twenty-four. My shoulders were small and sloped and knobbly. My chest was rigid, a taut drum of bones I thudded with my fist like an ape. My breasts were lemon-size and hard and my nipples were sharp, like thorns. But I was really just all ribs, and so thin that my hips jutted out awkwardly and were often bruised from bumping into things. My guts were still cramped from the ice cream and eggs from the day before. The sluggishness of my bowels was a constant preoccupation. There was a complex science to eating and evacuating, balancing
the rising intensity of my constipated discomfort with the catharsis of my laxative-induced purges. I took such poor care of myself. I knew I should drink water, eat healthful foods, but I really didn't like to drink water or eat healthful foods. I found fruits and vegetables detestable, like eating a bar of soap or a candle. I also suffered from that unfortunate maladjustment to puberty—still at twenty-four—that made me ashamed of my womanliness. There were days on end I ate very little—a handful of nuts or raisins here, a crust of bread there. And for fun, such as with the chocolates a few nights prior, I sometimes chewed but spat out candies or cookies, anything that tasted good but which I feared might put meat on my bones.

Back then, at twenty-four, people already considered me a spinster. I'd had only one kiss from a boy by then. When I was sixteen, Peter Woodman, a senior, took me to the high school prom. I won't say too much about him—I don't want to sound as though I've carried the memory around with any romantic nostalgia. If there's anything I've learned to detest, it is nostalgia. And anyway, Randy is the romantic lead in my story, if there is one. Peter Woodman can't hold a candle to him. My prom dress was very pretty, though—navy taffeta. I loved navy blue. Whatever I wore in that color reminded me of a uniform, something that I felt validated me and obscured me at once. We spent most of our time sitting at a table in the darkened gymnasium, Peter talking to his friends. His father worked in the police station and I'm sure Peter only asked me to the prom as a favor his father owed to mine. We didn't dance, not that I minded. The evening of the prom ended in Peter's father's pickup truck in
the high school parking lot when I bit the boy's throat to keep him from reaching any farther up my dress. In fact, I think his hand was barely on my knee, I was so guarded. And the kiss was only superficial—a momentary touching of the lips, sort of sweet when I think of it now. I can't remember how I got home that night after tumbling out of the truck, Peter heckling me and rubbing his neck as I watched him drive away. Did my teeth draw blood? I don't know. And who cares anyway? By now he's probably dead. Most people I knew are dead.

That Monday morning in X-ville, I put on my new blue stockings and dressed in my mother's clothes. I locked my father's shoes back in the trunk of the Dodge and drove to work, to Moorehead. I remember conjuring up a new strategy for my getaway. One day soon, when I was good and ready, I'd pile on all the clothes I decided on taking with me: my gray coat, several pairs of wool socks, snow boots, mittens, gloves, hat, scarf, pants, skirt, dress, et cetera, and I'd drive about three hours northwest across state lines to Vermont. I knew I could survive the drive for one hour with the windows up without fainting, and being bundled up would save me the rest of the way with the windows down. New York wasn't that far from X-ville. Two hundred fifty-seven miles south, to be exact. But first I'd lead any search astray by abandoning the Dodge in Rutland, which I'd read about in a book about railroads. In Rutland I'd find some kind of abandoned lot or dead-end street, and then I'd walk to the railway station and take a train down to the city to start my new life. I thought I was so smart. I planned to bring along an empty suitcase to carry the clothes
I'd take off once I got on the train. I'd have some clothes, the money I'd been hoarding in the attic, and nothing else.

But maybe I'd need something to read on my ride to my future, I thought. I could borrow a few of the finer books from the X-ville library, disappear and never return them. This seemed to me a brilliant idea. First, I would get to keep the books as mementos, a bit like when a killer snips a lock of hair from his victim or takes some small object—a pen, a comb, a rosary—as his trophy. Second, I'd give good cause for concern to my father and others who might wonder whether I ever intended to return or under what circumstances I was forced to leave. I pictured detectives poking around the house. “Nothing seems to be out of order, Mr. Dunlop. Maybe she's visiting a friend.”

