I did not pity her at all. In a way I admired her. I admired her lack of compunction, the courage of her bad manners, the energy of simple rage. Throwing a bag of spaghetti had a simplicity to it, a recklessness, a careless grandeur. It got things over with. I was a long way, then, from being able to do anything like it myself.
Chapter 34
After the stewed pineapple Grace wants me to come down into the cellar with her to play school. I do this, but I have to come up the stairs again to go to the bathroom. Grace has given me permission, the same way the teachers in school give you permission. As I come up the cellar stairs I can hear Aunt Mildred and Mrs. Smeath, who are in the kitchen doing the dishes.
“She’s exactly like a heathen,” says Aunt Mildred. Because she’s been a missionary in China, she’s an authority. “Nothing you’ve done has made a scrap of difference.”
“She’s learning her Bible, Grace tells me,” Mrs. Smeath says, and then I know it’s me they’re discussing. I stop on the top step, where I can see into the kitchen: the kitchen table where the dirty dishes are piled, the back edges of Mrs. Smeath and Aunt Mildred.
“They’ll learn all that,” says Aunt Mildred. “Till you’re blue in the face. But it’s all rote learning, it doesn’t sink in. The minute your back is turned they’ll go right back the way they were.”
The unfairness of this hits me like a kick. How can they say that, when I’ve won a special mention for my essay on Temperance, about drunken men having car accidents and freezing to death in snowstorms because the alcohol dilates their capillaries? I even know what capillaries are, I even spelled it right. I can recite whole psalms, whole chapters, I can sing all the colored-slide white-knight Sunday school songs without looking.
“What can you expect, with that family?” says Mrs. Smeath. She doesn’t go on to say what’s wrong with my family. “The other children sense it. They know.”
“You don’t think they’re being too hard on her?” says Aunt Mildred. Her voice is relishing. She wants to know how hard.
“It’s God’s punishment,” says Mrs. Smeath. “It serves her right.”
A hot wave moves through my body. This wave is shame, which I have felt before, but it is also hatred, which I have not, not in this pure form. It’s hatred with a particular shape, the shape of Mrs. Smeath’s one breast and no waist. It’s like a fleshy weed in my chest, white-stemmed and fat; like the stalk of a burdock, with its rank leaves and little green burrs, growing in the cat piss earth beside the path down to the bridge. A heavy, thick hatred.
I stand there on the top step, frozen with hate. What I hate is not Grace or even Cordelia. I can’t go as far as that. I hate Mrs. Smeath, because what I thought was a secret, something going on among girls, among children, is not one. It has been discussed before, and tolerated. Mrs. Smeath has known and approved. She has done nothing to stop it. She thinks it serves me right. She moves away from the sink and walks to the kitchen table for another stack of dirty plates, into my line of vision. I have a brief, intense image of Mrs. Smeath going through the flesh-colored wringer of my mother’s washing machine, legs first, bones cracking and flattening, skin and flesh squeezing up toward her head, which will pop in a minute like a huge balloon of blood. If my eyes could shoot out fatal rays like the ones in comic books I would incinerate her on the spot. She is right, I am a heathen. I cannot forgive.
As if she can feel my stare she turns and sees me. Our eyes meet: she knows I’ve heard. But she doesn’t flinch, she isn’t embarrassed or apologetic. She gives me that smug smile, with the lips closed over the teeth. What she says is not to me but to Aunt Mildred. “Little pitchers have big ears.”
Her bad heart floats in her body like an eye, an evil eye, it sees me. We sit on the wooden bench in the church basement, in the dark, watching the wall. Light glints from Grace’s glassy eyes as she watches me sideways.
The picture is of a dead bird in an enormous hand, with a shaft of light coming down onto it. I am moving my lips, but I’m not singing. I am losing confidence in God. Mrs. Smeath has God all sewed up, she knows what things are his punishments. He’s on her side, and it’s a side from which I’m excluded.