Then it was her turn to go into the bathroom and wash her hands. He insisted that she do this for at least three minutes, and under water hot enough to turn her skin red. When she came back to bed, she held her palms out to his face. If the smell of Lifebuoy wasn’t strong enough to satisfy him, she would have to do it again.
“And when I came back, the broom would be there.”
He would put it on top of the sheet if it was summer, on the blankets if it was winter. Running straight down the middle of the bed. His side and her side.
“If I was restless and happened to move it, he’d wake up. No matter how fast asleep he was. And he’d push me back to my side. Hard. He called it ‘transgressing the broom.’”
The time he slapped her was when she asked how they would ever have children if he never put it in her. “He was furious. That’s why he slapped me. He apologized later, but what he said right then was, ‘Do you think I’d put myself in your germy womanhole and bring children into this filthy world? It’s all going to blow up anyway, anyone who reads the paper can see that coming, and the radiation will kill us. We’ll die with sores all over our bodies, and coughing up our lungs. It could happen any day.’”
“Jesus. No wonder you left him, Sadie.”
“Only after four wasted years. It took me that long to convince myself that I deserved more from life than color-coordinating my husband’s sock drawer, giving him handjobs twice a week, and sleeping with a goddam broom. That was the most humiliating part, the part I was sure I could never talk about to anyone… because it was funny. ”
I didn’t think it was funny. I thought it was somewhere in the twilight zone between neurosis and outright psychosis. I also thought I was listening to the perfect Fifties Fable. It was easy to imagine Rock Hudson and Doris Day sleeping with a broom between them. If Rock hadn’t been gay, that was.
“And he hasn’t come looking for you?”
“No. I applied to a dozen different schools and had the answers sent to a post office box. I felt like a woman having an affair, sneaking around. And that’s how my mother and father treated me when they found out. My dad has come around a little-I think he suspects how bad it was, although of course he doesn’t want to know any of the details-but my mother? Not her. She’s furious with me. She had to change churches and quit the Sewing Bee. Because she couldn’t hold her head up, she says.”
In a way, this seemed as cruel and crazy as the broom, but I didn’t say so. A different aspect of the matter interested me more than Sadie’s conventional Southern parents. “ Clayton didn’t tell them you were gone? Have I got that right? Never came to see them?”
“No. My mother understood, of course.” Sadie’s ordinarily faint Southern accent deepened. “I just shamed that poor boy so bad that he didn’t want to tell anyone. ” She dropped the drawl. “I’m not being sarcastic, either. She understands shame, and she understands covering up. On those two things, Johnny and my mama are in perfect harmony. She’s the one he should have married.” She laughed a little hysterically. “Mama probably would have loved that old broom.”
“Never a word from him? Not even a postcard saying, ‘Hey Sadie, let’s tie up the loose ends so we can get on with our lives?’”
“How could there be? He doesn’t know where I am, and I’m sure he doesn’t care.”
“Is there anything you want from him? Because I’m sure a lawyer-”
She kissed me. “The only thing I want is here in bed with me.”
I kicked the sheets down to our ankles. “Look at me, Sadie. No charge.”
She looked. And then she touched.
I drowsed afterward. Not deep-I could still hear the wind and that one rattling windowpane-but I got far enough down to dream. Sadie and I were in an empty house. We were naked. Something was moving around upstairs-it made thudding, unpleasant noises. It might have been pacing, but it seemed as if there were too many feet. I didn’t feel guilty that we were going to be discovered with our clothes off. I felt scared. Written in charcoal on the peeling plaster of one wall were the words I WILL KILL THE PRESIDENT SOON. Below it, someone had added NOT SOON ENOUGH HES FULL OF DISEEZE. This had been printed in dark lipstick. Or maybe it was blood.
Thud, clump, thud.
From overhead.
“I think it’s Frank Dunning,” I whispered to Sadie. I gripped her arm. It was very cold. It was like gripping the arm of a dead person. A woman who had been beaten to death with a sledgehammer, perhaps.
Sadie shook her head. She was looking up at the ceiling, her mouth trembling.
Clud, thump, clud.
Plaster-dust sifting down.
“Then it’s John Clayton,” I whispered.
“No,” she said. “I think it’s the Yellow Card Man. He brought the Jimla.”
Above us, the thudding stopped abruptly.
She took hold of my arm and began to shake it. Her eyes were eating up her face. “It is! It’s the Jimla! And it heard us! The Jimla knows we’re here! ”
“Wake up, George! Wake up!”
