DEANNE

Not only not to hope, not even to wait: just to endure.

–William Faulkner

Burle Sewald bent over and kissed his wife’s forehead.

"You did good honey," he said without letting his eyes meet hers.

I filled her up like that, he thought. I can damn well get the woman fat. Slow and nether, the kind of suffocation he enjoyed; him and her his own mountain of flesh. teeth. and muscles.

The baby’s hands were very small and almost translucent. He took one between his finger and thumb and then let it drop.

His wife lay there exhausted, loins like a split fig, praying silently to Jesus Christ.

Deanne grew up, straddling her father’s knee, hollered at by her mother. She had beautiful round cheeks and still gray eyes. A mushroom is glossy and pure before the maggots come.

When she turned 7 Burle began molesting her sexually. Her brothers, who were just entering their teens — You can imagine — Two sturdy — Corrupt — Young — Americans.

"That girl of yours is fooling around," Burle said to his wife.

Twelve.

Her father’s cruelty took on new tones, scarlet highlights, like the glow of hell. He beat her up while his wife slunk off to the kitchen. Her brothers could have cared less.

He hit her.

"I saw you walking with a nigger boy," he said, his clothes sheltering the white meat of his body.

Fifteen.

"If you get yourself pregnant by a black your baby won’t be neither black or white . . . Everybody’s gotta have a race and like it or not you’re a white girl . . . You hear! . . . You hear me when I’m speaking?"

The Sewalds were from an unbroken line of German-Americans. They all had blond hair.

Manny was corn colored. He treated her like beef, gave her black eyes and got her pregnant.

She held the baby in her arms, her eyes moist, glassy.

"If you don’t quit bugging me, I’m gonna beat you with a stick!" Manny said.

"But he needs diapers Manny."

"Deanne!"

She went to the blood bank and donated plasma so that she could buy the baby diapers and her and Manny cigarettes. She went to a strip joint to apply for work and wore a tight skirt and provocative pumps, but the darksmoke room, men brooding over bottles, made her leave without opening her mouth.

Manny was not much of a breadwinner. The kicks and pricks Deanne received could not feed her baby. At the beginning of the month, when the welfare check arrived, Manny would become friendly, even romantic. He would go out, drink beer with his buddies, come home and be abusive.

"You’re hurting me," she would say when he grabbed her by the wrists.

"Not as much as I’m going to hurt you if you don't shut your mouth!"

Pregnant a second time.

He made a little money selling crank. Deanne snorted the stuff, a baby kicking in her belly. Manny was on edge . . . He screamed . . . Roared . . . He became disgusted with the way she ate, sat, and toyed with her earlobe. She ran scared around their little apartment, from one room to the next, the main thing was to stay out of his way.

"Call 911! . . . Call 911!" she screamed. The neighbors called the police. She begged them to let him go.

They took the babies. Child services, gummy phantoms, stretching, joining and gaping . . . Manny shrugged his shoulders while Deanne howled.

She could no more take care of herself than her children. The 40 dollars a month food stamps she received was spent on pop, chips, Carl Buddig beef. She gabbed with the neighbors, smoked cigarettes, and watched TV. Her body fattened. Indolence, ill diet.

Depression. With no kids around, the place became especially dreary. She went from being untidy and lazy to being just plain cataleptic. Not a stitch of work got done. Dishes piled up filthy in the sink while the cupboards ran bare.

Manny spent his time nursing cans of beer, spouting sarcastic remarks, looking for any excuse to deliver Deanne a few quick slaps. "You’d better keep away from me," he would say when he was feeling particularly volatile.

Driving around with high blood alcohol content, Manny was pulled over. They found a few grams of crank on him, he bit an officer of the law, was tied to a stretcher, taken away writhing and screaming. They had to gag him. They had captured an animal, a dangerous hybrid that had best be kept under observation.

Deanne was whoring, but not for money. She just did not know what else to do. The only thing anybody ever wanted of her was her sex.

Burle acquired custody of his daughter's children. He refused the mother visits, called her slut, thrust the blame for her baseness away from his own door. "It’s those candy-assed liberals filling our streets with drugs, welfare mothers . . ." he would say.

Truth be told, he missed the unsanctioned caresses that he once shared with his daughter. Now that she was a grown woman, he could not bring himself to take her bodily. Still, they both had clear memories of their incest. Deanne had certainly been nursed on a mutant form of familial love. Her father’s and brothers' brutality made criminal lust seem the norm. For her, romance was an emotional synonym for violence.

She sold her plasma by the quart. That kept her in cigarettes. Food stamps kept her on a low diet. Men visited, shot her up, and had their way. Her hands and legs trembled, though vice would sometimes abate the spasms.

Stomach, rump, hips and thighs fattened up, breasts withered. She no longer looked the pretty fräulien. Her figure abided as a lump of laxity. The personality of this woman was made up of addictions and phobias. She was a hypochondriac, a minor kleptomaniac. She feared the weather, insects, heights, believed in bad omens, avoided anything with the number thirteen. When she went to bed she would not remove the cross from around her neck for fear of nightmares.

"Get out, get out, get out!" Manny screamed, raising his fist above his head.

Deanne whimpered, "Honey I love you. You know I do . . . Don’t you hit me, you hear!"

Out of jail. He returned home chicken chested, out for revenge on his female for all the men she had given pleasure to while he had been in lock up. All the stupidity of a homosapien flared up in him as he came back to reclaim his territory, to tear apart whoever it was who had been sleeping in his bed.

"Get out of my apartment, and don’t you dare come back," he said as he slammed the door behind her.

"‘Kay Manny, if that’s the way you want it . . ." Tears rolled down Deanne’s cheeks.

She walked the streets, pressing her lips willingly against whatever surface came her way. An odor surrounded her, a smell. She dreamed of her children as she sat on the curb. She would have liked to have nursed them, instead her breasts were groped by rough handed men.

"Don’t come around here unless you’re leading a clean life," her father would say. "Those kids are better off without a mother than a whore as one."

He was implementing tough love. It gave him pleasure to salt his daughter’s sores. From then on when she banged at her parent’s door no one would answer.

She walked from corner to corner. An ambulance screamed by. The sun was setting. Night. A shelter from the darkness meant warming some man’s bed. Curling beneath sleazy sheets, grasping a broad, oily back while a suet belly jiggled against hers.

There are cruel and hateful men who will sleep with any woman. They hide behind beards trimmed like woman’s loins, out to seek vengeance on the opposite sex . . . through sex. Encouraged vices, watched tremble, preyed on her fear, paranoia, hysteria.

Staring at the ground she crossed the street. Her struggle ended in a rush, a flash of pain.

Deanne lay in the ground. She had hung on, between the petals of a white rose, for 3 days. Her respiration slowed down, ended, eyes rolled back in head.

The children, the by-product of her body, a boy and a girl, lived in relative comfort. Burle, gray headed, watched them as they played, the boy with disinterest, the girl with the lascivious twinkle of an old goat.

Deanne stared at the ground, distracted, dejected. She crossed the street. A bus came around the corner and hit her. Mom’s eyes had sweated when she gave birth to Deanne, but when she found out her daughter was dying she did not cry. The woman was as dry as a cracker.

© Brendan Connell 2001