Braided Lives (37 page)

Peter that afternoon takes me off to watch some friends of his bobsled in competition. On the way back he is glum. “Had a pinsticking contest with the old man. Oh, to be born from a bottle! He tried to forbid me bringing you to the country club.”

“But they haven’t met me.”

“They’ve asked questions. He keeps discoursing about inappropriate discrepancies in background.” He takes his narrow head in his hands. “Ties up with his general attack. Whatever I do is wrong and must be done only to irritate them.”

“Does he want you to come into his business instead of being a physicist?”

“He wouldn’t trust me to design a privy.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Forest Crecy, architect. Hell and gone successful. You had to know that.” He glares suspicion.

The next day he calls just as I’m off to my late shift at the telephone company. “You don’t care that much about going, so let’s forget it. It’ll be goddamn dull. I got us tickets to the road company of
West Side Story.
A matinee because of your ludicrous job.”

When he comes to pick me up he drives a gleaming white Sprite. “Not what I wanted, but a hell of a lot better than that garbage wagon, right? They couldn’t find a cheaper sports job, but at least it’s a real car. He says, maybe, maybe if I don’t rack this one up, he’ll get me a Porsche for my Ph.D. The bastard. Next year I’ll have a job and I’ll buy myself a goddamned silver Porsche.”

Saucy white bribe. I hold my hair down and we are off like a playful hornet. A game with me as his sacrifice pawn. He boasts that his parents refuse categorically to sanction his relationship with me. I want to giggle. What relationship? His small well-made hands grip the wheel as he plays racing driver. I bet he even makes faces in the mirror while he shaves.

I ache with weariness as I lie on the glider in the attic, its grubby plastic worn to my body. My parents sleep. Sometimes I like the feeling of sitting up alone but tonight it gives me the sense of being more isolated than I care for. I snap on the little radio to the CBC. Mozart, yes, clarinet concerto, K. 622. Ignoring that my recognition is based on Lennie’s having given Donna the record, how nice is my exactitude. I, Jill, daughter of Flicka, Bride of Frankenstein, rise from the morass of bubble gum and comic books and Saturday Roy Rogers matinees. What a triumph of will over environment. It was Mr. Stein, the high-school English teacher who took such an interest in my poetry and sadistic pleasure in my crush on him, who taught me to say Mo-tsart instead of Mo-zart, a habit which has, my friends, become almost second nature. I am even now working to perfect the short o into what sounds to my Midwestern ears like harrible, preferred by New Yorkers on campus and my desk dictionary. What do I want? I ache through all my body and that can’t be only the telephone company, uncomfortable as the switchboard is, swarming with roaches.

O Western wind, when wilt thou blow,

That the small rain down can rain?

Christ, that my love were in my arms

And I in my bed again!

A clean sweet sinking hurt those words leave. I sat in honors class while they explicated that poem—what we do to poems—and worried and worried over that phrase “the small rain.” Finally I had to stick my hand up and say that due to the subject of the poem I thought it might allude to orgasm. I have never heard a silence as hot and wet as that one, broken a full minute later when our button-down, black-umbrella-toting professor let out his pursed lips, “That is a very interesting interpretation …
Miss
Stuart… though perhaps a bit pornographic for our purposes.”

Four lines like four powerful straight blows on the head of a nail to the brain. Where did you read your dreams? An early addiction to the romantic poets, who could not live out their verses either. Pain is aesthetic only at a distance. When Julie lent me
Axel’s Castle
and there I read what Mike said that first night we made love, I felt conned. Maybe the solution is simply to have sex without building castles over it—friends who sometimes copulate. Do I know?

