Braided Lives (59 page)

They are still loading. I pull up abreast. “It’s time!”

“Shit,” Kemp says. “I know it. Faster!”

Now my hands sweat so profusely my gloves are wet and slip on the wheel. The men move in slow motions, large figures underwater who push against high gravity to force the leaden boxes through the murky atmosphere, three men (Ace still at the wheel of the bread truck) frozen in instant replay. I stare at the far corner around which the watchman will march any second. The truck is facing back the way we came. Laboriously I turn the car around to face the same direction, then sit with my eyes fixed on the rearview mirror watching that pool of light into which the watchman will step.

Kemp has given the high sign. They shut the doors of the bread truck as Kemp comes around to our car’s driver’s side. With the engine running, I scramble over and he slides in, slamming the door with the same gesture as he heels the accelerator and we are off with a screech of rubber down the street, leaving the bread truck to amble after us.

We drive straight to Livonia, a near suburb of Detroit, where we park in a garage behind a row of garden apartments. As I sit in the Studebaker, Ace, Buddy and Ray unload, much more leisurely than they loaded. They are tired and clumsy. Kemp goes into the apartment building with a thin grey-haired man who tells us to be very quiet, for this is a respectable neighborhood. Kemp returns for my inventory and then disappears again.

When he comes back at last, he brings a six-pack of beer and the unloading goes on. When the truck is finally empty, Ace drives it away, after Kemp peels off bills into his hand. Then Buddy climbs into the driver’s seat with Ray beside him, while Kemp and I curl up in the backseat.

There he makes five piles of money. Ace got a hundred and fifty off the top. Kemp gets two shares; the rest of us one, in twenties that crackle in Kemp’s hands. As the car is stopped at a traffic light, he passes Buddy’s share to him. Ray reaches over the seat for his money. Last, Kemp hands me mine. I would like to count it. I don’t know if this is polite. It feels fat, but I don’t know how thick a pile the three hundred I need for Donna would make. I stick the wad in the pocket of my suede jacket and try to count the bills surreptitiously with my fingertips, but I keep losing track.

When Kemp and I are finally dropped at his house, I shut myself in the bathroom and count the bills quickly. One hundred, two hundred, three hundred, four hundred eighty. Abruptly tears start out of my eyes. I wash my face and comb my hair down.

“Not bad for such an easy job.” Kemp rummages in his refrigerator. “See, I told you it was a piece of cake. Are you hungry?”

I nod.

“I’ve got some minestrone. Good and thick. While it’s heating, let’s fuck.”

It is one of our good times. We are both greedy and easily roused, tired enough to take the time I need, keyed enough for my time to be shorter than ordinarily. By the time we are done the soup is boiling. He steps into his pants without underwear, hastening to the kitchen to see to it, lest it boil over. Yawning with pleasure and relief and deliverance, I pick our scattered clothes off the floor. As I lift his jacket, the weight puzzles me and I touch the pocket gingerly. It is a gun. Carefully I replace the jacket on the floor and sit on the bed’s edge.

He lied to me. He told me he never carries a gun. I am sweating again as I sit there and my teeth abruptly chatter. I put on his terry-cloth robe, twisting it tight around myself as I consider whether to challenge him. It is over. Nothing bad happened, so far at any rate. I do not expect us to be caught. Still, I feel tricked. I would not shoot any working person for money. Why did Kemp bring it? Inner security? Feeling like a professional, a big shot? Superstition? Or to use if necessary? I feel less safe with him than I have since that first time I got into his convertible.

In the morning Kemp calls in sick to the optics factory, I cut my classes and we sleep till eleven. After breakfast I walk to town. The sun is sunny, many leaves torn from the trees by the recent storm and clear sunlight lancing down unobstructed on my bare black head, warming me like a motherly hand. Briskly I hike, contemplating how much I enjoyed the burglary and how frightened his gun makes me. I probe and probe my reactions, aware I am truly frightened and yet truly fascinated: by myself, by the night’s adventure, by Kemp still.

