Gerald’s Game

CHAPTER NINE

The urge to vomit passed slowly, but it did pass. Jessie lay on her back with her eyes pressed tightly shut, now beginning to really feel the painful throbbing in her shoulders. It came in slow, peristaltic waves, and she had a dismaying idea that this was only the beginning.

I want to go to sleep, she thought. It was the child’s voice again. Now it sounded shocked and frightened. It had no interest in logic, no patience for cans and can’ts. I was almost asleep when thebad dog came, and that’s what I want now-to go to sleep.

She sympathized wholeheartedly. The problem was, she didn’t really feel sleepy anymore. She had “ust seen a dog tear a chunk out of her husband, and she didn’t feel sleepy at all.

What she felt was thirsty.

Jessie opened her eyes and the first thing she saw was Gerald, lying on his own reflection in the highly polished bedroom floor like some grotesque human atoll. His eyes were still open, still staring furiously up at the ceiling, but his glasses now hung askew with one bow sticking into his ear instead of going over it. His head was cocked at such an extreme angle that his plump left cheek lay almost against his left shoulder. Between his right shoulder and right elbow there was nothing but a dark red smile with ragged white edges.

“Dear Jesus,” Jessie muttered. She looked quickly away, out the west window. Golden light-it was almost sunset light now-dazzled her, and she shut her eyes again, watching the ebb and flow of red and black as her heart pushed membranes of blood through her closed lids. After a few moments of this, she noticed that the same darting patterns repeated themselves over and over again. It was almost like looking at protozoa under a microscope, protozoa on a slide which had been tinted with a red stain. She found this repeating pattern both interesting and soothing. She supposed you didn’t have to be a genius to understand the appeal such simple repeating shapes held, given the circumstances. When all the normal patterns and routines of a person’s life fell apart and with such shocking suddenness-you had to find something you could hold onto, something that was both sane and predictable. If the organized swirl of blood in the thin sheaths of skin between your eyeballs and the last sunlight of an October day was all you could find, then you took it and said thank you very much. Because if you couldn’t find something to hold onto, something that made at least some sort of sense, the alien elements of the new world order were apt to drive you quite mad.

Elements like the sounds now coming from the entry, for instance. The sounds that were a filthy, starving stray eating part of the man who had taken you to see your first Bergman film, the man who had taken you to the amusement park at Old Orchard Beach, coaxed you aboard that big Viking ship that swung back and forth in the air like a pendulum, then laughed until tears squirted out of his eyes when you said you wanted to go again. The man who had once made love to you in the bathtub until you were literally screaming with pleasure. The man who was now sliding down that dog’s gullet in gobs and chunks.

Alien elements like that.

“Strange days, pretty mamma,” she said. “Strange days indeed.” Her speaking voice had become a dusty, painful croak. She supposed she would do well to just shut up and give it a rest, but when it was quiet in the bedroom she could hear the panic, still there, still creeping around on the big soft pads of its feet, looking for an opening, waiting for her to let down her guard. Besides, there was no real quiet. The chainsaw guy had packed it in for the day, but the loon still voiced its occasional cry and the wind was rising as night approached, banging the door more loudly and more frequently-than ever.

Plus, of course, the sound of the dog dining on her husband. While Gerald had been waiting to collect and pay for their sub sandwiches in Amato’s, Jessie had stepped next door to Michaud’s Market. The fish at Michaud’s was always good-almost fresh enough to flop, as her grandmother would have said. She had bought some lovely fillet of sole, thinking she would pan-broil it if they decided to stay overnight. Sole was good because Gerald, who would live on a diet of nothing but roast beef and fried chicken if left to his own devices (with the occasional order of deep-fried mushrooms thrown in for nutritional purposes), actually claimed to like sole. She had bought it without the slightest premonition that he would be eaten before he could cat.

“It’s a jungle out there, baby,” Jessie said in her dusty, croaky voice, and realized she was now doing more than just thinking in Ruth Neary’s voice; she actually sounded like Ruth, who in their college days would have lived on a diet of nothing but Dewar’s and Marlboros, if left to her own devices.

That tough no-bullshit voice spoke up then, as if Jessie had rubbed a magic lamp. Remember that Nick Lowe song you heard onWBLM when you were coming home from your pottery class one day lastwinter? The one that made you laugh?

She did. She didn’t want to, but she did. It had been a Nick Lowe tune she believed had been titled “She Used to Be a Winner (Now She’s just the Doggy’s Dinner)', a cynically amusing pop meditation on loneliness set to an incongruously sunny beat. Amusing as hell last winter, yes, Ruth was right about that, but not so amusing now.

“Stop it, Ruth,” she croaked. “If you’re going to freeload in my head, at least have the decency to quit teasing me.”

Teasing you? Jesus, tootsie, I’m not teasing you; I’m trying to wakeyou up!

“I am awake!” she said querulously. On the take the loon cried out again, as if to back her up on that. “Partly thanks to you!”

No, you’re not. You haven’t been awake-really awake-for a longtime. When something bad happens, Jess, do you know what you do? You tell yourself, “Oh, this is nothing to worry about, this is just a baddream, I get them every now and then, they’re no big deal, and as soonas I roll over on my back again I’ll be fine.” And that’s what you do, youpoor sap. That’s just what you do.

Jessie opened her mouth to reply-such canards should not go unanswered, dry mouth and sore throat or not-but Goodwife Burlingame had mounted the ramparts before Jessie herself could do more than begin to organize her thoughts.

How can you say such awful things? You’re horrible! Go away!