Sad, muted horn from the street. A foreign car in this neighborhood? Sound that quivers on my nerves. The junkman passing in the alley with his limp hat hanging over his tobacco face, the reins slack on his lap, the grey horse plodding. The big green wheels of his cart creaked while he lifted what looked like a wooden egg to his mouth and blew a questing entreaty. The other kids called him the sheeny, but when Mother heard me use that phrase, she had a talk with me. After that with self-attentive shame I stood by the hollyhocks and watched him lurch past, each shambling clop of the horse, each lunge of the big wheels over a broken brick or bottle shaking him limp as a tree but leaving him as finally rooted in his seat.

Backs of garages, rat tunnels, igloo garbage containers for the apartment houses, tiger lilies sprung from asphalt: the alley was my childhood boulevard. It led kitty-corner to the four-family where Joey lived. Skinny, dark, quick as a squirrel, he had the somber eyes and the grimace taut and bitter even at seven of the hard-luck fighter. When I was five, he asked me to marry him; Mother said I couldn’t because he was Catholic…. I can see myself dawdling in the alley the day his family moved, until finally he came out, looked at me over the fence and then rushed back in. I burst into tears and fled down our basement to smear myself with coal dust. I have always been in love, in continual sequence since the dawn of memory. Whether that is my sickness or my health, I cannot guess.

By the time I get back to school January 3, Theo has already been expelled from the university.

“They caught her with Dulcie,” Donna tells me, half scandalized, half amused. “Imagine Dulcie—that sexless officious thing!”

“Now I understand why Theo wouldn’t move into the co-op with us. But what happened to Theo? Where the hell is she?”

“They expelled her so fast she was gone before anyone even heard. I mean, there’s nothing scares them like catching a couple of women together. With girls being forced to live in the dorms, the deans are weak in the knees that the watchful rich daddies will pull their daughters out. So Theo hardly had time to put her clothes on before she was on her way back to New York.”

I try to find out where she is, but no one wants to be overheard admitting to having known her. I am politely dismissed, even hung up on. Dulcie has been sent home to Pontiac, but I can’t even get her number. I spend quiet times on the dorm switchboard pestering everybody I can think of. My only help is Julie. Oddly enough Julie does not worry about guilt by association. She assumes she is above suspicion. Friday she visits my co-op room with news.

“Theo’s parents wired her money for a plane ticket home. Then they committed her to one of those posh funny farms in Connecticut.”

“A nuthouse?”

“Only the highest quality nuts. Mostly women drying out, I expect. Sort of like a fat farm with bars.”

“Find out the name of it, okay?”

“I’ll try. I saw Mike yesterday—we have the same seminar in Ronsard. You can’t even sneeze in English. Anyhow …”

Lately I seem to be bleeding internally. Donna is over at Sal’s. Their romance has heated up after Christmas and I have noticed catalogs for American University and George Washington on her desk although she has said nothing to me about following him East.

But Julie is watching me carefully. “You spent a lot of time with Theo, in her room. I guess you’re missing her?”

Oh, we have arrived. “If you mean did I know she liked women, no. We never talked about sex.”

“What did you talk about?”

“Death and music and trouble and music and booze and music.”

“She was always playing records. A female jock with tastes for Handel and Bartók.”

“She taught me a lot about music, Julie. I do miss her.”

“Her or her record collection?”

“Both, I guess.” I take the easy way out Julie offers me, wondering why it feels so shitty to lie. I am also lying when I say I never guessed that Theo was attracted to women. Any woman who has ever loved another has a special sensitivity to that openness.

“It’s so …
dégoûtant.
. .” Julie muses. “What could they possibly do? Rub themselves together like sticks?”

“Ah, perhaps you should try out what men and women do before you judge what women and women do,” I say, dangerously I am aware. Julie never did seduce Van nor pry an engagement ring out of him. Now Van is at Yale studying comparative literature and writing letters back to Mike about how stimulating it all is. Van got a fellowship but Mike’s grades are not exceptional enough. His family would have to cough up the money for him to join Van.

“Perhaps I should,” she says and actually blushes.

