She took a bite of her dog, relishing the sting of the sauerkraut against her tongue, then sipped her lemonade. It occurred to her that Bill mightn’t want to know her anymore when she had finished, that he would feel nothing but horror and disgust for a woman who could live with a creature like Norman for all those years, but it was too late to start worrying about things like that. She opened her mouth and began to speak. Her voice sounded steady enough, and that had a calming effect on her.
She began by telling him about a fifteen-year-old girl who’d felt extraordinarily pretty with a pink ribbon tied in her hair, and how this girl had gone to a varsity basketball game one night only because her Future Homemakers meeting had been cancelled at the last minute and she had two hours to kill before her father came and picked her up. Or maybe, she said, she’d just wanted people to see how pretty she looked, wearing that ribbon, and the school library was empty. A boy in a letter-jacket had sat down beside her in the bleachers, a big boy with broad shoulders, a senior who would have been out there, running up and down the court with the rest of them, if he hadn’t been kicked off the team in December for fighting. She went on, listening to her mouth spill out things she had been positive she would take untold with her to her grave. Not about the tennis racket, that one she would take untold to her grave, but about how Norman had bitten her on their honeymoon and how she had tried to persuade herself it was a lovebite, and about the Norman-assisted miscarriage, and about the crucial differences between face-hitting and back-hitting. ‘So I have to pee a lot,’ she said, smiling nervously down at her own hands, ‘but that’s getting better.’ She told him about the times, early in their marriage, when he had burned her toes or the tips of her fingers with his cigarette lighter; hilariously enough, that particular torment had ceased when Norman quit smoking. She told him about the night Norman had come home from work, sat silently in front of the TV during the news, holding his dinner on his lap but not eating it; how he had put his plate aside when Dan Rather had finished and how he had begun poking her with the tip of a pencil that had been lying on the table at one end of the couch. He poked hard enough to hurt and leave little black dots like moles on her skin, but not quite hard enough to draw blood. She told Bill there were other times when Norman had hurt her worse, but that he had never scared her more.
Mostly it was his silence. When she talked to him, tried to find out what was wrong, he wouldn’t reply. He only kept walking after her as she retreated (she hadn’t wanted to run; that would very likely have been like dropping a sulphur match into a barrel of gunpowder), not answering her questions and ignoring her outstretched, splay-fingered hands. He kept poking her arms and her shoulders and her upper chest — she had been wearing one of those shell tops with a mildly scooped neck — with the pencil and making a little plosive noise under his breath every time the pencil’s blunt point dug into her skin: Poo! Poo! Poo! At last she had been huddled in the corner with her knees up against her breasts and her hands laced over the back of her head and he had been kneeling in front of her, his face serious, almost studious, and he kept poking her with the pencil and making that noise. She told Bill that by then she was sure he was going to kill her, that she was going to be the only woman in the history of the world to be stabbed to death with a Mongol No. 2 pencil . . . and what she remembered telling herself over and over again was that she mustn’t scream because the neighbors would hear and she didn’t want to be found this way. Not still alive, at least. It was too shameful.
Then, just as she was nearing the point where she knew she was going to begin screaming in
spite of herself, Norman had gone into the bathroom and shut the door. He was in there a long time and she had thought about running then — just running out the door and into the anywhere — but it had been night, and he had been in the house. If he had come out and found her gone, she said, he would have chased her and caught her and killed her, she knew it. ‘He would have snapped my neck like the wishbone in a chicken,’ she told Bill without looking up. She had promised herself that she would leave, though; she would do it the very next time he hurt her. But after that night he hadn’t laid a hand on her for a long time. Five months, maybe. And when he did go after her again, at first it hadn’t been so bad and she had told herself that if she could stand up to being poked over and over again with a pencil, she could put up with a few punches. She had gone on thinking that until 1985, when things had suddenly escalated. She told him how scary Norman had been that year, because of the trouble with Wendy Yarrow.
‘That was the year you had your miscarriage, wasn’t it?’ Bill asked.
‘Yes,’ she told her hands. ‘He broke one of my ribs, too. Or maybe it was a couple. I don’t really remember anymore, isn’t that awful?’
He didn’t reply, so she hurried on, telling him that the worst parts (other than the miscarriage, of course) were the lo ng, scary silences when he would simply look at her, breathing so loudly through his nose that he sounded like an animal getting ready to charge.
Things had gotten a little better, she said, after her miscarriage. She told him about how she had started to slip a few cogs at the end, how time sometimes got away from her when she was in her rocker and how sometimes, when she was setting the table for supper and listening for the sound of Norman’s car pulling into the driveway, she’d realize she’d taken eight or even nine showers in the course of the day. Usually with the bathroom lights off. ‘I liked to shower in the dark,’ she said, still not daring to look up from her hands. ‘It was like a wet closet.’
She finished by telling him about Anna’s call, which Anna had made in a hurry for one important reason. She had learned a detail which hadn’t been in the newspaper story, a detail the police were holding back to help them weed out any false confessions or bad tips they might receive. Peter Slowik had been bitten over three dozen times, and at least one part of his anatomy was missing. The police believed that the killer had taken it with him . . . one way or another. Anna knew from Therapy Circle that Rosie McClendon, whose first significant contact in this city had been with her ex-husband, had been married to a biter.
There might be no connection, Anna had been quick to add. But . . . on the other hand . . .
‘A biter,’ Bill said quietly. It sounded almost as if he were talking to himself. ‘Is that what they call men like him? Is that the term?’
‘I guess it is,’ Rosie said. And then, maybe because she was afraid he wouldn’t believe her (would think she had been ‘fibulating,’ in Normanspeak), she slid her shoulder briefly out of the pink Tape Engine tee-shirt she was wearing and showed him the old white ring of scar there, like the remnant of a shark-bite. That had been the first one, her honeymoon present.
Then she turned up her left forearm, showing him another one. This time it wasn’t a bite it made her think of; for some reason it made her think of smooth white faces almost hidden in lush green undergrowth.
‘This one bled quite a bit, then got infected,’ she told him. She spoke in the tone of someone relaying routine information — that Gramma had called earlier, perhaps, or that the mailman had left a package. ‘I didn’t go to the doctor, though. Norman brought home a big bottle of antibiotic tablets. I took them and got better. He knows all sorts of people he can get things from. He calls people like that “daddy’s little helpers.” That’s sort of funny when you think of it, isn’t it?’
She was still talking mostly to her hands, which were clasped in her lap, but she finally dared a quick look up at him, to gauge his reaction to the things she had been saying. What