As I enter town I pass a field overgrown with tall weeds, gaunt brown stalks and still living grass, strewn with broken bricks, cinder blocks, aluminum cans, pop and beer bottles, rotting trash. A man who must be a professor strides briskly across the field, taking a shortcut toward the street that leads to the university. He trots along carrying a black umbrella tightly furled and swung like a walking stick. Under his arm is tucked a leather attaché case. Among the broken bricks and strewn condoms and mudholes he swings along evenly to his one o’clock class. Perhaps he is running over his lecture in his head, for he does not even see me. He reaches the sidewalk on the far side of the garbage jungle, striding along the neat residential street without altering his pace. I smile as I fall in behind him. What class do I belong to? His or Kemp’s? To whom is my loyalty due? I am a creature of this vacant lot, like those I grew up playing in, but even this one is no doubt due to be built on soon in this prosperous and ever-expanding city. In my pocket I carry Donna’s liberation.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

I
N THE
S
NOW
K
ING’S
P
ALACE

T
HE ABORTION IS performed in a house that is a clinic inside, clean and efficient. The catch is that because of the illegality, no anesthesia is used. It is an operation done raw, Donna cut open and feeling every stroke. The doctor, unusually kind, permits me to remain in the room. Donna holds my hand. When he is finally done with the D and C, my hand is bleeding.

This doctor is also unusual in that he has the patient wait and recover on his premises to make sure no complications seem likely. Donna is put to bed in a small upstairs room, in pain but happy. I sit by the side of the bed, giving her my uninjured hand. She is bleeding heavily but at peace. As I watch her, I feel a sense of victory. Even with her being in pain, locked in like prisoners, unable to use the phone, this is the best our time has to offer.

Buhbe had twelve children and at least five abortions; Mother three children, at least two abortions and a miscarriage that almost killed her —doctors can’t help you when you’re miscarrying until the fetus is out, for fear of being an accomplice to abortion. My buhbe, my mother and their sisters always chose illegally and dangerously which of the endless possibilities for fecundity they would bring to birth, which of the multitude of possible children they might feed, clothe and love. So women have always done, in all societies everywhere, with or without male knowledge or aid, with or without the help of official medicine and law. Such was the province of midwives and witches.

Buhbe was born into hunger and danger and sailed in steerage into poverty and danger. Survival was an end in itself. Yet what a storyteller she was, carrying like seeds in a watermelon stories of the vanished past, of history burnt down, of the murdered and lost, the dense maddening lore of the shtetl.

Mother was born into trouble. After I was pregnant that first and only time, she taught me to touch my womb and tell what time of my cycle I’m in, how close to ovulation, how close to my period; she also taught me that a menstruating woman turns fermenting wine sour and that cats understand everything you say about them. One of those dicta is a superstition.

Sometimes I see her as a blood sacrifice to the ordinary confines of working-class life for a woman, robbed not only of her teeth but her chance to live out the hunger, the vitality, the rich imagination and passion in her. I am one strand in a fabric of women, Donna and Theo and Stephanie and Alberta and many others as dear or dearer to me who do not fit into the particular pattern of this story but live with their lives stitched to mine. Were I pointing out a different pattern in this crazy quilt, it would be their stories I would tell you as another story of my living.

“I’m bleeding … rather heavily,” Donna says tentatively.

The blood is running out so fast that I summon the nurse. The nurse gives her an injection and props her legs up. Finally the flow lessens. I am profoundly grateful to them for not sending us out where she would bleed in the street. I know what happens if you go into a hospital emergency room bleeding from the uterus. It is like going in with a gunshot wound; the criminal aspects come first and the medical treatment second, if then. I know how rare this doctor is to do follow-up care.

