The Progress of Love

dances later on with my father, she asked him not to put any dressing on his hair, because the smell reminded her.) A bunch of men standing out on the street, outside a hotel, seemed to Mariettalike a clot of poison. You tried not to hear what they were saying, but you could be sure it was vile. If they didn’t say anything, they laughed and vileness spread out from them—poison—just the same. It was only after Marietta was saved that she could walk right past them. Armed by God, she walked through their midst and nothing stuck to her, nothing scorched her; she was safe as Daniel.
    Now she turned and ran, straight back the way she had come. Up the hill, running to get home. She thought she had made a mistake leaving her mother. Why did her mother tell her to go? Why did she want her father? Quite possibly so that she could greet him with the sight of her own warm body swinging on the end of a rope. Marietta should have stayed—she should have stayed and talked her mother out of it. She should have run to Mrs. Sutcliffe, or any neighbor, not wasted time this way. She hadn’t thought who could help, who could even believe what she was talking about. She had the idea that all families except her own lived in peace, that threats and miseries didn’t exist in other people’s houses, and couldn’t be explained there.
    A train was coming into town. Marietta had to wait. Passengers looked out at her from its windows. She broke out wailing in the faces of those strangers. When the train passed, she continued up the hill—a spectacle, with her hair uncombed, her feet bare and muddy, in her nightgown, with a wild, wet face. By the time she ran into her own yard, in sight of the barn, she was howling. “Mama!” she was howling. “Mama!”
    Nobody was there. The chair was standing just where it had been before. The rope was dangling over the back of it. Marietta was sure that her mother had gone ahead and done it. Her mother was already dead—she had been cut down and taken away.
    But warm, fat hands settled down on her shoulders, and Mrs. Sutcliffe said, “Marietta. Stop the noise. Marietta. Child. Stop the crying. Come inside. She is well, Marietta. Come inside and you will see.”
    Mrs. Sutcliffe’s foreign voice said, “Mari-et-cha,” giving the name a rich, important sound. She was as kind as could be. When Marietta lived with the Sutcliffes later, she was treated as the daughterof the household, and it was a household just as peaceful and comfortable as she had imagined other households to be. But she never felt like a daughter there.
    In Mrs. Sutcliffe’s kitchen, Beryl sat on the floor eating a raisin cookie and playing with the black-and-white cat, whose name was Dickie. Marietta’s mother sat at the table, with a cup of coffee in front of her.
    “She was silly,” Mrs. Sutcliffe said. Did she mean Marietta’s mother or Marietta herself? She didn’t have many English words to describe things.
    Marietta’s mother laughed, and Marietta blacked out. She fainted, after running all that way uphill, howling, in the warm, damp morning. Next thing she knew, she was taking black, sweet coffee from a spoon held by Mrs. Sutcliffe. Beryl picked Dickie up by the front legs and offered him as a cheering present. Marietta’s mother was still sitting at the table.
    Her heart was broken. That was what I always heard my mother say. That was the end of it. Those words lifted up the story and sealed it shut. I never asked, Who broke it? I never asked, What was the men’s poison talk? What was the meaning of the word “vile”?
    Marietta’s mother laughed after not hanging herself. She sat at Mrs. Sutcliffe’s kitchen table long ago and laughed. Her heart was broken.
    I always had a feeling, with my mother’s talk and stories, of something swelling out behind. Like a cloud you couldn’t see through, or get to the end of. There was a cloud, a poison, that had touched my mother’s life. And when I grieved my mother, I became part of it. Then I would beat my head against my mother’s stomach and breasts, against her tall, firm front, demanding to be forgiven. My mother would tell me to ask God. But it wasn’t God, it was my mother I had to get straight with. It seemed as if she knew something about me that was worse, far worse, than ordinary lies and tricks and meanness; it was a really sickening shame. I beat against my mother’s front to make her forget that.
    My brothers weren’t bothered by any of this. I