January 2005 The Object of Desire
Suzanne DavisAfter my mother died, I was left alone on our rundown farm with the wind moaning through the cracks, doors slamming in empty rooms, bills piling up on the kitchen table and nightmares of Troy that had faded for a while but now resurfaced making sleep so difficult I finally went to my doctor for some sleeping pills. She started asking one question after another until finally like a bloodhound she had flushed out what she called “the root of my problem.” She promised me some narcotic help only if I signed up for therapy. Starting in April, every Wednesday night I drove to a little clapboard house in a neighborhood near Belaport’s hospital and sat in a cozy living room. That’s where I heard the stories of Cleo who was raped by her drug-addicted boyfriend and Donna who was a college freshman when a guy followed her home from her first night at a bar and raped her while she was passed out on her bunk. An armed intruder raped Dolores, a sixty-five year old widow, in her bed. Missy was barely thirteen when her minister’s son raped her. During these 90-minute sessions, I said only four words: “Laura. And I pass.” I was under no obligation to say anything more than my name. I kept listening for the part of each story that told how the women were to blame, which in my heart I believed to be true, followed by the judgment of the group, which again I believed we all deserved. But I could not detect where to blame any of them and Mona King, our group facilitator, kept reassuring each woman that she was NOT to blame. I began to look forward to the sessions, even though I didn’t speak much. One night on my way there, I picked up my mail and found a certified letter. When I saw the envelope’s green sticker, I decided it was from Troy, even though he and I were divorced and the return address was a local law firm. I stuffed the letter in my purse, unopened. That night was the fourth week at group, and everyone but me had shared their story. The women were quiet, and Mona, trying hard to reach us, told us about her own sister’s rape. Still, none of us spoke, me for reasons I already explained and the others I decided because Mona was a person who seemed to need boundaries, and as if proving that exact point, she pulled her blazer tight around her petite frame and sent around the circle a bucket of affirmations, asking us to each take one. When we were all holding a piece of folded paper, she turned to me. “Laura, will you please read yours to the group?” I took a deep breath. “’Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful and committed individuals can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.’” Mona looked around the circle. “I want each of you to take these home and reflect on them.” I crumpled up my paper. Mona turned back to me. “Laura, why did you do that?” She was staring me straight in the eye. I noticed how her nails were perfectly painted and the color matched her lipstick and everything about her looked cared for. “Because it’s shit,” I said. “And don’t try to bond with me, Mona. Like you know exactly how we feel! It was your sister, not you who was raped.” Mona drew in her breath. “Not one of us controlled what happened to us so who are we kidding about changing the world?” If Mona had said one word in response, if any of those women had said one word I was going to walk out, but there was total silence in that room. I had just spoken more then I had in a month and the silence was like water freezing between my story and me. “For a month I’ve been listening to you all blame yourselves. Donna, you saying ‘Oh, if I hadn’t drank so much,’ and you Cleo, ‘if I hadn’t let him in the apartment when he was high,’ and Dolores, ‘I should have locked my door.’ And Missy, ‘Oh, I should have told my parents.’ Mona, you keep saying it’s not our fault. Shift the blame away from the victim. Back to the perpetrator. But—“ I felt the muscles constrict in my throat. I gulped and gasped and jumped up to peer out the window. Then I was pacing back and forth, gripping my hands to keep them from shaking. “You want to talk stupid? You want to talk blame? I met Troy at an AA meeting in Atlanta. I was living with my aunt. Trying to get away from my mother. My aunt didn’t like Troy and he didn’t like her. First alarm. So what do I do? Move in with him. He takes me to the Sky Top and his friends say, ‘She’s so beautiful Troy. Let her go up there, man. She should be dancing.’ Troy says no. That’s good, right? But meanwhile, we’re three months behind on rent, the truck needs brakes, blah blah blah. So I push --the girls seem happy. They’ve got make up and clothes and gym passes. I say, ‘Listen Troy. We can use this money. Get married. Start a family.’ That’s what Troy wanted. The deal was six months. A year goes by. We pay the bills, get married, and move into a bigger apartment. I say, ‘Okay, Troy, time for a baby.’ He says ‘Just three more months, to get some savings.’ I don’t want to, but its just three months, so I do it. Then one night three college boys came in. They were loud and obnoxious and they left me a $100 bill with their phone numbers on it. When my shift was over, I went out back to get in Troy’s truck. He was drinking. He hadn’t had a drink since I met him. He asked for my money and I gave it to him and when he saw the phone numbers, he hit me. “Whore.” That’s all he said. Like I wasn’t even good enough for more than one word. He started driving crazy and I told him, ‘You’re the one that didn’t want me to stop, Troy. You’re scaring me.’ I tried to jump out, but he grabbed me by the throat and held me that way, drinking and driving with one hand until we got to the truck stop where all his buddies were holed up for the night, playing cards and drinking whiskey. I jumped out of the cab. My knees got all scrapped up. He caught me and – “ Only I couldn’t say it. Not even to them. I held up my fingers. “Three of them.” This was the only place where my voice faltered. “Because he said if he hadn’t of been there that’s what I would have done with those college boys.” “Laura,” Mona said, “this is not your fault.” “Well whose fucking fault is it?” I screamed. “I was a fucking stripper.” “Your husband’s,” she answered evenly. “The other men. Not you.” That’s when I let go and cried because for a month I had listened to her say those words to the other women. “You didn’t deserve to be raped, Laura. None of you did. You deserve better and when you see that, you’re going to get angry.” Mona nodded encouragingly. “When you get angry, that little piece of paper is going to start to mean something to you.” Mona’s words were like a promise. One I didn’t believe, but wanted to. Only our elder, Dolores, went to the police after her rape. The rest of us had all been too afraid. Afraid no one would believe us, afraid it was our fault, afraid we got what we deserved. “Let’s find Laura’s husband and kill him,” Cleo suggested, for they all agreed that my story was the most horrific, even though Mona tried to stop them from saying so. “That’s disassociating from your own painful experiences,” she said, pulling her blazer tighter around herself. “Dis this,” said Cleo flipping her the finger. “What’s that? I can’t hear you,” yelled Delores, our senior. “I’ve heard this so many times, I’m numb,” Donna mumbled. “You mean dumb,” Missy shot across the room. At that moment, we all laughed. A few days later, I had just put on a relaxation tape when I heard a knock on the door. It was a middle-aged man in a tweed jacket and wire rim glasses. He knocked one, two, three more times, sending me into a flight response so that my heart pounded, my throat closed, sweat sprouted, muscles contracted and I stayed hidden behind the lounge chair. I thought about the unopened letter in my purse and this guy knocking at my door at 10 am. Troy must have sent him to kill me for talking. My mother had told Troy the one time he had called that if he ever contacted me again, we’d report him. We got an unlisted number and I hadn’t heard from him since, but I was convinced this stranger in a suit was connected to Troy. After he drove away in a Lincoln Town Car, I checked the doors and windows, and walked around holding my cell phone. A working phone had become a powerful necessity after my relationship with Troy. One day shortly after we were married, one of the other dancers invited me to go see a movie with her. Troy was to be away hauling, so I said Yes, I’d love to. When I got off the phone, Troy was standing behind me. “Why don’t you call her back and change it to a night I can go?” he asked. “This will give me something to do while you’re gone.” Troy frowned. “Why do you need something to do?” I didn’t answer at first, then I said, “Troy it’s just a movie. With Sheila.” Troy picked up the phone and held it out to me. “What should I say? This is stupid, Troy.” But his face flushed red and he gripped the phone tight, pulling on the cord. I called Sheila and told her some lie about having forgotten a prior commitment. When I hung up, Troy put his arms around me. “I can’t have my beautiful wife going out alone at night, if I’m not there to protect her.” He started whispering sweet things in my ear and we ended up in bed. The next day Troy got us an unlisted number and wouldn’t let me give it out to anyone. “This is only while you have this job. You just never know about these guys.” The next week in group, we talked about our triggers—the things that made us relive our rape and how we handled those triggers. Donna had taken up running. Missy, who had endured three years of repeated rape and psychological battering from the minister’s son, worked in an animal shelter for abused and abandoned