Braided Lives (5 page)

B
UDDHA

N. B
ECK
(ass?)

F
RANZ
S
CHUBERT

J. S. B
ACH

L
EONARD
B
ERNSTEIN

T
ECUMSEH

M
Y
G
RANDFATHER
D
AVID
H
ABENSKI

M
ARLON
B
RANDO

A
LDOUS
H
UXLEY

I started a matching list of W
OMEN
W
HOM
I A
DMIRE:

M
Y
A
UNT
R
IVA
(I crossed her out when she visited us last year and sided with my mother.)

S
ACAJAWEA

G
EORGE
S
AND
(I can’t find any of her books in the library but I read about her in a biography of Chopin.)

Z
IPPORA
M
ENDEL
(A sabra I met at the main library in the card catalog room. She had been a soldier and was studying to be an engineer.)

E
MILY
D
ICKINSON
(Her poetry stuns me and she would understand about the attic.)

That’s it. I feel embarrassed. I am tempted to add Eleanor Roosevelt and Florence Nightingale but truthfully I am not desirous of becoming either. Every so often I try to add to that list, for whenever I contemplate it, it makes me feel dreary.

Tucking my hands between my thighs for warmth, I lie on the glider. I scarcely distinguish work and reverie, for all my projects—poems, notes, diary, dreams, reading—seem part of the same clandestine nether world. Does it really exist someplace? I spend a lot of time adjusting novels and biographies I read to invent roles for myself, which takes ingenuity for a female Hamlet or a female Count of Monte Cristo taxes my inventiveness. Hamlet gets to hog the whole play, emoting in wonderful soliloquies I can quote by heart and brandishing a sword and running somebody through from time to time, but all Ophelia gets is the mad scene and a mouthful of waterweed. This difficulty is a lump I cannot dislodge in the middle of my mind. I cannot imagine myself one of those Others I am curious about but largely ignorant of.

Girls when they talk to boys become different. The voice, the expression, the way of laughing and talking and standing of my girlfriends alter; they express different ideas and even their gait changes. I do not know if I cannot or will not do that; I only know I am afraid. Marriage does not figure in the tales I tell myself. I see it daily and it looks like a doom rather than a prize. Mother is always saying Riva was a dancer, but then she got married; Charlotte was a buyer for Crowley’s, but then she got married. Glory and adventure are the prizes. And love. I despise my hunger for affection.

Loving is not exotic since I’ve always been in love with somebody and not infrequently somebody had a crush on me, although the two longings haven’t coincided since age eight, unless you count Callie. I try not to.

I was eleven when an older girlfriend now on the streets hustling with Marcie seduced me. “Let’s play house,” she said and showed me how. In the next years I discovered that just about any of my girlfriends would play that game. I knew it was bad, but so were two thirds of our amusements. It did not seem worse than shoplifting from Woolworth’s or looking through our mothers’ drawers or letting air out of Old Man Kasmierov’s tires because he called the cops when we skated on his smooth new driveway or filching cigarettes from our fathers’ pockets and smoking them in the basement at school. It was casual sex, although I didn’t know it was sex at all. At the same time we argued about exactly what men did to women and where babies came out. What boys did to you was real sex, scary, fascinating, murky.

Callie was my best friend from seventh through ninth grades. I seduced her in 7A. Alone of the girls she never called Sarah or me kike when she got mad. They called her a hillbilly. We went around together arm in arm talking about boys and went to the movies and cut out pictures of singers and actors to worship. I tried to do her homework regularly so she’d pass with me, but she felt more and more resentful of school. Callie talked Southern and the teachers gave her a hard time. She never had milk money or the other coins they pried out of us for savings bonds. Callie dressed what they called inappropriate. So did I, but my hand-me-downs were drab and attracted no attention unless the other white girls wanted to torture me. Callie’s were from her older sister who worked as a cocktail waitress. Callie was always coming to school with or without a safety pin holding together décolleté that would in any case reveal nothing but rib cage.

Suddenly I writhe on the glider. When I was twelve I was given a new red nylon sweater for my birthday, which I wore to school. Nylon sweaters were new and cheap and bright and I was proud, for I’d never had anything like it. In the john, two girls held me down and took it off so the others could see if I was wearing falsies. The rest of the day the boys kept trying to pinch me. I was too ashamed to wear the sweater to school again.

I was stuck on Callie. I could not touch her that often without attachment, without emotion, without love. Is she good enough for me? I asked myself when I was feeling smart. Am I good enough for her? I asked when I was ashamed of my treacherous longings to get up and out of the neighborhood, when I had shown off in class, whenever I got 100 on a test she flunked. Callie was my little low down nest of belonging. I came to her with my sores and I tried to stand between her and the scorn that rapped against her daily. I nagged her to behave.

We were both running with the gang, but nobody knew of our secret attachment. What words did we have for it? It was as furtive as the fact that we both still sometimes played with our old dolls; as furtive as when Aunt Riva gave me a Valentine heart of chocolates and I shared it only with Callie, not with the gang; as furtive as the time Callie put on her mother’s bra, stuffed it with tissues, painted her face and strolled along Grand River collecting wolf whistles and dragging me hunched over behind her clumping like a broken wagon.

Then one July afternoon we were playing poker for bottle caps at Dino’s house, his parents being both at the bakery. I remember I was winning and in the excitement I was paying little attention until Dino and Callie went into the bedroom and shut the door. Even then I didn’t worry until time passed and passed and Freddie and Sharkie started making jokes I didn’t want to understand.

