Archive of Our Own

Sally has never been able to truly parse her relationships with men. When she was young - and beautiful - there was no shortage of them. Opening doors, pulling out chairs, offering her an arm or a coat or a little more, a little wink, a little tickle of the fingers in places best left unexplored till one was behind closed doors. She was accustomed to it, expected it, accepted it as the background of her life.

Until she had a child.

Until she got wrinkles.

Until she got grey hairs.

Until she got thicker in the middle and less inclined to wear a plunging neckline or a skirt that showed more thigh than it covered or shoes that favored mobility over the ability to tighten and display the calves.

"You try chasing a toddler in high heels," she'd snapped at her husband one frazzled evening. He had suggested, in a quiet way, that maybe she should try dressing up a bit, doing something with her hair again instead of twisting it back in a knot. "You try doing the damned laundry and changing diapers and getting the groceries."

His mouth had thinned and he had cast a glance at Laurie - settled, finally, happy with her blocks and her dolls and her coloring books, anything bright and distracting that Sally could pile around her - and there had been disapproval on his face. Disapproval and - yes, just a little, just in the twitch at the corner of his mouth, the narrowing of his eyes - disgust. Laurie had dark hair, dark eyes, but they were not his.

"I'm not a woman," he'd answered. She'd started screaming at him then and he'd started yelling and Laurie'd started crying and he finally left, snatching his coat up and muttering something about going out with his friends. Laurie had held her hands up, wailing piteously as he stalked past her, and fury warred with pity on his face, but only for a moment. He looked at her and he saw her real father reflected there and he could never bring himself to truly love her.

And the hell of it, Sally had thought, as she sat at the table, cradling her head in her hands and trying not to hear the door slamming, the car starting, the baby crying; the absolute fucking hell of it was this:

Sometimes she felt the same.

***

Laurie is a stranger to her.

She got the Tijuana bible a few weeks ago in the mail. It's a crude thing, gross and funny, and she remembers when they were everywhere. She'd showed one to Ursula once, that cold, beautiful woman that frightened Sally so, and Ursula had tapped the paper, rattling the book in Sally's hands.

"Never," she'd purred. She was like a cat, sleek and self-satisfied, and sometimes she looked at Sally the way men did, with that proprietary gleam in her slanted eyes. Sally was used to it from men, but it gave her a chill when it came from Ursula. She felt betrayed by it, in a way she had never been able to define beyond the vague notion that another woman - knowing what it was like to be owned by the eyes of everyone in the room - should never have turned that gaze on her.

"Never?" Sally had laughed, flashed a smile, used dazzle as a shield the way she had her entire life. "Sister, you don't know what you're missing."

Ursula had died not long after that, horribly, senselessly. Sally wonders if Laurie knows that story, wonders if she realizes how hard it was back then.

"Remember that guy that writes me letters? He sent me an item of memorabilia," she says, holds it out to her daughter. Laurie takes it, flips through it. "It's a Tijuana bible. This little eight page porno comic they did in the '30s and '40s."

"He sent you this?" Laurie demands.

"Sure, they're very valuable. Like antiques." She takes it back, flips through it fondly.

"Mother, this is gross."

"I think it's flattering." She smooths the pages in her hands, holds the thing to her heart. Laurie doesn't understand. She's always had everything handed to her, has always lived in a time when being a woman wasn't a constant struggle. "Why do you always call me Mother when you're mad?"

Laurie doesn't answer, but there is tension in her slim body, anger in her dark eyes. Sally doesn't look at her, can't look at her.

She looks so much like him when she's angry.

***

She visits Byron in the asylum when she gets the time. It's a long trek up to Maine, but he was a good friend, a good man.

He looks at her with bleary eyes, smiles a little. He's had breakdown after breakdown and his poor hands shake. Sally wraps one up in both of hers, leans close to him. "Hello, sweetheart," she murmurs. "How are you feeling today?"

"Not bad," he sighs. "Not bad." Sally has no way of knowing whether it's true or not. Byron hasn't been well for a very long time, between the drugs and the booze and the edge of constant, jittery near-panic that always seems to envelope him. The doctors won't tell her because she's not family, but she thinks maybe he's telling the truth. There's a clarity in his eyes, anyhow, and that comforts her.

"I talked to Hollis on the phone two days ago," she tells him. Byron laughs.

"Hollis!" he exclaims. "Hollis. How the hell is he doing?"

"He's good," she answers. "Says he's going to come visit you one day soon."

"I'll just bet he does," Byron mutters, fixing her with a shrewd look. It surprises her, the amount of lucidity in his eyes. She hasn't seen him like this in years. "You know, he always was in love with you."

