Braided Lives (12 page)

He catches my glance. “Notice anything different?”

“Different?” Same wide-set grey eyes, stubborn jaw, broad body … “Maybe now.” He walks ahead of me, turning with a shamed persistence.

“The pea jacket’s new? It becomes you.”

“I got it last year and you’ve seen it hundreds of times.” He rubs his cheek. “I’ve grown an inch and a half.”

“Since September? I haven’t grown since fourteen.”

“I’m physically slow. The only thing I ever did on time was start talking.”

“And sometimes you’re stingy with that.” I smile. “For me the most exciting thing has been Donna. We both hate the same kind of hypocrisy and crap—”

“You’ve mentioned her. In fact half of every letter you write me is Donna.”

“Talking to her shakes my ideas down. You have to meet her. She’ll be in Detroit spending New Year’s with her married sister.”

“Okay.” He shrugs. “If she wants to. Don’t make a big thing of it.”

“She’ll want to. She’s wonderful, Howie. We don’t look like cousins. She has silky blond hair. She’s so fair you expect her to glow in the dark.”

“Why talk that way?” He frowns. “You said she has a boyfriend now.”

I do not know what to say. Of course I had not thought of Howie for Donna. There’s Lennie and if there wasn’t, Howie is too young—ten months younger than I am and almost two years younger than Donna. No, I had not meant that at all.

“It’s wet and cold. Look, I found this Syrian coffeehouse on Second. What do you say, Jill? Ever had Turkish coffee?”

“Never. Why not? We’ll all be Semites together.”

“Maybe we can start a local Jew-Arab peace offensive? You don’t feel a little hypocritical, that word you’re so fond of, planning to march in there and sit playing Italian no doubt?”

“You think they’ll ask for a passport, Howie?”

“With your snub nose, you’re used to getting away with passing, aren’t you, Jill Stuart?”

“Well, do you announce you’re a Jew every time you walk into a regular goyishe restaurant, Howie?”

We are off and racing, arguing. I had forgotten the pleasure of walking with him at full stride. I had forgotten the pleasure of arguing with him, proving myself step by step to tear what final meaning I can from his bulldog grip. We are still friends.

Mother sits captive audience darning Dad’s socks. Across the table I crouch behind my anthropology notebook, reading her the words that will obliterate her prejudices. “If primitive is apelike, then hairiness is primitive. Which is hairiest of races? Mother! You aren’t paying attention!” I want to take her with me. I can’t help it, we shared so much in my childhood I still long to carry her off on my journeys. If she wants me to be like her, I also want her to be like me.

“Of course I am. I never had the least trouble with body hair. You ought to pluck your eyebrows—they’re as heavy as your father’s.”

“Nobody plucks their eyebrows anymore, Mother!” The sock in her hand is canary yellow. “Whose sock is that?”

“This one? Oh … guess it’s Matt’s. Such a nice boy, it’s a pleasure to have him around.”

“Yeah, it’s an insight into primitive man.”

“You’re jealous. It makes up to me a little of the pain of my two boys being so far from home….” Halfheartedly. After all, Leo’s around more than I am since his paint business went sour. He’s always dancing across the border to avoid his creditors in Ohio and then running back to avoid his ex-wives in Michigan. Her beautiful brown eyes gloat on the socks. “I had an evening gown just that color.”

“Does he actually wear those? And doesn’t get stoned in the streets?”

“With the smartest bolero. I wonder if I haven’t got a piece of it? Like your father says, I never throw anything away.” She winks. “Bet I could dig it out. What say?”

Such kindness is cheap. “Sure. Take a look.”

Sitting on Matt’s floor with her short legs spread to make a lap, she empties scraps from the dresser that holds sewing supplies and summer clothes. She tries to stuff her arms into a yellow silk bolero already split in the seams. “I’ve gained so much. I put it on carrying you and never could get it off.” She stares at my body. “I bet it’d fit you.
Try it.”

