Braided Lives (11 page)

“Well. You’re late.” The woman looks me over. “What happened to you?”

“I fell. Twisted my ankle.” I limp cleverly to the desk and sign in, then limp to the elevator. Up we sail so nice. The doors open. I step dazed into a crowd. The hall is lined with girls in robes and pajamas setting their hair in pin curls, filing their nails. Waiting for me? Trial by jury. Escape!

“You’re late for the corridor meeting again, Stuart,” the trim grim blond standing in midhall raps out. “If it’s not one of you, it’s the other.”

With a show of dignity I brush the particles, dead leaves, twigs from my coat. “Ladies, the democratic process means a lot to me!” I am getting my wind. “The trouble with this place is—”

Julie tugs hard and I sit with a thud between her and Donna. My hands are grimy and cut with a slow ooze of blood from my palm. Through the long winter of the meeting I stare at the baseboard. Dulcie, the athletic chairman, is urging us to play soccer or field hockey. I raise my hand when others do. I sign a paper and pass it. My head aches.

Following Donna into our room, I snap off the overhead light. “Could you study by your desk lamp?”

“What made you late? You’re not going to bed already?”

“I’m dead.” I peel my clothes and let them drop.

Her chair clatters back. “Stu, did something happen with Carl? You’ll feel better if you tell me.”

The room churns slowly. I draw the blankets over me. “Carl?”

“Isn’t that his name?”

“Carl…. I lost him at a party.”

“Oh, Stu!”

“No, he was out of his mind.” I expose my face from the heap of blanket. “I’m not cut out for dating. I’m sorry, I can’t do it, Donna, that’s all!” When she speaks again, I pretend not to hear.

I push open the door to Drake’s, a place offering many teas and coffees, some jazz and dim booths, and walk into the dark brown air thick with smoke and conversation. Awkward at approaching strangers who lounge at home here, I slip nervously toward the back. Ah, Lennie: ruddy thatch, his strong teeth showing against his beard, he waves me over. As I slide in the bench on the opposite side from them he says, “Great news! I found an apartment with two other guys. I can move in February second.”

“It’s a drag now.” Donna sighs with exasperation. “No place to go. We’re never, never alone. We just sit on benches necking till we get pneumonia.”

I had planned to tell Donna alone, but I pull out the pages with the red needlepoint of my English instructor around the edges. “Bishop gave me back ‘Day is for faces.’ “

“How did he like it?” She leans across the cups. Their interest is more than polite, for the voices from the pit now tell about Donna’s seduction by her brother-in-law and the terror of her first period, along with Lennie’s grandfather dying of a heart attack on their stairs and the time Lennie was beaten by a Puerto Rican gang who caught him crossing their turf. Their heads touch over the pages, flax and red. I know what they read.

Miss Stuart, the accidents of adolescence are not the stuff from which literature is honed. Personal outcries cannot infect the critic with anything but dismay; and I doubt whether the experiments of puberty could be so rendered as to attract any audience but that of the confession magazine. Outpouring such as this should be kept to oneself.

Lennie slams the manuscript down. “Button-down fag!”

Donna blinks rapidly. “Accidents of puberty! That’s all there is.”

“He wouldn’t look at me. He thinks it’s addressed to him—you know, love meet cetera.” Lean dry Mr. Bishop. “Maybe it is melodramatic.”

Lennie plants his hand on it—big for his size with crisp paprika hairs. Through Donna I am conscious of his body. “I’ll show it to this poet I know. He’ll give you a straight crit of it.”

I shake my head but Donna smiles. “He means Mike. Mike has big brown eyes. He broods. I though you said he was coming?”

“What do you go around noticing his eyes for? I’ll put a padlock on you.” His big hand squeezes her shoulder, she kisses his cheek. They are doggedly free in public affection, so that I have learned to sit with blank face and continue talking.

