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She comes crawling back to Stanley in the sweltering New Orleans summer, her baby clutched to her chest. The pragmatist in Stella scolds her; finding even a drop of work in the desert that’s here is a daunting task, especially for a single mother with an infant child. Better to return to where she knows her financial situation will be stable. And then the sensualist in her is trammeled by lovesickness. No matter what she’s tried it’s impossible to expunge the echo of him crying out for her as she left him all that time before — she misses her honey horribly, both the rare moments of raw tenderness and even his violence.
Once Stella arrives back to their dilapidated home she braces herself for what might come. When he calls out for her to enter she tries to gauge the depth of emotion in his voice. Will he be angry at me for leaving? She wonders. Did he know I might come back? God, whatever happens, hopefully knowing that we’ve got a child on our hands, a daughter , might make things a little better.
And so she crosses the threshold into their house, hesitance stabbing her every step.
Stanley’s turned away from her in three-quarters profile; she can’t make out much of his features beyond the starched shirt he wears stretched tight over his back and his short, rumpled hair.
“You’re back,” is all he says.
Stella swallows thickly. If he gets mad, it’s only because I was the one behaving irresponsibly. “I… I was having trouble, Stanley. I couldn’t support Bonnie — the baby. My — our — daughter. Not on my own.”
She braces herself, awaiting his reaction when he turns around: Anger, perhaps, a rumbling to his voice that’ll louden to shouting (not that she hasn’t borne witness to Stanley’s wrath before, she just doesn’t want that to be the first image her Bonnie sees of her father).
Instead, though, Stanley’s expression is one of sorrow. There’s no trace of anything baleful; the emotion on his face is reminiscent of the crumpled-up regret watching her descend the steps to meet him several nights ago. He reaches out tentatively at the swaddled-up bundle in Stella’s arms, one tiny, sticky pink hand wraps stubby little fingers over his.
“Her name is Bonnie,” Stella whispers. She picked it out because it meant beautiful. When she passes their baby into Stanley’s arms at his silent behest that’s when she starts quietly crying, pressing her tear-streaked face against his shoulder. It’s okay, this too shall pass.
So Bonnie grows up. Stanley is often inclined to point out how much she takes after her mother, Stella notices: It’s in the soft and rounded structure of her face, her wide-apart blue eyes with a touch of green. Her hair is the same soft blonde but being so little she’s far too young for the more coiffed looks Stella opts to style her own hair in with the curling iron, so for now it’s kept pigtailed in red ribbons.
(And life resumes in much the same way as it did before Blanche came along to briefly shake it all up and interrupt their lives. Stella slips back into the role of the homemaker, now with a daughter, and treads carefully around Stanley’s late night poker parties — now it comes with the addition of braiding her daughter’s hair before ushering her off to school promising that lunch will be ready once she comes back home for it. Still, even though she knows Stanley would forbid it, she keeps the old photos and stories of Blanche close to her chest because while it certainly isn’t much in the comfortable grayness of day-to-day life sometimes she just needs a little something that sings with color.)
(Poor Blanche. Poor, poor delusional Blanche.)
“Maybe someday,” Stella muses as she extracts their dinner out from the oven, “Once I’ve got the time I’ll help teach you how to cook. You’re going to need it once you’re all grown up, after all.”
Bonnie squints down at the napkin she’s struggling to fold. “I’d like that. I’d like that very much.”
The trouble begins when Stanley arrives home.
Her stomach twists up into dreadful knots at the sight of him as he walks through the door. The dirt and grease from work stink to high heaven in the short, oppressive ceilings from their house, and there’s a stiffness to the way his knuckles uncurl from his hat as he removes it. Bad day at work, Stella thinks to herself.
“Why,” he asks, voice dangerously soft as he scrutinizes the newly set table, “Are the glasses on the wrong side?”
She forces herself to look away from Stanley, features contorted up in disdain, to where their drinking glasses sparkle on the table — on the upper left side to their plates as opposed to the upper right. Stanley comes to the conclusion of the matter soon enough; Stella was busy in the kitchen all this time getting dinner ready while Bonnie was waiting in the humid main room of their house till she was told to set the table.