The game ended. I waited and waited for her. Freddie tried to get me to go upstairs with him. “Bug off,” I said, beginning to feel sick with anxiety. It was getting near five and we both had to be home. Finally I banged on the door.

“Don’t be a jackass,” Freddie warned. “Dino’ll bust you in the snoot if you barge in on him.”

But they were done. Callie strolled out buttoning her blouse, while Dino did not bother to put his shirt on. He said a long good-bye at the door, kissing her sloppily, but did not offer to walk us home.

Right on the corner of Tireman by the drugstore we had a big fight. “Did you fuck him, Callie? Did you?”

“So what if I did?”

“You could get pregnant!”

“No, I can’t. I never got the curse yet.”

“Callie! Why did you want to do that?”

“Dino’s cute. He’s the cutest boy I know. You’re just jealous. You like him too.”

I was stung because I did have a crush on Dino. Everybody said Freddie was better-looking, but Dino was quicker in his words and his thoughts and how he moved. I associated him with my beautiful black-and-white tomcat Lightning I had till he was killed; but I could not imagine doing whatever Callie did with Lightning or Dino.

Callie took my arm. “You can have Freddie.”

“I don’t want Freddie! Why did you do that?”

“Let me be, Jill. I bet you could get Freddie. Easy.”

“Besides, I got my periods. Last year.”

Callie yanked her arm away. “You’re just chicken! Just a baby chicken! But I’m growed up and I’m going to act like it.”

I went home weeping through the alleys, so no one would see me. The bond between us snapped. Not only was Callie instantly absorbed in Dino, doting on him and fetching and taking his coarse lip, but she dropped me into unimportance, a bystander in her real life. A year later Dino passed her on to Sharkie, whose kid she had. Freddie wanted me to be his girl, so I was, but I wouldn’t do more than neck with him.

I sit up on the glider, chafing my cold hands. Lately reading psychology books and adult novels, I found a label for my adventuring. Am I sick? Am I depraved? “Am I an L.?” I write in my notebook, scared to spell out lesbian. Not only were our games wicked, it turns out, but they were worse than regular terrifying real sex. I can hardly believe that, but there it is in black and white, and I have to trust books over my own unlikely and childish experiences. Perhaps I’m already crazy? I talk to myself, I make up fantasies I care more for than my homework, and I am not popular, blond or going steady—nothing a teenager should be. I have never had a real date like I read about or see on TV. I still miss Callie. Now she is changed forever from the mischievous soulful runt who buried pheasants with me to a housewife padding around in slip and feathered mules, a permanent whine in her voice and a puzzled frown pulling at her wide mouth.

Francis’ guitar is leaning against the wall in its battered case, its female curves drawing my eyes. I am staring at it in my usual vague welter of want and revulsion when the door downstairs bangs open.

“Jillie? Are you hiding up there again? Who do you think is going to wash your dishes for you? Santa Claus?”

When I climb down the steps, however, she is standing at the bottom wrapped in the red kimono Francis brought back from Japan. Her small mouth puckers with gloom. “I can’t decide what to wear. And my hair won’t come right.”

“It looks fine to me.”

“Like a cat caught in a fan!” She puts a hand coquettishly to her throat. “You do it so well. And Charlotte’s hair will be all done. She goes to the beauty parlor every Friday.”

We spread dresses on the bed. “Say, isn’t this new?”

She gives it a punishing slap. “Since when do I have a penny to spend on myself? I picked it up on sale, ages ago.”

Letting the kimono slide from her plump shoulders she beckons for the dress, turquoise with white flowers. I take up the comb. “Your hair’s in good form. You’ll see, it’ll look fine.” Page boy, handmaiden, mirror to my mother, you see me in a role I have played since I was old enough to sit up and say yes to her tales and complaints, in recent years consciously disarming her wary jealousy by flattery. Why she is jealous is opaque to me, for all I do with a mirror is make faces. Even before my own reflection over her head as she flirts with herself, I avert my eyes self-consciously. I have seen my mother naked hundreds of times, for she often calls me in to wash her back, but I rarely see my father less than fully dressed. Even bathing suits are unusual. In center city Detroit there is not a lot of water around, even though when you look at the Great Lakes on a map, we look as if we’re afloat. Maybe twice a summer we go to a beach. I am scared of the water, as of so much else; I have all my mother’s fears and a few extra. Although I learned to swim in high school, I would feel disloyal. Dad can swim but Mother can’t. To swim would be to desert her, clutching my hand, nervous in a foot of water.

“So
he
wants you to share a room with the skinny blond one.” She snorts. “What’s the use of going away to Ann Arbor if you don’t meet new people and make useful contacts? You never got on with your father’s people anyhow.”

He comes in, taking a tie from the door rack and whipping it playfully at her behind. He is impatient for the company of men where a couple of drinks will loosen his humor. He has strict notions what talk becomes a man: baseball, football and hockey in their seasons, union matters and politics—if the other fellows are regular Democrats too. When he mentions Roosevelt his voice catches. The thirties were his Armageddon. Although his work is dirty, he puts on a suit as often as he can, for his father taught him not to dress like a workman. “Yes, sir, we’ll beat the pants off Gene and Charlotte.”

“Oh?” She turns, her eyes glinting anger. “So that’s what you’d like to do to Charlotte? I’ve always suspected as much.” It is impossible to tell if she is joking. Does she know?

He gives his hair a quick rake and tosses the comb to his bureau. “Hustle it up or they’ll be asleep before we get there.” He looks well in a suit, for he is lean.