Dolores Claiborne(21)
She pats me kinda gentle on the arm - the one that wasn't bruised - and says, 'You be strong, now. All things work for the best. I've been through it and I know. I'll pray for you, Dolores.' She said that last like she'd just told me she was gonna give me a million dollars and then went on her way upstreet. I went into the market, still mystified. I would have thought she'd lost her mind, except anyone who's ever passed the time of day with Yvette knows she ain't got a whole hell of a lot to lose.
I had my shoppin half done when it hit me. I stood there watchin Skippy Porter weigh my chops, my market basket over my arm and my head thrown back, laughin from way down deep inside my belly, the way you do when you know you can't do nothing but let her rip. Skippy looked around at me and says, 'You all right, Missus Claiborne?'
'I'm fine,' I says. 'I just thought of somethin funny.' And off I went again.
'I guess you did,' Skippy says, and then he went back to his scales. God bless the Porters, Andy; as long as they stay, there'll be at least one family on the island knows how to mind its business. Meantime, I just went on laughin. A few other people looked at me like I'd gone nuts, but I didn't care. Sometimes life is so goddam funny you just have to laugh.
Yvette's married to Tommy Anderson, accourse, and Tommy was one of Joe's beer-and-poker buddies in the late fifties and early sixties. There'd been a bunch of them out at our place a day or two after I bruised my arm, tryin to get Joe's latest bargain, an old Ford pick-em-up, runnin. It was my day off, and I brought em all out a pitcher of iced tea, mostly in hopes of keepin em off the suds at least until the sun went down.
Tommy must have seen the bruise when I was pourin the tea. Maybe he asked Joe what happened after I left, or maybe he just remarked on it. Either way, Joe St George wasn't a fella to let opportunity pass him by - not one like that, at least. Thinkin it over on my way home from the market, the only thing I was curious about was what Joe told Tommy and the others I'd done - forgot to put his bedroom slippers under the stove so they'd be warm when he stepped into em, maybe, or cooked the beans too mushy on Sat'dy night. Whatever it was, Tommy went home and told Yvette that Joe St George had needed to give his wife a little home correction. And all I'd ever done was bang off the corner of the Marshalls' mantelpiece runnin to see who was at the door!
That's what I mean when I say there's two sides to a marriage - the outside and the inside. People on the island saw me and Joe like they saw most other couples our age: not too happy, not too sad, mostly just goin along like two hosses pullin a wagon. . . they may not notice each other like they once did, and they may not get along with each other as well as they once did when they do notice each other, but they're harnessed side by side n goin down the road as well's they can just the same, not bitin each other, or lollygaggin, or doin any of the other things that draw the whip.
But people aren't hosses, n marriage ain't much like pullin a wagon, even though I know it some-times looks that way on the outside. The folks on island didn't know about the cream-pitcher, or how Joe cried in the dark and said he wished he'd never seen my ugly face. Nor was that the worst of it.
The worst didn't start until a year or so after we finished our doins in bed. It's funny, ain't it, how folks can look right at anything and draw a completely wrong conclusion about why it happened. But it's natural enough, as long as you remember that the inside and outside of a marriage aren't usually much alike. What I'm gonna tell you now was on the inside of ours, and until today I always thought it would stay there.
Lookin back, I think the trouble must have really started in '62. Selena'd just started high school over on the mainland. She had come on real pretty, and I remember that summer after her freshman year she got along with her Dad better than she had for the last couple of years. I'd been dreadin her teenage years, foreseein a lot of squabbles between the two of em as she grew up and started questionin his idears and what he saw as his rights over her more and more.
Instead, there was that little time of peace and quiet and good feelins between them, when she'd go out and watch him work on his old clunkers behind the house, or sit beside him on the couch while we were watchin TV at night (Little Pete didn -think much of that arrangement, I can tell you) ask him questions about his day durin the commercials. He'd answer her in a calm, thoughtful way wasn't used to . . but I sort of remembered. From high school I remembered it, back when I was gettin to know him and he was decidin that yes, he wanted to court me.
At the same time this was happenin, she drew distance away from me. Oh, she'd still do the chores I set her, and sometimes she'd talk about her day at school. . . but only if I went to work and pulled it out of her. There was a coldness that hadn't been there before, and it was only later on that I began to see how everything fit together, and how it all went back to the night she'd come out of her bed room and seen us there, her Dad with his hand clapped to his ear and blood runnin through the fingers, her Mom standin over him with a hatchet.
He was never a man to let certain kinds of opportunity pass him by, I told you, and this was just more of the same. He'd told Tommy Anderson one kind of story; the one he told his daughter was in different pew but the same church. I don't think there was anything in his mind at first but spite; he knew how much I loved Selena, and he must have thought tellin her how mean and bad-tempered I was - maybe even how dangerous I was - would be a fine piece of revenge. He tried to turn her against me, and while he never really succeeded at that, he did manage to get closer to her than he'd been since she was a little girl. Why not? She was always tender-hearted, Selena was, and I never ran up against a man as good at the poor-me's as Joe was.