Big Easy Bonanza

wasn’t what the fear feeling at the base of her spine was about—that had to do with Ma-Mère. But there was something else, something about Bitty that was creeping into her consciousness.
    She said, “Oh, Mother, of course not. Why on earth would you think that?”
    Her mother’s eyes brimmed. “It was a terrible summer—terrible things happened that summer.”
    You’re not kidding.
    She made Bitty a vanilla milkshake, thinking she needed something more substantial than the chicken soup, and watched her let it melt as she pretended to drink it. She seemed to fade after the odd interrogation, and to have trouble sitting. Marcelle knew what she really wanted, that she was too proud to say so, and she felt guilty keeping her mother from her only pleasure. When André whimpered in his sleep she made an excuse to wake him up and leave.
    Dear God, what had Bitty done? It was hard to imagine drunk, incompetent, uncaring Bitty even noticing Marcelle long enough to abuse her. But something violent had most certainly happened that summer. Marcelle had seen a not-so-instant replay—or bits of it—in Bitty’s kitchen. She had seen her mother lunging at her—holding an object, something large, terribly frightening—and hitting her. Marcelle had fallen, she could remember the blow, could almost feel it again, feel the wind knocked out of her. You couldn’t make that up, that feeling, Marcelle was sure of it. It must really have happened. But if her mother had hit her, then why? What had Marcelle done to provoke it? The hell of it was, she thought she knew, she just couldn’t bring it into focus.
    That night she woke up screaming, or thought she did. She checked André—he was still asleep. If she had actually made noise, she hadn’t waked him. He would probably be all right, he would probably escape. He was four now and hadn’t had night terrors—age three was when kids tended to get them.
    She had learned that when she was reading child-care books, preparing to be a mother, and had realized that she had had them that summer in Covington. Every night she woke up screaming and wailing, terrified, inconsolable.
    “What is it?” Ma-Mère would say, her eyes blazing, furious.
    Marcelle was too frightened to answer, probably didn’t know anyway, she thought now.
    “What is it, Marcelle? You’ll wake up Pa-Père and Henry.” Ma-Mère would shake her, perhaps trying to jar loose the answer.
    “What is it, chère?” Marcelle would flail about, probably, if she had done what the books said children did, and would cry all the harder.
    “Shut up! Shut up or I’ll give you something to cry about!” And she would. She would pull down Marcelle’s pajamas and spank her with a hairbrush.
    The books said children forgot abuses, and perhaps Marcelle had forgotten her share—what had happened with Bitty, for instance—but those memories of the hairbrush stung even now, like Bakelite on bare flesh.
    Pa-Père took Henry fishing every day and paid practically no attention to her. But she heard him telling Henry how to fish, she supposed—she didn’t know what they talked about— she heard him and he frightened her, just by the way he talked. Even now his voice frightened her. As an adult she had been able to put a few things together, and she could see that her grandparents were indeed very stern—much more so than her own parents—but then they had seemed frankly terrifying. The best thing about Pa-Père was that he turned his attention to Henry instead of to her.
    But being in Covington with them had seemed a prison sentence. Marcelle knew—she had always known—that she was sent there for a reason. It was because she had been bad, and had somehow hurt her mother. Henry had told her that. Now, trying to sleep after the nightmare, after learning Bitty had been angry enough to hit her and knock her down, she tried to dredge it out of the muck of nearly a quarter of a century.
    An image from the nightmare came back—a doll thrown against a wall, but splattering blood, not a doll at all, a real baby. Her mind ran the dream backward—it was the splattering that had awakened her. Now the mental camera panned back toward the person who had thrown the doll—Marcelle, laughing.
    That was it. It was the summer her sister was born. The dream was so vivid now. In it she hated the doll—loathed it. (Loathed her sister, surely.) And she was afraid of her. How could you hate and fear a baby so much?
Wait, you were only a