Lifelines Read online

  That shirt was thrown out, but there were other things. Duse always held back when she had to try on clothes. She tensed a leg so it wouldn’t slide into a pants opening, she flexed her arm against the open wound of a sleeve. She walked in shoes hesitantly, waiting for a sensation to curve up around her. She never knew what would claim her, what wouldn’t let her alone. Sometimes she felt there was no room for her, and she’d smear ink on the cloth or tear and muddy it until it was unwearable. She told Anna that she felt all the past owners still living in the clothing, that those lives crowded her, but Anna scoffed at her, saying that a joke like that wasn’t funny.

  Duse was seven when Richard’s headaches began. He was reading on the couch one day, stretched out, listening to a serial on the radio, when his left eye began streaming. He kept lifting his hand to wipe at the tears, but they wouldn’t be stopped. His head suddenly hurt; it felt too small, the seams of it seemed to be ripping, letting out drifts of pain. The pain snaked deep in his thighs up toward his head and he thought the pressure would kill him. “Anna—” he shouted, and then he got up and pressed his head into the wall, and when that felt better, he pressed harder, then harder, until he was banging his head into the wall, until he had scraped his skin.

  When Anna reached him, she had to pry him back from the wall. She was afraid he would crack his head right open, that he would smear the whole house with his blood, with pieces of his body. She helped him to bed and wrapped a chunk of ice into a rough blue rag and put it to his head. It took the doctor an hour to get there, and then he had to use up more time washing his hands and setting down his black bag, and all the while Richard moaned in the sheets and burrowed his head into the feather pillow. Richard didn’t remember the doctor, but he did hear Duse playing ball outside, bouncing rubber against the wood of the house, and the sound hurt him, for a moment he hated her. The doctor jabbed a needle into him and then he slept, and Anna was told it was migraine, that there was no cure, only pills.

  Duse learned to recognize the headache’s approach by her father’s eyes, and she kept free of him. She didn’t like him to lock himself into the bath, she knew he only ran the water to hide the sounds he made when he started banging his head into the wall, trying to bruise out the pain.

  He wouldn’t tell Anna until later about the other doctors he went to see. He wouldn’t let either Anna or Duse see more than one doctor when they were sick, and even then they had to be wrenched apart with fever before they could go. He told them that home remedies were better than pills, and so Duse grew up sickened on cod liver oil, chilled by ice packs for fever. Richard paid his doctors with photographic sessions. He posed families, he put hands into hands, and when he sent prints, the best ones framed, he considered his debt paid.

  It didn’t matter how good his prints were, the doctors still told him the same things, that no one knew what caused migraines or how to control them, that there was never any cure. He was given syrups, bottles with labels that claimed the liquid inside was a rejuvenator. He kept one of those bottles in his coat, and every once in a while, he would take a long sloppy swig from the bottle, wiping the film from his lips with the back of his hand. It was weeks before he gave up hope on those bottles. One doctor gave him an electric belt to wear about his waist. “Your energy is wrong,” the doctor told him. He compared it to the faulty wiring of a house. It cost Richard twelve photographs, all of them silver framed, but he wore the belt when he could, when Anna and Duce were out. He hid it in his desk, he locked the drawer. It hummed, it jiggered a little, but it didn’t do anything until it sparked one day and then it brought on another headache.

  He hated the pain, he hated being sick, and he began to blame Anna and Duse. He was surly when he came home, he complained that they both made too much noise, that they brought on his headaches with their careless spending, their careless noise. When he screamed and banged with a headache that lasted days, Anna would stuff Duse’s ears with cotton. Richard began warring with Anna. Duse was used to their bickering, but this was something different. She could sense a texture, a kind of nap, that wasn’t there before. Usually they simply shouted at one another until Anna would hide her weepy face in her hands, surrendering. But now they were physical. They lunged at each other, never really making contact. His moves were dodges, dances to keep Anna from striking him. She, in turn, railed at him from a distance, raging until she collapsed, exhausted, into a chair. Richard stood watching her face turn small and tight, and he began rubbing at his forehead, using his two hands like dowsers, searching out the pain.

  They never really made up. Things simply settled back down again into an uneasy sort of truce. She cooked his meals, she asked about his work, she shooed and scooted Duse away from him, as if she were a mosquito itching to be slapped.

  It bothered Duse. She wouldn’t recognize them when they fought. She would run and get the keys from the desk and sit in the car. Sometimes she would cry, curled up in the front seat with her knees bumping against the wheel. She could hear them, she felt the glassy breaking noises in their voices. She beeped the horn, but all that did was make some of the neighbors peer out at her from behind their curtain shields. She dozed a little when it was silent, curling her back into the seat. Anna always came out to get her, telling Richard that Duse was just outside on the grass.

  One time Richard came striding out after a fight. When he passed the car, he saw her, and she shut her eyes.

