Braided Lives (33 page)

Chicago, 1969. I am meeting with an outlaw abortion group, women who perform safe and cheap abortions for other women. The best doctor we had, in Pennsylvania, has been busted and faces prison. We are in trouble, but trouble is our whole reason for being. In my files are names and prices and directions for contacting abortionists in eighteen states. I even have information on Mexico and Guatemala. You never know when some woman may desperately need it.

New York, 1970. We are marching, tens of thousands of us, through the streets of New York shouting for legal abortion for all of us. Half the march I spend with older women. I am sure every one of us has had an illegal abortion or aborted ourselves. We are criminals. Then part of the time I march with the high-school women. They make up slogans and shout a lot. We are many and angry and beautiful as we run along. At the square there are too many speeches and we all get cold and my nose runs, but no one can stop us any longer. We will be free. Women will not pay in blood for love. Children will not be born unchosen, unwanted, unloved.

The following Saturday Mother calls a meeting. While my father stares at his joined hands, she reads out an oath for a year’s chastity, which she has me type in triplicate just like the invoices at Short Brothers I am back typing five days a week.

Shaking his head, Mike reads it over. “What do you say? Are you going to sign this thing, Jill?”

What a Biblical ring the oath has. “If I do not keep this Oath, may my right hand wither and my strength rot, may I never bear or beget living children and may my brain decay….” It’s easy to tell Mother wrote it. I meet his gaze. I say all three of you are acting in private plays. A great indifference grinds my thoughts to dust. Love is a word like the words on this paper, while I have learned no words bind beyond the noon of their saying. I also know that under my anemic indifference beats a will to live my own life strong enough to carry me through them and away. I will escape you all. I will choose what I do.

“Sure. Why not?”

Under the sickly light of the fluorescent fixture on the kitchen ceiling, with formality and silence we sign the oath. I write my name large, wanting to giggle. Three times. I get a copy, Mike gets a copy, they keep the original. One copy for both of them, they being one legal married body. Afterward Mother serves iced lemonade.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

H
ARDSCRABBLE
Y
EAR

I
ARRIVE IN the white room with tomato-soup curtains as graceful, as vigorous as a run-over cat. In Donna’s appalled stare I read my ghastliness. I weigh ninety-two pounds dressed. My skin is bluish grey. I suffer from anemia, colitis, eczema, toothache and insomnia. The first week I find two jobs. Financial independence is my deity; I will achieve it at any cost except my studies. This is the year that everything I touch turns into A’s, for I am only happy when utterly distant from my emotions. Four nights a week I work the dormitory switchboard plugging couples into each other. All day Saturday I take part in a psychology department experiment on ESP; I am fascinating to them because I regularly display negative correlation. When another subject sits in the next room trying to send me images on the special cards (circles, triangles, squares), I get them all wrong, whereas almost everybody gets at least a quarter of them right by chance. I block the images. I do not bother to explain about my mother. I let myself be studied and collect my dollar and a quarter an hour.

I go out with men who ask me, and many do. For the first time in my life I am naturally cold. I have not recovered an interest in sex, which seems to me a device for converting will and energy into passivity and flesh. Dating abrades the nerves but kills time, not quite as well as drinking which I do with Theo other evenings after the switchboard. In Theo I find a vast tolerance at once warm and cold: cold because nothing grows in that waste, and warm because she means me well. Compulsively at a certain level of drunkenness I tell her my summer again and again. Do I imagine I will wear it out? At a further degree of alcohol in the brain I escape into pure energy and final numbness.

At my desk I am finishing a paper on
Twelfth Night,
my favorite Shakespeare comedy with its mutable sex roles. November, but the day shimmers like painted cellophane under a glazed blue sky. After a week of icy rain the air is almost warm and I have the casements open. Now I watch Donna and Lennie trot briskly across the court, red beard and leather jacket, sleek blond cap of hair and blue wool coat. As they dance about each other gesturing, Lennie stomps in a puddle. I laugh and lean out to call to them under the lee of the building. Their sharp voices rise and I shut up.

