her birdy hands . . . and sometimes I’d almost scream and ask her not to, and once I spilled some of her soup on my arm when she touched my face and I burned myself and that time I did scream . .
. and I cried and I could see the smile in her eyes then, too.
“Near the end the drugs stopped working. She was the one who would scream then, and none of us could remember the way she was before, not even my mother. She was just this foul, hateful, screaming thing in the back bedroom . . . our dirty secret.”
Rachel swallowed. Her throat clicked.
“My parents were gone when she finally . . . when she . you know, when she. . .“
With terrible, wrenching effort, Rachel brought it out.
“When she died, my parents were gone. They were gone but I was with her. It was Passover season, and they went out for a while to see some friends. Just for a few minutes. I was reading a magazine in the kitchen. Well, I was looking at it, anyway. I was waiting -for it to be time to give her some more medicine because she was screaming. She’d been screaming ever since my folks left, almost.
I couldn’t read with her screaming that way. And then
see, what happened was . . . well . . . Zelda stopped screaming.
Louis, I was eight. . . bad dreams every night. . . I had started to think she hated me because my back was straight, because I didn’t have the constant pain, because I could walk, because I was going to live . . . I started to imagine she wanted to kill me. Only, even now tonight, Louis, I don’t really think it was all my imagination. I do think she hated me. I don’t really
think she would have killed me, but if she could have taken over my body some way. . . turned me out of it like in a fairy story I think she would have done that. But when she stopped screaming, I went in to see if everything was all right. . . to see if she had fallen over on her side or slipped off her pillows. I got in and I looked at her and I thought she must have swallowed her own tongue and she was choking to death. Louis”—Rachel’s voice rose again, teary and frighteningly childish, as if she were regressing, reliving the experience—”Louis, I didn’t know what to do! I was eight!”
“No, of course you didn’t,” Louis said. He turned to her and hugged her, and Rachel gripped him with the panicky strength of a poor swimmer whose boat has suddenly overturned in the middle of a large lake. “Did someone actually give you a hard time about it, babe?”
“No,” she said, “no one blamed me. But nobody could make it better either. No one could change it. No one could make it an unhappening, Louis. She hadn’t swallowed her tongue. She started making a sound, a kind of, I don’t know—gaaaaaa—like that—”
In her distressed, total recall of that day she did a more than creditable imitation of the way her sister Zelda must have sounded, and Louis’s mind Bashed to Victor Pascow. His grip on his wife tightened.
“—and there was spit, spit coming down her chin—”
“Rachel, that’s enough,” he said, not quite steadily. “I am aware of the symptoms.”
“I’m explaining,” she said stubbornly. “I’m explaining why I can’t go to poor Norma’s funeral, for one thing, and why we had that stupid fight that day—”
“Shh—that’s forgotten.”
“Not by me, it isn’t,” she said. “I remember it well, Louis. I remember it as well as I remember my sister Zelda choking to death in her bed on April 14, 1965.”
For a long moment there was silence in the room.
“I turned her over on her belly and thumped her back,” Rachel went on at last. “It’s all I knew to do. Her feet were beating up and down . . . and her twisted legs . . . and I remember there was a sound like farting . . . I thought she was farting or I was, but it wasn’t farts, it was the seams under both arms of my blouse ripping out when I turned her over. She started to . . . to convulse .
. . and I saw that her face was turned sideways, turned into the pillows, and I thought, oh, she’s choking, Zelda’s choking, and they’ll come home and say I murdered her by choking, they’ll say you hated her, Rachel, and that was true, and they’ll say you wanted her to be dead, and that was true too. Because, Louis, see, the first thought that went through my mind when she started to go up and down in the bed like that, I remember it, my first thought was Oh good, finally, Zelda’s choking and this is going to be over.
So I turned her over again and her face had gone black, Louis, and her eyes were bulging and her neck was swelled up. Then she died.
I backed across the room. I guess I wanted to back out the door, but I hit the wall and a picture fell down—it was a picture from one of the Oz books that Zelda liked before she got sick with the meningitis, when she was well, it was a picture of Oz the Great and Terrible, only Zelda always called him Oz the Gweat and
Tewwible because she couldn’t make that sound, and so she sounded like Elmer Fudd. My mother got that picture framed because . . . because Zelda liked it most of all Oz the Gweat and Tewwible . . . and it fell down and hit the floor and the glass in the frame shattered and I started to scream because I knew she was dead and I thought . . . I guess I thought it was her ghost, coming back to get me, and I knew that her ghost would hate me like she did, but her ghost wouldn’t be stuck in bed, so I screamed . . . I screamed and I ran out of the house screaming
‘Zelda’s dead! Zelda’s dead! Zelda’s dead!’ And the neighbors. . .
they came and they looked . . . they saw me running down the street with my blouse all ripped out under the arms . . . I was yelling ‘Zelda’s dead!’ Louis, and I guess maybe they thought I was crying but I think . . . I think maybe I was laughing, Louis. I think maybe that’s what I was doing.”
“If you were, I salute you for it,” Louis said.
“You don’t mean that, though,” Rachel said with the utter surety of one who has been over a point and over it and over it. He let it go.
He thought she might eventually get rid of this awful, rancid memory that had haunted her for so long—most of it, anyway—
but never this part. Never completely. Louis Creed was no psychiatrist, but he knew that there are rusty, half-buried things in the terrain of any life and that human beings seem compelled to go back to these things and pull at them, even though they cut. Tonight Rachel had pulled almost all of it out, like some grotesque and stinking rotten tooth, its crown black, its nerves infected, its roots fetid. It was out. Let that last noxious cell remain; if God was good it would remain dormant except in her deepest dreams. That she had been able to remove as much as she had was well nigh incredible—it did not just speak of her courage; it clarioned it. Louis was in awe of her. He felt like cheering.
He sat up now and turned on the light. “Yes,” he said, “I salute you for it. And if I needed another reason to . . . to really dislike your mother and father, I’ve got it now. You never should have been left alone with her, Rachel. Never.”
Like a child—the child of eight she had been when this dirty, incredible thing had happened—she reprimanded him, “Lou, it was Passover season—”
“I don’t care if it was judgment trump,” Louis said with a sudden low and hoarse savagery that caused her to pull back a little. He was remembering the student nurses, those two candy stripers whose evil luck it had been to be in attendance on the morning Pascow had been brought in dying. One of them, a tough little lady named Carla Shavers, had returned the next day and had worked out so well that even Chariton was impressed. The other they had never seen again. Louis was not surprised and did not blame her.
Where was the nurse? There should have been an R.N. in attendance . . . they went out, they actually went out and left an eight-year-old kid in charge of her dying sister, who was probably clinically insane by then. Why? Because it was Passover season.