pets. Delores loved to cook. Cleo was a big self-talker, giving herself positive messages all day long. At night, she took up knitting. Mona turned to me. “How about it, Laura? What’s your trigger? “ I shrugged. She smiled. “Can’t you think of anything?” “I don’t like to be pushed,” I said. Mona leaned forward, folding her hands together. “Okay, we’ll go with that. You don’t like to be pushed. Do you mean physically? Emotionally?” She opened her hands, appealing to me. “I don’t like to be pushed any way at all.” Mona tightened her lips, but before she could decide how or if to respond to me, there was a disgusted sigh from the corner. “You think you’re above us, don’t you?” Cleo’s hair was in dreadlocks, making her face severe. The whites of her eyes flashed hard on me. “What’s the matter, you afraid of me? Or you just afraid of the truth?” “Cleo!” Mona stood up, but I jumped in front of her. “The truth is, I’m just afraid – of everything. Okay Miss Volcano Eruption? Is that okay with you?” I don’t know where those silly words came from, but that’s what came out and I was standing over Cleo waiting for a fight when all of a sudden her face smoothed out and out came a whoop like I never heard, followed by another, then her shoulders shook and it was clear she was laughing. Suddenly, I was laughing too, then all the women were laughing and Mona was standing a little uneasy, all by herself. She glanced at her watch and dismissed us for the week, asking me to clarify what set me off and what constructive things I could do to pacify myself. I did try to think about how I calmed myself, but the truth was that even though the rape had happened nearly a year ago, I hadn’t found ways to help myself. My mother had nursed me through the initial trauma, singing my childhood lullaby to me, drawing me warm baths, cooking all my comfort foods including my favorite, chicken and biscuits. While it was true she hadn’t showed much maternal instinct earlier in my life, she certainly poured it on after I showed up on her doorstep, not having seen her for nearly four years. Then, as if the strain of it was too much for her, she suffered a massive heart attack while at the ATM machine. Now that she was dead, I was lost again, having gone from relying totally on Troy to relying totally on her. That week I went grocery shopping and bought the ingredients for chicken and biscuits. Then I went to the customer service counter to pay my electric bill. When I pulled out my wallet, the certified letter fluttered out and the clerk picked it up and handed it back. I stuffed it deep into my purse. The letter was like a shadow darting around a corner, not there at all if I didn’t pay attention to it. I went home and cooked the chicken and biscuits, forgetting the pan in the oven until I smelled it burning. The women in the group knew that I lived on a farm, the only farm left in the city proper and the next week they brought me a shovel, rake and hoe, along with some bulbs to plant. It had been Cleo’s idea. When I protested that I couldn’t take the gift, Cleo said, “Just shut up and plant me some lilies. My birthday’s in June and nobody’s ever brought me flowers. I’d like some damned lilies. Is that a direct enough request, Mona?” Mona had been coaching us on how to ask for what we needed. “That’s a very good job, Cleo.” Mona loved Cleo, foul language and all, because she tried harder than all of us put together. So the following morning I was just putting on a pair of overalls and a straw hat, when I heard a knock at the door. It was the man in the suit, again. I hid behind the dining room door, and after he left this time, I checked the windows, doors and phone, and also pulled the shades. It was a bright, sunny day and the light leaked in anyway making me feel like a failure. I scrubbed the counter, straightened the mail, cleaned the refrigerator, scoured the bathroom with bleach, but I could not get myself to open the door and go outside. Each time I tried, my legs went weak and my heart pounded. I don’t know how much time went by, but finally I found myself with the unopened envelope in my hand. I was angry and afraid. The letter weighed nothing. It was just a letter. It couldn’t hurt me. I stuffed it into the pocket of my overalls and yanked open the door, armed with the gardening tools the women had brought me. The sun slanted away from me and I dug for hours, pouring all my fear into the task of breaking up the hard earth, chopping the clods into a fine mix, tossing loose stones atop the old stonewall bordering the yard. When I was finished, I felt high, a better high than with the drugs I used to take when I was dancing. But the garden needed something more. Before I knew it, I was back in the house, climbing into the attic. I remembered seeing a show on TV where some fancy gardener potted plants in broken wicker chairs. After