  He was gentle with her. He didn’t ask where she got the key, he didn’t threaten to punish her. Instead he stood her on the ground outside the car and brushed her red hair with his fingers. “You don’t want to stay out here alone,” he said, glancing toward the house, toward Anna. “It’s terrible to be alone.” He tried to get her to smile. “I’m not very good to you, am I?” he said. “We don’t know each other very well, do we?” She didn’t think that she was supposed to answer, so she kept her body still.

  “Would you like to come and live with me?” he asked. “We could start up fresh, you and me.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Just us,” he persisted. “You could visit your mother anytime you liked.”

  She was puzzled. He had never seemed to need her, to connect, and she thought it was probably just another way to hurt Anna, to deny her. “No,” she said.

  “But what about some of the time,” he said. “A vacation, maybe, the ocean. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

  She pushed away from him. She didn’t want any part of him touching her. “No,” she said. “No.”

  She didn’t realize he was crying. Not at first. But then he was making sounds, coughing, shaking his shoulders. She stood there, waiting, and then she wove herself closer. She picked up his two arms and put them around her, and then she let him rock her back and forth a little, and she saw how his eyes were, how they didn’t focus, how they didn’t see.

  During the next weeks, she felt he was watching her, studying Anna, never really coming out and saying anything was wrong. When he left, it was in the middle of the night. Anna thought he had just gone into the kitchen for water. She fell back asleep, and it wasn’t until the morning that she missed him. She walked the rooms. In the living room was his camera, the lens smashed out of it; pieces of his photographs were scattered on the rug. She bent down, not feeling, and started methodically plucking the pieces up, carefully laying one section on top of another in her hand. Duse wandered into the room and squinted away the sleep. She watched, but when she looked down into her mother’s hands, at the pieces of picture, she saw Anna’s printed face, slashed right in half, the eyes staring up at her.

  Duse found the note, tacked to the kitchen table, which she gave to Anna. Anna’s face was very quiet when she read, but all she told Duse was that Richard hadn’t been happy, that he had left them, but it was no one’s fault, no one’s.

  “It has to be someone’s fault,” said Duse.

  “He says he loves you, right here,” said Anna, trying to place her finger on the
page, to make her hand still. She didn’t weep the whole time she was telling Duse how Richard was hoping to get into the army, to get training for a new career. She didn’t start to cry until she read Duse the part about how Richard had stockpiled sums of money and kept it in three iron boxes that he buried in the back yard in the rock garden—money she hadn’t known about. He had drawn a map for her to dig it out. She could live on that, he said, and he’d send them what he could. He said that money had made him feel secure, and now it would be their security—she and Duse would be all right. He wrote that he might still come back to them, he would have to see.

  “See what?” said Duse. An old image flickered in her head. She saw again Richard in the back yard, his palms covering his face, she saw the way he dug in the rock garden, the secretive way he had just stood there in his bare feet. She remembered, too, how Anna had dismissed the thing she had seen with her own eyes, how Anna had said she was just dreaming and to let it go. She had played right over the spots where the boxes were buried, and Richard had yelled at her, but the only reason he had been able to come up with, the only lie, had been that she might get hurt and that there was no money for doctors.

  “I’ll never want that money,” said Duse. “Any of it.” Anna, crying, looked up at Duse, but Duse’s face was stone. Duse wouldn’t want that money, either. She later told Isadora that she had never claimed her one box, that for all she knew it was still there buried under the earth. Anna wouldn’t touch the one box she said was Duse’s, and Duse gradually came to like the idea of that box just waiting, staying hidden until someone whose destiny it would be to uncover it dug it out.

  Anna began hating. She railed at Richard’s timing. No one wanted to hire a woman when the streets were clotted with men begging for work. She managed to scrape along on the box money and on the occasional checks Richard sent. She had to stop opening her doors to the tramps.

  “You can help out too, you know,” she told Duse. She reminded Duse of her namesake; she wanted Duse to enter contests, to go to some of the Chicago theatres and offer to sweep the stage for a chance to learn about acting, for a path to a stage career.

  But Duse never did anything that didn’t originate from her own stubborn head. She didn’t like it when Anna prodded her to walk like a goddess, to enunciate each word into stone. She told Anna that she didn’t want to act, she didn’t like pretending, but Anna continued to bring her home strips of embroidered cloth to parade in and a doll to pretend with. Even when that cloth became a dustrag, when the porcelain face of the doll rotted out in the rainy back yard where Duse had left it, Anna continued to watch Duse for signs of talent. “You could be rich,” Anna chided. “We both could be treated like royalty.”

  They made do. At each new year Anna heaved a sigh of relief that she had somehow managed to keep things going. It wasn’t until war came that Anna finally found work. She typed out envelopes for a man named Stan Morgan. He wasn’t keen on what he called woman-flutter, but he set Anna up with a typewriting machine at home. There was always the sound of that machine nights, the pecking growing faster and deeper as she got more experienced. The hammering made Duse crazy. She’d be outside the house, away from it, and she would hear that noisy machine’s breath. She would dig her fingers into her ears. That kept the sound within her, though that made it more painful.

