Dolores Claiborne Read online

  There was a story about the eclipse on the front page of the American just about every day that July, but I think that, for all his newspaper-readin, Joe had only the fuzziest idear anything out of the ordinary was gonna happen later in the month. He didn't care squat about such things, you see. What Joe cared about were the Commies and the freedom-riders (only he called em "the Greyhound niggers") and that goddam Catholic kike-lover in the White House. If he'd known what was gonna happen to Kennedy four months later, I think he almost coulda died happy, that's how nasty he was.

  I'd sit beside him just the same, though, and listen to him rant about whatever he'd found in that day's paper to put his fur up. I wanted him to get used to me bein around him when I come home, but if I was to tell you the work was easy, I'd be a goddamned liar. I wouldn't have minded his drinkin half as much, you know, if he'd had a more cheerful disposition when he did it. Some men do, I know, but Joe wasn't one of em. Drinkin brought out the woman in him, and for the woman in Joe, it was always about two days before one godawful gusher of a period.

  As the big day drew closer, though, leavin Vera's started to be a relief even though it was only a drunk smelly husband I was goin home to. She'd spent all of June bustlin around, jabberin away about this n that, checkin and recheckin her eclipse-gear, and callin people on the phone--she must have called the comp'ny caterin her ferry expedition at least twice a day durin the last week of June, and they was just one stop on her daily list.

  I had six girls workin under me in June and eight after the Fourth of July; it was the most help Vera ever had, either before or after her husband died. The house was scrubbed from top to bottom--scrubbed until it shone--and every bed was made up. Hell, we added temporary beds in the solarium and on the second-floor porch as well. She was expectin at least a dozen overnight guests on the weekend of the eclipse, and maybe as many as twenty. There wasn't enough hours in the day for her and she went racin around like Moses on a motorcycle, but she was happy.

  Then, right around the time I packed the boys off to their Aunt Alicia and Uncle Jack's--around the tenth or eleventh of July, that would be, and still over a week before the eclipse--her good mood collapsed.

  Collapsed? Frig, no. That ain't right. It popped, like a balloon that's been stuck with a pin. One day she was zoomin like a jet plane; the next she was steppin on the corners of her mouth and her eyes had taken on the mean, haunted look I'd seen a lot since she started spendin so much time on the island alone. She fired two girls that day, one for standin on a hassock to warsh the windows in the parlor, and the other for laughin in the kitchen with one of the caterers. That second one was especially nasty, cause the girl started to cry. She told Vera she'd known the young man in high school n hadn't seen him since n wanted to catch up a little on old times. She said she was sorry and begged not to be let go--she said her mother would be madder than a wet hen if that happened.

  It didn't cut no ice with Vera. "Look on the bright side, dear," she says in her bitchiest voice. "Your mother may be angry, but you'll have so much time to talk about all the fun you had at good old Jonesport High. "

  The girl--it was Sandra Mulcahey--went down the driveway with her head dropped, sobbin like her heart was gonna break. Vera stood in the hall, bent over a little so she could watch her out the window by the front door. My foot itched to kick her ass when I seen her standin that way ... but I felt a little sad for her, too. It wasn't hard to figure out what had changed her mood, and before much longer I knew for sure. Her kids weren't comin to watch the eclipse with her after all, chartered ferry or no chartered ferry. Maybe it was just that they'd made other plans, as kids will do with never a thought for any feelins their parents might have, but my guess was that whatever had gone wrong between her and them was still wrong.

  Vera's mood improved as the first of her other guests started to show up on the sixteenth n seventeenth, but I was still glad to get away each day, and on Thursday the eighteenth she fired another girl--Karen Jolander, that one was. Her big crime was droppin a plate that had been cracked to begin with. Karen wasn't cryin when she went down the driveway, but you could tell she was just holdin on until she was over the first hill to let loose.

  Well, I went and did somethin stupid--but you have to remember I was pretty strung-up myself by then. I managed to wait until Karen was out of sight, at least, but then I went lookin for Vera. I found her in the back garden. She'd yanked her straw sunhat on so hard the brim touched her ears, and she was takin such snaps with those garden-shears of hers that you'd'a thought she was Madam Dufarge choppin off heads instead of Vera Donovan cuttin roses for the parlor n dinin room.