"Was he?" Sally says lightly, though it stabs her in the heart.

"You knew," Byron accuses, squeezing her hands.

"I did," Sally allows. "But he never said anything."

Byron's grip is punishing but it relaxes, slowly releasing until he's slumped in his chair again, all of the fire gone out of him. She wonders what that was all about, why it matters to Byron. He breathes out slowly, a wistful smile on his face.

"I loved someone, too," he murmurs. Tears roll down his wrinkled cheeks. "But I never said. I should have."

"It's never too late," Sally says, because she doesn't know what else there is to say. Byron shakes his head slowly, side to side like an old pendulum.

"It's too late for me," he sighs. "It's been too late for almost forty years."

They sit in silence after that, holding hands for nearly an hour before the nurses take him away for his treatment. Sally sits in her car in the parking lot after and tries to summon tears but her eyes are dry as a desert.

***

"I know why you're here. I can still read you know, I saw it in the paper."

Laurie stares at her, turns away abruptly. Sally continues, serene. "Eddie Blake's funeral is today. Finally got his punchline, I guess." A pause, then, "Poor Eddie."

"Poor Eddie!?" Laurie explodes, whipping around. Her straight hair slings out behind her and Sally wishes idly that she'd do something with it. It looks so ordinary like that, just hanging down her back. "After what he did to you?"

"Oh Laurie," she breathes, "you're still young. You don't know. Things change."

***

He'd come to her without calling first. That was Eddie's way, though; he liked to take people by surprise. He wasn't a smart man but he was brutally clever and he understood that if his opponent was unbalanced, he had the advantage. She'd tried so hard to keep it from showing, but when she opened her door and he was standing there, she'd gasped, recoiled a little.

He smiled that smile, leaned against the door frame.

"Sally," he'd murmured. He had a voice like darkness, thick and low, and he smelled good, like sweat and aftershave and gunpowder. "You look good."

"Eddie," she'd replied, more than half hiding behind the door. "You look like hell."

"Can I come in?" he'd asked and she knew she should have just slammed the door in his face. Sometimes she still woke up feeling his hands on her waist, his heavy boot kicking her legs apart. She felt it now, by God, and she was going weak in the stomach, teary and terrified. Her hands shook but her voice was firm.

"You need to get the fuck out of here, Eddie." His mouth opened in an O of false surprise, eyes dancing with a mocking Look At Us, We're So Bad light.

"Sally, what a word," he chided. His hand slid along the door, thick fingers brushing across her own. His touch was like fire, shocking her skin with its heat. She almost jerked back, but he wasn't grabbing, wasn't even moving forward. She hesitated, conflicted. "Let me in, baby, I just want to talk."

"No, you don't," she'd accused.

"No," he'd admitted. "I don't."

In a perfect world she would have slammed the door and locked herself in the bathroom and slowly, gradually, she would have been able to push the fear back down to a level where it could be stoppered and ignored. In a perfect world, she would have stood up for herself. She would have respected herself. In a perfect world, he never would have come back in the first place.

But there he was and there she was and it was a bitch but his arms were thick and his hair was like coal and his eyes were dangerous, full of desire but not - and this was what had always impressed her about Eddie - not ownership. Eddie had never wanted to own her, he had only desired her, lusted for her body, and that at least was honest. That, at least, she could understand because God help her, she wanted him, too.

"Eddie," she'd said, her voice plaintive, weak. She hated herself in that moment and it was a hate that she carried like a millstone around her neck for the rest of her life. "Won't you just go away?"

"Sally," he whispered, leaning close, catching her with his dark eyes. "Won't you just let me in?"

And she did.

***

"What happened happened forty years ago," she murmurs, eyes fixed on the picture beside her. That snapshot from the day Eddie had first laid hands on her. Why she kept it, she didn't know. Perhaps as a reminder that things were not always as they seemed, or that she could conquer any obstacles. Perhaps, though, and most likely, simply because she had never looked more beautiful in her life. That had been it, that had been the peak.

She taps the glass covering the photograph with one manicured nail. She had never told Eddie, never told anyone, but if he had been patient, if he had just waited, maybe bought her a drink, she would have been wrapped around his little finger. She still is, she supposes, in ways that she can't even fathom. She'd cried when she read the paper, clutched it to her chest.

"I'm sixty-seven years old," she says, but Laurie isn't listening.

