Expensive People Page 20

  “What are you doing?” he says. He squats down on the bank. He puts the fishing pole and the bag behind him. He looks like a dog waiting for his dish; he knows he can't come until it's ready. I could throw a stone at him, and he could reach out and catch it with a laugh.

  “Can I come look?” he says.

  He gets up slowly. His legs are long and he walks like he isn't used to walking. He comes right out to where I am and looks at what I have: a little dam made with stones between my rock and another rock. The water is running slowly through it. Nothing can stop that water. There is scum on it, greasy spots, and I touch them with my finger even though I hate them.

  “I got two crabs in here,” I tell the man.

  I can hear him breathing when he bends down to look. A smell of licorice by him—and this makes me know I should run away. Men smell like smoke or something. They smell like beer, or the outside, or sweat. He is different from them.

  “A crab would like to bite a nice little girl like you,” he says. Right in the middle of talking he makes a swallowing sound. I keep playing in the water just like I was alone. I seem to see my mother coming out on the porch, frowning and making that sharp line like a cut between her eyebrows. She looks down and sees my doll on the steps, by itself. If she would come down to get me I would be all right. But she won't. She will just go back in the house and forget about me.

  Now the colored man squats beside me. He is still taller than I am. I am sitting with my feet in the water, and it makes me think of how the water might stop me, pulling at my feet, if I wanted to run. The water is quiet. If an airplane would fly past we could look up at it, but nothing happens. After a while the man starts to talk to me.

  He says I have mud on me. Yes, this is right. It is like in a dream; maybe he put the mud on me somehow when I wasn't watching. I'm afraid to look at him, but his voice is soft and nice. He talks about little boys and little girls. I know he is not a daddy from the way he talks.

  “Your hair is real nice,” he says.

  As soon as he touches me I am not afraid. He takes something out of my hair and shows me—a dried-up leaf. We both laugh.

  He is bending toward me. His eyes are funny. The eyelid is sleepy and would push down to close the eyes, except the eyeball bulges too much. It can't see enough. We are so close together that I can see tiny little threads of blood in his eyes. He smells nice. Dark skin like that is funny to me, I never saw it so close. I would like to touch it but I don't dare. The man's mouth keeps moving. Sometimes it is a smile, then it gets bigger, then it changes back to nothing. It is as if he doesn't know what it's doing. His teeth are yellowish. The top ones are big, and when he smiles I can see his gums—a bright pink color, like a dog's. When he breathes his nostrils get small and then larger. I can almost see the warm air coming out of him, mixed with the smell of licorice and the dark smell of his skin.

  He touches my shoulders and arms. He is saying something. He talks about my father and says he knows him, and he would like to be my father too. But he is not like any of the fathers because he talks in a whisper and nobody does that. He would not hit me or get mad. His eyelids come down over his big eyes and he must see me like you see something in a fog. His neck has a cord in it or something that moves; my grandmother has that too. It is the only ugly thing about him.

  Now he is washing me. His breath is fast and warm against my skin. “They'll spank you if you're not clean. You got to be clean. All clean,” he says. When he pulls my shirt off over my head the collar gets stuck by my nose and hurts me, but I know it is too late to run away. The water keeps coming and making a noise. “Now this. Hold on here,” he says, with his voice muffled as if it was pushed in a pillow, and he pulls my shorts down and takes them off.

  I can't stop shivering now. He stares at me. His hand is big and dark by my arm. I say I want to go home, and my voice is a surprise, because it is ready to cry. “Now you just be nice,” he says. He moves his hand on my back so that I am pressed up by him. I wait for something to hurt me but nothing hurts me. He would never hurt me like they would. His breath is fast and he could be drowning, and then he pushes me back a little. “Why don't you walk in the water a little?”

