Gwen, in Green

She thought about it when she was alone or when she was lying with George after sex and he was off, away from her, resting, dozing. Then the change came over her and she felt her body dirty against his. Although she’d been winning the battle for years, the fight was not over. There comes a time in life when one has to accept oneself as one is, when it is no longer possible to fool oneself. There were times when she thought she’d won, finally, but then she would remember, or the old hurt would begin to pound like an abscessed tooth and she would hear his voice in her mind:

“Gwen, Jesus, you’re all screwed up. Maybe you need help.”

But she was not the one who had had an affair with Grace Dowling, shameless bitch that Grace was. She was not the one who had betrayed, and just ten months after both she and George had vowed eternal love.

In more controlled moments she considered George’s affair with Grace to be the turning point; she could, almost, be grateful to Grace. At such moments, if she had been granted the ability to change the past she would have erased her mother. Dele her, as the crosswords said. Strike her out. Make her nothing more than a blank space in her mind.

“Gwen,” she said to herself, “you worry too much.”

That had to be true. If she were really a nut she would be able to scrap all the memories and be fashionably neurotic with the rest of the world. If anything, she was too sane. She couldn’t even drink enough to forget what she was doing. When she got too high she invariably suffered the agonies of the damned and felt suicidal over some drunken, relatively innocent escapade. Not that she was a wild one. Not Gwen Ferrier. But she was a talker when she was drinking and she said things like, “Ruthie, there is a certain responsibility involved in having pets.” Ruthie, a neighbor, had a nice, friendly beagle which was left outside in the coldest weather and which, in the fall, was always laden with huge, hulking, gray, sick, puky ticks. And Ruthie wouldn’t be insulted, she’d just laugh, but next morning Gwen would remember and feel ex­posed, for she kept herself, mostly, giving of her inner thoughts only to George.

So if you remember things like that and let them fester inside you and make you feel as if you should run over to Ruthie’s and apologize, how do you forget Mama?

“You don’t try to forget her,” George said. “You try to understand her. Gwen, she was a young woman. She had a bad break.”

“But my father loved her so,” Gwen would say. “I remember how he’d kiss her and tell her she was pretty.”

“She was pretty,” George said. “And sexy.”

Yes, she was that.

After her father died they lived in an apartment in the nice section of Winston-­Salem, if Winston-­Salem can be said to have a nice section. It was a small apartment with one bedroom, a sitting room, and a kitchen with a dining alcove. Gwen’s bed was a pull-­out couch in the sitting room, next to the bedroom door and sometimes they forgot even to close the door. And it was always a different man and, as George put it, her mother was a noisy lay, panting, moaning, crying out.

“Your mother does it,” the boys would say. “What’s wrong with you?”

She was a skinny child with weak arches which pained her. The insurance money wasn’t plentiful enough to buy clothing for her mother and two bottles of vodka a week and still have enough left over for the orthopedic shoes for Gwen. While not drinking or making love, her mother sewed, cutting down fancy party dresses for school clothing so that, in Gwen’s mind, she always looked freaky.

“She was just a lonely broad,” George would say. “Don’t condemn her for wanting to get something out of life.”

It took her a long time to learn that her mother wasn’t in pain when she would cry out and sob-­laugh at the same time. And everyone knew. The kids in school laughed at her, the dark-­haired, skinny, rather homely little girl in the cut-­down red party dress with the lace and frilly sleeves, the girl whose mother put out.

“George”—she wept as she said it one spring night when she was a sophomore in college at Chapel Hill—“I can’t marry you.”

“Why?”

“I can’t, that’s all.”

He insisted. “All right,” she said grimly. “If you must know. I’m frigid.”

He laughed. “You’ll have to prove it to me.”

She’d known him for over a year. His smile and his ease of manner had lured her into rare dates with him, had worked on her until, although she told herself that she didn’t love him, could never love a man, she looked for­ward to seeing him, saw him with a quick little flip of delight deep next to her heart, let him kiss her.

“You’re a nice girl, Gwen,” he told her. “The marrying kind.”

She knew the flip words. Her affliction was a hidden thing. “Aren’t you the hypocritical one? I’ve heard about you.”

“Experience is important in a man,” he said, grinning. “Women don’t need experience. It’s an instinctive act with them.”