Divining Women by Kaye Gibbons

Author:Kaye Gibbons
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2010-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

After we finished reading the letter, Maureen asked, “What happened next and then next?”

I told her what happened during the period my family called “Judith’s interlude.” Mother collected her from New York and brought her to Washington to rest with us before she took her on to Baltimore. Mrs. Stafford was destroyed. Had I not read her letter before Mother walked her through the door, I would have wondered whether a madman had just subjected her to some bizarre facial surgery. Her face was clawed by disappointment and nervous hives. Welts that had healed unevenly gave her skin the appearance of having been sloppily basted together in patches, like a poorly made scrap quilt. Her lashes were almost all missing—her eyes looked like they had been broiled inside their sockets, not unlike my grandfather’s after the occasional electromagnetic mishap. A stranger would’ve wondered whether she had been stabbing at her lips with the tips of a fountain pen, so persistently had she been biting them, and there was an angry, infected mass where she had chewed through to her gum. She was ashamed to go to the doctor, so she futilely caked the sore with a vile-smelling patent unguent.

“But,” she told us, “I’ve been able to stop what had been a continual stream of tears, because these little damages turn into caustic horrors when the salt hits them. That’s as much self-improvement as I’ve been able to accomplish.”

It was an astonishing vision of willingness and trust, how my mother diverted Mrs. Stafford’s attention with risqué songs and jokes while she drained the lip with a hot needle, which she said she would do and which she did do each morning, “so that my oldest friend can, at the very least, walk away from this marriage with her mouth.”

The Victoria lace Mrs. Stafford wore pulled down from her hat only heightened the sense of mystery about her and emphasized that she was attempting to hide something gruesome underneath. When she lifted the lace to kiss my grandparents, she rushed to tell them, “I know. People think I’m hiding the plague or some kind of scrofula or that I’ve been beaten about the face. And I know how the rest of my head looks, but this isn’t my hair. I have Chinese hair now. Mine fell out last week in these wadding heaps, and now my teeth are loose, but I suppose I have to tell myself, ‘That’s just the way of the world.’ ”

Grandmother Louise spoke directly to Mrs. Stafford, ignoring everything that was being discussed around her. “Judith, what are you planning to say to your mother? Have you thought about how to talk to her? What does she know? I ask because we had a late supper with her a few months ago, when she and your aunt came into town to see the new play at Ford’s Theatre, and she did not look well. I believe you should give this some thought.”

Mrs. Stafford said that although she was aching to go to her old home, she wasn’t aching to tell her mother the truth.

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