  His forehead is wrinkled, and in the wrinkles there are drops of sweat that won't run down. I wouldn't want to touch his hair. He stares at me while I wade in the water. Everywhere he touched me I feel strange, and where he looks at me I feel strange. I know how he is watching. I can feel how he likes me. He would never hurt me. Something that makes me want to laugh comes up into my throat and almost scares me.

  The sun is hot and makes me tired.

  He takes my clothes and dresses me on the bank. He is very quiet. He drops my shirt and picks it up again, right away. Then with his long forefinger he rubs my arm down to the wrist, as if he doesn't understand what it is. His hands are real funny inside—a pink color, not like the rest of him. His fingernails are light too but ridged with dirt.

  “Don't leave yet,” he says. “Please. Sit and eat this with me.”

  When we eat the licorice he seems to forget about it, even when it's in his mouth. He forgets to chew it. I can see something coming into his eyes that makes him forget about me; he is listening to something.

  We have a secret together that I won't ever tell.

  When I come home Mommy is still in the kitchen. But everything looks different. It is the same but different. The air is wet. The way Mommy looks at me when I come in is different. She is smoking a cigarette.

  “For Christ's sake, look at your shoes!”

  She might be going to hit me, and I jerk back. But she just bends down and starts to unlace my shoe. “Just lucky for you these are the old ones,” she says. The top of her head is damp. I can see her white scalp in places right through her hair. “Come on, put your foot up,” she says, tugging at my shoe.

  When the shoes are off she straightens up, and her face shows that she feels something hurt her.

  “What the hell is that?” she says.

  My heart starts to pound. “What?”

  “On your teeth.”

  She stares at me. I can see the little lines on her face that will get to be like Grandma's.

  “I said what is that? What have you been eating?”

  I try to pull away from her. “Nothing.”

  “What have you been eating? Licorice? Who gave it to you?”

  Her face gets hard. She leans down to me and sniffs, like a cat. I think of how I hate her because she can know every secret.

  “Who gave it to you?”

  “Nobody.”

  “I said who gave it to you!”

  She slaps me. Her hand moves so fast both of us are afraid of it. She makes me cry.

  “Who gave it to you? Who was it? Was it somebody down at the creek?”

  “A man … a man had it—”

  “What man?”

  “A man down there.”

  “A fisherman?”

  “Yes.”

  Her head is moving a little, rocking back and forth as if her heart began to pound too hard. “Why did he give it to you? Were you alone?”

  “He liked me.”

  “Why did he give it to you?”

  Her eyes are like the cat's eyes. They are too big for her face. What I see in them is terrible.

  “Did he … did he do anything to you?” she says. Her voice is getting higher. “What did he do? What did he do?”

  “Nothing.”

  She pulls me in from the door, like she doesn't know what she is doing. “God,” she says. She doesn't know I can hear it. “My God. My God.”

  I try to push against her legs. I would like to run back out the door and away from her and back down to the creek.

  “What did he do?” she says.

  I am crying now. “Nothing. I like him. I like him better than you!”

  She pulls me to the kitchen chair and knocks me against it, as if she was trying to make me sit on it but forgot how. The chair hurts my back
. “Tell me what he did!” she screams.

  She knocks me against the chair again. She is trying to hurt me, to kill me. Her face is terrible. It is somebody else's. She is like somebody from the city come to get me. It seems to me that the colored man is hiding behind me, afraid of her eyes and her screaming, that awful voice I never heard before. She is trying to get both of us.

  “What did he do? Oh, my God, my God!” Her words all run together. She is touching me everywhere, my arms, my legs. Her fingers want to pinch me but she won't let them. “He took your clothes off, didn't he?” she says. “He took them off. He took them off—this is on backwards, this is …”

  She begins to scream. Her arms swing around and one of the jars is knocked off the table and breaks on the floor. I try to get away from her.

  I kick her leg. She is going to kill me, her face is red and everything is different, her voice is going higher and higher and nothing can stop it. I know from the way her eyes stare at me that something terrible happened and that everything is changed.