my mother died, I had sold some old furniture, but now as I scanned the attic for remnants, my gaze caught the old wardrobe that stood near the one long window looking out to the fields. I went and opened it, releasing the dry pine scent and all its secrets. There hung the dress that as a child I pretended I was getting married in -- the silk so aged and stiff it felt like linen. I stripped out of my clothes and stepped into it, expecting the sleeves to flop over as they had when I was a kid, but the dress fit perfectly. I smoothed the bodice and tied the satin ribbon. When Troy and I got married in the Justice of the Peace office, I wore a gauzy white blouse with silver buttons and he wore blue jeans and we followed the ceremony with an afternoon of sex before I went back to work dancing for other men. We had dreamed of children and a large house filled with their screeching laughter. Suddenly, I smelled the diesel of Troy’s truck cab and felt his deadly strength pressing against my throat. I started to gag. I heard footsteps behind me so I stepped into the wardrobe and crouched down. There were the men, standing in the shadow, then on top of me, one at a time, and I was on the ceiling looking down, wondering how that woman’s knees got cut and bruised when no one was touching her knees. And even though I was on the ceiling, I felt afraid to look into her eyes. I wondered, Who is crying? Who is that? I put my hands out, feeling the walls, trying to talk myself back to reality and that’s when I felt the packet of letters. They were tied with a piece of ribbon. I held the letters out in light. The first letter was dated October, 1857 in bold and awkward handwriting, from someone named Elias – addressed to Mary Louise. He told the story of his grandmother, Sarah Carpenter, who had borne ten children and was disserted by her husband and left to raise them on her own and work the farm as well. He mentioned that they had erected a monument to her. I remembered seeing it on a high knoll in back, although I had never heard the story about it. The letter went on, So, Mary Louise, the will of the Brewster family owes itself to this woman, my grandmother. But our ties to this land go back even further, for I am a direct descendent of Major John Mason, the first major in Connecticut and a long time lieutenant governor. He was the founder of Belaport, having received from the Mohegan chief, Uncas, nine square miles of land. This land is blessed with many riches: rivers and harbor and on its outskirts fertile farmland, where our farm now lies. The Mohegans wrested this land from the Pequots who were the first children of the soil and the unfortunate victims of both English and tribal aggression. That was nearly two hundred and fifty years ago, but there are times when I am laboring in the fields that I swear I see an Indian leap across my path. These visions both thrill and terrify me. For the land holds sway over me, it is my soul. This I must say: in that I am a man who feels deeply, you would find satisfaction. I ask you to share this dream with me. Marry me and we will make a family to prosper on this land. Choose me and this land for all eternity. I await your reply, Elias. The second letter was postmarked two months later from Nebraska. Dear Elias, Your letters are such poetry. Your sentiments, your dreams inspire me. You ask me to marry you, to choose you. Yes, dear Elias. Already, I see you and your vision of the land as you describe it. As a child, I desired adventure and a life away from here. I promise that the dream of the land will be my dream as well and the dream I will help cultivate in the children from our union, God willing in this, as in all things. When I got done reading those letters, my head full of romantic images, I felt calm. I stepped out of the wardrobe and looked up and caught my gaze in a standing mirror along the opposite wall. The sunlight slanted through the window and shone on my dark hair, lighting up half my face and leaving the other half in shadow. Outside, my little garden plot looked like an embryo carved into the otherwise barren land. That next week at group, I reported how good it felt to take care of something, to be in control over where a certain flower would bloom, where a life would shine forth. I told them about finding the letters in the attic and how my ancestors felt about the land and wasn’t it a coincidence that just as I was planting a garden I should find something that had been there almost 150 years? Mona smiled the whole time I talked and what I described sounded so good, the women organized a group gardening day. All of us except Mona who needed to ‘maintain her boundaries,” met at my house on the following Saturday and we had so much fun, we decided to meet every week. The dirt flew during those gardening sessions and when we were done planting and