Deek interrupts: “Follette? That’s where your father was?”
“Yes.”
Not like I am ashamed, just this is a fact: Daddy served four years of a nine-year sentence for aggravated assault and was released on parole for good behavior when I was eleven years old. Follette is the men’s maximum-security prison up north at the Canadian border, the facility in the New York State prison system where nobody wants to go.
The guys’ eyes are on me now. The guys are listening, and I continue with the story, which is a true story I have never told any living soul before this evening.
“So I’m hoping that I am not lost, I’m on a kind of woodchip trail and there’s a parking lot nearby and a restroom, I’m thinking that I can use the women’s room, except out of the little building there comes this man zipping up his trousers and he’s seeing me, he’s in these rumpled old clothes and his face is boiled-looking and hair sticking up around his head, older than my daddy, I think, and he’s coming right at me, saying, ‘H’lo, honey, are you alone way out here?’ and I tell him no, my daddy is right close by, so he looks at the parking lot but there’s no cars there, but he says, ‘Well! Too bad, this time’—I think that’s what he said, he might’ve been talking to himself.
“I wasn’t listening and walked away fast. And I waited for him to go away and I thought he did and I went inside the women’s room which was hard to see in, there wasn’t any light and the sun was about setting, and I’m inside one of the toilet stalls, and there’s a scratching noise, and this guy—it must be this guy—has followed me into the women’s room! Where a man is not ever supposed to be! He’s poking a tree branch beneath the stall door, to scare me, saying, ‘Li’l girl, d’you need help? Need help in there? Wiping your li’l bottom? I can wipe, and I can lick. I’m real good at that.’ I’m so scared I am crying. I tell the man Go away please go away and leave me alone, my daddy is waiting for me, and he’s laughing, telling me the kinds of things he was going to do to me, things he’d done to girls that the girls had ‘liked real well’ and nobody would know, not even my daddy. But there was a car pulling up outside, and a woman comes into the restroom with a little girl, so the man runs out, and when I come outside he’s gone, or anyway I think he’s gone. The woman says to me, ‘Was that man bothering you? D’you want a ride with me?’ and I said no, I was going back to my daddy’s car and would wait for him there. Why I told the woman this, I don’t know. I thought that the man was gone. I headed back to the tavern the way I’d been coming. Now the sun is setting, it’s getting dark. I’m walking fast, and I’m running, and there’s the man with the boiled-looking face, almost I don’t see him squatting by the path, he’s got a rope in his hands, a rope maybe two feet long stretched between his hands he’s holding up for me to see, so I panic and run the other way, back to the parking lot, and the man calls after me, ‘Li’l girl! Don’t be afraid, li’l girl, your daddy sent me for you!’ Things like that he was saying. I found a place to hide by some picnic tables, and for a long time, maybe twenty minutes, the man is looking for me, calling, ‘Li’l girl!’ He knows that I am there somewhere, but it’s getting dark, and then there’s headlights, a car is bumping up a lane into the parking lot, and I can’t believe it, it’s my daddy. Just taking a chance he’d find me, Daddy would say afterward, that I’d be on this side of the lake—he’d asked people if they had seen me and somebody had and he’d come to the right place, at just the right time. He caught sight of the man with the boiled face. I told Daddy how he’d been following me and saying things to me, wanting to tie me up with a rope, and Daddy runs after him and catches him. The man is limping and can’t hardly run at all, and Daddy starts hitting him with his fists, not even saying anything but real quiet—Daddy does things real quiet. It’s the man who is crying out, begging for Daddy to stop, but Daddy can’t stop, Daddy won’t stop until it’s over . . . Daddy says when a man uses his fists it’s self-defense. Fists or feet, nobody can dispute ‘self-defense.’ Use a deadly weapon, like a tire iron—like Daddy used fighting another man in Strykersville, which got him arrested and sent to Follette—and you’re in serious trouble, but just your fists and your feet, no. What Daddy did to that man who’d wanted to tie me up and hurt me, I didn’t see. I did not see. I heard it, or some of it. But I did not see. And afterward Daddy dragged him to a ravine, where there’d be water at some times of the year but was dry now, and pushed him over, and I did not see that either. And Daddy comes back to me excited and breathing hard and his knuckles are skinned and bleeding but Daddy doesn’t hardly notice. He grabs me and hugs me and kisses me. Daddy is so happy that I am safe. ‘You never saw a thing, honey. Did you?’ And I told Daddy no, I did not, and that was the truth.”
