Braided Lives (27 page)

Relief courses through me like cool water. “This is just Donna’s last letter.”

She jabs the page. “Can you deny what it says right there?”

“How’d you get hold of this? It’s mine.”

“You think you’re clever, but let me tell you, there’s no one stupid enough they don’t know to look in an underwear drawer.”

“It’s personal. It was addressed to me.”

“I wouldn’t boast.” She jabs at it. “Read this.”

I follow her finger.

You don’t know how lucky you are to be with Mike, able to act your love instead of trying to ship it through the mails….

“What’s wrong with that?” I ask.

“To be able to
act
your love?” Her voice lilts with sarcasm. “To
be with
dear Lennie for just two hours in the old apartment, or even a fast twenty minutes? You think I don’t know what that means?”

“She misses Lennie. She’s in love. It’s nice.”

“What do you know about love, slut? Dirt, that’s what you know.”

“Quit it.” I push my chair back and rise.

“Keep your voice down.” She rises too, leaning so close her breath burns my cheek. “You told me you didn’t care for him but he’ll do, won’t he?”

“What I feel is none of your business. I’m going out.” I start to slip past but she flings out her arm.

“Sit down, or I’ll show the detective’s report to your father.” She smiles tightly at my cry. “I had the two of you followed by a detective these past ten days.”

My skin burns with nakedness. “I don’t believe you.”

“You’ve been acting so strange since you came home—”

“No, you never spent money for that. It’s too absurd!”

“Twenty-five dollars a night it cost me out of my own money from Matt. Burke’s Detective Agency, you can look them up in the phone book.”

“I don’t believe you!” I repeated louder. “What a tall story!”

She marches past me to grab her white beaded purse, fumbling in it. “Here. That’s the man. You saw him last week when you and Michael were leaving just as he was arriving.”

It is a business card.

Thomas E. Burke Detective Agency

Confidential Investigation

Civil—Criminal—Domestic

2525 Woodward Avenue, Suite 14A

KL 5-8500

licensed bonded

24 hour service surveillance

over 25 years experience

Scrawled on the card is a name in ballpoint, Roy Nastasian. I am numb. My nerves ring but I feel nothing. I feel deaf. She really did.

“In that boy’s car,” Mother cries. “In parks and fields and alleys and ditches!”

“What does a place matter? How could you spy on me?”

“Have you no pride at all? Are you a bitch, to receive any male who comes sniffing?”

“That is the worst thing you’ve ever done.”

“Are you through lying?”

“I’m not ashamed. You made it shameful.”

“I always held myself too high!” She thrusts out her hands. “Did he tell you he loved you? Hot air is cheap. Men pay a prostitute but what did he give you?”

“What I gave him. I love him.”

“Love!” She spits it through her teeth. “That’s a joke.”

“I’m proud of him and he makes me proud of myself.”

“If a man loves you, if he cares for you, he respects you too much. He’ll marry to have you.”

“I don’t want to be
had.
Respect that doesn’t touch? How do I know if I want to marry him?”

“Marriages aren’t made in bed, you poor fool.”

“I don’t share your values. I have to live my life by my own sense of right and wrong—”

She rises. “Call him.”

“What for?”

“I want to talk to him tonight. I won’t be surprised if he runs out, but if he cares for you—at all—he’ll come.”

I follow her into the living room. “You don’t believe he loves me.” I reach for the phone, stop. “Are you going to listen?”

“Surely you don’t expect me to trust you now.”

I replace the receiver. “Then I won’t call.”

“Then I will.”

I huddle toward the phone, dialing. The phone rings, rings. Let him be out.

“Hello?” Groggily. Voice thick as when I used to wake him at school.

“Mike, listen—”

“You woke me.” He yawns. “What time is it?”

“One. My mother just talked to me. She knows about us.”

“Knows what?”

“About us. Yes, she’s right here.”

“What are you talking about?”

“She
knows.
She’s standing here now. She accused me.”

“What the hell?” I can see him shaking his head trying to wake up. “About us having sex?”

“Yes.”

“You denied it, of course.”

“For a long while.”

“You didn’t admit anything! Are you out of your mind?”

“She had us followed by a detective.”

“Merde!”
A long silence.

“Mike.”

“You should still have denied it. What a mess!”

She leans against the jamb with a cold flickering smile. “Tell him to come over this evening.”

“Mike, she wants you to come over tonight.”

“Does she think I’m feebleminded?”

“Mike! She wants to talk to you. You have to come.”

“Walk into that house. And ‘talk’ to her?”

“She said you won’t because you don’t care for me.”

“What’s wrong with you? Do I have to prove it to your mother?” He groans. “Why did you admit it?”

Mother stirs restlessly. “Is he coming or not?”

“Just a minute, “ I say to her, cupping the receiver. Then to him, “Are you coming, Mike? Please!”

“All right, I’ll try to get there by eight.
Merde alors,
you sure got us in the soup. Don’t say anything else. We’ll see whether I can’t repair the damage.”

Hanging up I face her. “He’s coming at eight.” The harsh glaring anger has returned to her eyes but I pull free. ‘I’m going upstairs.”

“Just so you get out of my sight!” She swirls past and slams the door of her bedroom. The springs of her bed wince sharply.

Dad’s face is ruddy and beaming. His hair looks whiter by contrast with the burn from a day’s fishing. “Ever see a prettier string of blue-gills? How come you made pork chops, then?”

Mother says, “I’ll cook them tomorrow.”

I push the food around my plate, waiting till I can leave the table.