  I walked right up to her and said, "That was a boogery thing you done, firin that girl like that."

  She stood up and give me her haughtiest lady-of-the-manor look. "Do you think so? I'm so glad to have your opinion, Dolores. I crave it, you know; each night when I go to bed, I lie there in the dark, reviewing the day and asking the same question as each event passes before my eyes: 'What would Dolores St. George have done?' "

  Well, that made me madder'n ever. "I'll tell you one thing Dolores Claiborne don't do," I says, "and that's take it out on someone else when she's pissed off and disappointed about somethin. I guess I ain't enough of a high-riding bitch to do that."

  Her mouth dropped open like somebody'd pulled the bolts that held her jaw shut. I'm pretty sure that was the first time I really surprised her, and I marched away in a hurry, before she could see how scared I was. My legs were shakin so bad by the time I got into the kitchen that I had to sit down and I thought, You're crazy, Dolores, tweakin her tail like that. I stood up enough to peek out the window over the sink, but her back was to me and she was workin her shears again for all she was worth; roses were fallin into her basket like dead soldiers with bloody heads.

  I was gettin ready to go home that afternoon when she come up behind me and told me to wait a minute, she wanted to talk to me. I felt my heart sink all the way into my shoes. I hadn't no doubt at all that my time'd come--she'd tell me my services wouldn't be required anymore, give me one last Kiss-My-Back-Cheeks stare, and then down the road I'd go, this time for good. You'd think it'd been a relief to get shut of her, and I s'pose in some ways it woulda been, but I felt a pain around my heart just the same. I was thirty-six, I'd been workin hard since I was sixteen, and hadn't never been fired from a job. Just the same, there's some kinds of buggery-bullshit a person has to stand up to, and I was tryin with all my might to get ready to do that when I turned around to look at her.

  When I saw her face, though, I knew it wasn't firin she'd come to do. All the makeup she'd had on that mornin was scrubbed off, and the way her eyelids were swole up gave me the idear she'd either been takin a nap or cryin in her room. She had a brown paper grocery sack in her arms, and she kinda shoved it at me. "Here," she says.

  "What's this?" I ast her.

  "Two eclipse-viewers and two reflector-boxes," she says. "I thought you and Joe might like them. I happened to have--" She stopped then, and coughed into her curled-up fist before lookin me square in the eye again. One thing I admired about her, Andy--no matter what she was sayin or how hard it was for her, she'd look at you when she said it. "I happened to have two extras of each," she said.

  "Oh?" I says. "I'm sorry to hear that."

  She waved it away like it was a fly, then ast me if I'd changed my mind about goin on the ferry with her n her comp'ny.

  "No," I says, "I guess I'll put up m'dogs on my own porch rail n watch it with Joe from there. Or, if he's actin out the Tartar, I'll go down to East Head."

  "Speaking of acting out the Tartar," she says, still lookin right at me, "I want to apologize for this morning ... and ask if you'd call Mabel Jolander and tell her I've changed my mind."

  It took a lot of guts for her to say that, Andy--you didn't know her the way I did, so I guess you'll just have to take my word for it, but it took an awful lot of guts. When it came to apologizin, Vera Donovan was pretty much
of a teetotaler.

  "Sure I will," I said, speakin kind of gentle. I almost reached out n touched her hand, but in the end I didn't. "Only it's Karen, not Mabel. Mabel worked here six or seven years ago. She's in New Hampshire these days, her mother says--workin for the telephone comp'ny and doin real well."

  "Karen, then," she says. "Ask her back. Just say I've changed my mind, Dolores, not one word more than that. Do you understand?"

  "Yes," I says. "And thanks for the eclipse-things. They'll come in handy, I'm sure."

  "You're very welcome," she says. I opened the door to go out and she says, "Dolores?"

  I looked back over my shoulder, and she give me a funny little nod, as if she knew things she had no business knowin.

  "Sometimes you have to be a high-riding bitch to survive," she says. "Sometimes being a bitch is all a woman has to hold onto. " And then she closed the door in my face ... but gentle. She didn't slam it.

