Nine Women Read online

  I never grew used to the noise and rush of children leaving class. When the bell sounded, I always waited while the room emptied. Then, in a pause disturbed only by the soft sounds of the teacher gathering her papers, I walked slowly through the door, last and alone. Always alone, except for once, years later when I was at boarding school at St. Mary’s, mine the only dark face in a sea of Irish skin. (The other girls simply ignored me, saw through me as if I were invisible or transparent.) By the time I had gathered my books and reached the door, their departing backs were far down the hall. But at St. Mary’s I was not alone. My companion was a moonfaced child of my own age who had rheumatoid arthritis, took massive doses of cortisone, and moved with the slow painful dignity of an ancient woman. She died in our second year of high school. I, along with every other girl in the school, wrote a letter of condolence to her parents. Mine was never acknowledged.

  But that was in the future, in the time when I was no longer a child, a good many years away.

  For first grade, I had two skirts, made by my mother according to the uniform dress code of the parochial school system, and two blouses. Every second day, when I came home, I was expected to wash my blouse carefully, using the kitchen sink and a small scrubbing board that my mother kept underneath, propped against the pipes. I then hung it on the back porch inside the screen, where no bird could soil it. Every so often my mother was dissatisfied with its whiteness and she would wash it again in bleach. The next time I wore that blouse I was certain to have a rash across my neck and shoulders where the fabric rubbed my skin.

  Later on, when my growing required new blouses (the skirts had deep hems to let down), my mother made them slightly different. She added small tucks down the front, two tiny rows on each side of the buttons. I noticed the nuns looking at me—they were very strict about uniforms in those days—and they must have written to my mother. My next blouses were perfectly plain. What the nuns couldn’t know about were my slips. My mother made my slips too, and they had all the elaborate decorations that my blouses lacked. They were tucked, with drawn lace and wide bands of crochet at the shoulders, and a deep flounce of lace at the hem. Only one nun ever saw them and she wasn’t really a nun. She was a novice: very young, shorter even than I was. She was cleaning the bathrooms and I, not noticing her, was fanning myself with my skirt against the heat. She stopped and fingered my slip. “What lovely work, what exquisite work.” Then she looked shocked and ashamed—perhaps she had made a vow of silence—and she went hastily back to her pail and mop.

  After the first year at school, I took the city bus home. The stop was at our corner. All I had to do was cross the street and open the door. Once inside, I rushed to bathe, to brush my hair, to put on the dresses that my mother would sell. Wearing her clothes and her dreams, I would move carefully among her customers, gracefully, as only a princess can.

  The lotus blossom. The treasure of the mahal. In the women’s faces I saw greed and covetousness. My mother’s order books rustled busily. I myself drew spirit and sustenance from the flickering eyes and the fingers stretched out to touch. In the small crowded room, I had come into my castle and my kingdom.

  And so I passed my childhood disguised to myself as a princess. I thrived, grew strong and resilient. When the kingdom at last fell and the castle was conquered, and I lost my crown and my birthright, when I stood naked and revealed as a young black female of illegitimate birth, it hardly mattered. By then the castle and the kingdom were within me and I carried them away.

  HUNTER

  AS THE PLANE BEGAN its descent into Clarksdale, Nancy Martinson stretched and sighed, closed her magazine and tucked it away neatly. Her husband and younger daughter slept soundly in the seats next to her; across the aisle her other daughter worked a crossword puzzle.

  Outside the brilliant morning sunshine thinned to a yellow hazy glow. On the ground below, patches of fog shrouded the neatly plowed cornfields and clung to the brushy sides of the hills. The plane banked, circled; she saw a black strip of highway and a single car on it.

  The engines slowed, changed tone, settling the plane for its final approach. With a soft hiss, the wheels went down. Thick gray fog wiped the window empty.

  She sat back, rubbing her neck, dutifully checking her seat belt, waiting for the landing, watching the fog-obscured window. And saw a tree race past, leaves spattering like rain against the window.

