Braided Lives (45 page)

The weekend after July 4 he takes me home for the first time. I am geared up to meet his parents, a stomachache all the way in the Sprite, but it turns out he has an apartment of his own in the sprawling multi-leveled family enclave. We climb a flight of steps to a second-floor door on its own little terrace. Peter has a large living room with a view out the far end to the lake, St. Clair—littlest of the Great Lakes chain but quite big enough. You can’t see Canada across it.

When we came across the border from Detroit to Grosse Pointe Woods, the world changed. My city is a Black city. This is a white world, to an even greater degree than Ann Arbor, which after all has the old Black neighborhood around Detroit Street sloping toward the river and a smattering of Asian and Black students. But here the only Blacks I see are maids getting off work for the day, dragging their tired feet down to the bus stop. The Grosse Pointe suburbs are fancy, but in spite of the big trees, no greener than the city. In Detroit lush wild jungles sprout on any vacant lot in the slums. Here in fact nature is under strict control; armies of gardeners prune the hedges and lop back the trees and uproot the hardy weeds for expanses of flat lawn glinting under sprinklers. The houses seem to be vying in grandeur, pretension and size. Even the small lots sprout enormous houses.

In Grosse Pointe proper, a few blocks only, the streets wander down to the water where the biggest houses of all preen themselves before their view. But in Grosse Pointe Shores, the lake lies across a busy street from the houses and is almost inaccessible, marked with signs that forbid parking, stopping, swimming, fishing and would dearly like to forbid your looking. The signs proclaim all these activities dangerous, as the gentle sand beach slopes away gleaming in the sun like clean kitchen linoleum that nobody walks on. In order to keep the hoi polloi of Detroit from shlepping out here to use the beaches, the inhabitants are willing to sacrifice their own use.

“So what do you do when you’re dying for a swim? Use the pool?” I had noticed one near the house, kidney-shaped and vast.

“The yacht club. Everybody goes there.” He points toward the left. He explains that within a mile radius there are various country clubs, boating clubs, yacht clubs. “The Detroit, the Crescent, the Grosse Pointe —you can’t walk two blocks without hitting a fence.”

I wander around the living room, much neater than his old room. He has been reading the
Detroit News, Playboy,
and a physics journal. A couple of big glossy books of photographs lie on the glass-topped coffee table, the rya rug showing through. Five photographs of me are arranged in aluminum frames on the wall over the pale nubby couch among perhaps twenty others of women and of landscapes.

When he sees me staring at the wall, he motions me to sit on the couch. He fans out photographs—eight by tens on matte paper—over the coffee table.

“See?” he asks insistently. “I caught it. The things I perceive that you don’t even realize are in you. Now you can tell what I meant about photographing dreams.”

Maybe. The photographs are of professional caliber and the young woman in them could be a model or a starlet. She is all soft invitation, gentle radiance shimmering from her flesh like watered silk. Every curve invites with the passive gorgeousness of a ripe peach. For a moment I fall in love with myself on the table as he mixes martinis, watching me in the mirror over the little bar. My god, I think, is that me? I don’t spend a lot of time staring in a mirror and nothing in my life ever prepared me to find myself or to be found by anyone else beautiful. Is that what he means by not knowing myself? In a fine clear moment of narcissism I could wish to fuck that body on the paper. But that isn’t me in any useful sense. I do see myself in the bathroom mirror mornings with my eyes half open, my lips curled in a sneer of only partially diluted exhaustion. I meet myself scratching my ass and picking my nose. I am the cold hard intellect that improves my scholarship a step at a time until I am able to pay for far more than my tuition in the fall, so that for the first time since I stopped begging the difference from my parents, I will not have to work while I go to school this September. The dormouse is as much and no more me then these faces that are all lush softness. He has taken my backbone out so I do not scrap or snap. If I were truly that passive plum of a woman, Freddie would have had me on the kitchen floor at age fourteen while the iron burned through my father’s shirts above. Today I would be where Callie is, pregnant again, longing to move out of a three-room walk-up, at best working in the typing pool of a local office.

