Dolores Claiborne Read online

  Now, where was I? I ain't lost my place already, have I?

  Oh--yes. Thank you, honeybunch.

  What Joe left me with was that shacky little place out by the East Head and six acres of land, most of it blackberry tangles and the kind of trashwood that grows back after a clear-cut operation. What else? Lemme see. Three trucks that didn't run--two pickups and a pulp-hauler--four cord of wood, a bill at the grocery, a bill at the hardware, a bill with the oil company, a bill with the funeral home ... and do you want the icing on the goddam cake? He wa'ant a week in the ground before that rumpot Harry Doucette come over with a friggin IOU that said Joe owed him twenty dollars on a baseball bet!

  He left me all that, but do you think he left me any goddam insurance money? Nossir! Although that might have been a blessin in disguise, the way things turned out. I guess I'll get to that part before I'm done, but all I'm trying to say now is that Joe St. George really wa'ant a man at all; he was a goddam millstone I wore around my neck. Worse, really, because a millstone don't get drunk and then come home smellin of beer and wantin to throw a fuck into you at one in the morning. Wasn't none of that the reason why I killed the sonofawhore, but I guess it's as good a place as any to start.

  An island's not a good place to kill anybody, I can tell you that. Seems like there's always someone around, itching to get his nose into your business just when you can least afford it. That's why I did it when I did, and I'll get to that, too. For now suffice it to say that I did it just about three years after Vera Donovan's husband died in a motor accident outside of Baltimore, which was where they lived when they wasn't summerin on Little Tall. Back in those days, most of Vera's screws were still nice and tight.

  With Joe out of the pitcher and no money coming in, I was in a fix, I can tell you--I got an idear there's no one in the whole world feels as desperate as a woman on her own with kids dependin on her. I'd 'bout decided I'd better cross the reach and see if I couldn't get a job in Jonesport, checkin out groceries at the Shop n Save or waitressin in a restaurant, when that numb pussy all of a sudden decided she was gonna live on the island all year round. Most everyone thought she'd blown a fuse, but I wasn't all that surprised--by then she was spendin a lot of time up here, anyway.

  The fella who worked for her in those days--I don't remember his name, but you know who I mean, Andy, that dumb hunky that always wore his pants tight enough to show the world he had balls as big as Mason jars--called me up and said The Missus (that's what he always called her, The Missus; my, wasn't he dumb) wanted to know if I'd come to work for her full-time as her housekeeper. Well, I'd done it summers for the family since 1950, and I s'pose it was natural enough for her to call me before she called anyone else, but at the time it seemed like the answer to all my prayers.

  I said yes right on the spot, and I worked for her right up until yest'y forenoon, when she went down the front stairs on her stupid empty head.

  What was it her husband did, Andy? Made airplanes, didn't he?

  Oh. Ayuh, I guess I did hear that, but you know how people on the island talk. All I know for sure is that they was well-fixed, mighty well-fixed, and she got it all when he died. Except for what the government took, accourse, and I doubt if it got anywhere near as much as it was probably owed. Michael Donovan was sharp as a tack. Sly, too. And although nobody would believe it from the way she was over the last ten years, Vera was as sly as he was ... and she had her sly days right up until she died. I wonder if she knew what kind of a jam she'd be leavin me in if she did anything besides die in bed of a nice quiet heart-attack? I been down by East Head most of the day, sittin on those rickety stairs and thinkin about that ... that and a few hundred other things. First I'd think no, a bowl of oatmeal has more brains than Vera Donovan had at the end, and then I'd remember how she was about the vacuum cleaner and I'd think maybe ... yes, maybe ...

  But it don't matter now. The only thing that matters now is that I have flopped out of the frying pan and into the fire, and I'd dearly love to drag myself clear before my ass gets burned any worse. If I still can.

  I started off as Vera Donovan's housekeeper, and I ended up bein something they call a "paid companion." It didn't take me too long to figure out the difference. As Vera's housekeeper, I had to eat shit eight hours a day, five days a week. As her paid companion, I had to eat it around the clock.

  She had her first stroke in the summer of 1968, while she was watchin the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on her television. That was just a little one, and she used to blame it on Hubert Humphrey. "I finally looked at that happy asshole one too many times," she said, "and I popped a goddam blood-vessel. I should have known it was gonna happen, and it could just as easily have been Nixon."