Ruth’s no-bullshit voice uttered its cynical bark of laughter again, and Jessie thought how disquieting-how horribly disquieting-it was to hear part of your mind laughing in the make-believe voice of an old acquaintance who was long gone to God knew where.

Go away? You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Tootsie-Wootsie, Puddin” “n” Pie, Daddy’s little girl. Any time the truth gets too close, any time youstart to suspect the dream is maybe not just a dream, you run away.

That’s ridiculous.

It is? Then what happened to Nora Callighan?

For a moment that shocked Goody’s voice-and her own, the one that usually spoke both aloud and in her mind as “I'-to silence, but in that silence a strange, familiar image formed: a circle of laughing, pointing people-mostly women-standing around a young girl with her head and hands in stocks. She was hard to see because it was very dark-it should still have been full daylight but was for some reason very dark, just the same but the girl’s face would have been hidden even if the day had been bright. Her hair hung over it like a penitent’s shroud, although it was hard to believe she could have done anything too horrible; she was clearly no more than twelve or so. Whatever it was she was being punished for, it couldn’t be for hurting her husband. This particular daughter of Eve was too young to have even begun her monthly courses, let alone have a husband.

No, that’s not true, a voice from the deeper ranges of her mind suddenly spoke up. This voice was both musical yet frighteningly powerful, like the cry of a whale. She started when she was only tenand a half. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe he smelled blood, justlike that dog out in the entry. Maybe it made him frantic.

Shut up! Jessie cried. She felt suddenly frantic herself Shut up,we don’t talk about that!

And speaking of smells, what’s that other one? Ruth asked. Now the mental voice was harsh and eager… the voice of a prospector who has finally stumbled onto a vein of ore he has long suspected but has never been able to find. That mineral smell, like salt andold pennies-

We don’t talk about that, I said!

She lay on the coverlet, her muscles tense beneath her cold skin, both her captivity and her husband’s death forgotten-at least for the time being-in the face of this new threat. She could feel Ruth, or some cut-off part of her for which Ruth spoke, debating whether or not to pursue the matter. When it decided not to (not directly, at least), both Jessie and Goodwife Burlingame breathed a sigh of relief.

All right-let’s talk about Nora instead, Ruth said. Nora, your therapist? Nora, your counsellor? The one you started to go seearound the time you stopped painting because some of the paintingswere scaring you? Which was also the time, coincidentally or not,when Gerald’s sexual interest in you seemed to evaporate and youstarted sniffing the collars of his shirts for perfume? You rememberNora, don’t you?

Nora Callighan was a prying bitch! the Goodwife snarled.

“No,” Jessie muttered. “She was well-intentioned, I don’t doubt that a bit, she just always wanted to go one step too far. Ask one question too many.”

You said you liked her a lot. Didn’t I hear you say that?

“I want to stop thinking,” Jessie said. Her voice was wavery and uncertain. “I especially want to stop hearing voices, and talking back to them, too. It’s nuts.”

Well, you better listen just the same, Ruth said grimly, because youcan’t run away from this the way you ran away from Noratheway you ran away from me, for that matter.

I never ran away from you, Ruth! Shocked denial, and not very convincing. She had done just that, of course. Had simply packed her bags and moved out of the cheesy but cheerful dorm suite she and Ruth shared. She hadn’t done it because Ruth had started asking her too many of the wrong questions-questions about Jessie’s childhood, questions about Dark Score Lake, questions about what might have happened there during the summer just after Jessie started to menstruate. No, only a bad friend would have moved out for such reasons. Jessie hadn’t moved out because Ruth started asking questions; she moved out because Ruth wouldn’t stop asking them when Jessie asked her to do so. That, in Jessie s opinion, made Ruth a bad friend. Ruth had seen the lines Jessie had drawn in the dust… and had then deliberately stepped over them anyway. As Nora Callighan had done, years later.

Besides, the idea of running away under these conditions was pretty ludicrous, wasn’t it? She was, after all, handcuffed to the bed.

Don’t insult my intelligence, cutie-Pie, Ruth said. Your mind isn’thandcuffed to the bed, and we both know it. You can still ran if youwant to, but my advice-my strong advice-is don’t you do it, becauseI’m the only chance you’ve got. If you just lie there pretending thisis abad dream you got from sleeping on your left side, you’re going to die inhandcuffs. Is that what you want? Is that your prize for living yourwhole life in handcuffs, ever since-

“I will not think about that!” Jessie screamed at the empty room.

For a moment Ruth was silent, but before Jessie could do more than begin to hope that she’d gone away, Ruth was back… and back at her, worrying her like a terrier worrying a rag.

Come on, Jess-you’d probably like to believe you’re crazy ratherthan dig around in that old grave, but you’re really not, you know.I’m you, the Goodwife’s you…we’re all you, as a matter of fact.I have a pretty good idea of what happened that day at Dark Scorewhen the rest of the family was gone, and the thing I’m really curiousabout doesn’t have a lot to do with the events per se. What I’mreally curious about is this: is there apart of you-one I don’t knowabout-that wants to he sharing space with Gerald in that dog’sguts come this time tomorrow? I only ask because that doesn’t soundlike loyalty to me; it sounds like lunacy.

Tears were trickling down her cheeks again, but she didn’t know if she was crying because of the possibility-finally articulated-that she actually could die here or because for the first time in at least four years she had come close to thinking about that other summer place, the one on Dark Score Lake, and about what happened there on the day when the sun went out.