  III

  I am six years old. Down at the creek, I am trying to sit on a rock but my feet keep sliding off. Am I too big for the rock now? How big am I? Am I six years old or some other age? My toes curl inside my shoes but I can't take hold of the rock.

  The colored man leans toward me and touches my hair. “I'm going to be your new daddy,” he says.

  The colored man leans toward me and touches my shoulders. His hand is warm and heavy.

  The colored man leans toward me and puts his big hand around the back of my neck. He touches me with his mouth, and then I can feel his teeth and his tongue all soft and wet on my shoulder. “I love you,” he says. The words come back inside my head over and over, so that I am saying that to him: “I love you.”

  Then I am in the water and it touches me everywhere. I start to scream. My mouth tries to make noises but I can't hear them until somebody saves me.

  “Honey, wake up. Wake up!”

  My mother is by the bed. She pulls me awake.

  “What's wrong, Honey?” she says. “What did you dream about?”

  In the light from the lamp her face is lined and not pretty.

  I can hear myself crying. My throat is sore. When I see her face it makes me cry harder. What if they all come in behind her, all those people again, to look at me? The doctor had something cold that touched me. I hated them all. I wanted them to die.

  But only my father comes in. He stumbles against the bureau. “Another one of them dreams, huh?” he says in a voice like the doctor's. He is walking fast but then he slows down. The first night he was in here before my mother, to help me.

  My mother presses me against her. Her hands rub my back and remind me of something … the creek again, and the dead dry smell and the rush of terror like ice that came up in me, from way down in my stomach. Now it comes again and I can't stop crying.

  “Hey, little girl, come on now,” my father says. He bends over me with his two hands on his thighs, frowning. He stares at me and then at my mother. He is wondering who we are.

  “We better drive her back to the doctor tomorrow,” he says.

  “Leave her alone, she's all right,” my mother says.

  “What the hell do you know about it?”

  “She wasn't hurt, it's all in her head. It's in her head,” my mother says sharply. She leans back and looks at me as if she is trying to look inside my head. “I can take care of her.”

  “Look, I can't take this much longer. It's been a year now—”

  “It has not been a year!” my mother says.

  My crying runs down. It always stops. Then they go out and I hear them walk in the kitchen. Alone in bed, I lie with my legs stiff and my arms stiff; something bad will happen if I move. I have to stay just the way I am when they snap off my light, or something will happen to me. I have to stay like this until morning.

  They are out in the kitchen. At first they talk too low for me to hear, then louder. If they argue it will get louder. One night they talked about the nigger and I could hear them. Tommy could hear them too; I know he was awake. The nigger was caught and a state trooper that Daddy knows real well kicked him in the face—he was kicked in the face. I can't remember that face now. Yes, I can remember it. I can remember some face. He did something terrible, and what was terrible came onto me, like black tar you can't wash off, and they are sitting out there talking about it. They are trying to remember what that nigger did to me. They weren't there and so they can't remember it. They will sit there until morning and then I will smell coffee. They are talking about what to do, what to do with me, and they keep trying to remember what that nigger did to me.

  My mother's voice lifts sleepily. “Oh, you bastard!” she says. Something made of glass touches something else of glass.

  The rooster out back has been crowing for hours.

  “Look,” says my father, and then his voice drops and I can't hear it. I lie still with my legs and arms stiff like they were made of ice or stone, trying to hear him. I can never hear him.

  “… time is it?” says my mother.

  The room is starting to get light and so I know everything is safe again.

  15

  The first time I read “The Molesters” I had to leave the library at once. I felt uncanny. The air seemed to be rocking about me. I hurried through the shopping area of Cedar Grove as if under a spell, and for a while I stood at the corner near the Montclair Hat Shoppe and waited in terror for something to happen.

  Nothing happened.

