Woman Who Does Not Tremble
Gina packed luggage so many times, it felt like a drill. Bathroom stuff, a few clothes hardly worth the effort, an antique vase. Together these formed the necessities. Regretfully few books, hastily grabbed, packed around the edges of clothes that could no longer outfit a career.
At times she had not gone anywhere after the drill. The psychological feeling came, a threat landing on the porch in solid luggage, for both Gina and her husband. To be together no more or circumstances must change.
This was not a good strategy for figuring out what needed changing, Gina thought, though on this matter she was confused. At the very most, it brought problems to light.
The harshness of circumstances this time, though, like sandpaper against Gina's skin. No tears fell from her eyes, not even for the bruises they counted down her arm. Thirteen.
Was this unlucky number enough to finally give her a push?
Don't forget the blow dryer, she told herself. You don't want to waste money buying another. Avoid the mirror, Gina. You know what it will say. You're getting older and circumstances do not get better.
She talked in her head like to a child she had become in the marriage. Pick up the bags now, hurry. Walk down the stairs.
Close the door carefully in case others watch you. Do not look back, or you may turn to salt, crumble immediately and become the disobedient example they all talk about for generations.
Gina ran and grabbed through the house as if it burned down around her.
Finally, the relief of the view out the plane window while holding her little son's warm sleeping hand, his head heavily on her arm.
Green, impossibly emerald, an island and a universe moving below. How it hurts to leave, though Gina doesn't feel this. Even the whales, breathing their own pace, as if they are roadside joggers on this air highway out, rolling on the sea.
Snow remnants on the highest peaks remind her of cold locked up winter, only now as if it's a television show only vaguely interesting, moving beneath her in giant valleys lined by where bears live. This signals a big problem with her life, that she can't anymore think of whales and bears.
"Do not look back, or down," Gina says, as if warning herself. "No tears either."
No tears. Silent child sleeping on her arm, his faint snore.
It's all a drill maybe you can make more than that, Gina.
Get a place to live. Find furniture anywhere, the Salvation Army, a yard sale, something borrowed. The rooms are empty and smell of other people's lingering troubles, though landlords do their best, in the name of high rent, to cover it in new paint. White. White as if they are hiding things, trying to make rooms appear sanitary and new.
Gina accepts an apartment. Puts furniture in it. Cooks a few good meals, pretends to be all right. She knows as soon as the books are on a shelf, as soon as the bed is made, her husband will call through a relative. He's called all her relatives. If she calls back, he will talk about what he's going to do. When is she coming back? All casual like that.
When she holds out, he can handle it. He sends crab, smoked salmon, fresh halibut. He's a fisherman, accustomed to reeling them in, slowly. He knows to wait because fish grow tired. He lets out line and sits himself down in a soft white deck chair, crossing his legs.
The husband is confident in his fishing abilities and his money. He is a philosopher with a hook.
Gina has only enough money for a month's rent. She knows he knows.
"These thirteen bruises on your arm, they show thumb prints, a lot of handling," Judy said before Gina left.
Gina had gone to Judy's house, a health aide, an older red-haired woman smoking a cigarette as she examined Gina. Before this, Judy told her own story well enough Gina could trace her steps through it in sleep. Judy came from far away, escaping something too.
"Don't make excuses for him, Gina," she says, handing over the official medical paperwork as the younger woman leaves.
Gina holds out her arms to Judy, wanting the woman to hold her, yet wanting no one's touch. It's hypocritical, how do you trust those who hold you in their arms?
Judy's face feels sincere in the curve of her neck.
Gina climbs into her car, noticing how the clean the exchange. She showed Judy the bump on her head, the bruises. Judy examined, measured, counted, wrote it all down. No tears from Gina in the telling, only questions and a few logical answers Judy provided to questions about getting off the island with her child.
She hadn't trembled, not with Judy. She was there for information and documentation in case that would be necessary for the courts, and she got it.
Judy's warm face in her neck. That is when Gina realized how cold she felt.
She got back into her car, drove home knowing she would not pack right way.
The trauma settles slowly each time. He didn't grab her before like that, not with his hands. In the past he grabbed only with words. Three times she had carried through with the leaving, packing bathroom things, the few clothes that were more then, not quite so unfit for resuming a career, the regretfully few books whose titles change each time. Not everything can be carried out in an emergency. Fire victims know this.