“Oh no, not Eileen. Eileen has no friends,” my father would say. “Something's happened. She'd never leave me alone like this.”

My hope was that they'd think I was dead in a ditch somewhere, kidnapped, buried in an avalanche, eaten by a bear, what have you. It was important to me that nobody knew I planned to disappear. If my father thought I'd ran away, he would have humiliated me. I could imagine him puffing out his chest and scoffing at my foolishness with Aunt Ruth. They'd called me a spoiled brat, an idiot, an ungrateful rat's ass. Perhaps they did say all that once I really had left X-ville. I'll never know. I wanted my father to despair, cry his eyes out over his poor lost daughter, collapse at the foot of my cot, swathe himself in my smelly blankets just to remember the beautiful stink of my sweat. I wanted him to paw through my belongings like examining bleached
bones, inert artifacts of a life he'd never appreciated. If I'd ever had a music box, I'd have liked the song it played to break my father's heart. I'd have liked him to die of sadness at having lost me. “I loved her,” I wanted him to say. “And I was wrong to have acted like I didn't.” Such were my thoughts on my way to work that morning.

Unbeknownst to me at the time, I would be gone by Christmas morning, and though my memories since then have waxed and waned, I will do my best to narrate the events of my last days in X-ville. I will try to paint a complete picture. Some of my clearest memories may seem wholly irrelevant, but I will include them when I feel they add to the mood. For example, that morning when I got to Moorehead, the boys had been given special holiday sweaters knit by a group of do-gooders at a local church. Since there was a surplus of sweaters, I presume, one landed on my desk wrapped in brown paper. Mrs. Stephens told me it was a Christmas present from the warden. I tore open the package and found a navy blue, expertly knit vest with an orange crucifix across the chest and marked with an “S” for small written in shaky cursive on a scrap of wax paper safety-pinned to the collar. That shade of blue made me wonder. Maybe the warden actually liked me? He could hardly give me a box of chocolates, after all. He wouldn't want to attract the attention of the office ladies, arousing hostile suspicions of favoritism and clandestine love affairs. I pictured embracing the warden in his office, flinging myself at him like a rag doll. Was that what I wanted? My thoughts were like dirty films reeling inside my
brain, and I remember them from that morning as well as the dull thudding sound of the drawer when I shut the sweater inside it. I cannot, however, remember the layout of the prison's recreational facilities, or whether the Christmas pageant, as they called it, was held in the gymnasium or the chapel or a small auditorium, which I'm not sure existed at all. I may be thinking of my old high school.

This I remember very well: Around two o'clock, the warden came into our office, followed by a tall redheaded woman and a willowy bald man in a loose, mud-colored suit. My first impression of the woman was that she must be a performer at the special assembly—a singer or an actress with a soft spot for child criminals. My assumption seemed reasonable. Celebrities entertained army troops, after all. Why not young prisoners? Teenage boys were a worthy enough cause. Most of those boys, the ones serving shorter sentences, ended up in Vietnam anyway, I'm sure. In any case, this woman was beautiful and looked vaguely familiar in the way all beautiful people look familiar. So within thirty seconds I'd decided that she must be an idiot, have a brain like a powder puff, be bereft of any depth or darkness, have no interior life whatever. Like Doris Day, this woman must live in a charmed world of fluffy pillows and golden sunshine. So of course I hated her. I'd never come face-to-face with someone so beautiful before in my life.

