Braided Lives (13 page)

I deal, watching the cards snap out. Francis taught me. He also taught me to cheat, but I don’t feel like trying that, being out of practice. I settle for style over control. Poor Lennie, we’re both betrayed tonight. Mustn’t think that. Why shouldn’t she go out with Matt? I could give her no reason on the phone, with Mother running the sweeper behind me. The nerves creep in my fingers like caterpillars.

On the porch beside Dad at midnight I hear the firecrackers and bells beating at the sealed black sky. Make Matt come back now. Wait till he decants a few of his choice opinions on women, society, the good life. What can she want with him?

One twenty. Dad flashes around the table a look of quick boyish triumph, then card by card lays down a concealed hand. “Out!”

“You old smarty!” Mother pretends to slap at him. Ballard, stroking his horsehead tie, peers sideways at the scoop neck where her breasts gleam through black lace. Ballard used to be in the shop with Dad. Then he went to work as an electrician for a contractor laying out subdivisions north of the city. Now he is a contractor himself, a little sleazy, sometimes rolling in money and sometimes so broke he borrows from my parents.

On and on the night drags till two-thirty coffee. Finally the house is emptied of guests. Leo has gone off with Anita, the social lie being he will come in the back way later on. As I lie sleepless on the couch, only the porch light glows. Dad’s snores buck the dark. My thoughts plod round like a donkey chained to a mill. Like Samson, eyeless in Gaza. I do not love Milton but he feels appropriate in the rotten night.

Matt’s key in the lock. I rise on my elbow and fall back. The porch light hits the clock. Three thirty. I would like to kill him silently and suddenly. Still the hair rises on my nape as I hear the rustle of Mother’s robe. “Matt,” she whispers, “you’re late. I want a word with you.”

“Did I wake you? Sorry. I was trying to make like a mouse.”

“I haven’t slept. It’s four, Matt.”

The kitchen light falls on me briefly as she stands aside to let him past, then pulls the swinging door to. Her face in that flash hangs on in the dark, lines about her mouth sharply incised, eyes anthracite, hair standing up like a mass of rankled nerves. As I ease off the couch and creep toward the door, I feel momentarily sorry for Matt. The hiss of her voice and his answering confessional murmur torture me as I pick my way over the creaking boards. From the bedroom Dad’s snores rise undiminished.

Mother grates, “But you promised!”

His reply is a mumble. Slowly I lean on the door, a quarter inch, a half inch. “Don’t deny it! Matt, I see it in your face. Don’t you sit there and lie bold-faced to me.”

“But Mrs. S.—”

“You broke your promise to me!”

“God is my witness, I didn’t mean to …” I can hardly recognize this whining boy. “I’m only human, damn it.”

Sparks dance on my clenched eyes. No.

“I knew I was right about that little bitch. But that doesn’t let you off the hook. I’ll never trust you again, Matt. I took you into my home—”

“You’ve been an ace. I don’t deserve it. But I
tried
to remember my promise, honest.”

She clucks her tongue, saying more amiably, “Well, I haven’t lived this long without learning that when a man takes advantage of a woman, it’s because she asked for it.”

“Mrs. S., she’s got more fire than I ever run across—”

“I was afraid of this. I’ve got an instinct about people.”

“I swear I never meant to do it. I don’t know how to say this to you, decentlike, but she got me all worked up—”

My shoulder hits the door. Half blinded by the glare I lunge. “You dirty liar!” I get him by the throat, seeing the pink lipstick smeared on his collar. Mother seizes my arm as he pulls free.

Her hand goes back to strike me, then falls. “Shut up, you fool. You want to bring your father out? You won’t go back to college if he gets wind of this!”

Letting my hands drop I meet her dark stare. Eyes burning back. But I win. She turns with a dismissing wave to Matt. “Get to bed. Quietly. Not a
word
about this tomorrow.”

He sidles past and out. I switch off the light, not wanting to see her. My anger cools to a solid lump in my chest. I feel her at my elbow.

“I won’t have you living with her. I knew it was something like this! If your father finds out, he’ll drag you home so fast it’ll make your head swim. You ask them to change your room.”

I walk stiffly to the couch, a taste like rust in my mouth. Mother has given me a weapon. Dad did not want a roomer. With his sense of clan he will never forgive her if he finds out, and blame her twice over for concealing it. She hides the tea readings, the palm readings, the ill-smelling home permanent she uses, sure in her heart she keeps him with plotting and subterfuge. I would be cruel to tell him but it is fight or give up the pretense of my own life. I will not change rooms.

How Donna has played into Mother’s concealed hand. Matt was only the silly bait. Is there nothing more between women and men than the secret war of marriage, sex the economic counter or submission to the alley world of smut? Rigid I lie, my hands clenched on my belly. If sex is a war I am a conscientious objector: I will not play.

CHAPTER SEVEN

I
N
W
HICH
P
OET
M
EETS
P
OET AND
W
ORDS
A
RE
E
XCHANGED

S
UNDAY NIGHT, a note from Donna lies on my bunk. She has plumped up her pillow and mine for breasts and used my black hairbrush for pubic hair and her hand mirror for a face. On the belly of the doll a note says:

Stuiest:

Peter (a friend of Lennie’s—he has lots of $ and his own apartment) is lending it to us for this evening till curfew. Peter’s due back late. So tonight is our night at long last! Pray for me now and in the hour of our death—hopefully from overindulgence.

love, love love ya Donna

An hour later Julie perches on my bunk, slicing fruitcake. “If I eat it, I’ll get fatter than I am. My mother! She scolds me I’m overweight and then gives me a two-pound brandied fruitcake to take back. Is that sabotage or not?” Julie is dressed up in a new grey flannel suit with a ruffled blouse. I do not like her in suits as her body’s opulence is all in baroque hips and ass and she looks stuffed into the suit. I would put her in gypsy skirts or pants. “I had supper with Van, but he had to go back to his dorm early to study. He must be the only person on campus studying tonight…. So you met Mike? Doesn’t he have marvelous melting eyes? But his ears stick out like the handles on a sugar bowl, poor lamb. Don’t they?”

