Braided Lives (19 page)

I look around to see if everybody is watching. Only Julie gives me a look of arched brows, as she steps into her coat. Rob Prewitt is playing the guitar again, with Stephanie sitting on the arm of his chair while he sings directly to her. Donaldson stands with his arm around the pert woman who played the banjo. I know now where I saw her, leaving his apartment that morning. I like the way Alberta looks. She is almost as tall as Donaldson and she does not lean on him but has her arm around his waist as his is around hers, standing there foursquare on her feet. I resolve to stop sticking to Mike’s side like a melting snowbank. I watch them, puzzled. I am passionately in love with Mike, yet for a moment there in the kitchen I would have done anything to capture Donaldson’s attention. I wanted him too. What does that mean? I’ll have to ask Donna.

Donna is just hanging her coat as I walk in. “Well, bella Donna, it’s after midnight and not your birthday any longer, but be happy still!” I kiss her cheek.

She leans her cold forehead against mine. “I’m sober now.”

“Hung over?”

“I’m fine. It was a very nice evening.” Voice quiet, gritty. She stares down at her skirt, unzipping it carefully as if it were on a mannequin.

“What’s wrong? Did you tell Lennie about Jim?”

She folds the new sweater into a plastic bag. “Yes.”

“What happened?”

She puts her bra and panties into her laundry bag. Naked she stands brushing her corn tassel hair, her small sharp breasts pulled high. “Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“He took it like a lollipop.” She slips into her plaid robe and starts for the john down the hall. “He simply looked grave and said he was sure my sister would forgive me if she knew the circumstances. Then he started talking about abstract expressionism.”

“Well, aren’t you glad to have it out of the way?” I push open the door into the room with the row of toilets and row of sinks.

“Out of the way?” Beside me she brushes her teeth, spits, stares into the sink. “I guess I counted on that. It didn’t mean a thing to him! He didn’t understand.”

Confession and absolution. A ritual we play. Lennie couldn’t respond, is that it? I feel guilty as if I had deceived her, made promises about the world I cannot force it to keep.

When we return to our room Julie is waiting, perched against the cream-of-tomato-colored draperies in her severe navy wool bathrobe piped with green. Sometimes I look at Julie and see someone dressed by a mother who does not love her, with a good deal of money to spend. I have a brief moment of feeling caught between clients, because Julie clearly has feelings about the evening to spill too.

“We didn’t mean to walk in on you two.” I sit at my desk, equidistant from Donna lying in an S shape on her bunk and Julie perched rigidly on the window ledge. “You didn’t look too happy.”

“Couldn’t you expect a man who’s supposed to be in love with you and can drive perfectly well and knows how to take buses anyhow, to be able to come and see you during a ten-day vacation? From Kalamazoo to my house is maybe four hours! He acts as if I’m requesting he visit me in Antarctica!”

“You want your parents to meet him?”

“They met him when they visited. But I want him to come to the house and view them in their natural habitat. Besides, I must move this along. It’s stalled in the tentative phase.”

“Are you sure you want Van?”

“Why not?” She pats at her tightly curled hair.

“Why not become a nun?” Donna snaps in response.

“Episcopalian nuns are too weird. Besides, I look like something undercooked in black…. You were in the bedroom with Mike a long time, Jill. Well?”

“Well, what? It wasn’t that long. In the middle of a party?”

“If you really loved him, you wouldn’t care,” Donna says.

“Loving him isn’t the same as being able to get excited,” I say and an injured silence exudes from her. “I can’t help wanting a time that feels right.”

“I see. A rigid honesty does for me. If you don’t think discussing certain things with Lennie was harder than just going to bed with him, you’re crazy!”

Julie smiles a little mournfully, her brown eyes soft but her mouth pursed into a smirk. “We must both use our vacations, Jill, to get ourselves properly deflowered like Donna.”

