Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

Crisscross looked at me silently for a time. Then she said, “Oh, Merritt. Merritt Mason. You did it again. There is absolutely no hope for you; you’re a goner.”

“Did what?”

But I knew what she was going to say.

She said it.

“Saw somebody in need of something and loped right in to fix things. Spied a creature in distress. I know you. ‘Oh, Lord, there’s something over there moving and breathing and looking like it might need help. Let me at it!’ What did you get out of it this time? A chance to go back next week and clean his basement?”

“I got asked out for dinner this weekend and one hell of a goodnight kiss,” I snapped.

“I’m glad about the dinner,” she said. “I hope the kiss was worth all the fussing and nurturing you’re going to do. For that he could at least have screwed you.”

“The kiss was terrific,” I said, reddening. “The other comes next week. I can tell.”

“Thank you, Jesus,” she said, and folded her hands as in prayer, and rolled her wicked brown eyes heavenward. She looked back at me, waiting.

I looked away from her sharp, expectant little fox’s face. I was not a virgin when I met Pom, but I had slept with very few men. I had not even been out with many, and in the Atlanta of that time, with singles’ apartments sprouting like weeds and young men pouring in to catch the city’s soaring comet’s tail, that was downright difficult to accomplish. Every woman I knew dated all the time. It wasn’t that I wasn’t attractive; I am not pretty, but I am tall and thin and wear clothes well, and I know that I have an appealing smile. One of my last boyfriends had told me, “You’re just a tall, skinny drink of water with exploding hair until you smile. Then there’s nobody else in the room.”

It was nice to hear, but it did not make me feel any more comfortable with the young man who said it, and gradually I stopped seeing him. It was what happened to most of my relationships. I had slept with one man at LSU, after a rock concert, where the pot smoke had drifted thick and sweet, and had lived in mute terror of pregnancy and other things until the next month. The next man I slept with, years later, was a rock-climbing, sports car-driving investment banker who told me flatly that there was absolutely nothing attractive about a twenty-eight-year-old virgin. By then I was on the pill, because you never knew when, et cetera, et cetera, but I might as well not have been, because I enjoyed the sex so little that after being shamed into bed by the investment banker I did not do it again, and he stopped calling. I was thirty when I met Pom. For the first time, I wanted, with no reservations, to go to bed with a man. I could hardly wait, in fact. If he did not initiate it on our next date, I was going to. When he had first kissed me my whole body ignited. When we finished it was near meltdown.

It was the first time in my life I had not heard, in my mind, my mother’s bled-out voice saying bitterly, “Go ahead and do it with the first boy that tries it, if you’re ready to die, because doing it will kill you. It will hurt you and hurt you, and then it will kill you.”

My mother died of ovarian cancer when I was thirteen and my sister Laura was three. She was terribly sick for a year before that. I used to pull the covers over my head at night so that I could not hear her crying. She died thinking that she had gotten the cancer from having sexual relations with my father, who, she said, wasn’t satisfied unless he was on her every night. By that time, he had moved into the downstairs guest room and they seldom spoke. Our maid, Felicia, took care of her and my sister during the daytime, and a succession of Felicia’s relatives from the bayou came in and cooked. I took care of mother after school and at night. I didn’t miss much of the progress of the cancer as it chewed its way through her vitals. Later, when I got close enough to someone to want sex, or had necked in the back of a car until it seemed inevitable, I always stopped things abruptly. I knew with the top part of my mind that whatever else I got from the dirty deed, it wasn’t going to be cancer, but the bottom part of it didn’t know that. Whenever a hand touched my bare breast, or found the warm dark between my legs, I heard her voice: It will hurt you and hurt you, and then it will kill you . None of my relationships overrode that voice.

Pom silenced it with one kiss. Or perhaps the sheer need I saw in him overrode it. I knew, somehow, that I would not hear the voice again. I would sleep with him. I would marry him if he asked me. I would make him ask me. I would make such fine love with him that he would ask me; I would make such a good and orderly world for him and his children that he would ask me. I knew just how to do that.

After my mother died I took care of my sister and my father. It pleased him that I wanted to. It pleased me that it pleased him. He was a lawyer, a remote man who lived among paper and dust, or so I thought. Later I would learn that he lived most fully in the company of attractive women; my mother had been right about his sexual appetite. But he was discreet about it, and only remarried after I started college. Perhaps he was remote only to me and my sister; to Laura, especially. I knew she had not been a planned baby because I overheard the hushed, hissing quarrel over my mother’s pregnancy. Laura sensed it, long before Mother died. She cried inconsolably for much of her babyhood, and only I could seem to soothe her. By the time she was walking Mother was past caring for her. The only real approbation I remember seeing in my father’s eyes was when I had ministered particularly well to his second, changeling child.

I soon learned to care for him as well, acting as a grave, correct young hostess for him when he required it, seeing that his house was orderly and polished and quiet at all times. He would compliment me and I would feel my entire face light up, would grin from ear to ear despite myself. He was the first to tell me I had a wonderful smile. It earned him years of comfort. It earned me years of what amounted to servitude to my sister and father and our big house in Baton Rouge. I didn’t mind. I thought that it would keep him with me forever. When he remarried and moved into the perfectly run home of a rich seafaring lady who lived in Pascagoula, I was stunned, lost. But I still took care of Laura, because by that time it was what I knew best, was most comfortable doing. Caring for. Tending. I brought her to live with me in Atlanta when I came here after college to try my wings in advertising, and when I met Pom she was still living with me and attending sporadic classes in theater arts at Georgia State University downtown. Up until that time I could not imagine a world in which I did not care for Laura.

Fragile, lovely, hungry Laura. Edge-dancer, wing-walker, windmill-tilter, limits-pusher. From babyhood she could stand no boundaries, tolerated none. In the airless world of a small Louisiana city, even in the volatile sixties, boundaries swarmed thicker than June bugs. Her entire life was a starved scrabble after two things: freedom and love. Since the two are mutually exclusive, she achieved neither, except minimally, but she never abandoned her hectic quest. Freedom of a sort she might have had if she had been a less difficult child; Felicia was too old to keep up with her, and my father simply did not seem to see her. I was a nurturer, but no real threat as a disciplinarian. She might have soared like a small butterfly in an empty blue sky except that her need for love was visceral and unending and dragged her down out of the air, time after time, to dog the footsteps of those who could not seem to give it to her. Ravenous for love, she pursued it shrieking; repulsed, love fled her.

“Hush up that yellin’, Laura. I ain’t studyin’ you,” Felicia would say over and over. “You looks like a little ol’ baby bird, with yo’ eyes squoze shut and yo’ mouth open a mile wide. Cain’t nobody fill you up. Go on and find yo’ sister and tell her what you want.”