***

Hollis showed up for Sally's birthday party the year she turned sixty-five. He was sweetly awkward about the whole thing, hugging her tight, immediately shoving his hands into his pockets. She knew she wasn't pretty anymore, but Hollis still looked at her like she was.

"It's good to see you," she told him. "You look good." Truly, he did; he had aged, as had they all, but age suited him. He looked tough now, strong and wiry, like he'd been born to get old. He smiled at her and it sent a little thrill tingling down to her toes.

"So do you," he said, and Sally could tell that he meant it, could tell that he still thought she was beautiful in spite of the weight gain and the white hair and the wrinkles, good God the fucking wrinkles she had, she looked like a topographical map for chrissakes, but there was Hollis, staring at her like she hung the moon. "I've missed seeing that pretty face."

He took her hand and she curled her fingers around his. He had a grip like iron, firm and strong and steady.

She remembered how he'd just stood in the doorway as Hooded Justice beat the hell out of Eddie, how he hadn't moved to help her. How, just for a second, he had looked at her like he was wondering what she did to bring that kind of behavior on herself, as if she were responsible for Eddie's actions by virtue of being a pretty woman in a short skirt.

She remembered all that and she squeezed his hand and the butterflies died off, one by one dropping until he was just a friend, just someone she had known back when people looked at her and loved her. "You old flirt," she said, her tone teasing and reproachful. "Come see Laurie. You haven't talked to her since she was tiny."

The tiny flare of hope that had blossomed in his eyes snuffed out, replaced by a bitter sorrow that Sally pretended not to see.

***

She catches Eddie talking to Laurie, both of them standing outside after the conclusion of their little superhero meeting. Sally hadn't liked the idea of it, but after all, she'd pushed Laurie into the life and couldn't complain when Laurie participated in it. If she had known, though. If she had known...

He calls her doll like it's nothing, stares after Laurie hungrily. Later, in the car, Laurie demands to know what the hell that was all about, spoiled little brat that she is, and Sally rounds on her.

"What the hell were you thinking, talking to him?" she snaps and Laurie snaps right back, bristling in the kind of self-righteous anger that only the young can access.

"He was perfectly nice, Mother! He just wanted to talk!"

"Eddie Blake never wants to 'just talk'," Sally snarls, and Laurie sneers at her.

"Not every man is a pervert, you know," she says coldly. "He just said he used to know you. He was being nice. If he was trying to pick me up, he wouldn't have talked about how hot you were and how I had your eyes. Jesus, Mother."

And Sally doesn't tell her - though she finds out later, years later - about her history with Eddie Blake, doesn't tell her that she wasn't afraid of him trying anything sexual with Laurie. Eddie is a monster, a cynic, but not even he is that terrible. No, she is afraid, she always has been afraid, that Eddie will tell Laurie the truth.

She subsides, knowing there is no way to win this argument without telling Laurie everything. But she thinks bitterly that Eddie is a liar, Laurie doesn't have her eyes at all. Laurie is her father's child, spite and anger, and sometimes Sally just wants to beat it out of her, wants to lash the girl's skin until she whips every last speck of Eddie Blake out of her daughter's eyes.

***

"Every day the future looks a little bit darker," she sighs. "But the past, even the grimy parts of it, keep on getting brighter..."

Laurie rests a hand on Sally's shoulder and Sally looks up at her daughter.

How to explain to this child, this beautiful, willful child of hers, that she cried for Eddie Blake in spite of all that he did to her? How to make Laurie understand that, when she still doesn't know the truth of Sally's involvement with him? How to tell her that the thought of Eddie's touch makes her feel dirty some days and makes her feel like a nostalgic, lovelorn schoolgirl other days? There's no explaining it that makes any kind of sense and so Sally doesn't try.

She wonders, briefly, what Laurie might have looked like if Eddie had never touched her, if Hollis hadn't been such a coward. Would she have Hollis's bright, brilliant eyes? Would she have his thick brown hair, his stocky, powerful build? Would she have been a girl at all? Sally tries to imagine herself with a son, a boy like his father, quietly competent and unwaveringly good.

As if she needs another man, cluttering things up. As if she could ever have been a good mother to a son. She has enough trouble understanding Laurie.

No, she's had enough trouble with men, the way they seem to come into her orbit at all the wrong times, wanting all the wrong things. She long since gave up trying. It's enough now that she's got her memories and her daughter. She grips Laurie's fingers, leans towards her, and Laurie looks down with a distant sort of love in her eyes. They don't understand each other, never have, but that doesn't matter.

Perhaps it's her weakness, perhaps it's her nature, but Laurie is just like her father, and Sally cannot help loving her, cannot help loving either of them.