Songs of the Humpback Whale: A Novel in Five Voices

42 JANE

After we check into the only motel in What Cheer, I find myself remembering things that I have not thought about for years. I could understand it if I were replaying the crash over and over in my head-that would make sense to me. But instead I am seeing my father, plain as day. He moves around the edges of the motel room, picking up glass tumblers and straightening the bathroom mirror. He flushes the toilet, twice. I do not dare fall asleep; I do not dare fall asleep. Then, just as I have expected, he starts to walk towards my bed. But he changes course and sits instead on the other bed, next to Rebecca. He breathes clouds of scotch and tugs the blanket away, revealing, ripe, my daughter.

I was nine the first time it happened. My mother and father had a fight, and my mother left to stay with my aunt in Concord. I did everything I was supposed to: I made dinner for Daddy and Joley; I cleaned up the kitchen; I even remembered to put the hose into the sink when I ran the dishwasher. We all avoided talking about Mama.

But because she was away, and because I felt I had earned it, I decided to go into her room, to her perfume tray. Mama smelled different every day: like oranges and spice, or fresh lemon pies, or cool marble, or even the wind. When she left the room she left a memory, a scent, behind her.

I knew what I was looking for, a little red glass bottle in the shape of a berry that was called Framboise. The word was etched right on the glass. My mother did not let me wear perfume. Little girls who wear perfume, she said, turn into big girls who are tramps.

I was very careful with the fragile bottle because I didn’t want to spill a drop. I turned it over on my finger the way I had seen her do every morning, and then I touched this finger, wet with the smell of raspberries, to my throat and my wrists and behind my knees. I turned around and around in a circle. How wonderful, I thought. It is with me no matter where I go.

I stopped myself by catching my arms around the post of my parents’ bed. Standing at the door was my father.

“What the hell have you been doing?” he said, sniffing the air. He leaned closer to grab my shirt and the smell of whiskey cut through the thickness of berries. “You will bathe. Now!”

He made me strip naked in front of him, although I hadn’t done that in five years. He watched me from the door of the bathroom with his arms crossed. The entire time, I cried. I cried when the shower, too hot, scalded my skin and I continued to cry when I stepped onto the bath mat and toweled dry. “Go to your goddamned room,” my father said.

I pulled a flannel nightgown over my head and turned down the covers of my bed. I told myself aloud this was like any other night, and I tried not to lie awake waiting for punishment.

Joley came into my room on his way to bed. He was only five, but he knew. “Jane, what did you do wrong?” And I told him as best I could explain that I had stupidly been pretending to be Mama.

“There’s nothing you can do,” I said. “Get out before he hits you too.”

I waited the longest time that night, but my father did not come up to spank me. Maybe that was the worst part: imagining what terrible thing he was thinking up downstairs. A belt? A brush? When I heard him, heavy, coming up the stairs, I dove beneath the covers. I pulled my nightgown tight around my ankles, a drawstring. I counted to one hundred.

At seventy-seven my father turned my doorknob. He sat down on the edge of the bed and waited for me to pull away the covers from my face.

“I’m not going to punish you tonight,” my father said, “and do you know why? Because you were such a good little cook. That’s why.”

“Really?” I asked, amazed.

“Really.” He took off his shoes and asked if I would like to hear a story.

“Yes,” I said, thinking this might not be so bad after all. My father started to tell me a story-a fairy tale-about an evil woman who kept her daughter locked in a closet with mice and bats. The girl’s father tried to get to this closet but the woman had huge guard dogs protecting it and he had to kill her, and then the dogs, before he could rescue his daughter.

“And then what?” I asked, waiting to see what would happen.

“I don’t know. I haven’t come up with the ending.”

“You can’t just leave a story hanging,” I protested, and he said we should try to think of one together. But he was getting tired, so could he lie down next to me?

I moved over on the bed and we talked about the ways the girl’s father might kill the evil woman. Stakes through the heart, I suggested, but my father was leaning towards poisoned tea. We came up with other things that might be lurking in the closet: ghosts and tarantulas and man-eating piranhas. Maybe the girl should try to get out by herself, I suggested, but my father insisted that was not the way it would happen.

When he got cold he crawled under the covers, so close that when he spoke my hair fluttered. “What do you think will happen to that girl, Jane?” he said, and as he did that he put his hand on my chest.

It wasn’t right, I knew that, because every muscle in my body tensed at once. It wasn’t right, but then again he was my father, wasn’t he? And he had been so nice. He could have hit me tonight, but he didn’t.

“I don’t know,” I whispered. “I don’t know what should happen.”

“Well, what about this? The father drives stakes through the heart of the evil woman and drugs the Dobermans with poisoned tea. That way both of our ideas come into play.” Without hesitation, like he was proud of it, he slipped his hand between my legs, coming to rest like a weight on my vagina.

“Daddy.”

“Do you like it, Jane?” my father whispered. “Do you like the ending?”

I did not move. I pretended that this was some other little girl, someone else’s quivering body, and then when I heard my father’s breathing come deep and even, I slid away. I got out of bed without creaking the mattress and turned the doorknob like a whisper. I started to run as fast as I could. At the bottom of the stairs, I tripped and hit my head. Blood was running down my face when I flung open the front door and ran into the night, barefoot, no longer sure about anything, including who or what I was supposed to be.

A policeman found me in a neighbor’s yard early the next morning,and brought me back to the house. He held my hand and rang the doorbell and my father came to answer the door. Daddy was wearing his best suit and even Joley had on a nice Sunday shirt and a button-on tie. “We just called the station,” my father said, beaming. “Damn quick service.” He joked with the policeman and invited him in for coffee. He looked at the cut on my forehead and tried to rub over the dried blood with his finger but I pulled away. “Suit yourself, Jane,” he said. “You can take care of it upstairs.” As I crawled up the steps, with Joley behind me, I heard my father talking to that policeman. “We don’t know what the problem is,” he was saying. “It’s those nightmares.”

“What did he do, Jane?” Joley asked when I had locked the bathroom door behind us. I wouldn’t tell him, but I let him watch as I cleaned my cut with Bactine. He stripped the Band-Aid for me. It did not surprise me that the cut was the shape of a cross.

I told Joley I had to pee and pushed him outside. Then I locked the door again and pulled my nightgown over my head. I ripped it into shreds and threw it in the garbage pail. On the back of the door was the full-length mirror Mama used when she got all dressed up to go out. I could hear my father downstairs, laughing. I gazed into the mirror, expecting to find outlined the very parts that I could say I hated-but I was standing tall, thin, arms at my sides. I knew from this alien rhythm in my heart that I had become a different person. I did not understand how, under the circumstances, I could possibly look the same.