I don’t know in what words to praise them. “They’re beautiful,” I say. “Much more than I am just walking around.”

“You’re such a mess, Jill. Half blind faith and half self-hatred.”

But I prefer myself to these perfect images. “Can I have copies?”

“They’re for you. So you can remember how I see you. So you can keep in mind the woman you could be with me, for me. I have my own copies, framed. I put the best ones up on the wall this week.”

As we sip our martinis, he keeps glancing from me to the photographs, searching for confirmation of what he shot and processed.

When he has downed a couple of drinks he grips me by the elbow. “Okay. Time to meet Mother.”

“I thought we came upstairs to avoid her?”

“I like to keep my options open.”

His mother is lying on a white-painted wrought-iron chaise longue cushioned in aquamarine. She is about Peter’s height and as thin. She has less belly than I do. Bones and suntan, she wears a beige bikini, sunglasses with a graduated mauve tint. Her hair is just the faintest shade yellower than Donna’s. I am surprised to see that it is probably as long as mine used to be, worn up in an elaborate French knot. Her expression I cannot tell behind the sunglasses. Her lips part in a small discreet smile and she extends her hand, but not to shake because she waves limply.

“Yvonne mentioned that Peter had brought someone up.” She nods then at the pool. “Did you want to swim?”

“I didn’t bring my suit. I wish I had.”

“There might be something in the changing room that would fit you.” She peers at me. “Perhaps not.”

Peter is fidgeting and she turns her invisible gaze on him. “Petey, you look unhealthy. It’s well into July and you look as if you’d just crawled out of a cave.”

“Very few physicists spend the whole summer on the beach.”

“Oh nonsense. You don’t even have a position yet. There’s nothing to prevent you enjoying the club facilities with your friends. Your friends here,” she amends, obviously nervous he may decide to take me. “In Maine we’ll get you back into shape.”

“What’s this about Maine?” I ask him when a maid brings out a phone to her and we retire to the other end of the pool.

“They want me to go with them.”

“Are you going?”

“Perhaps. I don’t know, Jill. Depends on what happens at Argonne Labs next week. Maybe they’ll hire me immediately and I’ll move to Chicago. If not we’ll work out a way for you to spend some time in Maine.”

I don’t even bother arguing. I am in summer school and working and I wouldn’t have the money for a jaunt. Before going out to supper, upstairs while Peter slips on his sports jacket, he says, “Well, I did it, didn’t I? Introduced you to Mother?” Pointedly he hands the photographs to me, as if accusing me of forgetting them.

As we wait for our prime ribs, he fans out the photos again, looking quizzically from them to me. I have learned to eat my beef rare; otherwise he mocks me. It was an acquired taste but it has taken; if I ever ate a steak alone, I would now eat it rare. I have not been able to learn to like martinis but that forms no obstacle tonight as we are drinking beer —he legally and I on the old fake ID furnished by him when we first began to go out together. He fingers the photographs so obsessively I half expect him to take them back, but as we are getting up, once again he pushes them toward me.

As it turns out I don’t see much of Peter during the summer. After he is not hired by Argonne, he has until August 10 when his job at Detroit Edison officially begins. He vacations in Maine with his family until he must return for work.

Summer in Ann Arbor: the air is heavy as wet wool. Breathing is an effort you must force on yourself. The humidity is an absolute. We live as if in the back room of a laundry. How often Donna and I say in the tentative cool of the morning that we will hike out to the country after class, that we will hitch a ride to go swimming, that we will pack a picnic supper for ourselves. How often when afternoon lies over us like a vast hot sea of lassitude on whose bottom we barely crawl, we decide after all we will just stay home and sit on the porch. We see a lot of movies the summer of 1956, because the theater is air-conditioned. Minouska’s favorite place is the bathtub when not in use; she spreads out full length like a drawn bow of blackness seeking the cool the porcelain can offer. One wet night she gives birth, straining and striving, purring and uttering deep cries, and forces out with long pauses one black kitty, one grey tabby and one dead black and white. We will have to find homes for them in the fall.