Outside Drake’s I stamp my feet while they say good-bye, good-bye. Then I notice. From the doorway across State Street someone is watching. He shields his mouth to light a cigarette but his gaze over his cupped hands is on us. He is big-boned, slouched as he stands in the wind with the collar of his ill-fitting old coat turned up around his ears. That much I see in a series of quick glances. His gaze attracts me because of its intensity. Stubborn to stand in the icy skirl of the wind. As Lennie jogs off and Donna turns to leave with me, a motion in the corner of my eye halts me, grabbing Donna by a wild clutch.

“What’s wrong? Forget something in Drake’s?”

I cannot think what to answer. In the meantime he strides toward us with an exaggerated purposefulness that takes him through a drift and out the other side with snow clinging to his pants as if he could not be bothered to notice.

Donna sees him. “Oh, there’s Mike. Late as usual.”

He flicks his cigarette away and his hands seek refuge in the pockets of his oversized coat where they are clenched—I can feel that. “Know where I can find Lennie?”

Fraud, I think, you saw him go. That give me courage to look. His hair is dark, not black like mine but the darkest of browns, the color of black coffee. Strange face with a sharp scar just beside the mouth, something sensuous you would want to touch, dark in his sallow skin. Strong face, the skull is strong, but the eyes draw me: large, bark brown, set deep and darkly shining.

“You just missed him.” Donna makes a motion as if to scoop me forward. “By the way, have you two met?”

Damn you, Donna, you know!

“So you’re Jill? What do you know!” His grin opens him up. “Lennie says you’re a poet-ess.”

“I write poems,” I say in a fierce terrier voice.

“Stu.” Donna gives me another nudge. “Show him the poem. She gave some of her stuff to her English professor and he wrote the nastiest note. Show him, Stu.”

“I make nasty comments too.” Mike thrusts his chin out.

“How exciting. I write nasty poems. I’m not asking favors.” I am astonished that I bark back, but my poetry is one of the few parts of life where I feel brave.

Donna leans toward him flirtatiously. “Mike writes poems too. If he isn’t scared to show them to you …”

“I’d like to read them,” I say.

“With a fair trade.” He steps back. “Send your stuff over with Lennie and I’ll reciprocate.” He strides off, the coat too large for him flapping and bucking.

“Donna, did he really mean it? Oh, why did I argue with him?”

“I thought he was intrigued.”

“Honestly? You’re just saying that to make me feel good? How could you tell?” And on and on till she writhes away from me. I pick over the short meeting until it is worn flat. When I finally do send a few poems over with Lennie (they live in the same men’s dormitory), I have forgotten why I ever wanted to. Next week we go home for Christmas vacation. When it’s over I’ll have to remember to have Lennie get the poems back for me.

CHAPTER SIX

T
HE
D
ARKEST
N
IGHT OF THE
Y
EAR

“A
RE YOU TRYING to squash my foot? Watch where you’re pushing, Malcolm!” As Mother peers around the old overstuffed chair they are wrestling to a corner, she sees me walking the drum table after them a leg at a time. “Jill, you clumsy lummox, look what you’re doing to my carpet!”

Matt ambles out of my ex-room, which smells so strongly of bay rum after-shave I wonder if he drinks it. Skintight Levi’s with tee shirt, blond hair in a ducktail, face bold or crude depending on how much he annoys me; in three days he has annoyed me a great deal. “Let me give you a hand, Mrs. S. Stand back!” He heaves the chair up. “Where do you want this old thing?”

Brusquely Dad says, “Against the windows.”

“Malcolm, do you want it gloomy as a cave? It’s bad enough with the house next door shutting off the light—”

Dad tilts back, his hands in his pockets. “Want me to ask them to move it?”

When I came home to find Matt the new boarder given the run of the house I thought, Dad’s found a son. But Dad barely tolerates him.

Matt chides her, “Temper, temper, Mrs. S. Let’s dump it here.”

Why doesn’t she strike him dead? But she beams. “You’re a real help to me. Now where’s that stupid tree-stand? I swear every year I won’t be bothered with this silly business ever again.”

