Braided Lives (30 page)

“Till Saturday, then. Promise me you won’t try to see him secretly.”

I turn to Mike but his face is heavy and sullen. He stares at his worn loafers. I turn back to Mother. “I promise.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

I
N
W
HICH
N
OTHING
B
ECOMES
S
OMETHING AND
S
OMETHING
B
ECOMES
E
VERYTHING

I
HAVE SWORN I would not check again until two and I have held out, but the other promise I forced on myself—that I would not hope —I cannot keep. As I bolt the stall door, I whimper to myself, of course I have not started, not yet. When I look at my panties and see nothing, a cold nausea slides through me. I was sure this time. I felt the blood. Donna was fourteen days late and I am only eleven. Given the mute embroiled misery in which I stew, no wonder my period is off. Yet I am afraid.

As I pass her desk the older secretary Mrs. Papich looks up with her stubby fingers poised on the keys. “Do you have the runs?”

I nod, looking meek.

“That’s the third day you’ve spent dashing to the powder room. Better see a doctor, doll, before the boss gets annoyed.”

The only way he’ll know is if you tell him, toad. She identifies with Short Brothers, concerned to sweat every minute’s ill-paid labor out of me. Yet when she asked yesterday how I like the job, my voice came out so fervently that she was taken aback. Papich, I would slaughter pigs all day to keep out of the house. Violent closet scenes, how could I, why did I, bitch, my baby, shameless, ruined your life….

Rain drums on the rafters of the attic. In the west thunder growls, the tail of the storm approaching. Storms come over Detroit immense, thunder rolling in huge blocks down the sky, the rain coming straight down in vast sheets.

July 27, 1954

Dear Stu:

I couldn’t make head or tails of your letter. I don’t see how Aunt Pearl could have misconstrued my last letter so! I’m sure I didn’t say anything of that sort. I know you and Mike just date as good friends. She must have misinterpreted something I said for a joke….

Donna, Donna, don’t you understand this is no use? I suppose I am to leave this where Mother can find it, as if it could fool her in the easiest of times. I would ten times rather have a real letter from you, meant for me and not Mother.

I fold and toss it in the wastebasket. In a white flash the backyard elm stands out with its leaves combed all one way by the force of the rain. I stick a sheet in my typewriter,

July 31, 1954

Dear Donna,

propping my head on one hand. Where to begin. That my period is fifteen days overdue? I can no more set that down than I can say it aloud. Should I tell her my father stalks the house like the ghost of Hamlet’s father and that we are lucky to get through a meal? That Mike and Mother cannot decide whether it is worse to lose a debate to the other or to get stuck with me?

I rest my cheek on the metal of the typewriter, as remote from Donna as if it were ten years since we lived in the white room and talked our lives to each other. The simple telling has lost its magic. What can she do in Flint but worry about me? Absence is absolute. I yank the page from the machine and toss it after her letter. Immediately she seems even farther. A sheet of lightning, a crack and tumbling thud of thunder, and the light flickers in the rafters where a small moth knocks its cigar tip body against the bulb. I half want to go down to fight with them, for the human contact; I cannot go. The friction of their gazes wears me down.

“You know what old Cribbets said to me?” Mike slumps behind the wheel, his head bowed on his chest.

His tone, playful in a chilly way, sets me on edge. I wait.

“Breaking a hymen is not quite like breaking the rose window at Chartres. Don’t take yourself too seriously, Loesser. End quote.”

“Breaking his neck would be even more fun. I made less of a fuss about my virginity than you did.”

“If you hadn’t told your parents I took it, what would they have to wail about?”

“You want me to say there were forty others first?”

He turns his palms up in a shrug. “He also advised me in future to pick mistresses from women who’ve left home.”

“If I’m your mistress, how come I have to go to work every day?” My neck creeps. He is trying to pick a quarrel. “It would have been more convenient if we’d met in three or four years, but which of us could say we weren’t ready?”

He sighs loudly looking out. Then his face comes to life. “Say, look at those!” Two women in white shorts go cycling by. He strains to look after them. “Nothing beats a girl with a big ass.”

Which excludes me. “Are you tired of me, Mike?” Unreal question.

“Tired in what way?”

Why doesn’t he deny my nightmare question? “Any way.”

“I’m more than tired of your parents.”

I cannot believe this scene. We took a wrong turning and this is by accident; we can still retrace our steps back into loving. How his eyes burned dark when he said he loved me. He has not looked that way lately. But if somebody loves you, if you’re really loved, how can it just stop? I can’t believe it. I can’t.

“Cribbets says the worst thing for a writer is to get involved. A writer needs wide experience but he must keep part of himself detached.”

If he loved me and I am still me, why can’t he love me? I haven’t changed. “Oh? Did you bring your notebook tonight?”

“I don’t expect you to agree. Every woman resents a man’s independence. She wants him hanging at her breast like a baby.”

“I write as much as you do. And you’re not independent. I come closer to supporting myself than you do.”

“Inevitably, you’re a woman first. And most of what you write is just
merde.”

“Oh? You never said that before.”

“It was implied in everything I explained to you about aesthetic theory. You don’t expect me to take it seriously. Do you realize I’ve spent years thinking about aesthetics? Planning my career?”

“Mike, if you want to end it, say so. Don’t poison it.”

“Don’t be melodramatic.”

“Don’t you understand they won’t send me to school if we aren’t married? You won’t see me. I won’t be around.”

