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  The Marriage Bed

  Five Stories and

  Two Novella Excerpts

  By Elaine Ford

  Published by Wordrunner eChapbooks

  (an imprint of Wordrunner Press)

  Copyright 2015 Elaine Ford

  Cover photo by Carmen Silva

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Contents

  A Sense of Morality

  Wasps in a Bottle

  Rita Lafferty’s Lucky Summer

  Birthing

  Ship Street

  Nerve-Wrackin Christmas

  Original Brasses, Fine Patina

  About Elaine Ford

  About Wordrunner eChapbooks

  A Sense of Morality

  In November of 1969, the month 250,000 anti-Vietnam War demonstrators marched on Washington, Miles and I departed that city for good and moved into a beach cottage in a blue-collar town south of Boston. Mortgage-poor, unable to sell our Cleveland Park house for what it was worth, we were, to put it bluntly, broke. But for me the cottage was more than a cheap winter rental. I was desperate to get away from tear gas and slogan-shouting and head-bashing. The deserted seaside represented my private escape from the war.

  The first Saturday after the move, old friends from graduate school days drove down from Newton to inspect our uncharacteristically eccentric digs. We ate mussels for dinner and drank a great deal of jug wine, which Miles inevitably referred to as “plonk,” an expression he’d picked up in London the year he researched the Anti-Corn Law League. From behind an expanse of plate glass we looked out at the dark Atlantic. “You’ve done a Good Thing,” Ned Warner pronounced euphorically, as we contemplated the languorous progression of an oil tanker heading north, glittering like a parcel of urban property that had somehow become detached from the mainland. With a gratified smile Miles tipped more plonk into Ned’s glass.

  Around midnight the Warners left for home and Miles and I went upstairs to bed. An hour or so later I was awakened by a pair of indistinct shapes bumping softly into cartons, groping in piles of as yet unstowed possessions.

  “Miles,” I said, nudging him, “there are people in the bedroom.”

  “It’s only the Warners,” he muttered, from the depths of his wine-befogged sleep.

  “It can’t be the Warners,” I said. “The Warners have gone back to Newton.”

  Cutting the argument off right there, one of the shapes grabbed some part of Miles’s body and yanked him out of bed. “Just give us the big bills,” he said, putting to Miles’s throat what we later learned was our own boning knife. “You can keep the change.”

  Breathlessly I began to explain that we didn’t have any big bills; the Federal Home Loan Bank had it all. You can’t get blood out of a turnip, I said. At the same time Miles was chattering he didn’t know where his wallet might be but he’d do his best to find it and please for the love of God don’t kill him. I could tell from the wild croak in his voice that Miles was taking this turn of events harder that I. However, I didn’t have a boning knife nicking into my throat.

  Thug Number One frog-marched Miles downstairs in search of the wallet and I was left with Thug Number Two, who so far hadn’t said anything. “Miles never knows where his wallet is,” I confided, hoping to abort any suspicions that we were holding out on them. “Or his keys. That’s one of the things about Miles.”

  We could hear, downstairs, swear words out of Thug Number One as they stumbled around in the dark, and out of Miles a sort of unhinged keening. I found my husband’s lack of guts embarrassing. I jumped out of bed and switched on the light.

  “Hey!” Thug Number Two said, startled. But I began to hunt for the wallet among heaps of underwear, and he didn’t try to stop me. He was a slight man, twenty at most, with dull hair and a complexion that looked like it had been conditioned with a cheese grater. He held my bread knife, the serrated kind, and on his hands were two of my oven mitts. “So we don’t leave fingerprints,” he explained, with a wave of one mitt.

  “Good thinking.”

  “My cousin thought it up,” he said modestly. “We cut your phone wires, too.”

  “The phone hasn’t been hooked up yet.”

  “Oh.”

  An outraged shout came from below. “The wallet’s got six fucking bucks in it!”

  I shrugged: I’d told them so.

  After a moment’s thought Thug Number Two asked, “You got any gold?”