pruning, we put on our walking shoes and went walking through the fallow fields, following the crumbling stonewalls. One beautiful morning in June, I was dressed in my overalls waiting for the women to arrive when I stuck my hand in the pocket and felt the certified letter, exactly where I had left it the day I went into the attic. Life seemed so different in these few short weeks, I felt sure I could handle its contents, so I ripped it open, scanning the type quickly. It wasn’t from Troy at all. Some corporation, the AXZ Corporation, representing the Mohegan Indian Tribe, wanted to buy my 200 acres for $500,000. Relief flooded through me, mixed with a new fear. Should I sell the very land that was giving me and the other women such a sense of renewal? When the women pulled up, I stuffed the letter in my pocket and felt sick in the stomach as they exclaimed over the irises and day lilies that had sprung up. Cleo suggested we celebrate by taking a picnic lunch into the woods. “But what are you going to feed us?” she demanded, flipping through the cupboards of Mason jars covered with dust. “Not this shit.” Before I could reply she was out the door picking sage from the herb garden we had planted. She came back into the kitchen, and offered the leaves to Delores. “Okay Chef, do your magic.” Delores started chopping and sautéing, clucking over my use of corn oil when every one knew the benefits of olive and canola oils. While she was filling the kitchen with delicious smells, Missy fed the cats bowls of milk. I stood staring out the window until Cleo tugged on my arm, holding a basket of golden biscuits and a thermos of mint tea, demanding me to lead the way. We crossed the fields to the cemetery high on a hill, surrounded by overgrowth. We stepped over the broken wrought iron fence and cleared some branches before we sat and spread out our feast. Fields surrounded us on all sides. Leaves rustled lullabies. For a few minutes we were quiet, munching biscuits and drinking tea. Just miles away two gambling casinos spread over hundreds of acres as the Pequots and Mohegans battled again, only this time over people’s money. I tried to imagine the Mohegan’s expansion on this hill with roads leading up to it, crisscrossing the land. It looked and felt like rape. Cleo broke the silence. “What do you guys think you’d be doing now if you never got raped?” Mona had encouraged us to explore the ways “the violence done to us had interrupted our deepest desires.” She was always turning our shit into poetry like that, which was annoying, but she said it made us less likely to stuff it all away. Donna started reading the markers. “Look, this baby was just five days old. Listen to this. ‘God gave. He took. He will restore. He doeth all things well.’ Depressing!” she said. “That’s avoidance, honey.” Cleo enjoyed playing Mona with us. Donna picked up a twig and started breaking it in pieces. “Alright then. I’d be an investment manager instead of a bank teller.” I was thinking about the letters I had found, so full of hope and desire, so full of their own destiny, and children to create that destiny. These women had become my family. What would happen to that family if I sold the land? Suddenly, Cleo was shouting at me. “Earth to Laura. I said, I’d still be doing drugs. So does that make me better off now?” She grinned and showed the chipped tooth that resulted from fighting her ex-boyfriend. “I guess,” I said. “Come on. Why do you always hang back like that?” “Leave her alone, Cleo,” Missy said. “She’s not one of your stray animals. She’s a big girl. Aren’t you, Laura?” “Yep.” I was squinting at the monument that rose over my head. The long list of children’s names seemed to go on forever. “So? Maybe you’d still be dancing then?” I hit her so fast she rolled like a potato, but then she recovered and twisted and I was on the bottom. I kneed her in the groin and when she hunched forward I threw her over and knelt on her chest. My fist connected with her cheek, then it grazed off the bone and hit a rock. Donna and Delores were trying to pull me off, but Cleo was just lying there, not even fighting. She was crying, kicking her feet and crying. That’s what stopped me, seeing her, leaves in her kinky black hair, tears glistening on her cheeks, leaking through her hands. I knelt down and hugged her. “I’m sorry, Cleo. I’m so sorry.” She shook her head and rolled away from me, curling her knees to her chest. “Cleo,” I whispered. “Cleo please forgive me? “ I was kneeling over her, sobbing the words under my breath, but they carried on the open air. She smelled like fresh air and sage, nothing hidden or rotten about her. “Cleo, I’d have a dozen kids. That’s what I’d be doing. Like my ancestor.” I pointed to the monument. “But I can’t Cleo. That’s what the gynecologist said. Because of the rape.” Cleo rolled over and sat up. She wiped