Braided Lives (34 page)

We are PAF: the Political Alternatives Forum. Even that bland label has to most ears a harshly subversive sound and I cannot pull Donna or Lennie in with me. Lennie doesn’t trust me—I am the evil bitch who wounded his poet. Donna claims to find the discussion dull, though she comes with me occasionally. “All those men and only two women!” Alberta Mann is the other woman, Donaldson’s girlfriend. Donaldson is our faculty sponsor, so we can be a recognized student group to stage our little protests, show an occasional film
(Battleship Potemkin, The Grapes
of Wrath, Open City),
bring in a progressive folksinger, that is when we can get approval. We have to pass through two deans and a vice-president to sponsor Pete Seeger. We also hold forums on H-bomb testing, abolition of dormitory hours for women, the U.S. Marine invasion of Guatemala. At those timid meetings I live for a few moments in a world larger than that bounded by dormitory and classroom.

My birthday. I no longer have time for the hours and hours of slow work at dental school, so I am going to an outside dentist. My birthday present from my parents is their paying my March dental bill. My only real presents are Pablo Casals playing two Bach partitas for unaccompanied cello from Theo and from Donna a black-and-umber cotton circle skirt. My parents don’t call. The day passes rather grimly with a midterm in Shakespeare. Donna comes home at four and carries me off into the desultory snow.

“It ought to be spring, it’s spring by the calendar. We’ll make it be spring,” she announces. Coffee laced with brandy in a thermos, a blanket snuck out from her bunk, a little wheel of Camembert and part of a roast chicken: we dine in the snow of Island Park tucked in a bend of the Huron River. “Happy birthday, sweetie,” she tells me. “It’s got to get better from now on. Right? Right.”

In the snow littering down in big unhurried discs we find two swings twisted up for the winter but not taken off, and unwind their chains. Side by side we swing far back, far up and out.

“Donna, Donna, this is wonderful. It’s flying. I want to fly.” Again. Swinging high, high in an arc. I remember it from childhood. I always loved it. It’s sensual, the most arousing thing I have done in months. The blood pounds in me. The combination of caffeine and alcohol makes me energetically drunken so that I feel I could release the swing and sail out over the river, whose ice has broken but not melted.

We lie on the blanket afterward finishing the coffee with brandy, the chicken. “What happened to me, I survived it, didn’t I? So I’m not really weak, I’m not a coward, I’m not worthless.”

“You survived, Stu. I didn’t feel too sure at first, but I’m sure now. You’re all here again. Whoever said you were weak? Even since we were kids, you’ve been one tough customer.”

“Aw, Donna, you’re just easy to fool.” I know she cannot afford this celebration, that it is purchased by giving up something else, and I am doubly grateful. She gave me my birthday.

During spring vacation Donna goes to New York with Lennie. When I get back from Detroit, her luggage waits in the room, but not Donna. Squeals, giggles, romping in the hall. Dormitory life lacks dignity, I think. There has to be an alternative. I resolve to investigate. Close to curfew, Donna runs in. “You’re finally back!” Dropping her purse she hugs me, her sharp chin against my cheek.

“How was New York?”

“Oh.” She hangs up her coat, giving it a careful brushing. “We have to live there, Stu. It’s the most real city.” Her voice sounds forced. Her skin is blue with fatigue under the eyes.

“Is anything wrong? Were his parents mean to you?”

She winces. “They were so sweet I was embarrassed. Let’s get a soda downstairs. I’m dying of thirst.”

In the corridor the house athletic chairman Dulcie is heaving her suitcase out for a janitor. She gives us a grin half antagonistic, half patronizing. “Well, well, the James sisters. What trouble are you up to?”

“Now, podner, we don’t look for trouble, it looks for us. And when it finds us, even trouble runs.”

Donna jabs irritably at the elevator button. “Why do you answer them? She does think we’re sisters, by the way.”

Seep of pleasure. In the mirror opposite the elevator we are framed. “Like negative and photo—me dark and you light.”

