An excerpt from:

The Wendy Stories

Liza Taylor

Kinds of Damage

A man killed a woman, every day in April. Or two women, or three. No days were skipped. The brief daily articles Wendy read on the inner pages of the New York Times could have been recycled with a few variables punched in. Man (no variable there) chased and killed his (ex-)wife, (ex-)girlfriend, neighbor, mother, daughter, in a town, in a city, in a field, then killed himself, or didn’t kill himself. A restraining order had been filed, or expired, or denied, or unobtainable. Yesterday, he killed her and her female friend and their two daughters by forcing her car in front of an oncoming train, the first break in a week of guns. Last week she got knifed, drowned, poisoned, set on fire, thrown off a roof.

What Wendy learned as a kid: How to suffer well. How to slow her breathing to get calm. How to bear pain alone in the night. How to go silent inside. How to retreat. How to hide in a closet behind the clothes. How to brace herself for a blow. How to lie on her back, in a corner, and kick — her strong legs were her best defense.

Lions and hyenas have a built-in, genetic kind of hate for each other, as if one species swears to exterminate the other. We human species have the little exterminations: lies, cheats, tricks, betrayals, bigamies, custodies, kidnappings, denials.

Their bed came six months after ordering it, built of pale natural cherry, and it had a high canopy frame with crown moldings and carved ends. Wendy bought a set of white cotton bedding, making the bedroom into a theater set. Her negative thoughts tumbled over it — cost twice as much as her first car, wrong color wood, don’t deserve it, got to make some curtains for it, the rest of the furniture in the room looks like shit now. A great metaphor for her inner life, she thought: at the foot of a three thousand dollar canopy bed, she and Dennis throw their clothes (the same pair of jeans every day for Wendy, just change the underwear and t shirt) on a folding brown canvas director’s chair, almost twenty years old, left from her abysmal life with the schizophrenic and violent conceptual artist Spence. She bought those four crummy chairs when she and Spence were so poor they had no heat in NYC in the winter and yet at the same time Spence had his trust fund he hadn’t even told her about.

Her brother Rhys would grab Wendy’s wrist and whack her face with her own hand over and over, turning her hand into a limp, stinging rag, saying, ‘Girl, stop hitting yourself.’ On any edge of a cliff, or roof, or dock, her brother Brian grabbed her upper arms from behind, forcing her to lean out over the abyss. "Saved your life Girl," he bellowed. Stuffed into a sleeping bag and pushed down the stairs. Yards of Scotch tape tangled into her long hair so badly she had to cut it out. Rope whips. Slave for a day. Her brother Brian would stand in front of her and grip her head so she had to face him. ‘Girl, you’re ugly. Girl, you’re stupid. Say it, say it. Stupid Girl, ugly Girl.’ She could at least close her eyes, so she didn’t have to see herself reflected in his shiny, eager pupils.

She loved writing, she loved words, word play, legend, emotions in ink. She even loved making the letters, the variations in line you could get from ink or good soft pencil lead. After reading Seamus Heaney’s translation of an ancient Gaelic poem about a monk and scribe loving the act of writing, she knew she was one of those people, like the monk, like Heaney, even if she never published a word of it.

When her father came back from Asia he brought presents for her brothers: a Canon camera, and binoculars, and a typewriter. He brought Wendy, twelve then, a Timex watch with a plastic wristband. After much begging, Wendy persuaded Brian to lend her his camera. She spent days in the city taking photos of children, light, water, leaves, her friends, strangers. She took a photography class and learned to develop. Her prints won school prizes. Brian took away the camera. She asked her father for a camera. He asked her for a twenty-page typed essay on the contents of a darkroom, the chemical reactions involved, and the cultural implications of photography. She went to her room and sat with a pen in her hand for hours but couldn’t think of a word.

She listened to a radio host discuss the civil rights of repeated violent sex offenders, who are being held indefinitely to undergo a supposed rehabilitation. One prisoner said he was a political prisoner, not a criminal prisoner, and he would sue, and sue, and sue and sue until his inhumane treatment had stopped. He had raped a ten-year-old girl and strangled her with her tights. It was his third murder, the other two exactly the same but evidence had been mislaid so a mistrial was declared. He wanted to know, Why don’t I deserve to be out on the streets like any other human?

She thought she could learn to love winter sunlight and the shadows of bare maple branches striping the snow. Usually, though, there was no sun, but even then she tried to see the clouds as objects of beauty, as perfectly formed as the maples.

At sixteen, she got an after-school job she’d wanted for two years: apprentice to a wind instrument repairman. She loved the wood and glue smell of the workshop, the tiny brass wires and keys, the pale gloss of a just-polished sterling silver flute head joint. The finest polishing rouge came in dark red lumps like modeling clay. The old man who taught her had stumpy fingers, half the length of Wendy’s and black under the fingernails, yet sensitive enough to test the seal of saxophone pads with his eyes shut, feeling, listening. She had to tell him on the second day that she wouldn’t have sex with him and he seemed resigned to that and never touched her again. She brought home her first paycheck and proudly showed it to her father who said, I’d like to see you try to pay rent with that.

