Patience

As soon as my eyes open I know I am in David’s trailer. I have never been here, but I know. There is a smell, mildew and canned salmon, and the walls are covered with sun-bleached fake wood paneling.

“David,” I say, but my voice hurts me. My vocal cords feel sticky, like they’re glued to the back of my throat. I cough and it tires me, makes my head throb. As I turn my face down into the gummy carpet, I see David’s feet in front of me, and then he is squatting, but I can’t do anything except fall back to sleep.

Then I am awake, face-down, and my brain must be exploding out of the hole in the back of my head and David is straining and grunting behind me, clawing into my breasts and back. I can feel my flesh giving in, giving way. I look back where David has me hauled upward by my hips and there is blood, running down my thighs and making twin circles on the carpet beneath my knees. I am obviously not a virgin, so I am surprised in a distracted way.

When David is finished he withdraws, but still holds my hips up in the air. He leans back and catches hold of the Budweiser bottle on the end table behind him. He takes a deep pull, brings the bottle down with a crack on the corner of the table, and then he is holding the splintered neck. He is pushing my thighs further apart and I close my eyes again and my brain floats out of my head.

***********

David and I are in our bathing suits on the beach in Florida, and he is dark except on the undersides of his arms and where his shorts go. He is cupping my face with one hand and smiling, and in his other hand is the sand-smoothed cockle shell with the winking diamond ring inside. I am in his arms and I can taste the fine salt grit on his shoulder because my mouth is opened up with happy sobs.

Then JoAnne is born. When we come home from Baptist Hospital I am cradling JoAnne and David is running ahead like an eager dog, propping open the front door and pushing the big potted palms out of the hallway so I don’t trip. He pulls the rocking chair closer to the bay window and sits me down in it like am an old woman, puts the baby’s new blanket over my shoulder and comes up close to my face, trying to look at my eyes, but I keep them on JoAnne. “It’s all better now,” he says. “It’s different with a baby.”

**********

I open my eyes and he has loaded me in the car. I am heaped in the backseat like a pile of salt. I am lying on a sheet of plastic, and my skin is sticking and pulling, making little popping sounds on the plastic as my breath goes in and out. We are moving, but not very fast. I watch the leaves of the trees go by. I cannot tell our direction and don’t know if it matters.

**********

When JoAnne was nine, we moved back to the town where I grew up because David figured if I hadn’t told by then I wouldn’t tell, and the GE plant was hiring for more pay than he was making. I hadn’t told, not even JoAnne, not even my mother, and he was very careful to mark only where my blouse and skirt could cover. He was also very careful with JoAnne, although I once saw him raise up his hand when she dropped his beer unloading the groceries from the trunk. JoAnne stood there, sorry but not scared, and I lurched toward her just a little before I realized what I was doing, but David’s hand went down by itself and JoAnne swept up the glass and took the mop to the liquid and that was all there was. So it wasn’t any use telling her, just a child, and my mother would have told me to not be so stubborn and David wouldn’t have to be that way with me. She would have told me to raise the child and keep the house and do it with peace in my soul, which I tried to do, but I wasn’t Godly enough, or patient.

One Sunday at church while David stood passing the basket up and down the pews and we were singing “In the Garden,” Mother leaned over with her eyes all wet and whispered, “That man is the salt of the earth, the salt of the earth,” and my hand clenched and tangled in the shining blonde of JoAnne’s hair. She flinched and pulled away, whining “Mama!” She turned toward the aisle with her hymnal and sang in her sweet, lonely voice. David smiled blankly at us and swayed to the music, passing the basket up, and back, and up, and back, zig zagging through the congregation.

**********

When JoAnne was thirteen I took her, two suitcases, and Grandmother’s crystal lamp and we left. David spent a lot of time crying at Mother’s house but I stood my ground and told her it just didn’t work out, I just couldn’t love him. “You’re an ungrateful woman,” she said. “That man is the salt of the earth.” A few weeks later, when it became clear to him that we weren’t coming home, he sold our ranch house in town and moved into the trailer by the lake. He never called, never asked for JoAnne, but I didn’t tell her that because I didn’t want her to think he didn’t love her. Because he did. So I told her she wasn’t allowed to see him, which may or may not have been true, but I never had to make that decision and I was glad for it.

**********

I wasn’t surprised when David showed up at the office this morning, although I think I should have been, considering I hadn’t seen him in almost two years, except for twice at the grocery store and once when he sat beside me at a red light. He had sat looking directly at me but his face made no sign that he knew it was me, and when the light turned green he straightened up and drove away. I pulled into the Kangaroo station and sat there holding the wheel and listening to my breath until it became even again. But this morning he came and put his hands on my desk and leaned down and said, “I want to talk to JoAnne.” The way I saw it was it was probably okay because it had been two years and he hadn’t tried to pull a thing, not one single thing. Time had put some distance into my memory. “The girl ought to have a father,” he said, and this sounded right to me because it seems like everyone ought to have a father. I leaned over the cubicle wall and told Angela I was taking an early lunch, and like a fool I got into his Buick. He had smiled at me.

This is the difference between a man and a woman: a woman can leave you, turn around for a last look, shrug, and keep on going. She can put you out of her mind as quick as she can put you in. A man can leave, but he takes five last looks, or six, and he can’t shrug. He can be patient, and he can act like you don’t get to him, but he can’t shrug you off.

**********

When the car stops and the back door opens, I am looking at the front of my daughter’s high school. It is silent out except for the chattering of a flock of blackbirds. At this time of day, all the students and teachers are inside, bound by the timing of the bell. David’s face hovers upside down over mine. “Open your mouth,” he says, but I keep it closed. “Open,” he repeats, and I open because I can’t think of what else to do. He has the meat shears from the knife set my Aunt Elain gave us on our wedding day. “Say ‘ahhh,'” he says, mocking, but my voice hurts, and he sticks the shears in. “This is for you,” he says as the shears snap closed in my throat, “and only a little bit for JoAnne.”

Then my mouth is filling up with blood, salty and quick, and I open my mouth and blood floods onto the sidewalk of the school where David has dragged me and the car door slams and he is gone. A rust-haired boy comes around the corner from the direction of town. His books are on his back and he is carrying one of those plastic bags the dentist gives out with a free toothbrush and some floss and the card with your next appointment written on it. When he sees me he drops the bag and vomits silently into the gardenias. My mouth is still open to keep me from filling up with blood. The blood creeps across the sidewalk. “Help me,” I try to say, “thank you,” but nothing catches hold. He is inside and the birds are chuckling in the bradford pear. Mrs. McGehee, the graying secretary, is flying from the building and then the ambulance comes and JoAnne is standing with two other girls, watching. Her face is white and the girls are looking at her, reaching out and talking, but she doesn’t touch them or say anything. She moves away and climbs into the ambulance and sits beside me, chewing on the end of her braid. She watches me but she doesn’t ask any questions.

**********

In the hospital the machines hum and click. David holds JoAnne on his lap in the chair, rocking, although she’s almost grown. “I’m so glad you’re here,” she says, leaning her head into his chest. She looks like she wants to suck her thumb and I need to remind her about the evil I forgot. David’s hand rests on the part of her hair. He smiles a little half-smile and his eyes drift shut. I keep my eyes on the rise and fall of the white sheet across my chest.