Early in August I realize that Donna has in the space of a week withdrawn from me, but I am inclined to put it down to her usual obsession with coming finals, the long paper she is writing for political science on Hobbes (the legacy of Big Sal), the questionnaire she has been designing for sociology (her minor) and the therapy she has begun. I spend more time with Alberta who will be leaving soon for New York.

When Peter returns from Maine, on the weekend he checks us into a motel as Mr. and Mrs. Fender. “But why?” I ask him.

He grunts. “Scarface doesn’t leave tracks, baby. He don’t leave evidence for the feds.” He has even brought a small leather suitcase, although it contains only his shaving gear, a change of underwear and a clean shirt.

The motel is my first. Being Mrs. Fender for a night feels a little exciting, a little sordid. But for whom is this caution exercised? After I leave him Sunday I find myself disappointed. Our communication has suffered attrition, making me work twice as hard to get half as much response from him.

The next weekend we go swimming Saturday at Silver Lake and then eat at the Old German downtown, our favorite restaurant in Ann Arbor. “I’m moved into my new pad,” he announces. “Good-bye to the parental stockade.”

“Are we going there tonight?”

“Why not?”

As we drive into the city in his Sprite, he glances at me sharply. “You’re letting your hair grow,” he accuses.

I nod. “I missed the weight. Every couple of weeks I had to get it cut. But I’m leaving the front short. You’ll like it once it’s grown out a little.”

“Did you start therapy yet?”

“Aw, Peter, come on. When do I have time? Or money?” Or the desire, if the truth were spoken. When I remember telling my mother I was always going to be honest with men I was involved with, I sigh. A little I understand her calling me naive.

“Why don’t you go to the therapist that Donna’s seeing?”

“We couldn’t both go to the same guy. How did you know Donna’s gone into therapy?”

“Oh. When I was waiting for you. Last week. She told me.”

“She likes the guy,” I say to be agreeable.

“What do you mean? Transference?”

“No. Just that she feels comfortable with him.”

Peter’s apartment is on the tenth floor of a newish high-rise on the river, although his apartment does not face that way. It has only two rooms and a balcony just big enough for a deck chair and a plant that has already died. It faces a similar high-rise next door with its tiers of similar balconies. Peter had left the air-conditioning on so that the living room with its kitchenette separated by a counter is marvelously cool and inviting. He pours us each a martini from a pitcher ready mixed in the refrigerator. I take one gulp and leave it on the counter. He carries his into the bedroom and strips off his jacket, shirt and pants between sips.

“My period started last night,” I announce sheepishly. He doesn’t enjoy making love during the first two days of my period. He claims there is a smell and not enough friction.

“You must not want to make it with me.” He stares with his flat blue eyes, lying on the bed in his briefs with his hands behind his head, elbows out.

“That’s not true. I want to at least as much as you do. And you know it!” I perch on the bed’s edge, still dressed.

“That’s what you say, not what your unconscious means.”

“Come on, Peter. Periods come. It’s my time of the month, right on the full moon.”

“You let me visit this weekend knowing that and then you kept me dangling all day.”

“But I
wanted
to see you. You can’t drive up during the week. We could make love anyhow. It doesn’t always have to be perfect, does it?” I cross to the plate-glass window and peer out between the draperies. The sky is pale lavender with high diffused clouds. Inside the air conditioner purrs, making me cool for the first time all week.

He seems to agree, for when I approach the bedside, he catches my wrist and tugs me so the springs wince under my fall. I grin over his shoulder at the fierceness of his attack. He does want it and tonight he won’t tease me, feinting, withdrawing, changing his mind.

As I undress he asks, “Who have you been seeing?”