  She had a bigger one in 1975, and that time she didn't have no politicians to blame it on. Dr. Freneau told her she better quit smokin and drinkin, but he could have saved his breath--no high-steppin kitty like Vera Kiss-My-Back-Cheeks Donovan was going to listen to a plain old country doctor like Chip Freneau. "I'll bury him," she used to say, "and have a Scotch and soda sitting on his headstone. "

  For awhile it seemed like maybe she would do just that--he kept scoldin her, and she kept sailin along like the Queen Mary. Then, in 1981, she had her first whopper, and the hunky got killed in a car-wreck over on the mainland the very next year. That was when I moved in with her--October of 1982.

  Did I have to? I dunno. I guess not. I had my Sociable Security, as old Hattie McLeod used to call it. It wasn't much, but the kids were long gone by then--Litt!e Pete right off the face of the earth, poor little lost lamb--and I had managed to put a few dollars away, too. Living on the island has always been cheap, and while it ain't what it once was, it's still a whale of a lot cheaper than livin on the mainland. So I guess I didn't have to go live with Vera, no.

  But by then her and me was used to each other. It's hard to explain to a man. I 'spect Nancy there with her pads n pens n tape-recorder understands, but I don't think she's s'posed to talk. We was used to each other in the way I s'pose two old bats can get used to hangin upside-down next to each other in the same cave, even though they're a long way from what you'd call the best of friends. And it wasn't really no big change. Hanging my Sunday clothes in the closet next to my housedresses was really the biggest part of it, because by the fall of '82 I was there all day every day and most nights as well. The money was a little better, but not so good I'd made the downpayment on my first Cadillac, if you know what I mean. Ha!

  I guess I did it mostly because there wasn't nobody else. She had a business manager down in New York, a man named Greenbush, but Greenbush wa'ant going to come up to Little Tall so she could scream down at him from her bedroom window to be sure and hang those sheets with six pins, not four, nor was he gonna move into the guest-room and change her diapers and wipe the shit off her fat old can while she accused him of stealin the dimes out of her goddam china pig and told him how she was gonna see him in jail for it. Greenbush cut the checks; I cleaned up her shit and listened to her rave on about the sheets and the dust bunnies and her goddam china pig.

  And what of it? I don't expect no medal for it, not even a Purple Heart. I've wiped up a lot of shit in my time, listened to even more of it (I was married to Joe St. George for sixteen years, remember), and none of it ever gave me the rickets. I guess in the end I stuck with her because she didn't have nobody else; it was either me or the nursin home. Her kids never came to see her, and that was one thing I felt sorry for her about. I didn't expect them to pitch in, don't get that idear, but I didn't see why they couldn't mend their old quarrel, whatever it was, and come once in awhile to spend the day or maybe a weekend with her. She was a miserable bitch, no doubt about it, but she was their Ma. And by then she was old. Accourse I know a lot more now than I did then, but--

  What?

  Yes, it's true. If I'm lyin, I'm dyin, as my grand-sons like to say. You just call that fella Greenbush, if you don't believe me. I expect when the news gets out--and it wi
ll, it always does--there'll be one of those soppy articles in the Bangor Daily News about how wonderful it all is. Well, I got news for you--it ain't wonderful. A friggin nightmare is what it is. No matter what happens in here, folks are gonna say I brainwarshed her into doin what she done n then killed her. I know it, Andy, n so do you. There ain't no power in heaven or on earth that can stop people from thinkin the worst when they want to.

  Well, not one goddam word of it's true. I didn't force her to do nothing, and she sure didn't do what she did because she loved me, or even liked me. I suppose she might have done it because she thought she owed me--in her own peculiar way she could have thought she owed me plenty, and t'wouldn't have been her way to say anything. Could even be what she done was her way of thankin me ... not for changin her shitty diapers but for bein there on all the nights when the wires came out of the corners or the dust bunnies came out from under the bed.

  You don't understand that, I know, but you will. Before you open that door and walk out of this room, I promise you'll understand everything.

