Savage, Grace

Chapter One

         First Grace heard the click of a key card. Then the door handle.
         Jesus, they’re back.
         She yanked the covers over her head.
         “Aunt Grace, Aunt Grace. Get up,” Jon-Jon called out, “Time for dinner.”
         “Shhh, shhh, shhh,” Rae-Ann whispered. “Aunt Grace is sleeping. Let’s go potty, Jon.”
         Grace heard Jon-Jon patter into the bathroom without complaint, the newness of the motel-room scene still worth his cooperation. She felt Rae-Ann settle in beside her on the bed.
         “Sorry for his yelling.”
         Grace nodded from under the covers.
         “How about dinner? You said maybe Italian food. Some pasta, warm garlic bread, a nice glass of red wine. Soul food, Sister Grace.”
         “Can’t do any more carbs,” she mumbled from beneath the blanket.
         "I can't hear you. Take your head out from under the covers, would you?" Rae-Ann said.
         “I’m done, Mommy,” Jon-Jon called from the bathroom.
         “Take your suit off, bud. Dry off a little.”
         “I need help, Mommy,” Jon-Jon called.
         “You can do it, bud. Be there in a minute,” Rae-Ann said.
         Grace inched the covers down, revealing scarlet-rimmed eyes puffed up from hard crying. "Count me out. You and Jon-Jon go."
         "You’ve been crying this whole time? I thought maybe a little rest would do the trick."
         “Xanax would do the trick," Grace said. “I’m out of Xanax.”
         “Where’s your prescription?”
         “On the nightstand,” Grace said, rubbing sleepy dirt from her eyes, then sinking her head in her hands.
         “I’ll see if I can a drugstore up here to give you a refill.”
         Grace looked up. “They’re not going to do that.”
         “The heck they’re not. They will if I tell ‘em to.”
         “Mommy!” Jon-Jon. called. He stumbled out of the bathroom with his trunks draped around his ankles.
         “Jon-Jon. Put a towel on this minute unless you want a whoopin’. Aunt Grace doesn’t wanna see Uncle Wiggly.”
         Jon-Jon looked down at his private parts, giggled, and waddled back into the bathroom.
         “Most action I’ve seen in months,” Grace said, then sniffled and looked around on the bed for the tissue box. “Tissues?”
         “On the floor. Here. Oh, and here you go,” Rae- Ann said, handing her the phone.
         “Whenever I put a phone to my ear, I can hear my biological clock ticking.”
         “Stop. I’ll read the number. You dial,” Rae-Ann said and scooped up the empty pill bottle. “I’m sorry. I thought you’d like that place. Since you’re taking that class and everything.”
         "Oh, Jesus, Rae-Ann. They said that village was a place for 'renewal of the human spirit.' Renewal, my ass."