In April, her husband Dennis was in Germany for a week. On Saturday the boys woke her at six-thirty. Both kids had baseball games at 8:30 am, in two neighboring diamonds, and she went back and forth between the two fields until eleven A. M., when the temperature was ninety-two. Both boys’ teams lost; Teddy was too little to care but Alex cried. She took the kids home, started working on the fourth of the lemon tube cakes she'd volunteered to make for Teddy’s school fair bake sale. She dreaded the fair — expensive, noisy, pretentious, and exhausting. Most families spent a minimum of $200 on tickets for food, rides, and junky magic tricks, and that was before the auction. Last year’s top auction item had been a week at someone’s house in St. Kitts, which went for thirteen thousand.

She found a baking supply store for white cardboard circles and lace doilies to mount the cakes and she made labels swearing the ingredients list peanut-free. The fourth cake broke in the pan and was too ugly to put up for sale. She realized she'd forgotten to eat when she fed the kids, so she ate some of the cake.

She delivered three cakes to the house of the mother organizing the bake sale, hoping to stay for a chat so she could at least talk to an adult once that day and maybe even get a scrap of praise for her cakes which she thought looked very appealing. But the door opened on a lady in her sixties, dressed in black leather, who spoke only Farsi. She ushered Wendy to a table already crowded with perfect and professional-looking cakes far more elaborate than Wendy’s. Screw it, she thought.

Desperate to stop moving, she took the kids to the library where she knew the kids would last exactly thirty-six minutes, so she snatched some good-looking fiction from the new books shelf and settled in the one vacant chair across a table from a homeless couple. She read until Teddy pulled a stack of books over on himself.

When they got home from the library and she moved to unbuckle them from their seat belt and car seat, Alex had gotten chewing gum in his hair, which she knew you had to use peanut butter to remove. While she was trying to get the peanut butter out of Alex’s hair and off the car upholstery, Teddy, free to push through the debris in the garage, got his foot stuck in a day-glo orange plastic Halloween pumpkin and she had to leave him stomping around and howling until she could get the peanut butter off her hands.

When all three had recovered, she produced a dinner of pizza, Japanese soup, and mangoes. Then she climbed up onto Alex’s upper bunk to remove the broken wall-mounted bookshelf which four boys had partially knocked down during yesterday’s army game. She tried to re-attach it, without success. Then came long baths for each boy, separately, which Alex had requested since he had turned eight.

Alex went to bed in the upper bunk to read and she read aloud to Teddy on the couch for twenty minutes. Teddy fell asleep on the couch. She started to think about going to bed herself when Alex staggered out, said he couldn’t sleep and had a headache so they got Tylenol and looked at picture books he had liked when he was younger, until she carried Teddy to bed and told Alex a story in the dark. He finally fell asleep at eleven-thirty. She cleaned up the bathroom and drained the tub, rubbed ointment on the sleeping kids’ chapped lips, filled the dishwasher and ran it, fed and was bitten by the school rabbit which they were tending for the weekend.

She went to bed. At two A.M. her brother Brian phoned from the airport in Paris en route to Moscow. He wanted to chat about his anger toward their father and she timed him for 90 seconds, counting the numbers in her head, and then said she had to get back to sleep. He sounded surprised and disappointed. Her hands still smelled of peanut butter.

Another depression crept up on her as indifferently as a weather front. The beads of sweat on Teddy’s forehead as he slept during an afternoon nap looked like a clutch of poisonous and gelatinous insect eggs.

She began to have trouble, at the baseball games, with the limp grass, the uniforms, gnats, the blindingly sinister late afternoon light, the conflict-ridden kids, the sense of defeat, the fact that she couldn’t discern Alex or Teddy in the outfield in their uniforms, as if their uniqueness were obliterated. It took all her self-control to not cry throughout the games.

As she watched the boys sleep at night, death images assaulted her: kids dying painfully in older, more brutal and virus-ridden times, the millions of hours mothers had spent by bedsides watching their kids die. If she tried hard enough she could blot them out by repeating songs (not nursery rhymes — bed rhymed with dead and in any lullaby sleep was a metaphor for death) and sometimes even prayers.

After two days of that, she went to the psychiatric emergency room. The young female psychiatrist questioning Wendy had a tic; the first two times the tic appeared, she thought the woman was tossing hair out of her eyes, hair as tangled and dirty-looking as her own. The psychiatrist had a young-looking face but a few strands of gray. The hair toss accelerated as the interview progressed.

Everything the psychiatrist asked about drugs, alcohol, appetite, sleep, suicidal intent; all framed through this quirk with her hair. If she hadn’t been able to fix that tic with all her years of psychiatric training, how good could she or anyone in this hospital be? The hopelessness that had sent Wendy there sank even further. She decided not to admit herself to the psychiatric unit, not this time. She got home in time to pick the kids up from school.