Bull’s-eye, because Donna has just remembered she told Julie she was a virgin; a statement Julie disbelieved anyhow. Donna doesn’t care enough to keep her lies straight with Julie. I have a moment of seeing the whole dormitory as a minefield of sexual hypocrisy, all women lying to each other about what they are doing or not doing with boys they also lie to, because the boys lie to and about them. “I don’t think of it as a flower or a cauliflower,” I say. “Just an accident I want to correct by willpower.”

“That ain’t what does it, sweetie.” Donna sits up, cheerfully vulgar. “I say the two of you will come back from spring vacation just as you’re going forth, prepared to talk about
it
every night for the next three hundred and sixty-four nights.”

“To judge from what I heard of his torrid journal, at least Mike will know what he’s about,” Julie says. “You won’t have to seduce him.”

Donna is still angry at me: because Lennie didn’t absolve her, because Julie is in the room, because she accidentally told Julie the truth. Because she is tired and wants to be asleep and we are clearly going to talk for a while. Because we all have to go home separated from our boyfriends and our little support group, and none of us want to.

Donna bounds up off the bed to pace, her snow leopard mode, all icy speed. Julie and I watch her bemused, our heads turning. Then she drops astride her desk chair and faces us, estranged from her by our inexperience. “Julie, you want it handed to you on a silver platter. If you do want him, get him. What’s stopping you? Put your hand on his prick if you have to. Rub against him. Sit on his lap and wriggle. Nothing easier, if you really want him. People don’t usually issue engraved invitations to have affairs with them. Not black tie…. And you, Jill, you’re just scared of men. You talk and talk and talk about honesty and integrity and then you find some picky reason why it’s honest and full of integrity to be scared shitless! I feel sorry for Mike.”

I feel as if Donna has kicked me in the belly. I blink very hard. Julie looks resolutely impassive, watching. Donna goes on, smiling sourly: “I bet each of you a dinner you won’t do it. That’s what men of the better social classes usually pay for it, isn’t it? A restaurant dinner?”

“In the restaurant of our choice?” Julie asks.

“No. The restaurant of my choice. I’m the one who’s going to be taken out. Twice.”

I agree to the bet, annoyed. Donna doesn’t perceive Mike clearly or she wouldn’t bother pushing. Me, I wish everybody began fucking each other when we were in kindergarten, to avoid this anxious nonsense.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

H
OT
P
ASTRAMI ON
W
RY

“W
HAT CAN I do, Mrs. S.?” Matt sits head in hands at the kitchen table. “I’m flat broke. But I swear I’ll pay you for last month, somehow.”

Mother washes, I dry, while Dad lies on the couch with the television on. Mother shakes the crisp unruly hair from her eyes. “Now, I’m not worried about that. But a big strong boy like you ought to be able to find work.”

“I tried, Mrs. S. Don’t I get up every morning stinking early no matter how it kills me and go the rounds? Do I lie in bed? Do I wait for them to come to me?”

How much like one of the family he sounds with that self-righteous rhetoric. Even begun to use his hands. Your best friends won’t tell you, Matt, but you’ve been assimilated.

“They’re laying off from the auto plants. And in the offices all they ask is, have you done your service and have you got your degree—and they don’t mean no high-school diploma.”

“It’s a fact,” Dad shouts from the front room. “A high-school diploma doesn’t mean what it did. They keep them in school too long anyhow.” He has grown tolerant of Matt. Sometimes he lets him cower in the basement, helping at the workbench as I used to. But only sometimes.

Mother’s eyes narrow. “Did you go to all those places I circled in red crayon in the Sunday paper?”

I dry the pots now, hurrying to finish so I can dress for Mike. I know where Matt spends his days. I saw him with Freddie’s younger brother and Le Roy next door rebuilding the engine on a hot rod at the garage where Sharkie works. Matt ducked behind the raised hood when Sharkie came out to yell at me, “Hey, Tits, how’s it goin’?” the way he does.