  All right; here comes the day of the eclipse, and if I'm going to tell you what happened--everything that happened--I ain't going to do it dry. I been talkin for damn near two hours straight by my watch, long enough to burn the oil offa anyone's bearins, and I'm still a long way from bein done. So I tell you what, Andy--either you part with an inch of the Jim Beam you got in your desk drawer, or we hang it up for tonight. What do you say?

  There--thank you. Boy, don't that just hit the spot! No; put it away. One's enough to prime the pump; two might not do anythin but clog the pipes.

  All right--here we go again.

  On the night of the nineteenth I went to bed so worried I was almost sick to my stomach with it, because the radio said there was a good chance it was gonna rain. I'd been so goddam busy plannin what I was gonna do and workin my nerve up to do it that the thought of rain'd never even crossed my mind. I'm gonna toss n turn all night, I thought as I laid down, and then I thought, No you ain't, Dolores, and I'll tell you why---you can't do a damn thing about the weather, and it don't matter, anyway. You know you mean to do for him even if it rains like a bastard all day long. You've gone too far to back out now. And I did know that, so I closed my eyes n went out like a light.

  Saturday--the twentieth of July, 1963--come up hot n muggy n cloudy. The radio said there most likely wouldn't be any rain after all, unless it was just a few thundershowers late in the evenin, but the clouds were gonna hang around most of the day, and chances of the coastal communities actually seein the eclipse were no better'n fifty-fifty.

  It felt like a big weight had slipped off my shoulders just the same, and when I went off to Vera's to help serve the big brunch buffet she had planned, my mind was calm and my worries behind me. It didn't matter that it was cloudy, you see; it wouldn't even matter if it showered off n on. As long as it didn't pour, the hotel-people would be up on the roof and Vera's people would be out on the reach, all of em hopin there'd be just enough of a break in the cloud-cover to let em get a look at what wasn't gonna happen again in their lifetimes ... not in Maine, anyhow. Hope's a powerful force in human nature, you know--no one knows that better'n me.

  As I remember, Vera ended up havin eighteen houseguests that Friday night, but there were even more at the Saturday-mornin buffet--thirty or forty, I'd say. The rest of the people who'd be goin with her on the boat (and they were island folk for the most part, not from away) would start gatherin at the town dock around one o'clock, and the old Princess was due to set out around two. By the time the eclipse actually began--four-thirty or so--the first two or three kegs of beer'd probably be empty.

  I expected to find Vera all nerved up and ready to fly out of her own skin, but I sometimes think she made a damn career outta surprisin me. She was wearin a billowy red-n-white thing that looked more like a cape than a dress--a caftan, I think they're called--and she'd pulled her hair back in a simple hosstail that was a long way from the fifty-buck hairdos she usually sported in those days.

  She went around and around the long buffet table that was set up on the back lawn near the rose garden, visitin and laughin with all her friends--most of em from Baltimore, judgin by the look n sound--but she was different that day than she had been durin the week leadin up to the eclipse. Remember me tellin you how she went zoomin back n forth like a jet plane? On the day of the eclipse, she was more like a butterfly visitin among a lot of plants, and her laugh wasn't so shrill or loud.

  She seen me bringin out a tray of scrambled eggs n hurried over to give me some instructions, but she didn't walk like she had been walkin the last few days--like she really wanted to be runnin--and the smile stayed on her face. I thought, She's happy--that's all it is. She's accepted that her kids aren't comin and has decided she can be happy just the same. And that was all ... unless you knew her, and knew how rare a thing it was for Vera Donovan to be happy. Tell you somethin, Andy--I knew her another thirty years, almost, but I don't think I ever saw her really happy again. Content, yes, and resigned, but happy? Radiant n happy, like a butterfly wanderin a field of flowers on a hot summer afternoon? I don't think so.

  "Dolores!" she says. "Dolores Claiborne!" It never occurred to me until a lot later that she'd called me by my maiden name, even though Joe was still alive n well that morning, and she never had before. When it did occur to me I shivered all over, the way you're s'posed to do when a goose walks acrost the place where you'll be buried someday.

  "Mornin, Vera," I said back. "I'm sorry the day's so gray."

