Braided Lives (44 page)

H
OWIE LEAPS ON the table, dressed in a checkered business suit stuffed to make him rotund. He belts out his big song in a surprisingly decent baritone:

“I am the judge.

I am the jury.

Kiss my behind

Or you’ll feel my fury!

We got subpoenas.

Immunity too.

You can’t touch us

While we cream you.”

Donaldson and Rob Prewitt play the other HU-WHACK members. Bolognese enacts a stool pigeon, Dick and Alberta, the witnesses. I play the dormouse member of HU-WHACK. I fall asleep and slide out of my chair and tip over the papers. Every so often I wake up ostentatiously and shout, “Hold the witness in contempt. Hold everybody in contempt. Hang ‘em all.” It has been unanimously agreed that under no circumstances do I sing. Donna plays the committee’s secretary, a part created for Stephanie that requires only that Donna undulate around in a tight skirt showing her legs whenever possible. Stephanie and Rob broke up. Rob has been flirting with Donna, but she is not interested. Alberta has a way of watching Donaldson when he is not looking at her. The person who watches Alberta is Howie. He sings:

“I call up the teachers,

I call up the hams.

From lions they turn

into little white lambs.

Baaaa! Baaaa! Baaaa! Baaaaa! Humbug.”

We have a full house for our decidedly amateur production. Basically the daring of attacking HUAC would produce laughs even if we weren’t funny. We are breaking a taboo. It’s hot in here under the lights in my dormouse papier-mache head. Now Donaldson, in his ordinary clothes skinny as death but improbably handsome, sidles up to Alberta to sing:

“Oh tell me now in forty-two

Did you sign a petition I’m asking you?”

How can he not love her? Wearing a sort of red girl scout uniform with shorts, she looks healthy, radiant, strong enough to fight at a barricade and carry him off to safety, if necessary. She sings:

“How can I recall, Representative dear.

I was nine years old, that very year.”

Donaldson: he is thin as Bolognese who stands near him on the stage, whispering in his ear like I ago but altogether lacking his magnetic presence. Donaldson is tall and negligently tweedy. His quintessential outfit is a good Harris Tweed sports jacket worn with a flannel shirt and chinos. Women want to tidy him up. Bolognese is ageless; Donaldson at thirty-four (Alberta told me his age) is boyish. Since he shaved off his beard, he seems closer to us. I guess that’s why he grew it. He sings:

“There are Commies of ten,

premature anti-Fascists of six,

dwarfs, midgets and trolls:

we know their tricks.

There are babies today

agitating in bed

whose bottoms are pink

and faces, red!”

Alberta pirouettes. She has enormous stage presence. That surprises me, but then she is a folksinger and lacks only her banjo.

“
Oh, I was a red diaper baby.

I even had a Paul Robeson doll.

Now you think I will squeal on my parents,

But blood is much thicker than gall!”

They generate electricity, this used-to-be couple. How could he prefer anyone to her? Alberta is plain good. She’s bright and political and caring. If ever I saw a wife going to waste, that’s Alberta. She even takes care of me, but she’s her daddy’s girl and she loves only daddies. When I’m sick she makes me tea with much lemon and a dash of bourbon so I sweat out my fever. She gives me vitamin pills and sometimes a scarf or necklace she has grown tired of. I adore being taken care of by Alberta, and I bet he did too. I think she will make a great lawyer.

Donaldson appears all head. His long lean body calls no attention to itself, but is only a stand to hang his leonine head on, the large eyes fixed on infinity. He slumps there like an outsized right parenthesis, yet he too radiates energy, not physical like Alberta’s but intellectual. In droves we fall for his brilliance, but can you bed down with intellect? Alberta is not a profoundly sexual woman. Being in love is everything for her, rare and absolute, and sex comes along like an awkward wagon dragging behind.

The curtains close and as the audience begins to clap I step out, waving them to momentary silence. “Dear friends,” I cry, “if you think this was a farce, you are dead right. Let’s laugh it off the face of our country.” I bow, the curtains part and the cast all come forward. We are a big hit.

Applause, you can get drunk on it and then it’s gone at once while I stand backstage waiting my turn for the little dressing room so I can climb out of the dormouse pelt (left from a production of
Peter and the Wolf)
and the papier-mache head Alberta made, that I plan to hang on my wall. Howie is ebullient. He bounds up to Alberta to hug her awkwardly. I bet he’s been plotting all night to do that. “You were great!”

“We were all not half bad,” she says mildly, disengaging herself. “Let’s hear it for the writers!”

“We had a full house.” Dick, our treasurer, speaks happily. “We made our expenses back and we’ll finish out the year with a little extra in the kitty for the first time ever.”

At the party Donna stays close to me and does not pick anyone up. Peter is off in New York on a job interview. It is not that I do not miss him, but suddenly I have a lot more time this weekend. Relationships do eat up the hours. Donna enjoyed being in the play, even as an afterthought. She has been studying hard for finals already. Charlie calls her every day. I hear the conversations when I can’t avoid it. Sometimes she brings the phone into our room on its long cord.

All the conversations are variations on his asking, “But why won’t you see me any longer?” She says, “But I don’t love you.” He says, “But you didn’t love me before and you slept with me anyhow.” She, “That was a problem.” He, “You’ll come to love me. Because I love you.” She, “Charlie, you don’t even know me. I never acted natural with you. I don’t know if I’m capable of loving anyone. Go find yourself someone better than me. It won’t be hard.”

