A Conference of Victims by Gina Berriault

Author:Gina Berriault
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2023-03-08T00:00:00+00:00

One night he barred her way. “What’re you putting your coat on for?” he said. “You ain’t going anywhere.” He was wonderingly sober.

“I’m going over to Mama’s.”

“You ain’t going to Mama’s, girlie,” he said, and for a moment, because she was locked in and didn’t know the man, she was a child again, her mind was a child’s mind, wondering whether girlie was an affectionate word or a derisive one. Then she turned and ran down the hall to the back door. He ran after her and caught hold of her coat and threw her down on the kitchen floor. Her hip struck the floor and her face struck the table leg. She pulled her skirt down—it had leaped up past her knees—and attempted no other move, afraid that any move other than the modest one would make him more angry. For a second, as she lay stunned, she felt that he was right, throwing her down. It was such an extreme act, he must be right. Ashamed because she had brought him to violence, she could not look up into his face, she could only stare at his shoes. The great number of times she had left this apartment to find a queasy comfort from her comforting of her mother all added up to a crime. Her coming and going was a crime of futility.

“You’re a goddamn saint, Naomi,” he said, “but I ain’t religious. It makes me sick to see a saint. They don’t serve no good example, they just make you feel like a louse. Get up, get up,” he said, banging around the coffee pot from one burner to another. The match he struck leaped out of his hand and fell on the table, and he swung after it furiously, and blew it out. With shaking hand, he struck another match. “Get up, get up. Sit down, sit down. Take off your coat, stay awhile.”

She reached up to the table and drew herself up, and she sat down. Although she was suffocatingly hot, she left her coat on.

“Fix you some hot coffee,” he said. “You should of seen all the coffee we drank over in England, on those cold nights with the V-1’s buzzing around. Did I ever tell you about the time the anti-aircraft brought down a V-1 over the airfield? It began to bob around up there, turned around, changed its mind, and fell just half a mile away.” He cleared his throat, a loud, raspy, prolonged scraping.

She was afraid to touch her cheekbone and afraid to lay her head in her hand, afraid that any soothing of herself might be mistaken for reproach.

“You going to take your coat off?”

She shook her head. The coat comforted her, the coat gave her dignity, it gave her access to the outdoors and protection against the inside of strange houses, like this one. She was about to draw her coat together when he went down on his knees, encircling her hips, laying his face in her lap, kissing the triangle into her closed thighs.

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