The man was not interesting to me in the least. He sniffled, rubbed his head with one hand, carried two coats over his other arm—his and the redhead's, I presumed. I couldn't help but stare at the woman. I have a dreamy picture in my memory of
how she was dressed that day, in peculiar shades of pink, not unfashionable per se, but not in the fashion of the times and certainly not of X-ville. She wore a long flowing skirt, a sweater set draped around her slim figure, and a stiff-rimmed hat, which I picture now somewhat like a riding helmet, only it was gray and delicate, felt maybe, and held an iridescent feather on one side. Perhaps I've invented the hat. She wore a long gold pendant necklace—that I know for sure. Her shoes were like men's riding boots, only smaller, and with a delicate heel. Her legs were very long and her arms were thin and folded across her narrow rib cage. I was surprised to see a cigarette in her fingers. Many women smoked, of course, more than do now, but it seemed odd for her to smoke just standing there in the office as though she were at a cocktail party, as though she owned the place. And the way she smoked disturbed me. When others smoked, it was something needy and cheap. When this woman inhaled, her face trembled and her eyes fluttered in subtle ecstasy, as though she were tasting a delectable dessert or stepping into a warm bath. She seemed to be in a state of enchantment, perfectly happy. And so she struck me as perverse. Pretentious wasn't a word we used back then. Obnoxious was more like it.

“Listen up,” said the warden. He had a wide, red and pitted face with a huge nose and small, inscrutable eyes, but was so well groomed, so clean and militant, I thought of him as handsome. “I present to you our new psychiatrist, Dr. Bradley Morris. He comes highly recommended by Dr. Frye, and I'm sure he'll be an asset to us in keeping our boys in line and on the path to redemption. And this is Miss Rebecca Saint John, our
first ever prison director of education, thanks to a generous donation from Uncle Sam. I'm sure she's completely qualified. I understand she's just finished her graduate work at Radcliffe—”

“Harvard,” said this Rebecca Saint John, leaning toward him slightly. She tipped her cigarette ash on the floor and blew the smoke at the ceiling, seemed to grin. It was truly bizarre.

“Harvard,” the warden continued, titillated, it seemed to me. “I know you will all welcome our new additions with respect and professionalism, and I hope you'll show Miss Saint John around in her first few days as she learns our customs here.” He pointed vaguely to the office ladies, me included. It all seemed very strange, such a young, attractive woman appearing out of nowhere, and to do what? Teaching writing and arithmetic seemed like a ridiculous objective. Those Moorehead boys struggled just to walk around, sit down, eat and breathe without beating their heads against the walls. Dr. Morris was there, for all intents and purposes, to drug them into acting right. What could they possibly be taught in their condition? The warden took Miss Saint John's coat from Dr. Morris's arm, handed it to me, and seemed to smile. I could never tell his real feelings toward me, sweater vest or not. His death mask was thick as concrete, I suppose. In any case, it was my job to assign the new woman a locker. So she followed me back to the locker room.

Rebecca Saint John's face that day had no makeup on it that I could detect, and yet she looked impeccable, fresh faced, a natural beauty. Her hair was long and thick, the color of brass, coarse and, I noted gratefully, in need of a hardy brushing. Her skin was sort of golden colored, and her face was round and full
with strong cheekbones, a small rosebud mouth, thin eyebrows and unusually blond eyelashes. Her eyes were an odd shade of blue. There was something manufactured about that color. It was a shade of blue like a swimming pool in an ad for a tropical getaway. It was the color of mouthwash, toothpaste, toilet cleaner. My own eyes, I thought, were like shallow lake water, green, murky, full of slime and sand. Needless to say, I felt completely insulted and horrible about myself in the presence of this beautiful woman. Perhaps I should have honored my resentment and kept my distance, but I couldn't help myself. I wanted to be close to her, to get an intimate view of her features, how she breathed, what her face did when her mind was busy thinking. I hoped to be able to spot her superficial imperfections, or at least find flaws in her character which could cancel out the good marks she got in the looks category. You see how silly I was? I wrote out the combination to her locker on a slip of paper and took a whiff of her when I handed it over. She smelled like baby powder. She wore no ring. I wondered if she had a boyfriend.

“Now let me have you stand here and watch me and let's see if I can figure out this lock,” she said. She had a haughty, precisely articulated accent, the kind of accent you hear in old movies set in the south of France or fancy Manhattan hotels. Continental? I'd never heard anyone in real life talk like that. It seemed absurd in such a place as Moorehead. Imagine the well-mannered tone of a British noblewoman politely bossing around her maid. I stood with my back against a column of lockers as she spun the dial of the combination lock.