Braided Lives (6 page)

Mother chirps around him picking off lint. Suddenly her eyes are doleful. “If Gene suggests playing for money, you put a stop to it. How much are you taking?”

He brushes ash from his lapel. “Don’t worry about it.”

“With the refrigerator and the TV still not paid for! It would shame us before the neighbors if they take them away!”

I stand at the front window while the Packard pulls from the driveway. My father will not drive a Ford or a GM car. He remembers how Bennett’s Ford Service fired on the unemployed and how they beat the UAW people, mostly women, who came to leaflet outside the gate, breaking the back of one and fracturing another’s skull. He describes the sit-down strikes at GM. We have Terraplanes, Hudsons, Studebakers until they fail one by one. “Henry Ford hated Jews,” my mother whispers. “Ford was a union buster,” my father mutters. History soaks into me.

Then I draw the blinds and swirl around. Empty, empty house. I run to do the dishes twice as fast as usual, so that the house is truly mine, without duty standing at my shoulder interrupting.

Done, flushed with the heat of the water, I grab a glass and clatter downstairs past the grade door that leads to the yard. Damp shadows lean on me breathing rotting potatoes as I hurry past the stout-armed furnace where firelight plays on the cement, dodging under the line where Dad’s overalls drip, past his workbench and power tools, into the fruit cellar.

I love the bright jars, golden peaches, buff pears, dark berries, the quarts of tomato juice, the half-pints of strawberry and raspberry jam, although I hate the season when I help Mother put them up.
Superimposed images. September is my season for canning peaches. I like putting up the fruit I grow. I become my mother in joy. After thirty her strengths and virtues began to bloom in me, her dislike of waste, her witch’s way with plants and birds and furry animals, her respect for sunlight and clean water and soil built well with compost.

Dad’s Christmas bottle of Old Grand Dad is hidden by a row of home-canned tomatoes. The damp creeps along my arms, seeks the neck of my sweater. Taking care not to disturb the dust I pour an inch in my tumbler, return the bottle, return the tomato pints to their circles on the newspaper-covered shelf, return myself tumbler in hand fleeing the shadows upstairs.

I loll on the bumpy rust-colored couch that fills one wall, sipping my prize and contemplating whether or not to turn on the TV. In the curve of gradual acquisition of TVs on our block, we were average. I was in the ninth grade. Had we gotten it earlier, I am convinced I would not have become a compulsive reader and thus the ability to study my way out of here would have been closed to me. At first we watched every night, but now it is theirs and I am grateful to it for occupying them while I steal away into my privacy. Still I have warm memories. During the Kefauver hearings my besotted mother let me stay home from school pretending the flu during the best parts so we could watch together, mesmerized. “Not that the businessmen aren’t just as big crooks,” she reminded me. “And the senators are all in their pockets. All riches are robbery.” But she couldn’t resist the spectacle. Our last period of passionate rapprochement was during the recent trial of the Rosenbergs. That scared my mother. We never spoke of it in front of Dad. We didn’t fight even about the books I read and I stayed downstairs in the evenings. We are sure they will be pardoned, still. They cannot kill a mother with children over some nonsense with matchboxes. Dad does not suspect how much radical identification she has passed on. Not that she can argue a political position, but the passion and loyalty she has given I can attach to a base of reading and observation. Logic I learned from him. You have to argue a case if you want anything out of him, unless you proceed by indirection, as she always does.

Small room with aqua walls bedizened with pictures of snow-capped mountains, with plaques of grapes (including the one I was painting at day care when the Detroit race riots came into our neighborhood), with hanging begonias in planters shaped like puppies. The tormented pattern of the rug struggles between runners of green and brown put down where it has worn. Two corners are hung with knickknack shelves of huddled china giraffes and elephants, gilded cups and saucers, wigwams, souvenirs of Mackinac Island, the Blue Hole, the Wisconsin Dells.

