Braided Lives (49 page)

“Afterward I got up as soon as I could move and I started to walk toward town. He kept insisting I get in the car. I wouldn’t. But then I was scared to walk on with my clothes all torn and messed up and my mouth bleeding, in the dark. Finally I did get in the car. Then when we drove into town, at a traffic light, I jumped out. He left the car there and he ran right after me down the street.”

“Did he catch you?”

“No. I had a real head start by the time he parked. But I could hear him yelling. Stu, go look out the window and see if he’s still there, outside the house.”

The streetlight falls on a couple embracing under the low boughs of a sugar maple. “No one’s there.”

Restlessly she stirs, passes her hand over her eyes. “It’s terrifying to feel helpless. That someone can just take you and use you like that.”

“It hurt?”

“Like being torn. How it must hurt those young girls, virgins.” She holds the pillow against her. “But I didn’t give in!”

“You didn’t.” I stroke her hair. “Don’t talk. Lie still.”

“Promise you won’t tell anyone. Ever. Ever!”

“Donna, I won’t, but why? Being raped is terrible and painful, but you didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Everybody makes jokes about it. Everybody thinks that’s what you really want. I didn’t want it. I didn’t want him. I hated him. I was scared of him. I was terrified lying there. I was terrified he’d do something even worse and cut me up or kill me. I was sure he was going to kill me and leave my body there.”

I stroke her head, her thin silky hair. “Shhhh,” I say. “I’ll never tell anyone. Never.” The night is small and hot with a lid like a casserole holding us. In a dull soothing voice I try to lull her, stroking. “Tomorrow is Monday and the week begins. I have a paper due on Donne’s ‘Extasie.’ My lecturer Fells spent the hour Friday deciding Donne had never achieved a true mystical experience—such as I’m sure he does every morning before breakfast on dry toast—and could be dismissed as a Catholic manque.” Donna snorts, her body unclenching slightly. My tongue clacks in my mouth like a dried piece of leather. “Fells’s method is to work our way through the body of somebody’s work, like Donne, logging as we go, finding the flaws in all the supposed great works, until one or two absolutely perfect masterpieces are left standing, and then move on with our chain saws to the next mountain.”

The toilet flushes again and again, our housemates clatter upstairs. Minouska comes to explore her, sniffing. Goes back to her kittens. Donna’s fine hair tangles under my hand. Finally she sleeps. Maybe she does need Peter. Maybe he can do better than I at keeping her alive and well. I seem to have failed her. I sit on while the amorous lowing of the front-porch leavetaking rises and falls, a gelid grey despair weighting me quiet and still.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

O
LD
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AVER AND
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ORM

M
ONDAY DONNA DOES not go to her classes. Exhausted, she lies in bed. I tell the other inhabitants of the co-op that she has a summer cold. No one is markedly curious. It is the end of August and some of the women like Donna and me will be here in the fall, some like Alberta are just finishing up and ready to leave Ann Arbor and some are only taking summer courses. The house has a loose disjointed feel, so that no one pays as close attention to others’ welfare as in the winter. Her bruises and weeping are invisible.

Monday evening after supper while Donna is napping, a teacher here for the summer calls up the stairwell, “Donna Stuart, Donna Stuart, you have a visitor.”

Peter? Grimly, making myself smile ferociously at the treads, I march down. The guy standing in the hall is not familiar to me. Then he is. I know exactly who he is, about five nine and big-boned, his hair in a blond ducktail. For a moment he reminds me of Matt, but Matt soft in the waist and slope-shouldered. Awkward in the hall. “You get the hell out of here,” I say. “You’ve done enough to her!” I stop three steps from the bottom to keep some height on him.

“Who’re you? Where’s Donna?”

“Sick in bed from what you did to her, what do you think? You son of a bitch. I’m her cousin. If you ever show your face around here again—”

“Go on, what do you know about it? She went out with me twice.”

A coat tree stands in the corner of the hall. As I glare at him, I am suddenly moving forward past him to seize it, raincoats, umbrellas and all, and swing it. It hits him a glancing blow on the shoulder, tumbling him backward into the wall. I swing the wooden coat tree around again and he is out the door and down the steps. I follow to the screen door, weak in the knees, my rage gone as it came, out of nowhere, to nowhere. “And don’t come back!” I yell, wanting to sound fierce.

The guy at the wheel of the silver convertible out front is laughing as my victim climbs in the other side. Then the dark-haired driver takes off with the obligatory screech. I pick up the raincoats and umbrellas scattered over the hall. The teacher stands in the doorway to the living room, watching me with an expression of alarm. “As you were,” I say to the coat tree as I stand it in its corner.

I feel better as I climb upstairs, less helpless. Donna sits up. “Where were you?” she asks.

“Just talking to Howie.”

“You like being one of the boys.” She shakes her head sadly. “Don’t you think they ultimately unsex you?”

“Nobody else can either give me my sex or take it from me,” I say companionably, perching on the edge of her bed. “Want some tea now?”

When I hear that Francis is home for Labor Day, I make immediate arrangements to drive in with Howie, who is moving his mother and grandmother into a small garden apartment out Seven Mile Road, about a mile and a quarter from where Mike’s mother lives.

When I walk into the tiny square living room, Francis is sprawled on the sofa with his feet hooked over the arm reading
The Racing Form.
He glances up and looks me over. Rolling onto his elbow with his lazy grin, he then recognizes me. “Goddamn it’s you,” he says accusingly. “Jill!”

I hug him but he is stiff with me. Skinny, skinny. Because I am so pleased to see him with his tough grace, his way of moving and sitting, never even flicking the ash from his butt without style, it is a while before I notice how bad he looks. “Where’s Mom and Dad?” I drop on the couch turned sideways to absorb as much of him as possible.

