Obedience by Will Lavender

years old. I walked downstairs and everyone was naked, all the women with their flabby breasts. Incense in the air. ‘Go back upstairs, Lizzie,’ my mother said. And I did, just as I was told.”
    “You’re lucky,” Dennis joked. “The wildest thing I ever saw was my dad scribbling equations on the windows. He said that he liked to see them from both sides. Mother disagreed.”
    “You don’t understand,” Elizabeth said. “It got completely out of control for my mother. She couldn’t contain it. She fell in love with an artist, a guy who did lithographing in San Francisco. Finally, she moved out there with him. A few years later, when I was in college, she came back. Broke. Dirty and damaged. She was a completely different person. And still married to Daddy. He took her back, of course. There really wasn’t any question. He still loved her, fiercely. He took her back even though my brothers and I warned him not to.”
    Elizabeth was turned away from him now, speaking into the pillow. Dennis felt her speech wasn’t for him. These were things, he knew, that she could never say to Dean Orman. He would look down on her for it, think she was low class, weak and disposable. So, Dennis realized: the same act-the covering of the ring, the omission of her name-had been played with Orman in Morocco. He thought of the dean and Elizabeth in the desert, the sandy wind sweeping across their tent, and all those half-truths being told.
    “And a few years later she was dead,” Elizabeth went on. “Cervical cancer.”
    “I’m sorry,” Dennis said.
    “Don’t be. If you had known her you wouldn’t have felt anything but a loss, like some sort of phantom pain. At her funeral, no one mentioned her years in San Francisco, those hippie parties. I never told anyone about what I had seen that night. It was just assumed that these things happen, you know. They happen. There is no randomness in the world. Everything falls into a certain pattern. My mother-she knew this. She called me once from the West Coast. She said, ‘Lizzie, I think I’ve been cursed.’ I didn’t say anything. I silently agreed with her, of course. She had been. Cursed with some sort of bitter disease. An obscene pleasure drive. An urge to
fuck
anything that moved. And it killed her. This is what I’ve inherited from her.”
    Dennis said nothing. The fan turned and whirred above them. Some children passed in the hall, laughing deliriously. Someone’s telephone rang in another room.
    “I was married before. Before I met Ed. I was studying at Cleveland State, working toward a master’s in psychology. My life was as good as it had ever been. I met this man who was unlike anyone I had ever met: sincere, loving. Magnificent. You would have liked him, Dennis.”
    “Would I?” Dennis said, just to fill up the space with his own words.
    “He was charming and sweet. Just like you. When he fucked me, it was for
my
pleasure, not just his. He didn’t want to come on my face or put his finger in my ass or watch me with another woman. He didn’t want to jerk off while I danced around in red leather. He was the type who spread roses over the bed. He took me to fancy restaurants all over Cleveland and introduced me to his friends at the office. I felt important, more than somebody’s
decoration.”
    “Do you feel like a decoration when you’re with him?”
Him: it was their code for Dean Orman.
    “Sometimes,” Elizabeth said, turning even farther away from Dennis. He couldn’t see her eyes anymore, just the back of her hair and the deep crease between her shoulders. He touched her there, wanting her to come back to him, at least so he could see her eyes, but she turned over onto her back and pulled the blanket up to her face. Now she was hidden completely.
    “We were married in just a few weeks,” she said, her voice muffled in the blanket. “It was nothing, just a civil service with a justice of the peace. We thought our love was above marriage, that it