Amy Pence

A Face Before the Face

What wakes me is not the storm but the image in the dream: vivid but fragmentary. It quakes straight through me, the color of liver. The room is adrift, aqueous when I open my eyes. Shivers of lightning pass through it. Rain pelts the windows, as if the clouds had set low around my cabin and opened up sideways. In the storm's bobbing spiral, the picture reworks itself: first crustacean, then budding limbs, its one eye pulling apart into two. A baby's skeleton --- its rib's cavern heaving, fluorescent, as if there in the ocean's scree it was breathing its last. Or its first. I'd had no stillbirths, no miscarriages. Yet it was that incomplete thing - that whispered you know, you know what it is, Josephine - that ached to be seen.

One of the shutters smacks furiously on the east side of my cabin. I haven't gotten around to nailing it down, and only remember it when the wind takes its heavy edge. Frank, my closest neighbor, occasionally comes uphill the two miles or so to check on me. Lately, all he can do is harp about taking down the tree: St. Therese. But I shake my head no.

In the fall, he'll come up once every two weeks or so to help chop wood for the winter. But unless I go down to ask for help, he leaves me alone summers. He knows I can manage fine enough; I have the truck to go to town if I need to, though I stock up for three months straight: canned vegetables, large sacks of beans and rice that I buy in Dahlonega. In the summer, I groom my own vegetables among the herbs. Can them myself in the fall. I have no desire for things that spoil, like meats, or milks and cheeses, though once in awhile I have a craving for eggs.

And Craving said: 'I did not see you descend, but now I see you rising,' Mary Magdalene's words roll around in my sleep-logged head. Jesus via Mary Magdalene. The craving or the promise of eggs brings the rounded skeleton back into my view. Lightning shivers across the ceiling - showing me the beams and cobwebs - I close my eyes to look at the skeleton more closely. Half-baby, half-fish. Because it has no arms, and yet the mouth purses and purses with cries.

How are you dear? My voice creaks open in the darkness, a cat scratching to be let in. A loud crack sounds right above my head. I wonder how St. Therese is taking it; some nights I hear her groans and sighs. Tonight she's drowned out by the tempest. I push myself wearily up, reach for my glasses. I slog across the room in the murky dark to the nearest window, my joints aching. Outside, leaves lash in the wind and rain, small branches whip past my vision, and in a quick shock of light there is St. Therese, recumbent yet awed - as if her mouth were open. If the trees had become human and divine for me, what had humans become?

They have no arms. Tonight in the eerie light, tree branches appear like hair standing on end. They are torsos without limbs.

Like Tansy's pictures. When she was four, five, just beginning to draw, she drew the standard bell-shaped bodies for girls and women. Her daddy was just the one thin spoke with legs and arms. But the bell-shaped girls: they were never the right height. I never understood why she drew me the same size as she was. What kind of mother must I be? That's what I used to think. And, of course, both of them, always, were armless. When I pointed it out, Tansy's mouth would drop open, and she'd look at her drawings she'd not really seen them. They were drawn by another Tansy, a different girl.

"I forgot," she'd say in a thin voice, then draw them in with haste. The crayoned arms looked limp and powerless. They were afterthoughts. She hadn't intended them at all.

There were no arms, but there must be wings. "Where are mine?," she would ask. I guessed it was because Edward had told her she was a fairy, and those walks into the woods, so late, too late, I thought, were journeys into a fairy land he'd created for her. He didn't tell me that; he quit telling me things even before she was born. A silent man, with a smug mouth and a waist that expanded year by year. Even her name Edward had insisted on: Tansy, the queen of Tylwyeth Teg, a fairy race. By then, I had no energy to object.

But the wings - the lack of them really - became her obsession. There she'd be in her room, rubbing her back against the wall - "where are my wings, Mommy, where are my wings?". Frantic, then angry, then inconsolable. "They hurt, Mommy, they hurt. They won't come out! Why can't they come out, Mommy? Why, why?".  As if her body were not her own, she would throw herself on the floor or struggle against me, lashing out with her small arms. Her face a blur of the unconscious. A face before the face.

