Carrie

‘You haven’t touched your pie, Carrie.’ Momma looked up from the tract she had been perusing while she drank her Constant Comment. ‘It’s homemade.’

‘It makes me have pimples, Momma.’

‘Your pimples are the Lord’s way of chastising you. Now eat your pie.’

‘Momma?’

‘Yes?’

Carrie plunged. ‘I’ve been invited to the Spring Ball next Friday by Tommy Ross-‘

The tract was forgotten. Momma was staring at her with wide my ears-are-deceiving-me eyes. Her nostrils flared like those of a horse that has heard the dry rattle of a snake.

Carrie tried to swallow an obstruction and only

(i am not afraid o yes i am)

got rid of part of it.

‘-and he’s a very nice boy. He’s promised to stop in and meet you before and-‘

‘No.’

‘-to have me in by eleven. I’ve-‘

‘No, no, no!’

‘-accepted. Momma, please see that I have to start to, to try and get along with the world. I’m not like you. I’m funny – I mean, the kids think I’m funny. I don’t want to be. I want to try and be a whole person before it’s too late to-‘

Mrs White threw her tea in Carrie’s face.

It was only lukewarm, but it could not have shut of Carrie’s words more suddenly if it had been scalding. She sat numbly, the amber fluid dripping from her chin and cheeks on to her white blouse, spreading. It was sticky and smelled like cinnamon.

Mrs White sat trembling, her face frozen except for her nostrils, which continued to flare. Abruptly she threw back her head and screamed at the ceiling.

‘God! God! God!’ Her jaw snapped brutally over each syllable.

Carrie sat without moving.

Mrs White got up and came around the table. Her hands were hooked into shaking claws. Her face bore a half-mad expression of compassion mixed with hate.

‘The closet,’ she said. ‘Go to your closet and pray.’

‘No, Momma.’

‘Boys. Yes, boys come next. After the blood the boys come. Like sniffing dogs, grinning and slobbering, trying to find out where that smell is. That … smell!’

She swung her whole arm into the blow, and the sound of her palm against Carrie’s face

(o god i am so afraid now)

was like that flat sound of a leather belt being snapped in air. Carrie remained seated, although her upper body swayed. The mark on her cheek was first white, then blood red.

‘The mark,’ Mrs White said. Her eyes were large but blank, she was breathing in rapid, snatching gulps of air. She seemed to be talking to herself as the claw hand descended on to Carrie’s shoulder and pulled her out of her chair.

‘I’ve seen it, all right. Oh yes. But. I. Never. Did. But for him. He. Took. Me . . .’ She paused, her eyes wandering vaguely toward the ceiling. Carrie was terrified. Momma seemed in the throes of some great revelation which might destroy her.

‘Momma-‘

‘In cars. Oh, I know where they take you in their arms. City limits. Roadhouses. Whiskey. Smelling … oh they smell it on you!’ Her voice rose to a scream. Tendons stood out on her neck, and her head twisted in a questing upward rotation.

‘Momma, you better stop.’

This seemed to snap her back to some kind of hazy reality. Her lips twitched in a kind of elementary surprise and she halted, as if groping for old bearings in a new world.

‘The closet,’ she, muttered. ‘Go to your closet and pray.

‘No.’

Momma raised her hand to strike.

‘No!’

The hand stopped in the dead air. Momma stared up at it, as if to confirm that it was still there, and whole.

The pie pan suddenly rose from the trivet on the table and hurled itself across the room to impact beside the living-room door in a splash of blueberry drool.

‘I’m going, Momma!’

Momma’s overturned teacup rose and flew past her head to shatter above the stove. Momma shrieked and dropped to her knees with her hands over her head.

‘Devil’s child,’ she moaned. ‘Devil’s child. Satan spawn-‘

‘Momma, stand up.’

‘Lust and licentiousness, the cravings of the flesh-‘

‘Stand up!’

Momma’s voice faded her but she did stand up, with her hands still on her head, like a prisoner of war.

Her lips moved. To Carrie she seemed to be reciting the Lord’s ]Prayer.

‘I don’t want to fight with you, Momma,’ Carrie said, and her voice almost broke from her and dissolved. She struggled to control it. ‘I only want to be let to live my own life. I… I don’t like yours.’ She stopped, horrified in spite of herself. The ultimate blasphemy had been spoken, and it was a thousand times worse than the Eff Word.

‘Witch,’ Momma whispered. ‘It says in the Lord’s Book: "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to bye." Your father did the Lord’s work-‘

‘I don’t want to talk about that,’ Carrie said. It always disturbed her to hear Momma talk about her father. ‘I just want you to understand that things are going to change around here, Momma.’ Her eyes gleamed. ‘They better understand it, too.’

But Momma was whispering to herself again.

Unsatisfied, with a feeling of anticlimax in her throat and the dismal rolling of emotional upset in her belly, she went to the cellar to get her dress material.

It was better than the closet. There was that. Anything was better than the closet with its blue light and the overpowering stench of sweat and her own sin. Anything. Everything.

She stood with the wrapped package hugged against her breast and closed her eyes, shutting out the weak glow of the cellar’s bare, cobweb-festooned bulb. Tommy Ross didn’t love her, she knew that. This was some strange kind of atonement, and she could understand that and respond to it. She had lain cheek and jowl with the concept of penance since she had been old enough to reason.

He had said it would be good-that they would see to it. Well, she would see to it. They better not start anything. They just better not. She did not know if her gift had come from the lord of light or of darkness, and now, finally finding that she did not care which, she was overcome with an almost indescribable relief, as if a huge weight, long carried, had slipped from her shoulders.