Bonnie fiddles with the cinched waist of her checkered dress with small, anxious fingers. She flinches when Stanley looks at her.
“The glasses are supposed to go on the right side of the plates, you know—”
“I didn’t mean to, Dad,” she blurts out, “I swear, I didn’t—”
The first slap — he jerks her into place when he grabs hold of her hair and strikes her hard enough to leave a blotchy pink welt where his hand hit her skin — shocks Bonnie into silence. Stella, shaking herself from a horrified stupor, moves to try and pull him back. God, not Bonnie, please, don’t—
He shoves her away and she stumbles back. Though she closes her eyes so she doesn’t see the second blow, the sound of Bonnie beginning to quietly sob makes her stomach churn.
“Don’t you ever — ever! — talk back to me like that. Understood?”
Sniffle, sniffle, sniffle. “Yeah. I’m sorry, Dad.”
“Mom, do you think Dad hates me?”
The words are spoken through a mouth heavy with toothpaste. Stella watches her daughter pad out of the bathroom in white slippers too big on her feet, dressed in a plain yellow nightgown. Her hair’s still crumpled from having been worn in braids the whole day, so she’ll seat Bonnie on her lap before she reads a bedtime story to her and tucks her in with a goodnight kiss.
(This evening’s events are still imprinted on her mind, though. Dinner was a dreadfully quiet affair, full of red-eyed sniffling and looks of burning resentment and Stella knowing deep down that her darling’s in the right, she does love Bonnie but her daughter just doesn’t understand that this is the way her father loves and being the man of their house he’s just disciplining her so she knows how to behave.)
“What makes you say that?” Stella bends down and rests her hands on Bonnie’s shoulders. Her narrow shoulders shake beneath the short, puffed-up sleeves of her nightgown.
“You know, Mom. ‘Cause of earlier tonight at around dinnertime. When he… he…”
The truth of the matter is this: Stanley’s love is written into thunderous violence, and that’s the way that Stella likes it. It hurts her terribly, but she knows how to resign herself to the worst of it that doesn’t enthrall her. Since becoming a mother she’s stayed to herself the way she knows she ought to, enduring and enjoying the bruises left in the wake of her man’s agonizing, maddening, cruelty borne of passion. But the way she watches Stanley treating Bonnie leaves a scream stuck in her throat, because ten-year-old Bonnie can’t wrap her head around what it means. For all her years of living under their roof, Bonnie just doesn’t understand the language Stanley speaks in. Stella, on the contrary, does.
So she clears her throat and does her best to communicate it.
“Oh, sweetheart, Dad doesn’t hate you,” she begins, guiding Bonnie so that she’s seated on the pale bedspread of her bed. She pulls out a comb and begins to run it through the hair gone wavy from being newly unbraided, easing her way through the little tangles and snags with a sense of tenderness.
“He doesn’t?”
“No, of course not. Your father loves you very much. He cares about you dearly, you know, and wants nothing but the best for you. I love you terribly, and Dad does as well.”
“Then what about earlier tonight? When he… hit me? What about that? Because I think he must hate me something awful if it ended up with him hitting me the way he did then.”
“You have to understand, Bonnie, that your father’s very temperamental. Not to mention that since he’s the man of our house he wants to make sure that any child of his is well-behaved. That’s just his way of showing he cares, and he wants you to be a fine young lady when you’re all grown. Besides,” and this much she knows is true, perhaps if Stanley’s day had fared better this eve wouldn’t have spiraled out of control the way it did, “He had a difficult day at work, so he had a lot of pent-up bitterness and frustration by the time he got home. But I’m sure he didn’t mean for any of it to come off as though he hates you, alright? Your father loves you very much, you’re a sunbeam in his life and I can confirm that.”
“You’re sure about that?”
She smooths flyaway hair from Bonnie’s face with a hairbrush. This is as true as she can articulate it. Perhaps the situation is that Stanley cares for Bonnie not unlike how he cares for her: Raw and unrefined, but that’s why she adores him. Maybe once her daughter is grown she’ll come to understand that.
“I’m absolutely certain of it, sweetheart,” she says, knowing that the welt left on Bonnie’s face will darken to a shadowy bruise in time.