Listening to my story, the guys have gotten quiet. Even Deek is sitting very still, listening to me. The look on his face, like he’s waiting to laugh at me, bare his glistening teeth at me in a mock-grin, is gone. Fresh-opened cans of Black Horse Ale on the table the guys have not been drinking. Must be they are waiting for me to continue. But my story is over.
Hadn’t known how it would end. Because I had not told it before. Even to myself, though it is a true story. I wouldn’t have known that I had the words for it. But you always have words for a true story, I think.
I am not going to tell Deek, Jax, Croke, Heins how there was never any article in any newspaper that I saw about the man with the boiled-looking face if he’d been found in Java State Park in that ravine. What was left of that man, if anything was left. Or maybe he’d gotten all right again, next morning crawled out of the ravine and limped away. That is a possibility. I didn’t see, and Daddy never spoke of it afterward. Daddy drove us back to Strykersville that night. It was past midnight when we got home, and Momma was waiting up watching TV, and if she’d meant to be angry with Daddy for keeping me out so late, by the time we got to the house she was feeling different, and kissed us both, saw that I was looking feverish and said, Annislee, go to bed right now, it’s hours past your bedtime. That night Daddy stayed with Momma.
Off and on then Daddy stayed with us. Then that fall something happened between him and Momma, so Daddy moved out; that’s when he began working at the stone quarry at Sparta. But Sparta is only about fifty miles from Strykersville, and Daddy and Momma are still married, I think. Till death do us part Daddy believes in, and in her heart Momma does too.
I’m smiling at these guys crowded at the battered old table in Deek’s uncle’s cottage, so close I can see their eyes, and the irises of their eyes, and as far into their souls as I need to see. Saying, “I feel lucky—I’d like to try poker again, a few hands. I think I’m catching on now.”
Smother
Only a doll, Alva! Like you.
That’s what they told her. Their voices were a single voice.
She was very young then. It had to be 1974, because she was in second grade at Buhr Elementary School, which was the faded red-brick building set back from the busy street; she has forgotten the name of the street and much of her life at that time but she remembers the school, she remembers a teacher who was kind to her, she remembers Rock Basin Park where the child was smothered.
This was in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania. A long time ago.
Now it begins: this season of the year.
Early warm spring. Why?
Can’t sleep. Can’t concentrate. Questions put to her, can’t hear. Can’t seem to walk more than a few feet without swaying. Fear of losing her balance in some public place, falling. Strangers’ hands on her.
It’s worse this year. Must be airborne pollen, can’t breathe.
Can’t breathe. Smother!
• • •
Is it a buried child she remembers? Or only a smothered child?
Is it a child? Or a baby?
Only a doll, Alva. You can see.
Is it a girl? Or . . .
She’s desperate, ridiculous. Praying, Dear God, don’t let it be a girl.
She is an adult now. She is not a
child. Somehow she has become thirty-seven years old.
An orphan! Thirty-seven years.
Can’t sleep. Can’t breathe. Hurriedly dresses, leaves for the arts college. On the bus her head rattles. A man is peering at her from behind a raised newspaper, eyes she feels crawling on her, disrobing her, poking fingers, prying open. Cut is a nasty word she first heard at the faded red-brick school long ago. No idea what it meant. No idea why the older boys laughed. No idea why she ran away to hide her face. No idea why her teacher spoke so carefully to her: Alva, have you been hurt? Alva, have you been touched? Holding out her left arm, where the purplish yellow bruise had blossomed in the night.
Alva pulls the cord. Next stop! Can’t breathe in the crowded bus. Eyes crawling over her like lice. She has disguised herself in swaths of muslin, like a nun, like a Muslim woman, wrappings of saffron material, mist-colored, soiled white. And her waist-long hair that needs washing, spilling from a makeshift velvet cowl.