“Your mother wouldn’t let me get you up, or I’d have taken you along.” He grins. “We took a dip afterwards to cool off. Water was fine. Poor old Gene didn’t catch but one sunfish, and that was undersize.” He helps himself to more potatoes. “Best to eat them fresh caught.”

Mother sits low in her chair, her cheeks puffy. “I didn’t have the strength to clean them.”

He frowns at her. “Feeling under the weather, Pearl?”

She shakes her head.

His deep voice trembles with awkward gentleness, like his hands at some delicate work. “Sure you aren’t sick? The heat’s got you down.”

“I’ll explain after supper.” She shakes her head, her face screwing up as if she will cry.

She cannot mean to tell him! She must have planned some story to get him out of the way. But as I start to clear the table, she says, “Better go upstairs. He’ll take this hard. I don’t know what he’ll do to you.”

Through the doorway he squats in front of the television. “What are you going to tell him?”

“What?” The lines in her face pull down. “What you told me.”

“Mother, you can’t.”

“I have to. I don’t look forward to it.”

“Don’t do it, then. Why? It’s none of his business.”

“Because if he figures it out, he’ll blame me.” She wipes the hair from her forehead. “He’ll think I connived.”

I turn and run upstairs, to hurl myself on the glider. Though I strain to hear, I catch only the murmur of voices mixed with the television. Then the television stops but the voices go on. She is a woman and sensual. Her mother had too many babies and she helped them into bloody birth. At ten she looked fifteen. Her hungry reading exposes her to some ideas, some breadth of living. But he has never indicated to me that sex exists. Love is not a word he uses. His judgment is the fall of a headman’s ax.

The broken triad of gongs at last. As I start down, aware of how disheveled I feel, my eagerness to see Mike slides away. The world is wide, in all directions more attractive than this house. A rope of sheets out the window. They come to search. Ten years later a postcard from Manila, Jill the beachcomber. Now my parents will never approve of me, never accept me, never love me. Blown. But nothing I did was ever what they wanted. Wrong child.

Mike is posed stiffly in the rust armchair that rubs knees with the green, where Mother perches, her hands twisted in her lap. She has changed into her good blue dress and powdered her face, but her hair is wild. I look last and unwillingly at Dad in his usual chair in front of the windows. His face is a mask of cold fury. I seat myself on the couch toward the kitchen, the farthest point available.

“Now that this thing has come out, I intend to settle it this evening.” Dad’s voice catches. He sits heavily, addressing himself to a copper plaque above Mike of a galleon in full sail. “The worst has happened. We can keep shame to a minimum.”

“I don’t think we’ve done anything for which we need feel ashamed,” Mike begins in his reading aloud voice. “There’s been some misunderstanding.”

“I misunderstand nothing.” The lines tauten in Father’s cheeks. “We will not talk about that.”

“Mr. Stuart, Jill is old enough to know her own mind—”

“She’s my daughter and my dependent, and this is my house.” Father’s hand quivers as he lights a cigarette. “A wrong has been committed against society, against us. It must be set right.”

Those two hundred dollars: a dependent. But I can’t make enough this summer to pay the whole dorm this year either. All my muscles clench as if pulling the words from Mike, for I want him to answer them, to make them understand. “Ideas change, sir. Jill doesn’t think what we did wrong any more than I do.”

“We’re right,” I burst out. “I can’t live by a morality I don’t believe in, I don’t approve of. I don’t try to make you act the way I do, but you grew up in a different world than I have to live in. You grew up right after World War One. They didn’t even have cars—”

“Keep quiet,” my father bellows. “You’ve forfeited your right to be heard.” He does not glance at me.

“Suppose I’d done something really bad like robbing Mrs. Coyle of her Social Security check or running over a kid playing in the street! For two people to make love just isn’t a crime!”

“There’s nothing you can say! Be quiet!” My father’s fists clench. For a moment there is silence. Everyone stares at the floor. Why doesn’t Mike speak up? They’ll listen to him.

Mother blazes at me, “Were you a virgin? Was he the first?”

My face prickles. I rub my fingers against the worn nap.

“Answer me. Were you a virgin, Jill?”

“What difference does that make? So was he.”

Mike throws me an awful look.

“Are you lying to me? I wish I could believe you.” She turns to Mike. “Was she?”

Reluctantly he nods. How can you, she won’t believe you. Finding his nod has not released our stares he says finally, “Yes.”

My only value to them. Broken like a vase.

“The only thing to do …” Father’s gaze rebounds from our faces and comes to rest on the blank television. “What must be done …” His eyes behind gold rims are winter ponds. The new burn from the day fishing has condensed to hectic red splotches. “You’ll be married as soon as possible.”

Mike stirs. “I never promised to marry her.”

“I never promised to marry him either!” I squawk. We will never escape this place. We will be staked here sweating forever.

“I’ll bet you were careful not to promise anything!” Mother bends toward Mike. “Taking advantage of her—you can see she hasn’t the sense to come in out of the rain. What did you intend?”

He thrusts his chin out, straining with exasperation. “We didn’t intend anything! We like seeing each other, talking, spending time. I suppose we might get married someday when I have my doctorate, but that’s irrelevant.”

“I wonder how irrelevant your mother will find it when I show her the detective’s report.”

Father writhes in his chair scattering ash. Mike stares at Mother in frank hostility, each measuring the other’s will. “You know I wouldn’t have my mother see it. She’d die before she’d have anything to do with sordid matters like detectives.”

“You should have though of that before you began carrying on. You can drop that high-and-mighty manner right now.”