“Move out. You’re eighteen.”

“If I leave I can’t go back. They’re my parents!”

“You’ve enough parents to spread all around the city and have enough left over to free all the orphans. He’s living in the Victorian Age and she’s a power-mad witch.”

I should keep quiet, I know. “Mike, won’t you marry me? I have no skin left. Why do you make me beg?”

He stares ahead, his arm with the muscles knotted hard against my touch. I slide away to the door. “Sorry. I’m upset. You’d better take me home.”

“I didn’t say I wouldn’t marry you.”

“Of course.” A rock in my gut: the embryo? “Take me home anyhow.” I will never tell him, after tonight.

“We haven’t fucked yet.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Oh? After all the trouble you got me into? Don’t try those withholding games on me. You think I’ll come around, then. No thanks. Come here.”

That night I experience sex as pure pain.

As I come up the walk with the steam of rush hour still printed on my skin, my wrinkled dress, Mother peeks out the window. “You’re late,” she says nervously.

“The bus broke down.” I sit wearily across the table, taking up a knife to peel potatoes.

“Jill.” Her tongue pink and rough as a cat’s darts out to lick her lips. “Do you want to marry him?”

“I never did.” I wince. “That’s not apropos, is it?”

“It’s a long time, marriage.”

“I don’t think this one would be.”

“I’ve been thinking. We could send you someplace else to school, if you’d give him up….” She trails off questioningly. We look at each other with a frank bald weariness.

“It’s late to apply.”

“You could get into Wayne.”

“It’s not as good a school as the university.”

“He isn’t worth the pain, honey. He’s weak.”

The protest rises in my throat, sinks back.

“You’ll get over him. You’ll be more careful, won’t you? I can’t stand to see you look so pale.”

“You don’t look so hot either.” The scroll of peel uncurls from my knife. “Why did you have to interfere?”

“You weren’t happy. I could see you weren’t.”

“I was. You think I’m happy now?”

“We could send you someplace else to school. Away from him.”

“Berkeley?”

“So far? Well … Sarah’s in Sacramento. They have a college there too. You could work till February and then go.”

“Would Father agree?”

“He hates Mike.”

“He hates me too.”

“Don’t say such things.” She rubs her nose. “He’s tired. He wants it over and done with. We could bring him around.”

“I don’t know.” The sectioned potato bleeds chalky juice that makes my palm itch. A live thing one cuts up. Trust me, she coaxes, and then what?

“You’re young,” she whispers. “How can a man tell you aren’t a virgin if you hold yourself tight? I never told Max about Sam. Being a widow at seventeen, it was too much! Being supposed to wear black and never go dancing. He never would’ve known if your uncle Murray hadn’t dropped it. Then I persuaded Max the marriage had never been, what do you call it?”

“It’d be selling out what we had. You and I will never agree about what that love meant to me.” Past tense. I hear myself.

“You had a sordid affair in cars and fields and God knows where, like thieves. Don’t glamorize your mistakes when I’m trying to help.”

“We see things so differently. I can’t take a bribe to break with him. I have to choose it.” I also can’t trust her. They won’t send me anyplace except out to work at a dead-end job. They want nothing good for me, nothing I want for myself, not an education, not freedom, not compatible friends, not love, not a chance to write.

Her eyes flash narrowly as she slices the potato into smaller and smaller chunks. “Think about it, Jill. Think it over.”

“Are you alone? I have news.” Mike’s voice slurs with excitement.

“They’re on the porch. Can you hear if I speak this softly?” I want to ask what happened to him last night, that he didn’t come at eight, but I don’t dare.

“Night before last I talked to my cousin Sheldon. He said to tell Mother, that she wouldn’t kick me out. So I did it.”

“What did she say?” I hold my stomach.

He laughs shortly. “That’s why I couldn’t call yesterday.”

“Does she want to see me today? Should I come over?”

“She’s tearing her hair that I ever brought you in the house. She says your parents haven’t a leg to stand on. She called her brother-in-law, he’s a lawyer.”

“They haven’t been talking law, Mike.”

“She locked up the car and threatened to take a leave of absence to watch me.”

Why does he sound so flattered by the fuss? My hand on the phone does not sweat because it is too cold. “Planning to stay home?”

“I’ll get over in a few days, when she cools down. But I’m glad I made a clean breast of it, finally. Throwing myself on the mercy of the court. The relatives are up in arms, phone calls and visits and summonses! They haven’t been this riled up since Sheldon got caught cheating on an exam.”

“I can’t talk anymore. Good night.”

I walk toward the bathroom to be sick. Twenty-nine days and no period. Twenty-nine mornings with that razor edge cutting me from sleep, twenty-nine days of seizing hope from every cramp and twinge, looking always for the blood that does not come. Red is the invisible color of hope.

Saturday morning I wake to see Mother standing by my dresser holding my calendar. Her face is hard. “Jill, are you with child?”

I swing out of bed, clutching my old pajama bottoms with one hand. “I don’t know.”

“How late are you?”

She can count it too. “Thirty-two days.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

I heist up my pajamas. “Are you kidding?”

“Do you have other symptoms?”

“Nausea. I’ve been throwing up.”

“Do your breasts itch?”

They begin at once, O psychosomatic me. “I’m late because of the turmoil.”

She shakes her head briskly. “A month late? Never. You’re regular, like all the rest of my family.”