* * * * *

         When Rae-Ann suggested Canterbury, Grace thought it was a great idea. Her anthropology professor told her that if she’s going to New Hampshire, visiting the Shaker settlement was a must-do.
         Everything took longer to get to in New Hampshire than she and Rae-Anne figured. New Englanders drove too damn slowly for the comfort of tourists. Plus after passing at least a dozen donut shops or signs for donut shops since crossing the New Hampshire state line, they had to stop for a few of  Dunkin Donuts finest. And one latte. And two Moo-lattas.
         “Donuts, liquor stores, and white churches. Is that all there is to New Hampshire?” Rae-Ann had asked on the way.
         “Maybe it’s a plot,” Grace had said. “To get people to church, drummed up by the churches. Ply ‘em with donuts and liquor. Create a demand for repentance. That’ll fill the pews.”
         “Like I don’t know what you do for a living,” Rae-Ann had said.
         Gorged on donuts, they got to Canterbury after lunch, later than they expected. As they left the parking lot, Jon-Jon decided that sitting in his stroller was not part of the plan that day and threw himself into a tantrum in front of the ticket counter.
         They strolled onto the grounds with Jon-Jon pushing his stroller, his stuffed cat strapped into the seat, his head cocked and sporting a crooked smile. At that moment, he looked so much like Grace’s brother when he was Jon-Jon’s age, she scooped him up and blew a raspberry into his belly. Rae-Ann studied the map as Jon-Jon squealed in Grace’s arms.
         “He’s rammy today. We may have to do a self-guided tour. Unless they have a tour that lasts an hour or less that I’m not seeing,” Rae-Ann.
         Grace swung Jon-Jon from under his armpits. “Okay last time. One. Two. Three,” she said, whirling him around on three. “Now be a big boy, and push your stroller.”
         "Hmm. We could do the Dwelling House,” Rae-Ann said. “That's only supposed to last for forty-five minutes. The next one starts in ten minutes. I think we need to go to that building up there on the right, with the copper top."
         "Copper top, it is," Grace said, helping Jon-Jon maneuver the stroller from the grass to the stone walkway.
         The most imposing building at Canterbury, the Dwelling House and its cupola towered stories higher than the rest of the settlement, its distinctive L-shape jutting into a colony of rectangular houses with triangle roofs in the same design as the houses of Grace's childhood drawings. Its landing, freshly-painted but with too-deep steps, discouraged a crowd of families and couples from self-guided intentions.
         "It's 1:33. I thought the tour was supposed to start at 1:30," Rae-Ann said. Jon-Jon could only handle a forty-five minute tour if it started on time.
         "That might be him," Grace said, pointing to a tall man, who looked sure of his steps, compared to the adults behind him, bumbling on the stone path, pausing to turn settlement maps at thirty- and forty-five degree angles. Like Israelites wandering into Canaan, they stared up and abroad, taking in neat two- and three-story structures, laid out with a density reminding Grace of modern "planned communities" with their pseudo village squares, but dropped into hundreds of acres of trees and farm fields in the pristine New Hampshire countryside.
         "Mornin'," the tall man said. He had a barrel chest and a full-head of hair pushing gray. "I assume ya'll here for the Home Tour."
         A Southern expert on the Canterbury Shaker settlement. Grace was further disappointed. She had been in New Hampshire for two days and had yet to hear anyone say, “Ya can’t get they-ah from he-ah.”
         "Where ya’ll  from?" he asked. And as people shared their home states and hometowns, he nodded, approving. Virginia, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania. One man from Texas was doing the Shaker circuit that summer, having visited his first settlement in Kentucky with plans to travel onto Maine after today's stop at Canterbury.
         Grace knew the Shakers made furniture with clean lines and thought they hung their chairs on walls.
         The guide ushered fifteen visitors up the landing and into a smallish room on the first floor of the dwelling house. "The Shakers, so-called because they were Quakers who danced and shook in worship, are America's most successful utopian society. Since 1792, the Canterbury Village settlement committed itself to making a heaven on earth, practicing common ownership, pacifism, sexual equality, and celibacy."
         Celibacy leads to utopia? I'm a utopist. Who knew?
         Thirteen months ago, Grace became a utopist by necessity, not design, because Chris said things weren't working out.

* * * * *

         Chris rolled off her and went to the bathroom to clean himself up.
         What about me? If he stayed in there for ten minutes, she could take care of the problem herself, which she had to do a lot lately. He hadn't tended to her needs the last few times they made love.
         "Are you coming back to bed?" Grace yelled.
         "I have to get ready for work," he said and pulled the sliding door to the bathroom shut.
         Grace pulled herself up and vaulted down from her new box spring and pillow-top mattress set, sticking the landing. She wrapped a throw around her mid-section; she didn't want a lecture about her need for satisfaction to be undercut by feeling self-conscious about a few figure flaws. Maybe she'd leave her breasts exposed. Or at least one. Full and perky, he could never resist fondling them. On second thought she covered them up. Right now he didn't deserve to ogle even one, let alone touch them. She slid open the bathroom door as he climbed in the shower.
         "Hey. I'm in here."
         "Yeah, and I was out there, waiting for you."
         "I don't have time this morning."
         "Jesus. You haven't had ‘time for me' in the last month."
         "Yeah? Maybe if you didn't beg for it all the time, I'd actually want to do it," he said, drawing the shower curtain closed. "This isn't working out."
         By the time Chris emerged from the bathroom, smelling sweet as Lifebuoy and clean-shaven, Grace had collected the things he kept at her place in plastic shopping bags and told him to get out.
         When she first met Chris, he was a thirty-year-old never-married, which beat the rebounding-divorceds by a penis length. After ten years of looking for the right one, she had to turn Chris out, like a half a dozen others before him who sucked up her twenties one and two years at a time, playing at love with her.
         Now thirty-two herself, she hadn't been with a man in thirteen months. She hadn't even met anyone she wanted to sleep with in that time, all the while aching for a private celebration between consenting bodies in her pillow-soft queen-sized Serta, truly the perfect sleeper, unless you had no one to sleep with. Then it was the too-big, too-soft, no-sex sleeper from Hell.