Once upon a time she had almost spilled that secret at a women’s consciousness group… back in the early seventies that had been, and of course attending that meeting had been her roomie’s idea, but Jessie had gone along willingly, at least to begin with; it had seemed harmless enough, just another act in the amazing tie-dyed carnival that was college back then. For Jessie, those first two years of college-particularly with someone like Ruth Neary to tour her through the games, rides, and exhibits-had been for the most part quite wonderful, a time when fearlessness seemed usual and achievement inevitable. Those were the days when no dorm room was complete without a Peter Max poster and if you were tired of the Beatles-not that anybody was-you could slap on a little Hot Tuna or MC5. It had all been a little too bright to be real, like things seen through a fever which is not quite high enough to be life-threatening. In fact, those first two years had been a blast.

The blast had ended with that first meeting of a women’s consciousness group. In there, Jessie had discovered a ghastly gray world which seemed simultaneously to preview the adult future that lay ahead for her in the eighties and to whisper of gloomy childhood secrets that had been buried alive in the sixties… but did not lie quiet there. There had been twenty women in the living room of the cottage attached to the Neuworth Interdenominational Chapel, some perched on the old sofa, others peering out of the shadows thrown by the wings of the vast and lumpy parsonage chairs, most sitting cross-legged on the floor in a rough circle-twenty women between the ages of eighteen and fortysomething. They had joined hands and shared a moment of silence at the beginning of the session. When that was over, Jessie had been assaulted by ghastly stories of rape, of incest, of physical torture. If she lived to be a hundred she would never forget the calm, pretty blonde girl who had pulled up her sweater to show the old scars of cigarette burns on the underside of her breasts.

That was when the carnival ended for Jessie Mahout. Ended? No, that wasn’t right. It was as if she had been afforded a momentary glimpse behind the carnival; had been allowed to see the gray and empty fields of autumn that were the real truth: nothing but empty cigarette wrappers and used condoms and a few cheap broken prizes caught in the tall grass, waiting to either blow away or be covered by the winter snows. She saw that silent stupid sterile world waiting beyond the thin layer of patched canvas which was all that separated it from the razzle-dazzle brightness of the midway, the patter of the hucksters, and the glimmer-glamour of the rides, and it terrified her. To think that only this lay ahead for her, only this and nothing more, was awful; to think that it lay behind her as well, imperfectly hidden by the patched and tawdry canvas of her own doctored memories, was insupportable.

After showing them the bottoms of her breasts, the pretty blonde girl had pulled her sweater back down and explained that she could say nothing to her parents about what her brother’s friends had done to her on the weekend her parents had gone to Montreal because it might mean that what her brother had been doing to her off and on all during the last year would come out, and her parents would never have believed that.

The blonde girl’s voice was as calm as her face, her tone perfectly rational. When she finished there was a thunderstruck pause-a moment during which Jessie had felt something tearing loose inside her and had heard a hundred ghostly interior voices screaming in mingled hope and terror-and then Ruth had spoken.

“Why wouldn’t they believe you?” she’d demanded. “Jesus, Liv-they burned you with live cigarettes! I mean, you had the burns as evidence! Why wouldn’t they believe you? Didn’t they love you?”

Yes, Jessie thought. Yes, they loved her. But-

“Yes,” the blonde girl said. “They loved me. They still do. But they idolized my brother Barry.”

Sitting beside Ruth, the heel of one not-quite-steady hand resting against her forehead, Jessie remembered whispering, “Besides, it would have killed her.”

Ruth turned to her, began, “What-?” and the blonde girl, still not crying, still eerily calm, said: “Besides, finding out something like that would have killed my mother.”

And then Jessie had known she was going to explode if she didn’t get out of there. So she had gotten up, springing out of her chair so fast she had almost knocked the ugly, bulky thing over. She had sprinted from the room, knowing they were all looking at her, not caring. What they thought didn’t matter. What mattered was that the sun had gone out, the very sun itself, and if she told, her story would be disbelieved only if God was good. If God was in a bad mood, Jessie would be believed… and even if it didn’t kill her mother, it would blow the family apart like a stick of dynamite in a rotten pumpkin.

So she had run out of the room and through the kitchen and would have belted right on through the back door, except the back door was locked. Ruth chased after her, calling for her to stop, Jessie, stop. She had, but only because that damned locked door made her. She’d put her face against the cold dark glass, actually considering-yes, for just a moment she had-slamming her head right through it and cutting her throat, anything to blot out that awful gray vision of the future ahead and the past behind, but in the end she had simply turned around and slid down to the floor, clasping her bare legs below the hem of the short skirt she’d been wearing and putting her forehead against her upraised knees and closing her eyes. Ruth sat down beside her and put an arm around her, rocking her back and forth, crooning to her, stroking her hair, encouraging her to give it up, get rid of it, sick it up, let it go.

Now, lying here in the house on the shore of Kashwakamak Lake, she wondered what had happened to the tearless, eerily calm blonde girl who had told them about her brother Barry and Barry’s friends-young men who had clearly felt a woman was just a life-support system for a cunt and that branding was a perfectly just punishment for a young woman who felt more or less okay about fucking her brother but not her brother’s goodbuddies. More to the point, Jessie wondered what she had said to Ruth as they sat with their backs against the locked kitchen door and their arms around each other. The only thing she could remember for sure was something like “He never burned me, he never burned me, he never hurt me at all.” But there must have been more to it than that, because the questions Ruth had refused to stop asking had all pointed clearly in just one direction: toward Dark Score Lake and the day the sun had gone out.

She had finally left Ruth rather than tell… just as she had left Nora rather than tell. She had run just as fast as her legs could carry her-Jessie Mahout Burlingame, also known as The Amazing Gingerbread Girl, the last wonder of a dubious age, survivor of the day the sun had gone out, now handcuffed to the bed and able to run no more.