Alva’s long narrow bony feet. In need of washing.
Venus de Milo, it’s been said of Alva, unclothed.
Botticelli Venus, in a voice of (male) marveling.
Tells herself she is twelve hundred miles from Rock Basin Park. She is thirty-seven years old, not seven.
Thirty-seven, Alva? You must be joking.
Alva doesn’t joke. Taking cues from others, Alva is able to laugh on cue—a high-pitched, little-girl, startled sound like glass breaking—but she doesn’t understand the logic of jokes.
Alva sometimes laughs if (somehow) she’s tickled. Breasts and abdomen palpitated by an examining gynecologist at the free clinic, echo exam where the technician moves a device around and around, and pushes against, the thinly flesh-cushioned bone protecting the heart.
Yet why is it you can’t tickle yourself? Alva wonders.
Sometimes even in mirrors nobody’s there.
Can’t be more than, what—twenty-five?
Alva won’t contest the point. Alva doesn’t lie, but if people, predominately men, wish to believe that she’s younger than her age, as young as she appears, Alva won’t protest.
The transparent tape they’d wrapped around her head, over her face, to smother her, to shut her mouth and eyes, shut her terrified screams inside, Alva hadn’t protested. Too exhausted, when finally the tape was torn off.
Tearing off eyelashes, much of her eyebrows, clumps of hair.
Hadn’t protested. Never told. Who to tell?
Alva has learned: to modulate her voice like wind chimes, to smell like scented candles, to shake her long streaked-blond hair like a knotted waterfall past her slender shoulders. Her smile is shyly trusting. Her eyes are warm melting caramel. Men have fallen in love with that smile. Men have fallen in love with those eyes. The exotic layers of cloth Alva wraps herself in, gauze, see-through, thin muslins, sometimes sprinkled with gold dust. An unexpected glimpse of Alva’s bare flesh (is she naked, beneath?) inside the swaths of fabric, midriff, inside of a forearm, creamy translucent breast.
Men follow Alva. Alva knows to hide.
Smother! A man’s gritty palm closing over her mouth, clamping tight to keep her from screaming.
Momma! Make him stop! Don’t let—
The scream had to be swallowed. There was no choice.
Almost she can see the man’s face.
A perspiring face, red-flushed face, furious eyes.
Never tell! What we did to her, we’ll do to you.
For a long time she forgot. Now she’s remembering. Why?
She’s twelve hundred miles from Rock Basin Park and Upper Darby, Pennsylvania. Has not returned in many years. Maybe the man who claimed to be her father has died. Maybe it’s her mother who continues to send checks, whose signature Alva avoids looking at.
Guilt money, this is. But Alva needs money.
Lately she can think of nothing else except Only a doll, Alva. Like you. Can’t sleep, can’t breathe. These terrible days of early warm spring when everyone else walks in the sunshine, coatless and smiling. Airborne pollen, maple seeds madly swirling in the wind, a rich stupefying scent of lilac.
Lilac! In Rock Basin Park. Where she ran. Where she hid. Maybe he’d crushed her face in it: lilac. If not Alva’s face, the other girl’s.
Alva has never had a child. Alva has never been pregnant.
Men have tried to make Alva pregnant. Many times.
Children frighten Alva; she looks quickly away from them. If by accident she glances into a stroller, a baby buggy, a crib, quickly she turns her gaze aside.
It’s just a doll, Alva. Like you.
Amnesia is a desert of fine white sun-glaring sand to the horizon. Amnesia isn’t oblivion. Amnesia isn’t memory loss caused by brain injury or neurological deterioration, in which actual brain cells have died. Amnesia is almost-remembering. Amnesia is the torment of almost-remembering. Amnesia is the dream from which you have only just awakened, hovering out of reach below the surface of bright rippling water.
Amnesia is the paralyzed limb into which one day, one hour, feeling may begin suddenly to flow.