  Somebody has thrown a tree at us, she thought foolishly. How can that be.

  The floor rose, lurching hard against her feet. She was shaken like a rag doll, so violently she could scarcely breathe. She wrapped her arms around her body, holding on, while her head pounded against the seat back. Her knees jerked up, beating against her crossed arms. She heard loud squeals like tires on pavement and a steady high-pitched metallic whine. And voices, massed voices like a church choir far away. But no, she thought with sluggish wonder, those were screams.

  She held tightly to herself as she careened through flashes of light and dark, through roaring oceans of sound. Shaking violently like a flag snapping in the wind.

  A yellow column of flame appeared in the aisle. Glittering, shining. The color of sun, burning like sun.

  She saw her daughter—recognized the blue and white stripes of her dress—saw her daughter, arms outstretched, rise to meet it. Pass through the gleaming gateway and vanish.

  Next to her, her husband was rising, stretching. She saw clearly the initial on his shirt sleeve. He reached for her, missed, called to her. Before he vanished in the brilliant light.

  She too would follow.… But the arms wrapped around her body refused to loosen their grip. Her feet stamped down against the lurching floor and found nothing there. She struggled, bent double, thrashing from side to side.

  Then she was free. In silence, in complete and perfect silence, she floated slowly through air that was sprinkled and speckled with glitter. Fell forever along rainbows like giant playground slides. Ended at last with trees bending over her, surrounding her. To hold them back, she lifted her hands straight out in front of her, fingers spread.

  All around her small lives went on, undisturbed. Grass broke through its softened seed, uncoiling to the surface, lifting tents of mud on the points of its sharp blades. Leaves unrolled from their tight curls on the twigs overhead, relaxing to the air with soft whisperings of content.

  She heard ants running across the surface of the earth, feet clattering like iron boots. She heard grains of sand shift and rattle within the tunnels worms dug patiently below the surface. And she saw that the ground around her spurted blood like many fountains and the worms’ tunnels flooded red.

  Sam Flanders, in his second year with KLR-News, left his apartment half an hour early for work. He checked his watch, then checked again with the car radio. He shrugged: thirty minutes’ lost sleep. Well, since he had extra time, he wouldn’t fight interstate traffic. He’d go the long way, by back roads, through the country.

  He drove out Perkins Road, past miles of new yellow-green cornfields, hazy with night fog. He turned down Bingham Lane, a small blacktopped road that ran through old pasture fields just west of the airport. By night this stretch of road was the most popular lovers’ lane in the county. There were car tracks running into the brush on both sides and piles of beer cans and bottles half covered by Johnson grass.

  Maybe there was a story in that, he thought automatically, absentmindedly: Alcohol and Youth. The news director was a prohibitionist at heart; maybe he’d go for something like that.

  He slowed in a heavy patch of fog and then moments later rose into bright sun at the top of a hill. The fog was always bad out here. It would burn itself off in strips and shreds and the area wouldn’t be clear until nearly noon. He thought: They build airports in these low waste areas and then wonder why they have so many instrument approaches.

  Back into the fog. He turned on his headlights and started the windshield wipers. Nothing to do but creep along.

  Because the windows were closed
against the morning chill, he heard the impact as a dull thud. He blinked, uncertain, seeing nothing. Another muffled sound. He opened the window and leaned out into the wet air. A couple of loud pops: he wasn’t sure of their direction.

  The fog seemed thicker than ever. He turned on his car’s emergency flashers and drove with his head half out the open window. Nothing. He pulled off the road and got out: still nothing. He hesitated; there was a faint smell of something in the air and the fog itself seemed to tremble and dance. A few spatters of rain splashed his face.

  He drove on again, puzzled and curious. A mile farther and he noticed a faint glow to his right, the fog darkened suddenly and he smelled oily smoke.

  He held his breath and blinked rapidly. His jaw quivered, he stopped it with his hand. He glanced at his watch without actually seeing it. Then, carefully, methodically, he let the words form in his mind: an incoming flight has crashed short of the runway.