  She glanced up at the sky, which was hung with low, humid summer clouds, then smiled. "The sun will be out by three o'clock," she says.

  "You make it sound like you put in a work-order for it," I says.

  I was only teasin, accourse, but she gave me a serious little nod and said, "Yes--that's just what I did. Now run into the kitchen, Dolores, and see why that stupid caterer hasn't brought out a fresh pot of coffee yet."

  I set out to do as she ast, but before I got more'n four steps toward the kitchen door, she called after me just like she'd done two days before, when she told me that sometimes a woman has to be a bitch to survive. I turned around with the idear in my head that she was gonna tell me that same thing all over again. She didn't though. She was standin there in her pretty red-n-white tent-dress, with her hands on her hips n that hosstail lyin over one shoulder, lookin not a year over twenty-one in that white mornin light.

  "Sunshine by three, Dolores!" she says. "See if I'm not right!"

  The buffet was over by eleven, and me n the girls had the kitchen to ourselves by noon, the caterer and his people havin moved on down to the Island Princess to start gettin ready for Act Two. Vera herself left fairly late, around twelve-fifteen, drivin the last three or four of her comp'ny down to the dock herself in the old Ford Ranch Wagon she kep on the island. I stuck with the warshin-up until one o'clock or so, then told Gail Lavesque, who was more or less my second in command that day, that I felt a little headachey n sick to my stomach, and I was gonna go on home now that the worst of the mess was ridded up. On my way out, Karen Jolander gave me a hug and thanked me. She was cryin again, too. I swan to goodness, that girl never stopped leakin around the eyes all the years I knew her.

  "I don't know who's been talkin to you, Karen," I said, "but you don't have nothing to thank me for--I didn't do a single solitary thing."

  "No one's said a word to me," she says, "but I know it was you, Missus St. George. No one else'd dare speak up to the old dragon. "

  I gave her a kiss on the cheek n told her I thought she wouldn't have nothing to worry about as long as she didn't drop any more plates. Then I set out for home.

  I remember everythin that happened, Andy--everythin--but from the time I stepped off Vera's driveway and onto Center Drive, it's like rememberin things that've happened in the brightest, most real-seemin dream you've ever had in your life. I kep thinkin "I'm goin home to kill my husband, I'm goin home to kill my husband," like I could pound it into my head the way you'd pound a nail into some thick wood like teak or mahogany, if I only kept at it long enough.
But lookin back on it, I guess it was in my head all the time. It was my heart that couldn't understand.

  Although it was only one-fifteen or so when I got to the village and the start of the eclipse still over three hours away, the streets were so empty it was spooky. It made me think of that little town down in the southern part of the state where they say no one lives. Then I looked up at the roof of The Harborside, and that was spookier still. There must've been a hundred people or more up there already, strollin around n checkin the sky like farmers at plantin time. I looked downhill to the dock and seen the Princess there, her gangplank down and the auto deck full of people instead of cars. They was walkin around with drinks in their hands, havin themselves a big open-air cocktail-party. The dock itself was crammed with people, and there musta been five hundred small boats--more'n I'd ever seen out there at one time anyway--on the reach already, anchored and waitin. And it seemed like everyone you saw, whether they was on the hotel roof or the town dock or the Princess, was wearin dark glasses and holdin either a smoked-glass eclipse-viewer or a reflector-box. There's never been a day like it on the island before or since, and even if I hadn't had in mind what I did have in mind, I think it woulda felt like a dream to me.

  The greenfront was open, eclipse or no eclipse --I expect that booger'll be doin business as usual even on Apocalypse Morn. I stopped in, bought a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red, then walked on out East Lane to the house. I gave the bottle to Joe first thing--didn't make any bones about it, just plopped it into his lap. Then I walked into the house n got the bag Vera had given me, the one with the eclipse-viewers and reflector-boxes in it. When I came out on the back porch again, he was holdin that bottle of Scotch up so he could see the color.

  "Are you gonna drink it or just admire it?" I ast him.

  He give me a look, kinda suspicious, and says, "Just what the hell is this, Dolores?"

  "It's a present to celebrate the eclipse," I said. "If you don't want it, I c'n always pour it down the sink."