Matt half rises. “I’ll join the army. Let them take me! I’ll go down and enlist tomorrow….” He trails off, waiting.

Head cocked, birdlike, she deliberates. “That might be your best bet, Matt. Both my boys were in the army.”

Sure, and Leo came out a con man and Francis spent six months in stockade and pulled a dishonorable. What games they play. She’ll never let him out from under her thumb. I grab the bathroom, racing for the hot water left from dishes. Although I turn on the water in the tub and strew the floor with clothing to mark possession, when I pass him in the hall he will not respond to my stuck-out tongue. He shuffles along with his shoulders sagging in the tee shirt, all the fight wilted from him.

I put on my black shirtdress I bought two summers ago when I had a job at Sam’s Cutrate Department Store downtown, quickly so that Mother will not appear and realize I am not wearing a slip. Then I sit at her vanity hoping for inspiration. I arch my neck, strain as tall as I can before the mirror. The rite of unity that will forge us into one. On my face the pale intensity of decision. Maybe I should borrow Mother’s powder. Rachel No. 2. The act of love—such a taut phrase. I feel like the heroine of a novel or an opera. I should speak in verse.

She sits at the mirror in the last pared minutes of growing cool and separate as a birch tree while the moth of fear beats at her throat….

In
her throat? Is pared too precious?

“Well, honey, a date.” Mother shuts the door with a clanging of hangers, a swishing of Dad’s ties. “What are you mooning about?”

If I ignore her, will she leave? Fat chance.

“Black! Why try to look drab?” She pokes at my shoulder.

I hang back from her touch. “I’m light. I can wear it.” Why do I always defend?

“You’d think your parents had died, black black black! Wait till you have your fill of funerals.” She sinks on the bed staring at me, her face reflected in the mirror next to my own. Her small lips are pursed as if over something sour. “What’s he going to do—this boy—Michael?”

“Teach in a college.”

“Urn. Teachers don’t make much.”

“I’m not going to marry him, Mother!” I feel stirred up already, as if she could reach a long spoon into my guts. She is always making arbitrary naive statements about the outside world. The faculty makes a lot more than my father, but she is firmly convinced colleges are raddled by genteel poverty.

“Can’t I make a simple statement?” She picks a loose hair from my shoulders. “What’s his father do?”

“He’s dead.”

“Poor boy.” She pinches my arm whispering, “He’s Jewish?”

I nod.

She eyes herself in the mirror. “Your father won’t like that. Orthodox?” She fluffs her hair.

“No.”

“You know what a bother it was with Grandma. Papa used to say you need new ways in a new land. He could read five languages and his English was perfect.
She
never learned to talk right.”

Actually I liked her food requirements, for they meant we ate differently and had to go down to the old Jewish neighborhood where Howie lives to shop. When Grandma came in the summer was the only time I ever had bagels, stuffed cabbage, smoked whitefish, ruggeleh. “Mike is studying German and French.”

She lets her hands fall on her thighs. “Never could see what good it did Papa, selling door to door, packing fish. Then getting himself killed and leaving us with all those kids. It’s a hard life, it’s a dog eat dog, and don’t let those professors tell you different.” She sits staring, then flares up as if I had contradicted her. “But he was a brilliant man, and don’t you forget it! A scholar and a man of action! A Jew who cared about everyone, even the Polacks, the shvartzehs. Too much he cared and ended up dead for it.” She touches my hair. A spark snaps to her hand. “Let me cut your hair the way I wore it at your age. Your face would look so sweet, chickie.”

The seductive power of the coaxing voice: give in, give in and all will be lovey-warm in the Garden of Was. I dare not remember how I loved her when I was small enough for her lap. “Mike likes it this way.” Why must she stare with that shrewd yearning not for me but through me, to make me a phantom acting out her dreams?

“He’s handing you a line. So, what do you talk to him about? You have to know what to say and what not to say to a boy.”

“Mother, I talk to him just like I talk to Donna. To anyone.”