“I didn’t notice.” I don’t want to be vulnerable in front of Julie. “I only met him once for five minutes.”

“Lennie’s getting an apartment in a month, hmm? I wish Van would. To neck standing up gives me a backache. Tonight,
toute
daring he put his hand on my sweater and squeezed. Then he blushed, I swear it. Of course all he got a hand on was my padded Lovable perfect circle thirty-four A—but it’s the spirit that counts.”

“Why don’t you seduce him, Julie?”

“I’m considering that. Otherwise he’ll go away when he graduates. If we do it, he might marry me.”

“Well, you have two years to work on him, right?”

“Year and a half. He’ll make a decent living as a college professor. He’s applying to several of the best graduate schools…. I think Mother doesn’t really expect me to do any better. But how am I supposed to seduce him standing in the courtyard?”

“You have to ask Donna. I wouldn’t know how to seduce him lying down in a bed.” Unless he were a girl, I think wryly. I’m out of practice but at least I know where to start.

“Donna? She’d be amused. She doesn’t care for other people’s tacky problems.”

“Try her some time.” Defend! Though without conviction. Among women Donna relates only to me. I wonder briefly if I have higher status because of that long-ago act I have tried hard to recall.

At thirteen I was part tomboy and part bookworm, finding my community with the gang. At fourteen Donna was pert rather than pretty, wild and shy with eight elbows jutting out. She had a high cackling giggle and a bright red nose peeling from sunburn. I wore my hair in braids still, for one of my acts of rebellion that August—the month after I was in Cold Springs with Donna—was to make Callie cut them off. I would not tell Mother who had done it, so was kept in for a week. Then my mother relented, setting my hair in metal curlers. Now she is permanently angry because I wear it long. Nobody has long hair nowadays, she says, and she is almost right. It is considered bohemian, which may be why I grew it, but I keep it long because I love the way it feels, part cloak, part fan, part mane, part security blanket.

Donna and I had sat that afternoon in the backseat while my father drove and Uncle Hubie read the map. I said to Donna, “Oh, my best friend Callie and I have the most super game when we’re alone.” I was going to tell her how we had taken to calling up names from the phone book and pretending to be the Gallup Poll. We asked whatever came into our minds (Does your dog wear pajamas? What do marshmallows make you think of when you step on them?) until they hung up or we started giggling. It astonished us how many stupid questions people would answer. Then I realized both dads had fallen silent. If mine heard me tell that, I would be in trouble.

“What game?” she asked persistently.

I signaled to her to be quiet.

“What game?” she whispered, moving closer.

“Later,” I muttered and began talking loudly about swimming.

All day she kept asking me and I kept not being able to tell her, at first for security reasons of family within earshot, and then because nothing was adequate to the buildup. By the time we got into bed that night I could imagine only one game this inadvertent crescendo could climax in. I did not decide to seduce my cousin but backed myself into a corner where my pride required I produce something to justify all the suspense. I remember my desperation and my solution but not that act. At fourteen Donna was nothing special in bed and I forgot her. Now I love her far more than she loves me.

Donna comes in Sunday night just before curfew ablaze with content, so it is not until the next afternoon that I bring up what I heard on New Year’s Eve.

“Please.” I lean over her as she sits stunned, knuckles to her forehead. “Don’t ever sleep with anyone like that—someone who’s likely to talk inside the family.”

“Who’d ever, ever think he’d go home and tell her?”

“You can’t gamble like that. Mother wants to separate us—”

“Oh.” Stark childish fright wrinkles her face but she makes her voice flat. “When are you moving out?”

“Never. Don’t be absurd. I’ll say the dorm is full.”

Relief is immediately driven from her face. “Will she tell my mother?”

“I don’t think so.”

“But she might? I want to die! What’ll happen to me?”

Her face is so drawn I am ashamed of scaring her. “Why would she? She’s scared of scandal and my dad would be furious.”

She turns from side to side, not looking at me. “Besides, we only petted.”

“Aw come on. He didn’t mean that.”

“Men exaggerate. You’d know that if you knew anything at all about men!” Still she turns in her chair.

“Donna, he was too scared to lie.”

“I didn’t.” She jumps up, twisting to face me. “I didn’t. Don’t you believe me?”

“Forget it.” I start to turn away.

She screams, “Do you believe me?”

“No.”

She throws herself at me, her nails clawing at my face. By reflex I set my feet and shove her off. She runs out, slamming the door. My arm. Above the elbow a double furrow fills with blood. Cat scratch. I touch my tongue to the ooze.

At my desk I sit chin on my cold hand. Could she be telling the truth? What difference does it make! My doubt is dangerous. I promised to take care of her, to accept her. Perhaps I must accept that certain moments are a nightmare played out.

The door opens. I keep still. “Stu? I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

I get up, jerking at my sweater. “I’m sorry too.”

“I couldn’t stand it when you wouldn’t believe me.”

“I guess I wanted to hurt you. I’m sorry too.”

“Then you believe me now?”

I do not know. How can I know, when the cost of resolution is too high? “Of course.”

Quickly she gives me a hard hug and withdraws her body at once. “I wouldn’t lie to you. I love you. You’re the only female I can stand. The only relative! The only person who’s ever, ever known me well and not made me feel like a piece of shit.” She takes my arm to look at the scratch. “I’ll get a Band-Aid.”