Plainsong (Plainsong #1)(3)

Victoria Roubideaux.

Even before she was awake she felt it rising in her chest and throat. Then she rose rapidly from bed in the white underpants and the outsized tee-shirt she wore at night and rushed into the bathroom where she crouched on the tile floor, holding her streaming hair away from her face and mouth with one hand and gripping the rim of the bowl with the other while she retched and gagged. Her body was wracked by spasms. Afterward a spit-string swung from her lip, stretched, elongated, then broke off. She felt weak and empty. Her throat burned, her chest hurt. Her brown face was unnaturally pale now, sallow and hollow beneath the high cheekbones. Her dark eyes looked larger and darker than ordinary, and on her forehead was a fine film of clammy sweat. She stayed kneeling, waiting for the gagging and paroxysms to pass.

A woman appeared in the doorway. She at once flipped the light on, filling the room with harsh yellow light. What’s all this? Victoria, what’s the matter with you?

Nothing, Mama.

Something is. You think I don’t hear you in here?

Go back to bed, Mama.

Don’t lie to me. You’ve been drinking, haven’t you.

No.

Don’t lie to me.

I’m not.

What is it then?

The girl rose from the floor. They looked at each other. The woman was thin, in her late forties, haggard of face, washed-out, still tired though she’d just risen from sleep, wearing a stained blue satin robe she clutched together over her sagging chest. Her hair had been dyed, but not recently; her hair was maroon, like no human natural color anywhere, the white roots showing at the temples and above her forehead.

The girl moved to the sink and ran water onto a washcloth and held the cloth to her face. The water dripped into the front of her thin shirt.

The woman watched her and removed cigarettes from her robe pocket and took out a lighter and lit the cigarette and stood in the door smoking. She scratched one naked ankle with the toes of the other foot.

Mama, do you have to smoke in here now?

I’m here, aren’t I? This is my house.

Please, Mama.

Then she was sick again. She could feel it rising. She was kneeling again at the bowl, gagging, her shoulders and chest wrung by dry spasms. Her dark hair was caught as before in one hand, automatically.

The woman stood over her, smoking, surveying her. Finally the girl was finished. She stood up and returned to the sink.

You know what I think, little miss? the woman said.

The girl applied the wet washcloth to her face once more.

I think you got yourself knocked up. I think you got a baby in you and it’s making you puking sick.

The girl held the cloth to her face and looked at her mother in the mirror.

Didn’t you.

Mama.

That’s it, isn’t it.

Mama, don’t.

Well you stupid little slut.

I’m not a slut. Don’t call me that.

What do you want me to call it? That’s the name for what you done. I told you before. And now look at you. Look here at what’s happened. I told you, didn’t I.

You told me a lot of things, Mama.

You better not get smart with me.

The girl’s eyes filled. Help me, Mama. I need you to help me.

It’s too late for that, the woman said. You got yourself into this, you can just get out of it. Your father wanted me to hold his head too. All them mornings when he’d come home feeling sick and sorry for himself. I won’t hold yours too.

Mama, please.

And you can just leave this house. Like he did finally. You’re so smart, you know everything. I won’t have you in here like this.

You don’t mean that.

See if I don’t. You just try me, miss.

In the back bedroom she dressed for school in a short skirt and white tee-shirt and put on a jeans jacket, the same clothes she’d worn the day before, and looped a red shiny purse on a long strap over her shoulder. She left the house without eating anything.

She walked to school in a kind of dream, walking out of the meager street onto the pavement of Main, across the tracks and then up onto the wide vacant early-morning sidewalks past the display windows of the stores, watching her reflection, how she walked and carried her body, and as yet she could see no change. There was nothing she could discern outwardly. She went on in her skirt and jacket with the red purse swinging at her hip.





Ike and Bobby.

They mounted their bikes and rode out of the drive onto the loose gravel on Railroad Street and east toward town. The air was still cool, with the smells of horse manure and trees and dry weeds and dirt in the atmosphere and something else they couldn’t name. Above them a pair of magpies swung on a cottonwood branch screaming, and then one of the birds flew off into the trees beyond Mrs. Frank’s house and the other cried four times, harsh and rapid, before it too flapped away.

They rode along the gravel road and passed the old vacated light plant, its high windows boarded over, and turned onto the pavement at Main Street and then bounced over the railroad tracks onto the cobblestone platform at the depot. It was a single-story redbrick building with a green tile roof. Inside was a dim waiting room smelling of dust and being closed up, and three or four highbacked pewlike wood benches set in rows facing the train tracks and a ticket office with a single window set behind black grillwork. An old green milk wagon on iron wheels stood outside on the cobblestones beside the wall. The wagon was never used anymore. But Ralph Black, the depot agent, admired the way it looked on the platform and he left it there. He didn’t have a lot to do. The passenger trains only stopped in Holt for five minutes, coming and going, long enough to allow the two or three passengers to board or get off and for the man in the baggage car to drop the Denver News onto the platform beside the tracks. The papers were there now, bound in twine in a single stack. The bottom papers had torn on the rough cobblestones.