“Help me,” she said to the empty bedroom. Now that she had remembered the blonde girl with the eerily calm face and voice and the stipple of old circular scars on her otherwise lovely breasts, Jessie could not get her out of her mind, nor the knowledge that it hadn’t been calmness, not at all, but some fundamental disconnection from the terrible thing that had happened to her. Somehow the blonde girl’s face became her face, and when Jessie spoke, she did so in the shaking, humbled voice of an atheist who has been stripped of everything but one final longshot prayer. “Please help me.”

It wasn’t God who answered but the part of her which apparently could speak only while masquerading as Ruth Neary. The voice now sounded gentle but not very hopeful. I’ll try, but you have to help me. I know you” re willing to do painful things, but youmay have to think painful thoughts, too. Are you ready for that?

“This isn’t about thinking,” Jessie said shakily, and thought: Sothat’s what Goodwife Burlingame sounds like out loud. “It’s about… well… escaping.”

And you may have to muzzle her, Ruth said. She’s a valid part ofyou, Jessie-of us-and not really a bad person, but she’s been left torun the whole show for far too long, and in a situation like this, herwaydealing with the world is not much good. Do you want to arguethe point?

Jessie didn’t want to argue that point or any other. She was too tired. The light falling through the west window was growing steadily hotter and redder as sunset approached. The wind gusted, sending leaves rattling along the lakeside deck, which was empty now; all the deck furniture had been stacked in the living room. The pines soughed; the back door banged; the dog paused, then resumed its noisome smacking and ripping and chewing.

“I’m so thirsty,” she said mournfully.

Okay, then-that’s where we ought to start.

She turned her head the other way until she felt the last warmth of the sun on the left side of her neck and the damp hair stuck to her cheek, and then she opened her eyes again. She found herself staring directly at Gerald’s glass of water, and her throat immediately sent out a parched, imperative cry.

Let’s begin this phase of operations by forgetting about the dog, Ruth said. The dog is just doing what it has to do to get along, and you’ve got to do the same.

“I don’t know if I can forget it,” Jessie said.

I think you can, toots-I really do. If you could sweep what happenedon the day the sun went out under the rug, I guess you can sweep anything under the rug.

For a moment she almost had it all, and understood she could have it all, if she really wanted to. The secret of that day had never been completely sunk in her subconscious, as such secrets were in the TV soap-operas and the movie melodramas; it had been buried in a shallow grave, at best. There had been some selective amnesia, but of a completely voluntary sort. If she wanted to remember what had happened on the day the sun had gone out, she thought she probably could.

As if this idea had been an invitation, her mind’s eye suddenly saw a vision of heartbreaking clarity: a pane of glass held in a pair of barbecue tongs. A hand wearing an oven-mitt was turning it this way and that in the smoke of a small sod fire.

Jessie stiffened on the bed and willed the image away.

Let’s get one thing straight, she thought. She supposed it was the Ruth-voice she was speaking to, but wasn’t completely sure; she wasn’t really sure of anything anymore. Idon’t want to remember.Got it? The events of that day have nothing to do with the events of thisone, They’re apples and oranges. it’s easy enough to understand theconnections-two lakes, two summer houses, two cases of

(secrets silence hurt harm)

sexual hanky-panky-but remembering what happened in i963 can’tdo a thing for me now except add to my general misery, So let’s just dropthat whole subject, okay? Let’s forget Dark Score Lake.

“What do you say, Ruth?” she asked in a low voice, and her gaze shifted to the batik butterfly across the room. For just a moment there was another image-a little girl, somebody’s sweet little Punkin, smelling the sweet aroma of aftershave and looking up into the sky through a piece of smoked glass-and then it was mercifully gone.

She looked at the butterfly for a few moments longer, wanting to make sure those old memories were going to stay gone, and then she looked back at Gerald’s glass of water. Incredibly, there were still a few slivers of ice floating on top, although the darkening room continued to hold the heat of the afternoon sun and would for awhile longer.

Jessie let her gaze drift down the glass, let it embrace those chilly bubbles of condensation standing on it. She couldn’t actually see the coaster on which the glass stood-the shelf cut it off-but she didn’t have to see it to visualize the dark, spreading ring of moisture forming on it as those cool beads of condensation continued to trickle down the sides of the glass and pool around it at the bottom.

Jessie’s tongue slipped out and swiped across her upper lip, not imparting much moisture.

I want to drink! the scared, demanding voice of the child-of somebody’s sweet little Punkin-yelled. I want it and I want itright…NOW!

But she couldn’t reach the glass. It was a clear-cut case of so near and yet so far.

Ruth: Don’t give up so easy-if you could hit the goddam dog withan ashtray, tootsie, maybe you can get the glass. Maybe you can.

Jessie raised her right hand again, straining as hard as her throbbing shoulder would allow, and still came up at least two and a half inches short. She swallowed, grimacing at the sandpapery jerk and clench of her throat.

“See?” she asked. “Are you happy now?”

Ruth didn’t reply, but Goody did, She spoke up softly, almost apologetically, inside jessie’s head. She said get it, not reach it. They…they might not be the same thing, Goody laughed in an embarrassed who-am-I-to-stick-my-oar-in way, and Jessie had a moment to think again how surpassingly odd it was to feel a part of yourself laughing like that, as if it really were an entirely separate entity. If I had a few more voices, Jessie thought, we couldhave a goddam bridge tournament in here.

