Braided Lives (29 page)

“It’s good strategy to delay a few days. Let them see they can’t push me. I called Cribbets and I’m seeing him Friday.”

“Don’t wait till next weekend to give them some sort of answer, Mike.” How long can I hide in the attic? I fear my father.

“Look, she’s trying to marry you off. The old comedy routine. She’s not about to send away the only suitor.”

“That’s not true! They’re furious and they’re ashamed.”

“She knew what was going on. Since the first night she had us tailed, she’s just been waiting to trap me good. I’m surprised she didn’t marry you off to one of the boarders before this.”

“Stop it!” I pull the door shut. “You’re worse than she is! I’m still the same person, I haven’t changed.”

“It’s still the same relationship, too. You went to bed with me because you wanted to, not so I’d marry you. Didn’t you?”

“Of course. I was proud to love you. You don’t know how this humiliates me.” The booth closes in with its stale air. I slide the door open an inch and lean my nose to the crack.

“It’s a tacky working-class ritual, marry-’em-off. Like a low comedy movie about hillbillies.”

“It hurts them, too. They’re trying to see your point of view, with the contract thing.”

“Great. Like a taxi to your execution.”

I shut the door. “You’ve said a hundred times you love me. Why is it an execution to marry me?”

“I don’t want to get married.”

“No more do I. But what can we do? What can we do?”

“Don’t fly off the handle. I told you I’ve been thinking, and you haven’t even asked me what I came up with.”

“Tell me.” I slide the door open and stretch out my legs.

“So simple I’m surprised we didn’t think of it last night. Just move out.”

“Leave them?”

“Right. Get a little apartment over here. Won’t that be soft?”

“Not very. What will I live on?”

“Well, you’re working, aren’t you?”

“I bring home fifty-eight a week. And what about school?”

“In the fall you can get a job there. We’ll still be together.”

“Mike, I can’t make enough to pay the dorm, and the university won’t let girls live out. If I have to live off what I’m earning, I’ll be broke in September when school opens.”

He sighs with exasperation. “Minor points we can work out. The main thing is to get you out of that hell and them off our backs.”

I close the door, a damp depression creeping like fog up my spine. “I can’t see how it would help me.” Working for prevailing slave wages in Ann Arbor, seeing my friends for an occasional evening now and then when they aren’t busy, asking them for reading lists. I’d have to be self-educated like my aunt Sarah, smartest of my mother’s sisters, who reads
The World Almanac
cover to cover, head full of unconnected facts she tries to tell you, like what’s the world’s longest suspension bridge. Aunt Sarah is a bookkeeper. “Why should I do all the suffering?”

“They’re your parents.”

“She’s right, you don’t care what happens to me!”

“How dare you say that? After what I went through for you last night, where do you get the nerve?”

“Mike, I’m sorry!”

“This is a test of whether you love me, if you’ll leave them and follow me.”

“All I need are tests. Why can’t we do it the other way? Then we can go on just as we are and both go back to school.”

“You want me to buy this shotgun marriage?”

“I could go through with it, and I don’t want to any more than you do.”

He does not reply for a long time. “Look, pumpkin, get out of the house and call me tomorrow. I’ll come by Tuesday or Wednesday.”

“Tuesday’s better. My father has a union meeting. One less to contend with.”

“All right, but you be thinking over my plan. You could get a little apartment with a big bed. See if you don’t agree.”

At the end of a mine tunnel, this airless hopeless booth.

At Short Brothers I have graduated to typing bills for those low-budget credit terms. All day every day I fill in name, address, monthly payment and whether the poor sucker is overdue yet, but I no longer watch the clock. I hate to go home. Lunch hour as I wander the streets of yellow and pink houses with carports and carriage lights on posts, I wonder how a woman comes to want to be shut up in a box to keep it clean and fill it with newer and newer objects. Children are hope only if you know what you hope for. Is love only a honey-sticky trap so that there may be more children? Then why did the world grow when I fell in love? I do not know a girl who does not say, I don’t want to live like my mother, I don’t want to be like my mother. Is it our mothers, ourselves or our men who mold us?

“Don’t try to tell me everybody does it.” Mother snaps her head back. “I’ve been around the world some in my time, and I’m not impressed by would-be sophisticates.”

Mike and Mother sit in the rust and green chairs with a pitcher of iced lemonade on the end table. I was amazed when she brought it in, but they launched right at each other. Now the pitcher stands almost empty. They sip lemonade between speeches like debaters.

“Look, Mrs. Stuart, we aren’t children to be disposed of as you happen to think right. Sex has for each person only the significance he attaches to it himself.”

“Oh?” Mother purses her lips. “And what significance would it have if Jill gets pregnant?”

“That’s impossible, since of course I’ve taken every precaution to protect her.”

Mother tosses her head with a theatrical laugh. “If you’d been married as long as I have and known as many women straddled with brats by oh-so-careful men, you’d know how funny that sounds.”

“I can only say they were not careful enough.”

“There’s only one sure cure and that’s a little virtue.”

“Mother, you talk as if all virtue means is not having sex.” I lean forward to draw their attention from glaring at each other. “Women are human too. Virtue’s more complicated. There’s honesty and compassion and generosity and courage—”

“And lying to your mother. I understand.”

“Yes, if knowing means you interfere. You try to control me.”

“Jill, let me answer her.” Mike makes a slicing gesture. “This is between the two of us.”

“You’d never have done this to her if her father was Jewish. You think that excuses you?”

He rakes his hand through his hair. “I don’t need excuses! Can’t you see that?”

Several cold moments she looks at him. “There’s a snake like you behind every young girl’s troubles. My sister Sarah wasted seven years on a bad actor who drank and chased around and deserted her with a child, finally, in the middle of Georgia. You remind me of him! That same look. You think whatever you want you can take, and no one has a right to ask you for the price.”