He does not release us until the end of the day. The co-op presents a more difficult situation. Normally we might have toughed it out like Wanda when she had her abortion and announced it, but if Peter is to be kept ignorant, nobody else must know. Donna has the stomach flu. Rosellen and I take turns nursing her. By Friday she is up, her face a dead chalky hue but more animation in her eyes than I’ve seen in weeks.

Friday afternoon she comes upstairs to my room and hugs me as I sit at my desk. I am startled. She has given herself permission at last to touch me. When she comes into the room she kisses me, and she kisses me when she leaves. They are dry soft kisses but kisses of affection. She never touches anyone but Peter, and I doubt if they walk entwined. Lennie was probably the only physically warm person she has ever been with—except for me, who hardly counts since till now I have been forbidden expression. I respond timidly, accepting these sudden offerings like flowers out of the snow that has begun to fall, large damp white circles like dogwood blossoms floating down and resting everywhere with an air of delicate surprise.

I want to be loved, I drink it in, but it feels fragile, born of the surcease of fear. When I wash my hair Saturday before supper, she insists on putting it up. As she does elaborate things with her curlers, I suffer the twisting and piling and the session under her hair dryer.

“You have dramatic features,” she tells me. “I’m a canvas I paint a face on. But you should play up your darkness.”

“Absolutely,” Stephanie says from the rocking chair, where she observes with a mixture of jealous alarm and curiosity. She has told me she thinks Donna wants me back as a roommate. I assure her I have no intention of moving out. I am tired of that drama of living together and not living together and almost convinced that we have grown closer without the constant bickering over mine and yours and who used what and left it how.

“Jill takes all the wrong tack with men,” Stephanie says, applying orange polish to her toenails. “Instead of waiting to see what a man wants, you tell him who you are.”

“If someone can’t know me and still love me, let him clear out.” I am annoyed. Where her robe slips I see a red love bite on her shoulder. The insult lies as much in her blunt instruction as in her assumption of superior firepower.

“You have to be honest,” Donna says loyally, who has just spent a month lying to Peter. “We both believe in the primacy of communication. Making love is a form of dialogue.”

“Oh? In French?” Stephanie snorts. “You know how to get round Jill, all right. You just agree with her silly moral notions.”

“I believe in acting clearly.” Donna handles my hair roughly with the effort of keeping her temper. “Our acts embody our values.”

“Acts? Like scratching myself? Brushing my teeth?” Stephanie jams the cap back on the polish bottle crooked.

“Why are you in such a bad mood?” In part they are pleasantly fighting over my platonic favors, but I think Stephanie is upset. “What gives with you?”

“Howie’s going to medical school at Columbia.”

“Sure. He likes New York. Columbia’s a good school. And it’ll put some space between him and his family. He needs to be farther away.”

“But I have too many incompletes to graduate. I’ll have to finish up in the fall.”

“Do you care about your degree?”

“My father would kill me. Howie says I have to get it. He doesn’t want to get married till I graduate,” she wails, scowling at her fresh orange nails. “My feet! They’re funny-looking and yellow.”

“What are you afraid of?”

“I know what she’s afraid of.” Donna adds another layer to her construction and nails it in place with a mock tortoiseshell comb. “When your guy is living someplace else, he’s meeting other women—at work, every time he goes to a friend’s house. If you aren’t on the spot, he’s fair game.”

Over my piled-up hair they grin at each other, sharing a moment of comradeship while I suffer a sense of being another species.

What Donna has wrought on my hair certainly makes me look older. I hardly dare nod or sneeze for fear of its all tumbling down. Tonight PAF debates free speech on campus. The university screens lecturers. We’re always getting our wrists slapped for desiring outside speakers. But under this debate another is surging. Hungary, Hungary, the betrayal of the Left, revolution, counterrevolution, anarchism, bourgeois liberties, nationalism, imperialism, they’re worse than us, they’re as bad as us, they’re all there is, they’re irrelevant. The speeches on responsible leadership in loco parentis ring false. People contradict each other nastily. It feels as if we are falling apart from an invisible center that has rotted out.