  His eyes still on the distant glow, he reached for the radio to call his office. He was precise and slow: “… Near the north end of Bingham Lane, visible from the road. Would you repeat that to me?” The electronic voice cackled it back to him. “Right. You got it. I’m going over there now.”

  It was farther than he thought, much farther. His run slowed to a trot as he made his way along a series of gullies, stumbling, sliding on the wet leaf mold, splashing through green-skimmed pools. When the overhead mist gleamed bright yellow and drops of fog sparkled like points of ice, he left the gully and began climbing a steep pine hill. His leather shoes slipped on the needle-covered ground, he grabbed trunks and branches to pull himself crosswise up the slope. There was an overhang at the top, soft and yielding. He scrambled across.

  From here he looked directly down at the broken fuselage and the towering feather of black smoke, flame-edged.

  He shivered in the gleaming heat, his knees buckled and he crouched animal-fashion on the ground. The flames seemed to reach to him, to beckon him. And he heard clearly: pealing bells, bells of jubilation.

  In panic he rolled and stumbled back down the slope, to hide in the thickest pines. To wait for the fire trucks and the company of other live men.

  By the time the first emergency vehicles arrived and the crews filled the air with their shouts, he’d noticed something a couple of hundred yards away through the thin bare trunks: a bright spot. He climbed toward it, moving slowly, gingerly, as if the ground might explode with his weight. He found an airplane seat wedged into the soft earth of a small rainwash. And in the seat a woman in a pale yellow dress. She lay on her back, arms stretched out, palms up. Her face was blackened and there were large smudges across her dress; her shoeless feet hung limply, toes down. She was so still he thought she was dead, until her wide-open eyes blinked, very slowly. He moved closer and saw the tiny rhythmical movement of small shallow breaths.

  Overhead a mockingbird chattered and began to sing. Sam Flanders scrambled toward the top of the ridge, shouting for help.

  For Nancy Martinson time came and went in a pattern of overhead fluorescent tubes, crisscrossed by faces. Some white, some dark, some blood red. Some with glasses circling their eyes. Some bearded like pirates. Some wearing white sails on their heads, set to drive them on the wind. (She heard the wind whistling and the steady clank of buoys and the sound of surf. What shore was that?)

  The faces bobbed across the fluorescent-streaked sky like balloons on a string. Their hands were hooks, they propped her up, put food into her mouth, massaged her jaws and stroked her throat, and dragged her stumbling up and down closed tubes of space.

  They began speaking to her. A full-rigged sailing ship said, “Nancy, Nancy, can you hear me?”

  The sails sped off into the distance and became a small triangle of starched cap. “Do I know you?” she said politely.

  Under the cap was a round face with dark eyebrows graying like frost. “Dr. Thigpen will be so delighted. Everybody will be so delighted.”

  “Why will they be delighted? Who are they to be delighted?”

  The round face smiled a gentle doll’s smile. And the porcelain smile hardened and froze.

  Eventually another smile hung in its place. Then another. There was never a moment when a shiny polished face was not watching and smiling.

  Sometimes she spoke to them and sometimes she didn’t. She discovered bit by bit they were real, that they smelt of perspiration and perfume and tobacco.

  She learned that they all wanted to talk to her. Carefully, so very carefully, so slowly.

  Do you know who you are? they wanted to know. And when were you born? And when did you marry?

  She grew irritated at their childish probing and refused to answer, saying: I have never heard anything so silly.

  They looked confused and a little hurt, so she changed her mind and said only: Don’t ask such stupid questions. I’m not feebleminded.

  Do you know what has happened? they asked. Yes, she said, the plane crashed. There were trees banging against the window. Like people wanting to get in.

  Dr. Thigpen—he came very often, he had thick gray hair and the long sad face of an old horse—said, “Do you remember that your husband and your two daughters were on that plane with you?”

  “Yes,” she said and then: “You’ve changed the questions. Before you would say: Was there anybody on the plane with you. Perhaps you think I don’t remember, but I do.”