* * * * *          

         The guide was saying the Shaker population at the Canterbury settlement swelled between 1793 and 1837. He indicated some floor models of the Dwelling House, under glass, in various stages of expansion, before waving them on into the next room.
         "As we head out into the hall, we're going to be Shakers. Brothers, take the right-hand staircase up to the living quarters. Sisters, head to your left side."
         "Hustle it up, Sister Grace. We hafta go check out the Shaker boud-OIRS," Rae-Ann said,  laying-on her sing-songy lilt at the end of a sentence.
         That was what Grace liked most about her brother's second wife. Rae-Ann was of good Southern stock. But when the moment called for it, she twanged like Alabama trailer trash on cue, like when she told her daughter that they were going shopping for her new bedspread at Target.
         "I don't want to go to Target. Their stuff is cheap," Grace’s niece had complained.
         "Target is our Saks Fifth Avenue, darlin',” Rae-Ann had said.  “Now get in the car, and don’t you make me call your Daddy."
         Grace, Rae-Ann, and Jon-Jon climbed a flight of steps and followed the rest of the ladies into the sisters' sleeping area.
         Separate-but-equal staircases.
         "All the furnishings in this room are reproductions,” the guide explained. “When we're finished, if you want to see several authentic pieces used at this settlement, you'll find them in the room you see roped off to your right.
         Every bed was a twin bed.
         "You'll notice that beneath this bedding," he said, pulling back thinly padded ticking to reveal ropes strung the length of the bed, "Shaker beds had thick ropes instead of slats to support them as they slept. They loosened up with use, so the sisters needed pull them tighter and retie the knots. That's where the expression, ‘Sleep tight,' comes from."
         Shakers tying the knot, Grace thought, looking down at the brochure for comfort: "A place for learning, reflection, and renewal of the human spirit," in a graceful script called back to her.
         But for the Shakers bedtime was no celebration of the human spirit. It was something necessary, involuntary, like breathing.
         "Now if you'll follow me, we'll head to the food preparation and dining areas. Again, don't forget to take the proper staircase."
         In a few minutes, the tour group crowded itself into a fifteen by twenty foot room with a huge bake oven as its centerpiece.
         "The oven was designed by a sister to accommodate sixty loaves of bread at one time or twenty-four huge bean pots. As you look to your left you'll see some of the textiles that resulted in this village not only being self-sustaining, but generating surplus wealth. The hooded cape you see was designed by two sisters who went on a train tour to promote it in other parts of the country, a nineteenth century marketing ploy that turned their talents into a profitable mail-order business."
         "See," Rae-Ann said, leaning in to whisper in Grace's ear. "Look how much people can get done when they give up sex."
         Grace grimaced. Maybe their industry sprang from something other than a lack of sex, perhaps a divine source pouring into them as they twirled and shook in their sacred meeting space, like being filled with the Holy Spirit. She briefly flashed on one of the photographs from the brochure--women in long-dresses with individual flames like tiny orange tongues licking at their head coverings.
         "Let's move on to the summer kitchen," the guide said. "As you can see, it's now a self-service café, but at one time, it served as the dining room for as many as a hundred brothers and sisters. They actually needed two or three seatings for each meal at one time.”
         “Surely they didn’t break bread together?” Rae-Ann.
         “I don’t think so. Even today, when the Amish get together for a big meal, they let the men eat first, so they can serve them.”
         “And what’s wrong with that, Sister Grace? Serving your man? That is my life-callin’. To serve your brother.”
         “And chocolate is a food group,” Grace said.
         "Finally for the last leg of our Dwelling House tour, we'll head to the Meetinghouse," he explained, "which is attached to the living quarters, since worship was as much a part of living as working and eating. Of course, the Meetinghouse had separate entrances for men and women, too."
         “I have to go potty,” Jon-Jon said.
         “All right, bud. See you in the Meetinghouse,” Rae-Ann told Grace. “We have to go find a Shaker privy.”
         Grace allowed herself to be herded along the entryway past the meetinghouse sign, absorbed in thought. Chris deserved to have his things packed up months before, but Grace had been too weak to toss him out. A lack of moral fortitude wasn't limited to the secular world. She wanted to ask the guide if any of the brothers or sisters ever slipped up and "used the wrong staircase." But was she prepared to hear that the answer might be no, that generations of Shaker women found contentment in sexless lives? An entire lifetime devoid of sex. How many? Sixty, seventy years without sex, of no intimacy with a man. No kissing, no fondling, no thrusting, or being thrust upon. No orgasms. No chance to even fake one. Just endless lonely nights.
         Her heart pounded and blood rushed in and then drained out of her face so quickly she stumbled backwards into the tour guide.
         "Whoa, Nellie. You're white as a sheet, ma’am. Sit down a spell," he said, pointing to a pew.
         "I need...some fresh air," she said. "Excuse me." Then Grace rushed through one of the Meetinghouse doors that led to outside, indifferent to whether she'd chosen the men's or the women's door, and collapsed on the stoop.
         Her head dropped into her hands, her coffee hair obscuring her face. Her heart continued firing as fast as an electric nail gun in a chest too tight to draw breath, causing her to shudder. She'd had an anxiety attack last month. That's what was happening to her. Either that or she had just played medium to a restless sister who died in the midst of a quaking, shaking frenzy but never crossed over.
         A stranger from the stone path approached her. "Are you all right? Miss?"
         Grace looked up a man in khaki pants, shimmering like a mirage. “Yeah. Just need to sit. Thanks.”
         “Aunt Grace!”
         She looked up to see Jon-Jon running ahead of his mom beside the stone path.
         “I went potty.”
         Grace pulled him into her chest. “That’s a good boy.”
         “What happened? Tour over?” Rae-Ann said. “Are you okay?”
         "I don't feel well. I think I need to go back to the motel."
         "Let's go then. That tour was only supposed to take an hour. Frankly, I think Jon-Jon's had it, too."
         Back at the Holiday Inn, Grace had dug in her purse for her Xanax. Finding none she crawled under the bedspread.
         "Here,” Rae-Ann said. She handed her a warm washcloth. “Put that over your eyes.  I'm gonna close these drapes. Then Jon-Jon and I are gonna go slosh around in the pool. You rest, so you can join us for dinner," Rae-Ann said, then herded Jon-Jon into the bathroom and out the door.
         She pulled herself into a fetal coil, holding the washcloth across her eyes with her right hand, blubbering the whole time they were gone.