  She had three ways of bein a bitch. I've known women who had more, but three's good for a senile old lady mostly stuck in a wheelchair or in bed. Three's damn good for a woman like that.

  The first way was when she was a bitch because she couldn't help it. You remember what I said about the clothespins, how you had to use six of em to hang the sheets, never just four? Well, that was just one example.

  There were certain ways things had to be done if you worked for Mrs. Kiss-My-Back-Cheeks Vera Donovan, and you didn't want to forget a single one of them. She told you how things were going to go right up front, and I'm here to tell you that's how things went. If you forgot something once, you got the rough side of her tongue. If you forgot twice, you got docked on payday. If you forgot three times, that was it--you were down the road, and no excuses listened to. That was Vera's rule, and it sat all right with me. I thought it was hard, but I thought it was fair. If you was told twice which racks she wanted the bakin put on after it came out of the oven, and not ever to stick it on the kitchen windowsills to cool like shanty Irish would do, and if you still couldn't remember, the chances were good you wasn't never going to remember.

  Three strikes and you're out was the rule, there was absolutely no exceptions to it, and I worked with a lot of different people in that house over the years because of it. I heard it said more'n once in the old days that workin for the Donovans was like steppin into one of those revolvin doors. You might get one spin, or two, and some folks went around as many as ten times or a dozen, but you always got spat out onto the sidewalk in the end. So when I went to work for her in the first place--this was in 1949--I went like you'd go into a dragon's cave. But she wasn't as bad as people liked to make out. If you kept your ears open, you could stay. I did, and the hunky did, too. But you had to stay on your toes all the time, because she was sharp, because she always knew more of what was going on with the island folk than any of the other summer people did ... and because she could be mean. Even back then, before all her other troubles befell her, she could be mean. It was like a hobby with her.

  "What are you doing here?" she says to me on that first day. "Shouldn't you be home minding that new baby of yours and making nice big dinners for the light of your life?"

  "Mrs. Cullum's happy to watch Selena four hours a day," I said. "Part-time is all I can take, ma'am."

  "Part-time is all I need, as I believe my advertisement in the local excuse for a newspaper said," she comes right back--just showin me the edge of that sharp tongue of hers, not actually cuttin me with it like she would so many times later. She was knittin that day, as I remember. That woman could knit like a flash--a whole pair of socks in a single day was no problem for her, even if she started as late as ten o'clock. But she said she had to be in the mood.

  "Yessum," I said. "It did."

  "My name isn't Yessum," she said, putting her knitting down. "It's Vera Donovan. If I hire you, you'll call me Missus Donovan--at least until we know each other well enough to make a change--and I'll call you Dolores. Is that clear?"

  "Yes, Missus Donovan," I said.

  "All right, we're off to a good start. Now answer my question. What are you doing here when you've got a house of your own to keep, Dolores?"

  "I want to earn a little extra money for Christmas," I said. I'd already decided on my way over I'd say that if she asked. "And if I'm satisfactory until then--and if I like working for you, of course--maybe I'll stay on a little longer."

  "If you like working for me," she repeats back, then rolls her eyes like it was the silliest thing she'd ever heard--how could anybody not like working for the great Vera Donovan? Then she repeats back, "Christmas money." She takes a pause, lookin at me the whole time, then says it again, even more sarcastic. "Kuh-risss-mas money!"

  Like she suspected I was really there because I barely had the rice shook out of my hair and was havin marriage troubles already, and she only wanted to see me blush and drop my eyes to know for sure. So I didn't blush and I didn't drop my eyes, although I was only twenty-two and it was a near thing. Nor would I have admitted to a single soul that I was already havin trouble--wild hosses wouldn't have dragged it out of me. Christmas money was good enough for Vera, no matter how sarcastic she might say it, and all I'd allow to myself was that the house-money was a little tight that summer. It was only years later that I could admit the real reason why I went up to face the dragon in her den that day: I had to find a way to put back some of the money Joe was drinking up through the week and losin in the Friday-night poker games at Fudgy's Tavern over on the mainland. In those days I still believed the love of a man for a woman and a woman for a man was stronger than the love of drinkin and hell-raisin--that love would eventually rise to the top like cream in a bottle of milk. I learned better over the next ten years. The world's a sorry schoolroom sometimes, ain't it?