Other times she only went through the motions of packing, knowing she should make it stick but making the threat for wanted changes like a plea. Those times she knew she had not even half a heart for the searching an apartment, the unacceptable furniture, the giving up of him and an entire island, a universe.
He was there when she arrived home from Judy's house. She showed him the bruises, for which he did not apologize.
"Gina, that's not how it happened," he said, after her confronting. "You were crazy, trying to get into the house. You fell down the stairs. You tried to break the window open."
"I was crazy trying to get back in the house because you locked me out. I'm in the middle of the night, on an island of your relatives, after being gone only an hour ...I only wanted to sleep in my own bed when I returned. Why did you lock the door?"
It is no use. He knows, and yet he won't know. Locking out makes no sense. Something spiteful from him, something from his past. Too many times now...who cares, Gina says to herself.
How well it connects to control. She works hard, has no social life. And he locks the door when she has one night of companions. He must control her, it's very important to him to limit her scope of all life.
Grabbed too much, her head hurting and her arms, Gina showers hot because she's so cold inside. She takes two aspirin and gets into bed. He soon follows, wrapping arms around her waist, winding legs with hers. She doesn't wet tears on the pillow. Alert, a wounded animal, she tries to sleep. She watches shadows of leaves landing on a light green wall.
These thoughts play out in snap shots as she adjusts to the shock of the new apartment she won't be able to afford next month. Awful white walls -- she always picks on them first. Can she take out a magic marker and write sayings to save herself from what she knows she will do? Knowing how she will betray herself to avoid white walls, pay out days of her life for a few more good memories with a man she loves. For the green shadows and the blue sea.
Besides, what would she write?
Gina looks through books while her child sleeps. Can she find something for both of them? Can she promise to obey the quote? She already knows she can make no promises, not even to herself because she didn't in previous running aways.
Into the night, she reads, looking desperately for a saying. She doesn't discriminate. The truth could be found anywhere.
"All the joys of heaven can be found on earth," someone tells someone in the final pages of Jean Plaidy novel, read long ago.
"For a long time I used to go to bed early. Sometimes when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say to myself: "I'm falling asleep." This from Remembrance of Things Past by Proust. Solid comforting words, but a lie, to begin a book. A thick book Gina had no time to read, given as a gift by a final lover before the husband.
She did not believe anyone could fall asleep that fast.
Even desperately tired, Gina would not consider Melville. He loved the sea like she did, the whole dreamy, moody, pregnant thing surrounding the island.
Gina found this after midnight: "A balance that does not tremble cannot weigh. A man who does not tremble cannot live." Written by someone she'd never heard of, quoted in an anthology.
Gina had brought along a marker, not a thick one, only one for labeling mailed boxes. It too was standard drill equipment. One needs these pens for the trip back, fixing the island address gratefully to each box. Relief in each stroke to be getting back there where fog hangs low and tides run life.
Oh, how she rigged her own sorrow, by having it among her possessions.
Which wall, she thought? The kitchen entryway gave way to a generous arch, while the hallway entry pinched in pitying skinniness. She settled on the hallway and took a kitchen chair to stand there. This would be the place her eyes land most.
"A balance that does not tremble cannot weigh," she wrote in large letters. "A woman who does not tremble, cannot live."
It said what she wanted, for now. She carried herself to bed, to Proust's sleep, the kind where his character fanes it easy in the spent smoke of a gone candle. God knows no one sleeps that well, do they?
Her husband had fished that day, she knew. He sat on the horizon of water and sky, and thought about what isn't right, landed on it, caught it on his hook. Sometimes he brings it home, sometimes casts it back to live on in the sea. The philosopher's hook always catches something of value.
Maybe this time it could not reel her back home. Perhaps she could swim hard and fast, and know what hooks look like so as not to confuse them with food and love.
The Salvation Army pillow, Gina realized, was neither too hard nor too soft as she laid her head upon it.
This was all she hoped, for now, as she hugged her child's sleeping body closer. A future neither too hard nor too soft.
Naomi Klouda
© August 2001
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