* * * * *

         “Here it is: 601-942-3222,” Rae Ann said.
         “What was the last part?” Grace asked.
         “Ready? 3-2-2-2.”
         “I’m hungry, Mommy!”
         “Just a minute, darlin’.”
         “Pharmacy, please,” Grace asked. “Can you give me a refill on a prescription? No, Pennsylvania. I have three refills left. Three. You can’t what?”
         “Gimme that,” Rae-Ann said, taking the phone. “Look. My friend has three refills left, and she’s sick, and no doctor’s going to see her on Saturday night at six o-clock. You are a national chain. Her information should be on that computer. Just what is your problem?”
         Grace waved Jon-Jon to her side and lifted up the spread so he could crawl in.
         “Savage. S-a-v-a-g-e. Grace.” Rae-Ann said. “What’s your birthdate, Grace?”
         “March 1, 1975.”
         "When will it be ready? Thank you," Rae-Ann said, returning the phone to the receiver.
         “I can’t believe you got them to fill that.”
         “You know what I say. Sometimes it pays to be a Savage,” Rae-Ann said, smiling. “How ‘bout dinner.”
         "I can't eat a thing. All that talk about living a whole lifetime without sex. It made me sick listening to it."
         She knew Rae-Ann could never say sex was nothing spectacular. Let her try the old “Any animal, no matter how primitive, is capable of procreation” argument on me. She’d have to remind her of their conversation on the drive up.
         While Jon-Jon had his earphones in watching his tractor movie, Rae-Ann expounded on the glorious state that is married sex. Both of them agreed they hated their first sexual encounter, which quashed their appetites sex for years. For Rae-Ann, it was a "That's all there is to it?" experience.
         For Grace, it was something traumatic, having been pushed into it by an over-sexed adolescent whose idea of educational reading was a steady diet of Hustler Magazines. But sex had taken on a palatable luster over with the right lovers, responsive ones who tended to her body, gently at first, then more vigorously as she developed an appreciation for sex like some people acquired a taste for mushrooms.
         "What if I never find someone to wake up with? To cuddle with, like my little buddy here,” Grace said, squeezing Jon-Jon and brushing her lips across his cheek. I'd rather...I don’t wanna live like that."
         "There's someone special out there for you," Rae-Ann said.
         Not the pukey someone-special speech. "For God’s sake. I'm thirty-two. I've wasted ten years on losers. Who's going to want me when they can have a twenty-five-year old?"
         "I can't answer that. But there's gotta be somebody the good Lord intended for you," she said.
         Grace said nothing because there was no arguing with Rae-Ann when she invoked "the good Lord" in the middle of a sentence.
         "We're just gonna let you alone, let you get some sleep. Can I get you anything before we go? Glass of water?" Rae-Ann said. “And I have Tylenol PM.” She reached into the front pouch of her carryall and tapped out a pair of blue caplets, handing them to Grace. “That’ll help you sleep. And I’ll bring back your Xanax.”
         "Thanks," Grace said, rearranging herself into the celebrated fetal ball. And as Rae-Ann and Jon-Jon headed out the door, Grace chanted, "I will find a good man and have great sex. And another orgasm. Not self-induced. I will find a good man and have great sex. And another orgasm. Not self-induced," and prayed she'd soon drift off into a Tylenol PM-induced sleep.

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