I march to the radio and turn on one of the benefits of Detroit, the CBC that pumps real music at me. This time I make it loud so it fills the house, an aquarium of music where I rise and sink, suddenly graceful. I leap and twirl and prance and kick until the music stops and I drop in a heap on the floor looking at the raw underside of the table. The edge of the tablecloth Buhbe crocheted hangs down all around. Would she still love me? Or would she judge me nasty as Mother does? Warm cinnamon lap, tales told all different from the way Mother told them, like turning the figures in a photograph around and seeing their backsides.

Slow and romantic violin. I dance but I am longing for
U.S.A.
which I am two thirds of the way through. Librarians so tight and clammy. That one wouldn’t let me have
U.S.A.
without Mother’s note. “My daughter Jill has my permission to read any book in the collections of the library. Only through wide and uncensored reading has a young person’s mind …” I learned to forge notes by seventh grade, when Callie and I began to cut school occasionally.

I finish the bourbon, shuddering as I subside on the couch. I have a conviction that mixed drinks are inauthentic. The worse the bourbon stings my throat, the more adult it seems. He will be tall and brilliant and terribly witty. I love the word urbane, although I am not sure exactly what it means. “Bourbon is urbane,” I say aloud, dressing him in a romantic ruffled white shirt and dark pants as his eyes focus on me intense and molten with an electrifying stare. The concert ends in applause and I switch off the radio…. I saw
To Have and Have Not
four times. That’s how it ought to be, both the man and the woman wanting each other and dueling a little and making wisecracks but showing bravery and loyalty. I want to be brave. Maybe I can add Lauren Bacall to my list. I adore her. Yes, I’ll do that, but not now. Silence chills the house. The ceiling creaks into footsteps. The wind whines at the panes, trying the catches. I want my notebooks and my novel but I’m suddenly scared of the attic.

In my mind the tall and handsome stranger in the ruffled shirt is still standing there with smoldering eyes but suddenly he is close up and turns into Freddie that time he came in while I was here alone ironing my father’s shirts. I see his face hard and angry and I remember the terror that gripped me on the kitchen floor when I realized he wasn’t going to listen to my firm loud nos that time. Terror twitched me violently as a bad shock and I bucked under his weight, his hands fumbling at my breasts, hurting me. I punched him in the ear as hard as I could and then I twisted free and grabbed the hot iron. He backed off then. I still don’t like to remember his face. How can I find any link between the music that stirs my emotions and the violent grappling that doesn’t? Something’s wrong with me.

Will no one ever love me? I am single and perverse. My fingers tingle but I don’t know if I am stung with loneliness or over flowing to reach out in abundance. The squat black shape of the phone draws me. I can’t call Howie because it’s Friday night. The receiver sings in my hand. My few girlfriends are out on dates. I dial my own number except for two digits changed at random. Ring. Ring. Where, in what front hall or beside a bed, on a desk or kitchen wall? Harsh sound alerting their air.

“Hello?” Male voice, deep and a little too loud.

No matter. “Hello? Hello, I love you.” Down with the receiver. My face burns my cold fingers. I am crazy.

I pin my hair under Francis’ old wool cap. I have been growing my black hair over protest for two years and it comes partway down my back and ties on my head in a perfect knot. I slip on my suede jacket and stand a moment on the porch, checking the time and that I have my house key. If I get back by ten thirty, they will never know I have been out. My neighborhood is supposed to be dangerous, but I go about as I choose. I figure I run fast. In jeans and jacket and Francis’ cap I pass for a boy. I know that too is somehow wicked but it gives me a free pass through these blocks.

I am off and running toward Callie’s flat over the bakeshop on Joy Road. I don’t bother to call. Callie will be there with her baby and it’s much too early for Sharkie to come home. I’m ashamed of myself, running to what is left of her. She makes me sad, but the house I always think I want to myself makes me taste loneliness harsh as the bourbon. Callie will sulk at first but I’ll listen to her complain about Sharkie and I’ll dandle and admire baby Marilyn and tell Callie all the dirt I can remember about kids in school. I’ll turn somersaults to stir her out. of her sulk. I wonder if Callie has ever figured out what I learned out of books, that according to them, doctors and psychiatrists and judges, we were lovers and could go to jail. I’m not sure she remembers, except that sometimes she looks at me in a certain shrewd skeptical way that makes me feel as if all my weaknesses are hanging out. I am walking slowly but I go on. It’s better than being alone, I guess.