She looked at the glass a moment longer, then let herself flop back down on the pillows so she could study the underside of the shelf. It wasn’t attached to the wall, she saw; it lay on four steel brackets that looked like upside-down capital L’s. And the shelf wasn’t attached to them, either-she was sure of it. She remembered once when Gerald had been talking on the phone, and had absentmindedly attempted to lean on the shelf. Her end had started to come up, levitating like the end of a seesaw, and if Gerald hadn’t snatched his hand away immediately, he would have flipped the shelf like a tiddlywink.

The thought of the telephone distracted her for a moment, but only a moment. It sat on the low table in front of the east window, the one with its scenic view of the driveway and the Mercedes, and it might as well have been on another planet, for all the good it could do in her current situation. Her eyes returned to the underside of the shelf, first studying the plank itself and then scanning the L-shaped brackets again.

When Gerald leaned on his end, her end had tilted. If she exerted enough pressure on her end to tilt his, the glass of water…

“It might slide down,” she said in a hoarse, musing voice. “It might slide down to my end.” Of course it might also go sliding gaily right past her to shatter on the floor, and it might bang into some unseen obstacle up there and overturn before it ever got to her, but it was worth trying, wasn’t it?

Sure, I guess so, she thought. Imean, I was planning to fly to NewYork in my Learjet-eat at Four Seasons, dance the night away atBirdland-but with Gerald dead I guess that would be a little tacky.And with all the good hooks currently out of reach-all the had ones,too, as far as that goes-I guess I might as well try for the consolation prize.

All right; how was she supposed to go about it?

“Very carefully,” she said. “That’s how.”

She used the handcuffs to pull herself up again and studied the glass some more. Not being able to actually see the surface of the shelf now struck her as a drawback. She had a pretty good idea of what was on her end, but was less sure about Gerald’s and the no-man’s-land in the middle. Of course it wasn’t surprising; who but someone with an eidetic memory could reel off a complete inventory of the items on a bedroom shelf? Who would have ever thought such things could matter?

Well, they matter now, I’m living in a world where all the perspectives have changed.

Yes indeed. In this world a stray dog could be scarier than Freddy Krueger, the phone was in the Twilight Zone, the sought-for desert oasis, goal of a thousand grizzled Foreign Legionnaires in a hundred desert romances, was a glass of water with a few last slivers of ice floating on top. In this new world order, the bedroom shelf had become a shipping lane as vital as the Panama Canal and an old paperback western or mystery in the wrong place could become a lethal roadblock.

Don’t you think you’re exaggerating a little? she asked herself uneasily, but in truth she did not. This would be a long-odds operation under the best of circumstances, but if there was junk on the runway, forget it. A single skinny Hercule Poirot-or one of the Star Trek novels Gerald read and then dropped like used napkins-wouldn’t show above the angle of the shelf, but it would be more than enough to stop or overturn the water-glass. No, she wasn’t exaggerating. The perspectives of this world really bad changed, and enough to make her think of that science fiction movie where the hero started to shrink and went on getting smaller until he was living in his daughter’s dolihouse and going in fear of the family cat. She was going to learn the new rules in a hurry… learn them and live by them.

Don’t lose your courage, Jessie, Ruth’s voice whispered.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m going to try-I really am. But sometimes it’s good to know what you’re up against. I think sometimes that makes a difference.”

She rotated her right wrist outward from her body as far as it would go, then raised her arm. In this position she looked like a woman-shape in a line of Egyptian hieroglyphs. She began to patter her fingers on the shelf again, feeling for obstructions along the stretch where she hoped the glass would finish up.

She touched a piece of fairly heavy-gauge paper and thumbed it for a moment, trying to think what it might be. Her first guess was a sheet from the note-pad that usually hid in the clutter on the telephone table, but it wasn’t thin enough for that. Her eye happened on a magazine-either Time or Newsweek, Gerald had brought both along-lying face-down beside the phone. She remembered him thumbing rapidly through one of the magazines while he took off his socks and unbuttoned his shirt. The piece of paper on the shelf was probably one of those annoying blow-in subscription cards with which the newsstand copies of magazines are always loaded. Gerald often laid such cards aside for later use as bookmarks. It might be something else, but Jessie decided it didn’t matter to her plans in any case. It wasn’t solid enough to stop the glass or overturn it. There was nothing else up there, at least within reach of her stretching, wriggling fingers.

“Okay,” Jessie said. Her heart had started to pound hard. Some sadistic pirate broadcaster in her mind tried to transmit a picture of the glass tumbling off the shelf and she immediately blocked the image out. “Easy; easy does it. Slow and easy wins the race. I hope.”

Holding her right hand where it was, although bending it away from her body in that direction didn’t work very well and hurt like the devil, Jessie raised her left hand (My ashtray-throwing hand, she thought with a grim glint of humor) and gripped the shelf with it well beyond the last supporting bracket on her side of the bed.

Here we go, she thought, and began to exert downward pressure with her left hand. Nothing happened.

I’m probably pulling too close to that last bracket to get enough leverage,The problem is the goddam handcuff chain. I don’t have enough slack to get as far out on the shelf as I need to be.

Probably true, but the insight didn’t change the fact that she wasn’t doing a thing to the shelf with her left hand where it was. She would have to spider her fingers out a little farther-if she could, that was-and hope it would be enough. It was funnybook physics, simple but deadly. The irony was that she could reach under the shelf and push it up any time she liked. There was one small problem with that, however-it would tip the glass the wrong way, off Gerald’s end and onto the floor. When you considered it closely, you saw that the situation really did have its amusing side; it was like an America’s Funniest Home Videos segment sent in from hell.

Suddenly the wind dropped and the sounds from the entry seemed very loud. “Are you enjoying him, shithead?” Jessie screamed. Pain ripped at her throat, but she didn’t-couldn’t-stop. “I hopeso, because the first thing I’m going to do when I get out of these cuffs is blow your head off!”