Matt and Mother bought the tree. The truth is that Dad takes Christmas for granted—he grew up with it and he has never shopped for a present in his life—while for Mother it still shimmers with forbidden glamour in the presents, the tree, the cards. She likes the decorations and when I was younger she and I labored to make everything special. I can hardly join in the fuss now. During vacations I work a split shift at the phone company, nine to one and six to ten, as a long-distance operator on the noisy board. With my room rented and my attic hideaway off limits because it is entered and left through Matt’s bedroom, I feel sorry for myself with a dry sneering intensity. Mother has arranged for me to sleep on the couch, but until Leo comes home around New Year’s, I’ll spend most of my time on the cot near the furnace where Francis sleeps when he’s home. Late at night when Francis is around you can tell by the soulful guitar rising through the floorboards; however, Francis is reported to be maybe in Texas and maybe in Mexico but surely in trouble. Until Leo arrives, the cot is mine.

I sit cross-legged on it feeling sour and sophisticated when I get home around ten forty-five until I sleep long after midnight. No one says, Jill: how brilliant you are now, how dynamic, how mature! No one sees that I am changed. I can’t wait for Donna to arrive; she is spending Christmas with her parents and then New Year’s with her sister and brother-in-law. In the meantime I read Dostoevsky and smoke, dropping the ashes on the cement floor. This time at home I smoke openly while Mother howls.
Dearest Mother: After twenty years I apologize, I creep and crawl and whine apologies. The truth is you were often wrong about what I needed or wanted, but this time you were right. Every time I watch my late adolescent self lighting up with a self-satisfied smirk, I could reach over my shoulder and stuff it in my ear. By thirty-five I will be coughing blood with chronic bronchitis. Never will I forget laboring for precious air, laboring and choking. I thought I was blowing the sweet smoke of freedom but I was just sucking the well-advertised death tit. About everything that grows, you are almost always right.

Leaving the sullen wind and cars passing sluggishly with a wake of grimy slush, I trot under the cobblestone arch. I am only a half hour late but Howie stands at the window glaring. His eyes cross me and I know he has seen me but he pretends no, looking at his watch. I ring the bell. Leisurely he slips on a pea jacket while I am still waiting at the door. His mother answers it.

“Jill, little Jill,” his mother gushes with her soft, slight accent. She should talk. She is exactly my height and considerably wider, still in her starchy nurse’s uniform. Her hair is light feathery brown under a fine hairnet, the eyes behind pink-rimmed glasses wide and blue to take me in. “What a lot of hair. You look like Rapunzel in the fairy books. So how do you like college? How are you doing?”

“We’re on the semester system so we won’t get our grades till the end of January. I think I’m doing okay.”

“Howie got all A’s.”

He has finally buttoned his pea jacket, trying to edge past his mother. “Let’s go, then. Come on.”

“Where are you going?” his mother bridles.

“Down to the library.” He leads me out.

“But I just got home,” his mother calls. “I haven’t seen you …”

“The library?” I ask when we’re around the corner. “You should have called me. I could meet you there as fast as coming here.”

“I want to get out of the house. Let’s just walk.”

I pace beside him while for several blocks we say nothing. At least there is pleasure in walking with him. I forgot how quickly he walks, at my natural stride. I ask at last, “So you like Columbia?”

“It’s a good school but a lot of shits go there. Kids with money and an exaggerated sense of who they are and what that’s worth. I got real tired being ritually pissed on those first months.”

I glance at him. “But you’re in New York, right? I’ve never been there. I’d give anything to see it.”

He takes off his glasses, wipes them with a rumpled handkerchief and puts them away, a new mannerism performed with a smile that says, be amused but don’t comment. “Aw, Jill, I haven’t hardly been south of One Hundred and Tenth Street. I’ve had so much homework, I’ve hardly done a damn thing else.”

I suddenly realize that Howie is premed, just like the awful competitive jerks Donna and I must put up with in zoology. That startles me so I squint sideways at him to see if he has undergone some disgusting change.