After reading the day’s short article on the day’s woman who was killed by the day’s husband or boyfriend or stepfather, she cried over the obituaries. For every eighty-two-year-old male philanthropist or lawyer or chemist or congressman, she imagined an obituary for an eighty-two-year-old woman who had raised five kids, seen two of them die, cooked sixty-five thousand meals and written forty journals and fifty-six poems and planted a garden the whole neighborhood looked forward to and nursed a father through cancer and a husband through Alzheimer’s.

The next time she went to the hospital she stayed there.

Since she couldn’t handle anyone else’s emotions, even imaginary, she tried reading neutral fiction. In Beowulf, the author listed the Sons of Halfdane: Heorogar, Hrothgar, Halga, each son by name, and then the daughter is "balm in bed to King Onela, the battle-scarred Swede." The daughter not getting even capital letter, let alone a name.

When, in fiction, did any writer show the details of women’s daily lives? Periods, breast feeding, the kind of benign passive sex you have sometimes just to keep him content, bras and their slipping straps, what to cook for dinner, how the colors look in the garden, the shape of a room, the smell of another woman’s laundry soap, putting lipstick on, putting pantyhose on, whether or not to leave the napping kids home alone for seven minutes while you drive the housekeeper to her bus stop. She would have to write some fiction herself, if only as an historical record.

Crossing Boston’s Commonwealth Avenue when she was twenty, she got stuck in the middle; jammed lanes of traffic at her back and in front cars going forty. A man in the jam, his head only inches from her elbow, began a string of obscenities. Come on and fuck me baby, I know you want it, come on mama, get a taste of this sweet cock. She wouldn’t turn her head to look at him but out of the corner of her eye she saw that his window was rolled down. The light changed. At the last second before he pulled away she swung her fist backward into his face, hating the feel of his cheek and stubble but loving the shriek of surprise and pain he gave as she ran across the road. She shook for an hour.

It started with the two square inches of skin under her eyes, which suddenly, almost overnight, sank a fraction of an inch, just enough to show the bones underneath. Every day when she took her sons to school she watched the other mothers and saw it happening under their eyes too. One woman whom she knew well enough to smile at but not well enough to stop and have a conversation — with that woman it happened over the summer between Alex’s first and second grade. The previous year she had been so beautiful it hurt to look at her, like staring too long at the sun, and then, when school started again in the fall, the skin under her eyes had sunk. She looked ten years older. Her hair was still black and her figure as athletic as anyone’s. But she’d lost her eyes.

In Yemen, the veiled women in traditional communities have been separated from men and from the modern world for so many generations they speak a different language from the men.

When she walked to junior high, her daily path took her along a lane where high school boys parked with their girlfriends and smoked and listened to the car radio until their school bell rang. Wendy hugged her books to her chest, slowing her breathing and staring straight ahead. The boys, always in the driver’s seats, leaned out of their windows and asked her the same questions day after day. "Hey sweetie, gettin any? I can show you something, cm’ere. Smile, beautiful. come fuck me, come suck me, I know you want to." The women, girls really, sat next to the men, tan makeup thick on their faces, and laughed as though it was the funniest thing they’d ever heard. How could they do it? Sometimes she glimpsed her brother Brian in the shadows of a back seat but he always looked away, his face blank. There was no other route she could take to school.

Face lifts showed. A face lift could get rid of the lines but it couldn’t fill out that crescent-shaped depression above the zygomatic arch.

She examined eighty-two-year-old ladies, strangers in the produce aisles at the Beverly Hills grocery store, wearing Chanel suits to pick out their radicchio, their lost faces beyond rescue. She blurred her vision to see them in a soft filter at fifty or even sixty. Even though it was happening to millions of women all around her in the neighborhood and the city and the world, it felt as though it was just her, Wendy, the only woman who was so unmotivated, disorganized, pathetic, distracted and poorly informed that she lost her face to time.

The most beautiful woman in Alex’s school had been Hugh Hefner’s mistress before marrying a rock star. Six feet tall and the same age as Wendy, her face glowed larger than life. Perfectly shaped wide-set green eyes and a deep philter, that grooved space between nose and upper lip, couldn’t hide the mild broadening effect of at least one front-of-the-ears tuck and probably lots of collagen. And the blight had struck. She had under-the-eye sinking.

Wendy and her father sat at the kitchen table with their Martinis in front of them; his third, her first, and he told her the title of his planned autobiography: A Man and His Sons. Just saying the title made him so emotional his voice cracked. “I wonder what I’ll call mine,” she said.

Twenty days after getting out of the hospital she felt the first relief in weeks while hearing the summer wind in the dead, spear-shaped leaves of a eucalyptus. They rattled like primitive wind chimes and made aimless, whimsical patterns of light and shadow. For a few seconds, while listening and looking, her pain stopped.

Liza Taylor's

. . . Kinds of Damage is part of her novel-length cycle including recent fiction in the Sun, Santa Monica Review, Hawaii Review, and Gargoyle. Taylor’s stories, essays and book reviews have also appeared in Thirteenth Moon, Threads, Sojourner, the Los Angeles Times, and multiple issues of the Santa Monica Review. Her novel The Drummer Was the First to Die (St. Martin’s Press) continues to be used as required reading in epidemiology courses across the country.

She lives in Michigan with her husband and their two sons.

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