“Mama, he’s not like that! And I’m not on sale, I don’t have a price.”

“You don’t know what he’s like.” She turns, her eyes bright with pleading. “You’re blind to him. But I see and it breaks my heart to have you mixed up with him.”

“You run on about virtue,” he says, “but you connived to let us go right along till you had the evidence you wanted. If you were so concerned for your daughter’s virtue, you’d have questioned her instead of hiring detectives. I want to see those reports. I’ll bet you knew ten days ago what was going on.”

Mother nods, an aloof judging motion. “So you want to see the reports.”

“I insist on it.”

“You think you’re smart, but you’re a credulous fool.”

He lowers his head, his shoulders tensing. “What do you mean?”

“No detectives, no reports.” She crosses her legs, letting her foot swing freely.

No detectives. A chunk of the world falls out. No detectives, and yet the wound does not close. It still haunts me that we lay down together and thought we were alone, while the bushes were full of eyes. “But you showed me that detective’s card. He was here. I saw him.”

“Roy Nastasian? Sure he was. Eunice is after Leo for the child support again. Mr. Nastasian was trying to find out where Leo is.”

“Mother! Why did you say you’d done it? Why?”

“To save time. I knew you’d deny it, and he would deny after you stopped. I figured that Mr. Nastasian would be hanging around trying to catch Leo, so he might give you a good scare by accident. I told him Leo had a car like yours.”

“God, of all the stupid things!” Mike drives his fist into his palm. “She took you in and you took me in. Fine!”

“But she showed me his card. I saw him here.”

“Go ahead, blame her.” Mother smiles tightly. “A man like you always blames the woman.”

Damn Leo! At the same time I feel a pang of kinship; the Haleckis and my parents made him and Joanie get married, starting Leo off on his marrying tic.

Mother says, “You think you’re so smart you’re invisible. Keeping her out till all hours of the night and her never able to tell me what you’ve been doing. I went to examine her panties in the hamper to see what she’d been up to, and she’d washed them all by hand. I knew it then. And just listening to her on the phone, yes, Mike, yes, Mike, I’m sorry, your lordship, all sugar.”

“What do you expect her to say with you listening? She defers to me because she knows me.”

I can hardly tell their furious strained faces apart. They enjoy this fight, I realize suddenly. They prove their strength in grappling. They look alike. Each performs with satisfaction.

“You think you’re strong, but you’re a weakling,” she taunts. “A man isn’t a man because he seduced a few girls, but because he takes on the responsibilities of a man. You’re a hardheaded arrogant boy.”

“Jill knows better than to listen to your malice.”

Mother sits straight, her feet barely reaching the floor. “I can tell when she’s gone out and called you, because she comes back with her face all swollen up from crying. That’s how you love her.”

“I don’t have to justify myself to you.”

“She’s my daughter and I’ll protect her as long as there’s breath in my body!”

“Who’s to protect her from you?”

They talk of love, love but mean power, and they look alike.

“We don’t have to listen to your malice.” He jumps to his feet. “Jill, let’s get out of here.”

I stand up.

“Where? Where will you take her?” Mother cries. “Into some alley? I will not let her leave this house.”

“You can’t stop us. Jill, come on.”

I take a step and halt. “I don’t understand. What do you want me to do, Mike?”

“I want you to walk out of here with me.”

“Jillie, don’t do it!” Mother starts out of her chair twisting her hands. “My baby, don’t go with him!”

“Oy, Gott, what do you both want?”

“Walk out with me.” His face strained in a grimace of angry pleading.

“But, Mike, what will we do? Will you go home then? Will you move out and we’ll live together?”

“Don’t listen to him, chickie.” Mother wrings my arm. “He doesn’t care. He just wants to show his power over you. He wants to take you from me.”

“You were the one trying to give me away! Will you both shut up? Do I have to prove I belong to somebody? I’m me, look! I’m alive! I’m a person.”

Mike sinks back. “You have her all riled up, with your shrieking. Listen, tell this woman you love me.”

“I love you. I do love him.”

“Then why doesn’t he marry you?” Mother collapses in the chair. “Why doesn’t he show he cares for you?”

Mike takes his head in his hands. “My head is splitting. I have such a bad headache I can’t think any longer.”

“Do you want an aspirin?”

“Bring me two. With cold water.”

Fetching them I stand beside him. In his temple a vein beats. I raise my hand to stroke him but let it drop as I see Mother over his shoulder, bowed goddess of loneliness. Her mouth draws toward her small pert nose, her eyes squint. “Do you want something, Mother?”

“I feel so faint. Can’t you open the windows some more?”

I push the windows behind Dad’s empty chair as high as they go. “Is that better?”

“A little.” She touches her eyelids. “I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep since this thing started. I worry and worry.”

Remembering their tense threatening postures, I dare not step back for fear of upsetting this peaceful equilibrium.

Mike stirs first, squaring his shoulders, pulling in his jaw to make a double chin. “So there were no detectives, if I can believe you now.”

Mother tightens. “That makes no difference. This can’t drag on longer.”

“Don’t try to rush me!”

“You were in an awful hurry before. All right, you sit alone and think about it. But you won’t see Jill anymore.”

I imagine him in that dark stucco house, digested into his family. “No. We need to see each other. We need to decide together.”

“He only makes you unhappy.”

“He has a right to!” My hands twist and leap. She doesn’t understand, she can’t see. He is the one who loved me. The one I promised myself: the dark, willful, brilliant and moody idol of my dreams, my own Heathcliff-Hamlet-Byron-Count of Monte Cristo.