The next day, Stanley takes them all out for ice cream. At first, Bonnie’s still rendered timid after last night: Coltish and awkward as she runs ahead of her parents towards the ice cream shop, making her way across the sun-streaked pavement. The sight of it makes Stella’s heart twist, but instead of acting on it she simply whispers to Stanley, her voice hardly audible, “Ice cream before dinner? Honey, you oughtn’t spoil our daughter. She won’t touch any of her food once she’s eaten.”
(And yet, she is acutely aware of the fact that her honey’s just too, too sorry for apologies. She leafs once more through those miserable memories of last night and remembers that precise expression of his face crumpled up in sorrow at the realization of what he’d done. Stanley just hasn’t got the words for apologies.)
He slings a broad, protective arm over her shoulder. “It’s my treat. I figured maybe we might wanna take some time to relax together, as a family, y’know?”
Bonnie spares her a glance from where she’s reached the end of the block, but it’s difficult to discern her expression. She looks a little unreal and hazy at the edges from the heat haze, the skirt of her pale green sundress rippling in the hot breeze. Stella looks back at Stanley and leaves a reverent kiss upon his cheek.
“Yes, I understand.”
Stella orders butter pecan — Stanley, on the other hand, prefers plain chocolate. Bonnie orders strawberry and chocolate and vanilla, the three scoops stacked precariously upon the waffle cone. The bruise on her cheek has darkened to a faded indigo, sitting so stark upon her skin, and a sickly sweet mix of the three different ice cream flavors drip sticky on her hand, but she’s slipped out of her nervousness by now, leaning against Stanley and chirping about how much she loves her father when he rests his hand on her head and ruffles at her hair.
“...We’ve got a lot of old things around here that I’m not sure we’ll really need anymore, so I appreciate you helping me out, Bonnie.”
The din from downstairs — roaring laughter, the rattling of lights above as some sort of fight breaks out, all the way down the the hasty shuffling of playing cards — is too much, it’s just no good. Not even the thunder from tonight’s cold, gray autumn rainstorm is helping to drown it out. But even so, Stella glides about behind the curtain to the other room cleaning the place up. That’s what she’s taken to doing during their poker games, because she knows she protests too much.
“It’s not a problem, Mom. I don’t have much else to do tonight, and it looked like you have a lot of old junk to go through. That much is the least I could do.”
She says it comfortably, but there’s a flicker of ill ease just beneath her otherwise placid tone: Both of them know full well what sorts of occurrences are prone to happen lest Bonnie interrupt the poker games let alone complain about them being too loud when she’s trying to sleep. They glide about the house tonight taking care not to risk Stanley’s wrath (yet even with their tiptoeing around with the utmost caution there’s always something they’re doing wrong, isn’t there?).
“I’ve got lots of stuff back from my old home in Belle Reve, and though there’s nothing really wrong with it I ought to get rid of it now.”
“Why, though?”
“Well,” Stella admits quietly, “Your father thinks it’s not very practical having all those tokens lying around. Sentimental, he calls it, says a lot of it’s too frilly and takes up too much space. And I suppose he’s right.”
“I don’t think so. If there’s nothing really wrong with having all these belongings scattered about, you shouldn’t have to get rid of them when you don’t want to.”
“Well, your father’s the one who said they take up too much space and I’m not inclined to disbelieve him.”
Reality withdraws at this juncture. She works with a compliant Bonnie, combing through the closet and boxes stuffed full of junk. Every so often Bonnie will turn her head to the side and cringe at the harsh clarity of whooping or shattering glass (Stella, on the other hand, strains her ears so she can hear it more sharply — out of habit, she supposes). But for the most part they sort through an eclectic range of old clothes that Stella looks upon with a sense of sadness. She thinks of that mint green gown, a remnant of Belle Reve that’ll be quietly discarded — she hadn’t thought to take too many of her old belongings with her when she departed but now she’ll never see them again.
“Hey Mom, are these photos of you?”
Her stomach twists.