Big talk, she thought. Very big talk for a woman who no longereven remembers if Gerald’s old shotgun-the one that belonged to his dad-is here or in the attic of the Portland house.

Nevertheless, there was a gratifying moment of silence from the shadowy world beyond the bedroom door. It was almost as if the dog were giving this threat its soberest, most thoughtful consideration.

Then the smackings and chewings began again.

Jessie’s right wrist twanged warningly, threatening to cramp up, warning her that she had better get on with her business right away… if she actually had any business to do, that was.

She leaned to the left and stretched her hand as far as the chain would allow. Then she began to put the pressure on the shelf again. At first there was nothing. She pulled harder, eyes slitted almost shut, the corners of her mouth turned down. It was the face of a child who expects a dose of bad medicine. And, just before she reached the maximum downward pressure her aching arm muscles could exert, she felt a tiny shift in the board, a change in the uniform drag of gravity so minute that it was more intuited than actually sensed.

Wishful thinking, Jess-that’s all you felt. Only that and nothingmore.

No. It was the input of senses which had been jacked into the stratosphere by terror, perhaps, but it wasn’t wishful thinking.

She let go of the shelf and just lay there for a few moments, taking long slow breaths and letting her muscles recover. She didn’t want them spasming or cramping up at the critical moment; she had quite enough problems without that, thanks. When she thought she felt as ready as she could feel, she curled her left fist loosely around the bedpost and slid it up and down until the sweat on her palm dried and the mahogany squeaked. Then she stretched out her arm and gripped the shelf again, It was time.

Got to be careful, though. The shelf moved, no question about that,and it’ll move more, but it’s going to take all my strength to get thatglass in motion…if I can do it at all, that is. And when a persongets near the end of their strength, control gets spotty.

That was true, but it wasn’t the kicker. The kicker was this: she had no feet for the shelf’s tip-point. Absolutely none at all.

Jessie remembered seesawing with her sister Maddy on the playground behind Falmouth Grammar School-they had come back early from the lake one summer and it seemed to her she had spent that whole August going up and down on those paintpeeling teeterboards with Maddy as her partner-and how they had been able to balance perfectly whenever they felt like it. All it took was for Maddy, who weighed a little more, to move a butt’s length in toward the middle. Long hot afternoons of practice, singing jump-rope songs to each other as they went up and own, had enabled them to find each seesaw’s tip-point with an almost scientific exactitude; those half a dozen warped green boards standing in a row on the sizzling hot-top had seemed almost like living things to them. She felt none of that eager liveliness under her fingers now. She would simply have to try her best and hope it was good enough.

And whatever the Bible may say to the contrary, don’t let your lefthand forget what your right hand is supposed to be doing. Your leftmay be your ashtray-throwing hand, but your right had better be yourglass-catching hand, Jessie. There’s only a few inches of shelf where you’ll have a chance to get hold of it. if it slides past that area, it won’t matterif it stays up-it’ll he as out of reach as it is right now.

Jessie didn’t think she could forget what her right hand was doing-it hurt too much. Whether or not it would be able to do what she needed it to do was another question entirely, though. She increased the pressure on the left side of the shelf as steadily and as gradually as she could. A stinging drop of sweat ran into the corner of one eye and she blinked it away. Somewhere the back door was banging again, but it had joined the telephone in that other universe. Here there was only the glass, the shelf, and Jessie. Part of her expected the shelf to come up all at once like a brutal Jack-in-the-box, catapulting everything off, and she tried to steel herself against the possible disappointment.

Worry about that if it happens, toots. In the meantime, don’t lose your concentration. I think something’s happening.

Something was. She could feel that minute shift again-that feel of the shelf starting to come unanchored at some point along Gerald’s side. This time Jessie didn’t let up her pressure but increased it, the muscles in her upper left arm standing out in hard little arcs that trembled with strain. She voiced a series of small explosive grunts. That sense of the shelf coming unanchored grew steadily stronger.

And suddenly the flat circular surface of the water in Gerald’s glass was a tilted plane and she heard the last slivers of ice chatter faintly as the right end of the board actually did come up. The glass itself did not move, however, and a horrible thought occurred to her: what if some of the water trickling down the sides of the glass had seeped beneath the cardboard coaster on which it sat? What if it had formed a seal, bonding it to the shelf?

“No, that can’t happen.” The words came out in a single whispered blurt, like a tired child’s rote prayer. She pulled down harder on the left end of the shelf, using all her strength. Every last horse was now running in harness; the stable was empty.

“Please don’t let it happen. Please.”

Gerald’s end of the shelf continued to rise, its end wavering wildly. A tube of Max Factor blush spilled off Jessie’s end and landed on the floor near the place where Gerald’s head had lain before the dog had come along and dragged him away from the bed. And now a new possibility-more of a probability, actually-occurred to her. If she increased the angle of the shelf much more, it would simply slide down the line of L-brackets, glass and all, like a toboggan going down a snowy hill. Thinking of the shelf as a seesaw could get her into trouble. It wasn’t a seesaw; there was no central pivot-point to which it was attached.

“Slide, you bastard!” she screamed at the glass in a high, breathy voice. She had forgotten Gerald; had forgotten she was thirsty; had forgotten everything but the glass, now tilted at an angle so acute that water was almost slopping over the rim and she couldn’t understand why it didn’t simply fall over. It didn’t, though; it just went on standing where it had stood all along, as if it had been glued to the spot. “Slide!”

Suddenly it did.