  The story seemed to me very confusing but “artistic.” Was it confusing because it was artistic, or artistic because it was confusing? I have since then stolen that copy of The Quarterly Review of Literature from the library, and to my shame be it said that I stole other copies of the issue from other libraries, I don't know why. I have seventeen copies here in my miserable room. They are all precisely the same.

  The story takes time to figure out, but finally you see that:

  There is only one man by the creek, only one man, and he happens to be a Negro. A Negro molester. (But rather gentle for a molester, I think. Is this Nada's sentimentalism?)

  The title refers to more than one molester; hence we see that all the adults are “molesters”; they molest and are adults; they go about their business of adulthood, which consists partly (it would be selfish to say wholly) of molesting.

  The child, who is much like myself, is telling the story to herself in various stages, unable to allow herself the full memory at first. It is too terrible. She gradually works up to it, is finally flooded by it and annihilated, so that the story ends upon an act of molestation. Clever Natashya Romanov, the author, who becomes herself one of the poking, prying molesters!

  In symbolic terms: the child is myself, Richard Everett. Nada wrote the story to exorcise the guilt she rightly felt for abandoning me so often.

  Nada, in three forms, as three adults, recognizes herself as my molester and acknowledges her guilt.

  Have I seen something forbidden? Have I made an error?

  About me on that fateful Cedar Grove day traffic moved on, traffic lights changed and changed again, people moved by, idle and ambling and attractive. I reached out to touch the brick of a building and the brick was rough, yes, and the sensation sped through my fingertips and into the depths of my body, assuring me of one thing: I was alive.

  Molesters are all about us.

  What can I do to be saved?

  If the child-hero of the story cannot understand what has happened to her, how are the rest of us to know? I include you, my readers. How will we know what mad acts were performed upon us, what open-heart surgery, what stealthy home brain surgery? Can we trust our well-meaning memories, our feeble good natures, which want to remember only the best about our parents, which brush aside ugly thoughts?

  … Is this an ordinary disintegration, a routine textbook case, or is there something woeful and transcendent about it? Imagine Hamlet stunted at el
even years of age—do I claim too much for myself? Am I classic or trivial? Am I archetypical or stereotypical? Is all suffering too familiar?

  Think of the power of words, my readers! Everything depends upon the style, the tone, the exact gesture, the divine play of words. Those anemic written signs Nada played with, having the power to raise up in me a seizure of trembling of the sort I hadn't had since the Johns Behemoth orgy in the Record Room—what a secret is behind them! There are some of us, sick people and madmen, who should not be shown symbolic matter. Pictures, designs, words, are too much for us. We fall into them and never hit the bottom; it's like falling and falling into one of your own dreams. We make too much of things, we sick people and madmen. Words mean too much to us. You think only food excites me, my readers? You think all the food I devour (those disgusting bones over in the corner, those heaps of emptied tin cans!) means anything to me? Not at all, not at all—bulk to induce sleep and peace, nothing more. I am going to eat my way out of this life, like Nada's noble kinsman. Food means nothing but words mean everything! You see how I have become my mother's son.

  Without her writing she would have been just Nada in the kitchen, Nada in her bathrobe upstairs, Nada on the telephone, Nada here, there, hugging me, turning vaguely from me—just that dark-haired lovely woman with the slightly knobby knees and wrists who, when she was in a hurry, walked along in a girlish, bobbing way with one hand bent sharply at the wrist as if to show that awkward little wrist bone. Yes, I would have loved her the way I loved Father, though probably more than I loved Father, but when I could read what she had written, creep and crawl and snuggle inside her brain, I began to see that the Nada who lived with us was just another visitor in our house, not as real or as colorful as Mrs. Hofstadter. That Nada was pretending. Wasn't she always saying to Father, “I admire you, I don't understand you so I admire you,” and wasn't she always growing vague, remote, her gaze drifting away to the ceiling, and who was this Sheer? What could he give her that we couldn't? No, the woman I called “Nada” (that stupid name, she was right) was just a liar. She cheated all the time.