CHAPTER THREE

A R
OUND OF
P
AINTS

E
VERY DAY FOR two weeks it has rained. If I step off the sidewalk onto a lawn or curbside plot, the ground squishes. The attic roof leaks, maddeningly into a pail. Mold grows between my fingers and I cannot decide on anything. The dormitory forms are still downstairs, only half filled out. Almost I could give up. Do what they want. Drop my fantasies in the trash. Give up, give in and be loved. I do not know if they will let me have the two hundred I still lack, for I cannot interrupt their fighting and painting to find out.

Spring rouses the maniac painter in both my parents, but the major blame for the last week can be laid on Leo, who filled up the basement with cartons of paint in gallon cans. He is storing some of his inventory here, as it turns out not to be as easy as he had expected to move paint. I wonder if it is hot, but that suspicion never touches my parents. They are pleased to buy enough paint to float a barge at what Leo calls wholesale. With all that paint sitting in boxes, they can use any color they please.

Mother won turquoise walls for the living room over Dad’s light green but he used the light green in their bedroom, which made Mother furious as she says she can’t wear green. He says he didn’t know she wore the bedroom walls. My multiuse bedroom has been done by their mutual choice in robin’s-egg blue. They now fight fiercely over the kitchen. Mother wants a lighter yellow with Chinese-red cabinets, while he wants beige and blue. The kitchen has become their sticking point. Neither will budge.

Today at last the clouds tear into high gauze and the sun stands over Detroit like a daisy of fire. My parents spend their Sunday morning fighting about the kitchen while I hide upstairs, studying irregular Spanish verbs. Then I hear my father walking over my head on the roof just before Mother calls me down.

She has shoved her crisp hair under a fuchsia and yellow bandanna —I swear half the clothes she wears she buys with choked rage—and grinds the vacuum sweeper back and forth on the rug. She shuts off the motor, letting the sausage bag deflate with a sigh, and points to two steaming buckets and a pile of rags. “Get started on the porch windows. You can reach the front-room windows if you stand on the steps. Go on, get moving. Lollygagging around while others work!”

My method of doing housework is to concentrate so hard on a stirring tale in my head that I hardly notice what I’m up to. It has advantages and disadvantages. With windows it works fine, for I note subconsciously when I have got them clean while I imagine what Mr. Stein
should
have said to me when I told him I got the scholarship to the university. I know he knows I have a crush on him and in my sourer moments I suspect him of enjoying it, but at least nobody has seen the poems I have written to him.

He is a needle, shiny, deeply thrust

into my mind. My plans are broad and hard

but blow like milkweed’s silk seeds in a gust

of wind before his will. I have no guard …

and on and on. He told me I had to stop writing what he called free verse and start writing sonnets.

“What?” I am startled back.

Dad has come down the high ladder from the roof. Rubbing his wind-reddened neck, he sits on the steps to smoke. “Stiff…. Damn it, forgot the hammer. Go up and get it, would you?”

The dirty pink rag, Mother’s old panties, hangs limp and steaming from my hand. “Up the ladder? To the roof?”

He grins with slight irritation. “It won’t walk down.”

“I’m sorry, but, you know … Climbing makes me sick.”

“You give in to yourself.” His eyes weigh on me, his teeth lock in his jaw. “You and your mother! Get it down.”

“It’s just…” Judge, mercy! “Maybe you could get it later?”

“No!” His big gnarled hands clasp on his knees as he glares.

He wanted a boy. At twelve I made the grand try, rowed him around twilight-curdled mosquito bogs, impaled the worm flesh, pulled hooks from my hair, stared at the bobber and itched. For months on end I sat itching and sweating and trying for a poker face, straight wooden tight-lipped virtue, Robin to Batman, a real goy boy. I tell you, I tried.