  "Well," Vera said, "we'll give each other a try, Dolores St. George ... although even if you work out, I imagine you'll be pregnant again in a year or so, and that's the last I'll see of you."

  The fact was I was two months pregnant right then, but wild hosses wouldn't have dragged that outta me, either. I wanted the ten dollars a week the job paid, and I got it, and you better believe me when I say I earned every red cent of it. I worked my tail off that summer, and when Labor Day rolled around, Vera ast me if I wanted to keep on after they went back to Baltimore--someone has to keep a big place like that up to snuff all the year round, you know--and I said fine.

  I kep at it until a month before Joe Junior was born, and I was back at it even before he was off the titty. In the summer I left him with Arlene Cullum--Vera wouldn't have a crying baby in the house, not her--but when she and her husband were gone, I'd bring both him and Selena in with me. Selena could be mostly left alone--even at two going on three she could be trusted most of the time. Joe Junior I carted with me on my daily rounds. He took his first steps in the master bedroom, although you can believe Vera never heard of it.

  She called me a week after I delivered (I almost didn't send her a birth announcement, then decided if she thought I was lookin for a fancy present that was her problem), congratulated me on givin birth to a son, and then said what I think she really called to say--that she was holdin my place for me. I think she intended me to be flattered, and I was. It was about the highest compliment a woman like Vera can pay, and it meant a lot more to me than the twenty-five-dollar bonus check I got in the mail from her in December of that year.

  She was hard but she was fair, and around that house of hers she was always the boss. Her husband wasn't there but one day in ten anyway, even in the summers when they were supposed to be livin there full-time, but when he was, you still knew who was in charge. Maybe he had two or three hundred executives who dropped their drawers every time he said shit, but Vera was boss of the shootin match on Little Tall Island, and when she told him to take his shoes off and stop trackin dirt on her nice clean carpet, he minded.<
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  And like I say, she had her ways of doin things. Did she ever! I don't know where she got her idears, but I do know she was a prisoner of them. If things wasn't done a certain way, she'd get a headache or one in her gut. She spent so much of her day checkin up on things that I thought plenty of times she would have had more peace of mind if she'd just given over and kep that house herself.

  All the tubs had to be scrubbed out with Spic n Span, that was one thing. No Lestoil, no Top Job, no Mr. Clean. Just Spic n Span. If she caught you scrubbin one of the tubs with anything else, God help you.

  When it came to the ironin, you had to use a special spray-bottle of starch on the collars of the shirts and the blouses, and there was a piece of gauze you were supposed to put over the collar before you sprayed. Friggin gauze didn't do a goddam thing, so far as I could ever tell, and I must have ironed at least ten thousand shirts and blouses in that house, but if she came into the laundry room and saw you was doin shirts without that little piece of netting on a collar, or at least hung over the end of the ironin board, God help you.

  If you didn't remember to turn on the exhaust fan in the kitchen when you were fryin somethin, God help you.

  The garbage cans in the garage, that was another thing. There was six of em. Sonny Quist came once a week to pick up the swill, and either the housekeeper or one of the maids--whoever was most handy--was supposed to bring those cans back into the garage the minute, the very second, he was gone. And you couldn't just drag em into the corner and leave em; they had to be lined up two and two and two along the garage's east wall, with their covers turned upside-down on top of em. If you forgot to do it just that way, God help you.

  Then there was the welcome mats. There were three of em--one for the front door, one for the patio door, and one for the back door, which had one of those snooty TRADESMAN'S ENTRANCE signs on it right up until last year, when I got tired of looking at it and took it down. Once a week I had to take those welcome mats and lay em on a big rock at the end of the back yard, oh, I'm gonna say about forty yards down from the swimmin pool, and beat the dirt out of em with a broom. Really had to make the dust fly. And if you lagged off, she was apt to catch you. She didn't watch every time you beat the welcome mats, but lots of times she would. She'd stand on the patio with a pair of her husband's binoculars. And the thing was, when you brought the mats back to the house, you had to make sure WELCOME was pointin the right way. The right way was so people walkin up to whichever door it was could read it. Put a welcome mat back on the stoop upside-down and God help you.