“Doing the shopping…. So, you’re a coed? You’re going to college and taking courses and rah-rah football games and all that?”

“Aw come one, Francis. I sell my football tickets—”

“Yeah? I could get you a good price for them, if I’m around.”

“I’d like that. Francis, what happened to you? Where were you?” I count years on my fingers. I haven’t seen him since I was fifteen. “When I wrote you at that Texas address, the letters just came back.”

“I was in business down Méjico way …” he says. Then he looks at me, his dark eyes that are my mother’s and mine squinting with wry amusement. “Actually I got busted.”

“You were in jail?”

“In Durango.”

“That’s in Mexico or Texas?”

“That’s in hell, that’s where it is. But don’t you tell her. This is strictly between you and I.”

“I wouldn’t dream of telling.” But I bet you tell Mother yourself. “How long have you been out?”

“About six months. If I would’ve come up any sooner, she’d have smelled the jail on me. When I crawled out of there on my belly I looked like a starved rat.”

“You look fine now,” I say, part truth, part lie. He’s a good-looking man on a small-framed lithe model. His curly black hair is receding a little and he is so thin I could cut my face on his chin. He looks years older than he ought, older than Leo, lines around the eyes, lines scoring the mouth. As soon as Mother gets some weight back on him, he will look more like himself. I tell him about the HUAC play we put on and what we’re doing in PAF, for Francis is the only one in the family I like to talk politics with. He’s a left-wing anarchist.

Now he’s skeptical. “Bunch of college kids, what’s the point? They won’t do nothing. Now you put that on at Ford’s, you’re getting someplace.”

“You have to reach everyone,” I argue. “College is where I am. A lot of people go now, Francis, not just rich kids. Donaldson, our faculty sponsor, points out that most people graduating college will be working for wages. They’ll be doing cleaner work than their parents but with no more power or control.”

“Is he the guy she said you got mixed up with?”

“Professor Donaldson? Of course not. What was she telling you anyhow?”

“Some guy knocked you up and wouldn’t get hitched then. Why didn’t you come back home?”

“What for, Francis? I didn’t have the baby. Why don’t you move back home? It’s a little dull here for both of us, right?”

“It’s not the same thing,” he says stubbornly, making me wonder if Mother has set him to trying to talk me back to Detroit. “I’m not about to get knocked up.”

“No, Francis, you look more like you been knocked down and knocked out. I am not about to get pregnant anymore either.”

“Yeah? You telling me you learned your lesson and you’re running around on the loose and you don’t go near no guys?”

“No. I’m telling you I got myself a diaphragm. Now lay off, Francis. I haven’t asked about your sex life, in jail or out.”

“Jesus,” he says. “I go away for a while and everything turns to shit. You think you know what you’re doing. I’ve known a hell of a lot of women, and I know what happens to girls who think they can hit the road like men.”

“Aw come on, Francis, you’ve known a hell of a lot of whores. And so have I. We both have had good friends on the street—”

“Your old pal Marcie …” He draws his finger across his throat.

“What do you mean? Somebody beat up on her?”

“Dead. Two weeks ago. Guess you don’t keep up with home.”

“Who killed her?” It occurs to me as I say it that I’m being silly. But what disease kills a twenty-year-old? Car accident?

“She killed her. ODed. Too pure horse rode her into the wall.” We both contemplate the wall before us. “You see what comes down.”

“I don’t sell my body. School’s interesting—I’m not so bored I need to do drugs. I’m financially independent of Mother and Dad.”

“Mom says they send you twenty-five a month.”

“I sure can use it. But you’re not imagining that pays for anything essential. Francis, you been home a couple of days and already you think you know more about my life than I do. That’s like Leo.”

“Bullshit. She’s worried sick about you.”

“Now let her worry about you.” I point to his guitar in the corner. “Learn any Mexican songs?”

“I don’t know who’s worse out of tune, that or me.” He flexes his fingers on his knees.

“What did you get busted for?”

“None of your business, little sister. You never ask that.” He laughs shortly. “Just a little of my business.” He feels the sharp edge of his chin. “I was in a fight.”

He could well have been and yet I do not believe him. For getting in a fight, they don’t put you in jail that long. We all have bad tempers and strike out, but never with the loss of reason it takes to maim or kill, unless it was self-defense. He offers me a beer and I sip politely. I want Francis to admire me, how I have grown, how I have changed, and to treat me as an equal at last. But I don’t think he is going to. I want to wrest approval from him. I have pulled myself way uphill from the tortured self-doubting cowardly waif he last saw. He must approve of me; he must.

Things remain awkward, good by flashes. The best time is Labor Day when Francis and I leave the union picnic early for one given by his Italian anarchist friends. The food is better with wine instead of beer. Francis even dances with me. As always he is a graceful dancer but now I can keep up with him. Well behaved, a perfect sister, I flirt with the old men and not with the young ones and generally act with only a splinter of myself.

As I climb the steps of the co-op with my suitcase and return to Howie’s car for a box of food from home, I am curious. A new graduate student housemother. Half the house will be strangers. As I lug the suitcase upstairs, an orange-haired girl in shorts is standing on a chair in my room doing something to the ceiling fixture. “Hi,” I say, “can I help? What are you doing to our light?”

“I’m just putting on a new shade. No, thanks, I can do it. Are you going to live in the house too?”

“Er. Did Donna switch off rooms to another one?”

“No, this is her room. Hey, Donna!”

She hurries from the bathroom scrubbing a towel over her wet hair. “Stu? How was Detroit?”

“What’s up here?”

“This is Rosellen, Stu. Rosellen’s going to live with me. Our schedules are in such conflict—you’re up so late and out so often. But there’s a great single room on third. I hauled your stuff up there and moved you in. You can have it to yourself.”