Bonnie found these photos in one of the boxes stuffed precariously with Blanche’s old clothes, the ones that she had taken care to tuck away from Stanley’s watchful eyes. God, she thinks to herself, what if he decides to get up and check on us here and he sees? But at the same time the grainy black-and-white snapshots that spill out of Bonnie’s arms hypnotize her: The photos of a younger Stella, pale hair close-curled to her face and features softened by an absence creasing worry lines possess a decidedly surreal quality to them, as though this isn’t the same person she’s looking at.
“Yes, Bonnie. And I’m getting rid of them. I don’t think I need them anymore.”
“What about the girl who’s with you? The one in that floaty, slinky dress here. She’s so pretty, she looks like one of those stars from the old pictures that my friends and I have seen.”
Surely, it can’t hurt to tell her at least a half-truth.
“That would be your Aunt Blanche. My older sister.”
“What’s she like?”
“Oh, she was incredible. She was so lovely, quite a few of the men in our neighborhood were after her attention. It wasn’t just her looks, either. Blanche was just so naturally charming, I think it was because she had this very refined, high-end taste. Back when we were girls it always felt like the house was alive with her in it.”
This house hasn’t been alive for a very long time, Stella reflects. Instead, perhaps they are all lying crumpled up in the smothering coils of the belly of a cold ghost. This place’s foundation is made of bones.
“She sounds like she was a lot of fun.”
“She is. Was. I think if she knew you she’d dote on you.”
“Do you think we might be able to visit her someday, or see if she can visit us?”
“No,” Stella declares sharply. “You can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Honey, your Aunt Blanche died a few years ago.” That much might as well be the truth.
“Oh. That’s sad. I wish we could see her.”
So do I, Stella thinks. So do I.
The lipstick Bonnie had stolen from her just didn’t look right when she’d set out a few mornings earlier: Luminous crimson sits on the edges of her mouth and it’s just too wrong, too mature — subtly reminiscent of when Bonnie was still very little and would wobble around in Stella’s high heels, she thinks. All she had done was caution her that she was not to wear her lipstick around Stanley, and that was all.
Now: That advice is abandoned, Bonnie arrives home crying. Stella rushes over to her and her heart sings with regret at the sight of the black eye. Her poor, poor bruised child.
“I’m so scared,” Bonnie gets out between sobs as she rests her head on one slim shoulder, “What’ll Dad think? He’ll think it’s all my fault, won’t he? ‘Cause I shouldn’t have led on that boy the way I did, right?”
“Bonnie, what happened? What happened?”
“Johnny Stevens — the boy from a few streets down, I knew him at school — I liked him, Mom — thought I could use your lipstick to make myself — make myself pretty enough for him to notice me, and — and he did — but he noticed too much — started touching at my leg when — when we went for a walk after getting sodas — I told him to stop and he — and he—”
“He what?”
“He hit me, Mom. Hit me and called me names. I just — I dunno, Mom, I’m so scared and it’s all my fault —”
“What’s the matter?”
Please, Stella prays to herself once she hears the harshness of her husband’s voice ring throughout their house with all the crispness of a bell, Please go easy on her. She half-expects Stanley to echo their daughter’s sentiments in a barrage of it’s all her fault, she shouldn’t have led that boy on the way she did and acted all flirtatious and now look what she’s done but she certainly got what she deserved. The worst part is that Stella actively seeks out her beloved’s violent delights, while Bonnie’s hardly even conditioned to them.
Instead, though, Stanley gathers Bonnie into his arms and holds her close.
“Oh God, Bonnie, I’m so sorry. That Stevens kid is a real piece of work, anyone who’d treat a girl like you the way he did would be.”
“I’m scared, Dad. What’ll happen when I see him at school next week? Everyone’ll know.”
“I’ll teach him a thing or two about hurting you so.”
Stella doesn’t bring up the missing (stolen) lipstick. All she does is make a feeble attempt to ease her distraught, battered little girl by letting a lie tripping out between her tongue and teeth about how she’ll do anything she can to keep her child safe from harm (but she already failed to keep that promise, she knows that much).
Stella knows what’s happening when her lipstick goes missing again.
Johnny Stevens had learned his lesson quick enough: No one dared speak of what happened afterwards, when she had gone to meet with Bonnie at the bowling alley a mere few days after what had happened she had spotted the Stevens boy — she hadn’t gotten a good look at him, but she did catch a glimpse of the ugly dark welt of a black eye.