  “Only my wedding ring,” I said untruthfully.

  He stared, rather puzzled, at a tangle of necklaces on my dresser: strung apple seeds, African clay beads. It was becoming clear that nothing about us was what he and his cousin had expected. “Oh no,” he said. “I wouldn’t take your wedding ring.”

  In the next few days Miles’s salt-stained wallet and three oven mitts washed up on the beach. The fourth must have gone out to sea. Weeks later, early on a Sunday morning, the police invited me down to the station to look at mug shots. “No,” I told the captain finally, “none of them is the man I saw.”

  “Right,” he said. “Now we’re going to show you a bozo we picked up last night on another break-in.”

  For sure he wasn’t the kindly acned thug who’d scrupled to take my wedding ring. This man had a day’s growth of coarse black beard, and although he was subdued—there in the captain’s office, handcuffed—I saw nothing modest in him. “Say something to the lady,” the captain prodded, and the man spoke a word or two in a mumble.

  I thought he might be Thug Number One, the man I’d heard but not seen. But I couldn’t be sure. “Do you have a cousin?” I asked. “A person with problem skin?”

  “Nah,” he said, and so far as I know, the police didn’t pursue the matter.

  But I saw Thug Number Two once more. It was in the produce department of a Dorchester supermarket; he wore a stained bib apron and was taking acorn squash out of a crate. In the intervening years his complexion had not improved. He flushed, recognizing me, and I began to shake. I could have had him arrested on the spot, I suppose, but instead I wheeled my cart on by. Out of a sense of honor, or morality, he’d spared me my wedding ring. Since then, I myself had cast it aside.

  Wasps in a Bottle

  Excerpted from the novel Monkey Bay

  Tucker looks out the window at Hannah’s little yellow Pinto parked by the alder thicket. The alders have catkins, like punctuation marks. She’s sitting at the table, working on the thick gray sleeve, her needles clacking one against the other.

  “Let’s get in the car and go,” he says suddenly.

  She looks up, the stitch halfway between the needles. “Go where?”

  “Boston. Anywhere.”

  She slips the stitch onto the needle and lays the knitting on the dull metal tabletop. “What are you saying, Tucker?”

  “Not for a lark. For good.”

  She’s tugging at a hank of her hair. Outside, herring gulls are yowling and squawking, but you can’t see them, because everything beyond the alder thicket is obscured by fog.

  “What about my mother?”

  “It’s insane, the way things are. Three wasps in a bottle.”

  “She doesn’t know about us, I’m sure she doesn’t.”

  Smoking a cigarette, he leans against the cold iron woodstove. He hasn’t bothered to light it because it’s fifty degrees o
ut.

  “What makes you so sure?” he says. “You don’t understand one thing about Marilla.”

  “And who’s to blame for that? It wasn’t me left her.”

  Ash drops onto the plywood floor. “We’d better not start talking about blame, Hannah.”

  “We could stop,” she says after a while.

  “That’s what I told you we couldn’t do. Remember, Hannah?”

  “I don’t understand why.”

  “Because you like it too much,” he says, coughing.

  “And so do you.”

  The filter sticks to his lip, and when he takes the butt out of his mouth to toss it into the stove he finds he’s torn the skin. He tastes blood on his tongue. “We have to get out of here,” he says. “Now. Today.”

  “Shouldn’t we think it over?”

  “Put your coat on and get in the car. I’ll be there in a minute.”

  “We have to leave her a note, at least.”

  “I’ll take care of it.”

  “Tucker—”

  “I said I’d take care of it.”

  She abandons the knitting and walks to the mud room, unsteadily, as though she’d been awakened in the night by an emergency phone call. He opens the cellar door and hurries down the plank steps. Into a plastic shopping bag he packs six Mason jars full of weed, all he has left from last year’s crop. He extracts a roll of bills from their hiding place in a clay sewer pipe and stuffs the money into the rear pocket of his jeans.