her face with her sleeve. “Those fuckers,” she hissed. She hugged me, but it was like she had punched a hole in my lung. I felt so deflated. I tried to breathe, but couldn’t. I picked up the picnic basket and the others gathered the thermos and papers and followed along behind as I led the way back to the house. I caught sight of taillights pulling out of the driveway, but the driver didn’t see us and I was glad. When we got to the house, the women silently gathered their belongings and left the picnic remnants on the porch. “See you at group?” Missy asked. I shrugged, darting Cleo a glance, but she was looking back toward the knoll, one hand raised to the welt on her cheek. She turned then, and her face looked like a gaping hole where the spirit had blown out. The sight of her broke my heart. “We didn’t deserve it Cleo,” I said fervently. “None of us did.” I was so angry, looking around at the circle of faces I had come to love, faces so vulnerable, so hurt, and still so damned beautiful. It seemed to me that we had just gone backwards in a very short time, but then I decided that maybe for the first time I was truly seeing the wrong that had been done to us. Cleo spun away and got in her car before I could find words to speak. The others followed. When I carried the picnic remains into the house, I was struck by its emptiness. Just an hour earlier the kitchen had been filled with women talking and laughing, kittens rubbing against our legs and the smell of herbs cooking. Now I stood facing the refrigerator, staring at the saying hanging between two magnets from the crisis hotline. “ -- a small group….. committed individuals….can change the world….” I felt a cold rage chill my bones. Mona was right. None of us had deserved it. That night I had nightmares like I hadn’t had for months. Troy lurking in the basement, then outside with his face pressed to the door, beckoning me to open it and for some reason I did, only when I opened the door he was gone. I woke up and got out of bed to watch the sun rise. Then, I showered and went out to cut some flowers, lilies for Cleo and irises for the others. I knew where they all lived, although I had never been to their homes. Cleo was sharing an apartment with her sister and three nieces and nephews. One of the children opened the door and regarded me warily. I recognized the look. Cleo came out into the hallway. I handed her the lilies. “My birthday’s not til the 27th,” she said, folding her arms across her chest. “Who says you can’t get flowers twice?” She grinned and took the flowers and that’s when I laid out my plan. As I talked, her grin widened. When I had finished talking she said, “They can’t take our land. They don’t even have but two drops Indian blood.” Then she went back in to put her flowers in water before accompanying me to visit the others. It is amazing how much can be accomplished by a few people working together. By Sunday, we had cleaned and painted the upstairs bedrooms and put a bed, bureau and nightstand in every room. We ripped the old linoleum off the kitchen floor, because Delores said she couldn’t cook in a kitchen like that. She wasn’t going to move in with us, since she had her own house, but she wanted to test out our community as a possible bed and breakfast. We all had plans and we spent the weekend dreaming and talking big as we worked. We took a break each day for our walk through the fields, although we stayed away from the knoll. Without saying it, I think we all felt too close to our ghosts, still. We planned what we would say when we called Mona with our news on Monday and what we would feed her for dinner when she came to visit, and which flowers might be blooming. We were making so much noise I almost didn’t hear the knock on the door. Cleo and Donna were upstairs gathering screens to be repaired, Delores was making lunch, and Missy was in the basement folding laundry, just like a real family. I could see through the window that it was the guy in the suit. I called to the women and as they gathered behind me, I thought Elias and Mary Louise would be proud of our commitment, even if we were an odd kind of family. I rehearsed how I would say, politely, we didn’t intend to sell this land for gambling and slot machines, not for anything. Then, I went and opened the door.
Suzanne Davis has published stories in American Short Fiction, Notre Dame Review, Feminist Studies, descant, Zone 3 and other journals. She has won numerous awards and honors, such as inclusion in the Boston Fiction Festival, finalist, Reynolds Price Short Fiction Award, Distinguished Story in Best American Short Stories series, and others. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Davis teaches creative writing and directs the University of Connecticut's summer study abroad program in Russia.
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