I squeeze it over my shaggy pullover. Coaxingly she smoothes it flat. When she was married to Max Abel, obviously she had prettier and better clothes than she has now. “When I was your age, I had a short dress that color. Not as good as this silk, of course. I bought it for a party. He’d been to college, that young man. But when we arrived, every girl was wearing green. They told me it was Saint Patrick’s Day. Those girls, dressed to kill and mean as can be. What did I know about their saints? I hate green—makes me red as a beet.”

“Did they make fun of you?” I ran into clothes snobbery at school and if I cared they could wound me, those girls who read the language of label and line. Donna calls them bitches but she lies on the bed sometimes turning the pages of
Vogue
and staring with tense hunger at the mannequins.

“They tried. But I knew how to dance and flirt. Nothing obvious, but the way men like. Soon I had the men buzzing. Those girls turned green as their dresses.” She will not bond with me around weakness, ever. “Men like a woman with a good figure, it’s human nature.” Her eyes walk over me like spiders. “Throw your shoulders back. Have you met any nice young men? Hasn’t
anybody
asked you out?”

I scrape the bolero off. “Once or twice.”

“With your sullen temper, I bet you argue their ears off. Learn to keep your mouth shut and smile. Hold your mouth tight like this, it’ll look smaller. Show me how you smile at a boy.”

I jump up. “I don’t smile. Donna says my mouth isn’t too big. And if it is, it’s mine! I like me. Donna likes me.”

Her eyes rest on me hard and hostile. “Donna! Donna! Donna! There’s something really wrong with you. Something rotten.”

Do not respond. No expression. Bacall in
To Have and Have Not
when the cop slaps her. Pride is being cool. “In this zoo, why ever not?” I fumble for a cigarette, light it with a kitchen match struck off my thumbnail, a new affectation I know will drive her crazy. I am suddenly thirteen again and miserable.

We sit at the back of the bus for privacy. Donna dabs at her eyes. “It’s only five years since Jim graduated, but oh, they’re disgustingly settled! He used to care about things, he was practically a socialist. But when I tried to tell them about Lennie, they made fun of him.”

“How could they? They never met him.”

“Because I said he has a beard and paints.” She blows her nose hard. “I said, why should women have hours when the men don’t? They both started in, parents wouldn’t send their
children
to school if they weren’t protected. I said, Don’t you think people screw before ten thirty? That just makes it sordid. And they had the nerve to pretend to be shocked!”

“How are things between Jim and you?”

“Stu, you know what he did? Took me aside and gave me a horrid smug lecture on making men respect me. He said because I’m not Jewish, Lennie would just try to use me—Lennie! I’m more fed up with not having sex than Lennie is.”

“Lennie loves you. Don’t talk to them anymore about him.” I pick at my jacket, feeling the cold ingroup pushing. Virtuous air of Aunt Jean saying broadly, “Why, when I showed him the house, he tried to jew me down.” Donna is an accident of warm flesh.

“You’re the only living soul I can talk to besides Lennie, and there are things I can’t say to him.”

“Have you told him about Jim?”

“Not yet. He’s so
good.
I just can’t.”

I am all for honesty but she is too unhappy for me to pester with my scruples. I check my package, peering at the fiery red of the dress. With great mystery Donna took me to a hallway lined with dentists’ offices where with the staring fixity of her confessions she swore me to secrecy. “Promise you won’t tell! Nobody! Especially Julie. Promise!” Thus I was initiated into the resale shop where I bought a red wool dress with a V neck, simple in a way that even I can recognize as well-made, of a jersey that clings and flatters.

“Donna.” I tap her arm. She is staring out the bus window at Awrey’s factory where they bake the almond-tasting windmill cookies. “I want you to meet my old friend Howie. Tonight?”

“Some other time. I’m worn out. Just let me come home with you. They make me feel so bad about myself.”

Dad and Leo are down in the basement. The whine of the electric jigsaw rises. Whenever it stops I hear them talking. They get on together, their conversation jingling with odd, unfitted facts like a pocketful of nails. Dad loves to know exactly how mechanical objects or processes work. Since Leo is always going into or out of some new business, Dad gets to question him about something and Leo gets to play expert answering.