  When he shuts the door behind him he sees her sitting in the car, her uncombed hair on the collar of her schoolgirl coat, and he feels a wild sense of relief, like a cork bursting out of a popgun. He runs to the car, the plastic bag cradled against his pea coat.

  “It won’t start,” she says dully, as he opens the door on the passenger side.

  “What?”

  “The battery’s dead.”

  “Shit,” he says. “The jumpers are in the truck.”

  “We’ll have to wait until she comes back.”

  “Are you nuts? Turn the ignition on and put her in second. I’ll push from behind, and when she gets going good down the drive, pop the clutch. Get it?” He drops the bag on the seat, hearing the jars clink into one another, and slams the door.

  Damn the mud, anyway. The car’s a tinny enough little heap, but it takes nearly all his strength to shove it out of the bog it’s parked in and onto the driveway. Stones in the driveway have been scooped up by the snowplow and are lying exposed in the muck and gravel. No problem for the pickup, it sails right over them, but they scrape the underbelly of the Pinto as he shoulders it inch by inch through what seems like wet tar. He can feel the wad of bills pressing against his butt. He pauses for breath, and Hannah winds down her window.

  “We’re never going to make it,” she says.

  “Yes we are. Easy as pie, once we get her on the downward slope.”

  “It’s too muddy to go fast enough.”

  “She’ll go, take my word for it.”

  “You’ll have a heart attack.”

  “Shut up and steer!” he yells, leaning his shoulder against the car frame. The metal’s so thin he can almost feel it buckle.

  The driveway rises gently as it moves away from the swampy spot near the alders—it seems like goddamn Mount Katahdin—but he knows there’s a sudden drop near the telephone pole about twenty yards ahead, and after that it’s downhill almost the whole way to Monkey Bay Road.

  Moisture begins to trickle down the back of his neck. His sock’s working down into his boot and the leather’s rubbing up a blister, probably going to end up with blood poisoning, but he doesn’t want to stop and lose momentum. Overhead, somewhere in the fog, gulls are screeching.

  When at last he reaches the top of the rise he takes a deep breath and gives the Pinto a tremendous running shove. He sees Hannah’s head wobble as the car hits a rock and veers off it, and then the car’s moving fast enough so he doesn’t have to push anymore.

  He stands there, gripping the stitch in his side, watching the car wind down a curve and disappear into the fog. Pray to God she doesn’t stall it waiting for him at the bottom, he thinks, and then he hears a hollow thunk and knows they’re not even going to make it that far.

  Rita Lafferty’s Lucky Summer

  The summer I was sixteen I had my first real job, selling pastries in Jojo’s Bakery on Broadway, near Sullivan Square. Over the machine that dispensed tickets was a hand-lettered sign: Take a Number. Like my Aunt Grace saying, “Take a card, take a card,” when she was going to do a trick or tell my fortune. Maybe the ticket machine was a lucky number machine, I liked to think. When I called out “seventeen” or “fifty-three” to the customers waiting their turn to be served, I half expected one of them to wave her ticket and shout “Bingo!” Nobody ever did, though. They’d be trying to shush their yammering kid or figuring out whether one pineapple cake could be sliced thin enough to feed eleven people.

  It was hard work. On your feet all day and no goofing off; whenever the stream of customers thinned out Jojo would always find something for you to do in back, washing cookie trays or making up boxes. What I really wanted to do was work the pastry tube, but no chance of that.

  Rita Lafferty, who worked at Jojo’s with me, fell in love that summer. Rita was thirty, though she didn’t look it. Her teeth were as bucked as though she’d spent her childhood opening tonic bottles with them. She lived with her mother over on Fosket Street. Mrs. Lafferty was forever calling up the bakery, trying to talk Rita into leaving early so she could run some errand for her. She’d even have made up the excuse that Rita was supposed to tell Jojo. Poor Rita didn’t know whether to be more afraid of her mother or of getting fired.

  The best thing about Rita was her hair. It was reddish brown and so heavy and dense that even the awful hair nets we had to wear couldn’t squash it. Once she made me examine the roots to prove to me that the color came from God. Not that I’d suspected otherwise.

