He led the way to the head, which opened directly to the sea at the boat’s lower levels. “Step lively, and step quick!” he called. “Trust me, Electra! Follow me!”
He plunged before her, out of the ship and into the black waters. She hesitated not an instant before she followed him into the darkness.
NEAVE
Gay Divorcée
Eleven months after the wedding to Ricky Luhmann, Lilly showed up at my door one rainy night with a suitcase to one side of her and Annie to the other. My sister had gotten quieter and quieter on the subject of her life. We could go for weeks without saying anything at all that wasn’t about back orders or salesgirls or payroll. The woman who came to my door with Annie clinging to her legs that rainy night was barely recognizable as my Lilly. Her hair hung clumped and damp, her eyes were sunken, and her expression was as frozen as a ceramic doll’s. Annie was very quiet, which scared me as much as Lilly’s looks.
Before this night my sister had spoken in no specific terms about her marriage to Ricky Luhrmann, but from a few brief and sweeping generalizations it was clear that gradually things with him had changed. We got Annie to bed and I sat my sister down at the kitchen table. I asked her if she wanted a warm bath and she looked stricken in a way you wouldn’t expect when you offered a shivering woman a warm bath.
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t want a bath. That’s all.”
“Okay,” I said. “Tea?” She said yes to tea. “Tell me,” I said when I set the cup in front of her.
How had this lumpy, hesitant ill ease between us happened? It was one of the things that Lilly’s marriage had accomplished. So thank God for Annie and the business, the shared countries where we both felt happy. They bridged the distance that had grown between the Lilly who was my closest ally and partner, and the Lilly who was married to Ricky Luhrmann.
“He climbed into the bath with me tonight,” she whispered. “And he turned me around and he was a little rough and I was tired and I tried to put him off, laugh, say wait a minute, wait till later. But he just tightened his grip. He hurt me. He can be firm. Rough, actually. But something tonight scared me, Neave. I started to struggle, and that made things escalate. He liked it that I struggled.”
She stopped talking. We both listened for Annie, wanting her to be far away and asleep because Lilly was going to take us someplace we didn’t want Annie to know existed. “He wanted it a particular way,” she whispered.
“What do you mean?”
“He pushed my head underwater, and I struggled. The more I struggled, the more … It excited him, Neave. He was like a kind of zombie, unreachable. And in another way he was completely there—I mean, more completely there than I’d ever seen him. I pushed back, tried to kick loose of him, because I was actually thinking, What will happen to Annie if he kills me? Until I listened to myself think those words, I didn’t admit that it was that bad. But tonight I actually thought he could. Maybe I’ve thought that for a while, but I just couldn’t listen to myself think it. But tonight it just shot through me and I got loose from him and pulled myself around.…”
“And?”
“I grabbed his private parts and I twisted.” She laughed in a way that made the word “hysterical” pop into my head. “Can you believe that? It gave me just enough time to get out of that tub, grab the clothes off the floor, get into Annie’s room, and lock the door. We climbed out the window listening to him banging on the door, screaming at us to let him in. I got us on the roof, and I pushed us off into the bushes. It felt like jumping off a cliff into a tidal pool a thousand feet below me. I told Annie it was a game.”
“She couldn’t possibly have believed you.”
“I know. She kind of went dark, completely quiet. Neave, when I heard myself thinking I might die I got so scared. Not for me. I thought, Well, Jane and Neave will take care of Annie. Neave, if I die, you will, won’t you?”
“You’re not going to die.”
“But if I do, if a truck hits me or I fall off a cliff, Annie will be all right, won’t she?”
“I don’t know if Annie will be all right, but I know that Jane and I will take care of her.”
The laugh was thin and bitter, not a Lilly laugh. “So like you, sugar, to tell me the truth when anybody else on Earth would have lied.”
“What lie?”
“That no matter what happened, Annie would be all right. I know I don’t pay as much attention to Annie as Good Housekeeping says that all good women yearn to do in their deepest hearts. I never said I was Mother of the Year, but I love her. I might not stay home and knit her sweaters every Saturday night, but you know I’d throw myself in front of a bullet for her. You know that, right?”
“I know it,” I said. “You’d step in front of a charging bear to protect Annie.”
“Oh, shut up,” she said to me, but she said it like she knew that the jokey tone was just to give us some kind of safe surface we could use to skate over this terrible thought: harm coming to Annie.
“Jane and I’ll be right behind you,” I nodded. “All of us taking on the bear.”
We sat for a full five minutes in an aching silence before she said, “Why do they hate us?”
“Who?” I asked.
“Men.”
“Only Ricky pushed your head underwater, Lilly. He isn’t all men.”
“But the way he looked, I’ve seen it before in other guys. Guard yourself, Mom always said, and I laughed but I knew why she was saying it. I’d been in the backseat of a car. I’ve been pushed against a wall or two. Not every man in a backseat gets that switch flipped inside of him, but some of them do and it’s hard to tell, at the start of things, if he’s one of the ones who could hurt you. Maybe wants to hurt you. It’s harder to tell because they don’t know themselves. They just want to … do things to you. For some of them, some of the time, it’s not just sex they want; or if it is, the sex involves torn clothes maybe or a black eye. Or worse.” Now she hardened herself. Straightened out her face in a wooden, icey-eyed way.
I’d never heard my sister talk like this—Lilly, the girl who’d been known to book three dates in a single weekend. The playful risk-taker, the woman in Chanel No. 5, the believer in Love.
“Maybe I know why they hate us,” she murmured.
“Yeah?”
“They hate us because we make them feel,” she said. “We make them feel all kinds of things, and they can’t stand it.”
*