“I am not your mother! If you want to wear dirty shirts, stink up the world. I won’t be made to feel bitchy about it, I won’t!” Donna’s voice cuts high and thin. “Do I ask you to do my laundry?”

“It was you who lost the laundry slip and now you blame me. If you yell at me again in front of my roommates …” Lennie trails off, sulking. “That’s castrating.”

“It wasn’t
my
laundry slip. It was
yours.
And we’re never alone!”

“Can I afford to move out? Will you live with me if I do?”

I am bent over my paper as Donna bursts in. She flings her coat on the floor and herself on my bunk. “I just had a fight with Lennie again. He’s always trying to make me feel guilty! If he catches a cold, he makes me feel I’ve done it to him.”

“Be careful. A little patience with each other …”

“We keep fighting about you and Mike. As if Mike had a side. Men are so blind. Mike tells him how you got him in trouble with his family, trying to force him to marry you, and then dumping him. That’s how he tells it all over town.”

“Julie keeps me posted,” I say dryly, looking out the window. “Lennie’s still waiting in the courtyard.”

“He is?” She gets up to look, beside me. “Idiot!” But she grins as she pokes into the sleeves of her coat. “Stubborn as a rock!”

The long grey winter settles in like a wolf feeding on a carcass. Julie talks about diaphragms. She is still not having sex with Van but they have progressed to fumbled petting. She believes in looking ahead, especially since, as she says, my case illustrates what happens when you depend on the man to take care. Van progresses no further as the months lengthen like icicles and drop of their own weight, but Donna and I discuss diaphragms frequently. Finally I make an appointment, although I have no immediate need.

It is Christmas vacation and I make the appointment for the afternoon between my split shifts at the telephone company on December 24. I give my real name and say I am going to be married.

“Where’s your engagement ring?” The gynecologist asks. He is fifty and frowns at me.

“We don’t want to waste money on that. We’re both students.”

He gives me a tight-lipped smile. “When you’re married, you come back with a ring and a license, and I’ll fit you. We don’t fit unmarried women.”

He charges me fifteen dollars and I go home with a stomachache. I will not be that stupid again. I consult Donna. We go to the dime store together the second half of Christmas vacation, while she’s visiting her sister and brother-in-law. We pick out gold-colored bands. We pick out glass engagement rings. We make appointments back to back for the thirtieth of December. I am “Mrs. Mary Moore” from Yeats’s poem and my husband is Henry. Donna is Mrs. Leonard Rose: Lennie’s bride for a day. We leave with our prescriptions and fill them together. I adore my diaphragm, neat with its pellucid dome in its compact. I cherish it in my jewelry box as I will in a few years cherish my first passport, as something magical that permits passage out.

My mother has bribed me to have my hair cut, paying for a real stylist down on Washington Boulevard, the most nearly fashionable downtown address. With the malls just beginning to erode downtown Detroit, Washington Boulevard is still an area where Mother goes nervously muttering, at the last minute trying to talk me into doing it at one of the department stores, Hudson’s, Crowley’s. Why am I willing? To destroy the last vestiges of the woman Mike had? Perhaps. No one wears her hair long except Alberta Mann and a few folksingers. I will try this accommodation, while refusing most others.

The stylist is impressed by my hair, although he chops it off willingly. He asks if I want it. I say yes and then forget and he chases me half a block carrying it in a paper bag. Mother and I sell it to a wig-maker. They say if it were not black it would be worth more.

Slipping the nail file back in its leather case, Julie joins her arms around her knees drawn up in tailored slacks. “Last night in the Union, Mike sat down with Van and me. He’d been drinking gin and he looked ghastly.”

“Would he look better if he’d been drinking imported Scotch? Why say it like that? I can’t stop his drinking.”

“Do you want to?”

“What has it to do with me? I haven’t talked to him in weeks.”

“He says it has everything to do with you.”

