The Angry Woman Suite by Lee Fullbright Page A

women up and I’d lorded it over Earl and I hadn’t needed any Matthew Waterston to do it.
    My dreams were filled with long fingers dancing across black and ivory keys. I smiled myself awake, stretching and opening my eyes. Lothian sat on the edge of my bed. I grabbed my crotch. She put her hand on top of the lump my hands made under the blanket and patted me, saying, “Jamie, it’s time.” Then she cooed in my ear and planted moist kisses all over my face. She didn’t bite me. She didn’t even hit me.
    The next morning was the same and the one after that as well, and as time went on I actually looked forward to the scent of lilacs and the feel of Lothian’s soft hands; she loved me after all. And there was not one fight at Grayson House, not for months, about the man who’d gotten away from the women. What a surprise, what a gift! What a miracle worker I was! And all because I’d become a pianist!
    But Mother ruined everything.
    “Lothian,” she said one night at dinner, “what went around doesn’t necessarily come back around.”
    I didn’t understand Mother’s meaning. And although Lothian didn’t answer, there was a glint in her eye, and my gut cramped with the old, familiar anxiety.
    The next morning I awoke to teeth biting down on my ear. At first just a tiny bite, but then harder. Lothian took my arms and pushed them under me, mean-like. She hissed, laid her body over mine, pinioned me, tried to smother me.
    And then she nibbled on me like a rat on garbage.
    After, I went into the bathroom and got up on a stool so I could see myself in the mirror, and I clawed the leftover skin on my ear with furious abandon. My earlobe looked like shredded cheddar when I was done, the sink covered with blood—and that’s how Stella found me, shrieking so loud she set my teeth on edge, making me want to wipe the blood out of the sink and slather it all over her horrible mouth. Instead I told Stella that a bug had bit me in the night, making me scratch my ear ragged. She took me in her arms, shrieking the whole time, and dabbed iodine, and taped bandages over my wound, and she wouldn’t let me go until Mother finally took me away from her and put me to bed.
    I didn’t have to go to school for two whole days. Days in which I laid in bed and listened to Stella and Lothian yell back and forth about the best way to look after me, and nights in which all the women yelled about the mysterious man who’d managed to get away from them. We were back to that.
    Earl mumbled that only a pissant could sleep through a bug gnawing on his ear all night long, but Grandmother, giving everyone very odd looks, said there were no bugs in her house or she’d know the reason why. Stella let me wear her old straw hat to school, which nearly covered my bandages; and I told anyone who asked that I’d wrestled a mad dog out of Stella’s garden.
    “Is that so?” Mr. Madsen said after class was dismissed. “A mad dog, you say?” I sat at the piano doing scales, not caring about the piano anymore, disconnected, letting my mind go. It hovered somewhere near the ceiling.
    “Yessir,” I answered from that high, distant place. “It was very mad.”
    “Did you make it mad?”
    “Mr. Madsen, it was born mad, I’d nothing to do with it.”
    “I see. And where’s the dog now?”
    “Dead,” I said serenely. “I shot it. It had to be done, sir. Really it did. It was the only way to get peace. That dog just had to be shot dead.”
    My life was in the toilet. The women fought every night, and Lothian chewed on me every morning. I brooded non-stop. I also went back to wondering about Matthew Waterston, staring at the portrait he’d painted of Mother. It was a study in mixed messages. Mother’s eyes were soft and beguiling, at variance with her slight, uninviting smile. Then there was the portrait’s backdrop; it was murky, but a silver river rose up out of that murkiness, curling about Mother’s head like a halo. Her dress was