  “It was my mistake,” he said.

  “I don’t think so,” she said.

  He continued as if he hadn’t heard: “They were on the plane with you.”

  “I will tell you what you want to know,” she said, “or what I think you want to know. I know who I am and I know that I am in a hospital, though I don’t know exactly where. I know that my husband and my two daughters, whose names are Anna and Marsha, were killed. I saw them die. I saw the whole plane die.”

  “Yes.” He polished his glasses, replaced them. She read in his eyes uncertainty and calculation. “You were thrown free, some hundred feet, they tell me, and down a very steep slope. Do you remember anything of that?”

  “There were mockingbirds singing,” she said, “and a wind blowing.”

  “Other people, the rescue crews, remember birds singing,” he said.

  She shrugged; other people were nothing to her.

  “The wind of course was the flames. Do you remember anything more, how you got there?”

  “I fell out,” she said. “I slipped right out between one second and the next—there was a little hesitation, a little opening, and I fell through.”

  The thought in his eyes ended, like doors closing. “There’ll be a formal hearing, there always is, they tell me. Normally you might be asked to testify. But under the circumstances I’m going to recommend very strongly that you not be contacted in any way.”

  She shrugged. “It is nothing to me whether I talk to them or to you or to any other of God’s creatures.”

  An appraising look from the glasses. “Do you know you were the only one to survive?”

  Again she saw the pillar of flame, tattered streamers flying. She saw it sweep down the aisle, gleaming.

  Survive. She looked into his two shiny rounds of eyeglass held together by a strip of gold. No, I didn’t, she said silently. No, I didn’t.

  Now Nancy Martinson sat by a window and watched a flat expanse of rooftops sprinkled with trees and speared by telephone poles. In the distance there was a bridge with traffic moving slowly across it, at night the cars became fireflies crawling up her windowpane. She listened: horns and sirens, urgent, complaining, angry; mumbling engines and tires hissing on asphalt; coughs and shouts and mutters and curses; dogs barking and babies crying and the soft singsong of cats on the prowl.

  Her brother Stephen came, and his wife, Lois. Nancy watched their tears and wondered if their grief would add appreciably to the general noise level outside in the world.

  “There’s nothing I can say, Nancy, what can I say?”

 
Lois sobbed and choked and ran from the room. They could hear her heels down the corridor, getting smaller and smaller, until they sounded like a distant woodpecker.

  “It was an accident,” Nancy said.

  “But, my God!”

  “Accidents happen,” Nancy told him, explaining slowly, carefully. “According to the laws of probability, a predictable number of people die in a predictable number of ways during any given time period.”

  He stared at her, silent, tears making shiny smears on his cheeks.

  “Airline fatalities are one for each eight million passenger miles.”

  A tear reached his lip, his tongue hesitantly licked it away.

  “Robert and I looked that up once.”

  He dried his cheek with his fingers. “Poor Robert.”

  “We decided we would fly together, the whole family. So no one would survive alone.… Do you remember when we were little, Stephen, we’d pull the tails off lizards, they’d run off, and the tails would be left behind, jerking and twitching.… Do you remember when we played under the chinaberry tree by the swing?” Sweet pale purple flowers and thousands of seeds on the ground. “We’d play marbles with the seeds,” she said.… Those houses she saw from her window, they must have chinaberry trees, and children playing under them. She could still feel the dry sandy soil between her fingers.

  “Will you live with us now?” her brother asked.

  “No, of course not.”

  Dr. Thigpen came in the room. “You move so silently,” she said. “Are all psychiatrists so quiet? I’ve never had to do with one before.”

  “I wear rubber-soled shoes.” His smile flashed on, then settled to a half-speed glow.

  “I’ll go home now,” she said. “To my house.”

  Dr. Thigpen nodded. “Your brother will see that everything is taken care of for you.”

  “Yes,” said Stephen eagerly. “Anytime you want to go home, we’ll drive you. I know you don’t want to fly.…”