To sit back I move a white plush dog with bells on nose and tail. Her room is paralyzingly neat, one Mondrian and one Klee reproduction matted on the wall, blue scarf on her dresser with cosmetics edge to edge, a row of pots and candleholders from gift shops equidistant along the window ledge and top of her bookcase. “Do you believe that, kid? That I’m working voodoo on him, like that shit he told Lennie?”

“The excess is part of the young Rimbaud pose anyhow,” she says, adding to my blank look, “you should have read Rimbaud last year to know what he’s up to. I know you don’t read French well, but you could have found a decent translation.” Faint air of letting me in on a secret. “He is brilliant, you know. I have an IQ of a hundred and sixty and I can’t follow him at times.”

“That’s because a lot of the time he doesn’t make sense.”

“You can’t imagine what my high school was like. They wanted us adjusted, one jolly community of interests and green-clipped lawns. They acted as if I’d scored high to upset them. It was much too high—for a girl.”

“My mother has a mistrust of intellect too. She suspects that brains are inherently subversive and dangerous and they get you dead. But you’re away from home, Julie. Really away.”

“Oh? Am I? I’ll go back. A commuting husband and three point five maladjusted children with braces on their teeth going to child therapists and riding school.”

“If you don’t want it, don’t buy back in. Join the circus. Join the WACS. Join the Communist party. Join a nunnery.” She makes me feel as if I’m sinking in down. I get up, pace to the window and back. “Visit scenic Antarctica. Work on a goat farm. Go on the streets.” I hear myself bellowing and fling myself down to ask mildly, “So how’s old Van anyhow? Have you had his sour cherry yet?”

Quickly she moves the plush dog out of the path of my descending rear. “Never. I’m hoping his blood will thaw with the spring, if it ever, ever comes. I swear, Mike makes me think Van isn’t alive sometimes…. But at least Van’s trustworthy. He’d never talk about me. I’m too bourgeois to stand to have someone boasting about me the way Mike did about you.”

“What are you talking about?”

Her plucked brows rise. “Van told me when Mike used to come back from the Arb last year, he’d come into the room where his friends were playing bridge and he’d make a sign—”

My body grows hot. “What kind of sign?”

“For the number of times, he’d hold up so many fingers.”

A hot coal burns in my chest. I could kill him. Those men laughed at me while I waltzed around on his arm like Juliet. “He treated me like a whore.”

As I am returning to my room to find Donna, it occurs to me Julie will of course repeat that to Mike. “Jill says you treated her like a whore.” Why do I come to suffer under her cold curious gaze? Yet I will return obsessed to hear what she knows of the backside of my great love.

My first civil rights action is meek. Eighteen of us gather in the blowing sleet to picket a local restaurant. Donna, Lennie and I march arm in arm. Donaldson is involved, which prompts Donna to try to awake my old crush on him, but I love her and no one else. My love for Donna is a small furry muff my buhbe gave me when I was five, ragged but still eloquent of another time and country, wherein my hands sought, to find only each other, but nonetheless were warmer.

In 1955 we are only cautiously radicals “of sorts,” a professor in the zoology department having been fired after the last House Un-American Activities Committee incursion into Michigan for being “an avowed Marxist.” I go regularly to a study group where we look earnestly into each other’s eyes. Even to discuss civil rights or social change feels dangerous. The FBI may burst in the door; one of us may be an agent. A student in the Labor Youth League (membership of four) found out his girlfriend had been scared by the FBI into providing lists of everyone who attended his frequent parties. All of us know stories of teachers who lost their jobs because they once signed a petition for the starving children of Ethiopia or the bombed villages of Spain, thus revealing themselves Premature Anti-Fascists. The FBI agents visit the morgue of the school newspaper to read old editorials in case whoever they are investigating once wrote something critical of The American Way of Life. Ideas feel incredibly potent in this thick atmosphere. Passing along a copy of Gunnar Myrdal’s
An American Dilemma
or J. P. Thompson’s
History of the English Working Class
feels like a brave political act.