“Outside.” She strikes the down button with her fist. “I got away from Lennie to wander through stores along Fifth Avenue. Lord and Taylor’s. Bonwit’s.” We ride down. “Money must take the hard edges off living. Beauty in the most casual objects. Small pleasures greasing the way to big ones.”

“We’re not likely to find out.” I don’t want Donna traveling through expensive stores in a daydream I cannot share. “Start craving those things and you’re hooked.”

“Start?” She laughs, a parched cough. We pass the row of dark dining rooms to the cubicle where the machines glow. As she uncaps her soda and tilts the bottle, lines of strain stand out.

“Donna, what happened in New York?”

“Nothing.” She walks rapidly back. “Nothing that happens to me has any importance, because I’m a piece of shit!”

“Did you have a fight with Lennie?”

Her mouth curls as if she will laugh but instead she bursts into sobbing, grinding her palms into her eyes. I take the soda and steer her into the dark dining room, past the tables to the ledge that runs below the tall windows. “Shhh, Donna, please.” I stroke her, soothe her. “Don’t cry…. What is it, tell me? What happened?” Droning on I persist, until exhausted she leans her cheek on the pane letting the breath from her parted lips steam across the glass.

“Why couldn’t he let me love him my own way? Why does he have to try to make me into his mother? All the time his eyes on me pleading. I’m not like his mother, I’m not a self-sacrificing lap!”

“Why should you be? But you’ll make up.”

“I made sure that can’t happen. Stu, he’s all the time trying to pull the reactions he wants from me. I had to fight not to be deliberately Midwestern. And in museums!” Her voice climbs in a tight spiral. “Sometimes I think he has no taste but what’s a defense for his own work. But I can’t tell—he’s ruined it for me. I can’t stand paintings any longer. Something in me shuts off.”

“What did you fight about? His work?”

“Tonight I told him I was sick to death of him.” Her voice breaks. Her hands claw at her arms. “I told him about Matt. Oh, say I lied. So what? Sometimes you hound me worse than he does.”

I guess I knew, for I feel nothing. “He reacted badly?”

“He said, but
why?
I said, because I wanted to. Because I was tired of waiting for him to find a bed. Because Matt had a good build.” She laughs like glass breaking. “Besides it was a foot long. I wasn’t so much excited as curious.”

“Was he good?”

“Too fast. But it was an experience, like being charged by a buffalo herd. I don’t think I like big pricks, but how was I to know beforehand?” She rubs her eyes roughly. “I don’t
know
why I did it. I don’t know! I make up reasons. I do things like I’m falling downhill, and then I make up reasons. Lennie said he’d ignored my past because I was lonely and everybody needs love. He did ignore it—why wasn’t that enough for me? I must be a complete bitch.”

Actually he didn’t ignore it, but this is no time to pass on that painful hearsay. Outside a fine rain is visible only around each lamppost. I drum my fingers on the window pole beside us on the ledge. If the weather ever warms, it’s used to open the upper tier of windows over the big plate-glass picture windows. “Because instant acceptance is unreal. Because we’re arrogant enough to feel what we’ve done we have to digest and understand to grow—”

“You make it clean.” She shakes her head, her hair whipping. “I hurt him. We? Why not say I’m sick.” She rakes her hands hard into her scalp. “I disgust myself.”

“Easy, Donna. When you stop loving, what can you do but get out? That’s what you told me about Mike.”

She glares. “Lennie says it’s your fault.”

“Me? But why?”

“He says you’re possessive and dependent, since you don’t have a man.”

“Oh? How would he know what I depend on?” I hunch forward.

“And Mike told him that old stuff about those girls.”

Including you, which neither of them knows. We are silent a few moments while she kicks her foot punishingly against the wall, thud, thud, jarring me. “I’ll just keep doing this, won’t I, fucking things up till I’m too fat and washed out to fool a man into thinking he wants me.” The tears start again. “Everything that’s nice, I spoil. I make everything dirty! It’s me that’s wrong, just me!”

“Donna, it takes two to fight. Don’t torment yourself.” I have a feeling that she is working herself into a frenzy of self-punishment.

She slides off the ledge. “You’re in bed with someone and suddenly you wonder why you’re there going through the gestures. That terrible blankness. Then I get crazy, I get dirty and mean.”