This Alva fears. Amnesia has been peace, bliss. Waking will be pain.
Alva, dear, is something wrong? Alva, tell me, please?
. . . know you can trust me, Alva. Don’t you?
Alva is childlike and trusting, but in fact Alva is not childlike and not trusting. Alva certainly isn’t one to tell. Not any man, of the many who’ve befriended her.
Teachers. Social workers. Psychologists. Therapists. Older men eager to help Alva, who so mysteriously seems unable to help herself. Some secret in your life, Alva? That has held you back, kept you from fulfilling your promise?
This is true. This is true! Alva knows. Long ago she was a promising young dancer. She has been promising as a student, a singer, an actress. Promising as a spiritual being, and promising as an artist/sculptor/jeweler. Alva’s most ambitious project was stringing together glass beads—hundreds, thousands of beads!— into exotic “Indian” necklaces and bracelets sold at a crafts fair in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Alva has received payment for intermittent work in Christian campus groups, in feminist centers, Buddhist centers, organic food co-ops, neighborhood medical clinics. She has worked in photo shops, frame shops. She has passed out fliers on street corners. She has worked in cafeterias. She has waitressed. She has been a model.
Alva never accepts money. On principle.
Alva will accept money sometimes. Only if necessary.
If desperate, Alva will accept meals, winter clothing, places to stay. (Alva never stays in one place for long. Alva slips away without saying goodbye.)
Like exotic glass beads, Alva’s life. But there is no one to string the glass beads together.
Men who’ve loved Alva have asked, What is it—a curse, a jinx, something in your childhood? Who are your parents? Where are you from? Are you close to your mother, your father . . . ?
Alva is mute. Alva’s head is wrapped in transparent tape. Alva’s screams are shut up inside.
Alva removes the envelope from the post office box. Opens it, tosses aside the accompanying letter, keeps only the check made out to Alva Lucille Ulrich. Guilt money, this is. But Alva needs money.
Alva needs her medications. Alva has qualified for public health assistance, but still Alva must pay a minimal fee, usually ten dollars, for her meds.
Alva takes only prescription drugs. Alva has been clean for years.
You saw nothing. You are a very bad little girl.
Hiding in plain view. Nude model. The girl who’d been morbidly shy in school. Calmly removing her layers of exotic fabric, kicking off her sandals, slipping into a plain cotton robe to enter the life studies room. Taking her place at the center of staring strangers, at whom she never looks.
The instructor, usually male. Staring at Alva too. At whom Alva never looks.
Venus de Milo, it’s been remarked of Alva. Botticelli Venus. Alva scarcely hears what is said of her at such times, for it isn’t said of her bu
t of her body.
Alva prefers large urban university campuses. Alva prefers academic art departments, not freelance artists or photographers.
Alva is an artist’s model. Alva is not available for porn—“erotic art.” Alva is not sexual.
Saw nothing. Bad girl.
It’s early May. It’s a sprawling university campus close by the Mississippi River. Far from Rock Basin Park. Far from Upper Darby, Pennsylvania.
Early May, too warm. Even Alva, naked, is warm. Students have shoved windows up as high as they can in the third-floor room in the old building on University Avenue. Alva has been sleepless; Alva has had difficulty breathing. Alva is uneasy; these windows open to the sky. There are noises from the busy street outside, but still there is airborne pollen, swirling maple seeds, a smell of lilac from somewhere on campus.
Smother!
Alva shudders. Alva stares into a corner of the ceiling. Alva holds herself so very still seated on the swath of velvet draped over a chair, Alva doesn’t appear to be breathing.
The child! In a soiled pink eyelet nightgown smelling of her panicked body. Eyes open and staring, sightless. Where the hand has clamped there is the reddened impress of fingers in the ivory skin. A bubble of saliva tinged with blood glistens at the small bruised mouth. They are wrapping her in the blanket that had been Alva’s. They are wrapping her tight so that if she comes awake, if she comes alive again, she won’t be able to kick and struggle. At dusk they will drive to Rock Basin Park, they will abandon her in a desolate place where there are no footpaths and lilac is growing wild.