Its movement ran so counter to her black imaginings that she was almost unable to understand what was happening. Later it would occur to her that the adventure of the sliding glass suggested something less than admirable about her own mindset: she had in some fashion or other been prepared for failure. It was success which left her shocked and gaping.

The short, smooth journey of the glass down the shelf toward her right hand so stunned her that Jessie almost pulled harder with her left, a move that almost certainly would have overbalanced the precariously tilted shelf and sent it crashing to the floor. Then her fingers were actually touching the glass, and she screamed again. It was the wordless, delighted shriek of a woman who has just won the lottery.

The shelf wavered, began to slip, then paused, as if it had a rudimentary mind of its own and was considering whether or not it really wanted to do this.

Not much time, toots, Ruth warned. Grab the goddam thing whilethe grabbing’s good.

Jessie tried, but the pads of her fingers only slid along the stick wet surface of the glass. There was nothing to grab, it seemed, and she couldn’t get quite enough finger-surface on the thricedamned thing to grip. Water sloshed onto her hand, and now she sensed that even if the shelf held, the glass would soon tip over.

Imagination, toots-just the old idea that a sad little Punkin likeyou can never do anything right.

That wasn’t far from the mark-it was certainly too close for comfort-but it wasn’t on the mark, not this time. The glass was getting ready to tip over, it really was, and she didn’t have the slightest idea of what she could do to prevent that from happening, Why did she have to have such short, stubby, ugly fingers? Why? If only she could get them a little farther around the glass…

A nightmare image from some old TV commercial occurred to her: a smiling woman in a fifties hairdo with a pair of blue rubber gloves on her hands. So flexible you can pick up a dime! the woman was screaming through her smile. Too bad you don’t have a pair,little Punkin or Goodwife or whoever the hell you are! Maybe you couldget that fucking glass before everything on the goddam shelf takes theexpress elevator!

Jessie suddenly realized the smiling, screaming woman in the Playtex rubber gloves was her mother, and a dry sob escaped her.

Don’t give up, Jessie! Ruth yellecl. Not yet! You’re close! I swearyou are!

She exerted the last tiny scrap of her strength on the left side of the shelf, praying incoherently that it wouldn’t slide-not yet, Oh please God or whoever You are, please don’t let it slide, not now, notyet.

The board did slide… but only a little. Then it held again, perhaps temporarily snagged on a splinter or balked by a warp in the wood. The glass slid a little farther into her hand, and now crazier and crazier-it seemed to be talking, too, the goddam glass. It sounded like one of those grizzled big-city cab-drivers who have a perpetual hard-on against the world: Jesus, lady, whatelse ya want me to do? Grow myself a goddam handle and turn into afuckin pitcher forya? A fresh trickle of water fell on Jessie’s straining right hand. Now the glass would fall; now it was inevitable. In her mind she could already feel the freeze as icewater doused the back of her neck.

“No!”

She twisted her right shoulder a little farther, opened her fingers a little wider, let the glass slide a tiny bit deeper into the straining pocket of her hand. The cuff was digging into the back of that hand, sending jabs of pain all the way up to her elbow, but Jessie ignored them. The muscles of her left arm were twanging wildly now, and the shakes were communicating themselves to the tilted, unstable shelf. Another tube of makeup tumbled to the floor. The last few slivers of ice chimed faintly. Above the shelf, she could see the shadow of the glass on the wall. In the long sunset light it looked like a grain silo blown atilt by a strong prairie wind.

More… just a little bit more…

There IS no more!

There better be, There’s got to be.

She stretched her right hand to its absolute tendon-creaking limit and felt the glass slide a tiny bit farther down the shelf. Then she closed her fingers again, praying it would finally be enough, because now there really was no more-she had pushed her resources to their absolute limit. It almost wasn’t; she could still feel the wet glass trying to squirm away. It had begun to seem like a live thing to her, a sentient being with a mean streak as wide as a turnpike passing lane. Its goal was to keep flirting toward her and then squirming away until her sanity broke and she lay here in the shadows of twilight, handcuffed and raving.

Don’t let it get away Jessie don’t you dare DON’T YOU DARE LETTHAT FUCKING GLASS GET AWAY-

And although there was no more, not a single foot-pound of pressure, not a single quarter-inch of stretch, she managed a little more anyway, turning her right wrist one final bit in toward the board. And this time when she curved her fingers around the glass, it remained motionless.

I think maybe I’ve got it. Not for sure, but maybe. Maybe.

Or maybe it was just that she had finally gotten to the wishful-thinking part. She didn’t care. Maybe this and maybe that and none of the maybes mattered anymore and that was actually a relief. The certainty was this-she couldn’t hold the shelf any longer. She had only tilted it three or four inches anyway, five at the most, but it felt as if she had bent down and picked up the whole house by one corner. That was the certainty.

She thought, Everything in perspective… and the voices that describethe world to you, I suppose. They matter. The voices inside your head.

With an incoherent prayer that the glass would remain in her hand when the shelf was no longer there to support it, she let go with her left hand. The shelf banged back onto its brackets, only slightly askew and shifted only an inch or two down to the left. The glass did stay in her hand, and now she could see the coaster. It clung to the bottom of the glass like a flying saucer.

Please God don’t let me drop it now. Don’t let me dr-

A cramp knotted her left arm, making her jerk back against the headboard. Her face knotted as well, pinching inward until the lips were a white scar and the eyes were agonized slits.

Wait, it will pass…it will pass…

Yes, of course it would. She’d had enough muscle cramps in her life to know that, but in the meantime oh God it hurt. If she had been able to touch the biceps of her left arm with her right hand, she knew, the skin there would have felt as if it had been stretched over a number of small smooth stones and then sewn up again with cunning invisible thread. It didn’t feel like a Charley horse; it felt like rigor-fucking-mortis.