  Rita’s boyfriend was a motorman on the Orange Line; he spent his working hours riding from Oak Grove to Forest Hills and back. They’d met in the Star Market, when he dropped a can of cream-style corn on her toe. He was a bachelor who lived alone in Magoun Square and cooked for himself. His name was Frank Hodges.

  Rita limped around for a few days, smiling goofily whenever anyone asked how she’d hurt her foot. And then, the day Frank’s gift arrived at the bakery, she began to confide in me.

  He’d sent it to apologize—possibly to head off a suit, though I didn’t suggest that to Rita: a large ceramic donkey with a clump of geraniums in each raffia saddle basket. “Isn’t it cunning?” she said. And how had Frank guessed that geraniums were practically her favorite flower?

  “Maybe he thought they’d match your hair?” I offered. The donkey had a somewhat toothy expression, but I didn’t mention that to Rita, either.

  “My hair’s not that kind of red. Still, to men red is red.”

  “That’s what I mean,” I agreed, from my own extensive knowledge of men.

  “He asked me out,” Rita went on, “when I called to thank him.”

  “How did you know his number?”

  She looked only a little sheepish. “I looked it up in the phone book. Well, I had to thank him, didn’t I?”

  They went to the movies that weekend, and the next weekend, on a Sunday afternoon, to Fenway Park to jeer at Don Zimmer. Finally, Frank came around to the bakery. He turned out to be a better-looking man than you’d imagine Rita could catch, even with her great hair. Not tall, but plenty of muscles and so tan you’d have thought he spent every day stretched out on Revere Beach instead of inside a subway car. Maybe not quite as old as Rita, but it was hard to tell for sure.

  “He seems nice,” I told her later, as we were bringing out trays of cream puffs. Rita only smiled. When she kept her mouth shut, she was surprisingly pretty. Especially after Frank came into her life. I began to notice things. She had nice breasts—we’d strip out of our nylon
uniforms at the end of the day, the two of us crowded into the tiny john in back—and she had a kind of sexy smell about her, too. Not that she was sleeping with Frank, I was sure, but her excitement was there in her delicate sweat and in the new way she moved her body. She even talked back to Mrs. Lafferty once or twice when the old witch called, demanding to know how soon she’d be home.

  Now I began to wonder why no man had noticed Rita before, why she had seemed so obviously virginal and fated to remain that way. Of course, there was the buck teeth. And she did tend to giggle, particularly in a crisis, and she fell all over herself agreeing with you, no matter what outrageous thing you’d said. Still, look outside the plate glass window onto Broadway: women walking by who are unmistakably married—someone once made love to them and planted babies in them—and how all that happened is a mystery. Arms puckered with fat now, gold teeth and false gold hair, voices like fishwives.

  Frank started picking Rita up after work. He drove a yellow Corvette, only slightly dented. The car worried me a little, because I calculated what it must cost to keep up the payments and wondered whether there’d be enough left over to support a wife, let alone babies and a mother-in-law. They’d gone to Virgie’s, she’d tell me the next morning, or to Davis Square for a pizza.

  “How come Frank is always available to pick you up?” I asked her. “Whether you work till 4:30 or 7:30 he always manages to be here.”

  “He arranges his schedule around mine,” she said, gazing at the birthday cake display. For some reason the glass on that particular case makes a good mirror.

  “How can he do that?”

  She smiled, tucking a few wisps of hair into her hair net and letting the elastic snap. “He has a lot of seniority. He gets first crack at the work sheet.”

  Well, I believed it if she did.

  And then all at once it struck me that she was sleeping with him, after all. There were no more reports of what movie they’d seen, or what they’d had to eat at Virgie’s. If I asked her, she’d say, “Oh, I forget.” Rita was a terrible liar, no inventiveness, no acting ability. I imagined them in Frank’s steamy apartment, making love to the rattle of traffic in Magoun Square, and I feared for her soul.