Somebody Else's Music Read Online Free PDF Page B

her interest in what Betsy was doing by buying People or the tabloids up in Johnstown or out at the mall. She could even remember the first time she had realized that Betsy was becoming Something Important, and it had burned into her brain the way such incidents do, the ones you think later were the billboards that announced your life had changed. Peggy had a lot of those incidents emblazoned on her brain, but not quite
enough of them. She tried to remember the first time Stu had hit her—really hit her, so that she came right up off the floor and slammed into something—but she always came up blank. It seemed to her that he had always hit her, even when they were children together, even back in high school. She knew that wasn’t true. She had pictures of herself—homecoming queen, prom princess, president of the student council—and in those days her eyes had been as clear and unclouded as the water in one of those Japanese pools, those oases of serenity. She did remember the first time she had ended up in the emergency ward, with Stu pacing the corridor and her left arm held away from her body at an odd angle, broken in one place, dislocated in another. The doctor who had seen to her had had eyes as flat as the eyes of an android in the science fiction movies Stu liked to see when he wasn’t loaded. When he was loaded, he came home with porn, slick black videotapes that looked as if they had been rubbed all over with linseed oil. He made her sit with him and watch women do things she didn’t have words for, that he said she wanted her to do to him, but that they never did together, ever, for some reason that seemed to be clear to him but that she couldn’t figure out. What bothered her was that she was sure the doctor knew exactly what had happened. When he looked at Stu, his eyes became even flatter than they had been at the beginning. He looked almost two-dimensional. She suddenly realized everyone knew, everyone in this emergency room, everyone (maybe) in town, so that all the energy she had spent trying to keep this secret had had no purpose at all. That was one of those moments that was emblazoned on her brain, because ever afterward—this morning, for instance—when she went into town and walked down Grandview Avenue, or when she left her classroom to go to the teachers’ lounge at school, she was sure that people could look straight at her and know her for exactly what she was. Not a homecoming queen. Not a prom princess. Not a student council president. Not even one of the girls who had gone up to UP-Johnstown to get her teaching certificate,
unlike the others who had had to stay home and settle for junior college, or worse. What she really was, was one of those people who are nothing, not a thing, without any value whatsoever, so that it didn’t matter if they were beaten bloody twice a month or if the one baby they had ever managed to conceive had died in a miscarriage brought on when their husbands kicked them senseless on their own kitchen floors—it didn’t matter because they deserved it, they deserved it, God marked some people out from birth to be the ones who deserved it, and it was only an accident that she had been able to hide the truth about herself for so long.
    â€œI couldn’t let you have a fucking baby,” Stu had said, when she came back from the hospital after the miscarriage. In the hospital, he had been different, not only sober but reasonable, so reasonable that the doctors had finally had to stop asking the questions that danced around the whole issue of what had made her lose the child. Once they got home again, he had started drinking. To give himself a bigger kick, he had done four lines of cocaine from her tortoiseshell hand mirror while she was in the bathroom. When they were both in college, after her junior year at UP-Johnstown, he had wanted her to try cocaine, too. He had even laid out the lines for her so that she