The end of term, the end of classes, finals and new trauma. Big Sal says good-bye to his class and leaves without telling Donna anything. Instead she receives by messenger a dozen yellow roses with a card saying, “My own sweet rose, it’s been great and I’ll always love you. S.” A package arrives from his secretary with all the things she had left at his apartment packed neatly in it, robe, diaphragm, perfume, hairbrush, nylons. A week later a second and last package comes from Garfinkel’s in Washington containing a negligee. The note says, “In fondest memory to my darling girl, S.”

I have never seen a negligee before. It is pale blue and silky with much lace. Donna carts it out in the backyard. There we pour gasoline on it and burn it ritually.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

A
NY
S
TORM IN A
P
ORT

“I
F PAUL ISN’T there I’ll throw a fit.” Donna tugs at her sweater. She is back to dressing like a college girl, while the fancy black and fancy blue sheaths hang in plastic at the back of our closet. “All the graduate students in poli sci go for the free cookies. Oh, why does he stare all the time and not ask me out?” Paul is in one of her classes.

The political science department’s weekly tea. Donna is a political science major now, a legacy from Big Sal. “Perhaps he’s shy, baby. Take it easy. You’re not over, you know, what happened yet.”

With a sigh she takes my hand in her cold palms and squeezes it hard. “I feel old, Stu, old. How long before I get hold of my life?”

“Living’s a slippery thing, ma Donna. We’re novices.”

She turns back to the mirror to glare at her reflection. “Can’t even tell what I want. One week I’m a political scientist. The next, I’ll be a prominent critic. Then I think I should study science. But whatever I turn to, it never feels real because it’s still just me. Sometimes all I want is a good screw. Sometimes to kill myself—me and a dozen others.”

“Good. Let’s make a list.”

“Think you wouldn’t be on it?” Her lips pull back. “You don’t know me! The day you see, you’ll hate me too. Sal saw through me.”

“Garbage. Your damn sin and confession upbringing makes you fear hell where there’s only mistakes and impatience and people bumping on each other.” I get up and put my arm around her gingerly, to comfort without alarm. “We’re just learning our ABCs of intimacy.”

She dodges my arm. “We’re all such shits. We’ll find out what you’ll accept, when it hurts you, someday.”

“Donna. Slow down. You run from me. You run from man to man. Why can’t we take walks? Read poetry? Sit and talk to each other?”

“You never talk to anybody until midnight and then with a glass of bourbon in your fist…. Stu, walk me over. I feel like such an ass, chasing this jerk.”

The snow blows down the street, blinding us, clotting in our lashes. She walks with one blue-gloved hand protecting her cheek. “How’s Peter? Aren’t you sleeping with him yet?”

“He hasn’t tried again.” Although I always carry my diaphragm with me when I see him, that is only as a fail-safe device. I have no particular desire for Peter. Strange how startled he was when I mentioned Donna had dated an Indian student. “What happened to that guy Sol?” he asked. Peter never did get Sal’s name straight.

“Maybe he can’t get it up!” Her high laugh is chopped by the wind. In the Fishbowl lobby she gives me a glance of appeal. “Do I look all right?”

Facing the plate glass I sit on a bench to watch the storm. Almost time for my writing class. Hypnotically the snow pelts down while students pass sliding on the tile streaked with dark prints. Donna is hard to live with. She pursues violent attractions, abandons them with disgust, sets herself impossible tasks and derides her failures. Why can’t I help?

Donaldson stands in front of me grinning before I focus on him. “Such concentration. Do you write in public like Sartre?”

“No, I sleep in public with my eyes open, like a cat.” That loudmouth folksinger Rob Prewitt is with him and winks at me. Hanging on Rob’s plaid arm is someone who looks vaguely familiar and who greets me by name. Smooth bronze hair, wide hips and plump arms bared under a kind of cape. Dressed like a gypsy in full-flounced skirt, peasant blouse, coarse stockings peeping out, big gold hoops, she stands out in the press of students.