  They both began to get postcards from Richard, from an army barracks in California. Anna’s face changed when she saw that familiar handwriting. He never said much, only that he was well and that he would be sending money. He never asked how she was, how Duse was doing. Anna blacked out his words and then saved the picture postcards. She liked the scenic trees, the swelling ocean. Duse’s cards were more amusing—sharks wearing bathing suits, crabs in sunglasses with wide cartoon grins—but she always tossed the cards out. She never believed she was in his thoughts, and she saw no reason to keep him in hers. Neither of them wrote to Richard. They had no real information on what he was doing.

  Anna hardened. Duse, too, kept to herself. She had no close friends. No one wanted to just sit out on the front stoop and think. Kids her age wanted to play with dolls. Duse decided that nothing was worse than having to accommodate people. She would always prefer solitude to that.

  Things were better for most people; the war seemed easier than the Depression. If there was food rationing, at least there was food to be rationed, and point cards to get it. Duse and Anna seemed to have less than everyone else, though. Duse had to take bread sandwiches to school (three layers of bread, the outsides dark, the insides soft and white). Duse liked to take the white part and mold it into shapes with her hands before she popped it into her mouth. When she was thirsty, she made do with water from the bubbler. Sometimes when she came back to her seat, she would find a thin greasy strip of luncheon meat folded on top of her bread. Other times she was mocked. Someone insisted that they had seen her peel a wad of gum from the bottom of a chair in class, that they had watched her slip it into her mouth, that they had seen her small mouth working on it. Someone else said that they knew for a fact that she had dropped her drawers and twirled around for two Oreo cookies. When the school had canned-good drives for soldiers and for starving war orphans, and Duse couldn’t afford to bring a can, a boy said that Duse had opened her can of beans and eaten the beans cold. The boy chanted at her, tormenting her. It infuriated Duse, not because she had no money, but because they were putting scents and textures into her mind. The gum was sodden and stale in her mouth as she listened to her accusers, the beans felt slimy against her lips, and she could feel the air on the tops of her thighs. It all made her gag. She had to go into the bathroom and vomit into the cool white of the sink.

  She never liked school. She didn’t like having to know only one answer for things when she was sure there must be another response. She would prop herself up on one arm and stare out the window, squinting toward the sun. Her teachers watched her the same critical way Anna did, as if they were searching for something. She got good enough grades, except in history. She refused to let events shape her; she insisted that she could ignore things, that she could live any way she wanted.

  She didn’t care about the war. She later told Isadora that she could even remember being kicked out of a diner when she was thirteen because she had insisted on ordering sauerkraut; she wouldn’t call it “liberty cabbage” the way they had it inked over in the menu. “That wasn’t its name,” she said. When her class had to write letters to the soldiers as a project, she put a blank piece of paper into an envelope and let the teacher address it; when they were handed silhouette cards of the fighter planes so they could all learn to spot them in the sky, Duse doodled over the shapes and eventually lost the cards.

  She wasn’t religious, but she loved church. She liked to wander into the church during the week when no one was really there and sit in one of the pews. The minister mistook her silence for piety and he left her alone. He liked to see that flaming head bent over. Duse tried to go to the later mass on Sunday when there were fewer people. She loved the hymns, loved closing her eyes and letting herself be carried on the back of all that sound.

  Although Anna was usually pulling at Duse, wanting her to make something of herself, to help, there were times that Duse did seek out her mother. She worried about her life. She didn’t think she wanted to marry, not if her husband would be like Richard, and she didn’t think Anna’s typing job was very interesting. She would get up in the night and crawl into Anna’s bed shivering. Anna would get up and make them both hot chocolate and she’d serve it in bed with the baby biscuits she liked to buy because they were so cheap. She’d have Duse laughing, the two of them littering the sheets with biscuit crumbs, staining the pillow cases with their chocolated mouths.

  They never discussed Richard. Every year, a day after her birthday, a small gift would arrive, usually candy or some fancy handkerchiefs. Duse dumped the candy out, she never used even one of the handkerchiefs. If anyone was going to do any denying, she reasoned
, it would be she.

  Duse was fifteen when she found work. She was prowling the immigrant section around Maxwell Street, lazily twisting in and out. She had a few coins stuck in the bottom of her shoe for safekeeping, and every step she took imprinted the hard surface of the coin into the skin of her feet. She was meandering toward the edges of the neighborhood when she saw a sign out in front of a red house, planted right into a lawn flustered with dandelions. The sign read SEE-ER. She had no idea what that was, but she was curious, and a little thirsty, too, and she knocked.

  An old woman came to the door balancing a silver tea tray, lifting her brows at Duse. “You want your fortune told?”

  Duse shook her head. “I want a job,” she said.

  The woman blinked at her. Duse shifted her weight uneasily from one foot to the other. Then the woman asked if Duse knew the right way to wash tea things so they wouldn’t water spot or crack, if Duse could clean cups so no tea leaves remained. She wanted to know if Duse could be a good silent girl. “Yes,” said Duse.