“What’s that on your face, young lady?” Right in front of us she scrubs Carol’s face with the dirty dishcloth. “Don’t let me catch you doing such a cheap thing again! At your age, the idea!” Carol wriggles, cries and screams, abandoning herself. We watch, horrified and thrilled. “Just wait till your father gets home!” her mother says in a cold, furious voice. “Making a spectacle of yourself,” as if there’s something wrong in the mere act of being looked at. Then she remembers we’re still here. “Off you go!”
Two days later Carol says her father has given it to her good, with his belt, buckle end, right across the bare bum. She says she can hardly sit down. She sounds proud of this. She shows us, after school, up in her room: she pulls up her skirt, pulls down her underpants, and sure enough there are the marks, almost like scratch marks, not very red but there.
It’s difficult to match this evidence with Carol’s father, nice Mr. Campbell, who has a soft mustache and calls Grace Beautiful Brown Eyes and Cordelia Miss Lobelia. It’s strange to imagine him hitting anyone with a belt. But fathers and their ways are enigmatic. I know without being told, for instance, that Mr. Smeath lives a secret life of trains and escapes in his head. Cordelia’s father is charming to us on the rare occasions when he is seen, he makes wry jokes, his smile is like a billboard, but why is she afraid of him?
Because she is. All fathers except mine are invisible in daytime; daytime is ruled by mothers. But fathers come out at night. Darkness brings home the fathers, with their real, unspeakable power. There is more to them than meets the eye. And so we believe the belt.
Carol says she’s seen a wet spot on the sheet of her mother’s twin bed, in the morning, before the bed was made. We tiptoe into her parents’ room. The bed with its tufty chenille bedspread is so neatly made up we’re afraid to turn down the covers to look. Carol opens the drawer of her mother’s bedside table and we peer in. There’s a rubber thing like the top of a mushroom, and a tube of toothpaste that isn’t toothpaste. Carol says these things are to keep you from having babies. Nobody giggles, nobody scoffs. Instead we read the label. Somehow the red marks on Carol’s, bum have given her a credibility she lacked before.
Carol lies on top of her own bed, which has a white ruffled spread that matches the curtains. She’s pretending to be sick, with an unspecified illness. We’ve dampened a washcloth, draped it over her forehead, brought her a glass of water. Illness is now a game we play.
“Oh, I’m so sick, oh, I’m so sick,” Carol moans, twisting her body on the bed. “Nurse, do something!”
“We have to listen to her heart,” says Cordelia. She pulls up Carol’s sweater, then her undershirt. We’ve all been to the doctor, we know about the brusque humiliations involved. “This won’t hurt.” There are the breasts, puffy-looking, their nipples bluish, like veins on a forehead. “Feel her heart,” Cordelia says to me.
I don’t want to. I don’t want to touch that swollen, unnatural flesh. “Go on,” says Cordelia. “Do as you’re told.”
“She’s being disobedient,” says Grace.
I reach out my hand, place it on the left breast. It feels like a balloon half filled with water, or like lukewarm oatmeal porridge. Carol giggles. “Oh, your hand’s so cold!” Nausea grips me.
“Her heart, stupid,” says Cordelia. “I didn’t say her tit. Don’t you know the difference?”
An ambulance comes and my mother is carried out to it on a stretcher. I don’t see this, Stephen tells me about it. It was in the middle of the night when I was asleep, but Stephen has taken to getting up secretly and looking out of his bedroom window at the stars. He says you can see the stars much better when most of the lights in the city are off. He says that the way to wake up at night without using an alarm clock is to drink two glasses of water before you go to bed. Then you have to concentrate on the hour you want to wake up. This is what the Indians used to do.
So he was awake, and listened, and snuck across to the other side of the house to look out the window there, where he could see what was going on out on the street. He says there were flashing lights but no siren, so it’s no wonder I didn’t hear anything.
When I get up in the morning my father is in the kitchen frying bacon. He knows how to do this, though he never does it in the city, only over campfires. In my parents’ bedroom there’s a pile of crumpled sheets on the floor, and the blankets are folded up on a chair; on the mattress there’s a huge oval splotch of blood. But when I come home from school the sheets are gone and the bed is made up, and there is nothing more to be seen.
My father says there has been an accident. But how can you have an accident lying in bed asleep?
Stephen says it was a baby, a baby that came out too soon. I don’t believe him: women who are going to have babies have big fat stomachs, and my mother didn’t have one.