Gwen, in Green

This seemed important to her. The basic insecurity of her childhood had marked her in many ways. One of them was in her habit of wanting a night-­light. She’d always slept with a light. It was just the way she was. And she locked doors and windows. She also, when feeling low, looked under beds and into closets before retiring, even with George in the house. If she didn’t look under the bed she couldn’t turn to snuggle with George, thus putting her back to the side of the bed and exposing it to that some­thing which would reach up something, a bony claw, an unidentified thing, and dig into her back, digging, dig­ging, cutting the tender flesh there and making her scream with agony. And a trip in darkness through the rooms of the dark little rental house would have been unthinkable. Something could lurk in each shadow.

Her insecurity had been a topic for many deep discus­sions during the seven years of their marriage. George had grown to accept it, to try to ignore it, since he couldn’t cure it.

“What do you expect to find under there?” he’d ask as she knelt to look under the bed before turning off the light.

“I don’t know,” she would say truthfully. “Nothing, I guess.”

“Your lover?”

“Silly.”

“Let us explore the nature of fear,” George would say, in his early attempts to cure Gwen. “Basically, it is the fear of death which is underneath all fear. Once you had another fear, the fear of losing your chastity by force, but that is no longer possible, so that fear must not be what makes you look under the bed.”

“I’m not expecting to discover a mad rapist,” she said.

“We fear dead bodies,” he said. “We shudder at tales of walking dead and rotting bones coming to life, and we scream if we find a severed hand in bed with us.”

“You’re pretty terrible, you know?”

“What do we see when we see the severed hand? We see ourselves. We are reminded by the sight of a dis­membered body that we, too, can be dismembered. Ergo, we are fearing death. Honey, we’re all going to pop off. You could trip over the vacuum cleaner and break your neck. You could choke to death on a potato chip. You could eat something that made you sick and rupture an artery or something by the force of your vomiting and die of peritonitis before I could get you to a hospital.”

“I don’t know, George. It’s silly, I know. It’s not a person. Really. I know the human animal is capable of great violence against his fellows, but I don’t shudder thinking about an evil man or something.”

“Being afraid of the dark is something most people outgrow. I pulled that night-­light bit when I was a kid, and my dad took me out into the woods coon hunting one night and left me to guard the fire. I saw wolves and bears in every shadow. Then, after a while, when they didn’t eat me, I got brave and started throwing sticks at them. The cowardly bastards ran away. They were more scared than I. Now I could understand if you saw wolves and bears under the bed, then you could throw shoes at them and run them away.”

“Just let me work it out, huh?” she asked.

“We fear pain. Now I, myself, brave stud that I am, can get the shudders thinking of torture. Remember the John D. MacDonald book where the evil guys were tor­turing someone? He said, and I agree, that torture is bad, but relatively ineffective unless you know, deep in your heart, that the cat doing the torturing is a real nut. I mean, you can have a cigarette thrust into your bare titty and it’ll hurt like hell and you’ll scream, but you know that it’ll heal. Same with splinters under the fingernails. They’ll come out, even if you have to cut off the nail. Even the nail will grow back. But if you know that this cat is going to do something irreparable to you, like cut off an arm or gouge out an eye, then you know real fear. The fear of dis­memberment and death. Now since you don’t have to worry about that, unless I eat loco weed and go ape, then what do you fear?”

“I don’t know.”

“The dark? I should take you coon hunting.”

“I’d hang onto you with both hands.”

“Not a bad idea,” he said. “Grab me now.”

But there was no fear in the dream house. Working hard, hair in a scarf, muscles aching, she arranged and moved furniture and settled in and slept deep sleep the first full night. George, up before her, was whistling and happy. “You left the door unlocked all night and no one ate us,” he said.

She hadn’t even thought about checking the doors. And she could walk the length of the house. She did this several nights later, waking with a thirst and going all the way to the kitchen for ice water, neglecting to turn on the lights because she hadn’t bothered to put on anything over her pajama top. “Well, Gwen,” she said. “Well.”