The client fell back, her hands raised, the half-finished dress cascading to the floor. Mrs. Gant picked it up and thrust it at her again, her hands hard in a series of restrained blows. “Get out of my shop,” she said. “Don’t you never come here again.”
Mrs. Gant went back to the room. Zilphia crouched in the corner, watching the door. Mrs. Gant drew her out by one thin arm. She began to beat Zilphia, striking her about the body with her flat hand while Zilphia’s thin arm appeared to elongate like rubber hose as she silently wrenched and strained. “Bitches!” Mrs. Gant said: “bitches!” She ceased as suddenly and sat on the bed and drew Zilphia toward her. Zilphia resisted. She began to cry and vomit, her eyeballs back-rolling until only the whites showed, shrieking and retching. Mrs. Gant got her to bed and sent for the doctor.
At that time Zilphia was pole-thin, with a wan, haunted face and big, not-quite-conquered eyes, going to and from school at her mother’s side, behind her small tragic mask of a face. In her third year she refused one day to go back to school. She would not tell Mrs. Gant why: that she was ashamed to never be seen on the street without her mother. Mrs. Gant would not let her stop. In the spring she was ill again, from anemia and nervousness and loneliness and actual despair.
She was sick for a long time. The doctor told Mrs. Gant that Zilphia would have to have companionship, to play with children of her own age and out-of-doors. When Zilphia was convalescent Mrs. Gant came in one day with a miniature cook stove. “Now you can have the girls in and you can cook,” she said. “Won’t that be nicer than visiting?” Zilphia lay on the pillow, not less white than it. Her eyes looked like holes thumbed into a piece of blotting paper. “You can have a tea party every day,” Mrs. Gant said. “I’ll make dresses for all the dolls.”
Zilphia began to cry. She lay on the pillow, crying, her hands at her sides. Mrs. Gant took the stove away. She took it back to the store and made them return her money.
Zilphia was convalescent for a long time. She still had sudden crying fits. When she was up Mrs. Gant asked her what girls she would like to visit. Zilphia named three or four. That afternoon Mrs. Gant locked the shop. She was seen in three different parts of town, looking at houses. She stopped passers. “Who lives there?” she said. They told her. “What family have they got?” The passer looked at her. She faced him steadily: a strong, still comely woman. “Have they got any boys?”
The next day she gave Zilphia permission to visit one of them. Zilphia would go home with the girl from school on certain days and they played in the barn or, in bad weather, in the house. At a certain hour Mrs. Gant appeared at the gate in a black shawl and bonnet and she and Zilphia returned to the barred room above the lot. And each afternoon … behind the barn a short pasture sloped to a ditch where scrub cedars grew … in these cedars Mrs. Gant sat on a wooden box from the time school was out until the time for Zilphia to start home, when she would hide the box again and go around by the next street to the gate and be waiting there when Zilphia emerged from the house.
She did not watch the barn or, in the winter time, the house; she just sat there … a woman who for twelve years had been growing into the outward semblance of a man until now at forty there was a faint shadow of moustache at the corner of her mouth … in the timeless patience of her country raising and her cold and implacable paranoia, in the mild weather, or with the shawl drawn close about her against the rain and cold.
In Zilphia’s thirteenth year Mrs. Gant began to examine her body each month. She made Zilphia strip naked and stand cringing before her while the savage light fell through the bars and the gray winter drove above the lot. After one of these examinations … it was in the spring … she told Zilphia what her father had done and what she had done. She sat on the bed while Zilphia cringed swiftly into her clothes, telling her about it in a cold, level voice, in the language of a man while Zilphia’s thin body shrank and shrank as though in upon itself, as though at the impact of the words.
Then her voice ceased. She was sitting on the bed, upright, motionless, her cold mad eyes gone blank as a statue’s; and standing before her, her mouth open a little, Zilphia thought of a rock or a pile from which an abruptly undammed stream has roared away.
They lived now in a kind of armistice. They slept in the same bed and ate of the same food for days in complete silence; sitting at the machine Mrs. Gant would hear Zilphia’s feet pass through the room and cease beyond the stairs to the street, without even raising her head. Yet now and then she would close the shop and with the shawl about her shoulders she would repair to the less frequented streets and lanes on the edge of town and after a while she would meet Zilphia walking rapidly and aimlessly. Then together they would return home without a word between them.
One afternoon Zilphia and the boy were lying beneath the blanket. It was in a ditch in the woods on the outskirts of town, within hailing distance of the highroad. They had been doing this for about a month, lying in the mutual, dreamlike mesmeric throes of puberty, rigid, side by side, their eyes closed, not even talking. When Zilphia opened her eyes she was looking up at Mrs. Gant’s inverted face and foreshortened body against the sky.
“Get up,” Mrs. Gant said. Zilphia lay quietly looking up at her. “Get up, you bitch,” Mrs. Gant said.
The next day Zilphia withdrew from school. In an oil cloth sewing apron she sat in a chair beside the window which gave upon the square; beside it Mrs. Gant’s machine whirred and whirred. The window was not barred. Through it she watched the children with whom she had gone to school begin to fall into inevitable pairs and pass into and out of her vision, some of them as far as the minister or the church; one year she made the white gown for the girl whom she used to visit; four years later, dresses for her daughter. She sat beside the window for twelve years.
III
In the town they told about Miss Zilphia’s beau, with amusement and pity and, here and there, with concern. “He’ll take advantage of her,” they said. “It ought not to be allowed. A person of her … surely they would not sell her a license, even if.…” She was a neat woman, with neat hair. Her skin was the color of celery and she was a little plump in a flabby sort of way. Her glasses lent a baffled, ascetic look to her face, enlarging her opaque irises.
As long as she had a needle in her fingers and was unobserved, her movements were direct, assured; but on the street, in the hat and clothes which her mother made for her, they had that vague, indefinite awkwardness of the nearsighted.
“But surely you don’t think that she … of course, her mother is crazy, but Zilphia … poor girl.”
“It’s a shame. A tramp painter. She should be protected. How her mother can be so blind I cannot.…”
He was a young man with black hair and eyes like wood ashes. One day Mrs. Gant found that he had been painting in the window at Zilphia’s chair for two days. She moved Zilphia into the back room … it was now a fitting room; for two years now they had been living in a frame bungalow bleak as a calendar picture, on an obscure street … and when he came inside to paint the walls Mrs. Gant closed the shop and she and Zilphia went home. For eight days Zilphia had a holiday, the first in twelve years.
Robbed of her needle, of the slow mechanical manipulation, Zilphia’s eyes began to pain her, and she could not sleep well. She would wake from dreams in which the painter performed monstrously with his pot and brush. In the dream his eyes were yellow instead of gray, and he was always chewing, his chin fading away into the blurred drool of the chewing; one night she waked herself by saying aloud, “He’s got a beard!” Now and then she dreamed of the pot and brush alone. They would be alive, performing of themselves actions of monstrous and ritualled significance.
After eight days Mrs. Gant fell ill; idleness brought her to bed. One night they had the doctor. The next morning Mrs. Gant rose and dressed and locked Zilphia into the house and went to town. Zilphia watched from the window her mother’s black-shawled figure toil slowly down the street, pausing now and then to hold itself erect by the fence. An hour later she