I stand at the sink washing supper dishes. Mother and Donna and Matt sit around the lit tree in the living room. I expected Donna to keep me company while I wash. I long for her to come. Instead she hangs out in the living room acting just like the Donna of that first week at school, fluttery, vapid, with a dry silly giggle like marbles rattling in her throat. Matt seems to swell while she shrinks. He occupies more than a chair, preening, strutting even as he sits. Mother watches, coy, amused. Mother sits with her sewing in her lap but she is not sewing. The bits of their talk that I can hear over the saw and the dishes cause me to grind my teeth in helpless annoyance.

“…just adore the way you customized your Hornet.” As if Donna can tell a Ford from a Chevy any better than I can. Ha.

“Matt’s real clever with his hands,” my mother says flirtatiously. “He can make anything go.” Then she spoils her innuendo by launching into an interminable story about what went wrong with the washing machine.

“… oh, Jill studies a lot more than I do.”

Traitor! As a matter of fact—with pleasure I hit a cracked plate on the drainboard and lay the two pieces neatly to one side—I study one hell of a lot less than you, Donna baby. I go for walks while you’re bent over your books curled up like a porcupine with a bellyache. And I read my work and yours. Maybe that annoys her. I never considered that before. Maybe she thinks I am showing off. I just want to know everything she learns to share that too.

When I finally finish the dishes, it’s time for me to go to work. Matt offers to drive me. The telephone office is about a mile and a half away. I’d love to turn down his offer, but I’m running late.

As we’re walking out, Mother is saying to Donna, “After all, it’s not like you’re engaged to this boy from New York, right?” She picks up Donna’s left hand. “But since you aren’t, what’s the harm seeing another fellow for a little fun? If he leaves you alone on New Year’s Eve, that’s his fault. He can’t expect you to sit home when he hasn’t even given you a ring. You’re only young once.”

Matt hasn’t driven me three blocks before we’re quarreling. “She won’t go out with you! She won’t. You don’t see anything in her but a pretty blond, but she’s intelligent. She won’t!”

“You want to bet? I can tell when a girl’s interested. I saw her looking me over.”

“How could she miss you parading up and down, you peacock?”

“Watch your language, Snow White.” He squeezes my knee. Promptly I bend his fingers back. “Ouch! Hey, I’m driving.”

“Then drive. They taught me it takes two hands in driver training.” Actually I never took it. You had to pay a fee. Dad kept saying he would teach me, but every lesson ended fast with me reduced by his annoyance to the physical equivalent of stammering, pulling all the wrong levers and treading hard on the accelerator instead of the brake.

“I could teach you a few things you don’t learn at school. But you’re scared of me.”

“Just bored.” I wonder I can sound so bright and hard when I
am
quite scared. I don’t trust him in the dark or the light. “You can play my mother’s son all you want—just keep out of my way.”

“Your mother is one damn fine woman. Grow up a little.”

“Doing my best. Just leave me and my friends alone.”

“Your mother says it’s okay if I take Donna out. So let’s leave it up to the lady, why don’t we? I’ll ask her when I drive
her
home tonight.”

They are all laughing at me. Mother and Matt. Now Donna is being drawn over to them.

New Year’s Eve. When I walk in at ten forty-five, my parents are entertaining. Mother insists I take a hand in their canasta game. On my right sits Charlotte Ballard, kidskin face, brassy hair lacquered into rolls. She spends a fortune she doesn’t have on that curlicue hair and the upkeep of her body armored like a fighting dinosaur. “Oh, Malcolm, what a nasty hand you gave me, you mean man!” Next is Dad. Mother sits between Gene Ballard’s scraped red face, eyes tough and beaming, and Leo. I have to give it to Leo, he manages to look darkly handsome in a tan suit. On my left is his new girlfriend. Anita has ash-blond hair in a poodle cut and wears a dress covered with rows of tassels. She is on her best behavior, which involves getting a little tipsy, laughing at whatever the men say, in case it should be funny, and saying “Pardon my French,” every time she says “Damn it.”