No, just a Charley horse, Jessie. Like the one you had earlier. Wait itout, that’s all. Wait it out and for Christ’s sweet sake don’t drop thatglass of water.

She waited, and after an eternity or two, the muscles in her arm began to relax and the pain began to ease. Jessie breathed out a long harsh sigh of relief, then prepared to drink her reward. Drink, yes, Goody thought, but I think you owe yourself a little morethan just a nice cool drink, my dear, Enjoy your reward…but enjoyit with dignity. No piggy gulping!

Goody, you never change, she thought, but when she raised the glass, she did so with the stately calm of a guest at a court dinner, ignoring the alkali dryness along the roof of her mouth and the bitter pulse of thirst in her throat. Because you could put Goody down all you wanted-she practically begged for it sometimes but behaving with a little dignity under these circumstances (especially under these circumstances) wasn’t such a bad idea. She had worked for the water; why not take the time to honor herself by enjoying it? That first cold sip sliding over her lips and coiling across the hot rug of her tongue was going to taste like victory… and after the run of lousy luck she’d just been through, that would indeed be a taste to savor.

Jessie brought the glass toward her mouth, concentrating on the wet sweetness just ahead, the drenching downpour. Her tastebuds cramped with anticipation, her toes curled, and she could feel a furious pulse beating beneath the angle of her jaw. She realized her nipples had hardened, as they sometimes did when she was turned on. Secrets of female sexuality you never dreamed of, Gerald, shethought. Handcuff me to the bedposts and nothing happens. Show me aglass of water, though, and I turn into a raving nympho.

The thought made her smile and when the glass came to an abrupt halt still a foot away from her face, stopping water onto her bare thigh and making it ripple with gooseflesh, the smile stayed on at first. She felt nothing in those first few seconds but a species of stupid amazement and

(?huh?)

incomprehension. What was wrong? What could be wrong?

Yow know what, one of the UFO voices said. It spoke with a calm certainty Jessie found dreadful. Yes, she supposed she did know, somewhere inside, but she didn’t want to let that knowledge step into the spotlight which was her conscious mind. Some truths were simply too harsh to be acknowledged. Too unfair.

Unfortunately, some truths were also self-evident “As Jessie gazed at the glass, her bloodshot, puffy eyes began to fill with horrified comprehension. The chain was the reason she wasn’t getting her drink. The handcuff chain was just too fucking short. The fact had been so obvious that she had missed it completely.

Jessie suddenly found herself remembering the night George Bush had been elected President. She and Gerald had been invited to a posh celebration party in the Hotel Sonesta’s rooftop restaurant. Senator William Cohen was the guest of honor, and the President-elect, Lonesome George himself, was expected to make a closed-circuit “television call” shortly before midnight. Gerald had hired a fog-colored limo for the occasion and it had pulled into their driveway at seven o'clock, dead on time, but at ten past the hour she had still been sitting on the bed in her best black dress, rummaging through her jewelry box and cursing as she hunted for a special pair of gold earrings. Gerald had poked his head impatiently into the room to see what was holding her up, listened with that “Why are you girls always so darned silly?” expression that she absolutely hated on his face, then said he wasn’t sure, but he thought she was wearing the ones she was looking for. She had been. It had made her feel small and stupid, a perfect justification for his patronizing expression. It had also made her feel like flying at him and knocking out his beautifully capped teeth with one of the sexy but exquisitely uncomfortable highheeled shoes she was wearing. What she had felt then was mild compared to what she was feeling now, however, and if anyone deserved getting their teeth knocked out, it was her.

She thrust her head as far forward as she could, pooching her lips out like the heroine of some corny old black-and-white romance movie. She got so close to the glass that she could see tiny sprays of air-bubbles caught in the last few slivers of ice, close enough to actually smell the minerals in the well-water (or to imagine she did), but she did not get quite close enough to drink from it. When she reached the point where she could simply stretch no farther, her puckered kiss-me lips were still a good four inches from the glass. It was almost enough, but almost, as Gerald (and her father as well, now that she thought about it) had been fond of saying, only counted in horseshoes.

“I don’t believe it,” she heard herself saying in her new hoarse Scotch-and-Marlboros voice. “I just don’t believe it.”

Anger suddenly woke inside her and screamed at her in Ruth Neary’s voice to throw the glass across the room; if she could not drink from it, Ruth’s voice proclaimed harshly, she would punish it; if she could not satisfy her thirst with what was in it, she could at least satisfy her mind with the sound of it shattering to a thousand bits against the wall.

Her grip on the glass tightened and the steel chain softened to a lax arc as she drew her hand back to do just that. Unfair! It was just so unfair!

The voice which stopped her was the soft, tentative voice of Goodwife Burlingame.

Maybe there’s a way, Jessie. Don’t give up yet-maybe there’s still away.

Ruth made no verbal reply to this, but there was no mistaking her sneer of disbelief; it was as heavy as iron and as bitter as a squirt of lemon-juice. Ruth still wanted her to throw the glass. Nora Callighan would undoubtedly have said that Ruth was heavily invested in the concept of payback.

Don’t pay any attention to her, the Goodwife said. Her voice had lost its unusual tentative quality; it sounded almost excited now. Put it back on the shelf, Jessie.

And what then? Ruth asked. What then, 0 Great White Guru, 0Goddess of Tupperware and Patron Saint of the Church of Shop-by-Mail?

Goody told her, and Ruth’s voice fell silent as Jessie and all the other voices inside her listened.