Dolores Claiborne

    About three days later, just when that bruise was goin from dark brown to a kind of yellow-green like they do, I ran into Yvette Anderson in the village. She was comm out of the grocery and I was goin in. She looked at the bruise on my arm, and when she spoke to me, her voice was just drippin with sympathy. Only a woman who's just seen something that makes her happier'n a pig in shit can drip that way. “Ain't men awful, Dolores?” she says.

    “Well, sometimes they are and sometimes they aren't,” I says back. I didn't have the slightest idear what she was talkin about-what I was mostly concerned with was gettin some of the pork chops that were on special that day before they were all gone.

    She pats me kinda gentle on the arm-the one that wasn't bruised-and says, “You be strong, now. All things work for the best. I've been through it and I know. I'll pray for you, Dolores. “ She said that last like she'd just told me she was gonna give me a million dollars and then went on her way upstreet. I went into the market, still mystified. I would have thought she'd lost her mind, except anyone who's ever passed the time of day with Yvette knows she ain't got a whole hell of a lot to lose.

    I had my shoppin half done when it hit me. I stood there watchin Skippy Porter weigh my chops, my market basket over my arm and my head thrown back, laughin from way down deep inside my belly, the way you do when you know you can't do nothing but let her rip. Skippy looked around at me and says, “You all right, Missus Claiborne?”

    “I'm fine,” I says. “I just thought of somethin funny. “ And off I went again.

    “I guess you did,” Skippy says, and then he went back to his scales. God bless the Porters, Andy; as long as they stay, there'll be at least one family on the island knows how to mind its business. Meantime, I just went on laughin. A few other people looked at me like I'd gone nuts, but I didn't care. Sometimes life is so goddam funny you just have to laugh.

    Yvette's married to Tommy Anderson, accourse, and Tommy was one of Joe's beer-and-poker buddies in the late fifties and early sixties. There'd been a bunch of them out at our place a day or two after I bruised my arm, tryin to get Joe's latest bargain, an old Ford pick-em-up, runnin. It was my day off, and I brought em all out a pitcher of iced tea, mostly in hopes of keepin em off the suds at least until the sun went down.

    Tommy must have seen the bruise when I was pourin the tea. Maybe he asked Joe what happened after I left, or maybe he just remarked on it. Either way, Joe St George wasn't a fella to let opportunity pass him by-not one like that, at least. Thinkin it over on my way home from the market, the only thing I was curious about was what Joe told Tommy and the others I'd done-forgot to put his bedroom slippers under the stove so they'd be warm when he stepped into em, maybe, or cooked the beans too mushy on Sat'dy night. Whatever it was, Tommy went home and told Yvette that Joe St George had needed to give his wife a little home correction. And all I'd ever done was bang off the corner of the Marshalls” mantelpiece runnin to see who was at the door!

    That's what I mean when I say there's two sides to a marriage-the outside and the inside. People on the island saw me and Joe like they saw most other couples our age: not too happy, not too sad, mostly just goin along like two hosses pullin a wagon… they may not notice each other like they once did, and they may not get along with each other as well as they once did when they do notice each other, but they're harnessed side by side n goin down the road as well's they can just the same, not bitin each other, or lollygaggin, or doin any of the other things that draw the whip.

    But people aren't hosses, n marriage ain't much like pullin a wagon, even though I know it some-times looks that way on the outside. The folks on island didn't know about the cream-pitcher, or how Joe cried in the dark and said he wished he'd never seen my ugly face. Nor was that the worst of it.

    The worst didn't start until a year or so after we finished our doins in bed. It's funny, ain't it, how folks can look right at anything and draw a completely wrong conclusion about why it happened. But it's natural enough, as long as you remember that the inside and outside of a marriage aren't usually much alike. What I'm gonna tell you now was on the inside of ours, and until today I always thought it would stay there.

    Lookin back, I think the trouble must have really started in “62. Selena'd just started high school over on the mainland. She had come on real pretty, and I remember that summer after her freshman year she got along with her Dad better than she had for the last couple of years. I'd been dreadin her teenage years, foreseein a lot of squabbles between the two of em as she grew up and started questionin his idears and what he saw as his rights over her more and more.