"Tansy, Tansy, calm down, calm down, honey," I'd plead with her. I'd hear dread in the sound of doors slamming all the way through the house, then Edward breathing behind the door, listening. The chill would pass from my scalp to my feet. Another confrontation. The doorknob would turn and Tansy would be on the floor sobbing.

"Why are you doing this to her, Josephine?" he would ask. I would try to defend myself. "I'm not doing anything, Edward." I'd try to explain that she was going on about wings. I'd ask him: why is she talking about them?

And then the twist, where I could never see it coming. "I can't believe the way you hurt her, Josephine. Are you telling her she doesn't have wings? Or are you telling her she does? Either way it's not very healthy." Every confrontation a convoluted spiral that turned me around, against myself, and all the time his drilling eyes, his lips drawn up in a sneer. I was like an insect in his gaze, skewered to the walls. Armless.

"Please Edward," I'd beg. "Help me help Tansy: I don't know what's wrong." I would plead, I would lose my cool, I would be angry in the face of the sticky molasses of his voice.

Because then he would say, languidly, mocking:  "You don't know what's wrong, you don't know what's wrong.  I was wrong about you. You have no mothering instinct.  You're hopeless Josephine, you shouldn't be near her.  Look how you're traumatizing her."  He'd point to a ruined Tansy, clawing at my knees.   And finally, with words like that, he would get me.

"Me?" I would sputter. Tansy would be banging her fists against my legs, and there he would be with his face so raw and close to mine, making both of us a distortion.  I would yell at him then, and when I would yell, Tansy would cower back in fear, and Edward would smile.

Oh God forgive me, God! God!  My whisper was a croak in the pool of the storm where I seemed to float at the window's gate. That was almost always how it would end, our fights.  Me pleading Oh God forgive me, crossing my scarred and guilty heart. When, in fact, it was Tansy and I who had been assaulted. I would go to my knees to pray and he would scoop up Tansy, covering her face as if I had struck her. Her body shivered; she did look like a winged body, then. "Go back to your room, Jo," he would say. "You've done your damage." And I would. I would almost crawl back to our bed with a weakness that would overtake me. I would sleep; I couldn't stop sleeping.

And then, one day, I woke: she was ten by then, and finally, I accused him. I said it. His glassy eyes flickered, like a moth beating against a lighted window. I watched his back retreating: through the screen door, down the steps, into the car. Where he sat. Glaring at me, something turning in his mind. He put the car in reverse; he tore down the street. Not a half an hour later, the call from the police. Was I relieved? Was I satisfied now?  That's what Edward would say, if he could have.

I creep back to my bed across the room and its furry confines, leaving St. Therese with her sisters, the birch trees that bend to support her. An undergirding. St. Therese, that girl-nun, a white oak, and her acolytes straining to keep her upright. All that is born, all that is created, all the elements of nature are interwoven and united with each other. All that is composed shall be decomposed; everything returns to its roots; matter returns to the origins of matter. So Jesus said to that whore Mary Magdalene. That whore, is what they think of her. Now. The thunder growls as it retreats south, towards Atlanta.

I pull up the covers. The skeleton baby opens in front of me like a triptych. As if I had pulled open a hinged lid. On one side was a version of me: I had gotten so desperate under Edward's gaze, I became a fetus curled into myself. One bulging eye: a mad oblivion.

On the other side were Tansy's pictures: those armless girls. The greasy smears of the skeletal crayola. In the center of the box: the adult Tansy, her incompletions, her boxed and contained life. Rigid, stick-thin. In Atlanta, 80 miles away, she probably lies open-eyed in the darkness. Next to a different man. The storm will come, will sweep over them, and she'll deny it all, all over again. Her father dead now; she sees him only as the martyr, the suicide: the victim of my "weird" accusations.

Like Mary Magdalene, all would be disputed. You did not see what you thought you did. Jesus did not come to you from the cave. You are wrong, and I am done with you.

How are you, dear?  The words linger in the room, like figments. I'll sleep again - soon - bobbing in the powerful sleep of our sacrifices.

Amy Pence’s chapbook of poems, Skin’s Dark Night, was published by 2River Press in 2003.  Current poems are online at The Pedestal Magazine and Mudlark and in print in Runes and Red Rock Review.  She lives in Carrollton, Georgia with her husband and her daughter and teaches in Atlanta. This is her first fiction publication.