This nub end of the school year I feel happy. Donna, Peter, Howie, my writing, my classes, my jobs, my political activity: all the golden balls float in the June light like perfect clouds. I am a juggler who has finally mastered her best trick. I am happy in my love for Donna which I call sisterly and in my love for Howie which I call brotherly and in my love for Peter which I call sexual and nurturing. I am even happy in my growing fondness for Minouska, who was named Eurydice, a name she refuses. She comes to Minouska, one of my grandma’s pet names for me. She stands beside my desk chair mewing plaintively, requiring me to pat my thigh six times repeating her name before she will sail up and land, belly dragging, and turn three, four times to curl up right over my cunt purring.

Obviously, I have helped Peter. He is more human, more open. He will take a job in New York, where I may go after I graduate in a year. In the meantime we can see each other vacations. We have a kind of grace together now, not the all-consuming relationship Mike was, but a model of how it should be for a mature adult, I tell myself.

When I am happy and when I am unhappy I draw people. When I am ordinarily involved and working and solving or failing problems, I am or seem less accessible. When I am opened like an oyster to the tides of grief or when I open myself to the rich flood of joy, people come to me. Tonight whenever I turn from Donna who stays close, Donaldson is beside me. He is looking at me a lot as Alberta looks at him and Howie looks at her.

I begin to drink heavily for the first time since Donna and I reconciled. I feel as if the will and the pain of the people in the room push on me, closing in like falling furniture, something so tangible that the air thickens with fears and wishes. I loathe this feeling of being skinless and peeled to others’ needs.

Why should the misfortunes of love and sexuality seem like a vast metaphysical disease to me, as if I saw deep cracks in things and under this ordinary badly furnished room of Dick and Carole Weisbuch, the terrors of outer space at the temperature of absolute zero yawn?

“Heavens, that dress must be made of iron. You’ve had it since I met you,” Julie says. She has materialized before me in a shirtdress of pale green silk.

My gaze slides past her to scan the room. Finally I have to ask, “How are you? … Is Mike with you?”

“Mike is off at Yale for the weekend, whither his family is sending him in the fall. To get him away from me.” She sounds almost proud, but adds with immediate brute justice, “Of course he didn’t have to go.”

“Maybe he felt he did,” I offer. Relief stuns me. Not to run into him ever again. “He feels very obligated to them.”

“He didn’t feel very obligated to me…. He complained I’m too inhibited in bed. You were a virgin, weren’t you? I don’t know what the difference could be.”

“I have no idea.” I suppress an urge to giggle. Can we be having this conversation? But Julie has always been completely open about sex, as if anything that happens to her has to be a shared joke.

“I don’t think he ever really fell in love with me. I don’t know why. He loved
you,
after all. It seems to me he could have loved me if he’d wanted to. After all, I could talk to him about his work and I can read all the languages he can. I would have helped him in his work; I would have loved that.”

“Maybe it’ll work out still. Once he’s through school.”

“Mike? I’m sure he has somebody else already.” She points. “I have a new boyfriend. Carl Forbes. He’s from Chagrin Falls and my father’s gotten him a job already in the accounting section at the General Motors offices in Newtown.”

I follow her finger. The guy is tall, ruddily handsome and vaguely familiar. I wonder if he was in one of my classes. Accounting? Maybe a lecture. “That’s wonderful,” I say. “Are you serious about him?”

“Jill! Are you drunk? Look at my finger.”

All that pointing. Oh. A chunky diamond on a white gold ring. “But you just broke up with Mike?” Did I fall into a time warp?

“He’s more my speed, I think. He’s
very
experienced with women but he’s not too bright. In some ways that’s a winning combination. He knows he’s foundering…. Jill, everybody makes jokes about women getting the senior jitters, but I discovered some men get it. Graduating can scare them too. I’ve done all right.” Observing him growing a little too animated over Donna, she heads for him.

Although when Donaldson casually puts his hand on my arm—and touching for him is never casual—my arm glows like a lightning bug with a cool yearning flame, I cannot look back into his hazel eyes under those auburn curls. I pretend I do not understand. I pretend I do not notice. I cannot hurt Alberta. Although I am so fascinated by him I would like to follow him home like a puppy dog, I ignore all signals. Stupidity covers me like a bird whose owner has thrown a blanket over its cage. Nothing must happen, I mutter in my head and laugh too loud and drink too much. Nothing will happen!

Nothing does. Except when I am standing by Julie and her new boyfriend, Carl, he puts his hand on her ass and murmurs, “Baby, women are made for love.” I recognize him then. My first college date.

Peter returns from his interview at Brookhaven sour and depressed. He has not been turned down but he has not been hired. Essentially he has been told maybe, by and by. The job offer in Detroit is industrial. Boring, he says. Detroit Edison is planning a fancy new breeder reactor near Monroe, to be named for Enrico Fermi, one of Peter’s heroes, but he still does not want to work in industry or in Detroit. He views himself as defeated. In his new job he will start at more money than my father ever saw, but I know how little that salary seems to Peter, who has no experience at living within any means he provides himself and for whom almost anything he can earn as a physicist must seem minimal. Since the psychoanalyst of his choice is on Long Island, he must put off entering analysis too. I am ready to comfort him but confused. I was keyed up to say good-bye. I was set to endure having his slender hard body wrenched from me and only the cold comfort of letters and occasional phone calls.

Now I am reprieved. I feel a muggy mixture of delight and resentment as summer school gets under way. The truth is I arranged my summer to comfort me for his loss and made a number of commitments and arrangements that depend on my having more time than I am likely to with Peter in Detroit. On the other hand, we have been doing much better. My angel clam has opened to me, so why stop when I’m making progress? He moved out of his dark comfortable room in June and is now living with his parents while he hunts for an apartment.