“I know that blankness.” I try to touch her shoulder.

She shakes free. “You don’t know this rage. You don’t know how sick I am. I want to break up everything—”

“Come, calm down, Donna. Come on….” I sound exaggeratedly flat. I try to establish eye contact. I try to take her hand.

“I’d like to smash that window! That big expensive window on this goddamned stupid warehouse-dormitory!”

I try to grasp her arm and pull her along. “Let’s go upstairs. My mother made a cake.”

She thrusts me away. “So sure I won’t?” She grabs the window pole.

“Come on, Donna.” I turn toward the door. “Stop it. Let’s go upstairs and talk there.”

She raises the pole. I lurch back to stop her, but she is swinging it wildly by the end with the hook, the metal hilt whirring through the air. I duck just in time, throwing myself flat. With a sharp report like a pistol shot the hilt strikes the glass, opening a crack that travels from the impact point to the top. Then she lets the pole drop, staring at the streamered star where the hilt struck, the long crack. She looks dazed.

I rise cautiously, brushing myself. “Oy, gevalt. What for?”

“But… you didn’t believe I’d do it.” Small wondering voice.

Hearing someone in the hall, I scuttle among the tables to ease the door shut. Then I cross to the pole, picking it from the glass splinters to wipe on my jeans. No fingerprints.

“Must you play detective?” She runs to the door, eager to escape.

“We better take the steps up. Don’t forget your soda.” We listen till the hall is safe, then climb to our room.

“I’m beat,” she says firmly. “Soon as I shower, I’m getting into bed.”

“I’ll study downstairs, but I’ll shower first.” I take my robe and towel. “What did I do with my soap?”

“You were supposed to get some in Detroit.”

“I forgot. Can I use yours tonight?”

“You always leave it in the puddle so it gets gooey. I like my soap firm.”

“I’ll be careful.” Her scolding assures me that she is done smashing things and that our life resumes.

“All right, but don’t forget to buy soap tomorrow. You can’t expect me to remember everything for you. Your red dress still needs cleaning.”

With robe and towels slung over our shoulders, I follow her down the hall carrying the plastic soap dish like a chalice before me.

We were staying one town along the Sogne Fjord from Flåm after taking the narrow-gauge toylike train down from the swirling snow of the pass in and through the mountains in corkscrew tunnels past hundreds of waterfalls to sea level, a thin strand where there wasn’t any land at all between mountain and deep water. The lodge had only a few couples staying; we were the only Americans. Those days were the last mild weather of the year before the arctic cold moved over it all. A short distance inland and a short distance uphill winter had swept down. Here all the windows were open on the fjord and, on the landward side of the pension, to the apple orchard whose leaves were changing color, duller than the apples that hung there and littered the ground.

The couple in the room just below us, whose porch lay right under our window, were French. Josh, who does not speak French (his Norwegian after two weeks was confined to where are the toilets, please, and thank you), could not understand why I had begun to glare at him. In fact we had fought, wept, reconciled and made love and were outside with our feet hanging off a rock staring at a ship putting out from the small dock in Flam while the spray from a cascade drifted over us, when I grasped it. The tone of their arguments got me, that couple below.

They were intellectuals, some shade of left. He was engaged in a vast continuous proof of his superiority to her for which every event of the day, every object encountered, every newspaper discussed, formed the matter. He was busy crushing her and she was busy striving to avoid his anger. She read him all day like a weather map and moved accordingly, retreating off the edge into weak smiles and silence.

That tourist was much better at torture than Mike had been, I realized. He didn’t have to raise his voice to lash her with anger. If you asked, they would say they were in love. He preferred victory over her to whatever other battle he might have engaged in, with state or party. Josh and I sat up talking and reading timetables and drinking the cognac we carried in our suitcase. Josh pointed out I am not married (no longer married) to the man downstairs and then he hiked to Flam to buy tickets on the steamer at 6
A.M
. In the morning we were both cranky
and snarled as we dragged our suitcase and L. L. Bean shoulder bag all the way to Flam and the ferry slip.