At first, she’d protested to Stanley that perhaps he’d been too harsh on the boy. Not that he listened, and not that he would have, though. In the end, though, Stella knows that her husband was only trying to protect his daughter and do his best to keep her safe from harm, and judging by the hurt in his eyes that night later on when he’d crawled into bed next to her she understood that he felt that he’d failed . Of course, she’d done the best she could to comfort him but in the end Bonnie could feel safe in her father’s arms now that things have been resolved.
Things are changing once more, though. Stella doesn’t comment on the makeup of hers that goes missing — Bonnie is turning fifteen later this year, after all. It’s certainly not unusual for girls her age to show the first signs of interest in makeup and apply it curiously and clumsily. The lipstick isn’t the only belonging of hers that ends up going missing, though. There’s both the cake mascara and wand, her rouge, a now-dull little eyebrow pencil. Sometimes during the nights of poker games when the air in the house is even more stiflingly humid and sticky than it is outside, Stella will spare a passing glance towards the bathroom and see Bonnie leaning in towards the mirror, a little flash of red lipstick in her hand as she tries to sculpt it against her lip shape over and over again.
“Take that makeup off before your father sees you wearing it,” she’ll scold her, silently praying that the din just beyond is enough to muffle her reprimand. Bonnie will sulkily wipe her lips clean, smearing the rest of her face in raspberry colored stain (and doesn’t it look so very much like the brightly-colored ices Stella and Blanche would eat together all those years ago when they were young girls?).
“Why, though?”
Stella never interrogates her about her reasons for wearing makeup — they both know that there’s a boy that just so happens to have caught Bonnie’s eye again, and she thinks that by adding a little bit of color to her face that perhaps he’ll notice and fancy her. Instead, she scrubs away the remnants of lipstick clinging to Bonnie’s face and quietly reminds her that it’s sort of an unspoken rule that she’s not allowed to wear makeup in the house just yet, she’s still too young and her father wouldn’t approve of it. The little bits of mascara clinging to her eyelids, inexpertly applied, are too dark for Stanley to ever notice. It’s the lipstick that’s the giveaway.
Well, Stanley Kowalski is many things but an idiot brute is not one of them.
He puts together the pieces because he combs through Stella’s belongings while she and Bonnie have gone out to pick up groceries and finds her makeup has gone missing. And this boy didn’t hit her the way the Stevens boy did, but…
“I’m sorry, Dad,” Bonnie says hoarsely. She doesn’t cry, just swallows and places a hand up to her cheek where Stanley had yanked hold of her by the hair and slapped her across the face. He first responds by gritting his teeth, then:
“I don’t want to see you fooling around with any of the boys ‘round here again. Alright?”
Bonnie nods. “Yessir.”
All she feels is paralyzed, even after she tried to pull him away.
She doesn’t tell Stanley or Bonnie that she’s going to the asylum. Her heart will ache whether she goes or not, but it’s been too long; she lies to them both about needing to go out to fetch a few purchases for this week’s meals later that she must have forgotten when she’d first gone out.
Her eyes rove over her sister’s sallow, pale face, the dullness to her eyes, the straw-like quality her hair has taken. Once upon a time, Blanche DuBois had been a princess who had stepped out of the pages of a fairytale. Now, caught up in her own fairytale she’d spun from madness, gone is the brightness of youth and even the memories of more pleasant times written on her face. There’s not even the liveliness of fear and dazzling tall tales from earlier, it’s as though Blanche has been scooped clean of what made her… her.
“How have things been going for you?” Blanche’s voice is so distant and murky.
Stella lies — both to herself and her own sister — when she tells her of how happy she is now that she’s returned to Stanley, now that she’s got a beautiful young daughter of her own. And she wonders if Blanche notices the desperate edge to her laugh.
“Is something the matter, Stella? You sound like a sob’s about to burst out of your throat.”
There’s no use in telling her, not when either of them wants to live in reality. God, Stella thinks to herself, I’m surely a hypocrite for keeping my secrets.
“No. Nothing at all.”